As robots take on caregiving roles, ensuring equitable and unbiased interactions with diverse populations is critical. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) serve as key components in shaping robotic behavior, speech, and decision-making, these models may encode and propagate societal biases, leading to disparities in care based on demographic factors. This paper examines how LLM-generated responses shape robot caregiving characteristics and responsibilities when prompted with different demographic information related to sex, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, disability, and age. Findings show simplified descriptions for disability and age, lower sentiment for disability and LGBTQ+ identities, and distinct clustering patterns reinforcing stereotypes in caregiving narratives. These results emphasize the need for ethical and inclusive HRI design.

With the advent of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), medical artificial intelligence (AI) has experienced significant technological progress and paradigm shifts. This survey provides an extensive review of recent advancements in Medical Vision-Language Models (Med-VLMs), which integrate visual and textual data to enhance healthcare outcomes. We discuss the foundational technology behind Med-VLMs, illustrating how general models are adapted for complex medical tasks, and examine their applications in healthcare. The transformative impact of Med-VLMs on clinical practice, education, and patient care is highlighted, alongside challenges such as data scarcity, narrow task generalization, interpretability issues, and ethical concerns like fairness, accountability, and privacy. These limitations are exacerbated by uneven dataset distribution, computational demands, and regulatory hurdles. Rigorous evaluation methods and robust regulatory frameworks are essential for safe integration into healthcare workflows. Future directions include leveraging large-scale, diverse datasets, improving cross-modal generalization, and enhancing interpretability. Innovations like federated learning, lightweight architectures, and Electronic Health Record (EHR) integration are explored as pathways to democratize access and improve clinical relevance. This review aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of Med-VLMs' strengths and limitations, fostering their ethical and balanced adoption in healthcare.

This paper presents our ongoing work toward developing an enterprise-ready Computer Using Generalist Agent (CUGA) system. Our research highlights the evolutionary nature of building agentic systems suitable for enterprise environments. By integrating state-of-the-art agentic AI techniques with a systematic approach to iterative evaluation, analysis, and refinement, we have achieved rapid and cost-effective performance gains, notably reaching a new state-of-the-art performance on the WebArena benchmark. We detail our development roadmap, the methodology and tools that facilitated rapid learning from failures and continuous system refinement, and discuss key lessons learned and future challenges for enterprise adoption.

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with hallucinations due to false or outdated knowledge. Given the high resource demands of retraining these models, there is an increasing focus on developing model editing. However, the general abilities of LLMs across downstream tasks are prone to significant degradation during sequential editing. This paper statistically observes that the parameter matrix after editing exhibits a significant deviation compared to its previous state as the number of edits increases. This serious deviation affects the original knowledge associations within LLMs and leads to the degradation of their general abilities. To this end, a framework termed Editing Anchor Compression (EAC) is proposed to constrain the deviation of the parameter matrix during sequential editing. It compresses the editing information by selecting editing anchors that are important in encoding new relations without deviating too much from the original matrix, thereby preserving the general abilities. Experiments of applying EAC to two popular editing methods on three LLMs across four tasks are conducted. Evaluation results show that EAC effectively minimizes unreasonable deviations caused by model editing, preserving over 70% of the general abilities while better retaining the editing knowledge compared to the original counterpart methods.

Instruction tuning is crucial for optimizing Large Language Models (LLMs), yet mainstream data selection methods heavily rely on LLMs as instruction quality scorers, leading to high computational costs and reduced data diversity. To address these limitations, we propose MergeIT, a novel LLM-based Merging strategy for better Instruction Tuning that shifts the focus from selection to synthesis. MergeIT operates in two stages: first, topic-aware filtering clusters and refines the dataset, preserving diversity while eliminating redundancy without relying on LLM-based scoring. Second, LLM-based merging synthesizes semantically similar instructions into more informative and compact training data, enhancing data richness while further reducing dataset size. Experimental results demonstrate that MergeIT enables efficient, diverse, and scalable instruction selection and synthesis, establishing LLM-based merging as a promising alternative to conventional scoring-based selection methods for instruction tuning. Our source code and datasets are now available at https://github.com/XcloudFance/MergeIT

Increasing test-time computation is a straightforward approach to enhancing the quality of responses in Large Language Models (LLMs). While Best-of-N sampling and Self-Consistency with majority voting are simple and effective, they require a fixed number of sampling responses for each query, regardless of its complexity. This could result in wasted computation for simpler questions and insufficient exploration for more challenging ones. In this work, we argue that model confidence of responses can be used for improving the efficiency of test-time scaling. Unfortunately, LLMs are known to be overconfident and provide unreliable confidence estimation. To address this limitation, we introduce Self-Calibration by distilling Self-Consistency-derived confidence into the model itself. This enables reliable confidence estimation at test time with one forward pass. We then design confidence-based efficient test-time scaling methods to handle queries of various difficulty, such as Early-Stopping for Best-of-N and Self-Consistency with calibrated confidence. Experiments on three LLMs across six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Specifically, applying confidence-based Early Stopping to Best-of-N improves MathQA accuracy from 81.0 to 83.6 with a sample budget of 16 responses, indicating the efficacy of confidence-based sampling strategy at inference time.

Self-play alignment algorithms have been developed as effective methods for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), formulating preference optimization as a two-player game. However, the regularization with respect to the reference policy, which is crucial for mitigating over-optimization, has been insufficiently investigated in self-play alignment. In this paper, we show that our regularization method can improve the unregularized self-play significantly. To study the impact of different regularizations in self-play alignment, we propose Regularized Self-Play Policy Optimization (RSPO). This generalized framework regularizes the self-play by simply adding a chosen regularization term into the loss while maintaining provable last-iterate convergence to the Nash Equilibrium of the corresponding regularized game. Surprisingly, empirical evaluations using the Mistral-7B-Instruct base model reveal that forward KL divergence regularization reduces response length in RSPO, whereas reverse KL divergence markedly improves raw win rates. RSPO with a linear combination of forward and reverse KL divergence regularization substantially increases the length-controlled win rate in AlpacaEval-2, elevating the unregularized self-play alignment method (SPPO) from $28.53\%$ to $35.44\%$. Finally, we show that RSPO also improves the response diversity.

Autoregressive decoding algorithms that use only past information often cannot guarantee the best performance. Recently, people discovered that looking-ahead algorithms such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with external reward models (RMs) can significantly improve models' output by allowing them to think ahead and leverage future outputs and associated rewards to guide the current generation. Such techniques can help the reinforcement fine-tuning phase by sampling better trajectories and the inference phase by selecting the better output. However, their high computational cost limits their applications, especially in streaming scenarios. To address this issue, we propose equipping the policy model with token-level self-reward modeling (TRM) capability to eliminate the need for external models and extra communication. We name the new architecture as Reward Transformer. In addition, we propose a streaming-looking-ahead (SLA) algorithm to further boost search efficiency with better parallelization. Experiments show that SLA achieves an overall win rate of 79.7\% against the baseline greedy decoding algorithm on three general-domain datasets with a frozen policy model while maintaining streaming efficiency. If we combine SLA with reinforcement fine-tuning techniques such as DPO, SLA achieves an overall win rate of 89.4\%.

Emotions have been shown to play a role in argument convincingness, yet this aspect is underexplored in the natural language processing (NLP) community. Unlike prior studies that use static analyses, focus on a single text domain or language, or treat emotion as just one of many factors, we introduce a dynamic framework inspired by manipulation checks commonly used in psychology and social science; leveraging LLM-based manipulation checks, this framework examines the extent to which perceived emotional intensity influences perceived convincingness. Through human evaluation of arguments across different languages, text domains, and topics, we find that in over half of cases, judgments of convincingness remain unchanged despite variations in perceived emotional intensity; when emotions do have an impact, they more often enhance rather than weaken convincingness. We further analyze how 11 LLMs behave in the same scenario, finding that while LLMs generally mirror human patterns, they struggle to capture nuanced emotional effects in individual judgments.

Automated theorem proving (ATP) is one of the most challenging mathematical reasoning tasks for Large Language Models (LLMs). Most existing LLM-based ATP methods rely on supervised fine-tuning, which results in a limited alignment between the theorem proving process and human preferences. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), which aligns LLMs with human preferences, has shown positive effects for certain tasks. However, the lack of high-quality preference data for theorem proving presents a significant challenge. In this paper, we innovatively apply DPO to formal automated theorem proving and introduces a Curriculum Learning-based DPO Iterative Theorem Proving (CuDIP) method. Specifically, we propose a method for constructing preference data which utilizes LLMs and existing theorem proving data to enhance the diversity of the preference data while reducing the reliance on human preference annotations. We then integrate this preference data construction method with curriculum learning to iteratively fine-tune the theorem proving model through DPO. Experimental results on the MiniF2F and ProofNet datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.