We introduce the first version of the AI Consumer Index (ACE), a benchmark for assessing whether frontier AI models can perform everyday consumer tasks. ACE contains a hidden heldout set of 400 test cases, split across four consumer activities: shopping, food, gaming, and DIY. We are also open sourcing 80 cases as a devset with a CC-BY license. For the ACE leaderboard we evaluated 10 frontier models (with websearch turned on) using a novel grading methodology that dynamically checks whether relevant parts of the response are grounded in the retrieved web sources. GPT 5 (Thinking = High) is the top-performing model, scoring 56.1%, followed by o3 Pro (Thinking = On) at 55.2% and GPT 5.1 (Thinking = High) at 55.1%. Model scores differ across domains, and in Shopping the top model scores under 50\%. We find that models are prone to hallucinating key information, such as prices. ACE shows a substantial gap between the performance of even the best models and consumers' AI needs.

Generating academic slides from scientific papers is a challenging multimodal reasoning task that requires both long context understanding and deliberate visual planning. Existing approaches largely reduce it to text only summarization, overlooking the visual component and design intensive nature of slide creation. In this paper we introduce SlideGen, an agentic, modular, and visual in the loop framework for scientific paper to slide generation. SlideGen orchestrates a group of vision language agents that reason collaboratively over the document structure and semantics, producing editable PPTX slides with logical flow and compelling visual presentation. By integrating coordinated outlining, mapping, arrangement, note synthesis, and iterative refinement, our system consistently delivers slides of expert level quality. Across diverse benchmarks and strong baselines, SlideGen outperforms existing methods in visual quality, content faithfulness, and readability, positioning it as the new state of the art in automated slide generation. Our work establishes a foundation for design aware multimodal slide generation, demonstrating how agentic collaboration can bridge understanding and presentation in complex multimodal reasoning tasks.

While the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in analytical tasks such as mathematics and code generation, their utility for abstractive summarization remains widely assumed but largely unverified. To bridge this gap, we first tailor general reasoning strategies to the summarization domain. We then conduct a systematic, large scale comparative study of 8 reasoning strategies and 3 Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) across 8 diverse datasets, assessing both summary quality and faithfulness. Our findings show that reasoning is not a universal solution and its effectiveness is highly dependent on the specific strategy and context. Specifically, we observe a trade-off between summary quality and factual faithfulness: explicit reasoning strategies tend to improve fluency at the expense of factual grounding, while implicit reasoning in LRMs exhibits the inverse pattern. Furthermore, increasing an LRM's internal reasoning budget does not improve, and can even hurt, factual consistency, suggesting that effective summarization demands faithful compression rather than creative over-thinking.

The exponential growth of digital content presents significant challenges for content safety. Current moderation systems, often based on single models or fixed pipelines, exhibit limitations in identifying implicit risks and providing interpretable judgment processes. To address these issues, we propose Aetheria, a multimodal interpretable content safety framework based on multi-agent debate and collaboration.Employing a collaborative architecture of five core agents, Aetheria conducts in-depth analysis and adjudication of multimodal content through a dynamic, mutually persuasive debate mechanism, which is grounded by RAG-based knowledge retrieval.Comprehensive experiments on our proposed benchmark (AIR-Bench) validate that Aetheria not only generates detailed and traceable audit reports but also demonstrates significant advantages over baselines in overall content safety accuracy, especially in the identification of implicit risks. This framework establishes a transparent and interpretable paradigm, significantly advancing the field of trustworthy AI content moderation.

AI systems that output their reasoning in natural language offer an opportunity for safety -- we can \emph{monitor} their chain of thought (CoT) for undesirable reasoning, such as the pursuit of harmful objectives. However, the extent to which CoT faithfully reflects the underlying reasoning process, and hence the extent to which it can be usefully monitored, may be influenced by certain aspects of training. We investigate how different \emph{training incentives}, applied to a reasoning model, affect its monitorability. We introduce a novel methodology for measuring monitorability according to whether a monitor can predict a key latent variable using the model's reasoning. When controlling for accuracy, we do not find evidence for consistent effects from commonly used incentives (length penalties and KL regularisation), but we find that adversarial optimisation (penalising monitor accuracy) degrades monitor performance, while direct optimisation for monitorability does not reliably lead to improvements. Our code is available at https://github.com/QiyaoWei/reasoning-under-pressure.

Edge computing processes data where it is generated, enabling faster decisions, lower bandwidth usage, and improved privacy. However, edge devices typically operate under strict constraints on processing power, memory, and energy consumption, making them unsuitable for large language models (LLMs). Fortunately, Small Language Models (SLMs) offer lightweight alternatives that bring AI inference to resource-constrained environments by significantly reducing computational cost while remaining suitable for specialization and customization. In this scenario, selecting the hardware platform that best balances performance and efficiency for SLM inference is challenging due to strict resource limitations. To address this issue, this study evaluates the inference performance and energy efficiency of commercial CPUs (Intel and ARM), GPUs (NVIDIA), and NPUs (RaiderChip) for running SLMs. GPUs, the usual platform of choice, are compared against commercial NPUs and recent multi-core CPUs. While NPUs leverage custom hardware designs optimized for computation, modern CPUs increasingly incorporate dedicated features targeting language-model workloads. Using a common execution framework and a suite of state-of-the-art SLMs, we analyze both maximum achievable performance and processing and energy efficiency across commercial solutions available for each platform. The results indicate that specialized backends outperform general-purpose CPUs, with NPUs achieving the highest performance by a wide margin. Bandwidth normalization proves essential for fair cross-architecture comparisons. Although low-power ARM processors deliver competitive results when energy usage is considered, metrics that combine performance and power (such as EDP) again highlight NPUs as the dominant architecture. These findings show that designs optimized for both efficiency and performance offer a clear advantage for edge workloads.

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason often relies on Reinforcement Learning (RL) with task-specific verifiers. However, many real-world reasoning-intensive tasks lack verifiers, despite offering abundant expert demonstrations that remain under-utilized for reasoning-focused training. We introduce RARO (Relativistic Adversarial Reasoning Optimization) that learns strong reasoning capabilities from only expert demonstrations via Inverse Reinforcement Learning. Our method sets up an adversarial game between a policy and a relativistic critic: the policy learns to mimic expert answers, while the critic aims to identify the experts among (expert, policy) answer pairs. Both the policy and the critic are trained jointly and continuously via RL, and we identify the key stabilization techniques required for robust learning. Empirically, RARO significantly outperforms strong verifier-free baselines on all of our evaluation tasks -- Countdown, DeepMath, and Poetry Writing -- and enjoys the same robust scaling trends as RL with verifiers. These results demonstrate that our method effectively elicits strong reasoning performance from expert demonstrations alone, enabling robust reasoning learning even when task-specific verifiers are unavailable. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been driven substantially by improvements in their reasoning abilities. Reasoning enables LLMs to perform deliberate intermediate computations before producing answers to the user queries, proposing candidate solutions and self-corrections. Much of this progress has been enabled via Reinforcement Learning (RL) on verifiable tasks such as mathematics and competitive programming (DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025; Y ang et al., 2025a; Shao et al., 2024; Luo et al., 2025). Notably, recent work has demonstrated that RL with V erifiable Rewards (RL VR) can enable LLMs to develop robust reasoning capabilities without any additional supervision (DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025). A growing body of work further improves the efficiency and stability of such RL algorithms on verifiable tasks, such as DAPO (Y u et al., 2025) and GSPO (Zheng et al., 2025). However, comparatively little attention has been paid to developing reasoning abilities on non-verifiable tasks, where task-specific verifiers are unavailable. Y et, in many impactful and challenging tasks -- such as analytical writing, open-ended research, or financial analysis -- LLM outputs are not directly verifiable due to hard-to-specify criteria, wide variation among acceptable answers, and other practical constraints. A popular approach in these settings is Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) (Ouyang et al., 2022; Rafailov et al., 2023), but they require collecting human preferences beyond demonstration data, which is often a time-consuming and expensive process.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities across general domains, yet their application to specialized sectors such as mortgage finance requires domain-specific knowledge augmentation while preserving instruction-following fidelity. We present MortgageLLM, a novel domain-specific large language model that addresses this dual challenge. It is developed using a dual-track specialization framework from a single base model (LLaMA-3.1-8B). We opted for this dual-expert approach as a single multi-task model suffers from performance trade-offs, where optimizing for structured tasks (via SFT) degrades conversational fidelity (via DPO). Our dual-track method solves this by creating two specialists, allowing each to be optimally trained for its distinct capability. Our approach applies the instruction residual technique to restore instruction-following capabilities post-domain adaptation without supervised fine-tuning. We contribute: (1) application of this residual technique to the highly specialized mortgage finance domain; (2) a dual-expert architecture combining a conversational Q&A model and a structured task model for classification and summarization; and (3) an intelligent task routing mechanism using few-shot classification performed by one of the expert models itself. We validate our approach on domain-specific benchmarks, where our final model (MLM v2) significantly outperforms the base LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct, achieving an LLM-as-a-Judge summarization score of 4.58 (vs. 3.99), a Q&A score of 4.09 (vs. 4.0), and a classification score of 2.6 (vs. 1.2). On semantic similarity, our model achieved a BERTScore of 0.77 for summarization (vs. 0.74), 0.68 for Q&A (vs. 0.58), and 0.75 for classification (vs. 0.73), substantially outperforming baseline approaches.

Pharmaceutical research and development has accumulated vast and heterogeneous archives of data. Much of this knowledge stems from discontinued programs, and reusing these archives is invaluable for reverse translation. However, in practice, such reuse is often infeasible. In this work, we introduce DiscoVerse, a multi-agent co-scientist designed to support pharmaceutical research and development at Roche. Designed as a human-in-the-loop assistant, DiscoVerse enables domain-specific queries by delivering evidence-based answers: it retrieves relevant data, links across documents, summarises key findings and preserves institutional memory. We assess DiscoVerse through expert evaluation of source-linked outputs. Our evaluation spans a selected subset of 180 molecules from Roche's research and development repositories, encompassing over 0.87 billion BPE tokens and more than four decades of research. To our knowledge, this represents the first agentic framework to be systematically assessed on real pharmaceutical data for reverse translation, enabled by authorized access to confidential archives covering the full lifecycle of drug development. Our contributions include: role-specialized agent designs aligned with scientist workflows; human-in-the-loop support for reverse translation; expert evaluation; and a large-scale demonstration showing promising decision-making insights. In brief, across seven benchmark queries, DiscoVerse achieved near-perfect recall ($\geq 0.99$) with moderate precision ($0.71-0.91$). Qualitative assessments and three real-world pharmaceutical use cases further showed faithful, source-linked synthesis across preclinical and clinical evidence.

AI research agents offer the promise to accelerate scientific progress by automating the design, implementation, and training of machine learning models. However, the field is still in its infancy, and the key factors driving the success or failure of agent trajectories are not fully understood. We examine the role that ideation diversity plays in agent performance. First, we analyse agent trajectories on MLE-bench, a well-known benchmark to evaluate AI research agents, across different models and agent scaffolds. Our analysis reveals that different models and agent scaffolds yield varying degrees of ideation diversity, and that higher-performing agents tend to have increased ideation diversity. Further, we run a controlled experiment where we modify the degree of ideation diversity, demonstrating that higher ideation diversity results in stronger performance. Finally, we strengthen our results by examining additional evaluation metrics beyond the standard medal-based scoring of MLE-bench, showing that our findings still hold across other agent performance metrics.