Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have exhibited remarkable progress. However, deficiencies remain compared to human intelligence, such as hallucination and shallow pattern matching. In this work, we aim to evaluate a fundamental yet underexplored intelligence: association, a cornerstone of human cognition for creative thinking and knowledge integration. Current benchmarks, often limited to closed-ended tasks, fail to capture the complexity of open-ended association reasoning vital for real-world applications. To address this, we present MMOPERA, a systematic benchmark with 11,497 instances across two open-ended tasks: Remote-Item Association (RIA) and In-Context Association (ICA), aligning association intelligence evaluation with human psychometric principles. It challenges LVLMs to resemble the spirit of divergent thinking and convergent associative reasoning through free-form responses and explicit reasoning paths. We deploy tailored LLM-as-a-Judge strategies to evaluate open-ended outputs, applying process-reward-informed judgment to dissect reasoning with precision. Extensive empirical studies on state-of-the-art LVLMs, including sensitivity analysis of task instances, validity analysis of LLM-as-a-Judge strategies, and diversity analysis across abilities, domains, languages, cultures, etc., provide a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the limitations of current LVLMs in associative reasoning, paving the way for more human-like and general-purpose AI.

We introduce FreshStack, a holistic framework for automatically building information retrieval (IR) evaluation benchmarks by incorporating challenging questions and answers. FreshStack conducts the following steps: (1) automatic corpus collection from code and technical documentation, (2) nugget generation from community-asked questions and answers, and (3) nugget-level support, retrieving documents using a fusion of retrieval techniques and hybrid architectures. We use FreshStack to build five datasets on fast-growing, recent, and niche domains to ensure the tasks are sufficiently challenging. On FreshStack, existing retrieval models, when applied out-of-the-box, significantly underperform oracle approaches on all five domains, denoting plenty of headroom to improve IR quality. In addition, we identify cases where rerankers do not improve first-stage retrieval accuracy (two out of five domains) and oracle context helps an LLM generator generate a high-quality RAG answer. We hope FreshStack will facilitate future work toward constructing realistic, scalable, and uncontaminated IR and RAG evaluation benchmarks.

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) task serves as a critical playground for evaluating whether foundation models can effectively perceive, understand, and reason about dynamic real-world scenarios.

Monitoring is an important aspect of safely deploying Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper examines activation probes for detecting "high-stakes" interactions--where the text indicates that the interaction might lead to significant harm--as a critical, yet underexplored, target for such monitoring. We evaluate several probe architectures trained on synthetic data, and find them to exhibit robust generalization to diverse, out-of-distribution, real-world data. Probes' performance is comparable to that of prompted or finetuned medium-sized LLM monitors, while offering computational savings of six orders-of-magnitude. These savings are enabled by reusing activations of the model that is being monitored. Our experiments also highlight the potential of building resource-aware hierarchical monitoring systems, where probes serve as an efficient initial filter and flag cases for more expensive downstream analysis.

Reinforcement learning (RL) using foundation models for policy approximations in multi-turn tasks remains challenging. We identify two main limitations related to sparse reward settings and policy gradient updates, based on which we formulate a key insight: updates from positive samples with high returns typically do not require policy regularisation, whereas updates from negative samples, reflecting undesirable behaviour, can harm model performance. This paper introduces Succeed or Learn Slowly (SoLS), a novel off-policy RL algorithm evaluated on mobile app control tasks. SoLS improves sample efficiency when fine-tuning foundation models for user interface navigation via a modified off-policy actor-critic approach, applying direct policy updates for positive samples and conservative, regularised updates for negative ones to prevent model degradation. We augment SoLS with Successful Transition Replay (STR), which prioritises learning from successful interactions, further improving sample efficiency. We evaluate SoLS on the AndroidWorld benchmark, where it significantly outperforms existing methods (at least 17% relative increase), including prompt-engineering and RL approaches, while requiring substantially fewer computational resources than GPT-4o-based methods with 5-60x faster inference.

Tabular data have been playing a vital role in diverse real-world fields, including healthcare, finance, etc. With the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs), early explorations of extending LLMs to the domain of tabular data have been developed. Most of these LLM-based methods typically first serialize tabular data into natural language descriptions, and then tune LLMs or directly infer on these serialized data. However, these methods suffer from two key inherent issues: (i) data perspective: existing data serialization methods lack universal applicability for structured tabular data, and may pose privacy risks through direct textual exposure, and (ii) model perspective: LLM fine-tuning methods struggle with tabular data, and in-context learning scalability is bottle-necked by input length constraints (suitable for few-shot learning). This work explores a novel direction of integrating LLMs into tabular data through logical decision tree rules as intermediaries, proposing a decision tree enhancer with LLM-derived rule for tabular prediction, DeLTa. The proposed DeLTa avoids tabular data serialization, and can be applied to full data learning setting without LLM fine-tuning. Specifically, we leverage the reasoning ability of LLMs to redesign an improved rule given a set of decision tree rules. Furthermore, we provide a calibration method for original decision trees via new generated rule by LLM, which approximates the error correction vector to steer the original decision tree predictions in the direction of "errors" reducing. Finally, extensive experiments on diverse tabular benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Probabilistic reasoning is a key aspect of both human and artificial intelligence that allows for handling uncertainty and ambiguity in decision-making. In this paper, we introduce a new numerical reasoning task under uncertainty for large language models, focusing on estimating the privacy risk of user-generated documents containing privacy-sensitive information. We propose BRANCH, a new LLM methodology that estimates the k-privacy value of a text--the size of the population matching the given information.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress across domains, yet their ability to perform inductive reasoning--inferring latent rules from sparse examples--remains limited. It is often assumed that chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, as used in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), enhances such reasoning. We investigate this assumption with creating four controlled, diagnostic game-based tasks--chess, Texas Hold'em, dice games, and blackjack--with hidden humandefined rules. We find that CoT reasoning can degrade inductive performance, with LRMs often underperforming their non-reasoning counterparts. To explain this, we present a theoretical framework that reveals how reasoning steps can amplify error through three failure modes: incorrect sub-task decomposition, incorrect sub-task solving, and incorrect final answer summarization. Based on our theoretical and empirical analysis, we introduce structured interventions that adapt CoT generation according to our identified failure types. These interventions improve inductive accuracy without retraining. Our findings suggest that effective (CoT) reasoning depends not only on taking more steps but also on ensuring those steps are well-structured.

Filtering Step Remaining Instances Raw images collected 7.5Mimages After deduplication and car detection 4.9M images Initial car bounding boxes 13.22M boxes After score/size thresholding 6.97M boxes After Qwen2.5-7B

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable capabilities by integrating visual perception with language understanding, enabling applications such as image-grounded dialogue, visual question answering, and scientific analysis. However, most MLLMs adopt a static inference paradigm, encoding the entire image into fixed visual tokens upfront, which limits their ability to iteratively refine understanding or adapt to context during inference. This contrasts sharply with human perception, which is dynamic, selective, and feedback-driven. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for inference-time visual token scaling that enables MLLMs to perform iterative, verifier-guided reasoning over visual content. We formulate the problem as a Markov Decision Process, involving a reasoner that proposes visual actions and a verifier--trained via multi-step Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)--that evaluates these actions and determines when reasoning should terminate. To support this, we present a new dataset, VTS, comprising supervised reasoning trajectories (VTS-SFT) and preference-labeled reasoning comparisons (VTS-DPO). Our method significantly outperforms existing approaches across diverse visual reasoning benchmarks, offering not only improved accuracy but also more interpretable and grounded reasoning processes. These results demonstrate the promise of dynamic inference mechanisms for enabling fine-grained, context-aware visual reasoning in next-generation MLLMs. Code and datasets are publicly released at https://vts-v.github.io/.