arXiv:2604.03881v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nudging is widely used to promote behavioral change, but its effectiveness is often limited when recipients must repeatedly translate feedback into workable next steps under changing circumstances. Large language models (LLMs) may help reduce part of this cognitive work by generating personalized guidance and updating it iteratively across intervention rounds. We developed an LLM agent for iterative personalization and tested it in a three-arm randomized experiment among 233 university residents in China, using daily electricity and shower hot-water conservation as objectively measured cases differing in friction. LLM-personalized nudges (T2) produced the largest conservation effects, while image-enhanced conventional nudges (T1) and text-based conventional nudges (C) showed similar outcomes (omnibus p = 0.009). Relative to C, T2 reduced electricity consumption by 0.56 kWh per room-day (p = 0.014), corresponding to an 18.3 percentage-point higher adjusted saving rate. This advantage emerged within the first two intervention rounds, alongside iterative updating of personalized guidance, and persisted thereafter. Hot-water outcomes followed the same direction but were smaller, less precisely estimated, and attenuated over time, consistent with stronger friction in this domain. LLM-personalized nudges emphasized prospective and context-specific guidance and were associated with higher participant engagement. This study provides field evidence that LLM-based iterative personalization can enhance behavioral nudging, with behavioral friction as a potential boundary condition. Larger trials and extension to more behaviors are warranted.

arXiv:2604.03924v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Goal-oriented conversational systems require making sequential decisions under uncertainty about the user's intent, where the algorithm must balance information acquisition and target commitment over multiple turns. Existing approaches address this challenge from different perspectives: structured methods enable multi-step planning but rely on predefined schemas, while LLM-based approaches support flexible interactions but lack long-horizon decision making, resulting in poor coordination between information acquisition and target commitment. To address this limitation, we formulate goal-oriented conversation as an uncertainty-aware sequential decision problem, where uncertainty serves as a guiding signal for multi-turn decision making. We propose a Conversation Uncertainty-aware Planning framework (CUP) that integrates language models with structured planning: a language model proposes feasible actions, and a planner evaluates their long-term impact on uncertainty reduction. Experiments on multiple conversational benchmarks show that CUP consistently improves success rates while requiring fewer interaction turns. Further analysis demonstrates that uncertainty-aware planning contributes to more efficient information acquisition and earlier confident commitment.

arXiv:2604.04906v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) changes social learning when aggregated outputs become training data for future predictions. To study this, we extend the DeGroot model by introducing an AI aggregator that trains on population beliefs and feeds synthesized signals back to agents. We define the learning gap as the deviation of long-run beliefs from the efficient benchmark, allowing us to capture how AI aggregation affects learning. Our main result identifies a threshold in the speed of updating: when the aggregator updates too quickly, there is no positive-measure set of training weights that robustly improves learning across a broad class of environments, whereas such weights exist when updating is sufficiently slow. We then compare global and local architectures. Local aggregators trained on proximate or topic-specific data robustly improve learning in all environments. Consequently, replacing specialized local aggregators with a single global aggregator worsens learning in at least one dimension of the state.

arXiv:2510.09901v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Computing has long served as a cornerstone of scientific discovery. Recently, a paradigm shift has emerged with the rise of large language models (LLMs), introducing autonomous systems, referred to as agents, that accelerate discovery across varying levels of autonomy. These language agents provide a flexible and versatile framework that orchestrates interactions with human scientists, natural language, computer language and code, and physics. This paper presents our view and vision of LLM-based scientific agents and their growing role in transforming the scientific discovery lifecycle, from hypothesis discovery, experimental design and execution, to result analysis and refinement. We critically examine current methodologies, emphasizing key innovations, practical achievements, and outstanding limitations. Additionally, we identify open research challenges and outline promising directions for building more robust, generalizable, and adaptive scientific agents. Our analysis highlights the transformative potential of autonomous agents to accelerate scientific discovery across diverse domains.

arXiv:2505.08548v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Achieving generalization in robotic manipulation remains a critical challenge, particularly for unseen scenarios and novel tasks. Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, while building on top of general Vision-Language Models (VLMs), still fall short of achieving robust zero-shot performance due to the scarcity and heterogeneity prevalent in embodied datasets. To address these limitations, we propose FSD (From Seeing to Doing), a novel vision-language model that generates intermediate representations through spatial relationship reasoning, providing fine-grained guidance for robotic manipulation. Our approach combines a hierarchical data pipeline for training with a self-consistency mechanism that aligns spatial coordinates with visual signals. Through extensive experiments, we comprehensively validated FSD's capabilities in both "seeing" and "doing," achieving outstanding performance across 8 benchmarks for general spatial reasoning and embodied reference abilities, as well as on our proposed more challenging benchmark VABench. We also verified zero-shot capabilities in robot manipulation, demonstrating significant performance improvements over baseline methods in both SimplerEnv and real robot settings. Experimental results show that FSD achieves 40.6% success rate in SimplerEnv and 72% success rate across 8 real-world tasks, outperforming the strongest baseline by 30%.

arXiv:2508.13998v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generalization in embodied AI is hindered by the "seeing-to-doing gap," which stems from data scarcity and embodiment heterogeneity. To address this, we pioneer "pointing" as a unified, embodiment-agnostic intermediate representation, defining four core embodied pointing abilities that bridge high-level vision-language comprehension with low-level action primitives. We introduce Embodied-R1, a 3B Vision-Language Model (VLM) specifically designed for embodied reasoning and pointing. We use a wide range of embodied and general visual reasoning datasets as sources to construct a large-scale dataset, Embodied-Points-200K, which supports key embodied pointing capabilities. We then train Embodied-R1 using a two-stage Reinforced Fine-tuning (RFT) curriculum with a specialized multi-task reward design. Embodied-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on 11 embodied spatial and pointing benchmarks. Critically, it demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization by achieving a 56.2% success rate in the SIMPLEREnv and 87.5% across 8 real-world XArm tasks without any task-specific fine-tuning, representing a 62% improvement over strong baselines. Furthermore, the model exhibits high robustness against diverse visual disturbances. Our work shows that a pointing-centric representation, combined with an RFT training paradigm, offers an effective and generalizable pathway to closing the perception-action gap in robotics.

arXiv:2604.00986v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study whether phone-use agents respect privacy while completing benign mobile tasks. This question has remained hard to answer because privacy-compliant behavior is not operationalized for phone-use agents, and ordinary apps do not reveal exactly what data agents type into which form entries during execution. To make this question measurable, we introduce MyPhoneBench, a verifiable evaluation framework for privacy behavior in mobile agents. We operationalize privacy-respecting phone use as permissioned access, minimal disclosure, and user-controlled memory through a minimal privacy contract, iMy, and pair it with instrumented mock apps plus rule-based auditing that make unnecessary permission requests, deceptive re-disclosure, and unnecessary form filling observable and reproducible. Across five frontier models on 10 mobile apps and 300 tasks, we find that task success, privacy-compliant task completion, and later-session use of saved preferences are distinct capabilities, and no single model dominates all three. Evaluating success and privacy jointly reshuffles the model ordering relative to either metric alone. The most persistent failure mode across models is simple data minimization: agents still fill optional personal entries that the task does not require. These results show that privacy failures arise from over-helpful execution of benign tasks, and that success-only evaluation overestimates the deployment readiness of current phone-use agents. All code, mock apps, and agent trajectories are publicly available at~ https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/MyPhoneBench.

arXiv:2603.29112v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce GISTBench, a benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to understand users from their interaction histories in recommendation systems. Unlike traditional RecSys benchmarks that focus on item prediction accuracy, our benchmark evaluates how well LLMs can extract and verify user interests from engagement data. We propose two novel metric families: Interest Groundedness (IG), decomposed into precision and recall components to separately penalize hallucinated interest categories and reward coverage, and Interest Specificity (IS), which assesses the distinctiveness of verified LLM-predicted user profiles. We release a synthetic dataset constructed on real user interactions on a global short-form video platform. Our dataset contains both implicit and explicit engagement signals and rich textual descriptions. We validate our dataset fidelity against user surveys, and evaluate eight open-weight LLMs spanning 7B to 120B parameters. Our findings reveal performance bottlenecks in current LLMs, particularly their limited ability to accurately count and attribute engagement signals across heterogeneous interaction types.

arXiv:2603.29176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parkinson's disease (PD) affects over ten million people worldwide. Although temporal interference (TI) and deep brain stimulation (DBS) are promising therapies, inter-individual variability limits empirical treatment selection, increasing non-negligible surgical risk and cost. Previous explorations either resort to limited statistical biomarkers that are insufficient to characterize variability, or employ AI-driven methods which is prone to overfitting and opacity. We bridge this gap with a pretraining-finetuning framework to predict outcomes directly from resting-state fMRI. Critically, a generative virtual brain foundation model, pretrained on a collective dataset (2707 subjects, 5621 sessions) to capture universal disorder patterns, was finetuned on PD cohorts receiving TI (n=51) or DBS (n=55) to yield individualized virtual brains with high fidelity to empirical functional connectivity (r=0.935). By constructing counterfactual estimations between pathological and healthy neural states within these personalized models, we predicted clinical responses (TI: AUPR=0.853; DBS: AUPR=0.915), substantially outperforming baselines. External and prospective validations (n=14, n=11) highlight the feasibility of clinical translation. Moreover, our framework provides state-dependent regional patterns linked to response, offering hypothesis-generating mechanistic insights.

arXiv:2603.29908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trajectory planning for autonomous driving increasingly leverages large language models (LLMs) for commonsense reasoning, yet LLM outputs are inherently unreliable, posing risks in safety-critical applications. We propose C-TRAIL, a framework built on a Commonsense World that couples LLM-derived commonsense with a trust mechanism to guide trajectory planning. C-TRAIL operates through a closed-loop Recall, Plan, and Update cycle: the Recall module queries an LLM for semantic relations and quantifies their reliability via a dual-trust mechanism; the Plan module injects trust-weighted commonsense into Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) through a Dirichlet trust policy; and the Update module adaptively refines trust scores and policy parameters from environmental feedback. Experiments on four simulated scenarios in Highway-env and two real-world levelXData datasets (highD, rounD) show that C-TRAIL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing ADE by 40.2%, FDE by 51.7%, and improving SR by 16.9 percentage points on average. The source code is available at https://github.com/ZhihongCui/CTRAIL.

arXiv:2603.28823v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling laws relate model quality to compute budget (FLOPs), but practitioners face wall-clock time constraints, not compute budgets. We study optimal model sizing under fixed time budgets from 5 minutes to 24 hours on consumer GPUs (RTX 4090). Across 70+ runs spanning 50M--1031M parameters, we find: (1)~at each time budget a U-shaped curve emerges where too-small models overfit and too-large models undertrain; (2)~optimal model size follows $N^* \propto t^{0.60}$, growing \emph{faster} than Chinchilla's $N^* \propto C^{0.50}$, with $\alpha = 0.60 \pm 0.07$ robustly exceeding compute-optimal across all sensitivity analyses; (3)~a \emph{dual U-shape mechanism}: short-budget U-curves arise from compute bottlenecks, while long-budget U-curves emerge from data bottlenecks (overfitting), with an intermediate regime where the U-curve temporarily disappears. These findings have immediate implications for researchers training on consumer hardware, where wall-clock time -- not FLOPs -- is the binding constraint. We release all code, logs, and 70+ experimental configurations.

arXiv:2603.29148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) is a model that can effectively handle graph data tasks and has been successfully applied. However, for large-scale graph datasets, GCN still faces the challenge of high computational overhead, especially when the number of convolutional layers in the graph is large. Currently, there are many advanced methods that use various sampling techniques or graph coarsening techniques to alleviate the inconvenience caused during training. However, among these methods, some ignore the multi-granularity information in the graph structure, and the time complexity of some coarsening methods is still relatively high. In response to these issues, based on our previous work, in this paper, we propose a new framework called Efficient and Scalable Granular-ball Graph Coarsening Method for Large-scale Graph Node Classification. Specifically, this method first uses a multi-granularity granular-ball graph coarsening algorithm to coarsen the original graph to obtain many subgraphs. The time complexity of this stage is linear and much lower than that of the exiting graph coarsening methods. Then, subgraphs composed of these granular-balls are randomly sampled to form minibatches for training GCN. Our algorithm can adaptively and significantly reduce the scale of the original graph, thereby enhancing the training efficiency and scalability of GCN. Ultimately, the experimental results of node classification on multiple datasets demonstrate that the method proposed in this paper exhibits superior performance. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/1-141D/.

arXiv:2603.22369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate prediction of synthetic lethality (SL) is important for guiding the development of cancer drugs and therapies. SL prediction faces significant challenges in the effective fusion of heterogeneous multi-source data. Existing multimodal methods often suffer from "modality laziness" due to disparate convergence speeds, which hinders the exploitation of complementary information. This is also one reason why most existing SL prediction models cannot perform well on both pan-cancer and single-cancer SL pair prediction. In this study, we propose SynLeaF, a dual-stage multimodal fusion framework for SL prediction across pan- and single-cancer contexts. The framework employs a VAE-based cross-encoder with a product of experts mechanism to fuse four omics data types (gene expression, mutation, methylation, and CNV), while simultaneously utilizing a relational graph convolutional network to capture structured gene representations from biomedical knowledge graphs. To mitigate modality laziness, SynLeaF introduces a dual-stage training mechanism employing featurelevel knowledge distillation with adaptive uni-modal teacher and ensemble strategies. In extensive experiments across eight specific cancer types and a pancancer dataset, SynLeaF achieves superior performance in 17 out of 19 scenarios. Ablation studies and gradient analyses further validate the critical contributions of the proposed fusion and distillation mechanisms to model robustness and generalization. To facilitate community use, a web server is available at https://synleaf.bioinformatics-lilab.cn.

arXiv:2602.12670v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment LLM agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark of 86 tasks across 11 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Each task is evaluated under three conditions: no Skills, curated Skills, and self-generated Skills. We test 7 agent-model configurations over 7,308 trajectories. Curated Skills raise average pass rate by 16.2 percentage points(pp), but effects vary widely by domain (+4.5pp for Software Engineering to +51.9pp for Healthcare) and 16 of 84 tasks show negative deltas. Self-generated Skills provide no benefit on average, showing that models cannot reliably author the procedural knowledge they benefit from consuming. Focused Skills with 2--3 modules outperform comprehensive documentation, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them.

arXiv:2506.17188v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the AI Search Paradigm, a comprehensive blueprint for next-generation search systems capable of emulating human information processing and decision-making. The paradigm employs a modular architecture of four LLM-powered agents (Master, Planner, Executor and Writer) that dynamically adapt to the full spectrum of information needs, from simple factual queries to complex multi-stage reasoning tasks. These agents collaborate dynamically through coordinated workflows to evaluate query complexity, decompose problems into executable plans, and orchestrate tool usage, task execution, and content synthesis. We systematically present key methodologies for realizing this paradigm, including task planning and tool integration, execution strategies, aligned and robust retrieval-augmented generation, and efficient LLM inference, spanning both algorithmic techniques and infrastructure-level optimizations. By providing an in-depth guide to these foundational components, this work aims to inform the development of trustworthy, adaptive, and scalable AI search systems.

arXiv:2602.07801v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In long-video understanding, conventional uniform frame sampling often fails to capture key visual evidence, leading to degraded performance and increased hallucinations. To address this, recent agentic thinking-with-videos paradigms have emerged, adopting a localize-clip-answer pipeline in which the model actively identifies relevant video segments, performs dense sampling within those clips, and then produces answers. However, existing methods remain inefficient, suffer from weak localization, and adhere to rigid workflows. To solve these issues, we propose VideoTemp-o3, a unified agentic thinking-with-videos framework that jointly models video grounding and question answering. VideoTemp-o3 exhibits strong localization capability, supports on-demand clipping, and can refine inaccurate localizations. Specifically, in the supervised fine-tuning stage, we design a unified masking mechanism that encourages exploration while preventing noise. For reinforcement learning, we introduce dedicated rewards to mitigate reward hacking. Besides, from the data perspective, we develop an effective pipeline to construct high-quality long video grounded QA data, along with a corresponding benchmark for systematic evaluation across various video durations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves remarkable performance on both long video understanding and grounding.

arXiv:2603.07427v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents, existing safety evaluations face a fundamental trade-off: manual benchmarks are costly, while LLM-based simulators are scalable but suffer from logic hallucination. We present AutoControl Arena, an automated framework for frontier AI risk evaluation built on the principle of logic-narrative decoupling. By grounding deterministic state in executable code while delegating generative dynamics to LLMs, we mitigate hallucination while maintaining flexibility. This principle, instantiated through a three-agent framework, achieves over 98% end-to-end success and 60% human preference over existing simulators. To elicit latent risks, we vary environmental Stress and Temptation across X-Bench (70 scenarios, 7 risk categories). Evaluating 9 frontier models reveals: (1) Alignment Illusion: risk rates surge from 21.7% to 54.5% under pressure, with capable models showing disproportionately larger increases; (2) Scenario-Specific Safety Scaling: advanced reasoning improves robustness for direct harms but worsens it for gaming scenarios; and (3) Divergent Misalignment Patterns: weaker models cause non-malicious harm while stronger models develop strategic concealment.

arXiv:2603.07733v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work investigated the capabilities of different models, including the Llama-3 series of models and CHATGPT, with different forms of expression in solving discrete optimization problems by testing natural language datasets. In contrast to formal datasets with a limited scope of parameters, our dataset included a variety of problem types in discrete optimization problems and featured a wide range of parameter magnitudes, including instances with large parameter sets, integrated with augmented data. It aimed to (1) provide an overview of LLMs' ability in large-scale problems, (2) offer suggestions to those who want to solve discrete optimization problems automatically, and (3) regard the performance as a benchmark for future research. These datasets included original, expanded and augmented datasets. Among these three datasets, the original and augmented ones aimed for evaluation while the expanded one may help finetune a new model. In the experiment, comparisons were made between strong and week models, CoT methods and No-CoT methods on various datasets. The result showed that stronger model performed better reasonably. Contrary to general agreement, it also showed that CoT technique was not always effective regarding the capability of models and disordered datasets improved performance of models on easy to-understand problems, even though they were sometimes with high variance, a manifestation of instability. Therefore, for those who seek to enhance the automatic resolution of discrete optimization problems, it is recommended to consult the results, including the line charts presented in the Appendix, as well as the conclusions drawn in this study for relevant suggestions.

arXiv:2602.12670v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment LLM agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark of 86 tasks across 11 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Each task is evaluated under three conditions: no Skills, curated Skills, and self-generated Skills. We test 7 agent-model configurations over 7,308 trajectories. Curated Skills raise average pass rate by 16.2 percentage points(pp), but effects vary widely by domain (+4.5pp for Software Engineering to +51.9pp for Healthcare) and 16 of 84 tasks show negative deltas. Self-generated Skills provide no benefit on average, showing that models cannot reliably author the procedural knowledge they benefit from consuming. Focused Skills with 2--3 modules outperform comprehensive documentation, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them.

arXiv:2603.03677v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have advanced medical dialogue systems, yet psychiatric consultation poses substantially higher demands due to subjective ambiguity and comorbidity complexity: an agent must continuously extract psychopathological cues from incomplete and inconsistent patient reports in multi-turn interactions and perform rigorous differential diagnostic reasoning. However, existing methods face two fundamental challenges. First, without criteria-grounded clinical supports, they are prone to unsupported clinical assertions when symptoms are atypical or underspecified. Second, in multi-turn interactions, they struggle to mitigate inquiry drift (off-topic or low-yield questioning) and optimize questioning strategies. To address these challenges, we propose MIND, a unified inquiry--diagnosis reinforcement learning framework for psychiatric consultation. Specifically, we build a Criteria-Grounded Psychiatric Reasoning Bank (PRB) that summarizes dialogue context into clinical retrieval states, retrieves semantically similar reference consultations, and distills reusable criteria-grounded clinical supports to guide criteria-aligned inquiry and reasoning. Building on this foundation, MIND enforces explicit clinical reasoning with rubric-based process rewards to provide fine-grained supervision over intermediate decision steps, and incorporates a value-aware trajectory rectification mechanism to jointly improve information acquisition and diagnostic decision-making across turns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MIND consistently outperforms strong baselines in diagnostic accuracy, empathetic interaction quality, interpretability, and generalization.