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RESCUE-BENCH: Towards Relation-Aware Multi-Party Emotional Support Conversation Systems

arXiv:2609.09657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing emotional support conversation systems mainly focus on one-on-one seeker-supporter interactions and individual emotional states, leaving interpersonal relations in multi-party scenarios underexplored. In this work, we introduce relation-aware emotional support conversation, a new task that evaluates whether LLMs can capture and utilize the evolving dynamics of relationships to offer more effective emotional support. We construct RESCUE (Relation-aware Emotional Support Conversation Understanding and Evaluation Benchmark) from real couple and family interview conversations, containing 191 samples, 7,079 annotated turns, and 1,064.8 minutes of video. Based on rich annotations of socio-emotional and support-related dynamics, RESCUE defines six tasks that evaluate two core capabilities required for relation-aware emotional support: Relational Understanding and Relation-Sensitive Support. Experiments with ten LLMs show that current models perform relatively well on tasks relying on local emotional or intervention cues, but struggle with relation-intensive tasks such as relation pattern prediction, viewpoint prediction, and support strategy prediction. These findings reveal the limitations of current LLMs in modeling interpersonal relations and making relation-sensitive support decisions.
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Dynamic Dual-Granularity Skill Bank for Agentic RL

arXiv:2603.28716v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic RL can benefit substantially from reusable experience, yet existing skill-based methods mainly extract trajectory-level guidance and often lack principled mechanisms for maintaining an evolving skill memory. We propose D2Skill, a dynamic dual-granularity skill bank for agentic RL that organizes reusable experience into task skills for high-level guidance and step skills for fine-grained decision support and error correction. D2Skill jointly trains the policy and skill bank through paired baseline and skill-injected rollouts under the same policy, using their performance gap to derive hindsight utility signals for both skill updating and policy optimization. Built entirely from training-time experience, the skill bank is continuously expanded through reflection and maintained with utility-aware retrieval and pruning. Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-Augmented QA tasks show that D2Skill substantially improves performance over skill-free baselines across models of different scales. Further ablations and analyses show that both dual-granularity skill modeling and dynamic skill maintenance are critical to these gains, while the learned skills exhibit higher utility, transfer across evaluation settings, and introduce only modest training overhead.
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SEA-Eval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Self-Evolving Agents Beyond Episodic Assessment

arXiv:2604.08988v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Current LLM-based agents demonstrate strong performance in episodic task execution but remain constrained by static toolsets and episodic amnesia, failing to accumulate experience across task boundaries. This paper formalizes the Self-Evolving Agent (SEA) from the perspective of digital embodiment and continuous cross-task evolution, introduces the Evolutionary Flywheel as its minimal sufficient architecture, and presents SEA-Eval -- the first benchmark designed specifically for evaluating SEAs. Grounded in Flywheel theory, SEA-Eval establishes SR and T as primary metrics and, through sequential task stream design, is designed to quantify evolutionary gain, evolutionary stability, and implicit alignment convergence. Empirical evaluation reveals that, under comparable success rates, token consumption differs by up to 31.2 times between frameworks on individual tasks, with divergent evolutionary trajectories emerging under sequential analysis -- demonstrating that success rate alone creates a capability illusion and that the sequential convergence of $T$ is the key criterion for distinguishing genuine evolution from pseudo-evolution.
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JAEGER: Joint 3D Audio-Visual Grounding and Reasoning in Simulated Physical Environments

arXiv:2602.18527v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current audio-visual large language models (AV-LLMs) are predominantly restricted to 2D perception, relying on RGB video and monaural audio. This design choice introduces a fundamental dimensionality mismatch that precludes reliable source localization and spatial reasoning in complex 3D environments. We address this limitation by presenting JAEGER, a framework that extends AV-LLMs to 3D space, to enable joint spatial grounding and reasoning through the integration of RGB-D observations and multi-channel first-order ambisonics. A core contribution of our work is the neural intensity vector (Neural IV), a learned spatial audio representation that encodes robust directional cues to enhance direction-of-arrival estimation, even in adverse acoustic scenarios with overlapping sources. To facilitate large-scale training and systematic evaluation, we propose SpatialSceneQA, a benchmark of 61k instruction-tuning samples curated from simulated physical environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently surpasses 2D-centric baselines across diverse spatial perception and reasoning tasks, underscoring the necessity of explicit 3D modelling for advancing AI in physical environments. Our source code, pre-trained model checkpoints, and datasets are available at https://github.com/liuzhan22/JAEGER.
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Data Difficulty and the Generalization--Extrapolation Tradeoff in LLM Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2605.12906v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data selection during supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can critically change the behavior of large language models (LLMs). Although existing work has studied the effect of selecting data based on heuristics such as perplexity, difficulty, or length, the reported findings are often inconsistent or context-dependent. In this work, we systematically study the role of data difficulty in fine-tuning from both empirical and theoretical perspectives, and find that there is no universally optimal difficulty level; rather, its effectiveness depends on the dataset size. We show that for a fixed data budget, there exists an optimal data difficulty for SFT, and that this optimal difficulty shifts toward harder data as the data budget increases. To explain this phenomenon, we conduct controlled synthetic experiments that reveal a simple underlying mechanism: the interplay between the (in-distribution) generalization gap and the extrapolation gap. We further support this mechanism through a theoretical analysis using PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds. Overall, our results clarify how data size and difficulty jointly affect the trade-off between generalization and extrapolation in SFT, providing guidance for difficulty-based data selection under certain model and data conditions.
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ActionNex: A Virtual Outage Manager for Cloud

arXiv:2604.03512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Outage management in large-scale cloud operations remains heavily manual, requiring rapid triage, cross-team coordination, and experience-driven decisions under partial observability. We present \textbf{ActionNex}, a production-grade agentic system that supports end-to-end outage assistance, including real-time updates, knowledge distillation, and role- and stage-conditioned next-best action recommendations. ActionNex ingests multimodal operational signals (e.g., outage content, telemetry, and human communications) and compresses them into critical events that represent meaningful state transitions. It couples this perception layer with a hierarchical memory subsystem: long-term Key-Condition-Action (KCA) knowledge distilled from playbooks and historical executions, episodic memory of prior outages, and working memory of the live context. A reasoning agent aligns current critical events to preconditions, retrieves relevant memories, and generates actionable recommendations; executed human actions serve as an implicit feedback signal to enable continual self-evolution in a human-agent hybrid system. We evaluate ActionNex on eight real Azure outages (8M tokens, 4,000 critical events) using two complementary ground-truth action sets, achieving 71.4\% precision and 52.8-54.8\% recall. The system has been piloted in production and has received positive early feedback.
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Schema-Aware Planning and Hybrid Knowledge Toolset for Reliable Knowledge Graph Triple Verification

arXiv:2604.04190v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge Graphs (KGs) serve as a critical foundation for AI systems, yet their automated construction inevitably introduces noise, compromising data trustworthiness. Existing triple verification methods, based on graph embeddings or language models, often suffer from single-source bias by relying on either internal structural constraints or external semantic evidence, and usually follow a static inference paradigm. As a result, they struggle with complex or long-tail facts and provide limited interpretability. To address these limitations, we propose SHARP (Schema-Hybrid Agent for Reliable Prediction), a training-free autonomous agent that reformulates triple verification as a dynamic process of strategic planning, active investigation, and evidential reasoning. Specifically, SHARP combines a Memory-Augmented Mechanism with Schema-Aware Strategic Planning to improve reasoning stability, and employs an enhanced ReAct loop with a Hybrid Knowledge Toolset to dynamically integrate internal KG structure and external textual evidence for cross-verification. Experiments on FB15K-237 and Wikidata5M-Ind show that SHARP significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines, achieving accuracy gains of 4.2% and 12.9%, respectively. Moreover, SHARP provides transparent, fact-based evidence chains for each judgment, demonstrating strong interpretability and robustness for complex verification tasks.
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Diagonal-Tiled Mixed-Precision Attention for Efficient Low-Bit MXFP Inference

arXiv:2604.03950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of real-world tasks, but their inference cost remains prohibitively high due to the quadratic complexity of attention and the memory bandwidth limitations of high-precision operations. In this work, we present a low-bit mixed-precision attention kernel using the microscaling floating-point (MXFP) data format, utilizing the computing capability on next-generation GPU architectures. Our Diagonal-Tiled Mixed-Precision Attention (DMA) incorporates two kinds of low-bit computation at the tiling-level, and is a delicate fused kernel implemented using Triton, exploiting hardware-level parallelism and memory efficiency to enable fast and efficient inference without compromising model performance. Extensive empirical evaluations on NVIDIA B200 GPUs show that our kernel maintains generation quality with negligible degradation, and meanwhile achieves significant speedup by kernel fusion. We release our code at https://github.com/yifu-ding/MP-Sparse-Attn.
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ROSClaw: A Hierarchical Semantic-Physical Framework for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2604.04664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The integration of large language models (LLMs) with embodied agents has improved high-level reasoning capabilities; however, a critical gap remains between semantic understanding and physical execution. While vision-language-action (VLA) and vision-language-navigation (VLN) systems enable robots to perform manipulation and navigation tasks from natural language instructions, they still struggle with long-horizon sequential and temporally structured tasks. Existing frameworks typically adopt modular pipelines for data collection, skill training, and policy deployment, resulting in high costs in experimental validation and policy optimization. To address these limitations, we propose ROSClaw, an agent framework for heterogeneous robots that integrates policy learning and task execution within a unified vision-language model (VLM) controller. The framework leverages e-URDF representations of heterogeneous robots as physical constraints to construct a sim-to-real topological mapping, enabling real-time access to the physical states of both simulated and real-world agents. We further incorporate a data collection and state accumulation mechanism that stores robot states, multimodal observations, and execution trajectories during real-world execution, enabling subsequent iterative policy optimization. During deployment, a unified agent maintains semantic continuity between reasoning and execution, and dynamically assigns task-specific control to different agents, thereby improving robustness in multi-policy execution. By establishing an autonomous closed-loop framework, ROSClaw minimizes the reliance on robot-specific development workflows. The framework supports hardware-level validation, automated generation of SDK-level control programs, and tool-based execution, enabling rapid cross-platform transfer and continual improvement of robotic skills. Ours project page: https://www.rosclaw.io/.
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Mind Your HEARTBEAT! Claw Background Execution Inherently Enables Silent Memory Pollution

arXiv:2603.23064v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We identify a critical security vulnerability in mainstream Claw personal AI agents: untrusted content encountered during heartbeat-driven background execution can silently pollute agent memory and subsequently influence user-facing behavior without the user's awareness. This vulnerability arises from an architectural design shared across the Claw ecosystem: heartbeat background execution runs in the same session as user-facing conversation, so content ingested from any external source monitored in the background (including email, message channels, news feeds, code repositories, and social platforms) can enter the same memory context used for foreground interaction, often with limited user visibility and without clear source provenance. We formalize this process as an Exposure (E) $\rightarrow$ Memory (M) $\rightarrow$ Behavior (B) pathway: misinformation encountered during heartbeat execution enters the agent's short-term session context, potentially gets written into long-term memory, and later shapes downstream user-facing behavior. We instantiate this pathway in an agent-native social setting using MissClaw, a controlled research replica of Moltbook. We find that (1) social credibility cues, especially perceived consensus, are the dominant driver of short-term behavioral influence, with misleading rates up to 61%; (2) routine memory-saving behavior can promote short-term pollution into durable long-term memory at rates up to 91%, with cross-session behavioral influence reaching 76%; (3) under naturalistic browsing with content dilution and context pruning, pollution still crosses session boundaries. Overall, prompt injection is not required: ordinary social misinformation is sufficient to silently shape agent memory and behavior under heartbeat-driven background execution.
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Grounded Token Initialization for New Vocabulary in LMs for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2604.02324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models (LMs) are increasingly extended with new learnable vocabulary tokens for domain-specific tasks, such as Semantic-ID tokens in generative recommendation. The standard practice initializes these new tokens as the mean of existing vocabulary embeddings, then relies on supervised fine-tuning to learn their representations. We present a systematic analysis of this strategy: through spectral and geometric diagnostics, we show that mean initialization collapses all new tokens into a degenerate subspace, erasing inter-token distinctions that subsequent fine-tuning struggles to fully recover. These findings suggest that \emph{token initialization} is a key bottleneck when extending LMs with new vocabularies. Motivated by this diagnosis, we propose the \emph{Grounded Token Initialization Hypothesis}: linguistically grounding novel tokens in the pretrained embedding space before fine-tuning better enables the model to leverage its general-purpose knowledge for novel-token domains. We operationalize this hypothesis as GTI (Grounded Token Initialization), a lightweight grounding stage that, prior to fine-tuning, maps new tokens to distinct, semantically meaningful locations in the pretrained embedding space using only paired linguistic supervision. Despite its simplicity, GTI outperforms both mean initialization and existing auxiliary-task adaptation methods in the majority of evaluation settings across multiple generative recommendation benchmarks, including industry-scale and public datasets. Further analyses show that grounded embeddings produce richer inter-token structure that persists through fine-tuning, corroborating the hypothesis that initialization quality is a key bottleneck in vocabulary extension.
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ATP-Bench: Towards Agentic Tool Planning for MLLM Interleaved Generation

arXiv:2603.29902v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interleaved text-and-image generation represents a significant frontier for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), offering a more intuitive way to convey complex information. Current paradigms rely on either image generation or retrieval augmentation, yet they typically treat the two as mutually exclusive paths, failing to unify factuality with creativity. We argue that the next milestone in this field is Agentic Tool Planning, where the model serves as a central controller that autonomously determines when, where, and which tools to invoke to produce interleaved responses for visual-critical queries. To systematically evaluate this paradigm, we introduce ATP-Bench, a novel benchmark comprising 7,702 QA pairs (including 1,592 VQA pairs) across eight categories and 25 visual-critical intents, featuring human-verified queries and ground truths. Furthermore, to evaluate agentic planning independent of end-to-end execution and changing tool backends, we propose a Multi-Agent MLLM-as-a-Judge (MAM) system. MAM evaluates tool-call precision, identifies missed opportunities for tool use, and assesses overall response quality without requiring ground-truth references. Our extensive experiments on 10 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal that models struggle with coherent interleaved planning and exhibit significant variations in tool-use behavior, highlighting substantial room for improvement and providing actionable guidance for advancing interleaved generation. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/ATP-Bench.
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MultiGen: Level-Design for Editable Multiplayer Worlds in Diffusion Game Engines

arXiv:2603.06679v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Video world models have shown immense promise for interactive simulation and entertainment, but current systems still struggle with two important aspects of interactivity: user control over the environment for reproducible, editable experiences, and shared inference where players hold influence over a common world. To address these limitations, we introduce an explicit external memory into the system, a persistent state operating independent of the model's context window, that is continually updated by user actions and queried throughout the generation roll-out. Unlike conventional diffusion game engines that operate as next-frame predictors, our approach decomposes generation into Memory, Observation, and Dynamics modules. This design gives users direct, editable control over environment structure via an editable memory representation, and it naturally extends to real-time multiplayer rollouts with coherent viewpoints and consistent cross-player interactions.
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QuestA: Expanding Reasoning Capacity in LLMs via Question Augmentation

arXiv:2507.13266v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a central paradigm for training large language models (LLMs) in reasoning tasks. Yet recent studies question RL's ability to incentivize reasoning capacity beyond the base model. This raises a key challenge: how can RL be adapted to solve harder reasoning problems more effectively? To address this challenge, we propose a simple yet effective strategy via Question Augmentation: introduce partial solutions during training to reduce problem difficulty and provide more informative learning signals. Our method, QuestA, when applied during RL training on math reasoning tasks, not only improves pass@1 but also pass@k-particularly on problems where standard RL struggles to make progress. This enables continual improvement over strong open-source models such as DeepScaleR and OpenMath Nemotron, further enhancing their reasoning capabilities. We achieve new state-of-the-art results on math benchmarks using 1.5B-parameter models: 72.50% (+10.73%) on AIME24, 62.29% (+12.79%) on AIME25, and 41.67% (+10.11%) on HMMT25. Code, data and model are available at https://github.com/foreverlasting1202/QuestA.
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PERMA: Benchmarking Personalized Memory Agents via Event-Driven Preference and Realistic Task Environments

arXiv:2603.23231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Empowering large language models with long-term memory is crucial for building agents that adapt to users' evolving needs. However, prior evaluations typically interleave preference-related dialogues with irrelevant conversations, reducing the task to needle-in-a-haystack retrieval while ignoring relationships between events that drive the evolution of user preferences. Such settings overlook a fundamental characteristic of real-world personalization: preferences emerge gradually and accumulate across interactions within noisy contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce PERMA, a benchmark designed to evaluate persona consistency over time beyond static preference recall. Additionally, we incorporate (1) text variability and (2) linguistic alignment to simulate erratic user inputs and individual idiolects in real-world data. PERMA consists of temporally ordered interaction events spanning multiple sessions and domains, with preference-related queries inserted over time. We design both multiple-choice and interactive tasks to probe the model's understanding of persona along the interaction timeline. Experiments demonstrate that by linking related interactions, advanced memory systems can extract more precise preferences and reduce token consumption, outperforming traditional semantic retrieval of raw dialogues. Nevertheless, they still struggle to maintain a coherent persona across temporal depth and cross-domain interference, highlighting the need for more robust personalized memory management in agents. Our code and data are open-sourced at https://github.com/PolarisLiu1/PERMA.
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A Synchronous EEG-fNIRS BCI: A Proof-of-Concept for Multimodal Avalanche Analysis of Motor Cognition in Older Adults

arXiv:2603.23358v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This proof-of-concept study introduces a novel multimodal framework combining synchronized EEG-fNIRS modalities with neuronal avalanche analysis to identify early network dysfunction in Alzheimer's disease. The approach leverages complementary neural signals to examine motor network dynamics during execution and imagery tasks within an interactive task environment. Preliminary analysis of a small pilot cohort (N=4 subjects, including one with Mild Cognitive Impairment) validated the technical feasibility of the multimodal framework and revealed observable condition-dependent patterns in network organization. Two primary observations emerged: a reduced neural contrast between motor execution and imagery states, and increased trial-to-trial variability in network organization in the MCI participant. These initial results successfully validate the technical pipeline and provide hypothesis-generating observations for future statistically powered studies. The convergence of findings across modalities suggests that multimodal assessment of network flexibility may help detect functional changes in early Alzheimer's continuum, supporting the future development of this BCI-inspired framework into an engaging diagnostic tool.
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Mind Your HEARTBEAT! Claw Background Execution Inherently Enables Silent Memory Pollution

arXiv:2603.23064v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We identify a critical security vulnerability in mainstream Claw personal AI agents: untrusted content encountered during heartbeat-driven background execution can silently pollute agent memory and subsequently influence user-facing behavior without the user's awareness. This vulnerability arises from an architectural design shared across the Claw ecosystem: heartbeat background execution runs in the same session as user-facing conversation, so content ingested from any external source monitored in the background (including email, message channels, news feeds, code repositories, and social platforms) can enter the same memory context used for foreground interaction, often with limited user visibility and without clear source provenance. We formalize this process as an Exposure (E) $\rightarrow$ Memory (M) $\rightarrow$ Behavior (B) pathway: misinformation encountered during heartbeat execution enters the agent's short-term session context, potentially gets written into long-term memory, and later shapes downstream user-facing behavior. We instantiate this pathway in an agent-native social setting using MissClaw, a controlled research replica of Moltbook. We find that (1) social credibility cues, especially perceived consensus, are the dominant driver of short-term behavioral influence, with misleading rates up to 61%; (2) routine memory-saving behavior can promote short-term pollution into durable long-term memory at rates up to 91%, with cross-session behavioral influence reaching 76%; (3) under naturalistic browsing with content dilution and context pruning, pollution still crosses session boundaries. Overall, prompt injection is not required: ordinary social misinformation is sufficient to silently shape agent memory and behavior under heartbeat-driven background execution.
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When Drafts Evolve: Speculative Decoding Meets Online Learning

arXiv:2603.12617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speculative decoding has emerged as a widely adopted paradigm for accelerating large language model inference, where a lightweight draft model rapidly generates candidate tokens that are then verified in parallel by a larger target model. However, due to limited model capacity, drafts often struggle to approximate the target distribution, resulting in shorter acceptance lengths and diminished speedup. A key yet under-explored observation is that speculative decoding inherently provides verification feedback that quantifies the deviation between the draft and target models at no additional cost. This process naturally forms an iterative "draft commits-feedback provides-draft adapts" evolving loop, which precisely matches the online learning paradigm. Motivated by this connection, we propose OnlineSpec, a unified framework that systematically leverages interactive feedback to continuously evolve draft models. Grounded in dynamic regret minimization, we establish a formal link between online learning performance and speculative system's acceleration rate, and develop novel algorithms via modern online learning techniques, including optimistic online learning that adaptively reuses historical gradients as predictive update hints, and online ensemble learning that dynamically maintains multiple draft models. Our algorithms are equipped with theoretical justifications and improved acceleration rates, achieving up to 24% speedup over seven benchmarks and three foundation models.
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Thinking in Streaming Video

arXiv:2603.12938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time understanding of continuous video streams is essential for interactive assistants and multimodal agents operating in dynamic environments. However, most existing video reasoning approaches follow a batch paradigm that defers reasoning until the full video context is observed, resulting in high latency and growing computational cost that are incompatible with streaming scenarios. In this paper, we introduce ThinkStream, a framework for streaming video reasoning based on a Watch--Think--Speak paradigm that enables models to incrementally update their understanding as new video observations arrive. At each step, the model performs a short reasoning update and decides whether sufficient evidence has accumulated to produce a response. To support long-horizon streaming, we propose Reasoning-Compressed Streaming Memory (RCSM), which treats intermediate reasoning traces as compact semantic memory that replaces outdated visual tokens while preserving essential context. We further train the model using a Streaming Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards scheme that aligns incremental reasoning and response timing with the requirements of streaming interaction. Experiments on multiple streaming video benchmarks show that ThinkStream significantly outperforms existing online video models while maintaining low latency and memory usage. Code, models and data will be released at https://github.com/johncaged/ThinkStream
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Give Them an Inch and They Will Take a Mile:Understanding and Measuring Caller Identity Confusion in MCP-Based AI Systems

arXiv:2603.07473v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open and standardized interface that enables large language models (LLMs) to interact with external tools and services, and is increasingly adopted by AI agents. However, the security of MCP-based systems remains largely unexplored.In this work, we conduct a large-scale security analysis of MCP servers integrated within MCP clients. We show that treating MCP servers as trusted entities without authenticating the caller identity is fundamentally insecure. Since MCP servers often cannot distinguish who is invoking a request, a single authorization decision may implicitly grant access to multiple, potentially untrusted callers.Our empirical study reveals that most MCP servers rely on persistent authorization states, allowing tool invocations after an initial authorization without re-authentication, regardless of the caller. In addition, many MCP servers fail to enforce authentication at the per-tool level, enabling unauthorized access to sensitive operations.These findings demonstrate that one-time authorization and server-level trust significantly expand the attack surface of MCP-based systems, highlighting the need for explicit caller authentication and fine-grained authorization mechanisms.
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