arXiv:2508.00450v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional recommendation systems tend to trap users in strong feedback loops by excessively pushing content aligned with their historical preferences, thereby limiting exploration opportunities and causing content fatigue. Although large language models (LLMs) demonstrate potential with their diverse content generation capabilities, existing LLM-enhanced dual-model frameworks face two major limitations: first, they overlook long-term preferences driven by group identity, leading to biased interest modeling; second, they suffer from static optimization flaws, as a one-time alignment process fails to leverage incremental user data for closed-loop optimization. To address these challenges, we propose the Co-Evolutionary Alignment (CoEA) method. For interest modeling bias, we introduce Dual-Stable Interest Exploration (DSIE) module, jointly modeling long-term group identity and short-term individual interests through parallel processing of behavioral sequences. For static optimization limitations, we design a Periodic Collaborative Optimization (PCO) mechanism. This mechanism regularly conducts preference verification on incremental data using the Relevance LLM, then guides the Novelty LLM to perform fine-tuning based on the verification results, and subsequently feeds back the output of the continually fine-tuned Novelty LLM to the Relevance LLM for re-evaluation, thereby achieving a dynamic closed-loop optimization. Extensive online and offline experiments verify the effectiveness of the CoEA model in serendipitous recommendation.

arXiv:2507.01335v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autoregressive language models are trained exclusively left-to-right. We explore the complementary factorization, training right-to-left at scale, and ask what reasoning patterns emerge when a model conditions on future context to predict the past. We train LEDOM, an open-source purely reverse autoregressive language model (2B/7B parameters, 435B tokens), and find it develops capabilities distinct from forward models, including abductive inference, question synthesis, and natural resolution of the reversal curse. We then explore one application of the reverse model: combining forward likelihood $P(y \mid x)$ with reverse posterior $P(x \mid y)$ through noisy channel duality. We propose Reverse Reward, which reranks forward outputs using reverse posterior estimates, and prove that bidirectional scoring penalizes hallucinated reasoning chains whose backward reconstruction degrades. Reverse Reward yields gains of up to 6.6\% on AIME 2024 and 15\% on AMC 2023 across multiple strong baselines. We release all models, code, and data here.

arXiv:2507.19418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) methods often incorporate auxiliary tasks to improve performance. However, existing approaches face limitations due to insufficient integration and a lack of flexible uncertainty estimation, leading to suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose a multitasks-based Deep Evidential Fusion Network (DEFNet) for BIQA, which performs multitask optimization with the assistance of scene and distortion type classification tasks. To achieve a more robust and reliable representation, we design a novel trustworthy information fusion strategy. It first combines diverse features and patterns across sub-regions to enhance information richness, and then performs local-global information fusion by balancing fine-grained details with coarse-grained context. Moreover, DEFNet exploits advanced uncertainty estimation technique inspired by evidential learning with the help of normal-inverse gamma distribution mixture. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and authentic distortion datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework. Additional evaluation and analysis are carried out to highlight its strong generalization capability and adaptability to previously unseen scenarios.

arXiv:2602.20159v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapid progress in video models has largely focused on visual quality, leaving their reasoning capabilities underexplored. Video reasoning grounds intelligence in spatiotemporally consistent visual environments that go beyond what text can naturally capture, enabling intuitive reasoning over spatiotemporal structure such as continuity, interaction, and causality. However, systematically studying video reasoning and its scaling behavior is hindered by the lack of large-scale training data. To address this gap, we introduce the Very Big Video Reasoning (VBVR) Dataset, an unprecedentedly large-scale resource spanning 200 curated reasoning tasks following a principled taxonomy and over one million video clips, approximately three orders of magnitude larger than existing datasets. We further present VBVR-Bench, a verifiable evaluation framework that moves beyond model-based judging by incorporating rule-based, human-aligned scorers, enabling reproducible and interpretable diagnosis of video reasoning capabilities. Leveraging the VBVR suite, we conduct one of the first large-scale scaling studies of video reasoning and observe early signs of emergent generalization to unseen reasoning tasks. Together, VBVR lays a foundation for the next stage of research in generalizable video reasoning. The data, benchmark toolkit, and models are publicly available at https://video-reason.com/ .

arXiv:2601.16449v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding human emotions from multimodal signals poses a significant challenge in affective computing and human-robot interaction. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have excelled in general vision-language tasks, their capabilities in emotional reasoning remain limited. The field currently suffers from a scarcity of large-scale datasets with high-quality, descriptive emotion annotations and lacks standardized benchmarks for evaluation. Our preliminary framework, Emotion-LLaMA, pioneered instruction-tuned multimodal learning for emotion reasoning but was restricted by explicit face detectors, implicit fusion strategies, and low-quality training data with limited scale. To address these limitations, we present Emotion-LLaMAv2 and the MMEVerse benchmark, establishing an end-to-end pipeline together with a standardized evaluation setting for emotion recognition and reasoning. Emotion-LLaMAv2 introduces three key advances. First, an end-to-end multiview encoder eliminates external face detection and captures nuanced emotional cues via richer spatial and temporal multiview tokens. Second, a Conv Attention pre-fusion module is designed to enable simultaneous local and global multimodal feature interactions external to the LLM backbone. Third, a perception-to-cognition curriculum instruction tuning scheme within the LLaMA2 backbone unifies emotion recognition and free-form emotion reasoning. To support large-scale training and reproducible evaluation, MMEVerse aggregates twelve publicly available emotion datasets, including IEMOCAP, MELD, DFEW, and MAFW, into a unified multimodal instruction format. The data are re-annotated via a multi-agent pipeline involving Qwen2 Audio, Qwen2.5 VL, and GPT 4o, producing 130k training clips and 36k testing clips across 18 evaluation benchmarks.

arXiv:2602.14473v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quadruped robots are employed in various scenarios in building construction. However, autonomous stair climbing across different indoor staircases remains a major challenge for robot dogs to complete building construction tasks. In this project, we employed a two-stage end-to-end deep reinforcement learning (RL) approach to optimize a robot's performance on U-shaped stairs. The training robot-dog modality, Unitree Go2, was first trained to climb stairs on Isaac Lab's pyramid-stair terrain, and then to climb a U-shaped indoor staircase using the learned policies. This project explores end-to-end RL methods that enable robot dogs to autonomously climb stairs. The results showed (1) the successful goal reached for robot dogs climbing U-shaped stairs with a stall penalty, and (2) the transferability from the policy trained on U-shaped stairs to deployment on straight, L-shaped, and spiral stair terrains, and transferability from other stair models to deployment on U-shaped terrain.

arXiv:2602.14872v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been a main driver of recent breakthroughs in large reasoning models. Yet it remains a mystery how rewards based solely on final outcomes can help overcome the long-horizon barrier to extended reasoning. To understand this, we develop a theory of the training dynamics of RL for transformers on compositional reasoning tasks. Our theory characterizes how the effectiveness of RLVR is governed by the smoothness of the difficulty spectrum. When data contains abrupt discontinuities in difficulty, learning undergoes grokking-type phase transitions, producing prolonged plateaus before progress recurs. In contrast, a smooth difficulty spectrum leads to a relay effect: persistent gradient signals on easier problems elevate the model's capabilities to the point where harder ones become tractable, resulting in steady and continuous improvement. Our theory explains how RLVR can improve performance at the edge of competence, and suggests that appropriately designed data mixtures can yield scalable gains. As a technical contribution, our analysis develops and adapts tools from Fourier analysis on finite groups to our setting. We validate the predicted mechanisms empirically via synthetic experiments.

arXiv:2507.19234v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Resource allocation (RA) is critical to efficient service deployment in Network Function Virtualization (NFV), a transformative networking paradigm. Recently, deep Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based methods have been showing promising potential to address this complexity. However, the lack of a systematic benchmarking framework and thorough analysis hinders the exploration of emerging networks and the development of more robust algorithms while causing inconsistent evaluation. In this paper, we introduce Virne, a comprehensive benchmarking framework for the NFV-RA problem, with a focus on supporting deep RL-based methods. Virne provides customizable simulations for diverse network scenarios, including cloud, edge, and 5G environments. It also features a modular and extensible implementation pipeline that supports over 30 methods of various types, and includes practical evaluation perspectives beyond effectiveness, such as scalability, generalization, and scalability. Furthermore, we conduct in-depth analysis through extensive experiments to provide valuable insights into performance trade-offs for efficient implementation and offer actionable guidance for future research directions. Overall, with its diverse simulations, rich implementations, and extensive evaluation capabilities, Virne could serve as a comprehensive benchmark for advancing NFV-RA methods and deep RL applications. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/GeminiLight/virne.