Daily Papers

Making moral judgments is an essential step toward developing ethical AI systems. Prevalent approaches are mostly implemented in a bottom-up manner, which uses a large set of annotated data to train models based on crowd-sourced opinions about morality. These approaches have been criticized for potentially overgeneralizing a limited group of annotators' moral stances and lacking explainability. In contrast, top-down approaches make moral judgments grounded in a set of principles. However, it remains conceptual due to the incapability of previous language models and the unsolved debate among moral principles. In this study, we propose a flexible framework to steer Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform moral reasoning with well-established moral theories from interdisciplinary research. The theory-guided top-down framework can incorporate various moral theories. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on datasets derived from moral theories. Furthermore, we show the alignment between different moral theories and existing morality datasets. Our analysis exhibits the potentials and flaws in existing resources (models and datasets) in developing explainable moral judgment-making systems.

Mounting posture is an important visual indicator of estrus in dairy cattle. However, achieving reliable mounting pose estimation in real-world environments remains challenging due to cluttered backgrounds and frequent inter-animal occlusion. We present FSMC-Pose, a top-down framework that integrates a lightweight frequency-spatial fusion backbone, CattleMountNet, and a multiscale self-calibration head, SC2Head. Specifically, we design two algorithmic components for CattleMountNet: the Spatial Frequency Enhancement Block (SFEBlock) and the Receptive Aggregation Block (RABlock). SFEBlock separates cattle from cluttered backgrounds, while RABlock captures multiscale contextual information. The Spatial-Channel Self-Calibration Head (SC2Head) attends to spatial and channel dependencies and introduces a self-calibration branch to mitigate structural misalignment under inter-animal overlap. We construct a mounting dataset, MOUNT-Cattle, covering 1176 mounting instances, which follows the COCO format and supports drop-in training across pose estimation models. Using a comprehensive dataset that combines MOUNT-Cattle with the public NWAFU-Cattle dataset, FSMC-Pose achieves higher accuracy than strong baselines, with markedly lower computational and parameter costs, while maintaining real-time inference on commodity GPUs. Extensive experiments and qualitative analyses show that FSMC-Pose effectively captures and estimates cattle mounting pose in complex and cluttered environments. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/elianafang/FSMC-Pose.

Parse graphs of the human body can be obtained in the human brain to help humans complete the human pose estimation (HPE). It contains a hierarchical structure, like a tree structure, and context relations among nodes. Many researchers pre-design the parse graph of body structure, and then design framework for HPE. However, these frameworks are difficulty adapting when encountering situations that differ from the preset human structure. Different from them, we regard the feature map as a whole, similarly to human body, so the feature map can be optimized based on parse graphs and each node feature is learned implicitly instead of explicitly, which means it can flexibly respond to different human body structure. In this paper, we design the Refinement Module based on the Parse Graph of feature map (RMPG), which includes two stages: top-down decomposition and bottom-up combination. In the top-down decomposition stage, the feature map is decomposed into multiple sub-feature maps along the channel and their context relations are calculated to obtain their respective context information. In the bottom-up combination stage, the sub-feature maps and their context information are combined to obtain refined sub-feature maps, and then these refined sub-feature maps are concatenated to obtain the refined feature map. Additionally ,we design a top-down framework by using multiple RMPG modules for HPE, some of which are supervised to obtain context relations among body parts. Our framework achieves excellent results on the COCO keypoint detection, CrowdPose and MPII human pose datasets. More importantly, our experiments also demonstrate the effectiveness of RMPG on different methods, including SimpleBaselines, Hourglass, and ViTPose.

UAV vision-language navigation (VLN) requires an agent to navigate complex 3D environments from an egocentric perspective while following ambiguous multi-step instructions over long horizons. Existing zero-shot methods remain limited, as they often rely on large base models, generic prompts, and loosely coordinated modules. In this work, we propose FineCog-Nav, a top-down framework inspired by human cognition that organizes navigation into fine-grained modules for language processing, perception, attention, memory, imagination, reasoning, and decision-making. Each module is driven by a moderate-sized foundation model with role-specific prompts and structured input-output protocols, enabling effective collaboration and improved interpretability. To support fine-grained evaluation, we construct AerialVLN-Fine, a curated benchmark of 300 trajectories derived from AerialVLN, with sentence-level instruction-trajectory alignment and refined instructions containing explicit visual endpoints and landmark references. Experiments show that FineCog-Nav consistently outperforms zero-shot baselines in instruction adherence, long-horizon planning, and generalization to unseen environments. These results suggest the effectiveness of fine-grained cognitive modularization for zero-shot aerial navigation. Project page: https://smartdianlab.github.io/projects-FineCogNav.

UV unwrapping flattens 3D surfaces to 2D with minimal distortion, often requiring the complex surface to be decomposed into multiple charts. Although extensively studied, existing UV unwrapping methods frequently struggle with AI-generated meshes, which are typically noisy, bumpy, and poorly conditioned. These methods often produce highly fragmented charts and suboptimal boundaries, introducing artifacts and hindering downstream tasks. We introduce PartUV, a part-based UV unwrapping pipeline that generates significantly fewer, part-aligned charts while maintaining low distortion. Built on top of a recent learning-based part decomposition method PartField, PartUV combines high-level semantic part decomposition with novel geometric heuristics in a top-down recursive framework. It ensures each chart's distortion remains below a user-specified threshold while minimizing the total number of charts. The pipeline integrates and extends parameterization and packing algorithms, incorporates dedicated handling of non-manifold and degenerate meshes, and is extensively parallelized for efficiency. Evaluated across four diverse datasets, including man-made, CAD, AI-generated, and Common Shapes, PartUV outperforms existing tools and recent neural methods in chart count and seam length, achieves comparable distortion, exhibits high success rates on challenging meshes, and enables new applications like part-specific multi-tiles packing. Our project page is at https://www.zhaoningwang.com/PartUV.

In this paper, we propose a novel top-down instance segmentation framework based on explicit shape encoding, named ESE-Seg. It largely reduces the computational consumption of the instance segmentation by explicitly decoding the multiple object shapes with tensor operations, thus performs the instance segmentation at almost the same speed as the object detection. ESE-Seg is based on a novel shape signature Inner-center Radius (IR), Chebyshev polynomial fitting and the strong modern object detectors. ESE-Seg with YOLOv3 outperforms the Mask R-CNN on Pascal VOC 2012 at mAP^r@0.5 while 7 times faster.

Modern deep-learning-based lane detection methods are successful in most scenarios but struggling for lane lines with complex topologies. In this work, we propose CondLaneNet, a novel top-to-down lane detection framework that detects the lane instances first and then dynamically predicts the line shape for each instance. Aiming to resolve lane instance-level discrimination problem, we introduce a conditional lane detection strategy based on conditional convolution and row-wise formulation. Further, we design the Recurrent Instance Module(RIM) to overcome the problem of detecting lane lines with complex topologies such as dense lines and fork lines. Benefit from the end-to-end pipeline which requires little post-process, our method has real-time efficiency. We extensively evaluate our method on three benchmarks of lane detection. Results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on all three benchmark datasets. Moreover, our method has the coexistence of accuracy and efficiency, e.g. a 78.14 F1 score and 220 FPS on CULane. Our code is available at https://github.com/aliyun/conditional-lane-detection.

Most LLM-based agent frameworks adopt a top-down philosophy: humans decompose tasks, define workflows, and assign agents to execute each step. While effective on benchmark-style tasks, such systems rely on designer updates and overlook agents' potential to learn from experience. Recently, Silver and Sutton(2025) envision a shift into a new era, where agents could progress from a stream of experiences. In this paper, we instantiate this vision of experience-driven learning by introducing a bottom-up agent paradigm that mirrors the human learning process. Agents acquire competence through a trial-and-reasoning mechanism-exploring, reflecting on outcomes, and abstracting skills over time. Once acquired, skills can be rapidly shared and extended, enabling continual evolution rather than static replication. As more agents are deployed, their diverse experiences accelerate this collective process, making bottom-up design especially suited for open-ended environments. We evaluate this paradigm in Slay the Spire and Civilization V, where agents perceive through raw visual inputs and act via mouse outputs, the same as human players. Using a unified, game-agnostic codebase without any game-specific prompts or privileged APIs, our bottom-up agents acquire skills entirely through autonomous interaction, demonstrating the potential of the bottom-up paradigm in complex, real-world environments. Our code is available at https://github.com/AngusDujw/Bottom-Up-Agent.

Designing realistic and functional 3D indoor rooms is essential for a wide range of applications, including interior design, virtual reality, gaming, and embodied AI. While recent MLLM-based approaches have shown great potential for 3D room synthesis from textual descriptions or reference images, text-based methods struggle to capture precise spatial information, and existing image-conditioned agents suffer from instability and infinite looping when tasked with holistic room generation from top-down views. To address these limitations, we propose Code-as-Room, an MLLM-based agentic framework equipped with a structured execution harness, which represents 3D rooms with Blender codes. Given a top-down room image, the framework parses the reference image to extract scene elements and their spatial relationships, and synthesizes executable Blender code for geometry, materials, and lighting in a principled, multi-stage pipeline. A cross-stage memory module is maintained throughout to mitigate context forgetting inherent to existing agent-based frameworks. We further introduce a dedicated benchmark for code-based 3D room synthesis, encompassing various evaluation protocols. Based on our benchmark, comprehensive comparisons against existing agent-based methods are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed execution harness.

While existing machine learning (ML) frameworks focus on established platforms, like running CUDA on server-grade GPUs, there have been growing demands to enable emerging AI applications in a broader set of scenarios, such as running Large Language Models (LLMs) within browsers and mobile phones. However, deploying emerging models on new platforms (such as Metal and WebGPU) presents significant software engineering challenges due to rapid model evolution and limited tooling and practices for these platforms. Previous practice for ML model deployment often follows a bottom-up fashion, where engineers first implement individual required operators and then put them together. However, this traditional development approach fails to meet the productivity requirements when deploying emerging ML applications, with the testing and debugging part as a bottleneck. To this end, we introduce TapML, a top-down approach designed to streamline model deployment on diverse platforms. While the traditional bottom-up approach requires crafting manual tests, TapML automatically creates high-quality, realistic test data through operator-wise test carving. Furthermore, TapML uses a migration-based strategy to gradually offload model implementation from the mature source platform to the target platform, minimizing the debugging scope of compound errors. TapML has been used as the default development method in the MLC-LLM project to deploy emerging ML models. Within 2 years, TapML has accelerated the deployment of 105 emerging models in 27 model architectures across 5 emerging platforms. We show that TapML effectively boosts developer productivity while ensuring the quality of deployed models. Furthermore, we summarize comprehensive case studies from our real-world development, offering best practices for developing emerging ML systems.

"Forward-only" algorithms, which train neural networks while avoiding a backward pass, have recently gained attention as a way of solving the biologically unrealistic aspects of backpropagation. Here, we first address compelling challenges related to the "forward-only" rules, which include reducing the performance gap with backpropagation and providing an analytical understanding of their dynamics. To this end, we show that the forward-only algorithm with top-down feedback is well-approximated by an "adaptive-feedback-alignment" algorithm, and we analytically track its performance during learning in a prototype high-dimensional setting. Then, we compare different versions of forward-only algorithms, focusing on the Forward-Forward and PEPITA frameworks, and we show that they share the same learning principles. Overall, our work unveils the connections between three key neuro-inspired learning rules, providing a link between "forward-only" algorithms, i.e., Forward-Forward and PEPITA, and an approximation of backpropagation, i.e., Feedback Alignment.

Large language model based agents are increasingly deployed in complex, tool augmented environments. While reinforcement learning provides a principled mechanism for such agents to improve through interaction, its effectiveness critically depends on the availability of structured training tasks. In many realistic settings, however, no such tasks exist a challenge we term task scarcity, which has become a key bottleneck for scaling agentic RL. Existing approaches typically assume predefined task collections, an assumption that fails in novel environments where tool semantics and affordances are initially unknown. To address this limitation, we formalize the problem of Task Generation for Agentic RL, where an agent must learn within a given environment that lacks predefined tasks. We propose CuES, a Curiosity driven and Environment grounded Synthesis framework that autonomously generates diverse, executable, and meaningful tasks directly from the environment structure and affordances, without relying on handcrafted seeds or external corpora. CuES drives exploration through intrinsic curiosity, abstracts interaction patterns into reusable task schemas, and refines them through lightweight top down guidance and memory based quality control. Across three representative environments, AppWorld, BFCL, and WebShop, CuES produces task distributions that match or surpass manually curated datasets in both diversity and executability, yielding substantial downstream policy improvements. These results demonstrate that curiosity driven, environment grounded task generation provides a scalable foundation for agents that not only learn how to act, but also learn what to learn. The code is available at https://github.com/modelscope/AgentEvolver/tree/main/research/CuES.

Scripting interfaces enable users to automate tasks and customize software workflows, but creating scripts traditionally requires programming expertise and familiarity with specific APIs, posing barriers for many users. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, runtime code generation is severely limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. To bridge the gap, we propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset, a collection of verified scripts, by exploiting LLMs and publicly available scripting guides. Our framework comprises two components: (1) task creation, using top-down functionality guidance and bottom-up API synergy exploration to generate helpful tasks; and (2) skill generation with trials, refining and validating scripts based on execution feedback. To efficiently navigate the extensive API landscape, we introduce a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based link prediction model to capture API synergy, enabling the generation of skills involving underutilized APIs and expanding the skillset's diversity. Experiments with Adobe Illustrator demonstrate that our framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. This is the first attempt to use software scripting interfaces as a testbed for LLM-based systems, highlighting the advantages of leveraging execution feedback in a controlled environment and offering valuable insights into aligning AI capabilities with user needs in specialized software domains.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the response quality and domain-specific performance of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge to combat hallucinations. In recent research, graph structures have been integrated into RAG to enhance the capture of semantic relations between entities. However, it primarily focuses on low-order pairwise entity relations, limiting the high-order associations among multiple entities. Hypergraph-enhanced approaches address this limitation by modeling multi-entity interactions via hyperedges, but they are typically constrained to inter-chunk entity-level representations, overlooking the global thematic organization and alignment across chunks. Drawing inspiration from the top-down cognitive process of human reasoning, we propose a theme-aligned dual-hypergraph RAG framework (Cog-RAG) that uses a theme hypergraph to capture inter-chunk thematic structure and an entity hypergraph to model high-order semantic relations. Furthermore, we design a cognitive-inspired two-stage retrieval strategy that first activates query-relevant thematic content from the theme hypergraph, and then guides fine-grained recall and diffusion in the entity hypergraph, achieving semantic alignment and consistent generation from global themes to local details. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that Cog-RAG significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baseline approaches.

Referring expression grounding is an important and challenging task in computer vision. To avoid the laborious annotation in conventional referring grounding, unpaired referring grounding is introduced, where the training data only contains a number of images and queries without correspondences. The few existing solutions to unpaired referring grounding are still preliminary, due to the challenges of learning image-text matching and lack of the top-down guidance with unpaired data. In this paper, we propose a novel bidirectional cross-modal matching (BiCM) framework to address these challenges. Particularly, we design a query-aware attention map (QAM) module that introduces top-down perspective via generating query-specific visual attention maps. A cross-modal object matching (COM) module is further introduced, which exploits the recently emerged image-text matching pretrained model, CLIP, to predict the target objects from a bottom-up perspective. The top-down and bottom-up predictions are then integrated via a similarity funsion (SF) module. We also propose a knowledge adaptation matching (KAM) module that leverages unpaired training data to adapt pretrained knowledge to the target dataset and task. Experiments show that our framework outperforms previous works by 6.55% and 9.94% on two popular grounding datasets.

We present TreeON, a novel neural-based framework for reconstructing detailed 3D tree point clouds from sparse top-down geodata, using only a single orthophoto and its corresponding Digital Surface Model (DSM). Our method introduces a new training supervision strategy that combines both geometric supervision and differentiable shadow and silhouette losses to learn point cloud representations of trees without requiring species labels, procedural rules, terrestrial reconstruction data, or ground laser scans. To address the lack of ground truth data, we generate a synthetic dataset of point clouds from procedurally modeled trees and train our network on it. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate better reconstruction quality and coverage compared to existing methods, as well as strong generalization to real-world data, producing visually appealing and structurally plausible tree point cloud representations suitable for integration into interactive digital 3D maps. The codebase, synthetic dataset, and pretrained model are publicly available at https://angelikigram.github.io/treeON/.

Language model deployments in consumer-facing applications introduce numerous risks. While existing research on harms and hazards of such applications follows top-down approaches derived from regulatory frameworks and theoretical analyses, empirical evidence of real-world failure modes remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce RealHarm, a dataset of annotated problematic interactions with AI agents built from a systematic review of publicly reported incidents. Analyzing harms, causes, and hazards specifically from the deployer's perspective, we find that reputational damage constitutes the predominant organizational harm, while misinformation emerges as the most common hazard category. We empirically evaluate state-of-the-art guardrails and content moderation systems to probe whether such systems would have prevented the incidents, revealing a significant gap in the protection of AI applications.

Current Vision-Language Models struggle with hours-long videos because processing full-length visual sequences induces prohibitive token explosion and attention dilution. To overcome this, we introduce MemDreamer to decouple perception and reasoning, shifting long-video understanding into an agentic exploration process. As a plug-and-play framework, it incrementally streams videos to construct a Hierarchical Graph Memory, a top-down three-tier architecture for semantic abstraction, anchored by a foundational graph capturing spatiotemporal and causal relations. During inference, the reasoning model employs agentic tool-augmented retrieval, navigating hierarchies, searching nodes, and traversing logical edges via an Observation-Reason-Action loop. Experiments show MemDreamer achieves SOTA results across four mainstream benchmarks, narrowing the gap with human experts to only 3.7 points. It constrains the reasoning context window to merely 2% of full-context ingestion while delivering a 12.5 point absolute accuracy gain. Furthermore, statistical analysis uncovers a strong positive linear correlation between an VLM's performance on logic reasoning and long-video understanding benchmarks, establishing agentic capability scaling as a new paradigm for multimodal comprehension.

Despite their success, modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs) exhibit fundamental limitations, including data inefficiency, poor out-of-distribution generalization, and vulnerability to adversarial perturbations. These shortcomings can be traced to a lack of inductive biases that reflect the inherent geometric structure of the visual world. The primate visual system, in contrast, demonstrates superior efficiency and robustness, suggesting that its architectural and computational principles,which evolved to internalize these structures,may offer a blueprint for more capable artificial vision. This paper introduces Visual Cortex Network (VCNet), a novel neural network architecture whose design is informed by the macro-scale organization of the primate visual cortex. VCNet is framed as a geometric framework that emulates key biological mechanisms, including hierarchical processing across distinct cortical areas, dual-stream information segregation for learning disentangled representations, and top-down predictive feedback for representation refinement. We interpret these mechanisms through the lens of geometry and dynamical systems, positing that they guide the learning of structured, low-dimensional neural manifolds. We evaluate VCNet on two specialized benchmarks: the Spots-10 animal pattern dataset, which probes sensitivity to natural textures, and a light field image classification task, which requires processing higher-dimensional visual data. Our results show that VCNet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 92.1\% on Spots-10 and 74.4\% on the light field dataset, surpassing contemporary models of comparable size. This work demonstrates that integrating high-level neuroscientific principles, viewed through a geometric lens, can lead to more efficient and robust models, providing a promising direction for addressing long-standing challenges in machine learning.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) has gained increasing attention over recent years and many approaches have emerged to advance their development. The remarkable achievements of foundation models have shaped the challenges and proposed methods for VLN research. In this survey, we provide a top-down review that adopts a principled framework for embodied planning and reasoning, and emphasizes the current methods and future opportunities leveraging foundation models to address VLN challenges. We hope our in-depth discussions could provide valuable resources and insights: on one hand, to milestone the progress and explore opportunities and potential roles for foundation models in this field, and on the other, to organize different challenges and solutions in VLN to foundation model researchers.

As large language models (LLMs) grow more powerful, concerns around potential harms like toxicity, unfairness, and hallucination threaten user trust. Ensuring beneficial alignment of LLMs with human values through model alignment is thus critical yet challenging, requiring a deeper understanding of LLM behaviors and mechanisms. We propose opening the black box of LLMs through a framework of holistic interpretability encompassing complementary bottom-up and top-down perspectives. The bottom-up view, enabled by mechanistic interpretability, focuses on component functionalities and training dynamics. The top-down view utilizes representation engineering to analyze behaviors through hidden representations. In this paper, we review the landscape around mechanistic interpretability and representation engineering, summarizing approaches, discussing limitations and applications, and outlining future challenges in using these techniques to achieve ethical, honest, and reliable reasoning aligned with human values.

Dense human pose estimation is the problem of learning dense correspondences between RGB images and the surfaces of human bodies, which finds various applications, such as human body reconstruction, human pose transfer, and human action recognition. Prior dense pose estimation methods are all based on Mask R-CNN framework and operate in a top-down manner of first attempting to identify a bounding box for each person and matching dense correspondences in each bounding box. Consequently, these methods lack robustness due to their critical dependence on the Mask R-CNN detection, and the runtime increases drastically as the number of persons in the image increases. We therefore propose a novel alternative method for solving the dense pose estimation problem, called Direct Dense Pose (DDP). DDP first predicts the instance mask and global IUV representation separately and then combines them together. We also propose a simple yet effective 2D temporal-smoothing scheme to alleviate the temporal jitters when dealing with video data. Experiments demonstrate that DDP overcomes the limitations of previous top-down baseline methods and achieves competitive accuracy. In addition, DDP is computationally more efficient than previous dense pose estimation methods, and it reduces jitters when applied to a video sequence, which is a problem plaguing the previous methods.

Acquiring detailed 3D scenes typically demands costly equipment, multi-view data, or labor-intensive modeling. Therefore, a lightweight alternative, generating complex 3D scenes from a single top-down image, plays an essential role in real-world applications. While recent 3D generative models have achieved remarkable results at the object level, their extension to full-scene generation often leads to inconsistent geometry, layout hallucinations, and low-quality meshes. In this work, we introduce 3DTown, a training-free framework designed to synthesize realistic and coherent 3D scenes from a single top-down view. Our method is grounded in two principles: region-based generation to improve image-to-3D alignment and resolution, and spatial-aware 3D inpainting to ensure global scene coherence and high-quality geometry generation. Specifically, we decompose the input image into overlapping regions and generate each using a pretrained 3D object generator, followed by a masked rectified flow inpainting process that fills in missing geometry while maintaining structural continuity. This modular design allows us to overcome resolution bottlenecks and preserve spatial structure without requiring 3D supervision or fine-tuning. Extensive experiments across diverse scenes show that 3DTown outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, including Trellis, Hunyuan3D-2, and TripoSG, in terms of geometry quality, spatial coherence, and texture fidelity. Our results demonstrate that high-quality 3D town generation is achievable from a single image using a principled, training-free approach.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents show great potential for enabling foundation models to complete real-world tasks, revolutionizing human-computer interaction and improving human productivity. In this report, we present OmegaUse, a general-purpose GUI agent model for autonomous task execution on both mobile and desktop platforms, supporting computer-use and phone-use scenarios. Building an effective GUI agent model relies on two factors: (1) high-quality data and (2) effective training methods. To address these, we introduce a carefully engineered data-construction pipeline and a decoupled training paradigm. For data construction, we leverage rigorously curated open-source datasets and introduce a novel automated synthesis framework that integrates bottom-up autonomous exploration with top-down taxonomy-guided generation to create high-fidelity synthetic data. For training, to better leverage these data, we adopt a two-stage strategy: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to establish fundamental interaction syntax, followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to improve spatial grounding and sequential planning. To balance computational efficiency with agentic reasoning capacity, OmegaUse is built on a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) backbone. To evaluate cross-terminal capabilities in an offline setting, we introduce OS-Nav, a benchmark suite spanning multiple operating systems: ChiM-Nav, targeting Chinese Android mobile environments, and Ubu-Nav, focusing on routine desktop interactions on Ubuntu. Extensive experiments show that OmegaUse is highly competitive across established GUI benchmarks, achieving a state-of-the-art (SOTA) score of 96.3% on ScreenSpot-V2 and a leading 79.1% step success rate on AndroidControl. OmegaUse also performs strongly on OS-Nav, reaching 74.24% step success on ChiM-Nav and 55.9% average success on Ubu-Nav.

As LLM-based agents increasingly operate in high-stakes domains with real-world consequences, ensuring their behavioral safety becomes paramount. The dominant oversight paradigm, LLM-as-a-Judge, faces a fundamental dilemma: how can probabilistic systems reliably supervise other probabilistic systems without inheriting their failure modes? We argue that formal verification offers a principled escape from this dilemma, yet its adoption has been hindered by a critical bottleneck: the translation from natural language requirements to formal specifications. This paper bridges this gap by proposing , a neuro-symbolic framework that employs a bidirectional Formal-of-Thought architecture: LLMs serve as specification compilers that top-down decompose high-level human intent into atomic, verifiable constraints, then bottom-up prove compliance using Dafny specifications and Z3 Satisfiability modulo theories solving, which produces mathematical guarantees rather than probabilistic scores. We validate across three benchmarks spanning behavioral safety, multi-domain constraint adherence, and agentic upward deception detection. Experiments on 7 agent models demonstrate that achieves an average improvement of 16.6% over LLM-as-a-Judge baselines, enables weak-to-strong generalization where a 7B judge achieves over 90% accuracy detecting deception from 72B agents, and provides near-linear safety improvement through iterative refinement.

Real-time multi-person pose estimation presents significant challenges in balancing speed and precision. While two-stage top-down methods slow down as the number of people in the image increases, existing one-stage methods often fail to simultaneously deliver high accuracy and real-time performance. This paper introduces RTMO, a one-stage pose estimation framework that seamlessly integrates coordinate classification by representing keypoints using dual 1-D heatmaps within the YOLO architecture, achieving accuracy comparable to top-down methods while maintaining high speed. We propose a dynamic coordinate classifier and a tailored loss function for heatmap learning, specifically designed to address the incompatibilities between coordinate classification and dense prediction models. RTMO outperforms state-of-the-art one-stage pose estimators, achieving 1.1% higher AP on COCO while operating about 9 times faster with the same backbone. Our largest model, RTMO-l, attains 74.8% AP on COCO val2017 and 141 FPS on a single V100 GPU, demonstrating its efficiency and accuracy. The code and models are available at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmpose/tree/main/projects/rtmo.

Accurate detection of pulmonary nodules with high sensitivity and specificity is essential for automatic lung cancer diagnosis from CT scans. Although many deep learning-based algorithms make great progress for improving the accuracy of nodule detection, the high false positive rate is still a challenging problem which limited the automatic diagnosis in routine clinical practice. In this paper, we propose a novel pulmonary nodule detection framework based on a 3D Feature Pyramid Network (3DFPN) to improve the sensitivity of nodule detection by employing multi-scale features to increase the resolution of nodules, as well as a parallel top-down path to transit the high-level semantic features to complement low-level general features. Furthermore, a High Sensitivity and Specificity (HS^2) network is introduced to eliminate the falsely detected nodule candidates by tracking the appearance changes in continuous CT slices of each nodule candidate. The proposed framework is evaluated on the public Lung Nodule Analysis (LUNA16) challenge dataset. Our method is able to accurately detect lung nodules at high sensitivity and specificity and achieves 90.4% sensitivity with 1/8 false positive per scan which outperforms the state-of-the-art results 15.6%.

The growing demand for automated graph algorithm reasoning has attracted increasing attention in the large language model (LLM) community. Recent LLM-based graph reasoning methods typically decouple task descriptions from graph data, generate executable code augmented by retrieval from technical documentation, and refine the code through debugging. However, we identify two key limitations in existing approaches: (i) they treat technical documentation as flat text collections and ignore its hierarchical structure, leading to noisy retrieval that degrades code generation quality; and (ii) their debugging mechanisms focus primarily on runtime errors, yet ignore more critical logical errors. To address them, we propose {\method}, an agentic hierarchical retrieval-augmented coding framework that exploits the document hierarchy through top-down traversal and early pruning, together with a self-debugging coding agent that iteratively refines code using automatically generated small-scale test cases. To enable comprehensive evaluation of complex graph reasoning, we introduce a new dataset, {\dataset}, covering small-scale, large-scale, and composite graph reasoning tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves higher task accuracy and lower inference cost compared to baselinesThe code is available at \href{https://github.com/FairyFali/GraphSkill{blue{https://github.com/FairyFali/GraphSkill}}.}.

The rapid emergence of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly advanced multimodal understanding, enabling applications in scene comprehension and visual reasoning. While these models have been primarily evaluated and developed for front-view image understanding, their capabilities in interpreting top-down images have received limited attention, partly due to the scarcity of diverse top-down datasets and the challenges in collecting such data. In contrast, top-down vision provides explicit spatial overviews and improved contextual understanding of scenes, making it particularly valuable for tasks like autonomous navigation, aerial imaging, and spatial planning. In this work, we address this gap by introducing TDBench, a comprehensive benchmark for VLMs in top-down image understanding. TDBench is constructed from public top-down view datasets and high-quality simulated images, including diverse real-world and synthetic scenarios. TDBench consists of visual question-answer pairs across ten evaluation dimensions of image understanding. Moreover, we conduct four case studies that commonly happen in real-world scenarios but are less explored. By revealing the strengths and limitations of existing VLM through evaluation results, we hope TDBench to provide insights for motivating future research. Project homepage: https://github.com/Columbia-ICSL/TDBench

Foundation models have transformed natural language processing and computer vision, and a rapidly growing literature on time-series foundation models (TSFMs) seeks to replicate this success in forecasting. While recent open-source models demonstrate the promise of TSFMs, the field lacks a comprehensive and community-accepted model evaluation framework. We see at least four major issues impeding progress on the development of such a framework. First, existing evaluation frameworks comprise benchmark forecasting tasks derived from often outdated datasets (e.g., M3), many of which lack clear metadata and overlap with the corpora used to pre-train TSFMs. Second, these frameworks evaluate models along a narrowly defined set of benchmark forecasting tasks, such as forecast horizon length or domain, but overlook core statistical properties such as non-stationarity and seasonality. Third, domain-specific models (e.g., XGBoost) are often compared unfairly, as existing frameworks do not enforce a systematic and consistent hyperparameter tuning convention for all models. Fourth, visualization tools for interpreting comparative performance are lacking. To address these issues, we introduce TempusBench, an open-source evaluation framework for TSFMs. TempusBench consists of 1) new datasets which are not included in existing TSFM pretraining corpora, 2) a set of novel benchmark tasks that go beyond existing ones, 3) a model evaluation pipeline with a standardized hyperparameter tuning protocol, and 4) a tensorboard-based visualization interface. We provide access to our code on GitHub: https://github.com/Smlcrm/TempusBench and maintain a live leaderboard at https://benchmark.smlcrm.com/.

Recent agentic search systems have made substantial progress by emphasising deep, multi-step reasoning. However, this focus often overlooks the challenges of wide-scale information synthesis, where agents must aggregate large volumes of heterogeneous evidence across many sources. As a result, most existing large language model agent systems face severe limitations in data-intensive settings, including context saturation, cascading error propagation, and high end-to-end latency. To address these challenges, we present \framework, a hierarchical framework based on principle of near-decomposability, containing a strategic Host, multiple Managers and parallel Workers. By leveraging aggregation and reflection mechanisms at the Manager layer, our framework enforces strict context isolation to prevent saturation and error propagation. Simultaneously, the parallelism in worker layer accelerates the speed of overall task execution, mitigating the significant latency. Our evaluation on two complementary benchmarks demonstrates both efficiency ( 3-5 times speed-up) and effectiveness, achieving a 8.4% success rate on WideSearch-en and 52.9% accuracy on BrowseComp-zh. The code is released at https://github.com/agent-on-the-fly/InfoSeeker

Optimizing communication topology in LLM-based multi-agent system is critical for enabling collective intelligence. Existing methods mainly rely on spatio-temporal interaction paradigms, where the sequential execution of multi-round dialogues incurs high latency and computation. Motivated by the recent insights that evaluation and debate mechanisms can improve problem-solving in multi-agent systems, we propose TopoDIM, a framework for one-shot Topology generation with Diverse Interaction Modes. Designed for decentralized execution to enhance adaptability and privacy, TopoDIM enables agents to autonomously construct heterogeneous communication without iterative coordination, achieving token efficiency and improved task performance. Experiments demonstrate that TopoDIM reduces total token consumption by 46.41% while improving average performance by 1.50% over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the framework exhibits strong adaptability in organizing communication among heterogeneous agents. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TopoDIM-8D35/

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) are revolutionizing the forecasting landscape from specific dataset modeling to generalizable task evaluation. However, we contend that existing benchmarks exhibit common limitations in four dimensions: constrained data composition dominated by reused legacy sources, compromised data integrity lacking rigorous quality assurance, misaligned task formulations detached from real-world contexts, and rigid analysis perspectives that obscure generalizable insights. To bridge these gaps, we introduce TIME, a next-generation task-centric benchmark comprising 50 fresh datasets and 98 forecasting tasks, tailored for strict zero-shot TSFM evaluation free from data leakage. Integrating large language models and human expertise, we establish a rigorous human-in-the-loop benchmark construction pipeline to ensure high data integrity and redefine task formulation by aligning forecasting configurations with real-world operational requirements and variate predictability. Furthermore, we propose a novel pattern-level evaluation perspective that moves beyond traditional dataset-level evaluations based on static meta labels. By leveraging structural time series features to characterize intrinsic temporal properties, this approach offers generalizable insights into model capabilities across diverse patterns. We evaluate 12 representative TSFMs and establish a multi-granular leaderboard to facilitate in-depth analysis and visualized inspection. The leaderboard is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Real-TSF/TIME-leaderboard.

In enterprise datasets, documents are rarely pure. They are not just text, nor just numbers; they are a complex amalgam of narrative and structure. Current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have attempted to address this complexity with a blunt tool: linearization. We convert rich, multidimensional tables into simple Markdown-style text strings, hoping that an embedding model will capture the geometry of a spreadsheet in a single vector. But it has already been shown that this is mathematically insufficient. This work presents Topo-RAG, a framework that challenges the assumption that "everything is text". We propose a dual architecture that respects the topology of the data: we route fluid narrative through traditional dense retrievers, while tabular structures are processed by a Cell-Aware Late Interaction mechanism, preserving their spatial relationships. Evaluated on SEC-25, a synthetic enterprise corpus that mimics real-world complexity, Topo-RAG demonstrates an 18.4% improvement in nDCG@10 on hybrid queries compared to standard linearization approaches. It's not just about searching better; it's about understanding the shape of information.

Recent approaches have demonstrated the promise of using diffusion models to generate interactive and explorable worlds. However, most of these methods face critical challenges such as excessively large parameter sizes, reliance on lengthy inference steps, and rapidly growing historical context, which severely limit real-time performance and lack text-controlled generation capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose \method, a novel framework designed to generate realistic, interactive, and continuous worlds from a single image or text prompt. \method achieves this through a carefully designed framework that supports keyboard-based exploration of the generated worlds. The framework comprises three core components: (1) a long-video generation framework integrating unified context compression with linear attention; (2) a real-time streaming acceleration strategy powered by bidirectional attention distillation and an enhanced text embedding scheme; (3) a text-controlled method for generating world events. We have provided the codebase in the supplementary material.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in constructing passage retrieval datasets. However, existing methods still face limitations in expressing cross-doc query needs and controlling annotation quality. To address these issues, this paper proposes a bidirectional generation pipeline, which aims to generate 3-level hierarchical queries for both intra-doc and cross-doc scenarios and mine additional relevance labels on top of direct mapping annotation. The pipeline introduces two query generation methods: bottom-up from single-doc text and top-down from multi-doc titles. The bottom-up method uses LLMs to disassemble and generate structured queries at both sentence-level and passage-level simultaneously from intra-doc passages. The top-down approach incorporates three key financial elements--industry, topic, and time--to divide report titles into clusters and prompts LLMs to generate topic-level queries from each cluster. For relevance annotation, our pipeline not only relies on direct mapping annotation from the generation relationship but also implements an indirect positives mining method to enrich the relevant query-passage pairs. Using this pipeline, we constructed a Financial Passage Retrieval Generated dataset (FinCPRG) from almost 1.3k Chinese financial research reports, which includes hierarchical queries and rich relevance labels. Through evaluations of mined relevance labels, benchmarking and training experiments, we assessed the quality of FinCPRG and validated its effectiveness as a passage retrieval dataset for both training and benchmarking.

We introduce TopoPrimer, a framework that makes the global topological structure of the series population an explicit input to any forecasting model. TopoPrimer improves accuracy across diverse domains, stabilizes forecasts under seasonal demand spikes, and closes the cold-start gap. Precomputed once per domain via persistent homology and spectral sheaf coordinates, TopoPrimer deploys per token for fully-trained models and as a lightweight adapter for pre-trained backbones. Of these two components, sheaf coordinates are the primary accuracy driver. Across four public benchmarks on Chronos and TimesFM, TopoPrimer consistently improves forecasting accuracy, with gains of up to 7.3% MSE on ECL. The topology advantage persists with near-identical magnitude across zero-shot and fine-tuned backbones, suggesting topology and per-series training capture complementary signals. The gains are most pronounced in difficult regimes. Under peak seasonal demand, classical and zero-shot models degrade by up to 50%, while TopoPrimer stays within 10%. At cold start with no item history, TopoPrimer reduces MAE by 27% over a topology-free baseline.

Hierarchical clustering of networks consists in finding a tree of communities, such that lower levels of the hierarchy reveal finer-grained community structures. There are two main classes of algorithms tackling this problem. Divisive (top-down) algorithms recursively partition the nodes into two communities, until a stopping rule indicates that no further split is needed. In contrast, agglomerative (bottom-up) algorithms first identify the smallest community structure and then repeatedly merge the communities using a linkage method. In this article, we establish theoretical guarantees for the recovery of the hierarchical tree and community structure of a Hierarchical Stochastic Block Model by a bottom-up algorithm. We also establish that this bottom-up algorithm attains the information-theoretic threshold for exact recovery at intermediate levels of the hierarchy. Notably, these recovery conditions are less restrictive compared to those existing for top-down algorithms. This shows that bottom-up algorithms extend the feasible region for achieving exact recovery at intermediate levels. Numerical experiments on both synthetic and real data sets confirm the superiority of bottom-up algorithms over top-down algorithms. We also observe that top-down algorithms can produce dendrograms with inversions. These findings contribute to a better understanding of hierarchical clustering techniques and their applications in network analysis.

Computational pathology, which involves analyzing whole slide images for automated cancer diagnosis, relies on multiple instance learning, where performance depends heavily on the feature extractor and aggregator. Recent Pathology Foundation Models (PFMs), pretrained on large-scale histopathology data, have significantly enhanced both the extractor and aggregator, but they lack a systematic analysis framework. In this survey, we present a hierarchical taxonomy organizing PFMs through a top-down philosophy applicable to foundation model analysis in any domain: model scope, model pretraining, and model design. Additionally, we systematically categorize PFM evaluation tasks into slide-level, patch-level, multimodal, and biological tasks, providing comprehensive benchmarking criteria. Our analysis identifies critical challenges in both PFM development (pathology-specific methodology, end-to-end pretraining, data-model scalability) and utilization (effective adaptation, model maintenance), paving the way for future directions in this promising field. Resources referenced in this survey are available at https://github.com/BearCleverProud/AwesomeWSI.

This paper introduces TopoDiffuser, a diffusion-based framework for multimodal trajectory prediction that incorporates topometric maps to generate accurate, diverse, and road-compliant future motion forecasts. By embedding structural cues from topometric maps into the denoising process of a conditional diffusion model, the proposed approach enables trajectory generation that naturally adheres to road geometry without relying on explicit constraints. A multimodal conditioning encoder fuses LiDAR observations, historical motion, and route information into a unified bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation. Extensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark demonstrate that TopoDiffuser outperforms state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining strong geometric consistency. Ablation studies further validate the contribution of each input modality, as well as the impact of denoising steps and the number of trajectory samples. To support future research, we publicly release our code at https://github.com/EI-Nav/TopoDiffuser.

Fashion design is a challenging and complex process.Recent works on fashion generation and editing are all agnostic of the actual fashion design process, which limits their usage in practice.In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical diffusion-based framework tailored for fashion design, coined as HieraFashDiff. Our model is designed to mimic the practical fashion design workflow, by unraveling the denosing process into two successive stages: 1) an ideation stage that generates design proposals given high-level concepts and 2) an iteration stage that continuously refines the proposals using low-level attributes. Our model supports fashion design generation and fine-grained local editing in a single framework. To train our model, we contribute a new dataset of full-body fashion images annotated with hierarchical text descriptions. Extensive evaluations show that, as compared to prior approaches, our method can generate fashion designs and edited results with higher fidelity and better prompt adherence, showing its promising potential to augment the practical fashion design workflow. Code and Dataset are available at https://github.com/haoli-zbdbc/hierafashdiff.

The emergent phenomena of large foundation models have revolutionized natural language processing. However, evaluating these models presents significant challenges due to their size, capabilities, and deployment across diverse applications. Existing literature often focuses on individual aspects, such as benchmark performance or specific tasks, but fails to provide a cohesive process that integrates the nuances of diverse use cases with broader ethical and operational considerations. This work focuses on three key aspects: (1) Formalizing the Evaluation Process by providing a structured framework tailored to specific use-case contexts, (2) Offering Actionable Tools and Frameworks such as checklists and templates to ensure thorough, reproducible, and practical evaluations, and (3) Surveying Recent Work with a targeted review of advancements in LLM evaluation, emphasizing real-world applications.

Generating immersive 360{\deg} indoor panoramas from 2D top-down views has applications in virtual reality, interior design, real estate, and robotics. This task is challenging due to the lack of explicit 3D structure and the need for geometric consistency and photorealism. We propose Top2Pano, an end-to-end model for synthesizing realistic indoor panoramas from top-down views. Our method estimates volumetric occupancy to infer 3D structures, then uses volumetric rendering to generate coarse color and depth panoramas. These guide a diffusion-based refinement stage using ControlNet, enhancing realism and structural fidelity. Evaluations on two datasets show Top2Pano outperforms baselines, effectively reconstructing geometry, occlusions, and spatial arrangements. It also generalizes well, producing high-quality panoramas from schematic floorplans. Our results highlight Top2Pano's potential in bridging top-down views with immersive indoor synthesis.

This work introduces TopoBenchmarkX, a modular open-source library designed to standardize benchmarking and accelerate research in Topological Deep Learning (TDL). TopoBenchmarkX maps the TDL pipeline into a sequence of independent and modular components for data loading and processing, as well as model training, optimization, and evaluation. This modular organization provides flexibility for modifications and facilitates the adaptation and optimization of various TDL pipelines. A key feature of TopoBenchmarkX is that it allows for the transformation and lifting between topological domains. This enables, for example, to obtain richer data representations and more fine-grained analyses by mapping the topology and features of a graph to higher-order topological domains such as simplicial and cell complexes. The range of applicability of TopoBenchmarkX is demonstrated by benchmarking several TDL architectures for various tasks and datasets.

Massive amounts of unlabelled data are captured by Earth Observation (EO) satellites, with the Sentinel-2 constellation generating 1.6 TB of data daily. This makes Remote Sensing a data-rich domain well suited to Machine Learning (ML) solutions. However, a bottleneck in applying ML models to EO is the lack of annotated data as annotation is a labour-intensive and costly process. As a result, research in this domain has focused on Self-Supervised Learning and Foundation Model approaches. This paper addresses the need to evaluate different Foundation Models on a fair and uniform benchmark by introducing the PhilEO Bench, a novel evaluation framework for EO Foundation Models. The framework comprises of a testbed and a novel 400 GB Sentinel-2 dataset containing labels for three downstream tasks, building density estimation, road segmentation, and land cover classification. We present experiments using our framework evaluating different Foundation Models, including Prithvi and SatMAE, at multiple n-shots and convergence rates.

While knowledge distillation (transfer) has been attracting attentions from the research community, the recent development in the fields has heightened the need for reproducible studies and highly generalized frameworks to lower barriers to such high-quality, reproducible deep learning research. Several researchers voluntarily published frameworks used in their knowledge distillation studies to help other interested researchers reproduce their original work. Such frameworks, however, are usually neither well generalized nor maintained, thus researchers are still required to write a lot of code to refactor/build on the frameworks for introducing new methods, models, datasets and designing experiments. In this paper, we present our developed open-source framework built on PyTorch and dedicated for knowledge distillation studies. The framework is designed to enable users to design experiments by declarative PyYAML configuration files, and helps researchers complete the recently proposed ML Code Completeness Checklist. Using the developed framework, we demonstrate its various efficient training strategies, and implement a variety of knowledge distillation methods. We also reproduce some of their original experimental results on the ImageNet and COCO datasets presented at major machine learning conferences such as ICLR, NeurIPS, CVPR and ECCV, including recent state-of-the-art methods. All the source code, configurations, log files and trained model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/yoshitomo-matsubara/torchdistill .

Geospatial foundation models (GFMs) have been proposed as generalizable backbones for disaster response, land-cover mapping, food-security monitoring, and other high-stakes Earth-observation tasks. Yet the published work about these models does not give reviewers or users enough information to tell which model fits a given task. We argue that nobody knows what the current state of the art is in geospatial foundation models. The methods may be useful, but the GFM literature does not standardize evaluations, training and testing protocols, released weights, or pretraining controls well enough for anyone to compare or rank them. In a 152-paper audit, we find 46 cross-paper disagreements of at least 10 points for the same model, benchmark, and protocol; 94/126 papers with extractable pretraining data use a configuration no other paper uses; and 39% of GFM papers release no model weights. This lack of community standards can be solved. We propose six concrete expectations: named-license weight release, shared core evaluations, copied-versus-rerun baseline annotations, variance reporting, one shared evaluation harness, and data-vs-architecture-vs-algorithm controls. These gaps are a coordination failure, not a fault of any individual lab; the authors of this paper, like many others in the GFM community, have contributed to them. Rather than just critiquing the community, we aim to provide concrete steps toward a shared understanding of how to innovate GFMs.

Tabular foundation models represent a growing paradigm in structured data learning, extending the benefits of large-scale pretraining to tabular domains. However, their adoption remains limited due to heterogeneous preprocessing pipelines, fragmented APIs, inconsistent fine-tuning procedures, and the absence of standardized evaluation for deployment-oriented metrics such as calibration and fairness. We present TabTune, a unified library that standardizes the complete workflow for tabular foundation models through a single interface. TabTune provides consistent access to seven state-of-the-art models supporting multiple adaptation strategies, including zero-shot inference, meta-learning, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). The framework automates model-aware preprocessing, manages architectural heterogeneity internally, and integrates evaluation modules for performance, calibration, and fairness. Designed for extensibility and reproducibility, TabTune enables consistent benchmarking of adaptation strategies of tabular foundation models. The library is open source and available at https://github.com/Lexsi-Labs/TabTune .

We develop and counterfactually evaluate a resolution-aware risk-design framework (PIRAP) for perpetual futures whose underlying tracks a single binary prediction-market probability through resolution. The framework specifies six components: an index estimator combining mid-price, depth-weighted mid, and time-decayed VWAP; jump-aware tiered margin sized against bounded-event terminal-collapse magnitude; leverage compression schedule contracting toward resolution; resolution-aware funding rule with boundary-aware correction; a multi-stage halt protocol; and an eligibility framework. Two formal non-portability propositions establish that standard basis-only funding paired with continuous-vol static margin fails on bounded-event underlyings. Empirical evaluation uses Polymarket's PMXT v2 archive for 2026-04-21 to 2026-04-27 (13,298-market analysis sample passing adequacy gates from 61,087 ingested; 13,115 resolved within the empirical window for E3). E1 evaluates two pre-registered stylized facts; E2 conducts counterfactual replay across three engine configurations; E3 isolates the resolution-zone protocol's contribution. Results are mixed. Five pre-registered floors: stylized-fact floors (boundary depth asymmetry, terminal-jump magnitude) PASS; welfare-side directional floors (final-hour liquidation -6%, drawdown -5.1% pooled, median PnL +14%) two FAIL one PASS; E3 mechanic floors (final-hour liquidation -80% by halt construction PASS; bad-debt frequency +2.4% FAIL). Three of five materiality floors fail: the framework as specified does not validate deployment, but the empirical record establishes a halt-versus-margin scope distinction (halt addresses execution-channel risk; terminal-jump bad-debt remains margin-side) and documents a pre-emption trade-off constraining the dynamic-margin component. The paper concludes with structural recommendations and explicit non-deployable status.

Controllable diffusion methods have substantially expanded the practical utility of diffusion models, but they are typically developed as isolated, backbone-specific systems with incompatible training pipelines, parameter formats, and runtime hooks. This fragmentation makes it difficult to reuse infrastructure across tasks, transfer capabilities across backbones, or compose multiple controls within a single generation pipeline. We present Diffusion Templates, a unified and open plugin framework that decouples base-model inference from controllable capability injection. The framework is organized around three components: Template models that map arbitrary task-specific inputs to an intermediate capability representation, a Template cache that functions as a standardized interface for capability injection, and a Template pipeline that loads, merges, and injects one or more Template caches into the base diffusion runtime. Because the interface is defined at the systems level rather than tied to a specific control architecture, heterogeneous capability carriers such as KV-Cache and LoRA can be supported under the same abstraction. Based on this design, we build a diverse model zoo spanning structural control, brightness adjustment, color adjustment, image editing, super-resolution, sharpness enhancement, aesthetic alignment, content reference, local inpainting, and age control. These case studies show that Diffusion Templates can unify a broad range of controllable generation tasks while preserving modularity, composability, and practical extensibility across rapidly evolving diffusion backbones. All resources will be open sourced, including code, models, and datasets.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated enhanced capabilities in function-calling, these advancements primarily rely on accessing the functions' responses. This methodology is practical for simpler APIs but faces scalability issues with irreversible APIs that significantly impact the system, such as a database deletion API. Similarly, processes requiring extensive time for each API call and those necessitating forward planning, like automated action pipelines, present complex challenges. Furthermore, scenarios often arise where a generalized approach is needed because algorithms lack direct access to the specific implementations of these functions or secrets to use them. Traditional tool planning methods are inadequate in these cases, compelling the need to operate within black-box environments. Unlike their performance in tool manipulation, LLMs excel in black-box tasks, such as program synthesis. Therefore, we harness the program synthesis capabilities of LLMs to strategize tool usage in black-box settings, ensuring solutions are verified prior to implementation. We introduce TOPGUN, an ingeniously crafted approach leveraging program synthesis for black box tool planning. Accompanied by SwissNYF, a comprehensive suite that integrates black-box algorithms for planning and verification tasks, addressing the aforementioned challenges and enhancing the versatility and effectiveness of LLMs in complex API interactions. The public code for SwissNYF is available at https://github.com/iclr-dummy-user/SwissNYF.

Foundation models use large datasets to build an effective representation of data that can be deployed on diverse downstream tasks. Previous research developed the OmniLearn foundation model for jet physics, using unique properties of particle physics, and showed that it could significantly advance discovery potential across collider experiments. This paper introduces a major upgrade, resulting in the OmniLearned framework. This framework has three new elements: (1) updates to the model architecture and training, (2) using over one billion jets used for training, and (3) providing well-documented software for accessing all datasets and models. We demonstrate OmniLearned with three representative tasks: top-quark jet tagging with the community Delphes-based benchmark dataset, b-tagging with ATLAS full simulation, and anomaly detection with CMS experimental data. In each case, OmniLearned is the state of the art, further expanding the discovery potential of past, current, and future collider experiments.

Automated analysis for engineering structures offers considerable potential for boosting efficiency by minimizing repetitive tasks. Although AI-driven methods are increasingly common, no systematic framework yet leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for automatic structural analysis. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework that integrates LLMs with structural analysis software. LLMs serve as the core engine: they parse structural descriptions from text and translate them into executable Python scripts. Moreover, the framework integrates the generative capabilities of LLMs with code-based finite element (FE) tools like OpenSeesPy. It employs domain-specific prompt design and in-context learning strategies to enhance the LLM's problem-solving capabilities and generative stability, enabling fully automated structural analysis from descriptive text to model outputs. In our experiments, we introduce a well-curated small-scale benchmark dataset of 20 structural analysis word problems (SAWPs) with ground-truth solutions and evaluate the performance of different LLMs within our framework in solving these SAWPs. The role of system instructions, crafted by structural engineers, is also investigated to understand their impact on LLM-driven structural analysis. Additionally, the generative stability of our framework is examined. Through multiple validation experiments on the benchmark, our results demonstrate that the proposed framework can substantially increase the level of automation in solving SAWPs compared to traditional methods. Quantitatively, the framework, built on GPT-4o, achieved 100% accuracy, surpassing GPT-4 (85%), Gemini 1.5 Pro (80%), and Llama-3.3 (30%) on the test examples. Furthermore, integrating domain-specific instructions enhanced performance by 30% on problems with asymmetrical structural configurations.

Modern AI technologies for drug discovery are distributed across heterogeneous platforms-including web applications, desktop environments, and code libraries-leading to fragmented workflows, inconsistent interfaces, and high integration overhead. We present an agentic end-to-end drug design framework that leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) in conjunction with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to dynamically coordinate access to biochemical databases, modular toolchains, and task-specific AI models. The system integrates four state-of-the-art components: MaSIF (MaSIF-site and MaSIF-seed-search) for geometric deep learning-based identification of protein-protein interaction (PPI) sites, Rosetta for grafting protein fragments onto protein backbones to form mini proteins, ProteinMPNN for amino acid sequences redesign, and AlphaFold3 for near-experimental accuracy in complex structure prediction. Starting from a target structure, the framework supports de novo binder generation via surface analysis, scaffold grafting and pose construction, sequence optimization, and structure prediction. Additionally, by replacing rigid, script-based workflows with a protocol-driven, LLM-coordinated architecture, the framework improves reproducibility, reduces manual overhead, and ensures extensibility, portability, and auditability across the entire drug design process.

Top-down attention plays a crucial role in the human vision system, wherein the brain initially obtains a rough overview of a scene to discover salient cues (i.e., overview first), followed by a more careful finer-grained examination (i.e., look closely next). However, modern ConvNets remain confined to a pyramid structure that successively downsamples the feature map for receptive field expansion, neglecting this crucial biomimetic principle. We present OverLoCK, the first pure ConvNet backbone architecture that explicitly incorporates a top-down attention mechanism. Unlike pyramid backbone networks, our design features a branched architecture with three synergistic sub-networks: 1) a Base-Net that encodes low/mid-level features; 2) a lightweight Overview-Net that generates dynamic top-down attention through coarse global context modeling (i.e., overview first); and 3) a robust Focus-Net that performs finer-grained perception guided by top-down attention (i.e., look closely next). To fully unleash the power of top-down attention, we further propose a novel context-mixing dynamic convolution (ContMix) that effectively models long-range dependencies while preserving inherent local inductive biases even when the input resolution increases, addressing critical limitations in existing convolutions. Our OverLoCK exhibits a notable performance improvement over existing methods. For instance, OverLoCK-T achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 84.2%, significantly surpassing ConvNeXt-B while using only around one-third of the FLOPs/parameters. On object detection, our OverLoCK-S clearly surpasses MogaNet-B by 1% in AP^b. On semantic segmentation, our OverLoCK-T remarkably improves UniRepLKNet-T by 1.7% in mIoU. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/LMMMEng/OverLoCK.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in automated front-end engineering, e.g., generating UI code from visual designs. However, existing front-end UI code generation benchmarks have the following limitations: (1) While framework-based development becomes predominant in modern front-end programming, current benchmarks fail to incorporate mainstream development frameworks. (2) Existing evaluations focus solely on the UI code generation task, whereas practical UI development involves several iterations, including refining editing, and repairing issues. (3) Current benchmarks employ unidimensional evaluation, lacking investigation into influencing factors like task difficulty, input context variations, and in-depth code-level analysis. To bridge these gaps, we introduce DesignBench, a multi-framework, multi-task evaluation benchmark for assessing MLLMs' capabilities in automated front-end engineering. DesignBench encompasses three widely-used UI frameworks (React, Vue, and Angular) alongside vanilla HTML/CSS, and evaluates on three essential front-end tasks (generation, edit, and repair) in real-world development workflows. DesignBench contains 900 webpage samples spanning over 11 topics, 9 edit types, and 6 issue categories, enabling detailed analysis of MLLM performance across multiple dimensions. Our systematic evaluation reveals critical insights into MLLMs' framework-specific limitations, task-related bottlenecks, and performance variations under different conditions, providing guidance for future research in automated front-end development. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/WebPAI/DesignBench.

Given an unconditional diffusion model and a predictor for a target property of interest (e.g., a classifier), the goal of training-free guidance is to generate samples with desirable target properties without additional training. Existing methods, though effective in various individual applications, often lack theoretical grounding and rigorous testing on extensive benchmarks. As a result, they could even fail on simple tasks, and applying them to a new problem becomes unavoidably difficult. This paper introduces a novel algorithmic framework encompassing existing methods as special cases, unifying the study of training-free guidance into the analysis of an algorithm-agnostic design space. Via theoretical and empirical investigation, we propose an efficient and effective hyper-parameter searching strategy that can be readily applied to any downstream task. We systematically benchmark across 7 diffusion models on 16 tasks with 40 targets, and improve performance by 8.5% on average. Our framework and benchmark offer a solid foundation for conditional generation in a training-free manner.

We deployed an LLM agent with ReAct reasoning and full data access. It executed flawlessly, yet when asked "Why is completion rate 80%?", it returned metrics instead of causal explanation. The agent knew how to reason but we had not specified what to reason about. This reflects a gap: runtime reasoning frameworks (ReAct, Chain-of-Thought) have transformed LLM agents, but design-time specification--determining what domain knowledge agents need--remains under-explored. We propose 4D-ARE (4-Dimensional Attribution-Driven Agent Requirements Engineering), a preliminary methodology for specifying attribution-driven agents. The core insight: decision-makers seek attribution, not answers. Attribution concerns organize into four dimensions (Results -> Process -> Support -> Long-term), motivated by Pearl's causal hierarchy. The framework operationalizes through five layers producing artifacts that compile directly to system prompts. We demonstrate the methodology through an industrial pilot deployment in financial services. 4D-ARE addresses what agents should reason about, complementing runtime frameworks that address how. We hypothesize systematic specification amplifies the power of these foundational advances. This paper presents a methodological proposal with preliminary industrial validation; rigorous empirical evaluation is planned for future work.

Foundation models for predictive machine learning on tabular data have recently gained significant traction in academia and industry. Research communities across disciplines are increasingly evaluating tabular foundation models on diverse datasets and tasks. However, these task- and discipline-specific evaluations remain largely inaccessible to model researchers because benchmark software and evaluation protocols are fragmented. As a result, model researchers rely on standard benchmarks, which are mostly defined for tasks where tabular foundation models already excel. The most challenging scenarios are excluded, limiting meaningful progress in the field by focusing on marginal improvements on IID data rather than on broader, more demanding challenges. To overcome this, we introduce BeyondArena, the first unified holistic benchmark for tabular data that supports diverse task types (IID, temporal, grouped), across sample size and feature dimensionality scales, with diverse feature types (with text, with high cardinality) from a broad range of disciplines. To enable unified benchmarking beyond standard benchmarks, we introduce Data Foundry, a Python framework and metadata schema for curating tabular datasets for predictive machine learning. Our results across 11 models and 142 curated datasets show that existing tabular foundation models excel on tiny- to medium-sized IID data, while traditional tree-based and deep learning models still dominate on non-IID, large, and high-dimensional datasets. BeyondArena guides model research for the most demanding challenges in tabular data, enabling progress towards truly foundational tabular models.

Geospatial Foundation Models (GeoFMs) are transforming Earth Observation (EO), but evaluation lacks standardized protocols. GEO-Bench-2 addresses this with a comprehensive framework spanning classification, segmentation, regression, object detection, and instance segmentation across 19 permissively-licensed datasets. We introduce ''capability'' groups to rank models on datasets that share common characteristics (e.g., resolution, bands, temporality). This enables users to identify which models excel in each capability and determine which areas need improvement in future work. To support both fair comparison and methodological innovation, we define a prescriptive yet flexible evaluation protocol. This not only ensures consistency in benchmarking but also facilitates research into model adaptation strategies, a key and open challenge in advancing GeoFMs for downstream tasks. Our experiments show that no single model dominates across all tasks, confirming the specificity of the choices made during architecture design and pretraining. While models pretrained on natural images (ConvNext ImageNet, DINO V3) excel on high-resolution tasks, EO-specific models (TerraMind, Prithvi, and Clay) outperform them on multispectral applications such as agriculture and disaster response. These findings demonstrate that optimal model choice depends on task requirements, data modalities, and constraints. This shows that the goal of a single GeoFM model that performs well across all tasks remains open for future research. GEO-Bench-2 enables informed, reproducible GeoFM evaluation tailored to specific use cases. Code, data, and leaderboard for GEO-Bench-2 are publicly released under a permissive license.

We present ABot-Earth 0.5, a generative 3D framework designed to synthesize vast, seamless 3D environments from ubiquitous, geospatially referenced satellite imagery. To achieve this, we propose a novel generative model formulated directly with the 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representation. The model is trained on a diverse corpus of existing real-world urban reconstructions, learning to generate realistic geometry and textures. At inference, it synthesizes novel 3D scenes conditioned solely on satellite imagery at a scalable rate of under 10 minutes per square kilometer, while demonstrating exceptional realism. The framework is designed for accessibility, with integrated hierarchical level-of-detail (LOD) structures that permit real-time, interactive visualization on web-based map engines. This high-fidelity simulation sandbox effectively mitigates the sim-to-real domain gap, enabling critical downstream Embodied AI applications like closed-loop UAV navigation. By providing an ultra-low-cost and high-efficiency solution, ABot-Earth 0.5 significantly lowers the technical and financial barriers to large-scale 3D reconstruction and empowers the future of global digital earth visualization.

This paper presents a framework that leverages pre-trained foundation models for robotic manipulation without domain-specific training. The framework integrates off-the-shelf models, combining multimodal perception from foundation models with a general-purpose reasoning model capable of robust task sequencing. Scene graphs, dynamically maintained within the framework, provide spatial awareness and enable consistent reasoning about the environment. The framework is evaluated through a series of tabletop robotic manipulation experiments, and the results highlight its potential for building robotic manipulation systems directly on top of off-the-shelf foundation models.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a standard paradigm for enhancing the factual accuracy and contextual relevance of Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating retrieval mechanisms. However, existing evaluation frameworks fail to provide a holistic black-box approach to assessing RAG systems, especially in real-world deployment scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce SCARF (System for Comprehensive Assessment of RAG Frameworks), a modular and flexible evaluation framework designed to benchmark deployed RAG applications systematically. SCARF provides an end-to-end, black-box evaluation methodology, enabling a limited-effort comparison across diverse RAG frameworks. Our framework supports multiple deployment configurations and facilitates automated testing across vector databases and LLM serving strategies, producing a detailed performance report. Moreover, SCARF integrates practical considerations such as response coherence, providing a scalable and adaptable solution for researchers and industry professionals evaluating RAG applications. Using the REST APIs interface, we demonstrate how SCARF can be applied to real-world scenarios, showcasing its flexibility in assessing different RAG frameworks and configurations. SCARF is available at GitHub repository.

With the widespread use of the internet, it has become increasingly crucial to extract specific information from vast amounts of academic articles efficiently. Data mining techniques are generally employed to solve this issue. However, data mining for academic articles is challenging since it requires automatically extracting specific patterns in complex and unstructured layout documents. Current data mining methods for academic articles employ rule-based(RB) or machine learning(ML) approaches. However, using rule-based methods incurs a high coding cost for complex typesetting articles. On the other hand, simply using machine learning methods requires annotation work for complex content types within the paper, which can be costly. Furthermore, only using machine learning can lead to cases where patterns easily recognized by rule-based methods are mistakenly extracted. To overcome these issues, from the perspective of analyzing the standard layout and typesetting used in the specified publication, we emphasize implementing specific methods for specific characteristics in academic articles. We have developed a novel Text Block Refinement Framework (TBRF), a machine learning and rule-based scheme hybrid. We used the well-known ACL proceeding articles as experimental data for the validation experiment. The experiment shows that our approach achieved over 95% classification accuracy and 90% detection accuracy for tables and figures.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in stand-alone code tasks like HumanEval and MBPP, but struggle with handling entire code repositories. This challenge has prompted research on enhancing LLM-codebase interaction at a repository scale. Current solutions rely on similarity-based retrieval or manual tools and APIs, each with notable drawbacks. Similarity-based retrieval often has low recall in complex tasks, while manual tools and APIs are typically task-specific and require expert knowledge, reducing their generalizability across diverse code tasks and real-world applications. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce \framework, a system that integrates LLM agents with graph database interfaces extracted from code repositories. By leveraging the structural properties of graph databases and the flexibility of the graph query language, \framework enables the LLM agent to construct and execute queries, allowing for precise, code structure-aware context retrieval and code navigation. We assess \framework using three benchmarks: CrossCodeEval, SWE-bench, and EvoCodeBench. Additionally, we develop five real-world coding applications. With a unified graph database schema, \framework demonstrates competitive performance and potential in both academic and real-world environments, showcasing its versatility and efficacy in software engineering. Our application demo: https://github.com/modelscope/modelscope-agent/tree/master/apps/codexgraph_agent.

We propose a novel and flexible roof modeling approach that can be used for constructing planar 3D polygon roof meshes. Our method uses a graph structure to encode roof topology and enforces the roof validity by optimizing a simple but effective planarity metric we propose. This approach is significantly more efficient than using general purpose 3D modeling tools such as 3ds Max or SketchUp, and more powerful and expressive than specialized tools such as the straight skeleton. Our optimization-based formulation is also flexible and can accommodate different styles and user preferences for roof modeling. We showcase two applications. The first application is an interactive roof editing framework that can be used for roof design or roof reconstruction from aerial images. We highlight the efficiency and generality of our approach by constructing a mesh-image paired dataset consisting of 2539 roofs. Our second application is a generative model to synthesize new roof meshes from scratch. We use our novel dataset to combine machine learning and our roof optimization techniques, by using transformers and graph convolutional networks to model roof topology, and our roof optimization methods to enforce the planarity constraint.

A key aspect of temporal domains is the ability to make predictions multiple time steps into the future, a process known as multi-step forecasting (MSF). At the core of this process is selecting a forecasting strategy, however, with no existing frameworks to map out the space of strategies, practitioners are left with ad-hoc methods for strategy selection. In this work, we propose Stratify, a parameterised framework that addresses multi-step forecasting, unifying existing strategies and introducing novel, improved strategies. We evaluate Stratify on 18 benchmark datasets, five function classes, and short to long forecast horizons (10, 20, 40, 80). In over 84% of 1080 experiments, novel strategies in Stratify improved performance compared to all existing ones. Importantly, we find that no single strategy consistently outperforms others in all task settings, highlighting the need for practitioners explore the Stratify space to carefully search and select forecasting strategies based on task-specific requirements. Our results are the most comprehensive benchmarking of known and novel forecasting strategies. We make code available to reproduce our results.

Traditional foundation models are pre-trained on broad datasets to reduce the training resources (e.g., time, energy, labeled samples) needed for fine-tuning a wide range of downstream tasks. However, traditional foundation models struggle with out-of-distribution prediction and can produce outputs that are unrealistic and physically infeasible. We propose the notation of physics-guided foundation models (PGFM), that is, foundation models integrated with broad or general domain (e.g., scientific) physical knowledge applicable to a wide range of downstream tasks.

Neural surrogates and operator networks for solving partial differential equation (PDE) problems have attracted significant research interest in recent years. However, most existing approaches are limited in their ability to generalize solutions across varying non-parametric geometric domains. In this work, we address this challenge in the context of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) bottle buckling analysis, a representative packaging design problem conventionally solved using computationally expensive finite element analysis (FEA). We introduce a hybrid DeepONet-Transolver framework that simultaneously predicts nodal displacement fields and the time evolution of reaction forces during top load compression. Our methodology is evaluated on two families of bottle geometries parameterized by two and four design variables. Training data is generated using nonlinear FEA simulations in Abaqus for 254 unique designs per family. The proposed framework achieves mean relative L^{2} errors of 2.5-13% for displacement fields and approximately 2.4% for time-dependent reaction forces for the four-parameter bottle family. Point-wise error analyses further show absolute displacement errors on the order of 10^{-4}-10^{-3}, with the largest discrepancies confined to localized geometric regions. Importantly, the model accurately captures key physical phenomena, such as buckling behavior, across diverse bottle geometries. These results highlight the potential of our framework as a scalable and computationally efficient surrogate, particularly for multi-task predictions in computational mechanics and applications requiring rapid design evaluation.

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for time series analysis, driven by large-scale pretraining on diverse data corpora. However, time series inherently exhibit heterogeneous information density over time, influenced by system states and signal complexity, presenting significant modeling challenges especially in a zero-shot scenario. Current TSFMs rely on non-adaptive processing pipelines that fail to capture this dynamic nature. For example, common tokenization strategies such as fixed-size patching enforce rigid observational granularity, limiting their ability to adapt to varying information densities. Similarly, conventional positional encodings impose a uniform temporal scale, making it difficult to model diverse periodicities and trends across series. To overcome these limitations, we propose Kairos, a flexible TSFM framework that integrates a dynamic patching tokenizer and an instance-adaptive positional embedding. Kairos adaptively selects tokenization granularity and tailors positional encodings to the unique characteristics of each time series instance. Trained on a large-scale Predictability-Stratified Time Series (PreSTS) corpus comprising over 300 billion time points and adopting a multi-patch prediction strategy in the inference stage, Kairos achieves superior performance with much fewer parameters on two common zero-shot benchmarks, GIFT-Eval and the Time-Series-Library benchmark, consistently outperforming established methods across diverse tasks. The project page is at https://foundation-model-research.github.io/Kairos .

Foundation models, often pre-trained with large-scale data, have achieved paramount success in jump-starting various vision and language applications. Recent advances further enable adapting foundation models in downstream tasks efficiently using only a few training samples, e.g., in-context learning. Yet, the application of such learning paradigms in medical image analysis remains scarce due to the shortage of publicly accessible data and benchmarks. In this paper, we aim at approaches adapting the foundation models for medical image classification and present a novel dataset and benchmark for the evaluation, i.e., examining the overall performance of accommodating the large-scale foundation models downstream on a set of diverse real-world clinical tasks. We collect five sets of medical imaging data from multiple institutes targeting a variety of real-world clinical tasks (22,349 images in total), i.e., thoracic diseases screening in X-rays, pathological lesion tissue screening, lesion detection in endoscopy images, neonatal jaundice evaluation, and diabetic retinopathy grading. Results of multiple baseline methods are demonstrated using the proposed dataset from both accuracy and cost-effective perspectives.

We present ControlLLM, a novel framework that enables large language models (LLMs) to utilize multi-modal tools for solving complex real-world tasks. Despite the remarkable performance of LLMs, they still struggle with tool invocation due to ambiguous user prompts, inaccurate tool selection and parameterization, and inefficient tool scheduling. To overcome these challenges, our framework comprises three key components: (1) a task decomposer that breaks down a complex task into clear subtasks with well-defined inputs and outputs; (2) a Thoughts-on-Graph (ToG) paradigm that searches the optimal solution path on a pre-built tool graph, which specifies the parameter and dependency relations among different tools; and (3) an execution engine with a rich toolbox that interprets the solution path and runs the tools efficiently on different computational devices. We evaluate our framework on diverse tasks involving image, audio, and video processing, demonstrating its superior accuracy, efficiency, and versatility compared to existing methods.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) increasingly solve complex tasks by orchestrating agents and tools selected from rapidly growing marketplaces. As these marketplaces expand, many candidates become functionally overlapping, making selection not just a retrieval problem: beyond filtering relevant agents, an orchestrator must choose options that are reliable, compatible with the current execution context, and able to cooperate with other selected agents. Existing recommender systems -- largely built for item-level ranking from flat user-item logs -- do not directly address the structured, sequential, and interaction-dependent nature of agent orchestration. We address this gap by formulating agent recommendation in MAS as a constrained decision problem and introducing a generic constrained recommendation framework that first uses retrieval to build a compact candidate set conditioned on the current subtask and context, and then performs utility optimization within this feasible set using a learned scorer that accounts for relevance, reliability, and interaction effects. We ground both the formulation and learning signals in historical calling trees, which capture the execution structure of MAS (parent-child calls, branching dependencies, and local cooperation patterns) beyond what flat logs provide. The framework supports two complementary settings: agent-level recommendation (select the next agent/tool) and system-level recommendation (select a small, connected agent team/subgraph for coordinated execution). To enable systematic evaluation, we construct a unified calling-tree benchmark by normalizing invocation logs from eight heterogeneous multi-agent corpora into a shared structured representation.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their integration into autonomous agent systems has created unprecedented opportunities for document analysis, decision support, and knowledge retrieval. However, the complexity of developing, evaluating, and iterating on LLM-based agent workflows presents significant barriers to researchers, particularly those without extensive software engineering expertise. We present FROAV (Framework for RAG Observation and Agent Verification), an open-source research platform that democratizes LLM agent research by providing a plug-and-play architecture combining visual workflow orchestration, a comprehensive evaluation framework, and extensible Python integration. FROAV implements a multi-stage Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline coupled with a rigorous "LLM-as-a-Judge" evaluation system, all accessible through intuitive graphical interfaces. Our framework integrates n8n for no-code workflow design, PostgreSQL for granular data management, FastAPI for flexible backend logic, and Streamlit for human-in-the-loop interaction. Through this integrated ecosystem, researchers can rapidly prototype RAG strategies, conduct prompt engineering experiments, validate agent performance against human judgments, and collect structured feedback-all without writing infrastructure code. We demonstrate the framework's utility through its application to financial document analysis, while emphasizing its material-agnostic architecture that adapts to any domain requiring semantic analysis. FROAV represents a significant step toward making LLM agent research accessible to a broader scientific community, enabling researchers to focus on hypothesis testing and algorithmic innovation rather than system integration challenges.

The open-vocabulary image segmentation task involves partitioning images into semantically meaningful segments and classifying them with flexible text-defined categories. The recent vision-based foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) have shown superior performance in generating class-agnostic image segments. The main challenge in open-vocabulary image segmentation now lies in accurately classifying these segments into text-defined categories. In this paper, we introduce the Universal Segment Embedding (USE) framework to address this challenge. This framework is comprised of two key components: 1) a data pipeline designed to efficiently curate a large amount of segment-text pairs at various granularities, and 2) a universal segment embedding model that enables precise segment classification into a vast range of text-defined categories. The USE model can not only help open-vocabulary image segmentation but also facilitate other downstream tasks (e.g., querying and ranking). Through comprehensive experimental studies on semantic segmentation and part segmentation benchmarks, we demonstrate that the USE framework outperforms state-of-the-art open-vocabulary segmentation methods.

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) offer strong zero-shot forecasting via large-scale pre-training, yet fine-tuning remains critical for boosting performance in domains with limited public data. With the growing number of TSFMs, efficiently identifying the best model for downstream fine-tuning becomes increasingly challenging. In this work, we introduce TimeTic, a transferability estimation framework that recasts model selection as an in-context-learning problem: given observations on known (source) datasets, it predicts how a TSFM will perform after fine-tuning on a downstream (target) dataset. TimeTic flexibly organizes the observed model-data relationships as contextual information, allowing it to adapt seamlessly to various test-time scenarios. Leveraging the natural tabular structure formed by dataset meta-features, model characteristics, and fine-tuned performance, we employ tabular foundation models to serve as in-context learners. We further introduce a novel model characterization based on entropy evolution across model layers, capturing embedding-space distinctions and enabling TimeTic to generalize across arbitrary model sets. We establish a comprehensive benchmark for transferability estimation including 10 datasets, 10 foundation models, and 3 forecasting tasks. On this benchmark, TimeTic's estimation demonstrates strong alignment with actual fine-tuned performance for previously unseen datasets, achieving a mean rank correlation of approximately 0.6 and a 30% improvement compared to using zero-shot performance as the transferability score.

The rapid advancement of foundation models (FMs) across language, image, audio, and video domains has shown remarkable capabilities in diverse tasks. However, the proliferation of FMs brings forth a critical challenge: the potential to generate hallucinated outputs, particularly in high-stakes applications. The tendency of foundation models to produce hallucinated content arguably represents the biggest hindrance to their widespread adoption in real-world scenarios, especially in domains where reliability and accuracy are paramount. This survey paper presents a comprehensive overview of recent developments that aim to identify and mitigate the problem of hallucination in FMs, spanning text, image, video, and audio modalities. By synthesizing recent advancements in detecting and mitigating hallucination across various modalities, the paper aims to provide valuable insights for researchers, developers, and practitioners. Essentially, it establishes a clear framework encompassing definition, taxonomy, and detection strategies for addressing hallucination in multimodal foundation models, laying the foundation for future research in this pivotal area.

Systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have become formidable tools for automating research and software production. However, their governance remains a challenge when technical requirements demand absolute consistency, auditability, and predictable control over cost and latency. Recent literature highlights two phenomena that aggravate this scenario: the stochastic variance inherent in the model's judgment (often treated as "systemic noise") and the substantial degradation of context utilization in long inputs, with critical losses when decisive information is diluted in the middle of the prompt. This article proposes PARCER as an engineering response to these limitations. The framework acts as a declarative "operational contract" in YAML, transforming unstructured interactions into versioned and executable artifacts. PARCER imposes strict governance structured into seven operational phases, introducing decision hygiene practices inspired by legal judgments to mitigate noise, adaptive token budgeting, formalized recovery routes (fallbacks) for context preservation, and systemic observability via OpenTelemetry. The objective of this work is to present the conceptual and technical architecture of PARCER, positioning it as a necessary transition from simple "prompt engineering" to "context engineering with governable governance".

Modeling dynamic graphs, such as those found in social networks, recommendation systems, and e-commerce platforms, is crucial for capturing evolving relationships and delivering relevant insights over time. Traditional approaches primarily rely on graph neural networks with temporal components or sequence generation models, which often focus narrowly on the historical context of target nodes. This limitation restricts the ability to adapt to new and emerging patterns in dynamic graphs. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework, Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Dynamic Graph modeling (RAG4DyG), which enhances dynamic graph predictions by incorporating contextually and temporally relevant examples from broader graph structures. Our approach includes a time- and context-aware contrastive learning module to identify high-quality demonstrations and a graph fusion strategy to effectively integrate these examples with historical contexts. The proposed framework is designed to be effective in both transductive and inductive scenarios, ensuring adaptability to previously unseen nodes and evolving graph structures. Extensive experiments across multiple real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of RAG4DyG in improving predictive accuracy and adaptability for dynamic graph modeling. The code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/YuxiaWu/RAG4DyG.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited significant potential in performing diverse tasks, including the ability to call functions or use external tools to enhance their performance. While current research on function calling by LLMs primarily focuses on single-turn interactions, this paper addresses the overlooked necessity for LLMs to engage in multi-turn function calling--critical for handling compositional, real-world queries that require planning with functions but not only use functions. To facilitate this, we introduce an approach, BUTTON, which generates synthetic compositional instruction tuning data via bottom-up instruction construction and top-down trajectory generation. In the bottom-up phase, we generate simple atomic tasks based on real-world scenarios and build compositional tasks using heuristic strategies based on atomic tasks. Corresponding functions are then developed for these compositional tasks. The top-down phase features a multi-agent environment where interactions among simulated humans, assistants, and tools are utilized to gather multi-turn function calling trajectories. This approach ensures task compositionality and allows for effective function and trajectory generation by examining atomic tasks within compositional tasks. We produce a dataset BUTTONInstruct comprising 8k data points and demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments across various LLMs.

Caffe provides multimedia scientists and practitioners with a clean and modifiable framework for state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms and a collection of reference models. The framework is a BSD-licensed C++ library with Python and MATLAB bindings for training and deploying general-purpose convolutional neural networks and other deep models efficiently on commodity architectures. Caffe fits industry and internet-scale media needs by CUDA GPU computation, processing over 40 million images a day on a single K40 or Titan GPU (approx 2.5 ms per image). By separating model representation from actual implementation, Caffe allows experimentation and seamless switching among platforms for ease of development and deployment from prototyping machines to cloud environments. Caffe is maintained and developed by the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center (BVLC) with the help of an active community of contributors on GitHub. It powers ongoing research projects, large-scale industrial applications, and startup prototypes in vision, speech, and multimedia.

In this paper, we propose a framework for solving a single-agent task by using multiple agents, each focusing on different aspects of the task. This approach has two main advantages: 1) it allows for training specialized agents on different parts of the task, and 2) it provides a new way to transfer knowledge, by transferring trained agents. Our framework generalizes the traditional hierarchical decomposition, in which, at any moment in time, a single agent has control until it has solved its particular subtask. We illustrate our framework with empirical experiments on two domains.

Tabular foundation models such as TabPFN have revolutionized predictive machine learning for tabular data. At the same time, the driving factors of this revolution are hard to understand. Existing open-source tabular foundation models are implemented in complicated pipelines boasting over 10,000 lines of code, lack architecture documentation or code quality. In short, the implementations are hard to understand, not beginner-friendly, and complicated to adapt for new experiments. We introduce nanoTabPFN, a simplified and lightweight implementation of the TabPFN v2 architecture and a corresponding training loop that uses pre-generated training data. nanoTabPFN makes tabular foundation models more accessible to students and researchers alike. For example, restricted to a small data setting it achieves a performance comparable to traditional machine learning baselines within one minute of pre-training on a single GPU (160,000x faster than TabPFN v2 pretraining). This eliminated requirement of large computational resources makes pre-training tabular foundation models accessible for educational purposes. Our code is available at https://github.com/automl/nanoTabPFN.

The automation of scientific discovery represents a critical milestone in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. However, existing agentic systems for science suffer from two fundamental limitations: rigid, pre-programmed workflows that cannot adapt to intermediate findings, and inadequate context management that hinders long-horizon research. We present freephdlabor, an open-source multiagent framework featuring fully dynamic workflows determined by real-time agent reasoning and a \textit{modular architecture} enabling seamless customization -- users can modify, add, or remove agents to address domain-specific requirements. The framework provides comprehensive infrastructure including automatic context compaction, workspace-based communication to prevent information degradation, memory persistence across sessions, and non-blocking human intervention mechanisms. These features collectively transform automated research from isolated, single-run attempts into continual research programs that build systematically on prior explorations and incorporate human feedback. By providing both the architectural principles and practical implementation for building customizable co-scientist systems, this work aims to facilitate broader adoption of automated research across scientific domains, enabling practitioners to deploy interactive multiagent systems that autonomously conduct end-to-end research -- from ideation through experimentation to publication-ready manuscripts.

Table of contents (ToC) extraction centres on structuring documents in a hierarchical manner. In this paper, we propose a new dataset, ESGDoc, comprising 1,093 ESG annual reports from 563 companies spanning from 2001 to 2022. These reports pose significant challenges due to their diverse structures and extensive length. To address these challenges, we propose a new framework for Toc extraction, consisting of three steps: (1) Constructing an initial tree of text blocks based on reading order and font sizes; (2) Modelling each tree node (or text block) independently by considering its contextual information captured in node-centric subtree; (3) Modifying the original tree by taking appropriate action on each tree node (Keep, Delete, or Move). This construction-modelling-modification (CMM) process offers several benefits. It eliminates the need for pairwise modelling of section headings as in previous approaches, making document segmentation practically feasible. By incorporating structured information, each section heading can leverage both local and long-distance context relevant to itself. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art baseline with a fraction of running time. Our framework proves its scalability by effectively handling documents of any length.

Creating immersive and playable 3D worlds from texts or images remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. Existing world generation approaches typically fall into two categories: video-based methods that offer rich diversity but lack 3D consistency and rendering efficiency, and 3D-based methods that provide geometric consistency but struggle with limited training data and memory-inefficient representations. To address these limitations, we present HunyuanWorld 1.0, a novel framework that combines the best of both worlds for generating immersive, explorable, and interactive 3D scenes from text and image conditions. Our approach features three key advantages: 1) 360{\deg} immersive experiences via panoramic world proxies; 2) mesh export capabilities for seamless compatibility with existing computer graphics pipelines; 3) disentangled object representations for augmented interactivity. The core of our framework is a semantically layered 3D mesh representation that leverages panoramic images as 360{\deg} world proxies for semantic-aware world decomposition and reconstruction, enabling the generation of diverse 3D worlds. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating coherent, explorable, and interactive 3D worlds while enabling versatile applications in virtual reality, physical simulation, game development, and interactive content creation.

Time series forecasting plays a crucial role in data mining, driving rapid advancements across numerous industries. With the emergence of large models, time series foundation models (TSFMs) have exhibited remarkable generalization capabilities, such as zero-shot learning, through large-scale pre-training. Meanwhile, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods have been widely employed to enhance the performance of foundation models on unseen data, allowing models to access to external knowledge. In this paper, we introduce TimeRAF, a Retrieval-Augmented Forecasting model that enhance zero-shot time series forecasting through retrieval-augmented techniques. We develop customized time series knowledge bases that are tailored to the specific forecasting tasks. TimeRAF employs an end-to-end learnable retriever to extract valuable information from the knowledge base. Additionally, we propose Channel Prompting for knowledge integration, which effectively extracts relevant information from the retrieved knowledge along the channel dimension. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, showing significant improvement across various domains and datasets.

We present GeoGrid-Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of foundation models to understand geo-spatial data in the grid structure. Geo-spatial datasets pose distinct challenges due to their dense numerical values, strong spatial and temporal dependencies, and unique multimodal representations including tabular data, heatmaps, and geographic visualizations. To assess how foundation models can support scientific research in this domain, GeoGrid-Bench features large-scale, real-world data covering 16 climate variables across 150 locations and extended time frames. The benchmark includes approximately 3,200 question-answer pairs, systematically generated from 8 domain expert-curated templates to reflect practical tasks encountered by human scientists. These range from basic queries at a single location and time to complex spatiotemporal comparisons across regions and periods. Our evaluation reveals that vision-language models perform best overall, and we provide a fine-grained analysis of the strengths and limitations of different foundation models in different geo-spatial tasks. This benchmark offers clearer insights into how foundation models can be effectively applied to geo-spatial data analysis and used to support scientific research.

We present Muses, the first training-free method for fantastic 3D creature generation in a feed-forward paradigm. Previous methods, which rely on part-aware optimization, manual assembly, or 2D image generation, often produce unrealistic or incoherent 3D assets due to the challenges of intricate part-level manipulation and limited out-of-domain generation. In contrast, Muses leverages the 3D skeleton, a fundamental representation of biological forms, to explicitly and rationally compose diverse elements. This skeletal foundation formalizes 3D content creation as a structure-aware pipeline of design, composition, and generation. Muses begins by constructing a creatively composed 3D skeleton with coherent layout and scale through graph-constrained reasoning. This skeleton then guides a voxel-based assembly process within a structured latent space, integrating regions from different objects. Finally, image-guided appearance modeling under skeletal conditions is applied to generate a style-consistent and harmonious texture for the assembled shape. Extensive experiments establish Muses' state-of-the-art performance in terms of visual fidelity and alignment with textual descriptions, and potential on flexible 3D object editing. Project page: https://luhexiao.github.io/Muses.github.io/.

Large language model-based (LLM-based) multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly used to extend agentic problem solving via role specialization and collaboration. MAS workflows can be naturally modeled as directed computation graphs, where nodes execute agents/sub-workflows and edges encode dependencies and message passing. However, implementing complex graph workflows in current frameworks still requires substantial manual effort, offers limited reuse, and makes it difficult to integrate heterogeneous external context sources. To overcome these limitations, we present MASFactory, a graph-centric framework for orchestrating LLM-based MAS. It introduces Vibe Graphing, a human-in-the-loop approach that compiles natural-language intent into an editable workflow specification and then into an executable graph. In addition, the framework provides reusable components and pluggable context integration, as well as a visualizer for topology preview, runtime tracing, and human-in-the-loop interaction. We evaluate MASFactory on seven public benchmarks, validating both reproduction consistency for representative MAS methods and the effectiveness of Vibe Graphing. Our code (https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/MASFactory) and video (https://youtu.be/ANynzVfY32k) are publicly available.

Neurons in the brain are organized such that nearby cells tend to share similar functions. AI models lack this organization, and past efforts to introduce topography have often led to trade-offs between topography and task performance. In this work, we present TopoLoss, a new loss function that promotes spatially organized topographic representations in AI models without significantly sacrificing task performance. TopoLoss is highly adaptable and can be seamlessly integrated into the training of leading model architectures. We validate our method on both vision (ResNet-18, ResNet-50, ViT) and language models (GPT-Neo-125M, NanoGPT), collectively TopoNets. TopoNets are the highest-performing supervised topographic models to date, exhibiting brain-like properties such as localized feature processing, lower dimensionality, and increased efficiency. TopoNets also predict responses in the brain and replicate the key topographic signatures observed in the brain's visual and language cortices. Together, this work establishes a robust and generalizable framework for integrating topography into leading model architectures, advancing the development of high-performing models that more closely emulate the computational strategies of the human brain.

Cooking is a sequential and visually grounded activity, where each step such as chopping, mixing, or frying carries both procedural logic and visual semantics. While recent diffusion models have shown strong capabilities in text-to-image generation, they struggle to handle structured multi-step scenarios like recipe illustration. Additionally, current recipe illustration methods are unable to adjust to the natural variability in recipe length, generating a fixed number of images regardless of the actual instructions structure. To address these limitations, we present CookAnything, a flexible and consistent diffusion-based framework that generates coherent, semantically distinct image sequences from textual cooking instructions of arbitrary length. The framework introduces three key components: (1) Step-wise Regional Control (SRC), which aligns textual steps with corresponding image regions within a single denoising process; (2) Flexible RoPE, a step-aware positional encoding mechanism that enhances both temporal coherence and spatial diversity; and (3) Cross-Step Consistency Control (CSCC), which maintains fine-grained ingredient consistency across steps. Experimental results on recipe illustration benchmarks show that CookAnything performs better than existing methods in training-based and training-free settings. The proposed framework supports scalable, high-quality visual synthesis of complex multi-step instructions and holds significant potential for broad applications in instructional media, and procedural content creation.

Multi-agent LLM frameworks are widely used to accelerate the development of agent systems powered by large language models (LLMs). These frameworks impose distinct architectural structures that govern how agents interact, store information, and coordinate tasks. However, their impact on system performance remains poorly understood. This gap is critical, as architectural choices alone can induce order-of-magnitude differences in latency and throughput, as well as substantial variation in accuracy and scalability. Addressing this challenge requires (i) jointly evaluating multiple capabilities, such as orchestration overhead, memory behavior, planning, specialization, and coordination, and (ii) conducting these evaluations under controlled, framework-level conditions to isolate architectural effects. Existing benchmarks focus on individual capabilities and lack standardized framework-level evaluation. We address these limitations by (i) introducing an architectural taxonomy for systematically comparing multi-agent LLM frameworks along fundamental dimensions, and (ii) developing MAFBench, a unified evaluation suite that integrates existing benchmarks under a standardized execution pipeline. Using MAFBench, we conduct a controlled empirical study across several widely used frameworks. Our results show that framework-level design choices alone can increase latency by over 100x, reduce planning accuracy by up to 30%, and lower coordination success from above 90% to below 30%. Finally, we translate our findings into concrete architectural design principles and framework selection guidance, and outline promising future research directions.

Top-down visual attention mechanisms have been used extensively in image captioning and visual question answering (VQA) to enable deeper image understanding through fine-grained analysis and even multiple steps of reasoning. In this work, we propose a combined bottom-up and top-down attention mechanism that enables attention to be calculated at the level of objects and other salient image regions. This is the natural basis for attention to be considered. Within our approach, the bottom-up mechanism (based on Faster R-CNN) proposes image regions, each with an associated feature vector, while the top-down mechanism determines feature weightings. Applying this approach to image captioning, our results on the MSCOCO test server establish a new state-of-the-art for the task, achieving CIDEr / SPICE / BLEU-4 scores of 117.9, 21.5 and 36.9, respectively. Demonstrating the broad applicability of the method, applying the same approach to VQA we obtain first place in the 2017 VQA Challenge.

Foundation models (FM), such as large language models (LLMs), which are large-scale machine learning (ML) models, have demonstrated remarkable adaptability in various downstream software engineering (SE) tasks, such as code completion, code understanding, and software development. As a result, FM leaderboards, especially those hosted on cloud platforms, have become essential tools for SE teams to compare and select the best third-party FMs for their specific products and purposes. However, the lack of standardized guidelines for FM evaluation and comparison threatens the transparency of FM leaderboards and limits stakeholders' ability to perform effective FM selection. As a first step towards addressing this challenge, our research focuses on understanding how these FM leaderboards operate in real-world scenarios ("leaderboard operations") and identifying potential leaderboard pitfalls and areas for improvement ("leaderboard smells"). In this regard, we perform a multivocal literature review to collect up to 721 FM leaderboards, after which we examine their documentation and engage in direct communication with leaderboard operators to understand their workflow patterns. Using card sorting and negotiated agreement, we identify 5 unique workflow patterns and develop a domain model that outlines the essential components and their interaction within FM leaderboards. We then identify 8 unique types of leaderboard smells in LBOps. By mitigating these smells, SE teams can improve transparency, accountability, and collaboration in current LBOps practices, fostering a more robust and responsible ecosystem for FM comparison and selection.

Training tool-use agents typically relies on outcome-based filtering: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on successful trajectories and Reinforcement Learning (RL) on pass-rate-selected tasks. However, this paradigm ignores interaction dynamics: successful trajectories may lack error recovery or exhibit redundancy, while pass rates fail to distinguish structurally informative tasks from trivial ones. We propose TopoCurate, an interaction-aware framework that projects multi-trial rollouts from the same task into a unified semantic quotient topology. By merging equivalent action-observation states, this projection transforms scattered linear trajectories into a structured manifold that explicitly captures how tool invocations and environmental responses drive the divergence between effective strategies and failure modes. Leveraging this representation, we introduce a dual-selection mechanism: for SFT, we prioritize trajectories demonstrating reflective recovery, semantic efficiency, and strategic diversity to mitigate covariate shift and mode collapse; for RL, we select tasks with high error branch ratios and strategic heterogeneity, maximizing gradient Signal-to-Noise Ratio to address vanishing signals in sparse-reward settings. Evaluations on BFCLv3 and Tau2 Bench show that TopoCurate achieves consistent gains of 4.2\% (SFT) and 6.9\% (RL) over state-of-the-art baselines. We will release the code and data soon for further investigations.

Accurate medical image segmentation is essential for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. While recent interactive foundation models (e.g., nnInteractive) enhance generalization through large-scale multimodal pretraining, they still depend on precise prompts and often perform below expectations in contexts that are underrepresented in their training data. We present AtlasSegFM, an atlas-guided framework that customizes available foundation models to clinical contexts with a single annotated example. The core innovations are: 1) a pipeline that provides context-aware prompts for foundation models via registration between a context atlas and query images, and 2) a test-time adapter to fuse predictions from both atlas registration and the foundation model. Extensive experiments across public and in-house datasets spanning multiple modalities and organs demonstrate that AtlasSegFM consistently improves segmentation, particularly for small, delicate structures. AtlasSegFM provides a lightweight, deployable solution one-shot customization of foundation models in real-world clinical workflows. The code will be made publicly available.

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents can substantially improve productivity by automating frequently executed long-latency tasks on mobile devices. However, existing evaluation benchmarks are still constrained to limited applications, simple tasks, and coarse-grained metrics. To address this, we introduce AndroidLens, a challenging evaluation framework for mobile GUI agents, comprising 571 long-latency tasks in both Chinese and English environments, each requiring an average of more than 26 steps to complete. The framework features: (1) tasks derived from real-world user scenarios across 38 domains, covering complex types such as multi-constraint, multi-goal, and domain-specific tasks; (2) static evaluation that preserves real-world anomalies and allows multiple valid paths to reduce bias; and (3) dynamic evaluation that employs a milestone-based scheme for fine-grained progress measurement via Average Task Progress (ATP). Our evaluation indicates that even the best models reach only a 12.7% task success rate and 50.47% ATP. We also underscore key challenges in real-world environments, including environmental anomalies, adaptive exploration, and long-term memory retention.

Recent video diffusion foundation models have achieved remarkable progress in high-quality video generation, yet turning them into real-time interactive video world models remains challenging. Interactive world models require controllable, causal, and low-latency rollout, which in practice demands a full pipeline spanning data construction, controllable fine-tuning, autoregressive training, few-step distillation, and streaming inference. In this work, we present minWM, a full-stack open-source framework for building real-time interactive video world models. minWM provides an end-to-end pipeline that converts existing bidirectional T2V/TI2V video foundation models into camera-controllable few-step autoregressive world models. Specifically, minWM first fine-tunes a bidirectional video diffusion model with camera control, and then applies the Causal Forcing / Causal Forcing++ pipeline, including AR diffusion training, causal ODE or causal consistency distillation, and asymmetric DMD, to distill it into a few-step autoregressive generator for low-latency rollout. The framework is modular and architecture-extensible: we instantiate it on representative open backbones, including Wan2.1-T2V-1.3B and HY1.5-TI2V-8B, covering both cross-attention-based condition injection and MMDiT-style architectures. minWM also supports adapting existing video world models, such as HY-WorldPlay, to new data distributions, training recipes, and latency targets. Beyond releasing runnable scripts, checkpoints, documentation, and inference code, we provide practical ablations on camera trajectory quality, controllability training steps, and minimal batch-size requirements. We hope minWM serves as a reproducible and extensible recipe for building and adapting real-time interactive video world models. Project Page: [https://github.com/shengshu-ai/minWM](https://github.com/shengshu-ai/minWM)

Smartphones have become indispensable in modern life, yet navigating complex tasks on mobile devices often remains frustrating. Recent advancements in large multimodal model (LMM)-based mobile agents have demonstrated the ability to perceive and act in mobile environments. However, current approaches face significant limitations: they fall short in addressing real-world human needs, struggle with reasoning-intensive and long-horizon tasks, and lack mechanisms to learn and improve from prior experiences. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Mobile-Agent-E, a hierarchical multi-agent framework capable of self-evolution through past experience. By hierarchical, we mean an explicit separation of high-level planning and low-level action execution. The framework comprises a Manager, responsible for devising overall plans by breaking down complex tasks into subgoals, and four subordinate agents--Perceptor, Operator, Action Reflector, and Notetaker--which handle fine-grained visual perception, immediate action execution, error verification, and information aggregation, respectively. Mobile-Agent-E also features a novel self-evolution module which maintains a persistent long-term memory comprising Tips and Shortcuts. Tips are general guidance and lessons learned from prior tasks on how to effectively interact with the environment. Shortcuts are reusable, executable sequences of atomic operations tailored for specific subroutines. The inclusion of Tips and Shortcuts facilitates continuous refinement in performance and efficiency. Alongside this framework, we introduce Mobile-Eval-E, a new benchmark featuring complex mobile tasks requiring long-horizon, multi-app interactions. Empirical results show that Mobile-Agent-E achieves a 22% absolute improvement over previous state-of-the-art approaches across three foundation model backbones. Project page: https://x-plug.github.io/MobileAgent.

In Greek mythology, Pistis symbolized good faith, trust, and reliability, echoing the core principles of RAG in LLM systems. Pistis-RAG, a scalable multi-stage framework, effectively addresses the challenges of large-scale retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Each stage plays a distinct role: matching refines the search space, pre-ranking prioritizes semantically relevant documents, and ranking aligns with the large language model's (LLM) preferences. The reasoning and aggregating stage supports the implementation of complex chain-of-thought (CoT) methods within this cascading structure. We argue that the lack of strong alignment between LLMs and the external knowledge ranking methods used in RAG tasks is relevant to the reliance on the model-centric paradigm in RAG frameworks. A content-centric approach would prioritize seamless integration between the LLMs and external information sources, optimizing the content transformation process for each specific task. Critically, our ranking stage deviates from traditional RAG approaches by recognizing that semantic relevance alone may not directly translate to improved generation. This is due to the sensitivity of the few-shot prompt order, as highlighted in prior work lu2021fantastically. Current RAG frameworks fail to account for this crucial factor. We introduce a novel ranking stage specifically designed for RAG systems. It adheres to information retrieval principles while considering the unique business scenario captured by LLM preferences and user feedback. Our approach integrates in-context learning (ICL) methods and reasoning steps to incorporate user feedback, ensuring efficient alignment. Experiments on the MMLU benchmark demonstrate a 9.3\% performance improvement. The model and code will be open-sourced on GitHub. Experiments on real-world, large-scale data validate our framework's scalability.

CLAX is a JAX-based library that implements classic click models using modern gradient-based optimization. While neural click models have emerged over the past decade, complex click models based on probabilistic graphical models (PGMs) have not systematically adopted gradient-based optimization, preventing practitioners from leveraging modern deep learning frameworks while preserving the interpretability of classic models. CLAX addresses this gap by replacing EM-based optimization with direct gradient-based optimization in a numerically stable manner. The framework's modular design enables the integration of any component, from embeddings and deep networks to custom modules, into classic click models for end-to-end optimization. We demonstrate CLAX's efficiency by running experiments on the full Baidu-ULTR dataset comprising over a billion user sessions in approx 2 hours on a single GPU, orders of magnitude faster than traditional EM approaches. CLAX implements ten classic click models, serving both industry practitioners seeking to understand user behavior and improve ranking performance at scale and researchers developing new click models. CLAX is available at: https://github.com/philipphager/clax

The rapid development of large language models and multimodal large language models has accelerated the emergence of proactive agents capable of operating everyday tools and assisting users in real-world environments. However, existing benchmarks struggle to evaluate such agents effectively, as they often rely on sandboxed environments and single-turn evaluation paradigms. Moreover, their scenario-based task taxonomies mix multiple model capabilities within the same task category, making it difficult to identify the root causes of agent failures. To address these limitations, we introduce UniClawBench, the first capability-driven benchmark designed to evaluate proactive agents in dynamic, real-world settings. UniClawBench is built around five foundational model capabilities: Skill Usage, Exploration, Long-Context Reasoning, Multimodal Understanding, and Cross-Platform Coordination. Based on these capabilities, we design 400 bilingual real-world tasks. Unlike previous benchmarks that rely on static, pre-recorded answers, our benchmark evaluates agents in live Docker containers using fine-grained, step-by-step completion checkpoints. Furthermore, we design a closed-loop evaluation strategy comprising an executor agent, a hidden supervisor agent, and a user agent to simulate realistic multi-turn human feedback without leaking grading criteria. To disentangle base model capabilities from framework-level design choices, we evaluate state-of-the-art models under multiple agent frameworks. Through comprehensive comparisons across both models and frameworks, we show how base model capabilities and agent framework designs jointly shape performance in real-world environments. To facilitate future research, we make our benchmark and code publicly available at https://github.com/HKU-MMLab/UniClawBench.

Gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy is essential in identifying GI tract abnormalities in order to detect diseases in their early stages and improve patient outcomes. Although deep learning has shown success in supporting GI diagnostics and decision-making, these models require curated datasets with labels that are expensive to acquire. Foundation models offer a promising solution by learning general-purpose representations, which can be finetuned for specific tasks, overcoming data scarcity. Developing foundation models for medical imaging holds significant potential, but the sensitive and protected nature of medical data presents unique challenges. Foundation model training typically requires extensive datasets, and while hospitals generate large volumes of data, privacy restrictions prevent direct data sharing, making foundation model training infeasible in most scenarios. In this work, we propose a FL framework for training foundation models for gastroendoscopy imaging, enabling data to remain within local hospital environments while contributing to a shared model. We explore several established FL algorithms, assessing their suitability for training foundation models without relying on task-specific labels, conducting experiments in both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings. We evaluate the trained foundation model on three critical downstream tasks--classification, detection, and segmentation--and demonstrate that it achieves improved performance across all tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach in a federated, privacy-preserving setting.

Autonomous discovery systems couple a resource that answers queries (a simulator, instrument, or analytic model) to an algorithm that selects what to query next. Most software frameworks for this loop inherit the control structure of numerical optimization: campaigns run for a fixed number of iterations, query costs are absent from the programming interface, and decision-making is treated as free. In practice, queries may differ in cost by orders of magnitude, and planners built on large language models or expensive surrogates consume resources of their own. Here we present CADAQUES, an open-source Python framework built on one architectural principle: cost is a first-class primitive of the discovery loop. CADAQUES separates the loop into two structural protocols, an Oracle that answers queries and a Driver that proposes them, and charges both evaluations and decisions against a common vector-valued budget spanning wall time, CPU hours, monetary cost, and language model tokens. An append-only ledger records, for each transaction, the cost declared before execution and the cost settled afterwards, making their discrepancy an observable property of the campaign. We evaluate the architecture by locating the critical temperature of the two-dimensional Ising model from noisy finite-size estimates against the exact thermodynamic-limit reference. In this noisy setting, strategies that concentrate around the best observed result can be misled by noise-induced peaks, whereas a schedule that explores with cheap low-fidelity queries and refines with higher-fidelity ones yields lower and less variable errors than high fidelity throughout, at the studied budget scale. Metering adds tens of microseconds per iteration, three orders of magnitude below the cheapest oracle query. The framework is MIT-licensed and archived at Zenodo (doi:10.5281/zenodo.21293589).

Large ride-hailing platforms, such as DiDi, Uber and Lyft, connect tens of thousands of vehicles in a city to millions of ride demands throughout the day, providing great promises for improving transportation efficiency through the tasks of order dispatching and vehicle repositioning. Existing studies, however, usually consider the two tasks in simplified settings that hardly address the complex interactions between the two, the real-time fluctuations between supply and demand, and the necessary coordinations due to the large-scale nature of the problem. In this paper we propose a unified value-based dynamic learning framework (V1D3) for tackling both tasks. At the center of the framework is a globally shared value function that is updated continuously using online experiences generated from real-time platform transactions. To improve the sample-efficiency and the robustness, we further propose a novel periodic ensemble method combining the fast online learning with a large-scale offline training scheme that leverages the abundant historical driver trajectory data. This allows the proposed framework to adapt quickly to the highly dynamic environment, to generalize robustly to recurrent patterns and to drive implicit coordinations among the population of managed vehicles. Extensive experiments based on real-world datasets show considerably improvements over other recently proposed methods on both tasks. Particularly, V1D3 outperforms the first prize winners of both dispatching and repositioning tracks in the KDD Cup 2020 RL competition, achieving state-of-the-art results on improving both total driver income and user experience related metrics.

Despite the remarkable developments achieved by recent 3D generation works, scaling these methods to geographic extents, such as modeling thousands of square kilometers of Earth's surface, remains an open challenge. We address this through a dual innovation in data infrastructure and model architecture. First, we introduce Aerial-Earth3D, the largest 3D aerial dataset to date, consisting of 50k curated scenes (each measuring 600m x 600m) captured across the U.S. mainland, comprising 45M multi-view Google Earth frames. Each scene provides pose-annotated multi-view images, depth maps, normals, semantic segmentation, and camera poses, with explicit quality control to ensure terrain diversity. Building on this foundation, we propose EarthCrafter, a tailored framework for large-scale 3D Earth generation via sparse-decoupled latent diffusion. Our architecture separates structural and textural generation: 1) Dual sparse 3D-VAEs compress high-resolution geometric voxels and textural 2D Gaussian Splats (2DGS) into compact latent spaces, largely alleviating the costly computation suffering from vast geographic scales while preserving critical information. 2) We propose condition-aware flow matching models trained on mixed inputs (semantics, images, or neither) to flexibly model latent geometry and texture features independently. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EarthCrafter performs substantially better in extremely large-scale generation. The framework further supports versatile applications, from semantic-guided urban layout generation to unconditional terrain synthesis, while maintaining geographic plausibility through our rich data priors from Aerial-Earth3D. Our project page is available at https://whiteinblue.github.io/earthcrafter/

Foundation model development attracts a rapidly expanding body of contributors, scientists, and applications. To help shape responsible development practices, we introduce the Foundation Model Development Cheatsheet: a growing collection of 250+ tools and resources spanning text, vision, and speech modalities. We draw on a large body of prior work to survey resources (e.g. software, documentation, frameworks, guides, and practical tools) that support informed data selection, processing, and understanding, precise and limitation-aware artifact documentation, efficient model training, advance awareness of the environmental impact from training, careful model evaluation of capabilities, risks, and claims, as well as responsible model release, licensing and deployment practices. We hope this curated collection of resources helps guide more responsible development. The process of curating this list, enabled us to review the AI development ecosystem, revealing what tools are critically missing, misused, or over-used in existing practices. We find that (i) tools for data sourcing, model evaluation, and monitoring are critically under-serving ethical and real-world needs, (ii) evaluations for model safety, capabilities, and environmental impact all lack reproducibility and transparency, (iii) text and particularly English-centric analyses continue to dominate over multilingual and multi-modal analyses, and (iv) evaluation of systems, rather than just models, is needed so that capabilities and impact are assessed in context.

Topological Neural Networks (TNNs) incorporate higher-order relational information beyond pairwise interactions, enabling richer representations than Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Concurrently, topological descriptors based on persistent homology (PH) are being increasingly employed to augment the GNNs. We investigate the benefits of integrating these two paradigms. Specifically, we introduce TopNets as a broad framework that subsumes and unifies various methods in the intersection of GNNs/TNNs and PH such as (generalizations of) RePHINE and TOGL. TopNets can also be readily adapted to handle (symmetries in) geometric complexes, extending the scope of TNNs and PH to spatial settings. Theoretically, we show that PH descriptors can provably enhance the expressivity of simplicial message-passing networks. Empirically, (continuous and E(n)-equivariant extensions of) TopNets achieve strong performance across diverse tasks, including antibody design, molecular dynamics simulation, and drug property prediction.

Foundation models have the potential to transform the landscape of remote sensing (RS) data analysis by enabling large computer vision models to be pre-trained on vast amounts of remote sensing data. These models can then be fine-tuned with small amounts of labeled training and applied to a variety of applications. Most existing foundation models are designed for high spatial resolution, cloud-free satellite imagery or photos, limiting their applicability in scenarios that require frequent temporal monitoring or broad spectral profiles. As a result, foundation models trained solely on cloud-free images have limited utility for applications that involve atmospheric variables or require atmospheric corrections. We introduce SatVision-TOA, a novel foundation model pre-trained on 14-band MODIS L1B Top-Of-Atmosphere (TOA) radiance imagery, addressing the need for models pre-trained to handle moderate- and coarse-resolution all-sky remote sensing data. The SatVision-TOA model is pre-trained using a Masked-Image-Modeling (MIM) framework and the SwinV2 architecture, and learns detailed contextual representations through self-supervised learning without the need for labels. It is a 3 billion parameter model that is trained on 100 million images. To our knowledge this is the largest foundation model trained solely on satellite RS imagery. Results show that SatVision-TOA achieves superior performance over baseline methods on downstream tasks such as 3D cloud retrieval. Notably, the model achieves a mean intersection over union (mIOU) of 0.46, a substantial improvement over the baseline mIOU of 0.22. Additionally, the rate of false negative results in the fine-tuning task were reduced by over 50% compared to the baseline. Our work advances pre-trained vision modeling for multispectral RS by learning from a variety of atmospheric and aerosol conditions to improve cloud and land surface monitoring.

Recently, several works tackled the video editing task fostered by the success of large-scale text-to-image generative models. However, most of these methods holistically edit the frame using the text, exploiting the prior given by foundation diffusion models and focusing on improving the temporal consistency across frames. In this work, we introduce a framework that is object-centric and is designed to control both the object's appearance and, notably, to execute precise and explicit structural modifications on the object. We build our framework on a pre-trained image-conditioned diffusion model, integrate layers to handle the temporal dimension, and propose training strategies and architectural modifications to enable shape control. We evaluate our method on the image-driven video editing task showing similar performance to the state-of-the-art, and showcasing novel shape-editing capabilities. Further details, code and examples are available on our project page: https://helia95.github.io/vase-website/

Interactive agent benchmarks face a tension between scalable construction and realistic workflow evaluation. Hand-authored tasks are expensive to extend and revise, while static prompt evaluation misses failures that only appear when agents operate over persistent state. Existing interactive benchmarks have advanced agent evaluation significantly, but most initialize tasks from clean state and do not systematically test how agents handle pre-existing partial, stale, or conflicting artifacts. We present ClawForge, a generator-backed benchmark framework for executable command-line workflows under state conflict. The framework compiles scenario templates, grounded slots, initialized state, reference trajectories, and validators into reproducible task specifications, and evaluates agents step by step over persistent workflow surfaces using normalized end state and observable side effects rather than exact trajectory matching. We instantiate this framework as the ClawForge-Bench (17 scenarios, 6 ability categories). Results across seven frontier models show that the best model reaches only 45.3% strict accuracy, wrong-state replacement remains below 17\% for all models, and the widest model separation (17% to 90%) is driven by whether agents inspect existing state before acting. Partial-credit and step-efficiency analyses further reveal that many failures are near-miss closures rather than early breakdowns, and that models exhibit qualitatively different failure styles under state conflict.

The recent development and success of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitate an evaluation of their performance across diverse NLP tasks in different languages. Although several frameworks have been developed and made publicly available, their customization capabilities for specific tasks and datasets are often complex for different users. In this study, we introduce the LLMeBench framework. Initially developed to evaluate Arabic NLP tasks using OpenAI's GPT and BLOOM models; it can be seamlessly customized for any NLP task and model, regardless of language. The framework also features zero- and few-shot learning settings. A new custom dataset can be added in less than 10 minutes, and users can use their own model API keys to evaluate the task at hand. The developed framework has been already tested on 31 unique NLP tasks using 53 publicly available datasets within 90 experimental setups, involving approximately 296K data points. We plan to open-source the framework for the community (https://github.com/qcri/LLMeBench/). A video demonstrating the framework is available online (https://youtu.be/FkQn4UjYA0s).

Geospatial technologies are becoming increasingly essential in our world for a wide range of applications, including agriculture, urban planning, and disaster response. To help improve the applicability and performance of deep learning models on these geospatial tasks, various works have begun investigating foundation models for this domain. Researchers have explored two prominent approaches for introducing such models in geospatial applications, but both have drawbacks in terms of limited performance benefit or prohibitive training cost. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel paradigm for building highly effective geospatial foundation models with minimal resource cost and carbon impact. We first construct a compact yet diverse dataset from multiple sources to promote feature diversity, which we term GeoPile. Then, we investigate the potential of continual pretraining from large-scale ImageNet-22k models and propose a multi-objective continual pretraining paradigm, which leverages the strong representations of ImageNet while simultaneously providing the freedom to learn valuable in-domain features. Our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art geospatial pretraining methods in an extensive evaluation on seven downstream datasets covering various tasks such as change detection, classification, multi-label classification, semantic segmentation, and super-resolution.

Recent advances in foundation models highlight a clear trend toward unification and scaling, showing emergent capabilities across diverse domains. While image generation and editing have rapidly transitioned from task-specific to unified frameworks, video generation and editing remain fragmented due to architectural limitations and data scarcity. In this work, we introduce EditVerse, a unified framework for image and video generation and editing within a single model. By representing all modalities, i.e., text, image, and video, as a unified token sequence, EditVerse leverages self-attention to achieve robust in-context learning, natural cross-modal knowledge transfer, and flexible handling of inputs and outputs with arbitrary resolutions and durations. To address the lack of video editing training data, we design a scalable data pipeline that curates 232K video editing samples and combines them with large-scale image and video datasets for joint training. Furthermore, we present EditVerseBench, the first benchmark for instruction-based video editing covering diverse tasks and resolutions. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that EditVerse achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing existing open-source and commercial models, while exhibiting emergent editing and generation abilities across modalities.

Developing foundation models in medical imaging requires continuous monitoring of downstream performance. Researchers are burdened with tracking numerous experiments, design choices, and their effects on performance, often relying on ad-hoc, manual workflows that are inherently slow and error-prone. We introduce EvalBlocks, a modular, plug-and-play framework for efficient evaluation of foundation models during development. Built on Snakemake, EvalBlocks supports seamless integration of new datasets, foundation models, aggregation methods, and evaluation strategies. All experiments and results are tracked centrally and are reproducible with a single command, while efficient caching and parallel execution enable scalable use on shared compute infrastructure. Demonstrated on five state-of-the-art foundation models and three medical imaging classification tasks, EvalBlocks streamlines model evaluation, enabling researchers to iterate faster and focus on model innovation rather than evaluation logistics. The framework is released as open source software at https://github.com/DIAGNijmegen/eval-blocks.

Foundation models are a strong trend in deep learning and computer vision. These models serve as a base for applications as they require minor or no further fine-tuning by developers to integrate into their applications. Foundation models for zero-shot object segmentation such as Segment Anything (SAM) output segmentation masks from images without any further object information. When they are followed in a pipeline by an object identification model, they can perform object detection without training. Here, we focus on training such an object identification model. A crucial practical aspect for an object identification model is to be flexible in input size. As object identification is an image retrieval problem, a suitable method should handle multi-query multi-gallery situations without constraining the number of input images (e.g. by having fixed-size aggregation layers). The key solution to train such a model is the centroid triplet loss (CTL), which aggregates image features to their centroids. CTL yields high accuracy, avoids misleading training signals and keeps the model input size flexible. In our experiments, we establish a new state of the art on the ArmBench object identification task, which shows general applicability of our model. We furthermore demonstrate an integrated unseen object detection pipeline on the challenging HOPE dataset, which requires fine-grained detection. There, our pipeline matches and surpasses related methods which have been trained on dataset-specific data.

AI agents increasingly rely on external tools to solve complex, long-horizon tasks. Advancing such agents requires reproducible evaluation and large-scale training in controllable, diverse, and realistic tool-use environments. However, real-world APIs are limited in availability, domain coverage, and stability, often requiring access keys and imposing rate limits, which render them impractical for stable evaluation or scalable training. To address these challenges, we introduce SynthTools, a flexible and scalable framework for generating synthetic tool ecosystems. Our framework consists of three core components: Tool Generation for automatic and scalable creation of diverse tools, Tool Simulation to emulate realistic tool behaviors, and Tool Audit to ensure correctness and consistency of tool simulation. To illustrate its scalability, we show that SynthTools can readily produce toolsets that span twice as many domains and twice as many tools per domain as prior work. Furthermore, the tool simulation and tool audit components demonstrate strong reliability, achieving 94% and 99% accuracy respectively. Finally, we construct downstream tasks from the generated tools that even state-of-the-art models struggle to complete. By enabling scalable, diverse, and reliable tool ecosystems, SynthTools provides a practical path toward large-scale training and stable evaluation of tool-use agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/namkoong-lab/SynthTools.

This research explores the integration of large language models (LLMs) into scientific data assimilation, focusing on combustion science as a case study. Leveraging foundational models integrated with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, the study introduces an approach to process diverse combustion research data, spanning experimental studies, simulations, and literature. The multifaceted nature of combustion research emphasizes the critical role of knowledge processing in navigating and extracting valuable information from a vast and diverse pool of sources. The developed approach minimizes computational and economic expenses while optimizing data privacy and accuracy. It incorporates prompt engineering and offline open-source LLMs, offering user autonomy in selecting base models. The study provides a thorough examination of text segmentation strategies, conducts comparative studies between LLMs, and explores various optimized prompts to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework. By incorporating an external database, the framework outperforms a conventional LLM in generating accurate responses and constructing robust arguments. Additionally, the study delves into the investigation of optimized prompt templates for the purpose of efficient extraction of scientific literature. The research addresses concerns related to hallucinations and false research articles by introducing a custom workflow developed with a detection algorithm to filter out inaccuracies. Despite identified areas for improvement, the framework consistently delivers accurate domain-specific responses with minimal human oversight. The prompt-agnostic approach introduced holds promise for future deliberations. The study underscores the significance of integrating LLMs and knowledge processing techniques in scientific research, providing a foundation for advancements in data assimilation and utilization.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in addressing tasks that necessitate a combination of task planning and the usage of external tools that require a blend of task planning and the utilization of external tools, such as APIs. However, real-world complex systems present three prevalent challenges concerning task planning and tool usage: (1) The real system usually has a vast array of APIs, so it is impossible to feed the descriptions of all APIs to the prompt of LLMs as the token length is limited; (2) the real system is designed for handling complex tasks, and the base LLMs can hardly plan a correct sub-task order and API-calling order for such tasks; (3) Similar semantics and functionalities among APIs in real systems create challenges for both LLMs and even humans in distinguishing between them. In response, this paper introduces a comprehensive framework aimed at enhancing the Task Planning and Tool Usage (TPTU) abilities of LLM-based agents operating within real-world systems. Our framework comprises three key components designed to address these challenges: (1) the API Retriever selects the most pertinent APIs for the user task among the extensive array available; (2) LLM Finetuner tunes a base LLM so that the finetuned LLM can be more capable for task planning and API calling; (3) the Demo Selector adaptively retrieves different demonstrations related to hard-to-distinguish APIs, which is further used for in-context learning to boost the final performance. We validate our methods using a real-world commercial system as well as an open-sourced academic dataset, and the outcomes clearly showcase the efficacy of each individual component as well as the integrated framework.