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Ping Xu, Zaitian Wang, Zhirui Wang, Pengjiang Li, Jiajia Wang, Ran Zhang, Pengfei Wang, Yuanchun Zhou

Cell clustering is crucial for uncovering cellular heterogeneity in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data by identifying cell types and marker genes. Despite its importance, existing benchmarks for scRNA-seq clustering remain fragmented, lacking standardized protocols and often omitting recent advances in artificial intelligence.To fill these gaps, we present scCluBench, a comprehensive benchmark of clustering algorithms for scRNA-seq data. scCluBench provides 36 scRNA-seq datasets collected from diverse public sources, covering multiple tissues, which are uniformly processed to ensure consistency for systematic evaluation and downstream analyses. To assess performance, we collect and reproduce a range of scRNA-seq clustering methods, including traditional, deep learning-based, graph-based, and biological foundation models. We comprehensively evaluate each method both quantitatively and qualitatively, using core performance metrics and visualization analyses. Furthermore, we construct representative downstream biological tasks, such as marker gene identification and cell type annotation, to further assess the practical utility. scCluBench then investigates the performance differences and applicability boundaries of various clustering models across diverse analytical tasks, systematically assessing their robustness and scalability in real-world scenarios. Overall, scCluBench offers a standardized and user-friendly benchmark for scRNA-seq clustering, with standardized datasets, unified evaluation protocols, and transparent analyses, facilitating informed method selection and providing valuable insights into model generalizability and application scope.

Mingkai Miao, Jianheng Tang, Guangyu Hu, Hongce Zhang

Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) are instrumental in many electronic design automation (EDA) tasks thanks to their compact representation of Boolean functions. In BDD‑based reversible‑circuit synthesis, which is critical for quantum computing, the chosen variable ordering governs the number of BDD nodes and thus the key metrics of resource consumption, such as Quantum Cost. Because finding an optimal variable ordering for BDDs is an NP‑complete problem, existing heuristics often degrade as circuit complexity grows. We introduce BDD2Seq, a graph‑to‑sequence framework that couples a Graph Neural Network encoder with a Pointer‑Network decoder and Diverse Beam Search to predict high‑quality orderings. By treating the circuit netlist as a graph, BDD2Seq learns structural dependencies that conventional heuristics overlooked, yielding smaller BDDs and faster synthesis. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks show that BDD2Seq achieves around 1.4 times lower Quantum Cost and 3.7 times faster synthesis than modern heuristic algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle the variable‑ordering problem in BDD‑based reversible‑circuit synthesis with a graph‑based generative model and diversity‑promoting decoding.

Qi Yang, Bolin Ni, Shiming Xiang, Houwen Peng

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with explicit step-by-step reasoning have achieved strong performance on complex tasks. However, such reasoning is unnecessary for many simple queries and introduces substantial computational overhead. To address this inefficiency, we present R-4B, an auto-thinking MLLM that dynamically determines whether to invoke the reasoning process based on input complexity.Our key idea is to equip a single model with both thinking and non-thinking capabilities and train it to select the appropriate mode. We first introduce bi-mode annealing, a unified training paradigm that constructs a model competent in both reasoning-intensive and direct-answer settings without requiring explicit complexity annotations. Building on this foundation, we propose Bi-mode Policy Optimization (BPO), a lightweight reinforcement learning algorithm that employs a dual-rollout mechanism: for each input, the model generates both thinking and non-thinking responses. This prevents mode collapse and enables robust learning of an adaptive reasoning policy using only simple, rule-based rewards.Extensive experiments across 25 benchmarks show that R-4B achieves state-of-the-art performance among models of similar scale. It consistently surpasses Qwen2.5-VL-7B and matches or exceeds larger models such as Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking-2506 (16B) on reasoning-intensive tasks, while reducing computational cost by avoiding redundant reasoning. Our results demonstrate that adaptive auto-thinking offers an effective and scalable pathway toward more efficient multimodal reasoning models.

Yida Niu, Xinhai Chang, Xin Liu, Ziyuan Jiao, Yixin Zhu

Robots deployed in unstructured environments must coordinate whole-body motion---simultaneously moving a mobile base and arm---to interact with the physical world. This coupled mobility and dexterity yields a state space that grows combinatorially with scene and object diversity, demanding datasets far larger than those sufficient for fixed-base manipulation. Yet existing acquisition methods, including teleoperation and planning, are either labor-intensive or computationally prohibitive at scale. The core bottleneck is the lack of a scalable pipeline for generating large-scale, physically valid, coordinated trajectory data across diverse embodiments and environments. Here we introduce AutoMoMa, a GPU-accelerated framework that unifies AKR modeling, which consolidates base, arm, and object kinematics into a single chain, with parallelized trajectory optimization. AutoMoMa achieves 5,000 episodes per GPU-hour (over 80x faster than CPU-based baselines), producing a dataset of over 500k physically valid trajectories spanning 330 scenes, diverse articulated objects, and multiple robot embodiments. Prior datasets were forced to compromise on scale, diversity, or kinematic fidelity; AutoMoMa addresses all three simultaneously. Training downstream IL policies further reveals that even a single articulated-object task requires tens of thousands of demonstrations for State-of-the-Art (SOTA) methods to reach 80% success, confirming that data scarcity--not algorithmic limitations--has been the binding constraint. AutoMoMa thus bridges high-performance planning and reliable IL-based control, providing the infrastructure previously missing for coordinated mobile manipulation research. By making large-scale, kinematically valid training data practical, AutoMoMa showcases generalizable whole-body robot policies capable of operating in the diverse, unstructured settings of the real world.

Zhiwen Fan, Jian Zhang, Renjie Li, Junge Zhang, Runjin Chen, Hezhen Hu, Kevin Wang, Peihao Wang, Huaizhi Qu, Shijie Zhou 等

The rapid advancement of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for 2D images and videos has sparked interest in extending these models to 3D scenes, with the goal of human-like visual-spatial intelligence. However, achieving deep spatial understanding comparable to human capabilities remains challenging for both model design and data acquisition. Existing methods often rely on external depth sensors for geometry capture or off-the-shelf algorithms for pre-constructing 3D maps, which limits their scalability.In this work, we introduce VLM-3R, a framework for Vision-Language Models that couples 3D reconstructive instruction tuning with scalable training data curation and a new benchmark for temporal reasoning. Specifically, VLM-3R processes monocular video frames with a geometry encoder that derives implicit 3D tokens representing scene context (spatial tokens) and camera motion (view tokens). In parallel, we build a scalable data creation pipeline with over 200K 3D reconstructive instruction-tuning question-answer pairs. To evaluate temporal reasoning, we further introduce the Vision-Spatial-Temporal Intelligence benchmark (VSTI-Bench), which contains over 138.6K question-answer pairs across five distinct tasks focused on evolving spatial relationships. Extensive experiments show that VLM-3R supports robust visual-spatial reasoning and improves the understanding of temporal 3D context changes, enabling monocular 3D spatial assistance and embodied reasoning.

Cheng Liang, Haoxian Chen, Liang Hou, Qi Fan, Gangshan Wu, Xin Tao, Limin Wang

The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism severely limits the context scalability of Video Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). We find that the highly sparse spatio-temporal attention patterns exhibited in Video DiTs can be naturally represented by the Monarch matrix. It is a class of structured matrices with flexible sparsity, enabling sub-quadratic attention via an alternating minimization algorithm. Accordingly, we propose VMonarch, a novel attention mechanism for Video DiTs that enables efficient computation over the dynamic sparse patterns with structured Monarch matrices. First, we adapt spatio-temporal Monarch factorization to explicitly capture the intra-frame and inter-frame correlations of the video data. Second, we introduce a recomputation strategy to mitigate artifacts arising from instabilities during alternating minimization of Monarch matrices. Third, we propose a novel online entropy algorithm fused into FlashAttention, enabling fast Monarch matrix updates for long sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VMonarch achieves comparable or superior generation quality to full attention on VBench after minimal fine-tuning. It overcomes the attention bottleneck in Video DiTs, reduces attention FLOPs by a factor of 17.5, and achieves a speedup of over 5 times in attention computation for long videos, surpassing state-of-the-art sparse attention methods at 90% sparsity.

Xiaoxue Chen, Ziyi Xiong, Yuantao Chen, Gen Li, Nan Wang, Hongcheng Luo, Long Chen, Haiyang Sun, Bing Wang, Guang Chen 等

Autonomous driving needs fast, scalable 4D reconstruction and re-simulation for training and evaluation, yet most methods for dynamic driving scenes still rely on per-scene optimization, known camera calibration, or short frame windows, making them slow and impractical. We revisit this problem from a feedforward perspective and introduce Driving Gaussian Grounded Transformer (DGGT), a unified framework for pose-free dynamic scene reconstruction. We note that the existing formulations, treating camera pose as a required input, limit flexibility and scalability. Instead, we reformulate pose as an output of the model, enabling reconstruction directly from sparse, unposed images and supporting an arbitrary number of views for long sequences. Our approach jointly predicts per-frame 3D Gaussian maps and camera parameters, disentangles dynamics with a lightweight dynamic head, and preserves temporal consistency with a lifespan head that modulates visibility over time. A diffusion-based rendering refinement further reduces motion/interpolation artifacts and improves novel-view quality under sparse inputs. The result is a single-pass, pose-free algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art performance and speed. Trained and evaluated on large-scale driving benchmarks (Waymo, nuScenes, Argoverse2), our method outperforms prior work both when trained on each dataset and in zero-shot transfer across datasets, and it scales well as the number of input frames increases.

Ishaan Rawal, Shubh Gupta, Yihan Hu, Wei Zhan

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are advancing autonomous driving by replacing modular pipelines with unified end-to-end architectures. Current VLAs face two challenges: (1) they require extensive datasets annotated with reasoning traces, and (2) these traces greatly increase token counts, inflating training and inference costs. We propose NoRD (No Reasoning for Driving), a data- and inference-efficient VLA that addresses both. Compared to existing VLAs, NoRD achieves competitive performance while being fine-tuned on atleast <60% of the data and no reasoning annotations, resulting in 3x fewer tokens. Our approach applies Reinforcement Learning (RL) to fine-tune a Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) policy trained on a small, reasoning-free dataset. However, we observe that the standard RL algorithm, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), fails to yield significant improvements over this data-efficient SFT policy. We find that this limitation stems from difficulty bias, which disproportionately penalizes reward signals from scenarios that produce high-variance rollouts within GRPO. NoRD overcomes this limitation by incorporating Dr.GRPO, a recent algorithm designed to mitigate difficulty bias in LLMs. As a result, NoRD achieves competitive performance on Waymo and NAVSIM without large datasets, reasoning or additional inputs, enabling scalable, data-efficient training, and fast inference.

Hongrui Cai, Junjie Luo, Zhihong Fu, Shengnan Zhu, Jiawei Wen, Wanquan Feng, Songtao Zhao, Qian He

Video Novel View Synthesis (VNVS) aims to render arbitrary novel viewpoints of dynamic scenes from a single-view video, but its algorithmic training faces a major challenge: the lack of large-scale multi-view video datasets. Prior methods often train on monocular data by framing it as an inpainting task, which typically leads to a training-inference gap and visual artifacts. While synthetic multi-view data can partially alleviate the data scarcity issue, its high acquisition costs and limited diversity restrict scalability. To address these problems, we propose Scaling4D, a novel strategy that theoretically bridges the training-inference gap while leveraging large-scale monocular videos for training. Specifically, we take a higher-level perspective on the problem, reformulating VNVS into a general correspondence-guided generation task. Furthermore, in conjunction with extensive real-world data, we establish a synthetic data pipeline integrated with our training strategy to enhance precision. Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate a positive correlation between performance and training data volume, confirming the scalability.

Phuc Pham, Uy Dieu Tran, Binh-Son Hua, Phong Nguyen

Realistic and efficient 3D garment generation remains a longstanding challenge in computer vision and digital fashion. Existing methods typically rely on large vision- language models to produce serialized representations of 2D sewing patterns, which are then transformed into simulation-ready 3D meshes using garment modeling framework such as GarmentCode. Although these approaches yield high-quality results, they often suffer from slow inference times, ranging from 30 seconds to a minute. In this work, we introduce SwiftTailor, a novel two-stage framework that unifies sewing-pattern reasoning and geometry-based mesh synthesis through a compact geometry image representation. SwiftTailor comprises two lightweight modules: PatternMaker, an efficient vision-language model that predicts sewing patterns from diverse input modalities, and GarmentSewer, an efficient dense prediction transformer that converts these patterns into a novel Garment Geometry Image, encoding the 3D surface of all garment panels in a unified UV space. The final 3D mesh is reconstructed through an efficient inverse mapping process that incorporates remeshing and dynamic stitching algorithms to directly assemble the garment, thereby amortizing the cost of physical simulation. Extensive experiments on the Multimodal GarmentCodeData demonstrate that SwiftTailor achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and visual fidelity while significantly reducing inference time. This work offers a scalable, interpretable, and high-performance solution for next-generation 3D garment generation.

Zihan Gu, Ruoyu Chen, Junchi Zhang, Yue Hu, Hua Zhang, Xiaochun Cao

Attribution is essential for interpreting object-level foundation models. Recent methods based on submodular subset selection have achieved high faithfulness, but their efficiency limitations hinder practical deployment in real-world scenarios. To address this, we propose PhaseWin, a novel phase-window search algorithm that enables faithful region attribution with near-linear complexity. PhaseWin replaces traditional quadratic-cost greedy selection with a phased coarse-to-fine search, combining adaptive pruning, windowed fine-grained selection, and dynamic supervision mechanisms to closely approximate greedy behavior while dramatically reducing model evaluations. Theoretically, PhaseWin retains near-greedy approximation guarantees under mild monotone submodular assumptions. Empirically, PhaseWin achieves over 95% of greedy attribution faithfulness using only 20% of the computational budget, and consistently outperforms other attribution baselines across object detection and visual grounding tasks with Grounding DINO and Florence-2. PhaseWin establishes a new state of the art in scalable, high-faithfulness attribution for object-level multimodal models. Code is available at https://github.com/Qihuai27/phasewin-search.

Avery Gump, Connor Henley, Sungjin Cheong, Akarsh Prabhakara, Mohit Gupta

Modern LiDARs are rapidly transitioning from bulky, mechanically scanned systems to ultra-compact, low-cost, solid-state arrays. This miniaturization--while enabling scalability, affordability, and camera-like data structures--introduces a new and severe failure mode: internal-multipath glare. When light from a bright or retroreflective surface reflects and scatters within the LiDAR, light that should reach a single pixel spreads across the pixel array. The resulting artifacts create phantom objects, obscure real ones, and produce safety-critical "ghosts in the point clouds." This paper introduces a physically grounded sensing model and algorithmic techniques for addressing this effect. We show that internal glare can be represented as a linear, scene-independent operator--the Transient Glare Spread Function (TGSF)--acting on the transient measurements. Building on this model, we develop a training-free approach that operates on low-level LiDAR detections (or echoes) prior to point-cloud formation, leveraging knowledge of the glare spread function to reason about the likelihood of each detection arising from glare. The resulting approach is compatible with existing LiDAR signal-processing pipelines, and deployable on unmodified commercial sensors. Using experiments with real single-photon LiDAR hardware, we demonstrate substantial suppression of severe glare artifacts while preserving true scene structure.

Tao Wu, Li Yang, Gen Zhan, Yabin Zhang, Yiting Liao, Junlin Li, Deliang Fu, Li Zhang, Limin Wang

Enhancing temporal understanding of MLLMs is essential for long-form video analysis, supporting tasks such as temporal localization and time-sensitive question answering. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been explored for temporal reasoning, existing approaches are often limited to specific tasks or datasets, hindering generalization across diverse temporal scenarios. To address this, we present TempR1, an RL-based method that strengthens MLLMs' temporal comprehension through multi-task training. We construct a multi-task corpus covering diverse temporal structures and build upon the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm for stable cross-task optimization. Temporal tasks are categorized into three interval-instance correspondence types, with tailored localization rewards designed for each. This design enables TempR1 to capture fine-grained temporal dependencies and adapt to different temporal patterns. Experiments show that TempR1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks. Joint optimization across complementary tasks further produces strong synergy, improving both generalization and single-task performance, thereby providing a scalable paradigm for temporal reasoning in MLLMs.

Ping Guo, Tiantian Zhang, Xi Lin, Xiang Li, Zhi-Ri Tang, Qingfu Zhang

Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) aims to train customized models for clients with highly heterogeneous data distributions while preserving data privacy. Existing approaches often rely on heuristics like clustering or model interpolation, which lack principled mechanisms for balancing heterogeneous client objectives. Serving M clients with distinct data distributions is inherently a multi-objective optimization problem, where achieving optimal personalization ideally requires M distinct models on the Pareto front. However, maintaining M separate models poses significant scalability challenges in federated settings with hundreds or thousands of clients. To address this challenge, we reformulate PFL as a few-for-many optimization problem that maintains only K shared server models (K << M) to collectively serve all M clients. We prove that this framework achieves near-optimal personalization: the approximation error diminishes as K increases and each client's model converges to each client's optimum as data grows. Building on this reformulation, we propose FedFew, a practical algorithm that jointly optimizes the K server models through efficient gradient-based updates. Unlike clustering-based approaches that require manual client partitioning or interpolation-based methods that demand careful hyperparameter tuning, FedFew automatically discovers the optimal model diversity through its optimization process. Experiments across vision, NLP, and real-world medical imaging datasets demonstrate that FedFew, with just 3 models, consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/pgg3/FedFew.

Zihao Xu, Dawei Xu, Zihan Li, Xixi Zheng, Chuan Zhang

Vector images have attracted increasing attention in the field of information hiding in recent years due to their scalability and structural properties. However, existing steganographic methods for vector images often introduce noticeable modifications to the files themselves, resulting in potential security risks and limited embedding capacity. Motivated by recent advances in diffusion models and image generative steganography, we propose GVIS, a novel Generative Vector Image Steganography framework. GVIS deterministically generates raster images using diffusion models, which are subsequently vectorized into vector images. On the sender side, we design a lightweight overlap detection algorithm to identify cubic Bezier curve control points suitable for data embedding, which enables the secret information to be encoded into the coordinate parameters of these control points. Then, the receiver can use the pre-shared settings to reconstruct the generation process and accurate message extraction by difference. Extensive theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that GVIS achieves high-capacity, high-accuracy, secure, and training-free steganography. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to apply generative models to vector image steganography.

Shashanka Venkataramanan, Valentinos Pariza, Mohammadreza Salehi, Lukas Knobel, Elias Ramzi, Spyros Gidaris, Andrei Bursuc, Yuki M Asano

We present Franca (pronounced Fran-ka): free one; the first fully open-source (data, code, weights) vision foundation model that matches and in many cases surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art proprietary models, e.g., DINOv2, CLIP, SigLIPv2, etc. Our approach is grounded in a transparent training pipeline inspired by Web-SSL and uses publicly available data: ImageNet-21K and a subset of ReLAION-2B. Beyond model release, we tackle critical limitations in self-supervised learning clustering methods. Existing approaches assign image features to large codebooks via clustering algorithms such as Sinkhorn-Knopp, but they often overlook the inherent ambiguity in cluster semantics. To address this, we introduce a multi-head clustering projector based on nested Matryoshka representations. This design progressively refines features into increasingly fine-grained clusters without increasing the model size, producing higher-quality dense representations. Additionally, we propose a novel positional disentanglement strategy that explicitly removes positional biases from dense representations.This leads to consistent gains on several downstream benchmarks, demonstrating the utility of cleaner feature spaces. Our contributions establish a new standard for transparent, high-performance vision models and open a path toward more reproducible and generalizable foundation models for the broader AI community.

Guangting Zheng, Qinyu Zhao, Tao Yang, Fei Xiao, Zhijie Lin, Jie Wu, Jiajun Deng, Yanyong Zhang, Rui Zhu

Directly modeling the explicit likelihood of the raw data distribution is a key topic in the machine learning area, which achieves the scaling success in Large Language Models by autoregressive modeling. However, continuous AR modeling over visual pixel data suffers from extremely long sequences and high-dimensional spaces. In this paper, we present FARMER, a novel end-to-end generative framework that unifies Normalizing Flows (NFs) and Autoregressive (AR) models for tractable likelihood estimation and high-quality image synthesis directly from raw pixels. FARMER employs an invertible autoregressive flow to transform images into latent sequences, whose distribution is implicitly modeled by an autoregressive model. To address the redundancy and complexity in pixel-level modeling, we propose a self-supervised dimension reduction scheme that partitions NF latent channels into informative and redundant groups, enabling more effective and efficient AR modeling. Furthermore, we design a one-step distillation scheme to significantly accelerate inference speed and introduce a resampling-based classifier-free guidance algorithm to boost image generation quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FARMER achieves competitive performance compared to existing pixel-based generative models while providing exact likelihoods and scalable training.

Xin Li, Shujun Tian, Tao Lu, Han Bao, Zonghui Wang, Wenzhi Chen

Diffusion models (DMs) have recently achieved remarkable success across diverse modalities, including high-fidelity image and video synthesis.However, their inherent step sequential denoising process introduces substantial cumulative latency, which significantly degrades user experience. While existing multi-GPU parallelization motheds can alleviate latency, they often incur prohibitive GPU-GPU communication overhead, offsetting much of the performance gain.We present Otil (Only Transmit Informative Latents), a communication-efficient parallel framework for accelerating diffusion inference.% Otil can minimizes redundant data exchange across GPUs while preserving generation quality.Our key insight is that latent activations change only marginally between consecutive denoising process. Leveraging this property, Otil identifies and synchronizes only the most informative latent sub-blocks and introduces a dynamic polling mechanism that periodically revisits all spatial regions, ensuring complete coverage without unnecessary communication. The framework is fully plug-and-play and remains compatible with fast sample and architectural acceleration algorithms, without requiring any retraining or architectural modification.Otil reduces GPU-GPU communication up to 87.5% compared with SOTA parallelism methods, achieving 1.8xspeedup on two GPUs with Stable Diffusion v1.5 and 2.6xon four GPUs with Stable Diffusion XL. When combined with few-step samplers (30 steps) and LoRA models, the acceleration further increases to 2.46x-2.84xon 2 GPUs. These demonstrate the strong potential of Otil for scalable and efficient multi-GPU diffusion inference while preserving generation fidelity.

Xinmiao Yu, Liwen Zhang, Xiaocheng Feng, Pengjun Xie, Jingren Zhou, Bing Qin, Yong Jiang

Large Language Model(LLM)-based agents have shown strong capabilities in web information seeking, with reinforcement learning (RL) becoming a key optimization paradigm. However, planning remains a bottleneck, as existing methods struggle with long-horizon strategies. Our analysis reveals a critical phenomenon—plan anchor—where the first reasoning step disproportionately impacts downstream behavior in long-horizon web reasoning tasks. Current RL algorithms, fail to account for this by uniformly distributing rewards across the trajectory.To address this, we propose Anchor-GRPO, a two-stage RL framework that decouples planning and execution. In Stage 1, the agent optimizes its first-step planning using fine-grained rubrics derived from self-play experiences and human calibration. In Stage 2, execution is aligned with the initial plan through sparse rewards, ensuring stable and efficient tool usage. We evaluate Anchor-GRPO on four benchmarks: BrowseComp, BrowseComp-Zh, GAIA, and XBench-DeepSearch. Across models from 3B to 30B, Anchor-GRPO outperforms baseline GRPO and First-step GRPO, improving task success and tool efficiency. Notably, WebAnchor-30B achieves 46.0% pass@1 on BrowseComp and 76.4% on GAIA. Anchor-GRPO also demonstrates strong scalability, getting higher accuracy as model size and context length increase.

Sama Hadhoud, Alaa Elsetohy, Frederikus Hudi, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Steven Halim, Alham Fikri Aji

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly succeed on competitive programming problems, yet existing evaluations conflate algorithmic reasoning with code-level implementation. We argue that competitive programming is fundamentally a problem-solving task and propose centering natural-language editorials in both solution generation and evaluation. Generating an editorial prior to code improves solve rates for some LLMs, with substantially larger gains when using expertly written gold editorials. However, even with gold editorials, models continue to struggle with implementation, while the gap between generated and gold editorials reveals a persistent problem-solving bottleneck in specifying correct and complete algorithms. Beyond pass/fail metrics, we diagnose reasoning errors by comparing model-generated editorials to gold standards using expert annotations and validate an LLM-as-a-judge protocol for scalable evaluation. We introduce a dataset of 83 ICPC-style problems with gold editorials and full test suites, and evaluate 19 LLMs, arguing that future benchmarks should explicitly separate problem solving from implementation.