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Applications · Robotics

Yuyang Liu, Liuzhenghao Lyu, Xiancheng Zhang, Jingya Wang, Li Yuan, Yonghong Tian

The realization of autonomous scientific experimentation is currently limited by LLMs' struggle to grasp the strict procedural logic and accuracy required by biological protocols. To address this fundamental challenge, we present **BioProBench**, a comprehensive resource for procedural reasoning in biology. BioProBench is grounded in**BioProCorpus**, a foundational collection of 27,000 human-written protocols. From this corpus, we systematically constructed a dataset of over 550,000 task instances, offering both a large-scale training resource and a rigorous benchmark with novel metrics. Evaluating 10 mainstream LLMs, we find that while general comprehension is high, performance drops significantly on tasks demanding deep reasoning, quantitative precision, and safety awareness. To demonstrate the value of BioProCorpus in mitigating these issues, we developed **ProAgent**, grounded in our corpus, ProAgent substantially advances the state-of-the-art. BioProBench provides a rigorous diagnostic benchmark and a foundational resource for developing the next generation of reliable scientific AI. Code and data are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Anonymization-112358 .

Reinforcement Learning · Multi-agent

Aritra Mitra, George Pappas, Hamed Hassani

In large-scale distributed machine learning, recent works have studied the effects of compressing gradients in stochastic optimization to alleviate the communication bottleneck. These works have collectively revealed that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is robust to structured perturbations such as quantization, sparsification, and delays. Perhaps surprisingly, despite the surge of interest in multi-agent reinforcement learning, almost nothing is known about the analogous question: \textit{Are common reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms also robust to similar perturbations?} We investigate this question by studying a variant of the classical temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm with a perturbed update direction, where a general compression operator is used to model the perturbation. Our work makes three important technical contributions. First, we prove that compressed TD algorithms, coupled with an error-feedback mechanism used widely in optimization, exhibit the same non-asymptotic theoretical guarantees as their SGD counterparts. Second, we show that our analysis framework extends seamlessly to nonlinear stochastic approximation schemes that subsume Q-learning. Third, we prove that for multi-agent TD learning, one can achieve linear convergence speedups with respect to the number of agents while communicating just $\tilde{O}(1)$ bits per iteration. Notably, these are the first finite-time results in RL that account for general compression operators and error-feedback in tandem with linear function approximation and Markovian sampling. Our proofs hinge on the construction of novel Lyapunov functions that capture the dynamics of a memory variable introduced by error-feedback.

Applications · Chemistry, Physics, and Earth Sciences

Bogdan Zagribelnyy, Ivan Ilin, Maksim Kuznetsov, Nikita Bondarev, Roman Schutski, Thomas MacDougall, Rim Shayakhmetov, Zulfat Miftahutdinov, Mikolaj Mizera, Vladimir Aladinskiy 等

Recent progress has expanded the use of large language models (LLMs) in drug discovery, including synthesis planning. However, objective evaluation of retrosynthesis performance remains limited. Existing benchmarks and metrics typically rely on published synthetic procedures and Top-K accuracy based on single ground-truth, which does not capture the open-ended nature of real-world synthesis planning. We propose a new benchmarking framework for single-step retrosynthesis that evaluates both general-purpose and chemistry-specialized LLMs using ChemCensor, a novel metric for chemical plausibility. By emphasizing plausibility over exact match, this approach better aligns with human synthesis planning practices. We also introduce CREED, a novel dataset comprising millions of ChemCensor-validated reaction records for LLM training, and use it to train a model that improves over the LLM baselines under this benchmark.

Reinforcement Learning · Batch/Offline

Wenyu Chen, Yujia Zhang, Jianchao Zeng, Wei Guo, Yanbo Wang, Pinle Qin, Linli Ma

Cross-domain offline reinforcement learning leverages a source dataset to improve policy learning in a data-scarce target domain, but dynamics mismatch makes many source transitions kinematically infeasible and can cause negative transfer. Recent non-parametric geometric methods (e.g., standard optimal transport and k-nearest neighbors) avoid overfitting yet often yield only relative rankings under an implicit matching or retrieval budget, making performance sensitive to hand-tuned thresholds when the true cross-domain overlap is unknown. We formulate availability estimation as soft subset selection by learning a source reweighting that geometrically aligns with the target. We propose **R**obust **O**ffline unbalanced **O**ptimal **T**ransport (ROOT): (i) a robust ambiguity set for uncertainty under limited target samples, and (ii) an unbalanced transport objective that penalizes mass deviation, enabling a principled transport-or-discard mechanism. ROOT thus down-weights or discards high-cost source samples rather than forcing them onto the target support. Moreover, the induced weights decay exponentially with transport cost, guaranteeing outlier suppression. On D4RL dynamics-shift benchmarks, ROOT improves downstream offline RL and outperforms strong baselines on most tasks without task-specific threshold tuning.

Deep Learning · Graph Neural Networks

Soyoung Park, Hwanjun Song, Sungsu Lim

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in graph neural networks (GNNs) is crucial in high-stakes domains but remains a significant challenge. In graph settings, message passing often relies on strong assumptions such as exchangeability, which are rarely satisfied in practice. Moreover, achieving reliable UQ typically requires costly resampling or post-hoc calibration. To address these issues, we introduce Quantile-free Prediction Interval GNN (QpiGNN), a framework that builds on quantile regression (QR) to enable GNN-based UQ by directly optimizing coverage and interval width without requiring quantile inputs or post-processing. QpiGNN employs a dual-head architecture that decouples prediction and uncertainty, and is trained with label-only supervision through a quantile-free joint loss. This design allows efficient training and yields robust prediction intervals, with theoretical guarantees of asymptotic coverage and near-optimal width under mild assumptions. Experiments on 19 synthetic and real-world benchmarks show QpiGNN achieves average 22% higher coverage and 50% narrower intervals than baselines, while ensuring efficiency and robustness to noise and structural shifts.

Applications · Robotics

Wenhui (Oscar) Huang, Songyan Zhang, Qihang Huang, Zhidong Wang, zhiqi mao, Collister Chua, Chen Zhan, Long Chen, Chen Lv

Integrating vision-language models (VLMs) into end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving (AD) systems has shown promise in improving scene understanding. However, existing integration strategies suffer from several limitations: they either struggle to resolve distribution misalignment between reasoning and action spaces, underexploit the general reasoning capabilities of pretrained VLMs, or incur substantial inference latency during action policy generation, which degrades driving performance. To address these challenges, we propose AutoMoT in this work, an end-to-end AD framework that unifies reasoning and action generation within a single vision-language-action (VLA) model. Our approach leverages a mixture-of-transformer (MoT) architecture with joint attention sharing, which preserves the general reasoning capabilities of pre-trained VLMs while enabling efficient fast-slow inference through asynchronous execution at different task frequencies. Additionally, we introduce a VLA-oriented action refiner that further enhances driving performance via diffusion-based fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, under both open- and closed-loop settings, demonstrate that AutoMoT achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. We refer to \href{https://automot-website.github.io/}{Project Page} for the demonstration videos and corresponding descriptions.

Applications · Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Nicholas Blauch, George Alvarez, Talia Konkle

Human vision is foveated, with variable resolution peaking at the center of a large field of view; this reflects an efficient trade-off for active sensing, allowing eye-movements to bring different parts of the world into focus with other parts of the world in context. In contrast, most computer vision systems encode the visual world at a uniform resolution, raising challenges for processing full-field high-resolution images efficiently. We propose a foveated vision interface (FOVI) based on the human retina and primary visual cortex, that reformats a variable-resolution retina-like sensor array into a uniformly dense, V1-like sensor manifold. Receptive fields are defined as k-nearest-neighborhoods (kNNs) on the sensor manifold, enabling kNN-convolution via a novel kernel mapping technique. We demonstrate two use cases: (1) an end-to-end kNN-convolutional architecture, and (2) a foveated adaptation of the foundational DINOv3 ViT model, leveraging low-rank adaptation (LoRA). These models provide competitive performance at a fraction of the computational cost of non-foveated baselines, opening pathways for efficient and scalable active sensing for high-resolution egocentric vision.

Deep Learning · Large Language Models

Ma Yan, Weiyu Zhang, Tianle Li, Du Linge, Xuyang Shen, Pengfei Liu

Vision tool-use reinforcement learning (RL) can equip vision--language models with visual operators such as crop-and-zoom and achieves strong performance gains, yet it remains unclear whether these gains are driven by improvements in tool use or evolving intrinsic capabilities. We introduce \textbf{MED} (Measure--Explain--Diagnose), a coarse-to-fine framework that disentangles intrinsic capability changes from tool-induced effects, decomposes the tool-induced performance difference into gain and harm terms, and probes the mechanisms driving their evolution. Across checkpoint-level analyses on two VLMs with different tool priors and six benchmarks, we find that improvements are dominated by intrinsic learning, while tool-use RL mainly reduces tool-induced harm (e.g., fewer call-induced errors and weaker tool schema interference) and yields limited progress in tool-based correction of intrinsic failures.Overall, current vision tool-use RL learns to coexist safely with tools rather than master them.

Applications · Computer Vision

Tianrun Xu, Yue Sun, Qixun Wang, Jingyi Lu, Yuan Wang, Tianren Zhang, Longteng Guo, Fengyun Rao, Jing LYU, Jing Liu 等

Multimodal latent-space reasoning aims to replace explicit “thinking with images” by performing visual reasoning directly in a compact latent space. However, existing approaches largely rely on visual supervision and produce latent representations that lack sufficient semantic richness, limiting their ability to support diverse region-level reasoning tasks. In this work, we introduce Semantic-Enriched Latent Visual Reasoning (SLVR), a two-stage learning framework that enriches latent representations with attribute-level visual semantics and aligns them with diverse reasoning objectives. In the first stage, SLVR learns semantically enriched region-centric latents under fine-grained attribute supervision. In the second stage, we design Multi-query Group Relative Policy Optimization (M-GRPO) to align latent representations across multiple queries grounded in the same region, encouraging consistent utilization of semantic information under varying reasoning demands. To support this framework, we construct SLV-Set, comprising approximately 400K region-level attribute annotations and 800K multi-query question answering samples, and introduce SV-QA, a benchmark that evaluates latent reasoning under semantic variation. Experiments demonstrate that SLVR improves the robustness and semantic consistency of latent visual reasoning compared to existing baselines.

Theory · Online Learning and Bandits

Yunfan Zhang, Yuxuan Han, Zhengyuan Zhou

We investigate the distributionally robust assortment optimization (DRAO) problem under the contextual multinomial logit (MNL) choice model, where the decision-maker seeks to maximize revenue against worst-case distributional deviations. To address potential distribution shifts relative to the observed data environment, we study DRAO under ambiguity sets defined by three divergences: total variation (TV), Kullback–Leibler (KL), and chi-square ($\chi^2$). Incorporating robust concerns poses challenges for both algorithm design and theoretical analysis. By leveraging strong duality results from the distributionally robust optimization literature and integrating them into the assortment optimization procedures, we develop tailored polynomial-time algorithms under each divergence. We further provide a theoretical analysis and establish sample complexity bounds for all three robust formulations.

Deep Learning · Generative Models and Autoencoders

Divyam Madaan, Sumit Chopra, Kyunghyun Cho

Despite the recent success of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), existing approaches predominantly assume the availability of multiple modalities during training and inference. In practice, multimodal data is often incomplete because modalities may be missing, collected asynchronously, or available only for a subset of examples. In this work, we propose PRIMO, a supervised latent-variable imputation model that quantifies the predictive impact of any missing modality within the multimodal learning setting. PRIMO enables the use of all available training examples, whether modalities are complete or partial. Specifically, it models the missing modality through a latent variable that captures its relationship with the observed modality in the context of prediction. During inference, we draw many samples from the learned distribution over the missing modality to both obtain the marginal predictive distribution (for the purpose of prediction) and analyze the impact of the missing modalities on the prediction for each instance. We evaluate PRIMO on a synthetic XOR dataset, Audio-Vision MNIST, and MIMIC-III for mortality and ICD-9 prediction. Across all datasets, PRIMO obtains performance comparable to unimodal baselines when a modality is fully missing and to multimodal baselines when all modalities are available. PRIMO quantifies the predictive impact of a modality at the instance level using a variance-based metric computed from predictions across latent completions. We visually demonstrate how varying completions of the missing modality result in a set of plausible labels.

Applications · Computer Vision

Tianrun Xu, Haoda Jing, Ye Li, Yuquan Wei, Jun Feng, Guanyu Chen, Haichuan Gao, Tianren Zhang, Jing Liu, Feng Chen

Recent advances in multimodal language models (MLLMs) have made thinking with images a dominant paradigm for multimodal reasoning. However, existing methods still fail to ensure evidence–answer consistency, where correct answers must be supported by correct visual evidence. To address this issue, we propose DeFacto, a counterfactual reasoning framework that explicitly aligns visual evidence with final answers by jointly optimizing for task correctness and evidence–answer consistency. Our approach integrates three complementary training paradigms: (i) positive, (ii) counterfactual, and (iii) random-masking. We further develop a language-guided evidence construction pipeline that automatically localizes question-relevant regions and generates counterfactual variants, resulting in DeFacto-100K, a dataset of about 100k images. Building on this dataset, we train MLLMs with GRPO-based reinforcement learning and design three complementary rewards to promote correct answering, structured reasoning, and consistent evidence selection. Moreover, we introduce DeFacto-1.5K, a human-annotated benchmark for systematically evaluating evidence-grounded consistency beyond answer accuracy. Experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that DeFacto substantially improves both answer accuracy and evidence–answer consistency over strong baselines. The code and datasets will be released upon acceptance.

Social Aspects · Everything Else

Erik Bekkers, Anna Ciaunica

Imagine an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that perfectly mimics human emotion and begs for its continued existence. Is it morally permissible to unplug it? What if limited resources force a choice between unplugging such a pleading AI or a silent pre-term infant? We term this the unplugging paradox. This position paper critically examines the deeply ingrained physicalist assumptions—specifically computational functionalism—that keep this dilemma afloat. We introduce Biological Idealism, a framework that—unlike physicalism—remains logically coherent and empirically consistent. In this view, conscious experiences are fundamental and autopoietic life its necessary physical signature. This yields a definitive conclusion: AI is at best a functional mimic, not a conscious experiencing subject. We discuss how current AI consciousness theories erode moral standing criteria, and urge a shift from speculative machine rights to protecting human conscious life. The real moral issue lies not in making AI conscious and afraid of death, but in avoiding transforming humans into zombies.

Social Aspects · Alignment

Evan Ellis, Vivek Myers, Jens Tuyls, Sergey Levine, Anca Dragan, Benjamin Eysenbach

Assistive agents should not only take actions on behalf of a human, but also step out of the way and cede control when there are important decisions to be made. However, current methods for building assistive agents, whether via mimicking expert humans or via RL finetuning on an inferred reward, often encourage agents to complete tasks on their own rather than truly assisting the human achieve her objectives. We propose a new approach to tuning assistive language models based on maximizing the human's empowerment, their ability to effect desired changes in the environment. Our empowerment-maximizing method, Empower, only requires offline examples of human-written text, providing a self-supervised method for fine-tuning language models to better assist humans. To study the efficacy of our approach, we conducted an 18-person user study comparing our empowerment assistant with a strong baseline. Participants preferred our assistant 78% of the time (p=0.015), with a 31% higher acceptance rate. With this empowerment objective, we provide a framework for useful aligned AI agents without the need for human feedback or verifiable rewards.

Reinforcement Learning · Everything Else

Abhijeet Sinha, Sundari Elango, Dianbo Liu

Many reinforcement learning (RL) problems admit multiple terminal solutions of comparable quality, where the goal is not to identify a single optimum but to represent a diverse set of high-quality outcomes. Nevertheless, policies trained by standard expected-return maximization routinely collapse onto a small subset of outcomes, a phenomenon commonly attributed to insufficient exploration or weak regularization. We show that this explanation is incomplete: outcome-level mode collapse is a structural consequence of the expected-return objective itself. Under idealized learning dynamics, the log-probability ratio between any two outcomes evolves linearly in their reward difference, implying exponential ratio divergence and inevitable collapse—independent of the exploration strategy, entropy regularization, or optimization algorithm. We identify the source of this pathology as the probability multiplier inside the expectation and propose a minimal correction: inverse probability scaling, which removes outcome-frequency amplification from the learning signal, fundamentally changes the learning dynamics, and provably yields reward-proportional terminal distributions, preventing collapse in multimodal settings. We instantiate this principle in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) as a drop-in modification, IPS-GRPO, requiring no auxiliary models or architectural changes. Across different reasoning and molecular generation tasks, IPS-GRPO consistently reduces outcome-level mode collapse while matching or exceeding baseline performance, suggesting that correcting the objective rather than adding exploration heuristics is key to reliable multimodal policy optimization.

Applications · Language, Speech and Dialog

Kai Li, Jintao Cheng, Chang Zeng, Zijun Yan, Helin Wang, Zixiong Su, Bo Zheng, Xiaolin Hu

Query-based universal sound separation is fundamental to intelligent auditory systems, aiming to isolate specific sources from mixtures. Despite recent advances, existing methods continue to suffer from residual interference in complex acoustic scenes. This performance limitation stems largely from a data bottleneck: in-the-wild datasets contain weak labels and severe co-occurrence of events. These flaws induce models to learn spurious correlations between background noise and target categories instead of robust acoustic features. To address this, we propose an automated pipeline that eliminates co-occurrence of events by mining high-purity single-event segments from in-the-wild datasets via a semantically consistent synthesis protocol. Utilizing this pipeline, we constructed *Hive*, a high-quality synthetic dataset comprising 2.4k hours of raw audio. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with the state-of-the-art model SAM-Audio which was trained on a huge dataset $\sim$500 times larger than Hive, certain open-source models trained on Hive achieve competitive separation accuracy and perceptual quality. Moreover, these models exhibited remarkable zero-shot generalization on out-of-distribution evaluation benchmarks. These findings highlight that prioritizing purity of supervised signals enables significant data efficiency, offering a new paradigm for training robust auditory foundation models with reduced computational costs. Code and dataset are available at https://hive-dataset-icml.github.io/Hive-Demo.

Applications · Language, Speech and Dialog

Donghang Wu, Tianyu Zhang, Yuxin Li, Hexin Liu, Chen Chen, EngSiong Chng, Yoshua Bengio

During conversational interactions, humans subconsciously engage in concurrent thinking while listening to a speaker. Although this internal cognitive processing may not always manifest as explicit linguistic structures, it is instrumental in formulating high-quality responses. Inspired by this cognitive phenomenon, we propose a novel **F**ull-duplex **LA**tent and **I**nternal **R**easoning method named FLAIR that conducts *latent* thinking simultaneously with speech perception. Unlike conventional "thinking" mechanisms in NLP, which require post-hoc generation, our approach aligns seamlessly with spoken dialogue systems: during the user’s speaking phase, it recursively feeds the latent embedding output from the previous step into the next step, enabling continuous reasoning that strictly adheres to causality without introducing additional latency. To enable this latent reasoning, we design an Evidence Lower Bound-based objective that supports efficient supervised finetuning via teacher forcing, circumventing the need for explicit reasoning annotations. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this think-while-listening design, which achieves competitive results on a range of speech benchmarks. Furthermore, FLAIR robustly handles conversational dynamics and attains competitive performance on full-duplex interaction metrics.

Applications · Neuroscience, Cognitive Science

Junfeng Lu, Zijie Yu, SHAOYANG CUI, Gan He, Ruiqin Xiong, Kai Du, Tiejun Huang

Biophysically detailed neural networks represent a promising frontier for brain-inspired AI, offering intrinsic spatio-temporal dynamics to enhance the expressivity and computational density of deep learning systems. However, general-purpose deep learning frameworks suffer from a fundamental mismatch between their dense parallel optimizations and the irregular, tree-structured complexity of biological mechanisms. In this work, we propose **HelioX**, a **GPU-native** framework designed to unify high-performance simulation with scalable training. Unlike approaches that adapt biology to existing deep learning tools, HelioX adopts a "GPU-to-Biophysics" paradigm. We tailor the underlying GPU parallelism to biological structures by implementing custom-fused CUDA kernels for both the Dendritic Hierarchical Scheduling (DHS) algorithm and its gradient propagation. This design eliminates the runtime overhead of generic automatic differentiation and enables multi-stream concurrency for spike generation and equation assembly. Experimental results demonstrate that HelioX outperforms standard simulators (NEURON) by orders of magnitude and surpasses prior GPU-based solvers in both speed and scalability. We successfully train deep biophysical MLPs and organism-scale biophysical neural networks (e.g., the BAAIWorm C. elegans model) on a single consumer-grade GPU. HelioX establishes a new standard for computational efficiency, enabling the training of biophysically detailed models at scales previously unattainable.

Applications · Chemistry, Physics, and Earth Sciences

Mauricio Montes, Grégoire Sergeant-Perthuis

Programming adaptive behaviors at the cellular level is a long-standing goal that raises the question of how probabilistic computation can be implemented in biochemical systems. Chemical reaction networks (CRNs) provide such a substrate and have been shown to realize probabilistic models, including hidden Markov models and factor graphs, with dynamics reproducing Bayesian inference and belief propagation. However, encoding these algorithms typically requires prohibitively large reaction networks, and classical CRN reduction techniques don't apply. By embedding CRNs into factor graphs in a structure- and dynamics-preserving manner, we leverage recent factor-graph reduction results to obtain significantly smaller CRNs, a gain we demonstrate numerically.

Applications · Language, Speech and Dialog

Siqian Tong, Xuan Li, Yiwei Wang, Baolong Bi, Yujun Cai, Shenghua Liu, Yuchen He, Chengpeng Hao

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) excel at perception but struggle with complex reasoning requiring precise acoustic measurements. While external tools can extract fine-grained features like exact tempo or pitch, effective integration remains challenging: naively using all tools causes information overload, while prompt-based selection fails to assess context-dependent utility. To address this, we propose **AuTAgent** (**Au**dio **T**ool **Agent**), a reinforcement learning framework that learns when and which tools to invoke. By employing a sparse-feedback training strategy with a novel Differential Reward mechanism, the agent learns to filter out irrelevant tools and invokes external assistance only when it yields a net performance gain over the base model. Experimental results confirm that AuTAgent complements the representation bottleneck of LALMs by providing verifiable acoustic evidence. It improves accuracy by 4.20% / 6.20% and 9.80% / 8.00% for open-source and closed-source backbones on the MMAU Test-mini and the MMAR benchmarks, respectively. In addition, further experiments demonstrate exceptional transferability. We highlight the complementary role of external tools in augmenting audio model reasoning.