Speaker verification (SV) models are increasingly integrated into security, personalization, and access control systems, yet their robustness to many real-world challenges remains inadequately benchmarked. Real-world systems can face diverse conditions, some naturally occurring, and others that may be purposely, or even maliciously created, which introduce mismatches between enrollment and test data, affecting their performance. Ideally, the effect of all of these on model performance must be benchmarked; however existing benchmarks fall short, generally evaluating only a subset of potential conditions, and missing others entirely. We introduce SVeritas, the Speaker Verification tasks benchmark suite, which evaluates the performance of speaker verification systems under an extensive variety of stressors, including “natural” variations such as duration, spontaneity and content of the recordings, background conditions such as noise, microphone distance, reverberation, and channel mismatches, recording condition influences such as audio bandwidth and the effect of various codecs, physical influences, such as the age and health conditions of the speaker, as well as the suspectibility of the models to spoofing and adversarial attacks. While several benchmarks do exist that each cover some of these issues, SVeritas is the first comprehensive evaluation that not only includes all of these, but also several other entirely new, but nonetheless important real-life conditions that have not previously been benchmarked. We use SVeritas to evaluate several state-of-the-art SV models and observe that while some architectures maintain stability under common distortions, they suffer substantial performance degradation in scenarios involving cross-language trials, age mismatches, and codec-induced compression. Extending our analysis across demographic subgroups, we further identify disparities in robustness across age groups, gender, and linguistic backgrounds. By standardizing evaluation under realistic and synthetic stress conditions, SVeritas enables precise diagnosis of model weaknesses and establishes a foundation for advancing equitable and reliable speaker verification systems.
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Evolution in Simulation: AI-Agent School with Dual Memory for High-Fidelity Educational Dynamics
PDF ↗Large language models (LLMs) based Agents are increasingly pivotal in simulating and understanding complex human systems and interactions. We propose the AI-Agent School (AAS) system, built around a self-evolving mechanism that leverages agents for simulating complex educational dynamics. Addressing the fragmented issues in teaching process modeling and the limitations of agents performance in simulating diverse educational participants, AAS constructs the Zero-Exp strategy, employs a continuous “experience-reflection-optimization” cycle, grounded in a dual memory base comprising experience and knowledge bases and incorporating short-term and long-term memory components. Through this mechanism, agents autonomously evolve via situated interactions within diverse simulated school scenarios. This evolution enables agents to more accurately model the nuanced, multi-faceted teacher-student engagements and underlying learning processes found in physical schools. Experiment confirms that AAS can effectively simulate intricate educational dynamics and is effective in fostering advanced agent cognitive abilities, providing a foundational stepping stone from the “Era of Experience” to the “Era of Simulation” by generating high-fidelity behavioral and interaction data.
Sparkle: Mastering Basic Spatial Capabilities in Vision Language Models Elicits Generalization to Spatial Reasoning
PDF ↗Vision-language models (VLMs) excel in many downstream tasks but struggle with spatial reasoning, which is crucial for navigation and interaction with physical environments. Specifically, many spatial reasoning tasks rely on fundamental two-dimensional (2D) capabilities, yet our evaluation shows that state-of-the-art VLMs often produce implausible or incorrect solutions for composite spatial problems, including simple pathfinding tasks that humans solve effortlessly at a glance. To address this, we explore an effective approach to enhance 2D spatial reasoning in VLMs by training them solely on basic spatial capabilities. We first disentangle 2D spatial reasoning into three core components: direction comprehension, distance estimation, and localization. Our central hypothesis is that mastering these basic capabilities will significantly boost performance on more complex spatial tasks requiring advanced reasoning and combinatorial problem-solving, as well as generalize to real-world visual-spatial scenarios. To test this hypothesis, we introduce Sparkle, a framework that generates synthetic data to provide targeted supervision for VLMs across these three basic spatial capabilities, producing an instruction dataset for each capability. Our experiments demonstrate that VLMs fine-tuned with Sparkle achieve substantial improvements, not only on basic tasks but also in generalizing to composite and out-of-distribution real-world spatial reasoning tasks. These findings highlight that enhancing basic spatial capabilities through synthetic generalization effectively improves complex spatial reasoning, offering insights into systematic strategies for boosting VLMs’ spatial understanding. Source codes of Sparkle are available at https://github.com/YihongT/Sparkle.
This paper studies the problem of how to use large language models (LLMs) to identify the underlying partial differential equations (PDEs) out of very limited observations of a physical system. Previous methods usually utilize physical-informed neural networks (PINNs) to learn the PDE solver and coefficient of PDEs simultaneously, which could suffer from performance degradation under extreme data scarcity. Towards this end, this paper attempts to utilize LLMs to solve this problem without further fine-tuning by proposing a novel framework named LLM for PDE Discovery (LLM4PD). The core of our LLM4PD is to utilize a coarse-to-fine paradigm to automatically discover underlying PDEs. In the coarse phase, LLM4PD selects the crucial terms from a library with hierarchical prompts and incorporates a review agent to enhance the accuracy. In the fine phase, LLM4PD interacts with a PDE solver to optimize the coefficient of the selected terms with the optimization trajectory. We also provide an adaptive hybrid optimization strategy switching between fine-tuning and exploration to balance stability and efficiency. Extensive experiments on several systems validate the effectiveness of our proposed LLM4PD in different settings.
Currently, large language models (LLMs) based Open domain Natural language planning (LONG) has considerable room for improvement. E.g., non-reusable plans with incomplete intermediate states and missing steps hinder real-world applications. To remedy these flaws, this paper establishes a dataset with a baseline for LONG. The GOLD dataset provides the largest dataset for textual procedures, along with corresponding reusable formal planning domain definitions, to date. The baseline, DIGGER, leverages entity-attribute-level action models, which reveal relevant implicit physical properties (aka attributes) of salient entities in actions. DIGGER first extracts action models and builds typed entity lists from textual procedures. Then, it builds goal states for new tasks and instantiates grounded actions using domain prediction. At last, plans are generalized and translated into textual procedures by LLM. Reference-based metrics, LLM-as-a-Judge, and human evaluation are employed to comprehensively evaluate LONG. Experiments on GOLD validate that DIGGER is stronger and more generalizable than recently proposed approaches and LLMs. I.e., DIGGER is the best in seen domains and applicable to unseen domains without adaptation. Specifically, the BLEU-1 score increased from 0.385 to 0.408 on seen domains and rose to 0.310 on unseen domains.
From Grounding to Manipulation: Case Studies of Foundation Model Integration in Embodied Robotic Systems
PDF ↗Foundation models (FMs) are increasingly applied to bridge language and action in embodied agents, yet the operational characteristics of different integration strategies remain under-explored—especially for complex instruction following and versatile action generation in changing environments. We investigate three paradigms for robotic systems: end-to-end vision-language-action models (VLAs) that implicitly unify perception and planning, and modular pipelines using either vision-language models (VLMs) or multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Two case studies frame the comparison: instruction grounding, which probs fine-grained language understanding and cross-modal disambiguation; and object manipulation, which targets skill transfer via VLA finetuning. Our experiments reveal trade-offs in system scale, generalization and data efficiency. These findings indicate design lessons for language-driven physical agents and point to challenges and opportunities for FM-powered robotics in real-world conditions.
Large language models show promising performance on reasoning tasks, yet evaluation methods for low-resource languages remain limited, particularly for complex STEM problem-solving. We introduce Trojsten Benchmark, a Slovak-language dataset of 1,108 high-school competition problems with reference solutions across mathematics, physics, and programming, and a rubric-based LLM grading framework. Using GPT-4 to generate rubrics and grade solutions, we observe 1.05 average absolute deviation from human graders (5-point scale), while benchmarking GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4, GPT-4o, and open-weight models (Llama 3, Phi-3). We quantify multistep reasoning performance by difficulty, show consistent underperformance on harder items, and demonstrate language sensitivity: accuracy drops on English translations of Slovak statements, evidencing challenges beyond translation. Trojsten Benchmark complements English-centric math datasets (e.g., MATH, GSM8K) by targeting open-response, rubric-gradable reasoning under low-resource linguistic framing. We release code and data to enable reproducible evaluation and human-aligned auto-grading for STEM in under-served languages.
The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) and publicly available ChatGPT have marked a significant turning point in the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into people’s everyday lives. This study explores the capability of LLMs in generating novel research ideas based on information from research papers. We conduct a thorough examination of 4 LLMs in five domains (e.g., Chemistry, Computer, Economics, Medical, and Physics). We found that the future research ideas generated by Claude-2 and GPT-4 are more aligned with the author’s perspective than GPT-3.5 and Gemini. We also found that Claude-2 generates more diverse future research ideas than GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and Gemini 1.0. We further performed a human evaluation of the novelty, relevancy, and feasibility of the generated future research ideas. This investigation offers insights into the evolving role of LLMs in idea generation, highlighting both its capability and limitations. Our work contributes to the ongoing efforts in evaluating and utilizing language models for generating future research ideas. We make our datasets and codes publicly available.
Spatial reasoning is a core component of human cognition, enabling individuals to perceive, comprehend, and interact with the physical world. It relies on a nuanced understanding of spatial structures and inter-object relationships, serving as the foundation for complex reasoning and decision-making. To investigate whether current vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit similar capability, we introduce Jigsaw-Puzzles, a novel benchmark consisting of 1,100 carefully curated real-world images with high spatial complexity. Based on this dataset, we design five tasks to rigorously evaluate VLMs’ spatial perception, structural understanding, and reasoning capabilities, while deliberately minimizing reliance on domain-specific knowledge to better isolate and assess the general spatial reasoning capability. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation across 24 state-of-the-art VLMs. The results show that even the strongest model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, achieves only 77.14% overall accuracy and performs particularly poorly on the Order Generation task, with only 30.00% accuracy, far below the 90%+ performance achieved by human participants. This persistent gap underscores the need for continued progress, positioning Jigsaw-Puzzles as a challenging and diagnostic benchmark for advancing spatial reasoning research in VLMs. Our project page is at https://zesen01.github.io/jigsaw-puzzles.
Subtle Risks, Critical Failures: A Framework for Diagnosing Physical Safety of LLMs for Embodied Decision Making
PDF ↗Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for decision making in embodied agents, yet existing safety evaluations often rely on coarse success rates and domain-specific setups, making it difficult to diagnose why and where these models fail. This obscures our understanding of embodied safety and limits the selective deployment of LLMs in high-risk physical environments. We introduce SAFEL, the framework for systematically evaluating the physical safety of LLMs in embodied decision making. SAFEL assesses two key competencies: (1) rejecting unsafe commands via the Command Refusal Test, and (2) generating safe and executable plans via the Plan Safety Test. Critically, the latter is decomposed into functional modules, goal interpretation, transition modeling, action sequencing enabling fine-grained diagnosis of safety failures. To support this framework, we introduce EMBODYGUARD, a PDDL-grounded benchmark containing 942 LLM-generated scenarios covering both overtly malicious and contextually hazardous instructions. Evaluation across 13 state-of-the-art LLMs reveals that while models often reject clearly unsafe commands, they struggle to anticipate and mitigate subtle, situational risks. Our results highlight critical limitations in current LLMs and provide a foundation for more targeted, modular improvements in safe embodied reasoning.
WildDoc: How Far Are We from Achieving Comprehensive and Robust Document Understanding in the Wild?
PDF ↗The rapid advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly enhanced capabilities in Document Understanding. However, prevailing benchmarks like DocVQA and ChartQA predominantly comprise scanned or digital documents, inadequately reflecting the intricate challenges posed by diverse real-world scenarios such as variable illumination and physical distortions. This paper introduces WildDoc, the inaugural benchmark designed specifically for assessing document understanding in natural environments. WildDoc incorporates a diverse set of manually captured document images reflecting real-world conditions and leverages document sources from established benchmarks to facilitate comprehensive comparisons with digital or scanned documents. Further, to rigorously evaluate model robustness, each document is captured four times under different conditions. Evaluations of state-of-the-art MLLMs on WildDoc expose substantial performance declines and underscore the models’ inadequate robustness compared to traditional benchmarks, highlighting the unique challenges posed by real-world document understanding.
Auto-evaluating language models (LMs), *i.e*., using a grader LM to evaluate the candidate LM, is an appealing way to accelerate the evaluation process and the cost associated with it. But this presents a paradox: how can we trust the grader LM, which is presumably weaker than the candidate LM, to assess problems that are beyond the frontier of the capabilities of either model or both? For instance, today’s LMs struggle on graduate-level physics and Olympiad-level math, making them unreliable graders in these domains. We show that providing *privileged information* – such as ground-truth solutions or problem-specific guidelines – improves automated evaluations on such frontier problems. This approach offers two key advantages. First, it expands the range of problems where LMs graders apply. Specifically, weaker models can now rate the predictions of stronger models. Second, privileged information can be used to devise easier variations of challenging problems which improves the separability of different LMs on tasks where their performance is generally low. With this approach, general-purpose LM graders match the state of the art performance on *RewardBench*, surpassing almost all the specially-tuned models. LM graders also outperform individual human raters on *Vibe-Eval*, and approach human expert graders on Olympiad-level math problems.
We introduce ProcWorld, a large-scale benchmark for partially observable embodied spatial reasoning and long-term planning with large language models (LLM) and vision language models (VLM). ProcWorld features a wide range of challenging embodied navigation and object manipulation tasks, covering 16 task types, 5,000 rooms, and over 10 million evaluation trajectories with diverse data distribution. ProcWorld supports configurable observation modes, ranging from text-only descriptions to vision-only observations. It enables text-based actions to control the agent following language instructions. ProcWorld has presented significant challenges for LLMs and VLMs: (1) active information gathering given partial observations for disambiguation; (2) simultaneous localization and decision-making by tracking the spatio-temporal state-action distribution; (3) constrained reasoning with dynamic states subject to physical reachability. Our extensive evaluation of 15 foundation models and 5 reasoning algorithms (with over 1 million rollouts) indicates larger models perform better. However, ProcWorld remains highly challenging for existing state-of-the-art models and in-context learning methods due to constrained reachability and the need for combinatorial spatial reasoning.
Using effective generalization capabilities of vision language models (VLMs) in context-specific dynamic tasks for embodied artificial intelligence remains a significant challenge. Although supervised fine-tuned models can better align with the real physical world, they still exhibit sluggish responses and hallucination issues in dynamically changing environments, necessitating further alignment. Existing post-SFT methods, reliant on reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought (CoT) approaches, are constrained by sparse rewards and action-only optimization, resulting in low sample efficiency, poor consistency, and model degradation. To address these issues, this paper proposes Thought-Centric Preference Optimization (TCPO) for effective embodied decision-making. Specifically, TCPO introduces a stepwise preference-based optimization approach, transforming sparse reward signals into richer step sample pairs. It emphasizes the alignment of the model’s intermediate reasoning process, mitigating the problem of model degradation. Moreover, by incorporating Action Policy Consistency Constraint (APC), it further imposes consistency constraints on the model output. Experiments in the ALFWorld environment demonstrate an average success rate of **26.67%**, achieving a **6%** improvement over RL4VLM and validating the effectiveness of our approach in mitigating model degradation after fine-tuning. These results highlight the potential of integrating preference-based learning techniques with CoT processes to enhance the decision-making capabilities of vision-language models in embodied agents.
Mining the Past with Dual Criteria: Integrating Three types of Historical Information for Context-aware Event Forecasting
PDF ↗Event forecasting requires modeling historical event data to predict future events, and achieving accurate predictions depends on effectively capturing the relevant historical information that aids forecasting. Most existing methods focus on entities and structural dependencies to capture historical clues but often overlook implicitly relevant information. This limitation arises from overlooking event semantics and deeper factual associations that are not explicitly connected in the graph structure but are nonetheless critical for accurate forecasting. To address this, we propose a dual-criteria constraint strategy that leverages event semantics for relevance modeling and incorporates a self-supervised semantic filter based on factual event associations to capture implicitly relevant historical information. Building on this strategy, our method, termed ITHI (Integrating Three types of Historical Information), combines sequential event information, periodically repeated event information, and relevant historical information to achieve context-aware event forecasting. We evaluated the proposed ITHI method on three public benchmark datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance and significantly outperforming existing approaches. Additionally, we validated its effectiveness on two structured temporal knowledge graph forecasting dataset.
Humans possess a unified cognitive ability to perceive, comprehend, and interact with the physical world. Why can’t large language models replicate this holistic understanding? Through a systematic analysis of existing training paradigms in vision-language-action models (VLA), we identify two key challenges: spurious forgetting, where robot training overwrites crucial visual-text alignments, and task interference, where competing control and understanding tasks degrade performance when trained jointly. To overcome these limitations, we propose ChatVLA, a novel framework featuring Phased Alignment Training, which incrementally integrates multimodal data after initial control mastery, and a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to minimize task interference. ChatVLA demonstrates competitive performance on visual question-answering datasets and significantly surpasses state-of-the-art vision-language-action (VLA) methods on multimodal understanding benchmarks. Notably, it achieves a six times higher performance on MMMU and scores 47.2% on MMStar with a more parameter-efficient design than ECoT. Furthermore, ChatVLA demonstrates superior performance on 25 real-world robot manipulation tasks compared to existing VLA methods like OpenVLA. Our findings highlight the potential of our unified framework for achieving both robust multimodal understanding and effective robot control.
Traditional robot simulators focus on physical process modeling and realistic rendering, often suffering from high computational costs, inefficiencies, and limited adaptability. To handle this issue, we concentrate on behavior simulation in robotics to analyze and validate the logic behind robot behaviors, aiming to achieve preliminary evaluation before deploying resource-intensive simulators and thus enhance simulation efficiency. In this paper, we propose BeSimulator, a modular and novel LLM-powered framework, as an attempt towards behavior simulation in the context of text-based environments. By constructing text-based virtual environments and performing semantic-level simulation, BeSimulator can generalize across scenarios and achieve long-horizon complex simulation. Inspired by human cognition paradigm, it employs a “consider-decide-capture-transfer” four-phase simulation process, termed Chain of Behavior Simulation (CBS), which excels at analyzing action feasibility and state transition. Additionally, BeSimulator incorporates code-driven reasoning to enable arithmetic operations and enhance reliability, and reflective feedback to refine simulation. Based on our manually constructed behavior-tree-based simulation benchmark, BTSIMBENCH, our experiments show a significant performance improvement in behavior simulation compared to baselines, ranging from 13.60% to 24.80%. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Dawn888888/BeSimulator.
Guesstimation—the task of making approximate quantitative estimates about objects or events—is a common real-world skill, yet remains underexplored in large language model (LLM) research. We introduce three guesstimation datasets: MARBLES, FUTURE, and ELECPRED, spanning physical estimation (e.g., how many marbles fit in a cup) to abstract predictions (e.g., the 2024 U.S. presidential election). Inspired by the social science concept of Wisdom of Crowds (WOC)—where the median of multiple estimates improves accuracy—we propose WOC decoding for LLMs. We replicate WOC effects in human participants and find that LLMs exhibit similar benefits: median aggregation across sampled responses consistently improves accuracy over greedy, self-consistency decoding, and mean decoding. This suggests that LLMs encode a world model that supports approximate reasoning. Our results position guesstimation as a useful probe of LLM world knowledge and highlight WOC decoding as a strategy for enhancing LLM guesstimation performance on real-world tasks.
Vision-Language Models have made significant progress on many perception-focused tasks. However, their progress on reasoning-focused tasks remains limited due to the lack of high-quality and diverse training data. In this work, we aim to address the scarcity of reasoning-focused multimodal datasets. We propose VisualWebInstruct, a novel approach that leverages search engines to create a diverse and high-quality dataset spanning multiple disciplines, including mathematics, physics, finance, and chemistry, etc. Starting with a meticulously selected set of 30,000 seed images, we employ Google Image Search to identify websites containing similar images. We collect and process HTML data from over 700K unique URLs. Through a pipeline of content extraction, filtering, and synthesis, we construct a dataset of approximately 900K question-answer (QA) pairs, with 40% consisting of visual QA pairs and the remaining comprising text-based QA pairs. Models fine-tuned on VisualWebInstruct demonstrate significant performance improvements: (1) fine-tuning on Llava-OV results in 10-20 absolute points improvement across benchmarks, and (2) fine-tuning from MAmmoTH-VL yields a 5 absolute points gain across benchmarks. Our best model, MAmmoTH-VL2, achieves the best known performance with SFT without RL within the 10B parameter class on MMMU-Pro (40.7), MathVerse (42.6), and DynaMath (55.7). These results highlight the effectiveness of our dataset in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of vision-language models for complex multimodal tasks.
Applications · Robotics
Ultrasound (US) is a widely used medical imaging modality due to its real-time capabilities, non-invasive nature, and cost-effectiveness. By reducing operator dependency and enhancing access to complex anatomical regions, robotic ultrasound can help improve workflow efficiency. Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and imitation learning (IL) to enable more autonomous and intelligent robotic ultrasound navigation. However, the application of learning-based robotic ultrasound to computer-assisted surgical tasks, such as anatomy reconstruction and surgical guidance, remains largely unexplored. A key bottleneck for this is the lack of realistic and efficient simulation environments tailored to these tasks. In this work, we present SonoGym, a scalable simulation platform for robotic ultrasound, enabling parallel simulation across tens to hundreds of environments. Our framework supports realistic and real-time simulation of US data from CT-derived 3D models of the anatomy through both a physics-based and a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) approach. Our framework enables the training of DRL and recent IL agents (vision transformers and diffusion policies) for relevant tasks in robotic orthopedic surgery by integrating common robotic platforms and orthopedic end effectors. We further incorporate submodular DRL---a recent method that handles history-dependent rewards---for anatomy reconstruction and safe reinforcement learning for surgery. Our results demonstrate successful policy learning across a range of scenarios, while also highlighting the limitations of current methods in clinically relevant environments. We believe our simulation can facilitate research in robot learning approaches for such challenging robotic surgery applications. Dataset, codes and videos are publicly available at https://sonogym.github.io/.