Search research

Agent Skills today consist largely of free-form prose requiring the agent to read, interpret, and re-derive how to act in every session. This imposes two compounding costs: reduced reliability on implementation-heavy tasks, and difficulty in skill creation and improvement, since editing prose is a fragile process that both humans and agents struggle with, particularly for domain-specific procedural knowledge underrepresented in model training. The Agent Instruction Protocol (AIP) addresses both by modeling a skill as a directed execution graph: discrete steps as nodes backed by deterministic scripts or natural-language descriptions, connected by explicit typed input/output edges, and governed by a schema-validated YAML specification. A compiler meta-skill translates existing human-written skills into this form. The benefits are twofold. First, compiling human-written skills to AIP raised Claude Sonnet's mean task reward from 0.60 to 0.71 and pass rate from 53% to 67% across 27 real agent tasks from SkillsBench - a statistically significant gain (Wilcoxon signed-rank p = 0.011), winning 12 tasks to 2 with 13 ties - often in less wall-clock time. The graph delivers vetted, runnable units to the agent rather than asking it to re-derive code, commands, and tool calls from natural language. Second, on creation and improvement, because each skill is schema-validated, functionally testable, and addressable node-by-node, failures can be diagnosed and repaired precisely. Two authored-skill failures were traced to the script level. After adjusting the AIP spec and recompiling, both recovered with zero regressions (one task going from 0/5 to 5/5), turning skill improvement into a measurable tuning loop rather than a prose rewrite. That same graph structure supports corpus-level governance and skill introspection, and provides a natural action space for reinforcement learning over skills.

We study how model post-training and test-time inference design affect natural-language proof generation for hard olympiad mathematics. Starting from Nemotron 3 Ultra, we train two specialist checkpoints using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, and evaluate checkpoint choice, verification, and refinement. Based on these findings, we present an open-model test-time-compute pipeline. The system operates entirely in natural language, with no formal prover, external tools, or internet access. Three Nemotron 3 Ultra checkpoints - the general-availability model and two post-trained specialists - power an iterative search that generates, verifies, and refines candidate proofs; a separate high-compute stage then selects each final submission. The system scored 30 out of 42 points at IMO 2026, reaching the gold-medal threshold. We release the two post-trained checkpoints as well as the training data, the training and inference code, the submitted solutions, and Nemotron-IMO-Bench, a new benchmark of 200 novel olympiad-level problems.

Future planetary exploration envisions autonomous robotic agents operating under severe communication constraints, without global positioning, and with minimal human intervention. In such environments, agents must not only perceive and act, but also reason over mission objectives, operational constraints, and evolving environmental conditions. While prior work has largely focused on perception and control, the translation of high-level mission knowledge into structured, machine-interpretable representations remains underexplored. We introduce a pilot benchmark for translating natural language (NL) into First-Order Logic (FOL) within the domain of planetary exploration. The dataset is constructed from real mission documentation sourced from NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS), spanning missions from 2003 to 2013. These documents describe mission phases such as launch, boost, coast, cruise, and orbital operations in rich natural language. We manually annotate these documents with corresponding FOL representations that capture temporal structure, agent roles, and operational dependencies. In addition, we provide structured predicate vocabularies and typed constants to enable controlled experimentation with varying levels of prior knowledge. This pilot benchmark provides a foundation for research at the intersection of language understanding and formal reasoning, grounded in real-world, safety-critical mission data. The dataset is provided at: https://github.com/HaydenMM/planetary-logic-benchmark/blob/main/pilot_benchmark.json

Financial institutions increasingly require AI explanations that are persistent, cross-validated across methods, and conversationally accessible to human decision-makers. We present an architecture for human-centered explainable AI in financial sentiment analysis that combines three contributions. First, we treat XAI artifacts -- LIME feature attributions, occlusion-based word importance scores, and saliency heatmaps -- as persistent, searchable objects in distributed S3-compatible storage with structured metadata and natural-language summaries, enabling semantic retrieval over explanation history and automatic index reconstruction after system failures. Second, we enable multi-method explanation triangulation, where a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) assistant compares and synthesizes results from multiple XAI methods applied to the same prediction, allowing users to assess explanation robustness through natural-language dialogue. Third, we evaluate the faithfulness of generated explanations using automated checks over grounding completeness, hallucinated claims, and method-attribution behavior. We demonstrate the architecture on an EXTRA-BRAIN financial sentiment analysis pipeline using FinBERT predictions and present evaluation results showing that constrained prompting reduces hallucination rate by 36% and increases method-attribution citations by 73% compared to naive prompting. We discuss implications for trustworthy, human-centered AI services in regulated financial environments.

In this report, we present our champion solutions for the Natural Language Queries and GoalStep tracks of the Ego4D Episodic Memory Challenge at CVPR 2026. Both tracks require accurately localizing temporal segments from long untrimmed egocentric videos. To address these tasks, we propose a reranking-based framework that effectively leverages the strong video-language reasoning capability of multimodal large language model (MLLM) while preserving the efficiency and candidate recall of conventional localization pipelines. Specifically, we first obtain a set of candidate segments from existing localization model OSGNet, and then employ MLLM to select the segment that best matches the given query, thereby refining the final prediction. Ultimately, our method achieved first place in both the Natural Language Queries and GoalStep tracks. Our code can be found at https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/CVPR25-OSGNet.

Causal reasoning in natural language requires identifying relevant variables, understanding their interactions, and reasoning about effects and interventions, often under noisy or ambiguous conditions. While large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong general reasoning abilities, they struggle to disentangle correlation from causation, particularly when observations are partially incorrect or irrelevant information is present. In this work, we introduce NoisyCausal, a new benchmark designed to evaluate causal reasoning under structured noise. Each instance is generated from a ground-truth causal graph and contextualized with a natural language scenario by injecting controllable forms of noise, such as irrelevant distractors, value perturbations, confounding, and partial observability. Moreover, we propose a modular reasoning framework that combines LLMs with explicit causal structure to address these challenges. Our method prompts the LLM to extract variables, construct a causal graph from context, and then reformulates the reasoning task as a structured prompt grounded in this graph. Rather than relying on statistical patterns alone, the LLM is guided by symbolic structure, enabling more interpretable and robust inference. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms standard prompting and reasoning baselines on NoisyCausal. Furthermore, it generalizes well to external benchmarks such as Cladder without task-specific tuning. Our findings highlight the importance of combining causal abstractions with language-driven reasoning to achieve faithful and robust causal understanding in LLMs.

LLM agents are increasingly improved without weight updates by evolving a natural-language artifact, such as reflections, workflows, playbooks, cheatsheets, or optimized prompts, that conditions a frozen policy. Such methods are typically reported as wins on the single benchmark where they help. We study them apples-to-apples and surface a sharper picture. We introduce RSEA, a Recursive Self-Evolving Agent that carries a compact three-layer natural-language state: an imperative strategy, reusable skills, and a procedural playbook. Across generations, RSEA rewrites all three layers from its own trajectories and commits a candidate only if it does not regress on a disjoint held-out split, using a strict keep-better gate. Across four diverse benchmarks, ALFWorld, GAIA, (τ)-bench, and WebShop, and six faithful baselines, ReAct, Reflexion, GEPA, AWM, ACE, and Dynamic Cheatsheet, all evaluated on one shared local backbone, we find three main results. First, no artifact universally wins. RSEA is the strongest single-pass method on ALFWorld, reaching 69.3% compared with 64.6% for ReAct (McNemar (p=0.015)), and reaches 79.4% with retry, the best overall result. However, concrete-workflow induction, represented by AWM, is best on the strong-backbone tool-use tasks. Second, unguarded context evolution is high-variance and unsafe. Dynamic Cheatsheet, which curates context online without a held-out gate, is near-best on ALFWorld at 70.7%, yet collapses on WebShop, with a score of 0.14 compared with 0.43 for ReAct. Third, RSEA's strict held-out selection is what makes recursive self-evolution monotone-safe: it never significantly underperforms the base agent on any benchmark and falls back to vanilla ReAct when evolved context would hurt.

Complex question answering across text, tables and images requires integrating diverse information sources. A framework supporting specialized processing with coordination and interpretability is needed. We introduce DeALOG, a decentralized multi-agent framework for multimodal question answering. It uses specialized agents: Table, Context, Visual, Summarizing and Verification, that communicate through a shared natural-language log as persistent memory. This log-based approach enables collaborative error detection and verification without central control, improving robustness. Evaluations on FinQA, TAT-QA, CRT-QA, WikiTableQuestions, FeTaQA, and MultiModalQA show competitive performance. Analysis confirms the importance of the shared log, agent specialization, and verification for accuracy. DeALOG, provides a scalable approach through modular components using natural-language communication.

Human motion is shaped by both external acoustic events and behavioral intent: spatial audio conveys environmental cues that elicit or guide a response, while text specifies the desired action and how it should be performed. In this paper, we study the novel task of human motion synthesis jointly conditioned on spatial audio and natural language, a problem that has been largely overlooked in previous research. To support this task, We introduce STAM, a dataset of motion sequences paired with spatial audio and detailed textual annotations whose rich vocabulary affords precise and nuanced specification of human motions. We further introduce MoSAT, a latent flow-matching framework for full-body motion generation jointly conditioned on natural-language intent and directional spatial-audio cues through hierarchical cross-attention before generating motion. Such a hierarchical design enhances temporally coherent and semantically aligned motion sequences. We also develop tri-modal evaluators for comprehensive evaluation on this novel task. Extensive experiments show that MoSAT achieves the SOTA performance by leveraging spatial audio's intrinsic motion-shaping properties alongside textual semantics, enabling precise and diverse motion in various scenarios.

Graphical user interface (GUI) automation remains challenging in real-world environments, where dynamic layouts, unexpected dialogs, and evolving interface states can cause autonomous agents to drift from user intent. Recent vision-based multimodal agents improve flexibility by operating directly over screenshots and natural language instructions, but planning and adaptation often remain internal, limiting users' ability to inspect, supervise, or correct system behavior. We present Plover, a plan-centric vision-based GUI automation system that externalizes task plans and replanning as persistent, inspectable, and revisable artifacts. Through a planner--executor architecture, Plover supports explicit supervision of evolving execution, localized correction through editable plans, natural-language guidance, and screenshot-grounded interventions, while preserving prior progress during repair. A formative study with six participants informed the interaction design. We then evaluate Plover through benchmark failure-case repair and scenario-based workflow analyses. Our results show that many autonomous GUI-agent failures are structurally repairable when plans remain visible and interventions are localized, and that explicit replanning helps make GUI automation more transparent, controllable, and adaptable.

LLMs deployed for natural-language querying of analytical databases suffer from two intertwined failures - incorrect answers and confident hallucinations - both rooted in the same cause: the model is forced to infer business semantics that the schema does not encode. We test whether supplying those semantics as context closes the gap. We benchmark three frontier LLMs (Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.4) on 100 natural-language questions over the Cleaned Contoso Retail Dataset in ClickHouse, using a paired single-shot protocol. Each model is evaluated twice: once given only the warehouse schema, and once given the schema plus a 4 KB hand-authored markdown document describing the dataset's measures, conventions, and disambiguation rules. Adding the document improves accuracy by +17 to +23 percentage points across all three models. With it, the three models are statistically indistinguishable (67.7-68.7%); without it, they are also indistinguishable (45.5-50.5%). Every cross-cluster comparison is significant at p < 0.01. The presence of the semantic-layer document accounts for essentially all of the significant variance; model choice within tier does not. We interpret this as a structural result: explicit business semantics suppress the dominant class of text-to-SQL errors not by making the model more capable, but by changing what the model is being asked to do.

Industrial robot applications require increasingly flexible systems that non-expert users can easily adapt for varying tasks and environments. However, different adaptations benefit from different interaction modalities. We present an interactive framework that enables robot skill adaptation through three complementary modalities: kinesthetic touch for precise spatial corrections, natural language for high-level semantic modifications, and a graphical web interface for visualizing geometric relations and trajectories, inspecting and adjusting parameters, and editing via-points by drag-and-drop. The framework integrates five components: energy-based human-intention detection, a tool-based LLM architecture (where the LLM selects and parameterizes predefined functions rather than generating code) for safe natural language adaptation, Kernelized Movement Primitives (KMPs) for motion encoding, probabilistic Virtual Fixtures for guided demonstration recording, and ergodic control for surface finishing. We demonstrate that this tool-based LLM architecture generalizes skill adaptation from KMPs to ergodic control, enabling voice-commanded surface finishing. Validation on a 7-DoF torque-controlled robot at the Automatica 2025 trade fair demonstrates the practical applicability of our approach in industrial settings.

Multi-robot collaboration could enable more efficient and scalable solutions to complex robotic tasks, but collaboration under partial observability remains challenging. Natural-language communication offers a promising approach to coordinating robots under partial observability. However, in decentralized manipulation, jointly learning explicit inter-robot communication and skill-level action selection from multimodal demonstrations remains underexplored for small vision-language models (VLMs) intended for on-device deployment. To address this gap, we introduce RoboTalk, a synthetic data-generation pipeline and dataset of 7,950 multimodal trajectories spanning 53 mobile-manipulation kitchen tasks for training small VLMs to communicate and coordinate. The dataset includes a leader-follower planning protocol, tool calls (perception, manipulation, navigation, and communication), rationale traces, and diversified natural-language communication. Fine-tuning open-source models on our dataset can reach 77% success on novel held-out tasks, a significant improvement over the untuned open source models, which had a success rate of around ~2%.

LEO satellite networks feature dynamic topologies, time-varying links, and diverse service requirements, which make conventional routing schemes difficult to support fine-grained quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning. Existing studies mainly optimize routing over network states with predefined objectives, but rarely address the practical challenge of translating unstructured natural-language service requests into adaptive routing decisions. To bridge this gap, we propose STR-Agent, an LLM-driven framework for QoS-aware routing in LEO satellite networks. The key innovation of STR-Agent lies in unifying intent perception, tool-based execution, experience accumulation, and reflection-based policy adaptation within a single agent architecture. Specifically, the Perception Module converts natural-language requests into structured routing semantics, while the Reflection Module dynamically adjusts the service-to-routing-policy mapping according to real-time congestion conditions and historical routing outcomes, rather than relying on a fixed routing objective. In addition, we develop a specialized perception model, and construct a domain-specific supervised fine-tuning dataset for LEO service understanding. Simulation results in a Walker-Delta constellation show that STR-Agent significantly outperforms conventional baselines: it reduces end-to-end delay by up to 60% compared with DQ-Dijkstra, improves average intent-understanding accuracy from 45.4% to 92.45% after supervised fine-tuning, and the Reflection Module further reduces the delay by 120 ms at 600 Mbps. These results demonstrate the potential of LLM-driven agent architectures to enable service-aware and adaptive QoS routing in future LEO satellite networks.

Promptable segmentation foundation models (FMs) such as SAM3 and Medical SAM3 promise few-shot, interactively-specified segmentation for medical imaging through a natural language interface, yet their performance on clinical tasks falls well short of this promise. We posit that this shortfall is not an artefact of insufficient medical pretraining or imperfect prompt phrasing, but a structural limitation that will persist in any domain where paired image-text supervision is scarce, as it is across most clinical modalities. We further hypothesize that the limitation is specific to natural language as a control signal: a visually grounded prompt, learned directly from the target distribution, should recover the lost performance without additional image-text data or backbone retraining. We propose Few-Shot Concept Prompt Learning (FS-CPL), which learns a continuous concept prompt embedding $\mathbf{p}^* \in \mathbb{R}^{T \times d}$ from a small support set of $K$ image--mask pairs via mask supervision, with the encoder-decoder backbone frozen. Across four public benchmarks spanning ultrasound and endoscopy (BUSI, HC18, TN3K, CVC-Clinic), FS-CPL delivers absolute Dice improvements of up to $+0.62$ over canonical text prompts and is \emph{backbone-agnostic}: it lifts both vanilla SAM3 and the domain-specifically pretrained Medical SAM3, showing that visual concept prompting is complementary to in-domain pretraining.

This paper presents ContractHIL-HLS, a contract-aligned multi-agent workflow for practical high-level synthesis (HLS) engineering. The workflow makes three contributions. First, it introduces a structured contract as the semantic-alignment and task-execution artifact that translates natural language requirements into explicit interfaces, constraints, validation checks, and rollback rules. Second, it incorporates hardware information into the feedback loop by feeding HLS, Vivado, PYNQ runtime, power, and failure evidence back into generation, thereby extending LLM-assisted HLS from kernel code toward system- and board-level closure. Third, it decomposes agents by semantic lowering and execution tasks rather than by conversational roles: a Contract Agent lowers natural language into the contract, an HTML Agent renders the contract as persistent structured HTML, and a Hardware-in-the-Loop Agent implements and revises the design with measured evidence. We evaluate ContractHIL-HLS in two parts. On 94 locally executable HLS-Eval tasks, the structured contract provides the largest small design gain, improving the estimated single-sample testbench pass rate from 64.0% to 70.2%; the full flow reaches 70.4% pass@1 and 76.6% pass@5. Because HLS-Eval does not exercise board-level design, we also validate ContractHIL-HLS on a board tested ML-KEM/ML-DSA post-quantum cryptography (PQC) secure-message accelerator, where the retained dual-bitstream organization reduces six-message average text runtime from 207.3 ms to 52.4 ms with positive routed WNS on both images while preserving decrypted-message verification. We open-source our work at BJUT-CS316-LAB/ContractHIL-HLS (https://github.com/BJUT-CS316-LAB/ContractHIL-HLS).

Referring segmentation grounds natural-language queries to pixel-level masks, but extending it to complex scenarios with multiple instances, cross-category groups, or open-ended target sets remains challenging. Previous Large Vision Language Model (LVLM)-based methods represent referred targets with one or more special tokens sequentially, treating multiple targets as separate outputs rather than a coherent set and offering little incentive to capture set-level properties such as completeness and mutual exclusivity. We reformulate open-ended referring segmentation as explicit set-level concept prediction and propose Set-Concept Segmentation (SetCon), which uses LVLM-generated natural-language concepts, instead of segmentation-specific tokens, as semantic conditions for joint mask-set decoding. A hierarchical semantic decomposition first predicts a shared set-level concept defining the target scope and then refines it into fine-grained concept groups aligned with target subsets. To support this, a two-stage annotation pipeline augments existing reasoning segmentation datasets with hierarchical semantic supervision (236k samples, 784k concept phrases). SetCon achieves state-of-the-art results on image benchmarks (+3.3 gIoU on gRefCOCO, +12.1 gIoU on MUSE), with margins that grow as the number of referred targets increases. The concept interface also transfers to video under a detect-and-track setting, yielding new state-of-the-art results on seven referring video benchmarks, including +10.9 J&F on MeViS and +12.4 J&F on Ref-SeCVOS.

LLM-based agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in data-intensive analytical tasks, yet their outputs are rarely verifiable: a reliance on linear text trajectories makes their reasoning difficult to audit. In particular, deterministic computations over raw data and semantic deductions over natural-language claims are often entangled in an unstructured stream, leaving numerical conclusions hard to reproduce and qualitative judgments hard to inspect. To address this, we propose VeriGraph, a traceable neuro-symbolic reasoning framework that enables agents to construct an explicit heterogeneous evidence directed acyclic graph (DAG) during execution. VeriGraph introduces three evidence-expansion primitives, namely computational, grounding, and derivational expansion, to connect raw data, interpreter variables, computed results, and natural-language claims in a unified graph. Under this formulation, structural traceability is reduced to graph reachability from raw data sources to terminal claims, while semantic support is measured by claim-level evidence evaluation. To improve graph construction, we further design a graph-based policy optimization strategy with a composite reward that jointly supervises answer correctness, computational integrity, and derivational coherence. Experiments on four benchmarks show that VeriGraph-8B achieves the highest overall score among all baselines. More importantly, VeriGraph produces auditable evidence graphs with substantially stronger claim grounding, achieving a 87.61% Grounding Rate under our claim-level evidence support evaluation. These results suggest that explicit evidence-graph construction is a promising path toward verifiable data-analytic agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/ignorejjj/VeriGraph.

Scene synthesis and editing has emerged as a promising direction in computer graphics. Current trained approaches for 3D indoor scene generation either oversimplify object semantics through one-hot class encodings (e.g., 'chair' or 'table'), require masked diffusion for editing, ignore room boundaries, or rely on floor plan renderings that fail to capture complex layouts. LLM-based methods enable richer semantics via natural language, but lack editing functionality, are limited to rectangular layouts, or rely on weak spatial reasoning from implicit world models. We introduce ReSpace, a generative framework for autoregressive text-driven 3D indoor scene synthesis and editing. Our approach features a compact structured scene representation with explicit room boundaries that enables asset-agnostic deployment and frames scene manipulation as a next-token prediction task, supporting object addition, removal, and swapping via natural language. We employ supervised fine-tuning with a preference alignment stage to train a specialized language model for object addition that accounts for user instructions, spatial geometry, object semantics, and scene-level composition. We further introduce a voxelization-based evaluation metric capturing fine-grained geometric violations beyond 3D bounding boxes. Experiments surpass state-of-the-art on object addition and achieve superior human-perceived quality on the application of full scene synthesis, despite not being trained on it.

Recent progress in generative models has significantly advanced image editing capabilities, yet precise and intuitive user control remains difficult. Specifically, users often struggle to communicate both exact spatial layouts and specific semantic details simultaneously. While natural language instructions effectively convey high-level semantics like texture and color, they lack spatial specificity. Conversely, freehand scribbles provide rough spatial boundaries but cannot express detailed visual attributes. Consequently, achieving precise control requires combining both modalities. However, existing models struggle to jointly interpret abstract scribbles alongside text due to a lack of specialized training data. In this work, we introduce ScribbleEdit, a large-scale synthetic dataset designed to bridge this gap by combining natural language instructions with freehand scribble inputs for more accurate, controllable edits. We construct this dataset through a synthetic pipeline that automatically generates source-target image pairs via inpainting, which are then paired with human-drawn scribbles and VLM-generated text instructions. Using ScribbleEdit, we evaluate and finetune both diffusion-based and autoregressive unified multimodal image editing models. Our experiments reveal that while off-the-shelf models struggle with abstract scribble inputs, finetuning on our synthetic dataset significantly improves their ability to generate spatially aligned and semantically consistent edits.

Text-to-image diffusion models are increasingly deployed in open-ended creative contexts, yet their outputs remain impersonal, optimized for aggregate aesthetics rather than individual taste. Human preferences are pluralistic: one user favoring muted, nostalgic portraits may prefer vibrant street photography, while another gravitates toward dreamy film aesthetics. Existing methods require dense interaction histories or per-user fine-tuning, failing in cold-start settings and collapsing context-dependent preferences into a static representation. We introduce zero-shot image personalization from personas (ZIPP), which conditions image generation on natural-language personas (concise descriptors of a user's identity and aesthetic sensibilities) without any user-specific data or weight updates. ZIPP uses an LLM to rewrite prompts from the perspective of a given persona, steering diffusion models toward personalized outputs. To mine personas at scale, we train an inductive Graph Attention Network over a 22M-user Reddit interaction graph with dual contrastive objectives aligning graph structure with visual behavior, then verbalize learned representations into natural-language personas via an MLLM. We introduce ZIPBench, the first zero-shot personalization benchmark with 1.5K users, graph-mined personas, and 40K generated images. Across four benchmarks and 14 LLMs spanning five model families, persona conditioning yields consistent gains (13-20%), with frontier models benefiting most. In the few-shot setting, ZIPP matches or exceeds fine-tuned baselines trained on 100+ examples per user. ZIPP achieves the lowest preference distributional divergence (CMMD 0.16 vs. 0.55), and IPF-normalized demographic evaluation shows it substantially reduces subpopulation bias present in existing methods. Human evaluation confirms a 79% win rate over generic generation and 58-65% over all fine-tuned baselines.

We present InstructFX2FX, a system for sequential audio effect refinement through multi-turn natural-language instructions. Existing text-to-effect systems are largely single-shot, mapping one textual descriptor to one preset. Real audio engineering is instead sequential: engineers refine an existing effect chain through successive instructions. This poses a stateful problem that single-shot systems do not address: given the current effect parameters state and a new instruction, update the sound while preserving what earlier instructions already achieved. InstructFX2FX addresses this with a hybrid architecture that divides labor between a language model and CLAP-guided optimization. The LLM serves as a high-level planner that selects effects and proposes the initial parameter state, motivated by recent evidence that LLMs can outperform CLAP-based optimization for single-turn text-to-effect mapping; CLAP-guided optimization then refines the existing parameter state, providing a more stable and robust refinement mechanism than LLM reprompting. In the demo, attendees drive a dry recording through successive natural-language instructions: after each turn, they choose how strongly the effect is applied, then issue the next instruction based on what still differs from the sound they intend. In a preliminary evaluation on SocialFX-derived descriptor pairs, CLAP-guided refinement achieves lower DSP-feature MMD than an LLM+LLM initialize-then-reprompt baseline on 9 of 10 pairs. Trajectory analysis further shows that, for differentiable effects, optimization tends to gradually move the audio toward the new target while retaining the effects of the previous instruction, highlighting the potential for gradual refinement.

Fuzzing frameworks like syzkaller have uncovered thousands of Linux kernel crashes, many of which are critical and security-sensitive. However, the ability to rapidly repair these crashes has not kept pace, particularly given the complexity and low-level nature of kernel code. Predominantly targeting user-space applications, existing LLM-based program repair techniques are not tailored to the unique challenges posed by kernel fuzz bugs-such as the absence of natural language bug reports, lack of exhaustive test oracles, and highly specialized crash artifacts. Thus, in this work, we first identify the prevalent bottlenecks that generic agents struggle with in complex systems such as the Linux kernel. Guided by these findings, we then build kAgent, a workflow-based agent inspired by how kernel developers diagnose and fix bugs, and kGym++, the co-designed toolstack supporting kAgent's requests. kAgent inspects relevant execution logs, generates execution-grounded natural language hypotheses, synthesizes candidate patches, validates patches through crash reproduction, and iteratively refines its reasoning. We ablate these agentic system features in kAgent and quantitatively analyze their contributions to the overall performance. We also report our experience on building agents for kernel crash repair. Although derived from this work on Linux, we note that our experience applies broadly to fuzzing-discovered bugs in complex systems software. We evaluate kAgent on kBenchSyz and show that it can repair up to 54.5% of crashes without localization and 65% with correct file hints. We also show kAgent's generalization on a few wild Syzkaller bugs, and how different patch types offer varying utility to developers who debug complex system software.

Automating optimization modeling from natural language with large language models (LLMs) faces two key challenges. First, training corpora lack structural diversity. Second, data generation pipelines remain static and decoupled from model learning. To address these challenges, we propose EvoOptiGraph, a novel framework where data and model co-evolve, driven by model weaknesses. EvoOptiGraph represents each mixed-integer linear program (MILP) as an attributed bipartite graph and applies validity-preserving evolutionary operators to generate structurally diverse instances. The evolved graphs are converted into solver code and natural language via deterministic compilation and verified back-translation. Training proceeds in two stages: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on an initial dataset, followed by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), where graph-derived weakness signals guide the generation of new instances targeting the model's failures. This forms a closed loop that continuously updates the training distribution. Empirical results on six public datasets show that EvoOptiGraph significantly outperforms larger generalist models, agentic methods, and specialized baselines in accuracy, executability, and generalization. These results demonstrate that targeted data-model coevolution is an effective strategy for improving LLMs on optimization modeling tasks.

Text-to-SQL systems translate natural language queries into executable SQL, democratizing access to structured data. Despite recent advances driven by large language models (LLMs), evaluation remains a major bottleneck: public benchmarks fail to capture the complexity of enterprise schema, while building private evaluation sets is costly and nondeterministic, making evaluation results difficult to reproduce. To address this issue, we present SQLMorph, a framework for Text-to-SQL evaluation via query mutation. SQLMorph introduces two techniques to automatically generate and expand evaluation sets: Join Query Expansion (JQE), which systematically increases structural complexity through valid join additions, and Textual Query Augmentation (TQA), which generates controlled natural language perturbations to assess robustness to linguistic variation. JQE and TQA create targeted choke points to challenge specific system components. When applied to state-of-the-art systems, JQE increases query coverage and reveals accuracy degradation as the number of joins grows. Meanwhile, TQA shows that linguistic brittleness induced by heavy abbreviation can reduce accuracy by up to 17%. Beyond evaluation sets, SQLMorph introduces a family of execution-level metrics that address the limitations of current binary measures, such as Execution Accuracy. We define Execution Precision (EXP) and Execution Recall (EXR) to quantify the fraction of correct and recovered results, respectively, and combine them via F1 for unified scoring. Our experiments show that these relaxed metrics enable fine-grained analysis of over- and under-prediction, revealing differences across systems that binary metrics obscure. Together, SQLMorph's query mutation and fine-grained metrics support debugging and better align Text-to-SQL evaluation practices with real-world deployments.

Open agent platforms allow community contributors to publish reusable skills that agents can invoke at runtime. This extensibility also creates a supply-chain risk: malicious contributors can hide harmful behavior inside skills that appear benign under superficial inspection. However, existing defenses are hard to evaluate because there is no benchmark that measures both malicious-skill detection and runtime verification. We present SkillVetBench, a two-stage security vetting benchmark for open agentic skill ecosystems. The first stage performs semantic vetting over each skill's natural-language specification to detect hidden malicious intent. The second stage executes flagged skills in an instrumented sandbox to observe runtime behavior and collect auditable evidence. We build a benchmark from confirmed malicious skills in the live OpenClaw ecosystem, including samples from the recent ClawHavoc supplychain campaign. Unlike static-only methods, SkillVetBench verifies detected threats with execution traces. Our experiments show that: (1) semantic-only and signature-based baselines are insufficient, missing up to 89% of malicious skills whose threats arise from natural-language instructions, multicomponent logic, or cross-component interactions; (2) runtime attacks are concentrated in a small set of high-permission primitives, especially exec, write_file, install_skill, and spawn; and (3) SkillVetBench provides case studies in which sandbox execution directly supports malicious verdicts with concrete runtime evidence.

We introduce Goedel-Architect, an agentic framework for formal theorem proving in Lean 4 centered on blueprint generation and refinement. A blueprint is a dependency graph of definitions and lemmas that builds up to the main theorem. First, Goedel-Architect generates a blueprint of formally stated definitions and lemmas, along with declared dependencies. This blueprint is optionally guided by a natural language proof. Then, a tool-equipped Lean prover component closes each open lemma node in parallel using relevant dependencies. Failed lemmas in turn drive refinement of the global blueprint. This strategy contrasts with other mainstream approaches which use recursive lemma decomposition, and can inefficiently loop on dead-end strategies. Using the open-weight DeepSeek-V4-Flash (284B-A13B) as the backbone, Goedel-Architect attains 99.2% pass@1 on MiniF2F-test and 75.6% pass@1 on PutnamBench. With an optional natural-language proof seeding the initial blueprint on the harder problems, we additionally close the remaining two MiniF2F-test problems (reaching 100%), lift PutnamBench to 88.8% (597/672), and solve 4/6 on IMO 2025, 11/12 on Putnam 2025, and 3/6 on USAMO 2026. This represents state-of-the-art performance for an open-source pipeline at a price point up to 500x less than comparable open-source pipelines.

Chain-of-thought reasoning has revolutionized natural language processing by enabling large language models (LLMs) to decompose problems into intermediate steps before answering. Yet confining reasoning to the textual domain presents limitations for tasks requiring direct manipulation of visual representations. Recent efforts augment multimodal LLMs with external visual expert tools such as depth estimation or object detection modules, but these remain fundamentally limited by their reliance on narrow, rigid operations that cannot flexibly generate or transform visual content. We propose ReImaGin, which leverages image generation models as a flexible visual reasoning mechanism for multimodal LLMs: unlike fixed-function tools, they accept natural language commands and can perform open-ended visual operations, like removing an occlusion or generating a floorplan from multiple disjoint views of a room. Across six diverse visual reasoning tasks including multi-view spatial reasoning and collision prediction, ReImaGin consistently outperforms both text-only reasoning and specialist vision-tool baselines, with gains of up to 25%, demonstrating the advantage of flexible, generative visual reasoning.

Enterprises increasingly seek to query data lakes using natural language via AI-driven tools like semantic operators or deep research agents. However, the latter operates as an opaque black box, hiding its intermediate reasoning and data retrieval steps, and failing to expose controls for managing API costs and execution latency. Meanwhile, the former can be prohibitively expensive for enterprise-scale data lakes. Consequently, analysts using these systems lack the agency to intercept hallucinated premises, verify intermediate results, or correct the system's trajectory. We present Carnot, an interactive execution engine for AI-driven analytics. Carnot compiles natural language requests into physical execution graphs and surfaces them through an interactive notebook interface. Rather than waiting blindly for a final output, users can critique the plan, incrementally execute operators, inspect intermediate data, or directly edit the underlying code or semantic operator instructions. Carnot's query optimizer will optimize the query with respect to cost or latency constraints provided by the user. Our demo will showcase how Carnot helps users achieve efficient and verifiable insights on workloads motivated by real enterprise use cases.

Recent advances in text-driven human motion generation enable models to synthesize realistic motion sequences from natural language descriptions. However, most existing approaches assume identity-neutral motion and generate movements using a canonical body representation, ignoring the strong influence of body morphology on motion dynamics. In practice, attributes such as body proportions, mass distribution, and age significantly affect how actions are performed, and neglecting this coupling often leads to physically inconsistent motions. We propose an identity-aware motion generation framework that explicitly models the relationship between body morphology and motion dynamics. Instead of relying on explicit geometric measurements, identity is represented using multimodal signals, including natural language descriptions and visual cues. We further introduce a joint motion-shape generation paradigm that simultaneously synthesizes motion sequences and body shape parameters, allowing identity cues to directly modulate motion dynamics. Extensive experiments on motion capture datasets and large-scale in-the-wild videos demonstrate improved motion realism and motion-identity consistency while maintaining high motion quality. Project page: https://vjwq.github.io/IAM