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Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for recommendation by leveraging their semantic understanding and contextual modeling capabilities. Recent studies further introduce reasoning mechanisms to improve user preference modeling. However, explicit natural-language reasoning incurs substantial inference overhead, whereas existing latent reasoning methods mainly focus on generating or verifying intermediate states, leaving their layer-wise preference roles and contributions insufficiently characterized. We propose HiLaR, a Hierarchical Latent Reasoning framework with layer-aware reinforcement optimization for LLM-based recommendation. HiLaR constructs temporal-guided hierarchical user preference representations, aligns them with multiple LLM latent reasoning states, and organizes the reasoning process from broad preferences to fine-grained current intents. To further optimize the reasoning trajectory, HiLaR combines final recommendation feedback with layer-aware process rewards derived from the marginal target-likelihood gain of each state. Experiments on four Amazon benchmark datasets show that HiLaR generally outperforms strong sequential, generative, and LLM-based recommendation baselines. Ablation and sensitivity analyses further verify the contribution of hierarchical representation learning, latent alignment, and process-level optimization. Our code is available in https://github.com/hupeiyu21/HiLaR.

Large Language Model (LLM)-based Test-Driven Development (TDD) has advanced automated code generation. However, existing approaches depend heavily on human-crafted test cases and cannot operate effectively when only natural-language requirements are available. Although recent work enables automatic test generation, it often overlooks the inherent stochasticity of LLMs, leading to two key defects: faulty tests generate misleading feedback that distorts code optimization, while mixed-quality test cases produce conflicting evaluation signals that hinder reliable code selection. To address these challenges, we propose MineValiCoder, a collaborative closed-loop TDD framework based on the mutual reinforcement of test-case quality and code quality. MineValiCoder comprises three modules. The Test Case Quality Mining (TCQM) module filters faulty test cases through self-validation, providing reliable optimization supervision. The Parallel TDD Refinement module iteratively optimizes code and generates diverse high-quality code candidates using validated test-case feedback. The Bipartite Graph-Based Code-Test Mutual Validation (BiCoTeV) module dynamically models code-test interactions and performs mutual validation scoring for stable and reliable optimal-code selection. Extensive evaluations across four LLMs and mainstream benchmarks show that MineValiCoder significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, it achieves Pass@1 scores of 96.34% on HumanEval, 87.40% on MBPP, 64.00% on APPS, and 51.33% on LiveCodeBench. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of MineValiCoder in mitigating LLM stochasticity and improving the reliability of automated code generation.

In recent years, studies have revealed a decline in semantic variety across popular music lyrics, particularly in English-language songs on streaming platforms like Spotify. This research examines whether a similar trend can be observed in a different linguistic and cultural context: the lyrics of all finalist songs from the 75 editions of the Sanremo Music Festival, Italy's most renowned music competition. What sets this work apart is the development of a flexible and efficient methodology for tracking changes in semantic similarity over time, which can be applied to different datasets to study similar phenomena. Drawing on a combination of full-text, segment-based, topic-based, and word-level analyses, the approach leverages both embedding techniques and large language models. When applied to the Sanremo corpus, this framework reveals a gradual move toward increasing semantic uniformity, echoing the global patterns identified in previous studies. These findings underscore the value of natural language processing tools in uncovering long-term shifts in musical language and cultural expression.

Safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) typically depends on high-quality supervision data, such as safe demonstrations or preference pairs. However, in real-world deployment, emerging safety requirements are often specified as natural-language policies, while corresponding supervision data may be costly, delayed, or unavailable. This creates a mismatch between rapidly evolving safety policies and conventional data-driven alignment methods. To address this, we propose PolicyAlign, a simple yet effective framework for directly aligning LLMs with safety policies. Given a safety policy, PolicyAlign first synthesizes policy-violating instructions and then performs on-policy self-distillation to internalize policy-guided behavior. To improve training stability and data efficiency, we further introduce Policy-Sensitive Filtering, which selects instructions where the policy induces the largest behavioral shift. Experiments across multiple models show that PolicyAlign consistently improves safety while maintaining low over-refusal and preserving general capabilities. PolicyAlign also generalizes to medical, legal, and financial safety scenarios, highlighting its potential as a scalable and maintainable approach to policy-based LLM safety alignment. The code is released at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/PolicyAlign.

African languages have very little labelled data, and it is unclear if augmenting the quantity of annotation data reliably enhances downstream performance. The study is a systematic sample-size scaling study of natural language inference (NLI) on 16 African languages based on the AfriXNLI benchmark. Under controlled conditions, two multilingual transformer models with roughly 0.6B parameters XLM-R Large fine-tuned on XNLI and AfroXLM-R Large are tested on sample sizes of between 50 and 500 labeled examples and average their results across random subsampling runs. As opposed to the usual belief of monotonic increase with increased data, we find a strongly language sensitive and often non-monotonic scaling behavior. Some languages show early saturation or decrease in performance with sample size as well as high variance in low resource regimes. These results indicate that the volume of data is not enough to guarantee stable profits to African NLI, creating the necessity of language sensitive datasets creation and stronger multi-lingual modelling strategies.

Much research has been carried out on large language models (LLMs) and LLM-powered agentic workflows. However, many works within the field state emergence of, ascribe to, or assume, generalised anthropomorphic attributes to them (e.g., morality or understanding of natural language). Our goal is not to argue in favour or against the existence of these attributes, but to point out that these conclusions could be incorrect. For this we build and train a simple neural network on the videogame Age of Empires II, and note that any entity in a sufficiently-powerful substrate, such as LEGO or the Greater Boston Area, could also present such attributes. Hence, the purported anthropomorphic attributes of LLMs are empirically non-unique: although some properties (e.g., responses to prompts) could remain invariant, others, such as the interpretation of their perceived behaviour, might change with the substrate. Thus, any empirically-grounded discussion on these attributes requires explicit measurement criteria; otherwise the interpretation is left to the representation. We then show that assuming that these attributes exist or not in a system, independent of the substrate and in a generalised way, leads to either circular or uninformative conclusions. This is regardless of the experimenter's viewpoint on the subject, or whether the outcome shows existence or non-existence. Finally we propose a 'null' assumption, where one assumes LLM non-uniqueness instead of assuming anthropomorphic attributes to set up an experiment, along with examples of it. We also discuss potential objections to our work, briefly survey the field, and prove that Age of Empires II is functionally- and Turing-complete.

This paper describes our system submitted to SemEval-2026 Task 11: Disentangling Content and Formal Reasoning in Large Language Models. We present an efficient modular neuro-symbolic approach, combining a symbolic prover with small reasoning LLMs (4B parameters). The system consists of an LLM-based parser that translates natural language syllogisms to a first-order logic (FOL) representation, an automated theorem prover, and two optional modules: machine translation for multilingual inputs and a symbolic retrieval component for the identification of relevant premises. The system achieves competitive accuracy and relatively low content effect on most subtasks. Our ablations show that this approach outperforms LLM-based zero-shot baselines in this parameter size range, but also reveal limited multilingual capabilities of small LLMs. Finally, we include a discussion of the task's main ranking metric and analyze its limitations.

Large language models have transformed AI-assisted software engineering, but current research remains biased toward high-resource languages such as Python, with weaker performance in languages like Rust and OCaml. Since real-world systems are inherently polyglot, robust multilingual code intelligence is crucial. This survey focuses on two key tasks: multilingual code generation from shared natural-language requirements, and multilingual code translation that preserves semantics across languages. It reviews representative methods, benchmarks, and evaluation metrics, and highlights challenges and opportunities for trustworthy cross-language generalization.

Can large language model agents discover hidden safety objectives through experience alone? We introduce EPO-Safe (Experiential Prompt Optimization for Safe Agents), a framework where an LLM iteratively generates action plans, receives sparse binary danger warnings, and evolves a natural language behavioral specification through reflection. Unlike standard LLM reflection methods that rely on rich textual feedback (e.g., compiler errors or detailed environment responses), EPO-Safe demonstrates that LLMs can perform safety reasoning from a strictly impoverished signal in structured, low-dimensional environments: the agent never observes the hidden performance function $R^*$, only a single bit per timestep indicating that an action was unsafe. We evaluate on five AI Safety Gridworlds (Leike et al., 2017) and five text-based scenario analogs where visible reward $R$ may diverge from $R^*$. EPO-Safe discovers safe behavior within 1-2 rounds (5-15 episodes), producing human-readable specifications with correct explanatory hypotheses about hazards (e.g., "X cells are directionally hazardous: entering from the north is dangerous"). Critically, we show that standard reward-driven reflection actively degrades safety: agents reflecting on reward alone use the loop to justify and accelerate reward hacking, proving that reflection must be paired with a dedicated safety channel to discover hidden constraints. We further evaluate robustness to noisy oracles: even when 50% of non-dangerous steps produce spurious warnings, mean safety performance degrades by only 15% on average, though sensitivity is environment-dependent, as cross-episode reflection naturally filters inconsistent signals. Each evolved specification functions as an auditable set of grounded behavioral rules discovered autonomously through interaction, rather than authored by humans as in Constitutional AI (Bai et al., 2022).

Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration radio transients whose automated detection increasingly relies on highly specialized deep learning models. These detectors achieve exceptional performance, but they require large task-specific training datasets and cannot be redefined without retraining. In this work, we evaluate whether small, open-weight, locally run generalist Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can detect FRBs in dynamic spectra under a zero-shot, prompt-only regime, with no fine-tuning and no labeled examples, returning structured decisions with a natural-language justification. From a controlled set of 3000 simulated L-band dynamic spectra containing FRBs, structured Radio Frequency Interference (RFI), and noise, we draw a balanced binary benchmark of 2000 samples and compare two such VLMs (Gemma 4 2B and 4B), sample by sample, against the state-of-the-art specialized detector SwinYNet. At the default threshold, Gemma 4 2B reaches an accuracy of 93.65%, with no statistically significant difference from SwinYNet (92.90%), while showing a significantly lower false-positive rate on structured RFI (6.4% vs. 25.0%) and no false positives on pure noise. SwinYNet retains a perfect probabilistic ranking on this benchmark (ROC-AUC of 1.0000 vs. 0.9482), a ceiling that the zero-shot VLM approaches from general-purpose pretraining alone. Rewriting the prompt alone reconfigures the same models for three-class FRB/RFI/noise classification on the full set of 3000 spectra, where they reach up to 86% accuracy without a single false FRB.

This paper presents the Arabic Women and Society Corpus, a ten year collection of 252,487 public Arabic Facebook posts related to women's empowerment and social wellbeing. The corpus was collected from 51,660 pages across 77 countries between 2013 and 2024, resulting in more than 267 million user interactions. Each post includes engagement metrics such as shares, comments, and emotional reactions, providing a unique view of audience sentiment and social attention. The data were processed using an automated pipeline with language identification, normalization, and metadata cleaning to ensure reliability and reproducibility. The corpus enables large scale analysis of gender discourse, social reform, and emotional engagement across Arabic dialects. It supports research in Arabic natural language processing, computational social science, and digital communication studies. The dataset and accompanying documentation will be released under request for research use.

Geometric Algebra (GA) presents challenges to learners due to its highly abstract mathematical structure and complex operational rules, as translating algebraic manipulations into concrete geometric interpretations is a non-intuitive process when developing related code. Currently, some existing GA software packages rely on manually written scripts for code generation and visualization, but their high learning curve hinders widespread adoption. Meanwhile, methods based on Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce logical errors when generating specific GA scripts, such as GAALOPScript, resulting in generally low accuracy. To address these issues, this study proposes GA-VisAgent -- a multi-agent interactive learning application for GA code generation and visualization -- building upon a Geometric algebra large language model (GAGPT). Integrating task planning mechanisms with ReAct reasoning strategies, GA-VisAgent can decompose complex operations into five standardized subtasks, including core operations like geometric products, rotations, and reflections. It supports natural language and mathematical formulas as input to automatically generate executable code, accompanied by interactive visualizations to aid user comprehension. Experimental results show that GA-VisAgent achieved a 90% code generation success rate across 40 typical Conformal GA tasks, representing a 70% improvement over GPT-4o. This application introduces an extensible new paradigm for teaching GA and developing visualization tools for related mathematical concepts. The online service for this project will be available at http://gagis.cn/gacrac.

Agentic large language model systems have demonstrated strong capabilities. However, their reliance on language as the universal interface fundamentally limits their applicability to many real-world problems, especially in scientific domains where domain-specific foundation models have been developed to address specialized tasks beyond natural language. In this work, we introduce Eywa, a heterogeneous agentic framework designed to extend language-centric systems to a broader class of scientific foundation models. The key idea of Eywa is to augment domain-specific foundation models with a language-model-based reasoning interface, enabling language models to guide inference over non-linguistic data modalities. This design allows predictive foundation models, which are typically optimized for specialized data and tasks, to participate in higher-level reasoning and decision-making processes within agentic systems. Eywa can serve as a drop-in replacement for a single-agent pipeline (EywaAgent) or be integrated into existing multi-agent systems by replacing traditional agents with specialized agents (EywaMAS). We further investigate a planning-based orchestration framework in which a planner dynamically coordinates traditional agents and Eywa agents to solve complex tasks across heterogeneous data modalities (EywaOrchestra). We evaluate Eywa across a diverse set of scientific domains spanning physical, life, and social sciences. Experimental results demonstrate that Eywa improves performance on tasks involving structured and domain-specific data, while reducing reliance on language-based reasoning through effective collaboration with specialized foundation models.

Pretrained Vision Transformers (ViTs) such as DINOv2 and MAE provide generic image features that can be applied to a variety of downstream tasks such as retrieval, classification, and segmentation. However, such representations tend to focus on the most salient visual cues in the image, with no way to direct them toward less prominent concepts of interest. In contrast, Multimodal LLMs can be guided with textual prompts, but the resulting representations tend to be language-centric and lose their effectiveness for generic visual tasks. To address this, we introduce Steerable Visual Representations, a new class of visual representations, whose global and local features can be steered with natural language. While most vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) fuse text with visual features after encoding (late fusion), we inject text directly into the layers of the visual encoder (early fusion) via lightweight cross-attention. We introduce benchmarks for measuring representational steerability, and demonstrate that our steerable visual features can focus on any desired objects in an image while preserving the underlying representation quality. Our method also matches or outperforms dedicated approaches on anomaly detection and personalized object discrimination, exhibiting zero-shot generalization to out-of-distribution tasks.

We present the first language-model-driven agentic artificial intelligence (AI) system to autonomously execute multi-stage physics experiments on a production synchrotron light source. Implemented at the Advanced Light Source particle accelerator, the system translates natural language user prompts into structured execution plans that combine archive data retrieval, control-system channel resolution, automated script generation, controlled machine interaction, and analysis. In a representative machine physics task, we show that preparation time was reduced by two orders of magnitude relative to manual scripting even for a system expert, while operator-standard safety constraints were strictly upheld. Core architectural features, plan-first orchestration, bounded tool access, and dynamic capability selection, enable transparent, auditable execution with fully reproducible artifacts. These results establish a blueprint for the safe integration of agentic AI into accelerator experiments and demanding machine physics studies, as well as routine operations, with direct portability across accelerators worldwide and, more broadly, to other large-scale scientific infrastructures.

This paper provides an experimental evaluation of the capability of large language models (LLMs) to assist in legal decision-making within the framework of Austrian and European Union value-added tax (VAT) law. In tax consulting practice, clients often describe cases in natural language, making LLMs a prime candidate for supporting automated decision-making and reducing the workload of tax professionals. Given the requirement for legally grounded and well-justified analyses, the propensity of LLMs to hallucinate presents a considerable challenge. The experiments focus on two common methods for enhancing LLM performance: fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). In this study, these methods are applied on both textbook cases and real-world cases from a tax consulting firm to systematically determine the best configurations of LLM-based systems and assess the legal-reasoning capabilities of LLMs. The findings highlight the potential of using LLMs to support tax consultants by automating routine tasks and providing initial analyses, although current prototypes are not ready for full automation due to the sensitivity of the legal domain. The findings indicate that LLMs, when properly configured, can effectively support tax professionals in VAT tasks and provide legally grounded justifications for decisions. However, limitations remain regarding the handling of implicit client knowledge and context-specific documentation, underscoring the need for future integration of structured background information.

Audio-Language Models (ALMs), trained on paired audio-text data, are designed to process, understand, and reason about audio-centric multimodal content. Unlike traditional supervised approaches that use predefined labels, ALMs leverage natural language supervision to better handle complex real-world audio scenes with multiple overlapping events. While demonstrating impressive zero-shot and task generalization capabilities, there is still a notable lack of systematic surveys that comprehensively organize and analyze developments. In this paper, we present the first systematic review of ALMs with three main contributions: (1) comprehensive coverage of ALM works across speech, music, and sound from a general audio perspective; (2) a unified taxonomy of ALM foundations, including model architectures and training objectives; (3) establishment of a research landscape capturing mutual promotion and constraints among different research aspects, aiding in summarizing evaluations, limitations, concerns and promising directions. Our review contributes to helping researchers understand the development of existing technologies and future trends, while also providing valuable references for implementation in practical applications.

Inference-time scaling for LLM reasoning has focused on three axes: chain depth, sample breadth, and learned step-scorers (PRMs). We introduce a fourth axis, granularity of external verbal supervision, via Verbal Process Supervision (VPS), a training-free framework that uses structured natural-language critique from a stronger supervisor to guide an iterative generate-critique-refine loop up to a round budget R. Across GPQA Diamond, AIME 2025, and LiveCodeBench V6 (covering both closed and open models), VPS yields three key results. First, on GPQA Diamond, GPT-5.4 (High) | GPT-5.4 (Low) reaches 94.9% at R=4, surpassing the 94.1% state of the art without gradient updates. Second, on AIME 2025, VPS enables strong weak-actor rescue, boosting scores from 11.7-26.7% to 63.3-90.0% (up to +63.3 points). Third, at matched compute, VPS outperforms Reflexion by +8.5 to +12.1 points and Self-Consistency@5 by +5.0 pp (GPQA) and +8.3 pp (LiveCodeBench), isolating critique granularity as the key driver. Performance scales with the supervisor-actor capability gap (Pearson r=0.90) and degrades when errors are not linguistically expressible (e.g., code synthesis), motivating hybrid verbal-executable methods. These results establish critique granularity as a new axis of inference-time scaling.

Can cooperation among large language model (LLM) agents be evolutionarily stable against free-rider invasion? We study an indirect reciprocity donation game where LLM agents observe behavioral traces and donate on a continuous scale. Strategies, represented as natural language prompts, evolve through cultural transmission across generations. Across four LLM backends, robustness to free-rider invasion varies by more than an order of magnitude. The strongest predictor of this robustness is opponent endowment sensitivity, the degree to which agents discriminate between cooperative and uncooperative opponents, operationalizing the classical Image Scoring mechanism. By contrast, adherence to the Leading-Eight L1 norm does not predict robustness. Robustness depends on defector exclusion: while both cooperator reward and defector punishment vary across models, only the stringency of defector exclusion predicts resistance to free-rider invasion. These findings reveal that LLM agents are confined to Image Scoring-like discrimination and fail to develop the more robust Leading-Eight norms, highlighting a fundamental vulnerability in culturally evolved LLM cooperation and motivating bottom-up approaches to norm construction.

As artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) models become integral to network operations, their lack of transparency poses a significant barrier to operator trust. Existing explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques often fail to bridge this gap for non-specialists, producing technical outputs that are difficult to translate into actionable insights. This paper presents a framework specifically designed to address this shortcoming. It leverages a moderately sized large language model (LLM) and extends beyond the standard use of SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) feature influence values. The framework employs a structured prompt enriched with mutual feature interaction data to generate human-understandable natural language explanations. To validate our framework, we performed an empirical evaluation on an optical quality of transmission (QoT) estimation use case with human evaluators. We collected independent performance evaluations from specialists, which showed a high inter-evaluator agreement. Compared to a state-of-the-art baseline that uses only SHAP feature influence values in a straightforward prompt, our approach improves the explanation usefulness and scope by 12.2% and 6.2%, while achieving 97.5% correctness.

Classical scaling laws for language model pretraining balance model size against training dataset size under a fixed compute budget, assuming abundant data and a single pass over the corpus. As training compute grows faster than the supply of natural language data, pretraining is likely to enter a data-constrained, compute-rich regime where models train for multiple epochs over a finite dataset. We study data-constrained pretraining along two axes, regularization and scaling. For regularization, we study masked-input regularization (MIR), an auxiliary next-token prediction loss on randomly masked inputs. MIR tests whether the random masking central to diffusion language models can benefit autoregressive pretraining without architectural changes or inference overhead. Across 72M to 1.4B parameter models, we find that MIR added on top of strong weight decay improves validation loss over autoregressive strong-weight-decay-only models, with downstream gains at 1.4B. For scaling, we propose SoftQ, a scaling law that couples model size and data size to capture their interaction under repeated data. Classical alternatives such as the Chinchilla law use an additive form that decouples these terms, making them misspecified in the data-constrained regime. We find that SoftQ fits data-constrained experiments substantially better than these alternatives, and estimates MIR's gains as equivalent to roughly 1.3 times as much unique training data. We release our code at https://github.com/yixinw-lab/dc_pretrain.

The iterated learning model was introduced to investigate language evolution: the way in which the characteristic properties of human languages have been shaped, at least partly, by repeated transmission from one language user to another. The key finding is that language compositionality can arise spontaneously as a consequence of language being passed repeatedly through a language learning bottleneck. Here we explore how changing the frequency of different meanings, so that some meanings occur much more frequently than others, affects the character of its compositionality. We find that, as observed in natural languages, high-frequency meanings can escape the pressure to conform to the grammar that characterizes lower-frequency meanings. However, when the frequency structure is instead imposed on parts rather than on whole meaning vectors, the language fails to transmit across generations. This occurs despite the fact that the most frequent elements are reliably learned. These results suggest that frequency can shape emergent linguistic structure only when the frequency distribution is defined over form-meaning units that learners can acquire holistically. When frequency is instead distributed over smaller units, it fails to support the relational structure required for compositional generalisation, thereby preventing stable language transmission.

Generation of clear and accessible public health narratives is critical for communicating complex epidemiological projections to policymakers and the general public at large. Such narratives require more than simply reporting numbers: projections must be contextualized and quantitatively grounded across multiple dimensions. Further, projections are often derived from large ensemble datasets which combine intervention assumptions, geographic and demographic strata, outcomes, time horizons, and uncertainty quantiles. However, directly using large language models (LLMs) to summarize and contextualize such data often leads to inconsistencies, omissions, and fragile behavior. We introduce an agentic framework (EpiNarrate) for public health report generation that separates structured numerical reasoning from natural-language generation. The framework first extracts scenario axes and organizes them into a partial-order schema, enabling systematic traversal of the underlying multidimensional space. It then constructs an augmented dataset and derives valid quantitative statements through a comparison grammar that enforces semantic and arithmetic consistency. To balance coverage and non-redundancy, we introduce an interestingness-driven selection mechanism based on maximum-entropy principles. Experiments on the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub demonstrate that our model produces narratives with improved factual grounding and broader coverage of salient epidemiological patterns, while preserving the style of expert-written reports.

Pairwise preference data is widely used for training and evaluating language models (e.g., RLHF), but each datapoint records a \emph{choice}, not the rationale behind it. Methods such as Inverse Constitutional AI (ICAI) attempt to improve interpretability by compressing datasets into short ``constitutions'' of natural-language principles. We argue this framing is under-specified: a flat list of principles is not yet an executable decision rule because it leaves principle composition implicit. We use the pairwise setting as a testbed to empirically characterize three open problems in constitutional methods. First, principle quality is hard to measure: coverage and accuracy are useful but incomplete proxies for end-to-end reconstruction. Second, \emph{composition is ambiguous}: holding principles fixed, different executors (LLM judge versus majority vote) agree only $73\%$ of the time. Third, \emph{constitutions differ between LLMs}: cross-model vote agreement is $73\%$, whereas intra-model agreement is $81\%$. Across PRISM, AlpacaEval, and Chatbot Arena, we show that principle refinement (ICAI+) may be a first step towards ameliorating these problems: inter-executor agreement rises to $78\%$, and transparent executors match LLM judge accuracy ($66\%$ vs.\ $67\%$). Our results highlight that constitutions should be evaluated as \emph{constitution--executor systems}, with implications for LLMs-as-a-judge broadly.

Understanding subtle driver actions is essential for building reliable driver monitoring systems. Existing visionlanguage models (VLMs) are trained on general datasets and struggle to recognize fine distinctions in driver behaviors. This paper addresses this limitation by creating a detailed natural language version of the Drive&Act dataset. We evaluate three VLMs on our new benchmark using LLM-based scoring methods. Their performance on the new benchmark shows that they cannot reliably generate accurate fine-grained driver activity descriptions. Based on the labeled Drive&Act dataset we create a new Drive&Act description dataset containing finegrained descriptions to train VLMs on driver activity understanding. Cross dataset evaluation on the Driver Monitoring Dataset (DMD) shows that the VLM fine-tuned on our new Drive&Act description dataset generalizes well to actions in the DMD dataset. The VLM fine-tuned on our Drive&Act description dataset achieves an ACCR score of 76 outperforming the zero-shot VLM baseline with an ACCR score of 66. These findings demonstrate that adapting VLMs with richly described driver actions can significantly improve their ability to interpret driver behavior while also highlighting the need for more diverse datasets to support broader generalization in future applications. Our Drive&Act description dataset and code will be publicly available on GitHub.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly act inside real workspaces, where tools and skills determine whether model reasoning becomes reliable action. Existing skills remain largely informal: Markdown skills and instruction packs encode procedures as long natural-language documents, while function calling, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and framework tools structure individual actions but usually leave workflow state, policy enforcement, and completion discipline outside the skill itself. We introduce Formal Skill, a runtime-native abstraction that represents reusable capability with JSON metadata and action schemas, reliable Python executors, hook-governed control logic, Formal Skill routing, and skill-local runtime state. By moving reusable procedure from repeated prompt text into executable state machines and hook policies, Formal Skill gives agents a token-efficient and enforceable control surface. We implement the abstraction in FairyClaw, an open-source event-driven runtime for executable, observable, and composable Formal Skills. On Harness-Bench, FairyClaw obtains highly competitive average scores while using substantially fewer tokens, with especially strong results on tasks that expose the role of Formal Skill.

Large language models (LLMs) often produce answers with high certainty even when they are incorrect, making reliable confidence estimation essential for deployment in real-world scenarios. Verbalized confidence, where models explicitly state their confidence in natural language, provides a flexible and user-facing uncertainty signal that can be applied even when token logits are unavailable. However, existing verbalized-confidence methods often optimize answer generation and confidence generation jointly, which can cause confidence-alignment objectives to interfere with answer accuracy. In this work, we propose a decoupled and order-aware framework for verbalized confidence calibration. Our method first generates an answer and then estimates confidence conditioned on the fixed question--answer pair, allowing confidence optimization without directly perturbing the answer-generation process. To align confidence with correctness likelihood, we construct a sampling-based surrogate from multiple model completions and optimize rank-based reinforcement learning objectives that encourage responses with higher estimated correctness likelihood to receive higher verbalized confidence. Experiments on reasoning and knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that our method improves calibration and failure prediction performance while largely preserving answer accuracy. These results demonstrate that verbalized confidence can be more reliably aligned by decoupling confidence estimation from answer generation and optimizing the relative ordering of confidence across responses.

Safety-critical perception systems must reliably detect rare object classes within small label spaces, a setting that long-tailed detection methods, designed for hundreds of classes with dense annotation, fundamentally do not address. Open-vocabulary detectors offer a promising alternative, as they use natural language queries at inference time, making prompt quality a first-class lever for detection performance. We exploit this property to address class imbalance: rather than retraining models or collecting additional annotations, we ask whether iteratively refining the language prompts, fed to frozen detectors, can improve minority class detection. We introduce C-GAP Caption-Guided Augmentation and Prompting), a detector-agnostic, annotation-free framework that operates in two phases. First, we establish a composite caption baseline combining per-image scene descriptions with class-quantity context, which we show outperforms scene-description only or class-quantity-only prompts across multiple open-vocabulary architectures and benchmarks. Second, an LLM iteratively refines each image's caption individually, with trials triaged into accept, tentative, or regenerate buckets based on minority-class AP@0.5 against a dynamic threshold derived from the composite baseline. Refinement terminates early once sufficient AP@0.5 gain is achieved. No detector weights are updated at any stage. Our experiments shows that C-GAP improves minority-class average precision up to 53% over the baselines. On COCO, C-GAP improves minority-class AP@0.5 by ~81% relative over the composite baseline (17.69 -> 32.09). Experiments confirm that composite captions provide the critical foundation for effective refinement: using scene-description-only or class-quantity-only prompts as the refinement starting point yields diminishing returns, supporting both stages of C-GAP as necessary contributions.

Modern recommendation systems largely infer user preferences from implicit behaviors such as clicks, watch time, and negative feedback, but these signals reveal what users do rather than why they like or dislike content. This work studies articulated user rationales (AURs), i.e., users' natural-language explanations of their preferences, as a new class of polarity-aware and reason-level textual signals for recommendation. Despite their potential value, AURs are difficult to use in industrial systems because they are naturally sparse, often low-quality, and only cover a small fraction of items. We present SARA (Scaling Articulated Rationales), an industrial framework that turns sparse AURs into scalable recommendation signals. SARA first builds a data engine that elicits and curates AURs from 240M Kuaishou Live users, producing SARA-HQ, a quality-controlled and author-centric rationale dataset. It then aligns a general-purpose MLLM into SARA-7B through large-scale SFT and Quality-Refining DPO, extending rationale generation from 86,564 AUR-covered authors to the full 10M-author space. Finally, SARA-Ranker integrates the generated positive and negative rationales into production ranking via rationale-aware interaction modeling and rejection-memory modeling. Extensive offline evaluation, human calibration, and online A/B tests show that SARA-7B generates more specific, polarity-consistent, and grounded rationales than strong MLLM baselines, while SARA-Ranker improves engagement and reduces negative feedback in production. Deployed with daily refresh for over 30 days, SARA establishes articulated rationales as a practical, first-class textual signal for industrial recommendation systems.

Wi-Fi-based human activity recognition has advanced substantially, but most existing methods assume a closed set of activities and require labeled Wi-Fi samples for every target class, limiting their ability to recognize unseen activities. We present Zero-Fi, a contrastive signal-language alignment framework for zero-shot Wi-Fi-based human activity recognition. Zero-Fi learns unified representations from complementary Wi-Fi signal features and aligns them with the semantic representations of natural-language activity descriptions in a shared embedding space. This cross-modal alignment enables Zero-Fi to recognize new activity classes without requiring labeled Wi-Fi samples or model adaptation for those classes. Experiments on large-scale public benchmark datasets demonstrate effective zero-shot recognition of held-out activity classes, highlighting the potential of signal-language alignment to extend Wi-Fi sensing beyond predefined activity classes.