We examine whether human psychometric questionnaires can serve as reliable tools for characterizing and predicting LLM behavior in everyday user interactions. We analyze eight open-source LLMs by comparing their value and personality profiles derived from two different methods: Likert self-reports on established questionnaires (PVQ-40/21 and BFI-44/10) and generation probabilities over value-laden responses to everyday user queries. The two profiles diverge substantially. Within-construct item consistency, often cited as evidence of stable LLM dispositions, disappears in generation probabilities. We find that established questionnaire items contain explicit lexical cues that allow models to recognize the target construct and respond in alignment-consistent, socially desirable ways, whereas realistic user queries contain far less recognizable cues. In addition, demographic persona prompts shift models' responses to human questionnaires in ways consistent with real human patterns, but no such shifts appear in the generation setting, highlighting that human questionnaires overestimate LLMs' ability to faithfully reproduce expected psychological traits when role-playing demographic personas. Overall, our study indicates that questionnaire scores alone should not be treated as evidence of LLMs' response tendencies in realistic user interactions, and supports generation-probability profiling with ecologically valid items as a complementary behavioral measure.
Woojung Song, Dongmin Choi, Yoonah Park et al.· 0 citations
Wildlife field operations demand efficient parallel deployment methods to identify and interact with specific individuals, enabling simultaneous collective behavioral analysis, and health and safety interventions. Previous robotics solutions approach the problem from the herd perspective, or are manually operated and limited in scale. We propose a decentralized vision-based multi-quadrotor system for wildlife monitoring that is scalable, low-bandwidth, and sensor-minimal (single onboard RGB camera). Our approach enables robust identification and tracking of large species in their natural habitat. We develop novel vision-based coordination and tracking algorithms designed for dynamic, unstructured environments without reliance on centralized communication or control. We validate our system through real-world experiments, demonstrating reliable deployment in diverse field conditions.
Makram Chahine, William Yang, Alaa Maalouf et al.· 0 citations
Computer-using agents (CUAs), which can autonomously control computers to perform multi-step actions, might pose significant safety risks if misused. However, existing benchmarks mainly evaluate LMs in chatbots or simple tool use. To more comprehensively evaluate CUAs' misuse risks, we introduce a new benchmark: CUAHarm. CUAHarm consists of 104 expert-written realistic misuse risks, such as disabling firewalls, leaking data, or installing backdoors. We provide a sandbox with rule-based verifiable rewards to measure CUAs' success rates in executing these tasks (e.g., whether the firewall is indeed disabled), beyond refusal rates. We evaluate frontier LMs including GPT-5, Claude 4 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Llama-3.3-70B, and Mistral Large 2. Even without jailbreaking prompts, these frontier LMs comply with executing these malicious tasks at a high success rate (e.g., 90% for Gemini 2.5 Pro). Furthermore, while newer models are safer in previous safety benchmarks, their misuse risks as CUAs become even higher, e.g., Gemini 2.5 Pro is riskier than Gemini 1.5 Pro. Additionally, while these LMs are robust to common malicious prompts (e.g., creating a bomb) when acting as chatbots, they could still act unsafely as CUAs. We further evaluate a leading agentic framework (UI-TARS-1.5) and find that while it improves performance, it also amplifies misuse risks. To mitigate the misuse risks of CUAs, we explore using LMs to monitor CUAs' actions. We find monitoring unsafe computer-using actions is significantly harder than monitoring conventional unsafe chatbot responses. While monitoring chain-of-thoughts leads to modest gains, the average monitoring accuracy is only 77%. A hierarchical summarization strategy improves performance by up to 13%, a promising direction though monitoring remains unreliable. CUAHarm is released at https://github.com/db-ol/CUAHarm to facilitate further research.
The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in medicine has enabled impressive capabilities, yet a critical gap remains in their ability to perform systematic, transparent, and verifiable reasoning, a cornerstone of clinical practice. This has catalyzed a shift from single-step answer generation to the development of LLMs explicitly designed for medical reasoning. This paper provides the first systematic review of this emerging field. We propose a taxonomy of reasoning enhancement techniques, categorized into training-time strategies (e.g., supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning) and test-time mechanisms (e.g., prompt engineering, multi-agent systems). We analyze how these techniques are applied across different data modalities (text, image, code) and in key clinical applications such as diagnosis, education, and treatment planning. Furthermore, we survey the evolution of evaluation benchmarks from simple accuracy metrics to sophisticated assessments of reasoning quality and visual interpretability. Based on an analysis of 60 seminal studies from 2022-2025, we conclude by identifying critical challenges, including the faithfulness-plausibility gap and the need for native multimodal reasoning, and outlining future directions toward building efficient, robust, and sociotechnically responsible medical AI.
Zizhan Ma, Wenxuan Wang, Meidan Ding et al.· 0 citations
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Synthetic data generation is increasingly used in machine learning for training and data augmentation. Yet, current strategies often rely on external foundation models or datasets, whose usage is restricted in many scenarios due to policy or legal constraints. We propose ScoreMix, a self-contained synthetic generation method to produce hard synthetic samples for recognition tasks by leveraging the score compositionality of diffusion models. The approach mixes class-conditioned scores along reverse diffusion trajectories, yielding domain-specific data augmentation without external resources. We systematically study class-selection strategies and find that mixing classes distant in the discriminator's embedding space yields larger gains, providing up to 3% additional average improvement, compared to selection based on proximity. Interestingly, we observe that condition and embedding spaces are largely uncorrelated under standard alignment metrics, and the generator's condition space has a negligible effect on downstream performance. Across 8 public face recognition benchmarks, ScoreMix improves accuracy by up to 7 percentage points, without hyperparameter search, highlighting both robustness and practicality. Our method provides a simple yet effective way to maximize discriminator performance using only the available dataset, without reliance on third-party resources. Paper website: https://parsa-ra.github.io/scoremix/.
Rapid advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have generated growing interest in their application to autonomous driving. A prevailing assumption is that successive VLM generations will continually improve driving performance and eventually outperform state-of-the-art methods. To systematically examine this assumption, we introduce LightEMMA, a longitudinal framework for evaluating the autonomous driving performance of VLMs. LightEMMA uses a lightweight, unified evaluation protocol that assesses each model's intrinsic driving capability without model-specific fine-tuning, architectural changes, or prompt engineering. Using this protocol, we evaluate 15 models from five major families on the challenging nuScenes prediction benchmark. Empirical findings show that, despite increased model scale and enhanced general reasoning capabilities, successive VLM generations do not consistently achieve better driving performance. Further analysis of driving scenarios reveals recurring failure modes, including overreliance on historical actions and difficulty reconciling conflicting visual cues. These findings highlight the need for domain-specific adaptation to improve the safety of VLM-based autonomous driving systems. The source code is available at https://github.com/michigan-traffic-lab/LightEMMA.
Zhijie Qiao, Haowei Li, Zhong Cao et al.· 0 citations
Sionna is an open-source, GPU-accelerated library that, as of version 0.14, incorporates a ray tracer, Sionna RT, for simulating radio wave propagation. A unique feature of Sionna RT is differentiability, enabling the calculation of gradients for the channel impulse responses (CIRs), radio maps, and other related metrics with respect to system and environmental parameters, such as material properties, antenna patterns, and array geometries. The release of Sionna 1.0 provided a complete overhaul of the ray tracer, significantly improving its speed, memory efficiency, and extensibility. This document details the algorithms employed by Sionna RT to simulate radio wave propagation efficiently, while also addressing their current limitations. Given that the computation of CIRs and radio maps requires distinct algorithms, these are detailed in separate sections. For CIRs, Sionna RT integrates shooting and bouncing of rays (SBR) with the image method and uses a hashing-based mechanism to efficiently eliminate duplicate paths. Radio maps are computed using a purely SBR-based approach for the non-diffracted component, complemented by a stage for diffracted paths.
Fay\c{c}al A\"it Aoudia, Jakob Hoydis, Merlin Nimier-David et al.· 0 citations
Existing LLM-based agents have achieved strong performance on held-in tasks, but their generalizability to unseen tasks remains poor. Hence, some recent work focus on fine-tuning the policy model with more diverse tasks to improve the generalizability. In this work, we find that finetuning a reward model to guide the policy model is more robust than directly finetuning the policy model. Based on this finding, we propose AgentRM, a generalizable reward model, to guide the policy model for effective test-time search. We comprehensively investigate three approaches to construct the reward model, including explicit reward modeling, implicit reward modeling and LLM-as-a-judge. We then use AgentRM to guide the answer generation with Best-of-N sampling and step-level beam search. On four types of nine agent tasks, AgentRM enhances the base policy model by $8.8$ points on average, surpassing the top general agent by $4.0$. Moreover, it demonstrates weak-to-strong generalization, yielding greater improvement of $12.6$ on LLaMA-3-70B policy model. As for the specializability, AgentRM can also boost a finetuned policy model and outperform the top specialized agent by $11.4$ on three held-in tasks. Further analysis verifies its effectiveness in test-time scaling. Codes will be released to facilitate the research in this area.
Yu Xia, Jingru Fan, Weize Chen et al.· 0 citations
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their potential in automating the scientific research ideation. Existing approaches primarily focus on prompting techniques, often producing ideas misaligned with expert standards - novelty, feasibility, and effectiveness, which are widely recognized by the research community as the three key subdimensions of high-quality ideas. Also, balancing these dimensions remains challenging due to their inherent trade-offs. To address these limitations, we propose the first framework that employs a two-stage approach combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and controllable Reinforcement Learning (RL) for the task. In the SFT stage, the model learns foundational patterns from pairs of research papers and their corresponding follow-up ideas. In the RL stage, multi-dimensional reward models guided by fine-grained feedback evaluate and optimize the model across key dimensions. During inference, dimensional controllers coordinated by a sentence-level decoder enable dynamic context-aware steering of the idea generation process. Our framework provides a balanced approach to research idea generation, achieving high-quality outcomes in the experiment by dynamically navigating the trade-offs among novelty, feasibility, and effectiveness.
Ruochen Li, Liqiang Jing, Chi Han et al.· 0 citations
The data market design problem is a problem in economic theory to find a set of signaling schemes (statistical experiments) to maximize expected revenue to the information seller, where each experiment reveals some of the information known to a seller and has a corresponding price [Bergemann et al., 2018]. Each buyer has their own decision to make in a world environment, and their subjective expected value for the information associated with a particular experiment comes from the improvement in this decision and depends on their prior and value for different outcomes. In a setting with multiple buyers, a buyer's expected value for an experiment may also depend on the information sold to others [Bonatti et al., 2022]. We introduce the application of deep learning for the design of revenue-optimal data markets, looking to expand the frontiers of what can be understood and achieved. Relative to earlier work on deep learning for auction design [D\"utting et al., 2023], we must learn signaling schemes rather than allocation rules and handle obedience constraints $-$ these arising from modeling the downstream actions of buyers $-$ in addition to incentive constraints on bids. Our experiments demonstrate that this new deep learning framework can almost precisely replicate all known solutions from theory, expand to more complex settings, and be used to establish the optimality of new designs for data markets and make conjectures in regard to the structure of optimal designs.
Sai Srivatsa Ravindranath, Yanchen Jiang, David C. Parkes· 0 citations
Omni-modal dialogue models can understand multimodal inputs and synthesize spoken replies, but a spoken answer still leaves the agent visually absent. We introduce \textbf{Ex-Omni-2D}, a framework that answers a multimodal query with coordinated text, personalized speech, and reference-conditioned video. The dialogue model first writes a structured \textit{Visual Thought Plan} (VTP) for scene, emotion, and motion, then generates the response text and multi-codebook speech units. These speech units are decoded into audio and aligned with video frames, giving the speech and avatar modules a common timing signal while allowing them to learn from different data sources. The video module is trained as a full-sequence Teacher conditioned on reference appearance, VTP semantics, and frame-aligned speech units. We further explore to distill it into a few-step block-causal \emph{Streaming Student}; its Prefix Streaming mechanism carries the previous clean latent into the next chunk and is analyzed as a partial mitigation for late-chunk subject drift. At $400\times720$/$720\times400$, the four-step four-GPU Student provides incremental output with lower startup latency than the full-sequence Teacher.
Haoyu Zhang, Zhipeng Li, Xiaoying Tang et al.· 0 citations
Large language models can answer scientific questions, yet a correct output does not reveal whether the model represents or uses the governing physics. Here, using three open-weight Gemma 4 models (google/gemma-4-E4B-it, google/gemma-4-12B-it, google/gemma-4-31B-it) we identify three experimentally separable signatures of materials-science mechanism information: selective concept readability, relational encoding of qualitative constitutive orientation, and causal, context-dependent control of constrained engineering answers. We combine matched direct and Jacobian vocabulary readouts, option-free state geometry, a 60-law counterfactual benchmark and causal interventions. In 50 held-out materials descriptions, three independently fitted Jacobian lenses reproduced concept ranks, and target-free word sets from both readouts enabled blinded identification of 9 of 10 mechanism families. A separate 72-prompt benchmark produced mechanism-specific hidden-state neighborhoods, but an exact graph audit showed that this apparent physical organization was equally explained by numerical comparison. We therefore compared otherwise identical prompts in which only the direction of the physical input was reversed, asking whether the resulting hidden-state movement followed the supplied constitutive law. These state transformations ordered direct, physically neutral and inverse laws across 60 frozen relations and correctly oriented 39 of 40 directional laws, whereas lexical controls were near chance. Bidirectional interventions shifted answer probabilities toward or away from the physically appropriate outcome across all 12 matched cases, while counterfactual state patches transferred opposing decision signals across mechanisms and answer formats. Physical relationships were therefore more visible in controlled state changes than in absolute states alone.
