MonitorBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Chain-of-Thought Monitorability in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) can generate chains of thought (CoTs) that are not always causally responsible for their final outputs. When such a mismatch occurs, the CoT no longer faithfully reflects the actual reasons (i.e., decision-critical factors) driving the model's behavior, leading to the reduced CoT monitorability problem. However, a comprehensive and fully open-source benchmark for thoroughly evaluating CoT monitorability remains lacking. To address this gap, we propose MonitorBench, a systematic benchmark for evaluating CoT monitorability in LLMs. MonitorBench provides: (1) a diverse set of 1,514 test instances with carefully designed decision-critical factors across 19 tasks spanning 7 categories to characterize \textit{when} CoTs can be used to monitor the factors driving LLM behavior; and (2) two stress-test settings to quantify \textit{the extent to which} CoT monitorability can be degraded. Extensive experiments across multiple popular LLMs with varying capabilities show that CoT monitorability is higher when the decision-critical factors shape the intermediate reasoning process without merely influencing the final answer. More capable LLMs tend to exhibit lower monitorability. And all evaluated LLMs can intentionally reduce monitorability under stress-tests, with monitorability dropping by up to 30\% in some tasks that do not require structural reasoning over the decision-critical factors. Overall, MonitorBench provides a basis for further research on evaluating future LLMs, studying advanced stress-test monitorability techniques, and developing new monitoring approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/ASTRAL-Group/MonitorBench.

SDF-Net: Structure-Aware Disentangled Feature Learning for Opticall-SAR Ship Re-identification

Cross-modal ship re-identification (ReID) between optical and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery is fundamentally challenged by the severe radiometric discrepancy between passive optical imaging and coherent active radar sensing. While existing approaches primarily rely on statistical distribution alignment or semantic matching, they often overlook a critical physical prior: ships are rigid objects whose geometric structures remain stable across sensing modalities, whereas texture appearance is highly modality-dependent. In this work, we propose SDF-Net, a Structure-Aware Disentangled Feature Learning Network that systematically incorporates geometric consistency into optical--SAR ship ReID. Built upon a ViT backbone, SDF-Net introduces a structure consistency constraint that extracts scale-invariant gradient energy statistics from intermediate layers to robustly anchor representations against radiometric variations. At the terminal stage, SDF-Net disentangles the learned representations into modality-invariant identity features and modality-specific characteristics. These decoupled cues are then integrated through a parameter-free additive residual fusion, effectively enhancing discriminative power. Extensive experiments on the HOSS-ReID dataset demonstrate that SDF-Net consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. The code and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/cfrfree/SDF-Net.

Scaling Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials with Mixtures of Experts

Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials (MLIPs) enable accurate large-scale atomistic simulations, yet improving their expressive capacity efficiently remains challenging. Here we systematically develop Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and Mixture-of-Linear-Experts (MoLE) architectures for MLIPs and analyze the effects of routing strategies and expert designs. We show that sparse activation combined with shared experts yields substantial performance gains, and that nonlinear MoE formulations outperform MoLE when shared experts are present, underscoring the importance of nonlinear expert specialization. Furthermore, element-wise routing consistently surpasses configuration-level routing, while global MoE routing often leads to numerical instability. The resulting element-wise MoE model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy across the OMol25, OMat24, and OC20M benchmarks. Analysis of routing patterns reveals chemically interpretable expert specialization aligned with periodic-table trends, indicating that the model effectively captures element-specific chemical characteristics for precise interatomic modeling.

OmniOCR: Generalist OCR for Ethnic Minority Languages

Optical character recognition (OCR) has advanced rapidly with deep learning and multimodal models, yet most methods focus on well-resourced scripts such as Latin and Chinese. Ethnic minority languages remain underexplored due to complex writing systems, scarce annotations, and diverse historical and modern forms, making generalization in low-resource or zero-shot settings challenging. To address these challenges, we present OmniOCR, a universal framework for ethnic minority scripts. OmniOCR introduces Dynamic Low-Rank Adaptation (Dynamic LoRA) to allocate model capacity across layers and scripts, enabling effective adaptation while preserving knowledge.A sparsity regularization prunes redundant updates, ensuring compact and efficient adaptation without extra inference cost. Evaluations on TibetanMNIST, Shui, ancient Yi, and Dongba show that OmniOCR outperforms zero-shot foundation models and standard post training, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy with superior parameter efficiency, and compared with the state-of-the-art baseline models, it improves accuracy by 39%-66% on these four datasets. Code: https://github.com/AIGeeksGroup/OmniOCR.

City Editing: Hierarchical Agentic Execution for Dependency-Aware Urban Geospatial Modification

As cities evolve over time, challenges such as traffic congestion and functional imbalance increasingly necessitate urban renewal through efficient modification of existing plans, rather than complete re-planning. In practice, even minor urban changes require substantial manual effort to redraw geospatial layouts, slowing the iterative planning and decision-making procedure. Motivated by recent advances in agentic systems and multimodal reasoning, we formulate urban renewal as a machine-executable task that iteratively modifies existing urban plans represented in structured geospatial formats. More specifically, we represent urban layouts using GeoJSON and decompose natural-language editing instructions into hierarchical geometric intents spanning polygon-, line-, and point-level operations. To coordinate interdependent edits across spatial elements and abstraction levels, we propose a hierarchical agentic framework that jointly performs multi-level planning and execution with explicit propagation of intermediate spatial constraints. We further introduce an iterative execution-validation mechanism that mitigates error accumulation and enforces global spatial consistency during multi-step editing. Extensive experiments across diverse urban editing scenarios demonstrate significant improvements in efficiency, robustness, correctness, and spatial validity over existing baselines.

Fusing Pixels and Genes: Spatially-Aware Learning in Computational Pathology

Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in multimodal learning within computational pathology. Existing models primarily rely on vision and language modalities; however, language alone lacks molecular specificity and offers limited pathological supervision, leading to representational bottlenecks. In this paper, we propose STAMP, a Spatial Transcriptomics-Augmented Multimodal Pathology representation learning framework that integrates spatially-resolved gene expression profiles to enable molecule-guided joint embedding of pathology images and transcriptomic data. Our study shows that self-supervised, gene-guided training provides a robust and task-agnostic signal for learning pathology image representations. Incorporating spatial context and multi-scale information further enhances model performance and generalizability. To support this, we constructed SpaVis-6M, the largest Visium-based spatial transcriptomics dataset to date, and trained a spatially-aware gene encoder on this resource. Leveraging hierarchical multi-scale contrastive alignment and cross-scale patch localization mechanisms, STAMP effectively aligns spatial transcriptomics with pathology images, capturing spatial structure and molecular variation. We validate STAMP across six datasets and four downstream tasks, where it consistently achieves strong performance. These results highlight the value and necessity of integrating spatially resolved molecular supervision for advancing multimodal learning in computational pathology. The code is included in the supplementary materials. The pretrained weights and SpaVis-6M are available at: https://github.com/Hanminghao/STAMP.

Multimodal Fact-Level Attribution for Verifiable Reasoning

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly used for real-world tasks involving multi-step reasoning and long-form generation, where reliability requires grounding model outputs in heterogeneous input sources and verifying individual factual claims. However, existing multimodal grounding benchmarks and evaluation methods focus on simplified, observation-based scenarios or limited modalities and fail to assess attribution in complex multimodal reasoning. We introduce MuRGAt (Multimodal Reasoning with Grounded Attribution), a benchmark for evaluating fact-level multimodal attribution in settings that require reasoning beyond direct observation. Given inputs spanning video, audio, and other modalities, MuRGAt requires models to generate answers with explicit reasoning and precise citations, where each citation specifies both modality and temporal segments. To enable reliable assessment, we introduce an automatic evaluation framework that strongly correlates with human judgments. Benchmarking with human and automated scores reveals that even strong MLLMs frequently hallucinate citations despite correct reasoning. Moreover, we observe a key trade-off: increasing reasoning depth or enforcing structured grounding often degrades accuracy, highlighting a significant gap between internal reasoning and verifiable attribution.

Compressed BC-LISTA via Low-Rank Convolutional Decomposition

We study Sparse Signal Recovery (SSR) methods for multichannel imaging with compressed {forward and backward} operators that preserve reconstruction accuracy. We propose a Compressed Block-Convolutional (C-BC) measurement model based on a low-rank Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) decomposition that is analytically initialized from a low-rank factorization of physics-derived forward/backward operators in time delay-based measurements. We use Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) to select a compact set of basis filters from the analytic model and compute linear mixing coefficients to approximate the full model. We consider the Learned Iterative Shrinkage-Thresholding Algorithm (LISTA) network as a representative example for which the C-BC-LISTA extension is presented. In simulated multichannel ultrasound imaging across multiple Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNRs), C-BC-LISTA requires substantially fewer parameters and smaller model size than other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods while improving reconstruction accuracy. In ablations over OMP, Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-based, and random initializations, OMP-initialized structured compression performs best, yielding the most efficient training and the best performance.

StreamSense: Streaming Social Task Detection with Selective Vision-Language Model Routing

Live streaming platforms require real-time monitoring and reaction to social signals, utilizing partial and asynchronous evidence from video, text, and audio. We propose StreamSense, a streaming detector that couples a lightweight streaming encoder with selective routing to a Vision-Language Model (VLM) expert. StreamSense handles most timestamps with the lightweight streaming encoder, escalates hard/ambiguous cases to the VLM, and defers decisions when context is insufficient. The encoder is trained using (i) a cross-modal contrastive term to align visual/audio cues with textual signals, and (ii) an IoU-weighted loss that down-weights poorly overlapping target segments, mitigating label interference across segment boundaries. We evaluate StreamSense on multiple social streaming detection tasks (e.g., sentiment classification and hate content moderation), and the results show that StreamSense achieves higher accuracy than VLM-only streaming while only occasionally invoking the VLM, thereby reducing average latency and compute. Our results indicate that selective escalation and deferral are effective primitives for understanding streaming social tasks. Code is publicly available on GitHub.

How do Visual Attributes Influence Web Agents? A Comprehensive Evaluation of User Interface Design Factors

Web agents have demonstrated strong performance on a wide range of web-based tasks. However, existing research on the effect of environmental variation has mostly focused on robustness to adversarial attacks, with less attention to agents' preferences in benign scenarios. Although early studies have examined how textual attributes influence agent behavior, a systematic understanding of how visual attributes shape agent decision-making remains limited. To address this, we introduce VAF, a controlled evaluation pipeline for quantifying how webpage Visual Attribute Factors influence web-agent decision-making. Specifically, VAF consists of three stages: (i) variant generation, which ensures the variants share identical semantics as the original item while only differ in visual attributes; (ii) browsing interaction, where agents navigate the page via scrolling and clicking the interested item, mirroring how human users browse online; (iii) validating through both click action and reasoning from agents, which we use the Target Click Rate and Target Mention Rate to jointly evaluate the effect of visual attributes. By quantitatively measuring the decision-making difference between the original and variant, we identify which visual attributes influence agents' behavior most. Extensive experiments, across 8 variant families (48 variants total), 5 real-world websites (including shopping, travel, and news browsing), and 4 representative web agents, show that background color contrast, item size, position, and card clarity have a strong influence on agents' actions, whereas font styling, text color, and item image clarity exhibit minor effects.