DualEval: Joint Model-Item Calibration for Unified LLM Evaluation

Current LLM evaluation relies on two complementary but often disconnected signals: static benchmarks with objective correctness labels and arena-style preference data that better reflect open-ended user interactions. We introduce DualEval, a latent model-item calibration framework that represents models and evaluation items in a shared space, jointly estimating model ability together with item difficulty and sharpness. We apply DualEval across four domains: coding, math, miscellaneous domain-knowledge tasks, and generic everyday user queries. Our evaluation uses 18 frontier LLMs, static benchmark labels, and reward-model scores validated against held-out human preferences for open-ended model responses. Empirically, our framework produces reliable and balanced model rankings, and its learned item-level profiles support downstream applications such as benchmark compression for sample-efficient evaluation and anomaly detection for contamination or outlier analysis. Overall, DualEval unifies static and arena-style evaluation through joint model-item calibration, producing model rankings and item-level diagnostics that support more sample-efficient, interpretable, and auditable evaluation pipelines.

World Engine: Towards the Era of Post-Training for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous vehicles must operate safely in the real world, where errors can have severe consequences. Although modern end-to-end driving policies excel in routine scenarios, their reliability is limited by the scarcity of safety-critical ``long-tail'' events in real driving datasets. These rare interactions define the practical safety boundary of the learned policy, yet they are difficult to collect at scale in the real world. Here we show that this fundamental limitation can be addressed by post-training pre-trained driving models on synthesized high-stakes interactions. We introduce World Engine, a generative framework that reconstructs high-fidelity interactive environments from real-world logs and systematically extrapolates them into realistic safety-critical variations. This paradigm enables reinforcement-based post-training to align policies with safety constraints, circumventing the physical risks inherent in real-world exploration. On a public benchmark built on nuPlan, World Engine substantially reduces failures in rare safety-critical scenarios and yields significantly larger gains than scaling pre-training data alone. Furthermore, when deployed on a production-scale autonomous driving system, the resulting policy reduces simulated collisions and demonstrates measurable improvements in on-road testing, showing that post-training on synthesized, safety-critical interactions offers a scalable and effective pathway to safer autonomous driving. The full codebase suite, including training, is released to the public.

RoboNaldo: Accurate, Stable and Powerful Humanoid Soccer Shooting via Motion-Guided Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

Elite humanoid soccer shooting requires whole-body stability, high-impulse whole-body interactions, and accuracy to targets. Motion tracking-driven reinforcement learning (RL) provides stability in whole-body movement coordination, but a fixed reference makes it hard to adapt to varied ball positions and strike timings; in contrast, task reward-driven RL struggles to explore and discover valid kicks from scratch. We therefore introduce RoboNaldo, a three-stage motion-guided curriculum RL framework for high-impulse humanoid interaction. A single human-kick reference is used as a scaffold and progressively shifts optimization towards shooting performance. The curriculum first learns a stable whole-body kicking prior, then adapts the kick to free-kick settings where the ball is stationary at random positions, and finally extends it to moving-ball shooting through a locomotion-command and kick-trigger interface. A high-level heuristic planner controls this interface during training, while alternative high-level controllers can drive the same low-level policy at inference. In simulation, RoboNaldo demonstrates free-kick shot error 48.6% lower and shoot velocity 2.96x than prior work baselines. In real world on a Unitree G1 with onboard perception, RoboNaldo attains 0.73 m and 0.86 m average target shooting error from 3 m away in free-kick and moving-ball cases, accordingly. And the post-contact ball velocity reaches 13.10 m/s, which is 59-71% of reported professional open-play shot speed. Project page: $\href{https://opendrivelab.com/RoboNaldo}{\text{opendrivelab.com/RoboNaldo}}$.

Not All Synthetic Data Is Yours to Learn From

Can a language model improve from plain text sampled from itself, with no prompts, no teacher, no verifier, and no reward model? Yes, but only when the synthetic corpus is compatible with the student, a relational property of the source-student pair rather than an intrinsic property of the data. We call this the latent capability resurfacing hypothesis: weak self-training can amplify capabilities already present in the pretrained model, but only under this compatibility condition. We study this in the minimal setting of prompt-free unconditional self-training, where base language models are fine-tuned on text generated from the BOS token alone, with no task specification or external supervision. We report three findings. First, synthetic utility is relational rather than intrinsic: self-generated data is the most effective source, same-lineage transfer outperforms stronger but differently trained sources, and cross-family transfer is substantially weaker. Second, common intrinsic proxies fail: neither benchmark-level semantic similarity nor average per-token likelihood under the student predicts which corpora help. Third, this regime produces a surprising byproduct. In controlled Pythia experiments, capability and verbatim memorization decouple: benchmark utility is preserved or improved while held-out exact-match extraction drops by over 95 percent, with no forget set, privacy objective, or targeted unlearning. Together, these results suggest that prompt-free self-training works by amplifying what the student already knows, not by importing structure from the data. They also reveal a regime in which capability and verbatim memorization can be separated without any explicit unlearning objective.

Configurable Reward Model for Balanced Safety Alignment

Aligning large language models (LLMs) to heterogeneous and rapidly evolving safety requirements remains a critical challenge. Existing instruction-tuned LLMs and standalone safety classifiers often fail to generalize to new safety configurations, motivating the need for Reward Models (RMs) that are explicitly configurable to changing specifications. We introduce the Configurable Safety Reward Model (CSRM), which is jointly optimized for calibrated safety compliance and reward modeling. Our approach is supported by configuration-targeted data augmentation that enforces instruction adherence while preserving relative severity structure. The resulting RM is sensitive to fine-grained safety configurations and conversational nuances, substantially improving generalization to previously unseen safety configurations. CSRM achieves state-of-the-art performance on recent configurable safety benchmarks, including CoSApien (94.6% F1) and DynaBench (75.8% F1), without requiring additional human annotation. When used for downstream safety alignment, CSRM yields LLMs with a significantly improved helpfulness-safety tradeoff compared to existing baselines.

Deconstructing Spatial Complexity: Hierarchical Decomposition for LLM Spatial Reasoning

LLMs have shown remarkable proficiency in general language understanding and reasoning. However, they consistently underperform in spatial reasoning that severely limits their application, particularly in embodied intelligence. Inspired by the success of hierarchical reinforcement learning, this paper introduces a novel method for hierarchical task decomposition in LLM spatial reasoning. Our approach guides LLMs to decompose complex tasks into manageable sub-tasks by identifying key intermediate states and generating simplified sub-environments. However, we identify that LLMs often fail to derive optimal intermediate states due to their insufficient spatial prior, leading to sub-optimal task decomposition. To address this limitation and enhance its planning capability, we propose the MCTS-Guided Group Relative Policy Optimization (M-GRPO), where we reformulate the UCT formula by incorporating the LLM's prior predictive probabilities alongside its epistemic uncertainty. Furthermore, we implement a more fine-grained advantage function, enabling the model to learn optimal path planning. Experimental results demonstrate that our method substantially improves LLM performance on spatial tasks, including navigation, planning, and strategic games, achieving state-of-the-art results. This work paves the way for LLMs in real-world applications.

Capture-Calibrate-Coach: A Graph-Based Framework for Knowledge Monitoring Estimation and Adaptive Feedback

Effective learning support requires understanding not only what learners know but also how accurately they perceive their own understanding. This metacognitive dimension, known as knowledge monitoring, fundamentally influences self-regulated learning, yet this dimension remains underexplored in current systems. This paper introduces the Capture-Calibrate-Coach (3C) framework for adaptive learning support. The Capture phase extracts learners' perceived knowledge states from open-ended self-reports to construct a heterogeneous graph linking learners and knowledge concepts. The Calibrate phase applies a heterogeneous graph neural network to infer latent perceived states for concepts not explicitly mentioned, enabling systematic knowledge monitoring assessment. The Coach phase classifies learners into five metacognitive patterns and delivers personalized feedback addressing both knowledge gaps and calibration errors. Evaluation with 684 students demonstrates 85.21% AUC in predicting latent perceived states, significantly outperforming baseline methods. A user study with 47 participants shows positive reception of feedback quality, with participants particularly valuing concrete feedback on knowledge gaps and actionable study guidance. These findings advance AI-based learning support toward metacognitive teammates that foster accurate self-awareness while supporting knowledge growth.

InsightTok: Improving Text and Face Fidelity in Discrete Tokenization for Autoregressive Image Generation

Text and faces are among the most perceptually salient and practically important patterns in visual generation, yet they remain challenging for autoregressive generators built on discrete tokenization. A central bottleneck is the tokenizer: aggressive downsampling and quantization often discard the fine-grained structures needed to preserve readable glyphs and distinctive facial features. We attribute this gap to standard discrete-tokenizer objectives being weakly aligned with text legibility and facial fidelity, as these objectives typically optimize generic reconstruction while compressing diverse content uniformly. To address this, we propose InsightTok, a simple yet effective discrete visual tokenization framework that enhances text and face fidelity through localized, content-aware perceptual losses. With a compact 16k codebook and a 16x downsampling rate, InsightTok significantly outperforms prior tokenizers in text and face reconstruction without compromising general reconstruction quality. These gains consistently transfer to autoregressive image generation in InsightAR, producing images with clearer text and more faithful facial details. Overall, our results highlight the potential of specialized supervision in tokenizer training for advancing discrete image generation.

RecGPT-Mobile: On-Device Large Language Models for User Intent Understanding in Taobao Feed Recommendation

Predicting a user's next search query from recent interaction behaviors is a critical problem in modern e-commerce systems, particularly in scenarios where user intent evolves rapidly. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong semantic reasoning capabilities and have recently been adopted to enhance training data construction for next-query prediction. However, due to resource constraints on mobile devices, existing applications are deployed on cloud servers, resulting in high inference costs. In this paper, we propose RecGPT-Mobile, a framework that designs a lightweight LLM-based intent understanding agent to improve recommendation quality in mobile e-commerce scenarios. By deploying LLMs directly on mobile devices, our approach can capture evolving interests of users more quickly and adjust the recommendation results in real time. Extensive offline analyses and online experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves the accuracy of recommendation results, laying a practical path for LLM deployment in production-scale recommendation systems on mobile devices, as well as a scalable solution for integrating LLMs into real-world next-query prediction systems.

Causality-Encoded Diffusion Models for Interventional Sampling and Edge Inference

Standard diffusion models are flexible estimators of complex distributions, but they do not encode causal structures and therefore do not by themselves support causal analysis. We propose a causality-encoded diffusion framework that incorporates a known directed acyclic graph by training conditional diffusion models consistent with the graph factorisation. The resulting sampler approximately recovers the observational distribution and enables interventional sampling by fixing intervened variables while propagating effects through the graph during reverse diffusion. Building on this interventional simulator, we develop a resampling-based test for directed edges that generates null replicates under a candidate graph. We establish convergence guarantees for observational and interventional distribution estimation, with rates governed by the maximum local dimension rather than the ambient dimension, and prove asymptotic control of type I error for the edge test. Simulations show improved interventional distribution recovery relative to baselines, with near-nominal size and favourable power in inference. An application to flow cytometry data demonstrates practical utility of the proposed method in assessing disputed signalling linkages.