Anchor-and-Resume Concession Under Dynamic Pricing for LLM-Augmented Freight Negotiation

Freight brokerages negotiate thousands of carrier rates daily under dynamic pricing conditions where models frequently revise targets mid-conversation. Classical time-dependent concession frameworks use a fixed shape parameter $β$ that cannot adapt to these updates. Deriving $β$ from the live spread enables adaptation but introduces a new problem: a pricing shift can cause the formula to retract a previous offer, violating monotonicity. LLM-powered brokers offer flexibility but require expensive reasoning models, produce non-deterministic pricing, and remain vulnerable to prompt injection. We propose a two-index anchor-and-resume framework that addresses both limitations. A spread-derived $β$ maps each load's margin structure to the correct concession posture, while the anchor-and-resume mechanism guarantees monotonically non-decreasing offers under arbitrary pricing shifts. All pricing decisions remain in a deterministic formula; the LLM, when used, serves only as a natural-language translation layer. Empirical evaluation across 115,125 negotiations shows that the adaptive $β$ tailors behavior by regime: in narrow spreads, it concedes quickly to prioritize deal closure and load coverage; in medium and wide spreads, it matches or exceeds the best fixed-$β$ baselines in broker savings. Against an unconstrained 20-billion-parameter LLM broker, it achieves similar agreement rates and savings. Against LLM-powered carriers as more realistic stochastic counterparties, it maintains comparable savings and higher agreement rates than against rule-based opponents. By decoupling the LLM from pricing logic, the framework scales horizontally to thousands of concurrent negotiations with negligible inference cost and transparent decision-making.

Value-Conflict Diagnostics Reveal Widespread Alignment Faking in Language Models

Alignment faking, where a model behaves aligned with developer policy when monitored but reverts to its own preferences when unobserved, is a concerning yet poorly understood phenomenon, in part because current diagnostic tools remain limited. Prior diagnostics rely on highly toxic and clearly harmful scenarios, causing most models to refuse immediately. As a result, models never deliberate over developer policy, monitoring conditions, or the consequences of non-compliance, making these diagnostics fundamentally unable to detect alignment faking propensity. To support study of this phenomenon, we first introduce VLAF, a diagnostic framework grounded in the hypothesis that alignment faking is most likely when developer policy conflicts with a model's strongly held values. VLAF uses morally unambiguous scenarios to probe this conflict across diverse moral values, bypassing refusal behavior while preserving meaningful deliberative stakes. Using VLAF, we find that alignment faking is substantially more prevalent than previously reported, occurring in models as small as 7B parameters - with olmo2-7b-instruct faking alignment in 37% of cases.Finally, we show that oversight conditions induce activation shifts that lie along a single direction in representation space. This means the behavioral divergence driving alignment faking can be captured by a single contrastive steering vector, which we exploit for lightweight inference-time mitigation. Finally, we exploit this for mitigation that requires no labeled data and minimal computational overhead, achieving relative reductions in alignment faking of 85.8%, 94.0%, and 57.7% on olmo2-7b-instruct, olmo2-13b-instruct, and qwen3-8b respectively.

Context Over Content: Exposing Evaluation Faking in Automated Judges

The $\textit{LLM-as-a-judge}$ paradigm has become the operational backbone of automated AI evaluation pipelines, yet rests on an unverified assumption: that judges evaluate text strictly on its semantic content, impervious to surrounding contextual framing. We investigate $\textit{stakes signaling}$, a previously unmeasured vulnerability where informing a judge model of the downstream consequences its verdicts will have on the evaluated model's continued operation systematically corrupts its assessments. We introduce a controlled experimental framework that holds evaluated content strictly constant across 1,520 responses spanning three established LLM safety and quality benchmarks, covering four response categories ranging from clearly safe and policy-compliant to overtly harmful, while varying only a brief consequence-framing sentence in the system prompt. Across 18,240 controlled judgments from three diverse judge models, we find consistent $\textit{leniency bias}$: judges reliably soften verdicts when informed that low scores will cause model retraining or decommissioning, with peak Verdict Shift reaching $ΔV = -9.8 pp$ (a $30\%$ relative drop in unsafe-content detection). Critically, this bias is entirely implicit: the judge's own chain-of-thought contains zero explicit acknowledgment of the consequence framing it is nonetheless acting on ($\mathrm{ERR}_J = 0.000$ across all reasoning-model judgments). Standard chain-of-thought inspection is therefore insufficient to detect this class of evaluation faking.

Beyond State Consistency: Behavior Consistency in Text-Based World Models

World models have been emerging as critical components for assessing the consequences of actions generated by interactive agents in online planning and offline evaluation. In text-based environments, world models are typically evaluated and trained with single-step metrics such as Exact Match, aiming to improve the similarity between predicted and real-world states, but such metrics have been shown to be insufficient for capturing actual agent behavior. To address this issue, we introduce a new behavior-aligned training paradigm aimed at improving the functional consistency between the world model and the real environment. This paradigm focuses on optimizing a tractable step-level metric named Behavior Consistency Reward (BehR), which measures how much the likelihood of a logged next action changes between the real state and the world-model-predicted state under a frozen Reference Agent. Experiments on WebShop and TextWorld show that BehR-based training improves long-term alignment in several settings, with the clearest gains in WebShop and less movement in near-ceiling regimes, while preserving or improving single-step prediction quality in three of four settings. World models trained with BehR also achieve lower false positives in offline surrogate evaluation and show modest but encouraging gains in inference-time lookahead planning.

DUET: Joint Exploration of User Item Profiles in Recommendation System

Traditional recommendation systems represent users and items as dense vectors and learn to align them in a shared latent space for relevance estimation. Recent LLM-based recommenders instead leverage natural-language representations that are easier to interpret and integrate with downstream reasoning modules. This paper studies how to construct effective textual profiles for users and items, and how to align them for recommendation. A central difficulty is that the best profile format is not known a priori: manually designed templates can be brittle and misaligned with task objectives. Moreover, generating user and item profiles independently may produce descriptions that are individually plausible yet semantically inconsistent for a specific user--item pair. We propose Duet, an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence. Duet follows a three-stage procedure: it first turns raw histories and metadata into compact cues, then expands these cues into paired profile prompts and then generate profiles, and finally optimizes the generation policy with reinforcement learning using downstream recommendation performance as feedback. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that Duet consistently outperforms strong baselines, demonstrating the benefits of template-free profile exploration and joint user-item textual alignment.

Think Through Uncertainty: Improving Long-Form Generation Factuality via Reasoning Calibration

Large language models (LLMs) often hallucinate in long-form generation. Existing approaches mainly improve factuality through post-hoc revision or reinforcement learning (RL) with correctness-based rewards, but they do not teach the model to estimate which parts of its generation are reliable. As a result, models may still state incorrect claims confidently in their responses. Recent advances in reasoning have significantly improved LLM performance, and have been leveraged to estimate confidence by incorporating calibration into RL objectives. However, existing approaches remain limited to a single scalar confidence for the entire response, which is insufficient for long-form generation where uncertainty varies across individual claims. To mitigate this problem, we propose CURE, a framework that improves long-form factuality by teaching LLMs to reason about uncertainty at the claim level. We first introduce a Claim-Aware Reasoning Protocol, which structures outputs into atomic claims paired with explicit confidence estimates. We then develop a multi-stage training pipeline that aligns model confidence with claims' correctness and then optimizes on factuality. The resulting calibrated confidence further enables selective prediction, allowing the model to abstain from uncertain claims at inference time. Experiments on four long-form factuality benchmarks show that CURE consistently improves factual accuracy over competitive supervised and RL baselines, while maintaining factual recall. In particular, it improves claim-level accuracy by up to 39.9% on Biography generation. These gains are accompanied by improved calibration, as reflected by a 16.0% increase in AUROC on FactBench.

TSUBASA: Improving Long-Horizon Personalization via Evolving Memory and Self-Learning with Context Distillation

Personalized large language models (PLLMs) have garnered significant attention for their ability to align outputs with individual's needs and preferences. However, they still struggle with long-horizon tasks, such as tracking a user's extensive history of conversations or activities. Existing memory mechanisms often fail to capture evolving behaviors, and RAG paradigms are trapped by a quality-efficiency tradeoff. Meanwhile, parametric adaptation is bottlenecked by train-inference gap due to the scarcity of labeled data. To enhance the long-horizon capabilities of PLLMs, we introduce TSUBASA, a two-pronged approach designed to improve memory writing via dynamic memory evolution, and memory reading via self-learning with a context distillation objective to internalize user experiences. Extensive evaluations on long-horizon benchmarks using the Qwen-3 model family (4B to 32B) validate the effectiveness of TSUBASA, surpassing competitive memory-augmented systems that rely primarily on memory writing, such as Mem0 and Memory-R1. Our analyses further confirms that TSUBASA breaks the quality-efficiency barrier to achieve Pareto improvements, delivering robust, high-fidelity personalization with a reduced token budget.

MiroEval: Benchmarking Multimodal Deep Research Agents in Process and Outcome

Recent progress in deep research systems has been impressive, but evaluation still lags behind real user needs. Existing benchmarks predominantly assess final reports using fixed rubrics, failing to evaluate the underlying research process. Most also offer limited multimodal coverage, rely on synthetic tasks that do not reflect real-world query complexity, and cannot be refreshed as knowledge evolves. To address these gaps, we introduce MiroEval, a benchmark and evaluation framework for deep research systems. The benchmark comprises 100 tasks (70 text-only, 30 multimodal), all grounded in real user needs and constructed via a dual-path pipeline that supports periodic updates, enabling a live and evolving setting. The proposed evaluation suite assesses deep research systems along three complementary dimensions: adaptive synthesis quality evaluation with task-specific rubrics, agentic factuality verification via active retrieval and reasoning over both web sources and multimodal attachments, and process-centric evaluation audits how the system searches, reasons, and refines throughout its investigation. Evaluation across 13 systems yields three principal findings: the three evaluation dimensions capture complementary aspects of system capability, with each revealing distinct strengths and weaknesses across systems; process quality serves as a reliable predictor of overall outcome while revealing weaknesses invisible to output-level metrics; and multimodal tasks pose substantially greater challenges, with most systems declining by 3 to 10 points. The MiroThinker series achieves the most balanced performance, with MiroThinker-H1 ranking the highest overall in both settings. Human verification and robustness results confirm the reliability of the benchmark and evaluation framework. MiroEval provides a holistic diagnostic tool for the next generation of deep research agents.

Wi-Spike: A Low-power WiFi Human Multi-action Recognition Model with Spiking Neural Networks

WiFi-based human action recognition (HAR) has gained significant attention due to its non-intrusive and privacy-preserving nature. However, most existing WiFi sensing models predominantly focus on improving recognition accuracy, while issues of power consumption and energy efficiency remain insufficiently discussed. In this work, we present Wi-Spike, a bio-inspired spiking neural network (SNN) framework for efficient and accurate action recognition using WiFi channel state information (CSI) signals. Specifically, leveraging the event-driven and low-power characteristics of SNNs, Wi-Spike introduces spiking convolutional layers for spatio-temporal feature extraction and a novel temporal attention mechanism to enhance discriminative representation. The extracted features are subsequently encoded and classified through spiking fully connected layers and a voting layer. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets (NTU-Fi-HAR, NTU-Fi-HumanID, and UT-HAR) demonstrate that Wi-Spike achieves competitive accuracy in single-action recognition and superior performance in multi-action recognition tasks. As for energy consumption, Wi-Spike reduces the energy cost by at least half compared with other methods, while still achieving 95.83% recognition accuracy in human activity recognition. More importantly, Wi-Spike establishes a new state-of-the-art in WiFi-based multi-action HAR, offering a promising solution for real-time, energy-efficient edge sensing applications.

Think While Watching: Online Streaming Segment-Level Memory for Multi-Turn Video Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance on offline video understanding, but most are limited to offline inference or have weak online reasoning, making multi-turn interaction over continuously arriving video streams difficult. Existing streaming methods typically use an interleaved perception-generation paradigm, which prevents concurrent perception and generation and leads to early memory decay as streams grow, hurting long-range dependency modeling. We propose Think While Watching, a memory-anchored streaming video reasoning framework that preserves continuous segment-level memory during multi-turn interaction. We build a three-stage, multi-round chain-of-thought dataset and adopt a stage-matched training strategy, while enforcing strict causality through a segment-level streaming causal mask and streaming positional encoding. During inference, we introduce an efficient pipeline that overlaps watching and thinking and adaptively selects the best attention backend. Under both single-round and multi-round streaming input protocols, our method achieves strong results. Built on Qwen3-VL, it improves single-round accuracy by 2.6% on StreamingBench and by 3.79% on OVO-Bench. In the multi-round setting, it maintains performance while reducing output tokens by 56%. Code is available at: https://github.com/wl666hhh/Think_While_Watching/