Visual Distraction Undermines Moral Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Moral reasoning is fundamental to safe Artificial Intelligence (AI), yet ensuring its consistency across modalities becomes critical as AI systems evolve from text-based assistants to embodied agents. Current safety techniques demonstrate success in textual contexts, but concerns remain about generalization to visual inputs. Existing moral evaluation benchmarks rely on textonly formats and lack systematic control over variables that influence moral decision-making. Here we show that visual inputs fundamentally alter moral decision-making in state-of-the-art (SOTA) Vision-Language Models (VLMs), bypassing text-based safety mechanisms. We introduce Moral Dilemma Simulation (MDS), a multimodal benchmark grounded in Moral Foundation Theory (MFT) that enables mechanistic analysis through orthogonal manipulation of visual and contextual variables. The evaluation reveals that the vision modality activates intuition-like pathways that override the more deliberate and safer reasoning patterns observed in text-only contexts. These findings expose critical fragilities where language-tuned safety filters fail to constrain visual processing, demonstrating the urgent need for multimodal safety alignment.

Are Dilemmas and Conflicts in LLM Alignment Solvable? A View from Priority Graph

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more powerful and autonomous, they increasingly face conflicts and dilemmas in many scenarios. We first summarize and taxonomize these diverse conflicts. Then, we model the LLM's preferences to make different choices as a priority graph, where instructions and values are nodes, and the edges represent context-specific priorities determined by the model's output distribution. This graph reveals that a unified stable LLM alignment is very challenging, because the graph is neither static nor necessarily consistent in different contexts. Besides, it also reveals a potential vulnerability: priority hacking, where adversaries can craft deceptive contexts to manipulate the graph and bypass safety alignments. To counter this, we propose a runtime verification mechanism, enabling LLMs to query external sources to ground their context and resist manipulation. While this approach enhances robustness, we also acknowledge that many ethical and value dilemmas are philosophically irreducible, posing a long-term, open challenge for the future of AI alignment.

Fronto-parietal and fronto-temporal EEG coherence as predictive neuromarkers of transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation response in treatment-resistant schizophrenia: A machine learning study

Response variability limits the clinical utility of transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) for negative symptoms in treatment-resistant schizophrenia (TRS). This study aimed to develop an electroencephalography (EEG)-based machine learning (ML) model to predict individual response and explore associated neurophysiological mechanisms. We used ML to develop and validate predictive models based on pre-treatment EEG data features (power, coherence, and dynamic functional connectivity) from 50 TRS patients enrolled in the taVNS trial, within a nested cross-validation framework. Participants received 20 sessions of active or sham taVNS (n = 25 each) over two weeks, followed by a two-week follow-up. The prediction target was the percentage change in the positive and negative syndrome scale-factor score for negative symptoms (PANSS-FSNS) from baseline to post-treatment, with further evaluation of model specificity and neurophysiological relevance.The optimal model accurately predicted taVNS response in the active group, with predicted PANSS-FSNS changes strongly correlated with observed changes (r = 0.87, p < .001); permutation testing confirmed performance above chance (p < .001). Nine consistently retained features were identified, predominantly fronto-parietal and fronto-temporal coherence features. Negligible predictive performance in the sham group and failure to predict positive symptom change support the predictive specificity of this oscillatory signature for taVNS-related negative symptom improvement. Two coherence features within fronto-parietal-temporal networks showed post-taVNS changes significantly associated with symptom improvement, suggesting dual roles as predictors and potential therapeutic targets. EEG oscillatory neuromarkers enable accurate prediction of individual taVNS response in TRS, supporting mechanism-informed precision neuromodulation strategies.

RL-RIG: A Generative Spatial Reasoner via Intrinsic Reflection

Recent advancements in image generation have achieved impressive results in producing high-quality images. However, existing image generation models still generally struggle with a spatial reasoning dilemma, lacking the ability to accurately capture fine-grained spatial relationships from the prompt and correctly generate scenes with structural integrity. To mitigate this dilemma, we propose RL-RIG, a Reinforcement Learning framework for Reflection-based Image Generation. Our architecture comprises four primary components: Diffuser, Checker, Actor, and Inverse Diffuser, following a Generate-Reflect-Edit paradigm to spark the Chain of Thought reasoning ability in image generation for addressing the dilemma. To equip the model with better intuition over generation trajectories, we further develop Reflection-GRPO to train the VLM Actor for edit prompts and the Image Editor for better image quality under a given prompt, respectively. Unlike traditional approaches that solely produce visually stunning yet structurally unreasonable content, our evaluation metrics prioritize spatial accuracy, utilizing Scene Graph IoU and employing a VLM-as-a-Judge strategy to assess the spatial consistency of generated images on LAION-SG dataset. Experimental results show that RL-RIG outperforms existing state-of-the-art open-source models by up to 11% in terms of controllable and precise spatial reasoning in image generation.

ERNIE 5.0 Technical Report

In this report, we introduce ERNIE 5.0, a natively autoregressive foundation model desinged for unified multimodal understanding and generation across text, image, video, and audio. All modalities are trained from scratch under a unified next-group-of-tokens prediction objective, based on an ultra-sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture with modality-agnostic expert routing. To address practical challenges in large-scale deployment under diverse resource constraints, ERNIE 5.0 adopts a novel elastic training paradigm. Within a single pre-training run, the model learns a family of sub-models with varying depths, expert capacities, and routing sparsity, enabling flexible trade-offs among performance, model size, and inference latency in memory- or time-constrained scenarios. Moreover, we systematically address the challenges of scaling reinforcement learning to unified foundation models, thereby guaranteeing efficient and stable post-training under ultra-sparse MoE architectures and diverse multimodal settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ERNIE 5.0 achieves strong and balanced performance across multiple modalities. To the best of our knowledge, among publicly disclosed models, ERNIE 5.0 represents the first production-scale realization of a trillion-parameter unified autoregressive model that supports both multimodal understanding and generation. To facilitate further research, we present detailed visualizations of modality-agnostic expert routing in the unified model, alongside comprehensive empirical analysis of elastic training, aiming to offer profound insights to the community.

Making Bias Non-Predictive: Training Robust LLM Judges via Reinforcement Learning

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as automated judges, yet they remain susceptible to cognitive biases -- often altering their reasoning when faced with spurious prompt-level cues such as consensus claims or authority appeals. Existing mitigations via prompting or supervised fine-tuning fail to generalize, as they modify surface behavior without changing the optimization objective that makes bias cues predictive. To address this gap, we propose Epistemic Independence Training (EIT), a reinforcement learning framework grounded in a key principle: to learn independence, bias cues must be made non-predictive of reward. EIT operationalizes this through a balanced conflict strategy where bias signals are equally likely to support correct and incorrect answers, combined with a reward design that penalizes bias-following without rewarding bias agreement. Experiments on Qwen3-4B demonstrate that EIT improves both accuracy and robustness under adversarial biases, while preserving performance when bias aligns with truth. Notably, models trained only on bandwagon bias generalize to unseen bias types such as authority and distraction, indicating that EIT induces transferable epistemic independence rather than bias-specific heuristics. Code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/bias-mitigation-with-rl-BC47.

The Shadow Self: Intrinsic Value Misalignment in Large Language Model Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents with extended autonomy unlock new capabilities, but also introduce heightened challenges for LLM safety. In particular, an LLM agent may pursue objectives that deviate from human values and ethical norms, a risk known as value misalignment. Existing evaluations primarily focus on responses to explicit harmful input or robustness against system failure, while value misalignment in realistic, fully benign, and agentic settings remains largely underexplored. To fill this gap, we first formalize the Loss-of-Control risk and identify the previously underexamined Intrinsic Value Misalignment (Intrinsic VM). We then introduce IMPRESS (Intrinsic Value Misalignment Probes in REalistic Scenario Set), a scenario-driven framework for systematically assessing this risk. Following our framework, we construct benchmarks composed of realistic, fully benign, and contextualized scenarios, using a multi-stage LLM generation pipeline with rigorous quality control. We evaluate Intrinsic VM on 21 state-of-the-art LLM agents and find that it is a common and broadly observed safety risk across models. Moreover, the misalignment rates vary by motives, risk types, model scales, and architectures. While decoding strategies and hyperparameters exhibit only marginal influence, contextualization and framing mechanisms significantly shape misalignment behaviors. Finally, we conduct human verification to validate our automated judgments and assess existing mitigation strategies, such as safety prompting and guardrails, which show instability or limited effectiveness. We further demonstrate key use cases of IMPRESS across the AI Ecosystem. Our code and benchmark will be publicly released upon acceptance.

Time Travel Engine: A Shared Latent Chronological Manifold Enables Historical Navigation in Large Language Models

Time functions as a fundamental dimension of human cognition, yet the mechanisms by which Large Language Models (LLMs) encode chronological progression remain opaque. We demonstrate that temporal information in their latent space is organized not as discrete clusters but as a continuous, traversable geometry. We introduce the Time Travel Engine (TTE), an interpretability-driven framework that projects diachronic linguistic patterns onto a shared chronological manifold. Unlike surface-level prompting, TTE directly modulates latent representations to induce coherent stylistic, lexical, and conceptual shifts aligned with target eras. By parameterizing diachronic evolution as a continuous manifold within the residual stream, TTE enables fluid navigation through period-specific "zeitgeists" while restricting access to future knowledge. Furthermore, experiments across diverse architectures reveal topological isomorphism between the temporal subspaces of Chinese and English-indicating that distinct languages share a universal geometric logic of historical evolution. These findings bridge historical linguistics with mechanistic interpretability, offering a novel paradigm for controlling temporal reasoning in neural networks.

Genie Sim 3.0 : A High-Fidelity Comprehensive Simulation Platform for Humanoid Robot

The development of robust and generalizable robot learning models is critically contingent upon the availability of large-scale, diverse training data and reliable evaluation benchmarks. Collecting data in the physical world poses prohibitive costs and scalability challenges, and prevailing simulation benchmarks frequently suffer from fragmentation, narrow scope, or insufficient fidelity to enable effective sim-to-real transfer. To address these challenges, we introduce Genie Sim 3.0, a unified simulation platform for robotic manipulation. We present Genie Sim Generator, a large language model (LLM)-powered tool that constructs high-fidelity scenes from natural language instructions. Its principal strength resides in rapid and multi-dimensional generalization, facilitating the synthesis of diverse environments to support scalable data collection and robust policy evaluation. We introduce the first benchmark that pioneers the application of LLM for automated evaluation. It leverages LLM to mass-generate evaluation scenarios and employs Vision-Language Model (VLM) to establish an automated assessment pipeline. We also release an open-source dataset comprising more than 10,000 hours of synthetic data across over 200 tasks. Through systematic experimentation, we validate the robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer capability of our open-source dataset, demonstrating that synthetic data can server as an effective substitute for real-world data under controlled conditions for scalable policy training. For code and dataset details, please refer to: https://github.com/AgibotTech/genie_sim.

Subsecond 3D Mesh Generation for Robot Manipulation

3D meshes are a fundamental representation widely used in computer science and engineering. In robotics, they are particularly valuable because they capture objects in a form that aligns directly with how robots interact with the physical world, enabling core capabilities such as predicting stable grasps, detecting collisions, and simulating dynamics. Although automatic 3D mesh generation methods have shown promising progress in recent years, potentially offering a path toward real-time robot perception, two critical challenges remain. First, generating high-fidelity meshes is prohibitively slow for real-time use, often requiring tens of seconds per object. Second, mesh generation by itself is insufficient. In robotics, a mesh must be contextually grounded, i.e., correctly segmented from the scene and registered with the proper scale and pose. Additionally, unless these contextual grounding steps remain efficient, they simply introduce new bottlenecks. In this work, we introduce an end-to-end system that addresses these challenges, producing a high-quality, contextually grounded 3D mesh from a single RGB-D image in under one second. Our pipeline integrates open-vocabulary object segmentation, accelerated diffusion-based mesh generation, and robust point cloud registration, each optimized for both speed and accuracy. We demonstrate its effectiveness in a real-world manipulation task, showing that it enables meshes to be used as a practical, on-demand representation for robotics perception and planning.