Parallel-Probe: Towards Efficient Parallel Thinking via 2D Probing

Parallel thinking has emerged as a promising paradigm for reasoning, yet it imposes significant computational burdens. Existing efficiency methods primarily rely on local, per-trajectory signals and lack principled mechanisms to exploit global dynamics across parallel branches. We introduce 2D probing, an interface that exposes the width-depth dynamics of parallel thinking by periodically eliciting intermediate answers from all branches. Our analysis reveals three key insights: non-monotonic scaling across width-depth allocations, heterogeneous reasoning branch lengths, and early stabilization of global consensus. Guided by these insights, we introduce $\textbf{Parallel-Probe}$, a training-free controller designed to optimize online parallel thinking. Parallel-Probe employs consensus-based early stopping to regulate reasoning depth and deviation-based branch pruning to dynamically adjust width. Extensive experiments across three benchmarks and multiple models demonstrate that Parallel-Probe establishes a superior Pareto frontier for test-time scaling. Compared to standard majority voting, it reduces sequential tokens by up to $\textbf{35.8}$% and total token cost by over $\textbf{25.8}$% while maintaining competitive accuracy.

PhoStream: Benchmarking Real-World Streaming for Omnimodal Assistants in Mobile Scenarios

Multimodal Large Language Models excel at offline audio-visual understanding, but their ability to serve as mobile assistants in continuous real-world streams remains underexplored. In daily phone use, mobile assistants must track streaming audio-visual inputs and respond at the right time, yet existing benchmarks are often restricted to multiple-choice questions or use shorter videos. In this paper, we introduce PhoStream, the first mobile-centric streaming benchmark that unifies on-screen and off-screen scenarios to evaluate video, audio, and temporal reasoning. PhoStream contains 5,572 open-ended QA pairs from 578 videos across 4 scenarios and 10 capabilities. We build it with an Automated Generative Pipeline backed by rigorous human verification, and evaluate models using a realistic Online Inference Pipeline and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation for open-ended responses. Experiments reveal a temporal asymmetry in LLM-judged scores (0-100): models perform well on Instant and Backward tasks (Gemini 3 Pro exceeds 80), but drop sharply on Forward tasks (16.40), largely due to early responses before the required visual and audio cues appear. This highlights a fundamental limitation: current MLLMs struggle to decide when to speak, not just what to say. Code and datasets used in this work will be made publicly accessible at https://github.com/Lucky-Lance/PhoStream.

Save the Good Prefix: Precise Error Penalization via Process-Supervised RL to Enhance LLM Reasoning

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful framework for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, most existing RL approaches rely on sparse outcome rewards, which fail to credit correct intermediate steps in partially successful solutions. Process reward models (PRMs) offer fine-grained step-level supervision, but their scores are often noisy and difficult to evaluate. As a result, recent PRM benchmarks focus on a more objective capability: detecting the first incorrect step in a reasoning path. However, this evaluation target is misaligned with how PRMs are typically used in RL, where their step-wise scores are treated as raw rewards to maximize. To bridge this gap, we propose Verifiable Prefix Policy Optimization (VPPO), which uses PRMs only to localize the first error during RL. Given an incorrect rollout, VPPO partitions the trajectory into a verified correct prefix and an erroneous suffix based on the first error, rewarding the former while applying targeted penalties only after the detected mistake. This design yields stable, interpretable learning signals and improves credit assignment. Across multiple reasoning benchmarks, VPPO consistently outperforms sparse-reward RL and prior PRM-guided baselines on both Pass@1 and Pass@K.

SafeThinker: Reasoning about Risk to Deepen Safety Beyond Shallow Alignment

Despite the intrinsic risk-awareness of Large Language Models (LLMs), current defenses often result in shallow safety alignment, rendering models vulnerable to disguised attacks (e.g., prefilling) while degrading utility. To bridge this gap, we propose SafeThinker, an adaptive framework that dynamically allocates defensive resources via a lightweight gateway classifier. Based on the gateway's risk assessment, inputs are routed through three distinct mechanisms: (i) a Standardized Refusal Mechanism for explicit threats to maximize efficiency; (ii) a Safety-Aware Twin Expert (SATE) module to intercept deceptive attacks masquerading as benign queries; and (iii) a Distribution-Guided Think (DDGT) component that adaptively intervenes during uncertain generation. Experiments show that SafeThinker significantly lowers attack success rates across diverse jailbreak strategies without compromising utility, demonstrating that coordinating intrinsic judgment throughout the generation process effectively balances robustness and practicality.

TellWhisper: Tell Whisper Who Speaks When

Multi-speaker automatic speech recognition (MASR) aims to predict ''who spoke when and what'' from multi-speaker speech, a key technology for multi-party dialogue understanding. However, most existing approaches decouple temporal modeling and speaker modeling when addressing ''when'' and ''who'': some inject speaker cues before encoding (e.g., speaker masking), which can cause irreversible information loss; others fuse identity by mixing speaker posteriors after encoding, which may entangle acoustic content with speaker identity. This separation is brittle under rapid turn-taking and overlapping speech, often leading to degraded performance. To address these limitations, we propose TellWhisper, a unified framework that jointly models speaker identity and temporal within the speech encoder. Specifically, we design TS-RoPE, a time-speaker rotary positional encoding: time coordinates are derived from frame indices, while speaker coordinates are derived from speaker activity and pause cues. By applying region-specific rotation angles, the model explicitly captures per-speaker continuity, speaker-turn transitions, and state dynamics, enabling the attention mechanism to simultaneously attend to ''when'' and ''who''. Moreover, to estimate frame-level speaker activity, we develop Hyper-SD, which casts speaker classification in hyperbolic space to enhance inter-class separation and refine speaker-activity estimates. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

MoE Adapter for Large Audio Language Models: Sparsity, Disentanglement, and Gradient-Conflict-Free

Extending the input modality of Large Language Models~(LLMs) to the audio domain is essential for achieving comprehensive multimodal perception. However, it is well-known that acoustic information is intrinsically \textit{heterogeneous}, entangling attributes such as speech, music, and environmental context. Existing research is limited to a dense, parameter-shared adapter to model these diverse patterns, which induces \textit{gradient conflict} during optimization, as parameter updates required for distinct attributes contradict each other. To address this limitation, we introduce the \textit{\textbf{MoE-Adapter}}, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts~(MoE) architecture designed to decouple acoustic information. Specifically, it employs a dynamic gating mechanism that routes audio tokens to specialized experts capturing complementary feature subspaces while retaining shared experts for global context, thereby mitigating gradient conflicts and enabling fine-grained feature learning. Comprehensive experiments show that the MoE-Adapter achieves superior performance on both audio semantic and paralinguistic tasks, consistently outperforming dense linear baselines with comparable computational costs. Furthermore, we will release the related code and models to facilitate future research.

Causality-Aware Temporal Projection for Video Understanding in Video-LLMs

Recent Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have shown strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, yet remain challenged by video understanding tasks that require consistent temporal ordering and causal coherence. Many parameter-efficient Video-LLMs rely on unconstrained bidirectional projectors to model inter-frame interactions, which can blur temporal ordering by allowing later frames to influence earlier representations, without explicit architectural mechanisms to respect the directional nature of video reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose V-CORE, a parameter-efficient framework that introduces explicit temporal ordering constraints for video understanding. V-CORE consists of two key components: (1) Learnable Spatial Aggregation (LSA), which adaptively selects salient spatial tokens to reduce redundancy, and (2) a Causality-Aware Temporal Projector (CATP), which enforces structured unidirectional information flow via block-causal attention and a terminal dynamic summary token acting as a causal sink. This design preserves intra-frame spatial interactions while ensuring that temporal information is aggregated in a strictly ordered manner. With 4-bit QLoRA and a frozen LLM backbone, V-CORE can be trained efficiently on a single consumer GPU. Experiments show that V-CORE achieves strong performance on the challenging NExT-QA benchmark, reaching 61.2% accuracy, and remains competitive across MSVD-QA, MSRVTT-QA, and TGIF-QA, with gains concentrated in temporal and causal reasoning subcategories (+3.5% and +5.2% respectively), directly validating the importance of explicit temporal ordering constraints.

AEGIS: Exploring the Limit of World Knowledge Capabilities for Unified Mulitmodal Models

The capability of Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) to apply world knowledge across diverse tasks remains a critical, unresolved challenge. Existing benchmarks fall short, offering only siloed, single-task evaluations with limited diagnostic power. To bridge this gap, we propose AEGIS (\emph{i.e.}, \textbf{A}ssessing \textbf{E}diting, \textbf{G}eneration, \textbf{I}nterpretation-Understanding for \textbf{S}uper-intelligence), a comprehensive multi-task benchmark covering visual understanding, generation, editing, and interleaved generation. AEGIS comprises 1,050 challenging, manually-annotated questions spanning 21 topics (including STEM, humanities, daily life, etc.) and 6 reasoning types. To concretely evaluate the performance of UMMs in world knowledge scope without ambiguous metrics, we further propose Deterministic Checklist-based Evaluation (DCE), a protocol that replaces ambiguous prompt-based scoring with atomic ``Y/N'' judgments, to enhance evaluation reliability. Our extensive experiments reveal that most UMMs exhibit severe world knowledge deficits and that performance degrades significantly with complex reasoning. Additionally, simple plug-in reasoning modules can partially mitigate these vulnerabilities, highlighting a promising direction for future research. These results highlight the importance of world-knowledge-based reasoning as a critical frontier for UMMs.

Scaling Reinforcement Learning for Content Moderation with Large Language Models

Content moderation at scale remains one of the most pressing challenges in today's digital ecosystem, where billions of user- and AI-generated artifacts must be continuously evaluated for policy violations. Although recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong potential for policy-grounded moderation, the practical challenges of training these systems to achieve expert-level accuracy in real-world settings remain largely unexplored, particularly in regimes characterized by label sparsity, evolving policy definitions, and the need for nuanced reasoning beyond shallow pattern matching. In this work, we present a comprehensive empirical investigation of scaling reinforcement learning (RL) for content classification, systematically evaluating multiple RL training recipes and reward-shaping strategies-including verifiable rewards and LLM-as-judge frameworks-to transform general-purpose language models into specialized, policy-aligned classifiers across three real-world content moderation tasks. Our findings provide actionable insights for industrial-scale moderation systems, demonstrating that RL exhibits sigmoid-like scaling behavior in which performance improves smoothly with increased training data, rollouts, and optimization steps before gradually saturating. Moreover, we show that RL substantially improves performance on tasks requiring complex policy-grounded reasoning while achieving up to 100x higher data efficiency than supervised fine-tuning, making it particularly effective in domains where expert annotations are scarce or costly.

VisionDirector: Vision-Language Guided Closed-Loop Refinement for Generative Image Synthesis

Generative models can now produce photorealistic imagery, yet they still struggle with the long, multi-goal prompts that professional designers issue. To expose this gap and better evaluate models' performance in real-world settings, we introduce Long Goal Bench (LGBench), a 2,000-task suite (1,000 T2I and 1,000 I2I) whose average instruction contains 18 to 22 tightly coupled goals spanning global layout, local object placement, typography, and logo fidelity. We find that even state-of-the-art models satisfy fewer than 72 percent of the goals and routinely miss localized edits, confirming the brittleness of current pipelines. To address this, we present VisionDirector, a training-free vision-language supervisor that (i) extracts structured goals from long instructions, (ii) dynamically decides between one-shot generation and staged edits, (iii) runs micro-grid sampling with semantic verification and rollback after every edit, and (iv) logs goal-level rewards. We further fine-tune the planner with Group Relative Policy Optimization, yielding shorter edit trajectories (3.1 versus 4.2 steps) and stronger alignment. VisionDirector achieves new state of the art on GenEval (plus 7 percent overall) and ImgEdit (plus 0.07 absolute) while producing consistent qualitative improvements on typography, multi-object scenes, and pose editing.