FloCA: Towards Faithful and Logically Consistent Flowchart Reasoning

Flowchart-oriented dialogue (FOD) systems aim to guide users through multi-turn decision-making or operational procedures by following a domain-specific flowchart to achieve a task goal. In this work, we formalize flowchart reasoning in FOD as grounding user input to flowchart nodes at each dialogue turn while ensuring node transition is consistent with the correct flowchart path. Despite recent advances of LLMs in task-oriented dialogue systems, adapting them to FOD still faces two limitations: (1) LLMs lack an explicit mechanism to represent and reason over flowchart topology, and (2) they are prone to hallucinations, leading to unfaithful flowchart reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose FloCA, a zero-shot flowchart-oriented conversational agent. FloCA uses an LLM for intent understanding and response generation while delegating flowchart reasoning to an external tool that performs topology-constrained graph execution, ensuring faithful and logically consistent node transitions across dialogue turns. We further introduce an evaluation framework with an LLM-based user simulator and five new metrics covering reasoning accuracy and interaction efficiency. Extensive experiments on FLODIAL and PFDial datasets highlight the bottlenecks of existing LLM-based methods and demonstrate the superiority of FloCA. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Jinzi-Zou/FloCA-flowchart-reasoning.

Chain of Mindset: Reasoning with Adaptive Cognitive Modes

Human problem-solving is never the repetition of a single mindset, by which we mean a distinct mode of cognitive processing. When tackling a specific task, we do not rely on a single mindset; instead, we integrate multiple mindsets within the single solution process. However, existing LLM reasoning methods fall into a common trap: they apply the same fixed mindset across all steps, overlooking that different stages of solving the same problem require fundamentally different mindsets. This single-minded assumption prevents models from reaching the next level of intelligence. To address this limitation, we propose Chain of Mindset (CoM), a training-free agentic framework that enables step-level adaptive mindset orchestration. CoM decomposes reasoning into four functionally heterogeneous mindsets: Spatial, Convergent, Divergent, and Algorithmic. A Meta-Agent dynamically selects the optimal mindset based on the evolving reasoning state, while a bidirectional Context Gate filters cross-module information flow to maintain effectiveness and efficiency. Experiments across six challenging benchmarks spanning mathematics, code generation, scientific QA, and spatial reasoning demonstrate that CoM achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the strongest baseline by 4.96\% and 4.72\% in overall accuracy on Qwen3-VL-32B-Instruct and Gemini-2.0-Flash, while balancing reasoning efficiency. Our code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/chain-of-mindset}{https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/chain-of-mindset}.

Geometric Image Editing via Effects-Sensitive In-Context Inpainting with Diffusion Transformers

Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly improved image editing. However, challenges persist in handling geometric transformations, such as translation, rotation, and scaling, particularly in complex scenes. Existing approaches suffer from two main limitations: (1) difficulty in achieving accurate geometric editing of object translation, rotation, and scaling; (2) inadequate modeling of intricate lighting and shadow effects, leading to unrealistic results. To address these issues, we propose GeoEdit, a framework that leverages in-context generation through a diffusion transformer module, which integrates geometric transformations for precise object edits. Moreover, we introduce Effects-Sensitive Attention, which enhances the modeling of intricate lighting and shadow effects for improved realism. To further support training, we construct RS-Objects, a large-scale geometric editing dataset containing over 120,000 high-quality image pairs, enabling the model to learn precise geometric editing while generating realistic lighting and shadows. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that GeoEdit consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality, geometric accuracy, and realism.

QuantaAlpha: An Evolutionary Framework for LLM-Driven Alpha Mining

Financial markets are noisy and non-stationary, making alpha mining highly sensitive to noise in backtesting results and sudden market regime shifts. While recent agentic frameworks improve alpha mining automation, they often lack controllable multi-round search and reliable reuse of validated experience. To address these challenges, we propose QuantaAlpha, an evolutionary alpha mining framework that treats each end-to-end mining run as a trajectory and improves factors through trajectory-level mutation and crossover operations. QuantaAlpha localizes suboptimal steps in each trajectory for targeted revision and recombines complementary high-reward segments to reuse effective patterns, enabling structured exploration and refinement across mining iterations. During factor generation, QuantaAlpha enforces semantic consistency across the hypothesis, factor expression, and executable code, while constraining the complexity and redundancy of the generated factor to mitigate crowding. Extensive experiments on the China Securities Index 300 (CSI 300) demonstrate consistent gains over strong baseline models and prior agentic systems. When utilizing GPT-5.2, QuantaAlpha achieves an Information Coefficient (IC) of 0.1501, with an Annualized Rate of Return (ARR) of 27.75% and a Maximum Drawdown (MDD) of 7.98%. Moreover, factors mined on CSI 300 transfer effectively to the China Securities Index 500 (CSI 500) and the Standard & Poor's 500 Index (S&P 500), delivering 160% and 137% cumulative excess return over four years, respectively, which indicates strong robustness of QuantaAlpha under market distribution shifts.

Spider-Sense: Intrinsic Risk Sensing for Efficient Agent Defense with Hierarchical Adaptive Screening

As large language models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents, their real-world applicability has expanded significantly, accompanied by new security challenges. Most existing agent defense mechanisms adopt a mandatory checking paradigm, in which security validation is forcibly triggered at predefined stages of the agent lifecycle. In this work, we argue that effective agent security should be intrinsic and selective rather than architecturally decoupled and mandatory. We propose Spider-Sense framework, an event-driven defense framework based on Intrinsic Risk Sensing (IRS), which allows agents to maintain latent vigilance and trigger defenses only upon risk perception. Once triggered, the Spider-Sense invokes a hierarchical defence mechanism that trades off efficiency and precision: it resolves known patterns via lightweight similarity matching while escalating ambiguous cases to deep internal reasoning, thereby eliminating reliance on external models. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce S$^2$Bench, a lifecycle-aware benchmark featuring realistic tool execution and multi-stage attacks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Spider-Sense achieves competitive or superior defense performance, attaining the lowest Attack Success Rate (ASR) and False Positive Rate (FPR), with only a marginal latency overhead of 8.3\%.

CRL-VLA: Continual Vision-Language-Action Learning

Lifelong learning is critical for embodied agents in open-world environments, where reinforcement learning fine-tuning has emerged as an important paradigm to enable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to master dexterous manipulation through environmental interaction. Thus, Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) is a promising pathway for deploying VLA models in lifelong robotic scenarios, yet balancing stability (retaining old skills) and plasticity (learning new ones) remains a formidable challenge for existing methods. We introduce CRL-VLA, a framework for continual post-training of VLA models with rigorous theoretical bounds. We derive a unified performance bound linking the stability-plasticity trade-off to goal-conditioned advantage magnitude, scaled by policy divergence. CRL-VLA resolves this dilemma via asymmetric regulation: constraining advantage magnitudes on prior tasks while enabling controlled growth on new tasks. This is realized through a simple but effective dual-critic architecture with novel Goal-Conditioned Value Formulation (GCVF), where a frozen critic anchors semantic consistency and a trainable estimator drives adaptation. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark demonstrate that CRL-VLA effectively harmonizes these conflicting objectives, outperforming baselines in both anti-forgetting and forward adaptation.

Not All Negative Samples Are Equal: LLMs Learn Better from Plausible Reasoning

Learning from negative samples holds great promise for improving Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning capability, yet existing methods treat all incorrect responses as equally informative, overlooking the crucial role of sample quality. To address this, we propose Plausible Negative Samples (PNS), a method that synthesizes high-quality negative samples exhibiting expected format and structural coherence while ultimately yielding incorrect answers. PNS trains a dedicated model via reverse reinforcement learning (RL) guided by a composite reward combining format compliance, accuracy inversion, reward model assessment, and chain-of-thought evaluation, generating responses nearly indistinguishable from correct solutions. We further validate PNS as a plug-and-play data source for preference optimization across three backbone models on seven mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Results demonstrate that PNS consistently outperforms other negative sample synthesis methods, achieving an average improvement of 2.03% over RL-trained models.

BrainFuse: a unified infrastructure integrating realistic biological modeling and core AI methodology

Neuroscience and artificial intelligence represent distinct yet complementary pathways to general intelligence. However, amid the ongoing boom in AI research and applications, the translational synergy between these two fields has grown increasingly elusive-hampered by a widening infrastructural incompatibility: modern AI frameworks lack native support for biophysical realism, while neural simulation tools are poorly suited for gradient-based optimization and neuromorphic hardware deployment. To bridge this gap, we introduce BrainFuse, a unified infrastructure that provides comprehensive support for biophysical neural simulation and gradient-based learning. By addressing algorithmic, computational, and deployment challenges, BrainFuse exhibits three core capabilities: (1) algorithmic integration of detailed neuronal dynamics into a differentiable learning framework; (2) system-level optimization that accelerates customizable ion-channel dynamics by up to 3,000x on GPUs; and (3) scalable computation with highly compatible pipelines for neuromorphic hardware deployment. We demonstrate this full-stack design through both AI and neuroscience tasks, from foundational neuron simulation and functional cylinder modeling to real-world deployment and application scenarios. For neuroscience, BrainFuse supports multiscale biological modeling, enabling the deployment of approximately 38,000 Hodgkin-Huxley neurons with 100 million synapses on a single neuromorphic chip while consuming as low as 1.98 W. For AI, BrainFuse facilitates the synergistic application of realistic biological neuron models, demonstrating enhanced robustness to input noise and improved temporal processing endowed by complex HH dynamics. BrainFuse therefore serves as a foundational engine to facilitate cross-disciplinary research and accelerate the development of next-generation bio-inspired intelligent systems.

LiNUS: Lightweight Automatic Segmentation of Deep Brain Nuclei for Real-Time DBS Surgery

This paper proposes LiNUS, a lightweight deep learning framework for the automatic segmentation of the Subthalamic Nucleus (STN) in Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) surgery. Addressing the challenges of small target volume and class imbalance in MRI data, LiNUS improves upon the U-Net architecture by introducing spectral normalization constraints, bilinear interpolation upsampling, and a multi-scale feature fusion mechanism. Experimental results on the Tsinghua DBS dataset (TT14) demonstrate that LiNUS achieves a Dice coefficient of 0.679 with an inference time of only 0.05 seconds per subject, significantly outperforming traditional manual and registration-based methods. Further validation on high-resolution data confirms the model's robustness, achieving a Dice score of 0.89. A dedicated Graphical User Interface (GUI) was also developed to facilitate real-time clinical application.

ABC-Bench: Benchmarking Agentic Backend Coding in Real-World Development

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous agents has expanded the scope of AI coding from localized code generation to complex, repository-level, and execution-driven problem solving. However, current benchmarks predominantly evaluate code logic in static contexts, neglecting the dynamic, full-process requirements of real-world engineering, particularly in backend development which demands rigorous environment configuration and service deployment. To address this gap, we introduce ABC-Bench, a benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow. Using a scalable automated pipeline, we curated 224 practical tasks spanning 8 languages and 19 frameworks from open-source repositories. Distinct from previous evaluations, ABC-Bench require the agents to manage the entire development lifecycle from repository exploration to instantiating containerized services and pass the external end-to-end API tests. Our extensive evaluation reveals that even state-of-the-art models struggle to deliver reliable performance on these holistic tasks, highlighting a substantial disparity between current model capabilities and the demands of practical backend engineering. Our code is available at https://github.com/OpenMOSS/ABC-Bench.