An Actor-Critic Framework for Continuous-Time Jump-Diffusion Controls with Normalizing Flows

Continuous-time stochastic control with time-inhomogeneous jump-diffusion dynamics is central in finance and economics, but computing optimal policies is difficult under explicit time dependence, discontinuous shocks, and high dimensionality. We propose an actor-critic framework that serves as a mesh-free solver for entropy-regularized control problems and stochastic games with jumps. The approach is built on a time-inhomogeneous little q-function and an appropriate occupation measure, yielding a policy-gradient representation that accommodates time-dependent drift, volatility, and jump terms. To represent expressive stochastic policies in continuous-action spaces, we parameterize the actor using conditional normalizing flows, enabling flexible non-Gaussian policies while retaining exact likelihood evaluation for entropy regularization and policy optimization. We validate the method on time-inhomogeneous linear-quadratic control, Merton portfolio optimization, and a multi-agent portfolio game, using explicit solutions or high-accuracy benchmarks. Numerical results demonstrate stable learning under jump discontinuities, accurate approximation of optimal stochastic policies, and favorable scaling with respect to dimension and number of agents.

Back to Basics: Revisiting ASR in the Age of Voice Agents

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have achieved near-human accuracy on curated benchmarks, yet still fail in real-world voice agents under conditions that current evaluations do not systematically cover. Without diagnostic tools that isolate specific failure factors, practitioners cannot anticipate which conditions, in which languages, will cause what degree of degradation. We introduce WildASR, a multilingual (four-language) diagnostic benchmark sourced entirely from real human speech that factorizes ASR robustness along three axes: environmental degradation, demographic shift, and linguistic diversity. Evaluating seven widely used ASR systems, we find severe and uneven performance degradation, and model robustness does not transfer across languages or conditions. Critically, models often hallucinate plausible but unspoken content under partial or degraded inputs, creating concrete safety risks for downstream agent behavior. Our results demonstrate that targeted, factor-isolated evaluation is essential for understanding and improving ASR reliability in production systems. Besides the benchmark itself, we also present three analytical tools that practitioners can use to guide deployment decisions.

MagicSeg: Open-World Segmentation Pretraining via Counterfactural Diffusion-Based Auto-Generation

Open-world semantic segmentation presently relies significantly on extensive image-text pair datasets, which often suffer from a lack of fine-grained pixel annotations on sufficient categories. The acquisition of such data is rendered economically prohibitive due to the substantial investments of both human labor and time. In light of the formidable image generation capabilities of diffusion models, we introduce a novel diffusion model-driven pipeline for automatically generating datasets tailored to the needs of open-world semantic segmentation, named "MagicSeg". Our MagicSeg initiates from class labels and proceeds to generate high-fidelity textual descriptions, which in turn serve as guidance for the diffusion model to generate images. Rather than only generating positive samples for each label, our process encompasses the simultaneous generation of corresponding negative images, designed to serve as paired counterfactual samples for contrastive training. Then, to provide a self-supervised signal for open-world segmentation pretraining, our MagicSeg integrates an open-vocabulary detection model and an interactive segmentation model to extract object masks as precise segmentation labels from images based on the provided category labels. By applying our dataset to the contrastive language-image pretraining model with the pseudo mask supervision and the auxiliary counterfactual contrastive training, the downstream model obtains strong performance on open-world semantic segmentation. We evaluate our model on PASCAL VOC, PASCAL Context, and COCO, achieving SOTA with performance of 62.9%, 26.7%, and 40.2%, respectively, demonstrating our dataset's effectiveness in enhancing open-world semantic segmentation capabilities. Project website: https://github.com/ckxhp/magicseg.

Send Less, Perceive More: Masked Quantized Point Cloud Communication for Loss-Tolerant Collaborative Perception

Collaborative perception allows connected vehicles to overcome occlusions and limited viewpoints by sharing sensory information. However, existing approaches struggle to achieve high accuracy under strict bandwidth constraints and remain highly vulnerable to random transmission packet loss. We introduce QPoint2Comm, a quantized point-cloud communication framework that dramatically reduces bandwidth while preserving high-fidelity 3D information. Instead of transmitting intermediate features, QPoint2Comm directly communicates quantized point-cloud indices using a shared codebook, enabling efficient reconstruction with lower bandwidth than feature-based methods. To ensure robustness to possible communication packet loss, we employ a masked training strategy that simulates random packet loss, allowing the model to maintain strong performance even under severe transmission failures. In addition, a cascade attention fusion module is proposed to enhance multi-vehicle information integration. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that QPoint2Comm sets a new state of the art in accuracy, communication efficiency, and resilience to packet loss.

Multi-dimensional Assessment and Explainable Feedback for Counselor Responses to Client Resistance in Text-based Counseling with LLMs

Effectively addressing client resistance is a sophisticated clinical skill in psychological counseling, yet practitioners often lack timely and scalable supervisory feedback to refine their approaches. Although current NLP research has examined overall counseling quality and general therapeutic skills, it fails to provide granular evaluations of high-stakes moments where clients exhibit resistance. In this work, we present a comprehensive pipeline for the multi-dimensional evaluation of human counselors' interventions specifically targeting client resistance in text-based therapy. We introduce a theory-driven framework that decomposes counselor responses into four distinct communication mechanisms. Leveraging this framework, we curate and share an expert-annotated dataset of real-world counseling excerpts, pairing counselor-client interactions with professional ratings and explanatory rationales. Using this data, we perform full-parameter instruction tuning on a Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct backbone to model fine-grained evaluative judgments of response quality and generate explanations underlying. Experimental results show that our approach can effectively distinguish the quality of different communication mechanisms (77-81% F1), substantially outperforming GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet (45-59% F1). Moreover, the model produces high-quality explanations that closely align with expert references and receive near-ceiling ratings from human experts (2.8-2.9/3.0). A controlled experiment with 43 counselors further confirms that receiving these AI-generated feedback significantly improves counselors' ability to respond effectively to client resistance.

VIBEVOICE-ASR Technical Report

This report presents VibeVoice-ASR, a general-purpose speech understanding framework built upon VibeVoice, designed to address the persistent challenges of context fragmentation and multi-speaker complexity in long-form audio (e.g., meetings, podcasts) that remain despite recent advancements in short-form speech recognition. Unlike traditional pipelined approaches that rely on audio chunking, VibeVoice-ASRsupports single-pass processing for up to 60 minutes of audio. It unifies Automatic Speech Recognition, Speaker Diarization, and Timestamping into a single end-to-end generation task. In addition, VibeVoice-ASR supports over 50 languages, requires no explicit language setting, and natively handles code-switching within and across utterances. Furthermore, we introduce a prompt-based context injection mechanism that allows users to supply customized conetxt, significantly improving accuracy on domain-specific terminology and polyphonic character disambiguation.

High-Fidelity 3D Tooth Reconstruction by Fusing Intraoral Scans and CBCT Data via a Deep Implicit Representation

High-fidelity 3D tooth models are essential for digital dentistry, but must capture both the detailed crown and the complete root. Clinical imaging modalities are limited: Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) captures the root but has a noisy, low-resolution crown, while Intraoral Scanners (IOS) provide a high-fidelity crown but no root information. A naive fusion of these sources results in unnatural seams and artifacts. We propose a novel, fully-automated pipeline that fuses CBCT and IOS data using a deep implicit representation. Our method first segments and robustly registers the tooth instances, then creates a hybrid proxy mesh combining the IOS crown and the CBCT root. The core of our approach is to use this noisy proxy to guide a class-specific DeepSDF network. This optimization process projects the input onto a learned manifold of ideal tooth shapes, generating a seamless, watertight, and anatomically coherent model. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations show our method uniquely preserves both the high-fidelity crown from IOS and the patient-specific root morphology from CBCT, overcoming the limitations of each modality and naive stitching.

Acting Flatterers via LLMs Sycophancy: Combating Clickbait with LLMs Opposing-Stance Reasoning

The widespread proliferation of online content has intensified concerns about clickbait, deceptive or exaggerated headlines designed to attract attention. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising avenue for addressing this issue, their effectiveness is often hindered by Sycophancy, a tendency to produce reasoning that matches users' beliefs over truthful ones, which deviates from instruction-following principles. Rather than treating sycophancy as a flaw to be eliminated, this work proposes a novel approach that initially harnesses this behavior to generate contrastive reasoning from opposing perspectives. Specifically, we design a Self-renewal Opposing-stance Reasoning Generation (SORG) framework that prompts LLMs to produce high-quality agree and disagree reasoning pairs for a given news title without requiring ground-truth labels. To utilize the generated reasoning, we develop a local Opposing Reasoning-based Clickbait Detection (ORCD) model that integrates three BERT encoders to represent the title and its associated reasoning. The model leverages contrastive learning, guided by soft labels derived from LLM-generated credibility scores, to enhance detection robustness. Experimental evaluations on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms LLM prompting, fine-tuned smaller language models, and state-of-the-art clickbait detection baselines.

AI4Reading: Chinese Audiobook Interpretation System Based on Multi-Agent Collaboration

Audiobook interpretations are attracting increasing attention, as they provide accessible and in-depth analyses of books that offer readers practical insights and intellectual inspiration. However, their manual creation process remains time-consuming and resource-intensive. To address this challenge, we propose AI4Reading, a multi-agent collaboration system leveraging large language models (LLMs) and speech synthesis technology to generate podcast, like audiobook interpretations. The system is designed to meet three key objectives: accurate content preservation, enhanced comprehensibility, and a logical narrative structure. To achieve these goals, we develop a framework composed of 11 specialized agents,including topic analysts, case analysts, editors, a narrator, and proofreaders that work in concert to explore themes, extract real world cases, refine content organization, and synthesize natural spoken language. By comparing expert interpretations with our system's output, the results show that although AI4Reading still has a gap in speech generation quality, the generated interpretative scripts are simpler and more accurate.

rStar2-Agent: Agentic Reasoning Technical Report

We introduce rStar2-Agent, a 14B math reasoning model trained with agentic reinforcement learning to achieve frontier-level performance. Beyond current long CoT, the model demonstrates advanced cognitive behaviors, such as thinking carefully before using Python coding tools and reflecting on code execution feedback to autonomously explore, verify, and refine intermediate steps in complex problem-solving. This capability is enabled through three key innovations that makes agentic RL effective at scale: (i) an efficient RL infrastructure with a reliable Python code environment that supports high-throughput execution and mitigates the high rollout costs, enabling training on limited GPU resources (64 MI300X GPUs); (ii) GRPO-RoC, an agentic RL algorithm with a Resample-on-Correct rollout strategy that addresses the inherent environment noises from coding tools, allowing the model to reason more effectively in a code environment; (iii) An efficient agent training recipe that starts with non-reasoning SFT and progresses through multi-RL stages, yielding advanced cognitive abilities with minimal compute cost. To this end, rStar2-Agent boosts a pre-trained 14B model to state of the art in only 510 RL steps within one week, achieving average pass@1 scores of 80.6% on AIME24 and 69.8% on AIME25, surpassing DeepSeek-R1 (671B) with significantly shorter responses. Beyond mathematics, rStar2-Agent-14B also demonstrates strong generalization to alignment, scientific reasoning, and agentic tool-use tasks. Code and training recipes are available at https://github.com/microsoft/rStar.