Daily Papers

While the Transformer architecture dominates many fields, its quadratic self-attention complexity hinders its use in large-scale applications. Linear attention offers an efficient alternative, but its direct application often degrades performance, with existing fixes typically re-introducing computational overhead through extra modules (e.g., depthwise separable convolution) that defeat the original purpose. In this work, we identify a key failure mode in these methods: global context collapse, where the model loses representational diversity. To address this, we propose Multi-Head Linear Attention (MHLA), which preserves this diversity by computing attention within divided heads along the token dimension. We prove that MHLA maintains linear complexity while recovering much of the expressive power of softmax attention, and verify its effectiveness across multiple domains, achieving a 3.6\% improvement on ImageNet classification, a 6.3\% gain on NLP, a 12.6\% improvement on image generation, and a 41\% enhancement on video generation under the same time complexity.

Convolutional networks, transformers, hybrid models, and Mamba-based architectures have demonstrated strong performance across various medical image classification tasks. However, these methods were primarily designed to classify clean images using labeled data. In contrast, real-world clinical data often involve image corruptions that are unique to multi-center studies and stem from variations in imaging equipment across manufacturers. In this paper, we introduce the Medical Vision Transformer (MedViTV2), a novel architecture incorporating Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) layers into the transformer architecture for the first time, aiming for generalized medical image classification. We have developed an efficient KAN block to reduce computational load while enhancing the accuracy of the original MedViT. Additionally, to counteract the fragility of our MedViT when scaled up, we propose an enhanced Dilated Neighborhood Attention (DiNA), an adaptation of the efficient fused dot-product attention kernel capable of capturing global context and expanding receptive fields to scale the model effectively and addressing feature collapse issues. Moreover, a hierarchical hybrid strategy is introduced to stack our Local Feature Perception and Global Feature Perception blocks in an efficient manner, which balances local and global feature perceptions to boost performance. Extensive experiments on 17 medical image classification datasets and 12 corrupted medical image datasets demonstrate that MedViTV2 achieved state-of-the-art results in 27 out of 29 experiments with reduced computational complexity. MedViTV2 is 44\% more computationally efficient than the previous version and significantly enhances accuracy, achieving improvements of 4.6\% on MedMNIST, 5.8\% on NonMNIST, and 13.4\% on the MedMNIST-C benchmark.

Modern deep neural networks have achieved impressive performance on tasks from image classification to natural language processing. Surprisingly, these complex systems with massive amounts of parameters exhibit the same structural properties in their last-layer features and classifiers across canonical datasets when training until convergence. In particular, it has been observed that the last-layer features collapse to their class-means, and those class-means are the vertices of a simplex Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF). This phenomenon is known as Neural Collapse (NC). Recent papers have theoretically shown that NC emerges in the global minimizers of training problems with the simplified "unconstrained feature model". In this context, we take a step further and prove the NC occurrences in deep linear networks for the popular mean squared error (MSE) and cross entropy (CE) losses, showing that global solutions exhibit NC properties across the linear layers. Furthermore, we extend our study to imbalanced data for MSE loss and present the first geometric analysis of NC under bias-free setting. Our results demonstrate the convergence of the last-layer features and classifiers to a geometry consisting of orthogonal vectors, whose lengths depend on the amount of data in their corresponding classes. Finally, we empirically validate our theoretical analyses on synthetic and practical network architectures with both balanced and imbalanced scenarios.

While datasets for video understanding have scaled to hour-long durations, they typically consist of densely concatenated clips that differ from natural, unscripted daily life. To bridge this gap, we introduce MM-Lifelong, a dataset designed for Multimodal Lifelong Understanding. Comprising 181.1 hours of footage, it is structured across Day, Week, and Month scales to capture varying temporal densities. Extensive evaluations reveal two critical failure modes in current paradigms: end-to-end MLLMs suffer from a Working Memory Bottleneck due to context saturation, while representative agentic baselines experience Global Localization Collapse when navigating sparse, month-long timelines. To address this, we propose the Recursive Multimodal Agent (ReMA), which employs dynamic memory management to iteratively update a recursive belief state, significantly outperforming existing methods. Finally, we establish dataset splits designed to isolate temporal and domain biases, providing a rigorous foundation for future research in supervised learning and out-of-distribution generalization.

Modern computer vision pipelines handle large images in one of two sub-optimal ways: down-sampling or cropping. These two methods incur significant losses in the amount of information and context present in an image. There are many downstream applications in which global context matters as much as high frequency details, such as in real-world satellite imagery; in such cases researchers have to make the uncomfortable choice of which information to discard. We introduce xT, a simple framework for vision transformers which effectively aggregates global context with local details and can model large images end-to-end on contemporary GPUs. We select a set of benchmark datasets across classic vision tasks which accurately reflect a vision model's ability to understand truly large images and incorporate fine details over large scales and assess our method's improvement on them. By introducing a nested tokenization scheme for large images in conjunction with long-sequence length models normally used for natural language processing, we are able to increase accuracy by up to 8.6% on challenging classification tasks and F_1 score by 11.6 on context-dependent segmentation in large images.

In the era of proliferation of large language and image generation models, the phenomenon of "model collapse" refers to the situation whereby as a model is trained recursively on data generated from previous generations of itself over time, its performance degrades until the model eventually becomes completely useless, i.e the model collapses. In this work, we study this phenomenon in the setting of high-dimensional regression and obtain analytic formulae which quantitatively outline this phenomenon in a broad range of regimes. In the special case of polynomial decaying spectral and source conditions, we obtain modified scaling laws which exhibit new crossover phenomena from fast to slow rates. We also propose a simple strategy based on adaptive regularization to mitigate model collapse. Our theoretical results are validated with experiments.

Large language model (LLM) applications such as agents and domain-specific reasoning increasingly rely on context adaptation -- modifying inputs with instructions, strategies, or evidence, rather than weight updates. Prior approaches improve usability but often suffer from brevity bias, which drops domain insights for concise summaries, and from context collapse, where iterative rewriting erodes details over time. Building on the adaptive memory introduced by Dynamic Cheatsheet, we introduce ACE (Agentic Context Engineering), a framework that treats contexts as evolving playbooks that accumulate, refine, and organize strategies through a modular process of generation, reflection, and curation. ACE prevents collapse with structured, incremental updates that preserve detailed knowledge and scale with long-context models. Across agent and domain-specific benchmarks, ACE optimizes contexts both offline (e.g., system prompts) and online (e.g., agent memory), consistently outperforming strong baselines: +10.6% on agents and +8.6% on finance, while significantly reducing adaptation latency and rollout cost. Notably, ACE could adapt effectively without labeled supervision and instead by leveraging natural execution feedback. On the AppWorld leaderboard, ACE matches the top-ranked production-level agent on the overall average and surpasses it on the harder test-challenge split, despite using a smaller open-source model. These results show that comprehensive, evolving contexts enable scalable, efficient, and self-improving LLM systems with low overhead.

Current artificial intelligence systems exhibit a fundamental architectural limitation: they resolve ambiguity prematurely. This premature semantic collapse--collapsing multiple valid interpretations into single outputs--stems from classical identity assumptions in neural architectures. We propose Non-Resolution Reasoning (NRR), a framework treating ambiguity retention as a valid reasoning mode. NRR introduces three principles: (1) Non-Identity (A neq A)--the same symbol refers to different entities across contexts; (2) Approximate Identity (A approx A)--entities share partial structural overlap without being identical; (3) Non-Resolution--conflicting interpretations coexist without forced convergence. We formalize these through Multi-Vector Embeddings for context-dependent representation, Non-Collapsing Attention for parallel interpretation retention, and Contextual Identity Tracking (CIT) for maintaining A neq A across inference. We illustrate NRR through case studies in paradox handling, creative generation, and context-dependent reasoning. Functional verification in a synthetic two-turn disambiguation task shows NRR-lite maintains high entropy (H = 0.91 bits, near-maximum 1.0) at ambiguous turns while standard architectures collapse early (H = 0.15 bits), preserving interpretive flexibility until context arrives. NRR challenges the assumption that meaning must collapse to be useful. The question is not whether AI should resolve ambiguity, but when, how, and under whose control.

Large language model (LLM) agents are fundamentally constrained by context length on long-horizon tasks. We introduce Context-Folding, a framework that empowers agents to actively manage their working context. An agent can procedurally branch into a sub-trajectory to handle a subtask and then fold it upon completion, collapsing the intermediate steps while retaining a concise summary of the outcome. To make this behavior learnable, we develop an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework FoldGRPO with specific process rewards to encourage effective task decomposition and context management. On complex long-horizon tasks (Deep Research and SWE), our folding agent matches or outperforms the ReAct baselines while using an active context 10times smaller and significantly outperforms models that rely on summarization-based context management.

Large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention due to their impressive general capabilities across diverse downstream tasks. However, without domain-specific optimization, they often underperform on specialized knowledge benchmarks and even produce hallucination. Recent studies show that strategically infusing domain knowledge during pretraining can substantially improve downstream performance. A critical challenge lies in balancing this infusion trade-off: injecting too little domain-specific data yields insufficient specialization, whereas excessive infusion triggers catastrophic forgetting of previously acquired knowledge. In this work, we focus on the phenomenon of memory collapse induced by over-infusion. Through systematic experiments, we make two key observations, i.e. 1) Critical collapse point: each model exhibits a threshold beyond which its knowledge retention capabilities sharply degrade. 2) Scale correlation: these collapse points scale consistently with the model's size. Building on these insights, we propose a knowledge infusion scaling law that predicts the optimal amount of domain knowledge to inject into large LLMs by analyzing their smaller counterparts. Extensive experiments across different model sizes and pertaining token budgets validate both the effectiveness and generalizability of our scaling law.

The Non-Local Network (NLNet) presents a pioneering approach for capturing long-range dependencies, via aggregating query-specific global context to each query position. However, through a rigorous empirical analysis, we have found that the global contexts modeled by non-local network are almost the same for different query positions within an image. In this paper, we take advantage of this finding to create a simplified network based on a query-independent formulation, which maintains the accuracy of NLNet but with significantly less computation. We further observe that this simplified design shares similar structure with Squeeze-Excitation Network (SENet). Hence we unify them into a three-step general framework for global context modeling. Within the general framework, we design a better instantiation, called the global context (GC) block, which is lightweight and can effectively model the global context. The lightweight property allows us to apply it for multiple layers in a backbone network to construct a global context network (GCNet), which generally outperforms both simplified NLNet and SENet on major benchmarks for various recognition tasks. The code and configurations are released at https://github.com/xvjiarui/GCNet.

Large language models (LLMs) tend to generate lexically, semantically, and stylistically homogenous texts. This poses a risk of knowledge collapse, where homogenous LLMs mediate a shrinking in the range of accessible information over time. Existing works on homogenization are limited by a focus on closed-ended multiple-choice setups or fuzzy semantic features, and do not look at trends across time and cultural contexts. To overcome this, we present a new methodology to measure epistemic diversity, i.e., variation in real-world claims in LLM outputs, which we use to perform a broad empirical study of LLM knowledge collapse. We test 27 LLMs, 155 topics covering 12 countries, and 200 prompt variations sourced from real user chats. For the topics in our study, we show that while newer models tend to generate more diverse claims, nearly all models are less epistemically diverse than a basic web search. We find that model size has a negative impact on epistemic diversity, while retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has a positive impact, though the improvement from RAG varies by the cultural context. Finally, compared to a traditional knowledge source (Wikipedia), we find that country-specific claims reflect the English language more than the local one, highlighting a gap in epistemic representation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful operators for evolutionary search, yet the design of efficient search scaffolds remains ad hoc. While promising, current LLM-in-the-loop systems lack a systematic approach to managing the evolutionary process. We identify three distinct failure modes: Context Pollution, where experiment history biases future candidate generation; Mode Collapse, where agents stagnate in local minima due to poor exploration-exploitation balance; and Weak Collaboration, where rigid crossover strategies fail to leverage parallel search trajectories effectively. We introduce Progress-Aware Consistent Evolution (PACEvolve), a framework designed to robustly govern the agent's context and search dynamics, to address these challenges. PACEvolve combines hierarchical context management (HCM) with pruning to address context pollution; momentum-based backtracking (MBB) to escape local minima; and a self-adaptive sampling policy that unifies backtracking and crossover for dynamic search coordination (CE), allowing agents to balance internal refinement with cross-trajectory collaboration. We demonstrate that PACEvolve provides a systematic path to consistent, long-horizon self-improvement, achieving state-of-the-art results on LLM-SR and KernelBench, while discovering solutions surpassing the record on Modded NanoGPT.

Model uncertainty and limited data are fundamental challenges to robust management of human intervention in a natural system. These challenges are acutely highlighted by concerns that many ecological systems may contain tipping points, such as Allee population sizes. Before a collapse, we do not know where the tipping points lie, if they exist at all. Hence, we know neither a complete model of the system dynamics nor do we have access to data in some large region of state-space where such a tipping point might exist. We illustrate how a Bayesian Non-Parametric (BNP) approach using a Gaussian Process (GP) prior provides a flexible representation of this inherent uncertainty. We embed GPs in a Stochastic Dynamic Programming (SDP) framework in order to make robust management predictions with both model uncertainty and limited data. We use simulations to evaluate this approach as compared with the standard approach of using model selection to choose from a set of candidate models. We find that model selection erroneously favors models without tipping points -- leading to harvest policies that guarantee extinction. The GPDP performs nearly as well as the true model and significantly outperforms standard approaches. We illustrate this using examples of simulated single-species dynamics, where the standard model selection approach should be most effective, and find that it still fails to account for uncertainty appropriately and leads to population crashes, while management based on the GPDP does not, since it does not underestimate the uncertainty outside of the observed data.

The realization that complex systems such as ecological communities can collapse or shift regimes suddenly and without rapid external forcing poses a serious challenge to our understanding and management of the natural world. The potential to identify early warning signals that would allow researchers and managers to predict such events before they happen has therefore been an invaluable discovery that offers a way forward in spite of such seemingly unpredictable behavior. Research into early warning signals has demonstrated that it is possible to define and detect such early warning signals in advance of a transition in certain contexts. Here we describe the pattern emerging as research continues to explore just how far we can generalize these results. A core of examples emerges that shares three properties: the phenomenon of rapid regime shifts, a pattern of 'critical slowing down' that can be used to detect the approaching shift, and a mechanism of bifurcation driving the sudden change. As research has expanded beyond these core examples, it is becoming clear that not all systems that show regime shifts exhibit critical slowing down, or vice versa. Even when systems exhibit critical slowing down, statistical detection is a challenge. We review the literature that explores these edge cases and highlight the need for (a) new early warning behaviors that can be used in cases where rapid shifts do not exhibit critical slowing down, (b) the development of methods to identify which behavior might be an appropriate signal when encountering a novel system; bearing in mind that a positive indication for some systems is a negative indication in others, and (c) statistical methods that can distinguish between signatures of early warning behaviors and noise.

Neural collapse (NC) is a phenomenon observed in classification tasks where top-layer representations collapse into their class means, which become equinorm, equiangular and aligned with the classifiers. These behaviors -- associated with generalization and robustness -- would manifest under specific conditions: models are trained towards zero loss, with noise-free labels belonging to balanced classes, which do not outnumber the model's hidden dimension. Recent studies have explored NC in the absence of one or more of these conditions to extend and capitalize on the associated benefits of ideal geometries. Language modeling presents a curious frontier, as training by token prediction constitutes a classification task where none of the conditions exist: the vocabulary is imbalanced and exceeds the embedding dimension; different tokens might correspond to similar contextual embeddings; and large language models (LLMs) in particular are typically only trained for a few epochs. This paper empirically investigates the impact of scaling the architectures and training of causal language models (CLMs) on their progression towards NC. We find that NC properties that develop with scaling are linked to generalization. Moreover, there is evidence of some relationship between NC and generalization independent of scale. Our work therefore underscores the generality of NC as it extends to the novel and more challenging setting of language modeling. Downstream, we seek to inspire further research on the phenomenon to deepen our understanding of LLMs -- and neural networks at large -- and improve existing architectures based on NC-related properties.

Long-horizon reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models faces critical scalability challenges from unbounded context growth, leading to context folding methods that compress interaction history during task execution. However, existing approaches treat summary actions as standard actions, overlooking that summaries fundamentally modify the agent's future observation space, creating a policy-dependent, non-stationary observation distribution that violates core RL assumptions. This introduces three fundamental challenges: (1) gradient dilution where summary tokens receive insufficient training signal, (2) self-conditioning where policy updates change summary distributions, creating a vicious cycle of training collapse, and (3) computational cost from processing unique contexts at each turn. We introduce FoldActhttps://github.com/SHAO-Jiaqi757/FoldAct, a framework that explicitly addresses these challenges through three key innovations: separated loss computation for independent gradient signals on summary and action tokens, full context consistency loss to reduce distribution shift, and selective segment training to reduce computational cost. Our method enables stable training of long-horizon search agents with context folding, addressing the non-stationary observation problem while improving training efficiency with 5.19times speedup.

We identify a novel phenomenon in language models: benign fine-tuning of frontier models can lead to privacy collapse. We find that diverse, subtle patterns in training data can degrade contextual privacy, including optimisation for helpfulness, exposure to user information, emotional and subjective dialogue, and debugging code printing internal variables, among others. Fine-tuned models lose their ability to reason about contextual privacy norms, share information inappropriately with tools, and violate memory boundaries across contexts. Privacy collapse is a ``silent failure'' because models maintain high performance on standard safety and utility benchmarks whilst exhibiting severe privacy vulnerabilities. Our experiments show evidence of privacy collapse across six models (closed and open weight), five fine-tuning datasets (real-world and controlled data), and two task categories (agentic and memory-based). Our mechanistic analysis reveals that privacy representations are uniquely fragile to fine-tuning, compared to task-relevant features which are preserved. Our results reveal a critical gap in current safety evaluations, in particular for the deployment of specialised agents.

Despite significant progress in model editing methods, their application in real-world scenarios remains challenging as they often cause large language models (LLMs) to collapse. Among them, ROME is particularly concerning, as it could disrupt LLMs with only a single edit. In this paper, we study the root causes of such collapse. Through extensive analysis, we identify two primary factors that contribute to the collapse: i) inconsistent handling of prefixed and unprefixed keys in the parameter update equation may result in very small denominators, causing excessively large parameter updates; ii) the subject of collapse cases is usually the first token, whose unprefixed key distribution significantly differs from the prefixed key distribution in autoregressive transformers, causing the aforementioned issue to materialize. To validate our findings, we propose a simple yet effective approach: uniformly using prefixed keys during editing phase and adding prefixes during testing phase to ensure the consistency between training and testing. The experimental results show that the proposed solution can prevent model collapse while maintaining the effectiveness of the edits.

Socio-economic causal effects depend heavily on their specific institutional and environmental context. A single intervention can produce opposite results depending on regulatory or market factors, contexts that are often complex and only partially observed. This poses a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs) in decision-support roles: can they distinguish structural causal mechanisms from surface-level correlations when the context changes? To address this, we introduce EconCausal, a large-scale benchmark comprising 10,490 context-annotated causal triplets extracted from 2,595 high-quality empirical studies published in top-tier economics and finance journals. Through a rigorous four-stage pipeline combining multi-run consensus, context refinement, and multi-critic filtering, we ensure each claim is grounded in peer-reviewed research with explicit identification strategies. Our evaluation reveals critical limitations in current LLMs' context-dependent reasoning. While top models achieve approximately 88 percent accuracy in fixed, explicit contexts, performance drops sharply under context shifts, with a 32.6 percentage point decline, and falls to 37 percent when misinformation is introduced. Furthermore, models exhibit severe over-commitment in ambiguous cases and struggle to recognize null effects, achieving only 9.5 percent accuracy, exposing a fundamental gap between pattern matching and genuine causal reasoning. These findings underscore substantial risks for high-stakes economic decision-making, where the cost of misinterpreting causality is high. The dataset and benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/econaikaist/econcausal-benchmark.

Every act of language generation compresses a rich internal state into a single token sequence. We call this process intention collapse: a many-to-one projection from a high dimensional intention space I into an external language space L. We formalize intention collapse for contemporary language models, define three simple, model agnostic intention metrics (intention entropy Hint, effective dimensionality dimeff, and latent knowledge recoverability Recov), and propose an empirical agenda for studying how inference time computation shapes internal intentions before they are verbalized. We also report a first small scale experiment. Using a 4 bit Mistral 7B model on 200 GSM8K problems, we compare a direct answer baseline, a chain of thought (CoT) regime, and a babble control. CoT raises accuracy from 5.5 percent to 53 percent, sharply reduces pre collapse intention entropy (from 1.42 to 0.37 bits), and shows higher global effective dimensionality than the other regimes despite producing fewer tokens than babble. At the same time, Hint has little item level predictive power, and a linear probe on I achieves AUROC 0.65 in the CoT regime but only about chance in the baseline regime, where it collapses to the majority class. These preliminary results indicate that intention level metrics can distinguish inference regimes and expose latent information that is partly lost during collapse, while also revealing important limitations of our current proxies

Large Language Model (LLM) agents trained with reinforcement learning (RL) show great promise for solving complex, multi-step tasks. However, their performance is often crippled by "Context Explosion", where the accumulation of long text outputs overwhelms the model's context window and leads to reasoning failures. To address this, we introduce CoDA, a Context-Decoupled hierarchical Agent, a simple but effective reinforcement learning framework that decouples high-level planning from low-level execution. It employs a single, shared LLM backbone that learns to operate in two distinct, contextually isolated roles: a high-level Planner that decomposes tasks within a concise strategic context, and a low-level Executor that handles tool interactions in an ephemeral, isolated workspace. We train this unified agent end-to-end using PECO (Planner-Executor Co-Optimization), a reinforcement learning methodology that applies a trajectory-level reward to jointly optimize both roles, fostering seamless collaboration through context-dependent policy updates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoDA achieves significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art baselines on complex multi-hop question-answering benchmarks, and it exhibits strong robustness in long-context scenarios, maintaining stable performance while all other baselines suffer severe degradation, thus further validating the effectiveness of our hierarchical design in mitigating context overload.

The stability of recursively trained large language models (LLMs) is a foundational problem for AI safety. Prevailing theory predicts model collapse, a progressive degradation when models are trained on their own output. We challenge this narrative by introducing a selective feedback mechanism. Contrary to expectation, instead of merely slowing decay, our experiments provide strong evidence that this pressure reverses it, inducing a statistically significant performance improvement in a Gemma 2B model on a complex summarization task. We name this phenomenon the Anti-Ouroboros Effect. We contrast this with a foundational experiment using a simple classifier, where the theoretical degenerative loop was validated, highlighting the unique dynamics of high-dimensional models. Our findings establish that systemic resilience can be an emergent property of LLMs under simple selection pressure, suggesting a powerful and scalable principle for developing safer and more robust AI systems. Across five generations, a quality-filtered condition improved by 6.6% in ROUGE-L F1 score, whereas an unfiltered control degraded by 3.5% and a random-filter control degraded by 4.2%

Providing Large Language Models with relevant contextual knowledge at inference time has been shown to greatly improve the quality of their generations. This is often achieved by prepending informative passages of text, or 'contexts', retrieved from external knowledge bases to their input. However, processing additional contexts online incurs significant computation costs that scale with their length. State Space Models (SSMs) offer a promising solution by allowing a database of contexts to be mapped onto fixed-dimensional states from which to start the generation. A key challenge arises when attempting to leverage information present across multiple contexts, since there is no straightforward way to condition generation on multiple independent states in existing SSMs. To address this, we leverage a simple mathematical relation derived from SSM dynamics to compose multiple states into one that efficiently approximates the effect of concatenating raw context tokens. Since the temporal ordering of contexts can often be uninformative, we enforce permutation-invariance by efficiently averaging states obtained via our composition algorithm across all possible context orderings. We evaluate our resulting method on WikiText and MSMARCO in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings, and show that we can match the strongest performing baseline while enjoying on average 5.4x speedup.

Global climate models (GCMs) are the main tools for understanding and predicting climate change. However, due to limited numerical resolutions, these models suffer from major structural uncertainties; e.g., they cannot resolve critical processes such as small-scale eddies in atmospheric and oceanic turbulence. Thus, such small-scale processes have to be represented as a function of the resolved scales via closures (parametrization). The accuracy of these closures is particularly important for capturing climate extremes. Traditionally, such closures are based on heuristics and simplifying assumptions about the unresolved physics. Recently, supervised-learned closures, trained offline on high-fidelity data, have been shown to outperform the classical physics-based closures. However, this approach requires a significant amount of high-fidelity training data and can also lead to instabilities. Reinforcement learning is emerging as a potent alternative for developing such closures as it requires only low-order statistics and leads to stable closures. In Scientific Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (SMARL) computational elements serve a dual role of discretization points and learning agents. We leverage SMARL and fundamentals of turbulence physics to learn closures for prototypes of atmospheric and oceanic turbulence. The policy is trained using only the enstrophy spectrum, which is nearly invariant and can be estimated from a few high-fidelity samples (these few samples are far from enough for supervised/offline learning). We show that these closures lead to stable low-resolution simulations that, at a fraction of the cost, can reproduce the high-fidelity simulations' statistics, including the tails of the probability density functions. The results demonstrate the high potential of SMARL for closure modeling for GCMs, especially in the regime of scarce data and indirect observations.

Observing certain patches in an image reduces the uncertainty of others. Their realization lowers the distribution entropy of each remaining patch feature, analogous to collapsing a particle's wave function in quantum mechanics. This phenomenon can intuitively be called patch collapse. To identify which patches are most relied on during a target region's collapse, we learn an autoencoder that softly selects a subset of patches to reconstruct each target patch. Graphing these learned dependencies for each patch's PageRank score reveals the optimal patch order to realize an image. We show that respecting this order benefits various masked image modeling methods. First, autoregressive image generation can be boosted by retraining the state-of-the-art model MAR. Next, we introduce a new setup for image classification by exposing Vision Transformers only to high-rank patches in the collapse order. Seeing 22\% of such patches is sufficient to achieve high accuracy. With these experiments, we propose patch collapse as a novel image modeling perspective that promotes vision efficiency. Our project is available at https://github.com/wguo-ai/CoP .

World models have emerged as a critical frontier in AI research, aiming to enhance large models by infusing them with physical dynamics and world knowledge. The core objective is to enable agents to understand, predict, and interact with complex environments. However, current research landscape remains fragmented, with approaches predominantly focused on injecting world knowledge into isolated tasks, such as visual prediction, 3D estimation, or symbol grounding, rather than establishing a unified definition or framework. While these task-specific integrations yield performance gains, they often lack the systematic coherence required for holistic world understanding. In this paper, we analyze the limitations of such fragmented approaches and propose a unified design specification for world models. We suggest that a robust world model should not be a loose collection of capabilities but a normative framework that integrally incorporates interaction, perception, symbolic reasoning, and spatial representation. This work aims to provide a structured perspective to guide future research toward more general, robust, and principled models of the world.

The study conducted by Shumailov et al. (2024) demonstrates that repeatedly training a generative model on synthetic data leads to model collapse. This finding has generated considerable interest and debate, particularly given that current models have nearly exhausted the available data. In this work, we investigate the effects of fitting a distribution (through Kernel Density Estimation, or KDE) or a model to the data, followed by repeated sampling from it. Our objective is to develop a theoretical understanding of the phenomenon observed by Shumailov et al. (2024). Our results indicate that the outcomes reported are a statistical phenomenon and may be unavoidable.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is increasingly viewed as a tree pruning mechanism. However, we identify a systemic pathology termed Recursive Space Contraction (RSC), an irreversible collapse driven by the combined dynamics of positive sharpening and negative squeezing, where the sampling probability of valid alternatives vanishes. While Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization aims to mitigate this, it imposes a rigid Shape Matching constraint that forces the policy to mimic the reference model's full density, creating a gradient conflict with the sharpening required for correctness. We propose Anchored Policy Optimization (APO), shifting the paradigm from global Shape Matching to Support Coverage. By defining a Safe Manifold based on the reference model's high-confidence support, APO permits aggressive sharpening for efficiency while selectively invoking a restorative force during error correction to prevent collapse. We theoretically derive that APO serves as a gradient-aligned mechanism to maximize support coverage, enabling an Elastic Recovery that re-inflates valid branches. Empirical evaluations on mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that APO breaks the accuracy-diversity trade-off, significantly improving Pass@1 while restoring the Pass@K diversity typically lost by standard policy gradient methods.

We formalize and study a phenomenon called feature collapse that makes precise the intuitive idea that entities playing a similar role in a learning task receive similar representations. As feature collapse requires a notion of task, we leverage a simple but prototypical NLP task to study it. We start by showing experimentally that feature collapse goes hand in hand with generalization. We then prove that, in the large sample limit, distinct words that play identical roles in this NLP task receive identical local feature representations in a neural network. This analysis reveals the crucial role that normalization mechanisms, such as LayerNorm, play in feature collapse and in generalization.

The ability to build and leverage world models is essential for a general-purpose AI agent. Testing such capabilities is hard, in part because the building blocks of world models are ill-defined. We present Elements of World Knowledge (EWOK), a framework for evaluating world modeling in language models by testing their ability to use knowledge of a concept to match a target text with a plausible/implausible context. EWOK targets specific concepts from multiple knowledge domains known to be vital for world modeling in humans. Domains range from social interactions (help/hinder) to spatial relations (left/right). Both, contexts and targets are minimal pairs. Objects, agents, and locations in the items can be flexibly filled in enabling easy generation of multiple controlled datasets. We then introduce EWOK-CORE-1.0, a dataset of 4,374 items covering 11 world knowledge domains. We evaluate 20 openweights large language models (1.3B--70B parameters) across a battery of evaluation paradigms along with a human norming study comprising 12,480 measurements. The overall performance of all tested models is worse than human performance, with results varying drastically across domains. These data highlight simple cases where even large models fail and present rich avenues for targeted research on LLM world modeling capabilities.

Earth System Models (ESM) are our main tool for projecting the impacts of climate change. However, running these models at sufficient resolution for local-scale risk-assessments is not computationally feasible. Deep learning-based super-resolution models offer a promising solution to downscale ESM outputs to higher resolutions by learning from data. Yet, due to regional variations in climatic processes, these models typically require retraining for each geographical area-demanding high-resolution observational data, which is unevenly available across the globe. This highlights the need to assess how well these models generalize across geographic regions. To address this, we introduce RainShift, a dataset and benchmark for evaluating downscaling under geographic distribution shifts. We evaluate state-of-the-art downscaling approaches including GANs and diffusion models in generalizing across data gaps between the Global North and Global South. Our findings reveal substantial performance drops in out-of-distribution regions, depending on model and geographic area. While expanding the training domain generally improves generalization, it is insufficient to overcome shifts between geographically distinct regions. We show that addressing these shifts through, for example, data alignment can improve spatial generalization. Our work advances the global applicability of downscaling methods and represents a step toward reducing inequities in access to high-resolution climate information.

Long document summarization systems are critical for domains with lengthy and jargonladen text, yet they present significant challenges to researchers and developers with limited computing resources. Existing solutions mainly focus on efficient attentions or divide-and-conquer strategies. The former reduces theoretical time complexity, but is still memory-heavy. The latter methods sacrifice global context, leading to uninformative and incoherent summaries. This work aims to leverage the memory-efficient nature of divide-and-conquer methods while preserving global context. Concretely, our framework AWESOME uses two novel mechanisms: (1) External memory mechanisms track previously encoded document segments and their corresponding summaries, to enhance global document understanding and summary coherence. (2) Global salient content is further identified beforehand to augment each document segment to support its summarization. Extensive experiments on diverse genres of text, including government reports, transcripts, scientific papers, and novels, show that AWESOME produces summaries with improved informativeness, faithfulness, and coherence than competitive baselines on longer documents, while having a similar or smaller GPU memory footprint.

Effective LLM training depends on predictable scaling of key quantities -- such as final loss and optimal hyperparameters -- with model and dataset size. Qiu et al. (2025) recently showed that this predictability can extend beyond scalars: whole training loss curves can *collapse* onto a universal trajectory after a simple normalization. What remains unclear is whether this phenomenon persists for LLM families trained under *practical scaling recipes*, where width, depth, learning rate, batch size, and weight decay are scaled jointly. We show that it does: loss curves collapse across scales precisely when optimization hyperparameters are set optimally for the given data budget, in accordance with recent empirical scaling laws. Collapse therefore emerges as a signature of compute-efficient training. We demonstrate two applications at scale: (1) deviation-from-collapse provides a sensitive, early diagnostic of training pathologies, and (2) predictability of collapsed curves enables early stopping in large-scale hyperparameter tuning. Finally, we train a competitive LLM family, *Celerity*, using these insights, establishing collapse as an effective tool for developing efficient LLMs.

As large language models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents for long-horizon information-seeking, managing finite context capacity has become a critical bottleneck. Existing context management methods typically commit to a single fixed strategy throughout the entire trajectory. Such static designs may work well in some states, but they cannot adapt as the usefulness and reliability of the accumulated context evolve during long-horizon search. To formalize this challenge, we introduce a probabilistic framework that characterizes long-horizon success through two complementary dimensions: search efficiency and terminal precision. Building on this perspective, we propose AgentSwing, a state-aware adaptive parallel context management routing framework. At each trigger point, AgentSwing expands multiple context-managed branches in parallel and uses lookahead routing to select the most promising continuation. Experiments across diverse benchmarks and agent backbones show that AgentSwing consistently outperforms strong static context management methods, often matching or exceeding their performance with up to 3times fewer interaction turns while also improving the ultimate performance ceiling of long-horizon web agents. Beyond the empirical gains, the proposed probabilistic framework provides a principled lens for analyzing and designing future context management strategies for long-horizon agents.

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a critical challenge in machine learning due to model overconfidence, often without awareness of their epistemological limits. We hypothesize that ``neural collapse'', a phenomenon affecting in-distribution data for models trained beyond loss convergence, also influences OOD data. To benefit from this interplay, we introduce NECO, a novel post-hoc method for OOD detection, which leverages the geometric properties of ``neural collapse'' and of principal component spaces to identify OOD data. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that NECO achieves state-of-the-art results on both small and large-scale OOD detection tasks while exhibiting strong generalization capabilities across different network architectures. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of our method in OOD detection. Code is available at https://gitlab.com/drti/neco

This study presents PARROT (Persuasion and Agreement Robustness Rating of Output Truth), a robustness focused framework designed to measure the degradation in accuracy that occurs under social pressure exerted on users through authority and persuasion in large language models (LLMs) the phenomenon of sycophancy (excessive conformity). PARROT (i) isolates causal effects by comparing the neutral version of the same question with an authoritatively false version using a double-blind evaluation, (ii) quantifies confidence shifts toward the correct and imposed false responses using log-likelihood-based calibration tracking, and (iii) systematically classifies failure modes (e.g., robust correct, sycophantic agreement, reinforced error, stubborn error, self-correction, etc.) using an eight-state behavioral taxonomy. We evaluated 22 models using 1,302 MMLU-style multiple-choice questions across 13 domains and domain-specific authority templates. Findings show marked heterogeneity: advanced models (e.g., GPT-5, GPT-4.1, Claude Sonnet 4.5) exhibit low "follow rates" (leq 11%, GPT-5: 4\%) and minimal accuracy loss, while older/smaller models show severe epistemic collapse (GPT-4: 80\%, Qwen 2.5-1.5B: 94\%). The danger is not limited to response changes; weak models reduce confidence in the correct response while increasing confidence in the imposed incorrect response. While international law and global knowledge at the domain level exhibit high fragility, elementary mathematics is relatively resilient. Consequently, we argue that the goal of "resistance to overfitting pressure" should be addressed as a primary objective alongside accuracy, harm avoidance, and privacy for safe deployment in the real world.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at single-turn tasks such as instruction following and summarization, yet real-world deployments require sustained multi-turn interactions where user goals and conversational context persist and evolve. A recurring challenge in this setting is context drift: the gradual divergence of a model's outputs from goal-consistent behavior across turns. Unlike single-turn errors, drift unfolds temporally and is poorly captured by static evaluation metrics. In this work, we present a study of context drift in multi-turn interactions and propose a simple dynamical framework to interpret its behavior. We formalize drift as the turn-wise KL divergence between the token-level predictive distributions of the test model and a goal-consistent reference model, and propose a recurrence model that interprets its evolution as a bounded stochastic process with restoring forces and controllable interventions. We instantiate this framework in both synthetic long-horizon rewriting tasks and realistic user-agent simulations such as in tau-Bench, measuring drift for several open-weight LLMs that are used as user simulators. Our experiments consistently reveal stable, noise-limited equilibria rather than runaway degradation, and demonstrate that simple reminder interventions reliably reduce divergence in line with theoretical predictions. Together, these results suggest that multi-turn drift can be understood as a controllable equilibrium phenomenon rather than as inevitable decay, providing a foundation for studying and mitigating context drift in extended interactions.

Large language model (LLM) providers boast big numbers for maximum context window sizes. To test the real world use of context windows, we 1) define a concept of maximum effective context window, 2) formulate a testing method of a context window's effectiveness over various sizes and problem types, and 3) create a standardized way to compare model efficacy for increasingly larger context window sizes to find the point of failure. We collected hundreds of thousands of data points across several models and found significant differences between reported Maximum Context Window (MCW) size and Maximum Effective Context Window (MECW) size. Our findings show that the MECW is, not only, drastically different from the MCW but also shifts based on the problem type. A few top of the line models in our test group failed with as little as 100 tokens in context; most had severe degradation in accuracy by 1000 tokens in context. All models fell far short of their Maximum Context Window by as much as 99 percent. Our data reveals the Maximum Effective Context Window shifts based on the type of problem provided, offering clear and actionable insights into how to improve model accuracy and decrease model hallucination rates.

General world models represent a crucial pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), serving as the cornerstone for various applications ranging from virtual environments to decision-making systems. Recently, the emergence of the Sora model has attained significant attention due to its remarkable simulation capabilities, which exhibits an incipient comprehension of physical laws. In this survey, we embark on a comprehensive exploration of the latest advancements in world models. Our analysis navigates through the forefront of generative methodologies in video generation, where world models stand as pivotal constructs facilitating the synthesis of highly realistic visual content. Additionally, we scrutinize the burgeoning field of autonomous-driving world models, meticulously delineating their indispensable role in reshaping transportation and urban mobility. Furthermore, we delve into the intricacies inherent in world models deployed within autonomous agents, shedding light on their profound significance in enabling intelligent interactions within dynamic environmental contexts. At last, we examine challenges and limitations of world models, and discuss their potential future directions. We hope this survey can serve as a foundational reference for the research community and inspire continued innovation. This survey will be regularly updated at: https://github.com/GigaAI-research/General-World-Models-Survey.

We explore local vs. global evolution of knowledge systems through the framework of socio-epistemic networks (SEN), applying two complementary methods to a corpus of scientific texts. The framework comprises three interconnected layers-social, semiotic (material), and semantic-proposing a multilayered approach to understanding structural developments of knowledge. To analyse diachronic changes on the semantic layer, we first use information-theoretic measures based on relative entropy to detect semantic shifts, assess their significance, and identify key driving features. Second, variations in document embedding densities reveal changes in semantic neighbourhoods, tracking how concentration of similar documents increase, remain stable, or disperse. This enables us to trace document trajectories based on content (topics) or metadata (authorship, institution). Case studies of Joseph Silk and Hans-J\"urgen Treder illustrate how individual scholar's work aligns with broader disciplinary shifts in general relativity and gravitation research, demonstrating the applications, limitations, and further potential of this approach.

Generative models are increasingly being used in various applications, such as text generation, commonsense reasoning, and question-answering. To be effective globally, these models must be aware of and account for local socio-cultural contexts, making it necessary to have benchmarks to evaluate the models for their cultural familiarity. Since the training data for LLMs is web-based and the Web is limited in its representation of information, it does not capture knowledge present within communities that are not on the Web. Thus, these models exacerbate the inequities, semantic misalignment, and stereotypes from the Web. There has been a growing call for community-centered participatory research methods in NLP. In this work, we respond to this call by using participatory research methods to introduce DOSA, the first community-generated Dataset of 615 Social Artifacts, by engaging with 260 participants from 19 different Indian geographic subcultures. We use a gamified framework that relies on collective sensemaking to collect the names and descriptions of these artifacts such that the descriptions semantically align with the shared sensibilities of the individuals from those cultures. Next, we benchmark four popular LLMs and find that they show significant variation across regional sub-cultures in their ability to infer the artifacts.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly prevalent, their generated outputs are proliferating across the web, risking a future where machine-generated content dilutes human-authored text. Since online data is the primary resource for LLM pre-training, subsequent models could be trained on an unknown portion of synthetic samples. This will lead to model collapse, a degenerative process whereby LLMs reinforce their own errors, and ultimately yield a declining performance. In this study, we investigate the impact of decoding strategy on model collapse, analysing the characteristics of text at each model generation, the similarity to human references, and the resulting model performance. Using the decoding strategies that lead to the most significant degradation, we evaluate model collapse in more realistic scenarios where the origin of the data (human or synthetic) is unknown. We train a machine-generated text detector and propose an importance sampling approach to alleviate model collapse. Our method is validated on two LLM variants (GPT-2 and SmolLM2) on the open-ended text generation task. We demonstrate that it can not only prevent model collapse but also improve performance when sufficient human-authored samples are present.

Large language models exhibit a systematic tendency toward early semantic commitment: given ambiguous input, they collapse multiple valid interpretations into a single response before sufficient context is available. This premature collapse discards information that may prove essential as dialogue evolves. We present a formal framework for text-to-state mapping (phi: T -> S) that transforms natural language into a non-collapsing state space where multiple interpretations coexist. The mapping decomposes into three stages: conflict detection, interpretation extraction, and state construction. We instantiate phi with a hybrid extraction pipeline that combines rule-based segmentation for explicit conflict markers (adversative conjunctions, hedging expressions) with LLM-based enumeration of implicit ambiguity (epistemic, lexical, structural). On a test set of 68 ambiguous sentences, the resulting states preserve interpretive multiplicity: using hybrid extraction, we obtain mean state entropy H = 1.087 bits across ambiguity categories, compared to H = 0 for collapse-based baselines that commit to a single interpretation. We additionally instantiate the rule-based conflict detector for Japanese markers (kedo, kamoshirenai, etc.) to illustrate cross-lingual portability of the conflict detection stage. This framework extends Non-Resolution Reasoning (NRR) by providing the missing algorithmic bridge between text and the NRR state space, enabling architectural collapse deferment in LLM inference. Design principles for state-to-state transformations are detailed in the Appendix, with empirical validation on 580 test cases (180 single states, 200 contradictory pairs, 200 temporal pairs), demonstrating 0% collapse for principle-satisfying operators versus up to 17.8% for violating operators.

The past several years have witnessed a huge surge in the use of social media platforms during mass convergence events such as health emergencies, natural or human-induced disasters. These non-traditional data sources are becoming vital for disease forecasts and surveillance when preparing for epidemic and pandemic outbreaks. In this paper, we present GeoCoV19, a large-scale Twitter dataset containing more than 524 million multilingual tweets posted over a period of 90 days since February 1, 2020. Moreover, we employ a gazetteer-based approach to infer the geolocation of tweets. We postulate that this large-scale, multilingual, geolocated social media data can empower the research communities to evaluate how societies are collectively coping with this unprecedented global crisis as well as to develop computational methods to address challenges such as identifying fake news, understanding communities' knowledge gaps, building disease forecast and surveillance models, among others.

Natural disasters, such as floods, tornadoes, or wildfires, are increasingly pervasive as the Earth undergoes global warming. It is difficult to predict when and where an incident will occur, so timely emergency response is critical to saving the lives of those endangered by destructive events. Fortunately, technology can play a role in these situations. Social media posts can be used as a low-latency data source to understand the progression and aftermath of a disaster, yet parsing this data is tedious without automated methods. Prior work has mostly focused on text-based filtering, yet image and video-based filtering remains largely unexplored. In this work, we present the Incidents1M Dataset, a large-scale multi-label dataset which contains 977,088 images, with 43 incident and 49 place categories. We provide details of the dataset construction, statistics and potential biases; introduce and train a model for incident detection; and perform image-filtering experiments on millions of images on Flickr and Twitter. We also present some applications on incident analysis to encourage and enable future work in computer vision for humanitarian aid. Code, data, and models are available at http://incidentsdataset.csail.mit.edu.

Global climate models typically operate at a grid resolution of hundreds of kilometers and fail to resolve atmospheric mesoscale processes, e.g., clouds, precipitation, and gravity waves (GWs). Model representation of these processes and their sources is essential to the global circulation and planetary energy budget, but subgrid scale contributions from these processes are often only approximately represented in models using parameterizations. These parameterizations are subject to approximations and idealizations, which limit their capability and accuracy. The most drastic of these approximations is the "single-column approximation" which completely neglects the horizontal evolution of these processes, resulting in key biases in current climate models. With a focus on atmospheric GWs, we present the first-ever global simulation of atmospheric GW fluxes using machine learning (ML) models trained on the WINDSET dataset to emulate global GW emulation in the atmosphere, as an alternative to traditional single-column parameterizations. Using an Attention U-Net-based architecture trained on globally resolved GW momentum fluxes, we illustrate the importance and effectiveness of global nonlocality, when simulating GWs using data-driven schemes.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents in dynamic, real-world environments, where success requires both reasoning and effective tool use. A central challenge for agentic tasks is the growing context length, as agents must accumulate long histories of actions and observations. This expansion raises costs and reduces efficiency in long-horizon tasks, yet prior work on context compression has mostly focused on single-step tasks or narrow applications. We introduce Agent Context Optimization (ACON), a unified framework that optimally compresses both environment observations and interaction histories into concise yet informative condensations. ACON leverages compression guideline optimization in natural language space: given paired trajectories where full context succeeds but compressed context fails, capable LLMs analyze the causes of failure, and the compression guideline is updated accordingly. Furthermore, we propose distilling the optimized LLM compressor into smaller models to reduce the overhead of the additional module. Experiments on AppWorld, OfficeBench, and Multi-objective QA show that ACON reduces memory usage by 26-54% (peak tokens) while largely preserving task performance, preserves over 95% of accuracy when distilled into smaller compressors, and enhances smaller LMs as long-horizon agents with up to 46% performance improvement.

Accurate confidence estimation is essential for trustworthy large language models (LLMs) systems, as it empowers the user to determine when to trust outputs and enables reliable deployment in safety-critical applications. Current confidence estimation methods for LLMs neglect the relevance between responses and contextual information, a crucial factor in output quality evaluation, particularly in scenarios where background knowledge is provided. To bridge this gap, we propose CRUX (Context-aware entropy Reduction and Unified consistency eXamination), the first framework that integrates context faithfulness and consistency for confidence estimation via two novel metrics. First, contextual entropy reduction represents data uncertainty with the information gain through contrastive sampling with and without context. Second, unified consistency examination captures potential model uncertainty through the global consistency of the generated answers with and without context. Experiments across three benchmark datasets (CoQA, SQuAD, QuAC) and two domain-specific datasets (BioASQ, EduQG) demonstrate CRUX's effectiveness, achieving the highest AUROC than existing baselines.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex reasoning but are traditionally evaluated in static, "frozen world" settings: model responses are assumed to be instantaneous, and the context of a request is presumed to be immutable over the duration of the response. While generally true for short-term tasks, the "frozen world" assumption breaks down in modern reasoning tasks such as assistive programming, where models may take hours to think through problems and code may change dramatically from the time the model starts thinking to the model's final output. In this work, we challenge the frozen world assumption and evaluate LRM robustness under two realistic dynamic scenarios: interruptions, which test the quality of the model's partial outputs on a limited budget, and dynamic context, which tests model adaptation to in-flight changes. Across mathematics and programming benchmarks that require long-form reasoning, static evaluations consistently overestimate robustness: even state-of-the-art LRMs, which achieve high accuracy in static settings, can fail unpredictably when interrupted or exposed to changing context, with performance dropping by up to 60% when updates are introduced late in the reasoning process. Our analysis further reveals several novel failure modes, including reasoning leakage, where models fold the reasoning into their final answer when interrupted; panic, where under time pressure models abandon reasoning entirely and return incorrect answers; and self-doubt, where performance degrades while incorporating updated information.

Recent advancements in long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) have primarily concentrated on processing extended input contexts, resulting in significant strides in long-context comprehension. However, the equally critical aspect of generating long-form outputs has received comparatively less attention. This paper advocates for a paradigm shift in NLP research toward addressing the challenges of long-output generation. Tasks such as novel writing, long-term planning, and complex reasoning require models to understand extensive contexts and produce coherent, contextually rich, and logically consistent extended text. These demands highlight a critical gap in current LLM capabilities. We underscore the importance of this under-explored domain and call for focused efforts to develop foundational LLMs tailored for generating high-quality, long-form outputs, which hold immense potential for real-world applications.

One of the key challenges in deploying RL to real-world applications is to adapt to variations of unknown environment contexts, such as changing terrains in robotic tasks and fluctuated bandwidth in congestion control. Existing works on adaptation to unknown environment contexts either assume the contexts are the same for the whole episode or assume the context variables are Markovian. However, in many real-world applications, the environment context usually stays stable for a stochastic period and then changes in an abrupt and unpredictable manner within an episode, resulting in a segment structure, which existing works fail to address. To leverage the segment structure of piecewise stable context in real-world applications, in this paper, we propose a \textbf{Segmented Context Belief Augmented Deep~(SeCBAD)} RL method. Our method can jointly infer the belief distribution over latent context with the posterior over segment length and perform more accurate belief context inference with observed data within the current context segment. The inferred belief context can be leveraged to augment the state, leading to a policy that can adapt to abrupt variations in context. We demonstrate empirically that SeCBAD can infer context segment length accurately and outperform existing methods on a toy grid world environment and Mujuco tasks with piecewise-stable context.

As AI model size grows, neural scaling laws have become a crucial tool to predict the improvements of large models when increasing capacity and the size of original (human or natural) training data. Yet, the widespread use of popular models means that the ecosystem of online data and text will co-evolve to progressively contain increased amounts of synthesized data. In this paper we ask: How will the scaling laws change in the inevitable regime where synthetic data makes its way into the training corpus? Will future models, still improve, or be doomed to degenerate up to total (model) collapse? We develop a theoretical framework of model collapse through the lens of scaling laws. We discover a wide range of decay phenomena, analyzing loss of scaling, shifted scaling with number of generations, the ''un-learning" of skills, and grokking when mixing human and synthesized data. Our theory is validated by large-scale experiments with a transformer on an arithmetic task and text generation using the large language model Llama2.

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is fundamentally determined by the contextual information provided during inference. This survey introduces Context Engineering, a formal discipline that transcends simple prompt design to encompass the systematic optimization of information payloads for LLMs. We present a comprehensive taxonomy decomposing Context Engineering into its foundational components and the sophisticated implementations that integrate them into intelligent systems. We first examine the foundational components: context retrieval and generation, context processing and context management. We then explore how these components are architecturally integrated to create sophisticated system implementations: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), memory systems and tool-integrated reasoning, and multi-agent systems. Through this systematic analysis of over 1300 research papers, our survey not only establishes a technical roadmap for the field but also reveals a critical research gap: a fundamental asymmetry exists between model capabilities. While current models, augmented by advanced context engineering, demonstrate remarkable proficiency in understanding complex contexts, they exhibit pronounced limitations in generating equally sophisticated, long-form outputs. Addressing this gap is a defining priority for future research. Ultimately, this survey provides a unified framework for both researchers and engineers advancing context-aware AI.

Although model editing has shown promise in revising knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs), its impact on the inherent capabilities of LLMs is often overlooked. In this work, we reveal a critical phenomenon: even a single edit can trigger model collapse, manifesting as significant performance degradation in various benchmark tasks. However, benchmarking LLMs after each edit, while necessary to prevent such collapses, is impractically time-consuming and resource-intensive. To mitigate this, we propose using perplexity as a surrogate metric, validated by extensive experiments demonstrating changes in an edited model's perplexity are strongly correlated with its downstream task performances. We further conduct an in-depth study on sequential editing, a practical setting for real-world scenarios, across various editing methods and LLMs, focusing on hard cases from our previous single edit studies. The results indicate that nearly all examined editing methods result in model collapse after only few edits. To facilitate further research, we have utilized GPT-3.5 to develop a new dataset, HardEdit, based on those hard cases. This dataset aims to establish the foundation for pioneering research in reliable model editing and the mechanisms underlying editing-induced model collapse. We hope this work can draw the community's attention to the potential risks inherent in model editing practices.

Worldwide geolocalization aims to locate the precise location at the coordinate level of photos taken anywhere on the Earth. It is very challenging due to 1) the difficulty of capturing subtle location-aware visual semantics, and 2) the heterogeneous geographical distribution of image data. As a result, existing studies have clear limitations when scaled to a worldwide context. They may easily confuse distant images with similar visual contents, or cannot adapt to various locations worldwide with different amounts of relevant data. To resolve these limitations, we propose G3, a novel framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). In particular, G3 consists of three steps, i.e., Geo-alignment, Geo-diversification, and Geo-verification to optimize both retrieval and generation phases of worldwide geolocalization. During Geo-alignment, our solution jointly learns expressive multi-modal representations for images, GPS and textual descriptions, which allows us to capture location-aware semantics for retrieving nearby images for a given query. During Geo-diversification, we leverage a prompt ensembling method that is robust to inconsistent retrieval performance for different image queries. Finally, we combine both retrieved and generated GPS candidates in Geo-verification for location prediction. Experiments on two well-established datasets IM2GPS3k and YFCC4k verify the superiority of G3 compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities, but often fail to perceive fine-grained visual details, limiting their applicability in precision-demanding tasks. While methods that crop salient regions of an image offer a partial solution, we identify a critical limitation they introduce: "Contextual Blindness". This failure occurs due to structural disconnect between high-fidelity details (from the crop) and the broader global context (from the original image), even when all necessary visual information is present. We argue that this limitation stems not from a lack of information 'Quantity', but from a lack of 'Structural Diversity' in the model's input. To resolve this, we propose Visual Funnel, a training-free, two-step approach. Visual Funnel first performs Contextual Anchoring to identify the region of interest in a single forward pass. It then constructs an Entropy-Scaled Portfolio that preserves the hierarchical context - ranging from focal detail to broader surroundings - by dynamically determining crop sizes based on attention entropy and refining crop centers. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Visual Funnel significantly outperforms naive single-crop and unstructured multi-crop baselines. Our results further validate that simply adding more unstructured crops provides limited or even detrimental benefits, confirming that the hierarchical structure of our portfolio is key to resolving Contextual Blindness.

Language models of code (LMs) work well when the surrounding code in the vicinity of generation provides sufficient context. This is not true when it becomes necessary to use types or functionality defined in another module or library, especially those not seen during training. LMs suffer from limited awareness of such global context and end up hallucinating, e.g., using types defined in other files incorrectly. Recent work tries to overcome this issue by retrieving global information to augment the local context. However, this bloats the prompt or requires architecture modifications and additional training. Integrated development environments (IDEs) assist developers by bringing the global context at their fingertips using static analysis. We extend this assistance, enjoyed by developers, to the LMs. We propose a notion of monitors that use static analysis in the background to guide the decoding. Unlike a priori retrieval, static analysis is invoked iteratively during the entire decoding process, providing the most relevant suggestions on demand. We demonstrate the usefulness of our proposal by monitoring for type-consistent use of identifiers whenever an LM generates code for object dereference. To evaluate our approach, we curate PragmaticCode, a dataset of open-source projects with their development environments. On models of varying parameter scale, we show that monitor-guided decoding consistently improves the ability of an LM to not only generate identifiers that match the ground truth but also improves compilation rates and agreement with ground truth. We find that LMs with fewer parameters, when guided with our monitor, can outperform larger LMs. With monitor-guided decoding, SantaCoder-1.1B achieves better compilation rate and next-identifier match than the much larger text-davinci-003 model. The datasets and code will be released at https://aka.ms/monitors4codegen .

Unprecedented volumes of Earth observation data are continually collected around the world, but high-quality labels remain scarce given the effort required to make physical measurements and observations. This has led to considerable investment in bespoke modeling efforts translating sparse labels into maps. Here we introduce AlphaEarth Foundations, an embedding field model yielding a highly general, geospatial representation that assimilates spatial, temporal, and measurement contexts across multiple sources, enabling accurate and efficient production of maps and monitoring systems from local to global scales. The embeddings generated by AlphaEarth Foundations are the only to consistently outperform all previous featurization approaches tested on a diverse set of mapping evaluations without re-training. We will release a dataset of global, annual, analysis-ready embedding field layers from 2017 through 2024.

The proliferation of generative models, combined with pretraining on web-scale data, raises a timely question: what happens when these models are trained on their own generated outputs? Recent investigations into model-data feedback loops proposed that such loops would lead to a phenomenon termed model collapse, under which performance progressively degrades with each model-data feedback iteration until fitted models become useless. However, those studies largely assumed that new data replace old data over time, where an arguably more realistic assumption is that data accumulate over time. In this paper, we ask: what effect does accumulating data have on model collapse? We empirically study this question by pretraining sequences of language models on text corpora. We confirm that replacing the original real data by each generation's synthetic data does indeed tend towards model collapse, then demonstrate that accumulating the successive generations of synthetic data alongside the original real data avoids model collapse; these results hold across a range of model sizes, architectures, and hyperparameters. We obtain similar results for deep generative models on other types of real data: diffusion models for molecule conformation generation and variational autoencoders for image generation. To understand why accumulating data can avoid model collapse, we use an analytically tractable framework introduced by prior work in which a sequence of linear models are fit to the previous models' outputs. Previous work used this framework to show that if data are replaced, the test error increases with the number of model-fitting iterations; we extend this argument to prove that if data instead accumulate, the test error has a finite upper bound independent of the number of iterations, meaning model collapse no longer occurs.

There is a recently discovered and intriguing phenomenon called Neural Collapse: at the terminal phase of training a deep neural network for classification, the within-class penultimate feature means and the associated classifier vectors of all flat classes collapse to the vertices of a simplex Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF). Recent work has tried to exploit this phenomenon by fixing the related classifier weights to a pre-computed ETF to induce neural collapse and maximize the separation of the learned features when training with imbalanced data. In this work, we propose to fix the linear classifier of a deep neural network to a Hierarchy-Aware Frame (HAFrame), instead of an ETF, and use a cosine similarity-based auxiliary loss to learn hierarchy-aware penultimate features that collapse to the HAFrame. We demonstrate that our approach reduces the mistake severity of the model's predictions while maintaining its top-1 accuracy on several datasets of varying scales with hierarchies of heights ranging from 3 to 12. Code: https://github.com/ltong1130ztr/HAFrame

Establishing whether language models can use contextual information in a human-plausible way is important to ensure their safe adoption in real-world settings. However, the questions of when and which parts of the context affect model generations are typically tackled separately, and current plausibility evaluations are practically limited to a handful of artificial benchmarks. To address this, we introduce Plausibility Evaluation of Context Reliance (PECoRe), an end-to-end interpretability framework designed to quantify context usage in language models' generations. Our approach leverages model internals to (i) contrastively identify context-sensitive target tokens in generated texts and (ii) link them to contextual cues justifying their prediction. We use PECoRe to quantify the plausibility of context-aware machine translation models, comparing model rationales with human annotations across several discourse-level phenomena. Finally, we apply our method to unannotated generations to identify context-mediated predictions and highlight instances of (im)plausible context usage in model translations.

Representations learned via self-supervised learning (SSL) can be susceptible to dimensional collapse, where the learned representation subspace is of extremely low dimensionality and thus fails to represent the full data distribution and modalities. Dimensional collapse also known as the "underfilling" phenomenon is one of the major causes of degraded performance on downstream tasks. Previous work has investigated the dimensional collapse problem of SSL at a global level. In this paper, we demonstrate that representations can span over high dimensional space globally, but collapse locally. To address this, we propose a method called local dimensionality regularization (LDReg). Our formulation is based on the derivation of the Fisher-Rao metric to compare and optimize local distance distributions at an asymptotically small radius for each data point. By increasing the local intrinsic dimensionality, we demonstrate through a range of experiments that LDReg improves the representation quality of SSL. The results also show that LDReg can regularize dimensionality at both local and global levels.

Epidemiologists aiming to model the dynamics of global events face a significant challenge in identifying the factors linked with anomalies such as disease outbreaks. In this paper, we present a novel method for identifying the most important development sectors sensitive to disease outbreaks by using global development indicators as markers. We use statistical methods to assess the causative linkages between these indicators and disease outbreaks, as well as to find the most often ranked indicators. We used data imputation techniques in addition to statistical analysis to convert raw real-world data sets into meaningful data for causal inference. The application of various algorithms for the detection of causal linkages between the indicators is the subject of this research. Despite the fact that disparities in governmental policies between countries account for differences in causal linkages, several indicators emerge as important determinants sensitive to disease outbreaks over the world in the 21st Century.

The Non-Local Network (NLNet) presents a pioneering approach for capturing long-range dependencies within an image, via aggregating query-specific global context to each query position. However, through a rigorous empirical analysis, we have found that the global contexts modeled by the non-local network are almost the same for different query positions. In this paper, we take advantage of this finding to create a simplified network based on a query-independent formulation, which maintains the accuracy of NLNet but with significantly less computation. We further replace the one-layer transformation function of the non-local block by a two-layer bottleneck, which further reduces the parameter number considerably. The resulting network element, called the global context (GC) block, effectively models global context in a lightweight manner, allowing it to be applied at multiple layers of a backbone network to form a global context network (GCNet). Experiments show that GCNet generally outperforms NLNet on major benchmarks for various recognition tasks. The code and network configurations are available at https://github.com/xvjiarui/GCNet.

Central to many self-improvement pipelines for large language models (LLMs) is the assumption that models can improve by reflecting on past mistakes. We study a phenomenon termed contextual drag: the presence of failed attempts in the context biases subsequent generations toward structurally similar errors. Across evaluations of 11 proprietary and open-weight models on 8 reasoning tasks, contextual drag induces 10-20% performance drops, and iterative self-refinement in models with severe contextual drag can collapse into self-deterioration. Structural analysis using tree edit distance reveals that subsequent reasoning trajectories inherit structurally similar error patterns from the context. We demonstrate that neither external feedback nor successful self-verification suffices to eliminate this effect. While mitigation strategies such as fallback-behavior fine-tuning and context denoising yield partial improvements, they fail to fully restore baseline performance, positioning contextual drag as a persistent failure mode in current reasoning architectures.

Predicting future international events from textual information, such as news articles, has tremendous potential for applications in global policy, strategic decision-making, and geopolitics. However, existing datasets available for this task are often limited in quality, hindering the progress of related research. In this paper, we introduce WORLDREP (WORLD Relationship and Event Prediction), a novel dataset designed to address these limitations by leveraging the advanced reasoning capabilities of large-language models (LLMs). Our dataset features high-quality scoring labels generated through advanced prompt modeling and rigorously validated by domain experts in political science. We showcase the quality and utility of WORLDREP for real-world event prediction tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness through extensive experiments and analysis. Furthermore, we publicly release our dataset along with the full automation source code for data collection, labeling, and benchmarking, aiming to support and advance research in text-based event prediction.

Context-aided forecasting (CAF) holds promise for integrating domain knowledge and forward-looking information, enabling AI systems to surpass traditional statistical methods. However, recent empirical studies reveal a puzzling gap: multimodal models often fail to outperform their unimodal counterparts. We hypothesize that this underperformance stems from poor context quality in existing datasets, as verification is challenging. To address these limitations, we introduce a semi-synthetic data augmentation method that generates contexts both descriptive of temporal dynamics and verifiably complementary to numerical histories. This approach enables massive-scale dataset creation, resulting in CAF-7M, a corpus of 7 million context-augmented time series windows, including a rigorously verified test set. We demonstrate that semi-synthetic pre-training transfers effectively to real-world evaluation, and show clear evidence of context utilization. Our results suggest that dataset quality, rather than architectural limitations, has been the primary bottleneck in context-aided forecasting.

Knowledge is fundamental to the overall capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). The knowledge paradigm of a model, which dictates how it encodes and utilizes knowledge, significantly affects its performance. Despite the continuous development of LLMs under existing knowledge paradigms, issues within these frameworks continue to constrain model potential. This blog post highlight three critical open problems limiting model capabilities: (1) challenges in knowledge updating for LLMs, (2) the failure of reverse knowledge generalization (the reversal curse), and (3) conflicts in internal knowledge. We review recent progress made in addressing these issues and discuss potential general solutions. Based on observations in these areas, we propose a hypothetical paradigm based on Contextual Knowledge Scaling, and further outline implementation pathways that remain feasible within contemporary techniques. Evidence suggests this approach holds potential to address current shortcomings, serving as our vision for future model paradigms. This blog post aims to provide researchers with a brief overview of progress in LLM knowledge systems, while provide inspiration for the development of next-generation model architectures.

When using large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive tasks, such as open-domain question answering, external context can bridge the gap between external knowledge and the LLMs' parametric knowledge. Recent research has been developed to amplify contextual knowledge over the parametric knowledge of LLMs with contrastive decoding approaches. While these approaches could yield truthful responses when relevant context is provided, they are prone to vulnerabilities when faced with noisy contexts. We extend the scope of previous studies to encompass noisy contexts and propose adaptive contrastive decoding (ACD) to leverage contextual influence effectively. ACD demonstrates improvements in open-domain question answering tasks compared to baselines, especially in robustness by remaining undistracted by noisy contexts in retrieval-augmented generation.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in environments that generate massive, dynamic contexts. However, a critical bottleneck remains: while agents have access to this context, their static prompts lack the mechanisms to manage it effectively, leading to recurring Corrective and Enhancement failures. To address this capability gap, we introduce SCOPE (Self-evolving Context Optimization via Prompt Evolution). SCOPE frames context management as an online optimization problem, synthesizing guidelines from execution traces to automatically evolve the agent's prompt. We propose a Dual-Stream mechanism that balances tactical specificity (resolving immediate errors) with strategic generality (evolving long-term principles). Furthermore, we introduce Perspective-Driven Exploration to maximize strategy coverage, increasing the likelihood that the agent has the correct strategy for any given task. Experiments on the HLE benchmark show that SCOPE improves task success rates from 14.23\% to 38.64\% without human intervention. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/JarvisPei/SCOPE.

We present an Encoder-Decoder Attention Transformer, EDAFormer, which consists of the Embedding-Free Transformer (EFT) encoder and the all-attention decoder leveraging our Embedding-Free Attention (EFA) structure. The proposed EFA is a novel global context modeling mechanism that focuses on functioning the global non-linearity, not the specific roles of the query, key and value. For the decoder, we explore the optimized structure for considering the globality, which can improve the semantic segmentation performance. In addition, we propose a novel Inference Spatial Reduction (ISR) method for the computational efficiency. Different from the previous spatial reduction attention methods, our ISR method further reduces the key-value resolution at the inference phase, which can mitigate the computation-performance trade-off gap for the efficient semantic segmentation. Our EDAFormer shows the state-of-the-art performance with the efficient computation compared to the existing transformer-based semantic segmentation models in three public benchmarks, including ADE20K, Cityscapes and COCO-Stuff. Furthermore, our ISR method reduces the computational cost by up to 61% with minimal mIoU performance degradation on Cityscapes dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/hyunwoo137/EDAFormer.

RL training of multi-turn LLM agents is inherently unstable, and reasoning quality directly determines task performance. Entropy is widely used to track reasoning stability. However, entropy only measures diversity within the same input, and cannot tell whether reasoning actually responds to different inputs. In RAGEN-2, we find that even with stable entropy, models can rely on fixed templates that look diverse but are input-agnostic. We call this template collapse, a failure mode invisible to entropy and all existing metrics. To diagnose this failure, we decompose reasoning quality into within-input diversity (Entropy) and cross-input distinguishability (Mutual Information, MI), and introduce a family of mutual information proxies for online diagnosis. Across diverse tasks, mutual information correlates with final performance much more strongly than entropy, making it a more reliable proxy for reasoning quality. We further explain template collapse with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) mechanism. Low reward variance weakens task gradients, letting regularization terms dominate and erase cross-input reasoning differences. To address this, we propose SNR-Aware Filtering to select high-signal prompts per iteration using reward variance as a lightweight proxy. Across planning, math reasoning, web navigation, and code execution, the method consistently improves both input dependence and task performance.

A 20-year analysis of CrossRef metadata demonstrates that global scholarly output -- encompassing publications, retractions, and preprints -- exhibits strikingly inertial growth, well-described by exponential, quadratic, and logistic models with nearly indistinguishable goodness-of-fit. Retraction dynamics, in particular, remain stable and minimally affected by the COVID-19 shock, which contributed less than 1% to total notices. Since 2004, publications doubled every 9.8 years, retractions every 11.4 years, and preprints at the fastest rate, every 5.6 years. The findings underscore a system primed for ongoing stress at unchanged structural bottlenecks. Although model forecasts diverge beyond 2024, the evidence suggests that the future trajectory of scholarly communication will be determined by persistent systemic inertia rather than episodic disruptions -- unless intentionally redirected by policy or AI-driven reform.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has inaugurated a transformative epoch in natural language processing, fostering unprecedented proficiency in text generation, comprehension, and contextual scrutiny. Nevertheless, effectively handling extensive contexts, crucial for myriad applications, poses a formidable obstacle owing to the intrinsic constraints of the models' context window sizes and the computational burdens entailed by their operations. This investigation presents an innovative framework that strategically tailors LLMs for streamlined context processing by harnessing the synergies among natural language summarization, soft prompt compression, and augmented utility preservation mechanisms. Our methodology, dubbed SoftPromptComp, amalgamates natural language prompts extracted from summarization methodologies with dynamically generated soft prompts to forge a concise yet semantically robust depiction of protracted contexts. This depiction undergoes further refinement via a weighting mechanism optimizing information retention and utility for subsequent tasks. We substantiate that our framework markedly diminishes computational overhead and enhances LLMs' efficacy across various benchmarks, while upholding or even augmenting the caliber of the produced content. By amalgamating soft prompt compression with sophisticated summarization, SoftPromptComp confronts the dual challenges of managing lengthy contexts and ensuring model scalability. Our findings point towards a propitious trajectory for augmenting LLMs' applicability and efficiency, rendering them more versatile and pragmatic for real-world applications. This research enriches the ongoing discourse on optimizing language models, providing insights into the potency of soft prompts and summarization techniques as pivotal instruments for the forthcoming generation of NLP solutions.

Pre-trained transformer-based models have recently shown great performance when applied to Named Entity Recognition (NER). As the complexity of their self-attention mechanism prevents them from processing long documents at once, these models are usually applied in a sequential fashion. Such an approach unfortunately only incorporates local context and prevents leveraging global document context in long documents such as novels, which might hinder performance. In this article, we explore the impact of global document context, and its relationships with local context. We find that correctly retrieving global document context has a greater impact on performance than only leveraging local context, prompting for further research on how to better retrieve that context.

Large language model (LLM) agents are fundamentally bottlenecked by finite context windows on long-horizon tasks. As trajectories grow, retaining tool outputs and intermediate reasoning in-context quickly becomes infeasible: the working context becomes prohibitively long, eventually exceeds the context budget, and makes distant evidence harder to use even when it is still present. Existing solutions typically shorten context through truncation or running summaries, but these methods are fundamentally lossy because they compress or discard past evidence itself. We introduce Memex, an indexed experience memory mechanism that instead compresses context without discarding evidence. Memex maintains a compact working context consisting of concise structured summaries and stable indices, while storing full-fidelity underlying interactions in an external experience database under those indices. The agent can then decide when to dereference an index and recover the exact past evidence needed for the current subgoal. We optimize both write and read behaviors with our reinforcement learning framework MemexRL, using reward shaping tailored to indexed memory usage under a context budget, so the agent learns what to summarize, what to archive, how to index it, and when to retrieve it. This yields a substantially less lossy form of long-horizon memory than summary-only approaches. We further provide a theoretical analysis showing the potential of the Memex loop to preserve decision quality with bounded dereferencing while keeping effective in-context computation bounded as history grows. Empirically, on challenging long-horizon tasks, Memex agent trained with MemexRL improves task success while using a significantly smaller working context.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on single-turn tasks, yet their effectiveness deteriorates in multi-turn conversations. We define this phenomenon as cumulative contextual decay - a progressive degradation of contextual integrity caused by attention pollution, dilution, and drift. To address this challenge, we propose Rhea (Role-aware Heuristic Episodic Attention), a novel framework that decouples conversation history into two functionally independent memory modules: (1) an Instructional Memory (IM) that persistently stores high-fidelity global constraints via a structural priority mechanism, and (2) an Episodic Memory (EM) that dynamically manages user-model interactions via asymmetric noise control and heuristic context retrieval. During inference, Rhea constructs a high signal-to-noise context by applying its priority attention: selectively integrating relevant episodic information while always prioritizing global instructions. To validate this approach, experiments on multiple multi-turn conversation benchmarks - including MT-Eval and Long-MT-Bench+ - show that Rhea mitigates performance decay and improves overall accuracy by 1.04 points on a 10-point scale (a 16% relative gain over strong baselines). Moreover, Rhea maintains near-perfect instruction fidelity (IAR > 8.1) across long-horizon interactions. These results demonstrate that Rhea provides a principled and effective framework for building more precise, instruction-consistent conversational LLMs.

When faced with novel situations, people are able to marshal relevant considerations from a wide range of background knowledge and put these to use in inferences and predictions. What permits us to draw in globally relevant information and reason over it coherently? Here, we explore the hypothesis that people use a combination of distributed and symbolic representations to construct bespoke mental models tailored to novel situations. We propose a computational implementation of this idea -- a ``Model Synthesis Architecture'' (MSA) -- using language models to implement global relevance-based retrieval and model synthesis and probabilistic programs to implement bespoke, coherent world models. We evaluate our MSA as a model of human judgments on a novel reasoning dataset. The dataset -- built around a `Model Olympics` domain of sports vignettes -- tests models' capacity for human-like, open-ended reasoning by requiring (i) judgments about novel causal structures described in language; (ii) drawing on large bodies of background knowledge; and (iii) doing both in light of observations that introduce arbitrary novel variables. Our MSA approach captures human judgments better than language model-only baselines, under both direct and chain-of-thought generations from the LM that supports model synthesis. These results suggest that MSAs can be implemented in a way that mirrors people's ability to deliver locally coherent reasoning over globally relevant variables, offering a path to understanding and replicating human reasoning in open-ended domains.

Seeing clearly with high resolution is a foundation of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), which has been proven to be vital for visual perception and reasoning. Existing works usually employ a straightforward resolution upscaling method, where the image consists of global and local branches, with the latter being the sliced image patches but resized to the same resolution as the former. This means that higher resolution requires more local patches, resulting in exorbitant computational expenses, and meanwhile, the dominance of local image tokens may diminish the global context. In this paper, we dive into the problems and propose a new framework as well as an elaborate optimization strategy. Specifically, we extract contextual information from the global view using a mixture of adapters, based on the observation that different adapters excel at different tasks. With regard to local patches, learnable query embeddings are introduced to reduce image tokens, the most important tokens accounting for the user question will be further selected by a similarity-based selector. Our empirical results demonstrate a `less is more' pattern, where utilizing fewer but more informative local image tokens leads to improved performance. Besides, a significant challenge lies in the training strategy, as simultaneous end-to-end training of the global mining block and local compression block does not yield optimal results. We thus advocate for an alternating training way, ensuring balanced learning between global and local aspects. Finally, we also introduce a challenging dataset with high requirements for image detail, enhancing the training of the local compression layer. The proposed method, termed LMM with Sophisticated Tasks, Local image compression, and Mixture of global Experts (SliME), achieves leading performance across various benchmarks with only 2 million training data.

Long context is an important topic in Natural Language Processing (NLP), running through the development of NLP architectures, and offers immense opportunities for Large Language Models (LLMs) giving LLMs the lifelong learning potential akin to humans. Unfortunately, the pursuit of a long context is accompanied by numerous obstacles. Nevertheless, long context remains a core competitive advantage for LLMs. In the past two years, the context length of LLMs has achieved a breakthrough extension to millions of tokens. Moreover, the research on long-context LLMs has expanded from length extrapolation to a comprehensive focus on architecture, infrastructure, training, and evaluation technologies. Inspired by the symphonic poem, Thus Spake Zarathustra, we draw an analogy between the journey of extending the context of LLM and the attempts of humans to transcend its mortality. In this survey, We will illustrate how LLM struggles between the tremendous need for a longer context and its equal need to accept the fact that it is ultimately finite. To achieve this, we give a global picture of the lifecycle of long-context LLMs from four perspectives: architecture, infrastructure, training, and evaluation, showcasing the full spectrum of long-context technologies. At the end of this survey, we will present 10 unanswered questions currently faced by long-context LLMs. We hope this survey can serve as a systematic introduction to the research on long-context LLMs.

As of writing this paper, COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease 2019) has spread to more than 220 countries and territories. Following the outbreak, the pandemic's seriousness has made people more active on social media, especially on the microblogging platforms such as Twitter and Weibo. The pandemic-specific discourse has remained on-trend on these platforms for months now. Previous studies have confirmed the contributions of such socially generated conversations towards situational awareness of crisis events. The early forecasts of cases are essential to authorities to estimate the requirements of resources needed to cope with the outgrowths of the virus. Therefore, this study attempts to incorporate the public discourse in the design of forecasting models particularly targeted for the steep-hill region of an ongoing wave. We propose a sentiment-involved topic-based latent variables search methodology for designing forecasting models from publicly available Twitter conversations. As a use case, we implement the proposed methodology on Australian COVID-19 daily cases and Twitter conversations generated within the country. Experimental results: (i) show the presence of latent social media variables that Granger-cause the daily COVID-19 confirmed cases, and (ii) confirm that those variables offer additional prediction capability to forecasting models. Further, the results show that the inclusion of social media variables introduces 48.83--51.38% improvements on RMSE over the baseline models. We also release the large-scale COVID-19 specific geotagged global tweets dataset, MegaGeoCOV, to the public anticipating that the geotagged data of this scale would aid in understanding the conversational dynamics of the pandemic through other spatial and temporal contexts.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the standard approach for equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with up-to-date knowledge. However, standard RAG, relying on independent passage retrieval, often fails to capture the interconnected nature of information required for complex, multi-hop reasoning. While structured RAG methods attempt to address this using knowledge graphs built from triples, we argue that the inherent context loss of triples (context collapse) limits the fidelity of the knowledge representation. We introduce PropRAG, a novel RAG framework that shifts from triples to context-rich propositions and introduces an efficient, LLM-free online beam search over proposition paths to discover multi-step reasoning chains. By coupling a higher-fidelity knowledge representation with explicit path discovery, PropRAG achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot Recall@5 and F1 scores on 2Wiki, HotpotQA, and MuSiQue, advancing non-parametric knowledge integration by improving evidence retrieval through richer representation and efficient reasoning path discovery.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning in dynamic social dilemmas commonly relies on parameter sharing to enable scalability. We show that in shared-policy Deep Q-Network learning, standard exploration can induce a robust and systematic collapse of cooperation even in environments where fully cooperative equilibria are stable and payoff dominant. Through controlled experiments, we demonstrate that shared DQN converges to stable but persistently low-cooperation regimes. This collapse is not caused by reward misalignment, noise, or insufficient training, but by a representational failure arising from partial observability combined with parameter coupling across heterogeneous agent states. Exploration-driven updates bias the shared representation toward locally dominant defection responses, which then propagate across agents and suppress cooperative learning. We confirm that the failure persists across network sizes, exploration schedules, and payoff structures, and disappears when parameter sharing is removed or when agents maintain independent representations. These results identify a fundamental failure mode of shared-policy MARL and establish structural conditions under which scalable learning architectures can systematically undermine cooperation. Our findings provide concrete guidance for the design of multi-agent learning systems in social and economic environments where collective behavior is critical.

Two lines of work are taking the central stage in AI research. On the one hand, the community is making increasing efforts to build models that discard spurious correlations and generalize better in novel test environments. Unfortunately, the bitter lesson so far is that no proposal convincingly outperforms a simple empirical risk minimization baseline. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) have erupted as algorithms able to learn in-context, generalizing on-the-fly to eclectic contextual circumstances that users enforce by means of prompting. In this paper, we argue that context is environment, and posit that in-context learning holds the key to better domain generalization. Via extensive theory and experiments, we show that paying attention to contextx2013x2013unlabeled examples as they arrivex2013x2013allows our proposed In-Context Risk Minimization (ICRM) algorithm to zoom-in on the test environment risk minimizer, leading to significant out-of-distribution performance improvements. From all of this, two messages are worth taking home. Researchers in domain generalization should consider environment as context, and harness the adaptive power of in-context learning. Researchers in LLMs should consider context as environment, to better structure data towards generalization.

Can AI reason about a war before its trajectory becomes historically obvious? Analyzing this capability is difficult because retrospective geopolitical prediction is heavily confounded by training-data leakage. We address this challenge through a temporally grounded case study of the early stages of the 2026 Middle East conflict, which unfolded after the training cutoff of current frontier models. We construct 11 critical temporal nodes, 42 node-specific verifiable questions, and 5 general exploratory questions, requiring models to reason only from information that would have been publicly available at each moment. This design substantially mitigates training-data leakage concerns, creating a setting well-suited for studying how models analyze an unfolding crisis under the fog of war, and provides, to our knowledge, the first temporally grounded analysis of LLM reasoning in an ongoing geopolitical conflict. Our analysis reveals three main findings. First, current state-of-the-art large language models often display a striking degree of strategic realism, reasoning beyond surface rhetoric toward deeper structural incentives. Second, this capability is uneven across domains: models are more reliable in economically and logistically structured settings than in politically ambiguous multi-actor environments. Finally, model narratives evolve over time, shifting from early expectations of rapid containment toward more systemic accounts of regional entrenchment and attritional de-escalation. Since the conflict remains ongoing at the time of writing, this work can serve as an archival snapshot of model reasoning during an unfolding geopolitical crisis, enabling future studies without the hindsight bias of retrospective analysis.

Multi-agent systems represent a significant advancement in artificial intelligence, enabling complex problem-solving through coordinated specialized agents. However, these systems face fundamental challenges in context management, coordination efficiency, and scalable operation. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for advancing multi-agent systems through Model Context Protocol (MCP), addressing these challenges through standardized context sharing and coordination mechanisms. We extend previous work on AI agent architectures by developing a unified theoretical foundation, advanced context management techniques, and scalable coordination patterns. Through detailed implementation case studies across enterprise knowledge management, collaborative research, and distributed problem-solving domains, we demonstrate significant performance improvements compared to traditional approaches. Our evaluation methodology provides a systematic assessment framework with benchmark tasks and datasets specifically designed for multi-agent systems. We identify current limitations, emerging research opportunities, and potential transformative applications across industries. This work contributes to the evolution of more capable, collaborative, and context-aware artificial intelligence systems that can effectively address complex real-world challenges.

Many current NLP systems are built from language models trained to optimize unsupervised objectives on large amounts of raw text. Under what conditions might such a procedure acquire meaning? Our systematic experiments with synthetic data reveal that, with languages where all expressions have context-independent denotations (i.e., languages with strong transparency), both autoregressive and masked language models successfully learn to emulate semantic relations between expressions. However, when denotations are changed to be context-dependent with the language otherwise unmodified, this ability degrades. Turning to natural language, our experiments with a specific phenomenon -- referential opacity -- add to the growing body of evidence that current language models do not represent natural language semantics well. We show this failure relates to the context-dependent nature of natural language form-meaning mappings.

Reinforcement learning algorithms such as group-relative policy optimization (GRPO) have demonstrated strong potential for improving the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, prior work has consistently observed an entropy collapse phenomenon during reinforcement post-training, characterized by a monotonic decrease in policy entropy that ultimately leads to training instability and collapse. As a result, most existing approaches restrict training to short horizons (typically 5-20 epochs), limiting sustained exploration and hindering further policy improvement. In addition, nearly all prior work relies on a single, fixed reasoning prompt or template during training. In this work, we introduce prompt augmentation, a training strategy that instructs the model to generate reasoning traces under diverse templates and formats, thereby increasing rollout diversity. We show that, without a KL regularization term, prompt augmentation enables stable scaling of training duration under a fixed dataset and allows the model to tolerate low-entropy regimes without premature collapse. Empirically, a Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B model trained with prompt augmentation on the MATH Level 3-5 dataset achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 44.5 per-benchmark accuracy and 51.3 per-question accuracy on standard mathematical reasoning benchmarks, including AIME24, AMC, MATH500, Minerva, and OlympiadBench. The code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/wenquanlu/prompt-augmentation-GRPO.

We propose a new long-context financial benchmark, FailSafeQA, designed to test the robustness and context-awareness of LLMs against six variations in human-interface interactions in LLM-based query-answer systems within finance. We concentrate on two case studies: Query Failure and Context Failure. In the Query Failure scenario, we perturb the original query to vary in domain expertise, completeness, and linguistic accuracy. In the Context Failure case, we simulate the uploads of degraded, irrelevant, and empty documents. We employ the LLM-as-a-Judge methodology with Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct and use fine-grained rating criteria to define and calculate Robustness, Context Grounding, and Compliance scores for 24 off-the-shelf models. The results suggest that although some models excel at mitigating input perturbations, they must balance robust answering with the ability to refrain from hallucinating. Notably, Palmyra-Fin-128k-Instruct, recognized as the most compliant model, maintained strong baseline performance but encountered challenges in sustaining robust predictions in 17% of test cases. On the other hand, the most robust model, OpenAI o3-mini, fabricated information in 41% of tested cases. The results demonstrate that even high-performing models have significant room for improvement and highlight the role of FailSafeQA as a tool for developing LLMs optimized for dependability in financial applications. The dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Writer/FailSafeQA

Long-context large language models (LC LLMs) promise to increase reliability of LLMs in real-world tasks requiring processing and understanding of long input documents. However, this ability of LC LLMs to reliably utilize their growing context windows remains under investigation. In this work, we evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art GPT-4 suite of LC LLMs in solving a series of progressively challenging tasks, as a function of factors such as context length, task difficulty, and position of key information by creating a real world financial news dataset. Our findings indicate that LC LLMs exhibit brittleness at longer context lengths even for simple tasks, with performance deteriorating sharply as task complexity increases. At longer context lengths, these state-of-the-art models experience catastrophic failures in instruction following resulting in degenerate outputs. Our prompt ablations also reveal unfortunate continued sensitivity to both the placement of the task instruction in the context window as well as minor markdown formatting. Finally, we advocate for more rigorous evaluation of LC LLMs by employing holistic metrics such as F1 (rather than recall) and reporting confidence intervals, thereby ensuring robust and conclusive findings.

Climate change poses an urgent global threat, needing the rapid identification and deployment of innovative solutions. We hypothesise that many of these solutions already exist within scientific literature but remain underutilised. To address this gap, this study employs a curated dataset sourced from OpenAlex, a comprehensive repository of scientific papers. Utilising Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT4-o from OpenAI, we evaluate title-abstract pairs from scientific papers on seven dimensions, covering climate change mitigation potential, stage of technological development, and readiness for deployment. The outputs of the language models are then compared with human evaluations to assess their effectiveness in identifying promising yet overlooked climate innovations. Our findings suggest that these LLM-based models can effectively augment human expertise, uncovering climate solutions that are potentially impactful but with far greater speed, throughput and consistency. Here, we focused on UK-based solutions, but the workflow is region-agnostic. This work contributes to the discovery of neglected innovations in scientific literature and demonstrates the potential of AI in enhancing climate action strategies.

Large language models (LLMs) have led to a series of breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP), owing to their excellent understanding and generation abilities. Remarkably, what further sets these models apart is the massive amounts of world knowledge they internalize during pretraining. While many downstream applications provide the model with an informational context to aid its performance on the underlying task, how the model's world knowledge interacts with the factual information presented in the context remains under explored. As a desirable behavior, an LLM should give precedence to the context whenever it contains task-relevant information that conflicts with the model's memorized knowledge. This enables model predictions to be grounded in the context, which can then be used to update or correct specific model predictions without frequent retraining. By contrast, when the context is irrelevant to the task, the model should ignore it and fall back on its internal knowledge. In this paper, we undertake a first joint study of the aforementioned two properties, namely controllability and robustness, in the context of LLMs. We demonstrate that state-of-the-art T5 and PaLM (both pretrained and finetuned) could exhibit poor controllability and robustness, which do not scale with increasing model size. As a solution, we propose a novel method - Knowledge Aware FineTuning (KAFT) - to strengthen both controllability and robustness by incorporating counterfactual and irrelevant contexts to standard supervised datasets. Our comprehensive evaluation showcases the utility of KAFT across model architectures and sizes.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized generative systems, achieving excellent performance across diverse domains. Although these models perform well in controlled environments, their real-world applications frequently encounter inputs containing both essential and irrelevant details. Our investigation has revealed a critical vulnerability in LLMs, which we term Contextual Distraction Vulnerability (CDV). This phenomenon arises when models fail to maintain consistent performance on questions modified with semantically coherent but irrelevant context. To systematically investigate this vulnerability, we propose an efficient tree-based search methodology to automatically generate CDV examples. Our approach successfully generates CDV examples across four datasets, causing an average performance degradation of approximately 45% in state-of-the-art LLMs. To address this critical issue, we explore various mitigation strategies and find that post-targeted training approaches can effectively enhance model robustness against contextual distractions. Our findings highlight the fundamental nature of CDV as an ability-level challenge rather than a knowledge-level issue since models demonstrate the necessary knowledge by answering correctly in the absence of distractions. This calls the community's attention to address CDV during model development to ensure reliability. The code is available at https://github.com/wyf23187/LLM_CDV.

Central to long-form text generation in vertical domains is the "impossible trinity" confronting current large language models (LLMs): the simultaneous achievement of low hallucination, deep logical coherence, and personalized expression. This study establishes that this bottleneck arises from existing generative paradigms succumbing to the Statistical Smoothing Trap, a phenomenon that overlooks the high-entropy information acquisition and structured cognitive processes integral to expert-level writing. To address this limitation, we propose the DeepNews Framework, an agentic workflow that explicitly models the implicit cognitive processes of seasoned financial journalists. The framework integrates three core modules: first, a dual-granularity retrieval mechanism grounded in information foraging theory, which enforces a 10:1 saturated information input ratio to mitigate hallucinatory outputs; second, schema-guided strategic planning, a process leveraging domain expert knowledge bases (narrative schemas) and Atomic Blocks to forge a robust logical skeleton; third, adversarial constraint prompting, a technique deploying tactics including Rhythm Break and Logic Fog to disrupt the probabilistic smoothness inherent in model-generated text. Experiments delineate a salient Knowledge Cliff in deep financial reporting: content truthfulness collapses when retrieved context falls below 15,000 characters, while a high-redundancy input exceeding 30,000 characters stabilizes the Hallucination-Free Rate (HFR) above 85%. In an ecological validity blind test conducted with a top-tier Chinese technology media outlet, the DeepNews system--built on a previous-generation model (DeepSeek-V3-0324)-achieved a 25% submission acceptance rate, significantly outperforming the 0% acceptance rate of zero-shot generation by a state-of-the-art (SOTA) model (GPT-5).

Recent agentic search systems have made substantial progress by emphasising deep, multi-step reasoning. However, this focus often overlooks the challenges of wide-scale information synthesis, where agents must aggregate large volumes of heterogeneous evidence across many sources. As a result, most existing large language model agent systems face severe limitations in data-intensive settings, including context saturation, cascading error propagation, and high end-to-end latency. To address these challenges, we present \framework, a hierarchical framework based on principle of near-decomposability, containing a strategic Host, multiple Managers and parallel Workers. By leveraging aggregation and reflection mechanisms at the Manager layer, our framework enforces strict context isolation to prevent saturation and error propagation. Simultaneously, the parallelism in worker layer accelerates the speed of overall task execution, mitigating the significant latency. Our evaluation on two complementary benchmarks demonstrates both efficiency ( 3-5 times speed-up) and effectiveness, achieving a 8.4% success rate on WideSearch-en and 52.9% accuracy on BrowseComp-zh. The code is released at https://github.com/agent-on-the-fly/InfoSeeker

Language agents increasingly require persistent worlds in which they can act, remember, and learn. Existing approaches sit at two extremes: conventional web frameworks provide reliable but fixed contexts backed by databases, while fully generative world models aim for unlimited environments at the expense of controllability and practical engineering. In this work, we introduce the Web World Model (WWM), a middle ground where world state and ``physics'' are implemented in ordinary web code to ensure logical consistency, while large language models generate context, narratives, and high-level decisions on top of this structured latent state. We build a suite of WWMs on a realistic web stack, including an infinite travel atlas grounded in real geography, fictional galaxy explorers, web-scale encyclopedic and narrative worlds, and simulation- and game-like environments. Across these systems, we identify practical design principles for WWMs: separating code-defined rules from model-driven imagination, representing latent state as typed web interfaces, and utilizing deterministic generation to achieve unlimited but structured exploration. Our results suggest that web stacks themselves can serve as a scalable substrate for world models, enabling controllable yet open-ended environments. Project Page: https://github.com/Princeton-AI2-Lab/Web-World-Models.

Training deep neural networks for classification often includes minimizing the training loss beyond the zero training error point. In this phase of training, a "neural collapse" behavior has been observed: the variability of features (outputs of the penultimate layer) of within-class samples decreases and the mean features of different classes approach a certain tight frame structure. Recent works analyze this behavior via idealized unconstrained features models where all the minimizers exhibit exact collapse. However, with practical networks and datasets, the features typically do not reach exact collapse, e.g., because deep layers cannot arbitrarily modify intermediate features that are far from being collapsed. In this paper, we propose a richer model that can capture this phenomenon by forcing the features to stay in the vicinity of a predefined features matrix (e.g., intermediate features). We explore the model in the small vicinity case via perturbation analysis and establish results that cannot be obtained by the previously studied models. For example, we prove reduction in the within-class variability of the optimized features compared to the predefined input features (via analyzing gradient flow on the "central-path" with minimal assumptions), analyze the minimizers in the near-collapse regime, and provide insights on the effect of regularization hyperparameters on the closeness to collapse. We support our theory with experiments in practical deep learning settings.

Context lengths for models have grown rapidly, from thousands to millions of tokens in just a few years. The extreme context sizes of modern long-context models have made it difficult to construct realistic long-context benchmarks -- not only due to the cost of collecting million-context tasks but also in identifying realistic scenarios that require significant contexts. We identify code comprehension and repair as a natural testbed and challenge task for long-context models and introduce LongCodeBench (LCB), a benchmark to test LLM coding abilities in long-context scenarios. Our benchmark tests both the comprehension and repair capabilities of LCLMs in realistic and important settings by drawing from real-world GitHub issues and constructing QA (LongCodeQA) and bug fixing (LongSWE-Bench) tasks. We carefully stratify the complexity of our benchmark, enabling us to evaluate models across different scales -- ranging from Qwen2.5 14B Instruct to Google's flagship Gemini model. We find that long-context remains a weakness for all models, with performance drops such as from 29% to 3% for Claude 3.5 Sonnet, or from 70.2% to 40% for Qwen2.5.

Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) have emerged as powerful tools for extracting representations from Earth observation data, but their evaluation remains inconsistent and narrow. Existing works often evaluate on suboptimal downstream datasets and tasks, that are often too easy or too narrow, limiting the usefulness of the evaluations to assess the real-world applicability of GFMs. Additionally, there is a distinct lack of diversity in current evaluation protocols, which fail to account for the multiplicity of image resolutions, sensor types, and temporalities, which further complicates the assessment of GFM performance. In particular, most existing benchmarks are geographically biased towards North America and Europe, questioning the global applicability of GFMs. To overcome these challenges, we introduce PANGAEA, a standardized evaluation protocol that covers a diverse set of datasets, tasks, resolutions, sensor modalities, and temporalities. It establishes a robust and widely applicable benchmark for GFMs. We evaluate the most popular GFMs openly available on this benchmark and analyze their performance across several domains. In particular, we compare these models to supervised baselines (e.g. UNet and vanilla ViT), and assess their effectiveness when faced with limited labeled data. Our findings highlight the limitations of GFMs, under different scenarios, showing that they do not consistently outperform supervised models. PANGAEA is designed to be highly extensible, allowing for the seamless inclusion of new datasets, models, and tasks in future research. By releasing the evaluation code and benchmark, we aim to enable other researchers to replicate our experiments and build upon our work, fostering a more principled evaluation protocol for large pre-trained geospatial models. The code is available at https://github.com/VMarsocci/pangaea-bench.

We introduce EXIT, an extractive context compression framework that enhances both the effectiveness and efficiency of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in question answering (QA). Current RAG systems often struggle when retrieval models fail to rank the most relevant documents, leading to the inclusion of more context at the expense of latency and accuracy. While abstractive compression methods can drastically reduce token counts, their token-by-token generation process significantly increases end-to-end latency. Conversely, existing extractive methods reduce latency but rely on independent, non-adaptive sentence selection, failing to fully utilize contextual information. EXIT addresses these limitations by classifying sentences from retrieved documents - while preserving their contextual dependencies - enabling parallelizable, context-aware extraction that adapts to query complexity and retrieval quality. Our evaluations on both single-hop and multi-hop QA tasks show that EXIT consistently surpasses existing compression methods and even uncompressed baselines in QA accuracy, while also delivering substantial reductions in inference time and token count. By improving both effectiveness and efficiency, EXIT provides a promising direction for developing scalable, high-quality QA solutions in RAG pipelines. Our code is available at https://github.com/ThisIsHwang/EXIT

The concept of world models has garnered significant attention due to advancements in multimodal large language models such as GPT-4 and video generation models such as Sora, which are central to the pursuit of artificial general intelligence. This survey offers a comprehensive review of the literature on world models. Generally, world models are regarded as tools for either understanding the present state of the world or predicting its future dynamics. This review presents a systematic categorization of world models, emphasizing two primary functions: (1) constructing internal representations to understand the mechanisms of the world, and (2) predicting future states to simulate and guide decision-making. Initially, we examine the current progress in these two categories. We then explore the application of world models in key domains, including generative games, autonomous driving, robotics, and social simulacra, with a focus on how each domain utilizes these aspects. Finally, we outline key challenges and provide insights into potential future research directions. We summarize the representative papers along with their code repositories in https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/World-Model.

Recent approaches have demonstrated the promise of using diffusion models to generate interactive and explorable worlds. However, most of these methods face critical challenges such as excessively large parameter sizes, reliance on lengthy inference steps, and rapidly growing historical context, which severely limit real-time performance and lack text-controlled generation capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose \method, a novel framework designed to generate realistic, interactive, and continuous worlds from a single image or text prompt. \method achieves this through a carefully designed framework that supports keyboard-based exploration of the generated worlds. The framework comprises three core components: (1) a long-video generation framework integrating unified context compression with linear attention; (2) a real-time streaming acceleration strategy powered by bidirectional attention distillation and an enhanced text embedding scheme; (3) a text-controlled method for generating world events. We have provided the codebase in the supplementary material.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of carrying out long-running, real-world tasks. However, as the amount of context grows, their reliability often deteriorates, a phenomenon known as "context rot". Existing long-context benchmarks primarily focus on single-step settings that evaluate a model's ability to retrieve information from a long snippet. In realistic scenarios, however, LLMs often need to act as agents that explore environments, follow instructions and plans, extract useful information, and predict correct actions under a dynamically growing context. To assess language agents in such settings, we introduce LOCA-bench (a benchmark for LOng-Context Agents). Given a task prompt, LOCA-bench leverages automated and scalable control of environment states to regulate the agent's context length. This design enables LOCA-bench to extend the context length potentially to infinity in a controlled way while keeping the underlying task semantics fixed. LOCA-bench evaluates language agents as a combination of models and scaffolds, including various context management strategies. While agent performance generally degrades as the environment states grow more complex, advanced context management techniques can substantially improve the overall success rate. We open-source LOCA-bench to provide a platform for evaluating models and scaffolds in long-context, agentic scenarios: https://github.com/hkust-nlp/LOCA-bench

Effectively identifying threats and mitigating their potential damage during crisis situations, such as natural disasters or violent attacks, is paramount for safeguarding endangered individuals. To tackle these challenges, AI has been used in assisting humans in emergency situations. Still, the use of NLP techniques remains limited and mostly focuses on classification tasks. The significant potential of timely warning message generation using NLG architectures, however, has been largely overlooked. In this paper we present CrisiText, the first large-scale dataset for the generation of warning messages across 13 different types of crisis scenarios. The dataset contains more than 400,000 warning messages (spanning almost 18,000 crisis situations) aimed at assisting civilians during and after such events. To generate the dataset, we started from existing crisis descriptions and created chains of events related to the scenarios. Each event was then paired with a warning message. The generations follow experts' written guidelines to ensure correct terminology and factuality of their suggestions. Additionally, each message is accompanied by three suboptimal warning types to allow for the study of different NLG approaches. To this end, we conducted a series of experiments comparing supervised fine-tuning setups with preference alignment, zero-shot, and few-shot approaches. We further assessed model performance in out-of-distribution scenarios and evaluated the effectiveness of an automatic post-editor.

LLM-based web agents show immense promise for information seeking, yet their effectiveness on long-horizon tasks is hindered by a fundamental trade-off in context management. Prevailing ReAct-based agents suffer from context saturation as they accumulate noisy, raw histories, while methods that fixedly summarize the full history at each step risk the irreversible loss of critical details. Addressing these, we introduce AgentFold, a novel agent paradigm centered on proactive context management, inspired by the human cognitive process of retrospective consolidation. AgentFold treats its context as a dynamic cognitive workspace to be actively sculpted, rather than a passive log to be filled. At each step, it learns to execute a `folding' operation, which manages its historical trajectory at multiple scales: it can perform granular condensations to preserve vital, fine-grained details, or deep consolidations to abstract away entire multi-step sub-tasks. The results on prominent benchmarks are striking: with simple supervised fine-tuning (without continual pre-training or RL), our AgentFold-30B-A3B agent achieves 36.2% on BrowseComp and 47.3% on BrowseComp-ZH. Notably, this performance not only surpasses or matches open-source models of a dramatically larger scale, such as the DeepSeek-V3.1-671B-A37B, but also surpasses leading proprietary agents like OpenAI's o4-mini.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate partial forecasting competence across social, political, and economic events. Yet, their predictive ability varies sharply with domain structure and prompt framing. We investigate how forecasting performance varies with different model families on real-world questions about events that happened beyond the model cutoff date. We analyze how context, question type, and external knowledge affect accuracy and calibration, and how adding factual news context modifies belief formation and failure modes. Our results show that forecasting ability is highly variable as it depends on what, and how, we ask.

Large language models are transforming systems research by automating the discovery of performance-critical algorithms for computer systems. Despite plausible codes generated by LLMs, producing solutions that meet the stringent correctness and performance requirements of systems demands iterative optimization. Test-time reinforcement learning offers high search efficiency but requires parameter updates infeasible under API-only access, while existing training-free evolutionary methods suffer from inefficient context utilization and undirected search. We introduce ContextEvolve, a multi-agent framework that achieves RL-level search efficiency under strict parameter-blind constraints by decomposing optimization context into three orthogonal dimensions: a Summarizer Agent condenses semantic state via code-to-language abstraction, a Navigator Agent distills optimization direction from trajectory analysis, and a Sampler Agent curates experience distribution through prioritized exemplar retrieval. This orchestration forms a functional isomorphism with RL-mapping to state representation, policy gradient, and experience replay-enabling principled optimization in a textual latent space. On the ADRS benchmark, ContextEvolve outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 33.3% while reducing token consumption by 29.0%. Codes for our work are released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ContextEvolve-ACC

Multi-agent systems can improve reliability, yet under a fixed inference budget they often help, saturate, or even collapse. We develop a minimal and calibratable theory that predicts these regimes from three binding constraints of modern agent stacks: finite context windows, lossy inter-agent communication, and shared failures among similar agents. Each leaf agent is summarized by a compute-performance scaling exponent β; communication is captured by a message-length fidelity curve γ(m); dependence is captured by an effective shared-error correlation ρ; and a context window W imposes hard fan-in limits that make hierarchy necessary. For binary success/failure tasks with majority aggregation, we prove a sharp phase transition for deep b-ary trees with correlated inputs and lossy communication: a single scalar α_ρ (combining γ(m), ρ, and fan-in b) determines whether weak signal is amplified to a nontrivial fixed point or washed out to chance. In the amplifying regime, we derive an organization exponent s and show that budgeted synergy, i.e., outperforming the best single agent under the same total budget, occurs exactly when s>β, yielding closed-form compute allocation rules and explicit budget thresholds. We further characterize saturation via a mixing depth and provide a conservative clipped predictor that remains accurate across growth and saturation. A continuous-performance warm-up gives closed-form risks for star, chain, and tree organizations, making correlation- and communication-induced floors explicit and exposing the core design trade-offs in a smooth setting. Finally, we validate the predicted phase boundaries in controlled synthetic simulations and show how the same mechanisms explain the dominant bottlenecks reported in recent large-scale matched-budget studies of LLM agent-system scaling.

Agents based on large language models have recently shown strong potential on real-world software engineering (SWE) tasks that require long-horizon interaction with repository-scale codebases. However, most existing agents rely on append-only context maintenance or passively triggered compression heuristics, which often lead to context explosion, semantic drift, and degraded reasoning in long-running interactions. We propose CAT, a new context management paradigm that elevates context maintenance to a callable tool integrated into the decision-making process of agents. CAT formalizes a structured context workspace consisting of stable task semantics, condensed long-term memory, and high-fidelity short-term interactions, and enables agents to proactively compress historical trajectories into actionable summaries at appropriate milestones. To support context management for SWE-agents, we propose a trajectory-level supervision framework, CAT-GENERATOR, based on an offline data construction pipeline that injects context-management actions into complete interaction trajectories. Using this framework, we train a context-aware model, SWE-Compressor. Experiments on SWE-Bench-Verified demonstrate that SWE-Compressor reaches a 57.6% solved rate and significantly outperforms ReAct-based agents and static compression baselines, while maintaining stable and scalable long-horizon reasoning under a bounded context budget.

Generative AI systems across modalities, ranging from text (including code), image, audio, and video, have broad social impacts, but there is no official standard for means of evaluating those impacts or for which impacts should be evaluated. In this paper, we present a guide that moves toward a standard approach in evaluating a base generative AI system for any modality in two overarching categories: what can be evaluated in a base system independent of context and what can be evaluated in a societal context. Importantly, this refers to base systems that have no predetermined application or deployment context, including a model itself, as well as system components, such as training data. Our framework for a base system defines seven categories of social impact: bias, stereotypes, and representational harms; cultural values and sensitive content; disparate performance; privacy and data protection; financial costs; environmental costs; and data and content moderation labor costs. Suggested methods for evaluation apply to listed generative modalities and analyses of the limitations of existing evaluations serve as a starting point for necessary investment in future evaluations. We offer five overarching categories for what can be evaluated in a broader societal context, each with its own subcategories: trustworthiness and autonomy; inequality, marginalization, and violence; concentration of authority; labor and creativity; and ecosystem and environment. Each subcategory includes recommendations for mitigating harm.

Text-to-image diffusion models excel at generating high-quality, diverse images from natural language prompts. However, they often fail to produce semantically accurate results when the prompt contains concept combinations that contradict their learned priors. We define this failure mode as contextual contradiction, where one concept implicitly negates another due to entangled associations learned during training. To address this, we propose a stage-aware prompt decomposition framework that guides the denoising process using a sequence of proxy prompts. Each proxy prompt is constructed to match the semantic content expected to emerge at a specific stage of denoising, while ensuring contextual coherence. To construct these proxy prompts, we leverage a large language model (LLM) to analyze the target prompt, identify contradictions, and generate alternative expressions that preserve the original intent while resolving contextual conflicts. By aligning prompt information with the denoising progression, our method enables fine-grained semantic control and accurate image generation in the presence of contextual contradictions. Experiments across a variety of challenging prompts show substantial improvements in alignment to the textual prompt.

World Models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for learning compact, predictive representations of environment dynamics, enabling agents to reason, plan, and generalize beyond direct experience. Despite recent interest in World Models, most available implementations remain publication-specific, severely limiting their reusability, increasing the risk of bugs, and reducing evaluation standardization. To mitigate these issues, we introduce stable-worldmodel (SWM), a modular, tested, and documented world-model research ecosystem that provides efficient data-collection tools, standardized environments, planning algorithms, and baseline implementations. In addition, each environment in SWM enables controllable factors of variation, including visual and physical properties, to support robustness and continual learning research. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of SWM by using it to study zero-shot robustness in DINO-WM.

In-Context Learning (ICL) is a technique by which language models make predictions based on examples provided in their input context. Previously, their context window size imposed a limit on the number of examples that can be shown, making example selection techniques crucial for identifying the maximally effective set of examples. However, the recent advent of Long Context Language Models (LCLMs) has significantly increased the number of examples that can be included in context, raising an important question of whether ICL performance in a many-shot regime is still sensitive to the method of sample selection. To answer this, we revisit these approaches in the context of LCLMs through extensive experiments on 18 datasets spanning 4 tasks. Surprisingly, we observe that sophisticated example selection techniques do not yield significant improvements over a simple random sample selection method. Instead, we find that the advent of LCLMs has fundamentally shifted the challenge of ICL from that of selecting the most effective examples to that of collecting sufficient examples to fill the context window. Specifically, in certain datasets, including all available examples does not fully utilize the context window; however, by augmenting the examples in context with a simple data augmentation approach, we substantially improve ICL performance by 5%.

Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) operate fundamentally as Bounded-Input Bounded-Output (BIBO) systems. They remain in a passive state until explicitly prompted, computing localized responses without intrinsic temporal continuity. While effective for isolated tasks, this reactive paradigm presents a critical bottleneck for engineering autonomous artificial intelligence. Current multi-agent frameworks attempt to distribute cognitive load but frequently rely on static memory pools and passive message passing, which inevitably leads to cognitive stagnation and homogeneous deadlocks during extended execution. To address this structural limitation, we propose Global Workspace Agents (GWA), a cognitive architecture inspired by Global Workspace Theory. GWA transitions multi-agent coordination from a passive data structure to an active, event-driven discrete dynamical system. By coupling a central broadcast hub with a heterogeneous swarm of functionally constrained agents, the system maintains a continuous cognitive cycle. Furthermore, we introduce an entropy-based intrinsic drive mechanism that mathematically quantifies semantic diversity, dynamically regulating generation temperature to autonomously break reasoning deadlocks. Coupled with a dual-layer memory bifurcation strategy to ensure long-term cognitive continuity, GWA provides a robust, reproducible engineering framework for sustained, self-directed LLM agency.

The emergence and impact of tipping points have garnered significant interest in both the social and natural sciences. Despite widespread recognition of the importance of feedbacks between human and natural systems, it is often assumed that the observed nonlinear dynamics in these coupled systems rests within either underlying human or natural processes, rather than the rates at which they interact. Using adoption of agricultural diversification practices as a case study, we show how two stable management paradigms (one dominated by conventional, homogeneous practices, the other by diversified practices) can emerge purely from temporal feedbacks between human decisions and ecological responses. We explore how this temporal mechanism of tipping points provides insight into designing more effective interventions that promote farmers transitions towards sustainable agriculture. Moreover, our flexible modeling framework could be applied to other cases to provide insight into numerous questions in social-ecological systems research and environmental policy.

World models have garnered significant attention as a promising research direction in artificial intelligence, yet a clear and unified definition remains lacking. In this paper, we introduce OpenWorldLib, a comprehensive and standardized inference framework for Advanced World Models. Drawing on the evolution of world models, we propose a clear definition: a world model is a model or framework centered on perception, equipped with interaction and long-term memory capabilities, for understanding and predicting the complex world. We further systematically categorize the essential capabilities of world models. Based on this definition, OpenWorldLib integrates models across different tasks within a unified framework, enabling efficient reuse and collaborative inference. Finally, we present additional reflections and analyses on potential future directions for world model research. Code link: https://github.com/OpenDCAI/OpenWorldLib

The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict has been a subject of intense media coverage worldwide. Understanding the global narrative surrounding this topic is crucial for researchers that aim to gain insights into its multifaceted dimensions. In this paper, we present a novel multimedia dataset that focuses on this topic by collecting and processing tweets posted by news or media companies on social media across the globe. We collected tweets from February 2022 to May 2023 to acquire approximately 1.5 million tweets in 60 different languages along with their images. Each entry in the dataset is accompanied by processed tags, allowing for the identification of entities, stances, textual or visual concepts, and sentiment. The availability of this multimedia dataset serves as a valuable resource for researchers aiming to investigate the global narrative surrounding the ongoing conflict from various aspects such as who are the prominent entities involved, what stances are taken, where do these stances originate from, how are the different textual and visual concepts related to the event portrayed.

Recent work on model editing using Rank-One Model Editing (ROME), a popular model editing method, has shown that there are certain facts that the algorithm is unable to edit without breaking the model. Such edits have previously been called disabling edits. These disabling edits cause immediate model collapse and limits the use of ROME for sequential editing. In this paper, we make two main contributions. Firstly, we show that model collapse with ROME only happens when making edits using the CounterFact dataset and does not happen when using the zsRE dataset. Secondly, we find that disabling edits are an artifact of the original implementation of ROME. With this paper, we provide a more stable implementation ROME, which we call r-ROME and show that we no longer observe model collapse when making large scale sequential edits with ROME.

Fine-grained object detection in challenging visual domains, such as vehicle damage assessment, presents a formidable challenge even for human experts to resolve reliably. While DiffusionDet has advanced the state-of-the-art through conditional denoising diffusion, its performance remains limited by local feature conditioning in context-dependent scenarios. We address this fundamental limitation by introducing Context-Aware Fusion (CAF), which leverages cross-attention mechanisms to integrate global scene context with local proposal features directly. The global context is generated using a separate dedicated encoder that captures comprehensive environmental information, enabling each object proposal to attend to scene-level understanding. Our framework significantly enhances the generative detection paradigm by enabling each object proposal to attend to comprehensive environmental information. Experimental results demonstrate an improvement over state-of-the-art models on the CarDD benchmark, establishing new performance benchmarks for context-aware object detection in fine-grained domains