Waking Up Blind: Cold-Start Optimization of Supervision-Free Agentic Trajectories for Grounded Visual Perception

Small Vision-Language Models (SVLMs) are efficient task controllers but often suffer from visual brittleness and poor tool orchestration. They typically require expensive supervised trajectory tuning to mitigate these deficits. In this work, we propose Self-supervised Perception Enabled by Cascaded Tool Rollout Alignment (SPECTRA), a supervision-free framework that bootstraps agentic capabilities via Coldstart Reinforcement Learning for SVLMs. SPECTRA enforces Soft Structured Multi-turn Rollouts, a topological constraint that directs agents to explicitly sequence tool derived evidence before synthesis, effectively grounding reasoning in visual observations. We employ a multi-objective reward signal that simultaneously maximizes task correctness, rollout structure, and tool utility, enabling agent to self-discover robust behaviors without human preference labels. We further introduce Tool Instrumental Utility (TIU), a novel metric to quantify tool efficacy in the absence of ground truth. Extensive evaluations across composite and out-of-distribution (MMMU-Pro) benchmarks demonstrate that SPECTRA boosts agentic trajectories, improving task accuracy by up to 5% and tool efficiency by 9%, enabling more efficient multimodal agents that learn effectively from environmental interaction alone.

SpatialMath: Spatial Comprehension-Infused Symbolic Reasoning for Mathematical Problem-Solving

Multimodal Small-to-Medium sized Language Models (MSLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in integrating visual and textual information but still face significant limitations in visual comprehension and mathematical reasoning, particularly in geometric problems with diverse levels of visual infusion. Current models struggle to accurately decompose intricate visual inputs and connect perception with structured reasoning, leading to suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose SpatialMath, a novel Spatial Comprehension-Infused Symbolic Reasoning Framework designed to integrate spatial representations into structured symbolic reasoning chains. SpatialMath employs a specialized perception module to extract spatially-grounded representations from visual diagrams, capturing critical geometric structures and spatial relationships. These representations are then methodically infused into symbolic reasoning chains, facilitating visual comprehension-aware structured reasoning. To this end, we introduce MATHVERSE-PLUS, a novel dataset containing structured visual interpretations and step-by-step reasoning paths for vision-intensive mathematical problems. SpatialMath significantly outperforms strong multimodal baselines, achieving up to 10 percentage points improvement over supervised fine-tuning with data augmentation in vision-intensive settings. Robustness analysis reveals that enhanced spatial representations directly improve reasoning accuracy, reinforcing the need for structured perception-to-reasoning pipelines in MSLMs.

Multilingual LLMs Inherently Reward In-Language Time-Sensitive Semantic Alignment for Low-Resource Languages

The unwavering disparity in labeled resources between resource-rich languages and those considered low-resource remains a significant impediment for Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent strides in cross-lingual in-context learning (X-ICL), mainly through semantically aligned examples retrieved from multilingual pre-trained transformers, have shown promise in mitigating this issue. However, our investigation reveals that LLMs intrinsically reward in-language semantically aligned cross-lingual instances over direct cross-lingual semantic alignments, with a pronounced disparity in handling time-sensitive queries in the X-ICL setup. Such queries demand sound temporal reasoning ability from LLMs, yet the advancements have predominantly focused on English. This study aims to bridge this gap by improving temporal reasoning capabilities in low-resource languages. To this end, we introduce mTEMPREASON a temporal reasoning dataset aimed at the varied degrees of low-resource languages and propose Cross-Lingual Time-Sensitive Semantic Alignment (CLiTSSA), a novel method to improve temporal reasoning in these contexts. To facilitate this, we construct an extension of mTEMPREASON comprising pairs of parallel cross-language temporal queries along with their anticipated in-language semantic similarity scores. Our empirical evidence underscores the superior performance of CLiTSSA compared to established baselines across three languages - Romanian, German, and French, encompassing three temporal tasks and including a diverse set of four contemporaneous LLMs. This marks a significant step forward in addressing resource disparity in the context of temporal reasoning across languages.

Temporally Consistent Factuality Probing for Large Language Models

The prolific use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as an alternate knowledge base requires them to be factually consistent, necessitating both correctness and consistency traits for paraphrased queries. Recently, significant attempts have been made to benchmark datasets and metrics to evaluate LLMs for these traits. However, structural simplicity (subject-relation-object) and contemporary association in their query formulation limit the broader definition of factuality and consistency. In this study, we introduce TeCFaP, a novel Temporally Consistent Factuality Probe task to expand the consistent factuality probe in the temporal dimension. To this end, we propose TEMP-COFAC, a high-quality dataset of prefix-style English query paraphrases. Subsequently, we extend the definitions of existing metrics to represent consistent factuality across temporal dimension. We experiment with a diverse set of LLMs and find most of them performing poorly on TeCFaP. Next, we propose a novel solution CoTSeLF (Consistent-Time-Sensitive Learning Framework) combining multi-task instruction tuning (MT-IT) with consistent-time-sensitive reinforcement learning (CTSRL) to improve temporally consistent factuality in LLMs. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of CoTSeLF over several baselines.

Focal Inferential Infusion Coupled with Tractable Density Discrimination for Implicit Hate Speech Detection

Although pre-trained large language models (PLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art on many NLP tasks, they lack understanding of subtle expressions of implicit hate speech. Such nuanced and implicit hate is often misclassified as non-hate. Various attempts have been made to enhance the detection of (implicit) hate content by augmenting external context or enforcing label separation via distance-based metrics. We combine these two approaches and introduce FiADD, a novel Focused Inferential Adaptive Density Discrimination framework. FiADD enhances the PLM finetuning pipeline by bringing the surface form of an implicit hate speech closer to its implied form while increasing the inter-cluster distance among various class labels. We test FiADD on three implicit hate datasets and observe significant improvement in the two-way and three-way hate classification tasks. We further experiment on the generalizability of FiADD on three other tasks, namely detecting sarcasm, irony, and stance, in which surface and implied forms differ, and observe similar performance improvement. We analyze the generated latent space to understand its evolution under FiADD, which corroborates the advantage of employing FiADD for implicit hate speech detection.

Mediapipe and CNNs for Real-Time ASL Gesture Recognition

This research paper describes a realtime system for identifying American Sign Language (ASL) movements that employs modern computer vision and machine learning approaches. The suggested method makes use of the Mediapipe library for feature extraction and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for ASL gesture classification. The testing results show that the suggested system can detect all ASL alphabets with an accuracy of 99.95%, indicating its potential for use in communication devices for people with hearing impairments. The proposed approach can also be applied to additional sign languages with similar hand motions, potentially increasing the quality of life for people with hearing loss. Overall, the study demonstrates the effectiveness of using Mediapipe and CNN for real-time sign language recognition, making a significant contribution to the field of computer vision and machine learning.