ChartVerse: Scaling Chart Reasoning via Reliable Programmatic Synthesis from Scratch

Chart reasoning is a critical capability for Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, the development of open-source models is severely hindered by the lack of high-quality training data. Existing datasets suffer from a dual challenge: synthetic charts are often simplistic and repetitive, while the associated QA pairs are prone to hallucinations and lack the reasoning depth required for complex tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose ChartVerse, a scalable framework designed to synthesize complex charts and reliable reasoning data from scratch. (1) To address the bottleneck of simple patterns, we first introduce Rollout Posterior Entropy (RPE), a novel metric that quantifies chart complexity. Guided by RPE, we develop complexity-aware chart coder to autonomously synthesize diverse, high-complexity charts via executable programs. (2) To guarantee reasoning rigor, we develop truth-anchored inverse QA synthesis. Diverging from standard generation, we adopt an answer-first paradigm: we extract deterministic answers directly from the source code, generate questions conditional on these anchors, and enforce strict consistency verification. To further elevate difficulty and reasoning depth, we filter samples based on model fail-rate and distill high-quality Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. We curate ChartVerse-SFT-600K and ChartVerse-RL-40K using Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking as the teacher. Experimental results demonstrate that ChartVerse-8B achieves state-of-the-art performance, notably surpassing its teacher and rivaling the stronger Qwen3-VL-32B-Thinking.

LB-MCTS: Synergizing Large Language Models and Bayesian Optimization for Efficient CASH

To lower the expertise barrier in machine learning, the AutoML community has focused on the CASH problem, a fundamental challenge that automates the process of algorithm selection and hyperparameter tuning. While traditional methods like Bayesian Optimization (BO) struggle with cold-start issues, Large Language Models (LLMs) can mitigate these via semantic priors. However, existing LLM-based optimizers generalize poorly to the high-dimensional, structured CASH space. We propose LB-MCTS, a framework synergizing LLMs and BO within a Monte Carlo Tree Search structure. It maximizes LLM reasoning with Selective Tuning Memory (STM) and explicit exploration-exploitation trade-off. It combines the strengths of both paradigms by dynamically shifting from LLM-driven to BO-driven proposals as data accumulates. Experiments on 104 AMLB datasets demonstrate the superiority of LB-MCTS over the competitive baselines.

Efficient Content-based Recommendation Model Training via Noise-aware Coreset Selection

Content-based recommendation systems (CRSs) utilize content features to predict user-item interactions, serving as essential tools for helping users navigate information-rich web services. However, ensuring the effectiveness of CRSs requires large-scale and even continuous model training to accommodate diverse user preferences, resulting in significant computational costs and resource demands. A promising approach to this challenge is coreset selection, which identifies a small but representative subset of data samples that preserves model quality while reducing training overhead. Yet, the selected coreset is vulnerable to the pervasive noise in user-item interactions, particularly when it is minimally sized. To this end, we propose Noise-aware Coreset Selection (NaCS), a specialized framework for CRSs. NaCS constructs coresets through submodular optimization based on training gradients, while simultaneously correcting noisy labels using a progressively trained model. Meanwhile, we refine the selected coreset by filtering out low-confidence samples through uncertainty quantification, thereby avoid training with unreliable interactions. Through extensive experiments, we show that NaCS produces higher-quality coresets for CRSs while achieving better efficiency than existing coreset selection techniques. Notably, NaCS recovers 93-95\% of full-dataset training performance using merely 1\% of the training data. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/chenxing1999/nacs}{https://github.com/chenxing1999/nacs}.

DataFlow: An LLM-Driven Framework for Unified Data Preparation and Workflow Automation in the Era of Data-Centric AI

The rapidly growing demand for high-quality data in Large Language Models (LLMs) has intensified the need for scalable, reliable, and semantically rich data preparation pipelines. However, current practices remain dominated by ad-hoc scripts and loosely specified workflows, which lack principled abstractions, hinder reproducibility, and offer limited support for model-in-the-loop data generation. To address these challenges, we present DataFlow, a unified and extensible LLM-driven data preparation framework. DataFlow is designed with system-level abstractions that enable modular, reusable, and composable data transformations, and provides a PyTorch-style pipeline construction API for building debuggable and optimizable dataflows. The framework consists of nearly 200 reusable operators and six domain-general pipelines spanning text, mathematical reasoning, code, Text-to-SQL, agentic RAG, and large-scale knowledge extraction. To further improve usability, we introduce DataFlow-Agent, which automatically translates natural-language specifications into executable pipelines via operator synthesis, pipeline planning, and iterative verification. Across six representative use cases, DataFlow consistently improves downstream LLM performance. Our math, code, and text pipelines outperform curated human datasets and specialized synthetic baselines, achieving up to +3\% execution accuracy in Text-to-SQL over SynSQL, +7\% average improvements on code benchmarks, and 1--3 point gains on MATH, GSM8K, and AIME. Moreover, a unified 10K-sample dataset produced by DataFlow enables base models to surpass counterparts trained on 1M Infinity-Instruct data. These results demonstrate that DataFlow provides a practical and high-performance substrate for reliable, reproducible, and scalable LLM data preparation, and establishes a system-level foundation for future data-centric AI development.

BRACE: A Benchmark for Robust Audio Caption Quality Evaluation

Automatic audio captioning is essential for audio understanding, enabling applications such as accessibility and content indexing. However, evaluating the quality of audio captions remains a major challenge, especially in reference-free settings where high-quality ground-truth captions are unavailable. While CLAPScore is currently the most widely used reference-free Audio Caption Evaluation Metric(ACEM), its robustness under diverse conditions has not been systematically validated. To address this gap, we introduce BRACE, a new benchmark designed to evaluate audio caption alignment quality in a reference-free setting. BRACE is primarily designed for assessing ACEMs, and can also be extended to measure the modality alignment abilities of Large Audio Language Model(LALM). BRACE consists of two sub-benchmarks: BRACE-Main for fine-grained caption comparison and BRACE-Hallucination for detecting subtle hallucinated content. We construct these datasets through high-quality filtering, LLM-based corruption, and human annotation. Given the widespread adoption of CLAPScore as a reference-free ACEM and the increasing application of LALMs in audio-language tasks, we evaluate both approaches using the BRACE benchmark, testing CLAPScore across various CLAP model variants and assessing multiple LALMs. Notably, even the best-performing CLAP-based ACEM achieves only a 70.01 F1-score on the BRACE-Main benchmark, while the best LALM reaches just 63.19. By revealing the limitations of CLAP models and LALMs, our BRACE benchmark offers valuable insights into the direction of future research.

AutoLugano: A Deep Learning Framework for Fully Automated Lymphoma Segmentation and Lugano Staging on FDG-PET/CT

Purpose: To develop a fully automated deep learning system, AutoLugano, for end-to-end lymphoma classification by performing lesion segmentation, anatomical localization, and automated Lugano staging from baseline FDG-PET/CT scans. Methods: The AutoLugano system processes baseline FDG-PET/CT scans through three sequential modules:(1) Anatomy-Informed Lesion Segmentation, a 3D nnU-Net model, trained on multi-channel inputs, performs automated lesion detection (2) Atlas-based Anatomical Localization, which leverages the TotalSegmentator toolkit to map segmented lesions to 21 predefined lymph node regions using deterministic anatomical rules; and (3) Automated Lugano Staging, where the spatial distribution of involved regions is translated into Lugano stages and therapeutic groups (Limited vs. Advanced Stage).The system was trained on the public autoPET dataset (n=1,007) and externally validated on an independent cohort of 67 patients. Performance was assessed using accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, F1-scorefor regional involvement detection and staging agreement. Results: On the external validation set, the proposed model demonstrated robust performance, achieving an overall accuracy of 88.31%, sensitivity of 74.47%, Specificity of 94.21% and an F1-score of 80.80% for regional involvement detection,outperforming baseline models. Most notably, for the critical clinical task of therapeutic stratification (Limited vs. Advanced Stage), the system achieved a high accuracy of 85.07%, with a specificity of 90.48% and a sensitivity of 82.61%.Conclusion: AutoLugano represents the first fully automated, end-to-end pipeline that translates a single baseline FDG-PET/CT scan into a complete Lugano stage. This study demonstrates its strong potential to assist in initial staging, treatment stratification, and supporting clinical decision-making.

Text2SQL-Flow: A Robust SQL-Aware Data Augmentation Framework for Text-to-SQL

The data-centric paradigm has become pivotal in AI, especially for Text-to-SQL, where performance is limited by scarce, simplistic, and low-diversity datasets. To address this, we propose Text2SQL-Flow, a SQL-aware data augmentation framework that generates large-scale, semantically valid, and structurally diverse Text-to-SQL pairs from minimal seed data. It operates across six augmentation dimensions and integrates an end-to-end pipeline featuring SQL execution verification, natural language question generation, chain-of-thought reasoning traces, and data classification. A modular Database Manager ensures cross-database compatibility and scalability. Using this framework, we build SQLFlow, a high-quality dataset of 89,544 annotated examples. We evaluate SQLFlow in two settings: (1) For open-source LLMs, fine-tuning on SQLFlow consistently improves performance across benchmarks under the same data budget. (2) For closed-source LLMs, we introduce a masked alignment retrieval method that treats SQLFlow as both knowledge base and training data for the retriever. This enables structure-aware example matching by modeling fine-grained alignments between questions and SQL queries. Experiments show our retrieval strategy outperforms existing methods, underscoring the value of SQLFlow's high-fidelity data and our novel technique. Our work establishes a scalable, data-centric foundation for advancing Text-to-SQL systems and highlights the critical role of high-quality structured data in modern AI.

Rethinking Text-to-SQL: Dynamic Multi-turn SQL Interaction for Real-world Database Exploration

Recent advances in Text-to-SQL have achieved strong results in static, single-turn tasks, where models generate SQL queries from natural language questions. However, these systems fall short in real-world interactive scenarios, where user intents evolve and queries must be refined over multiple turns. In applications such as finance and business analytics, users iteratively adjust query constraints or dimensions based on intermediate results. To evaluate such dynamic capabilities, we introduce DySQL-Bench, a benchmark assessing model performance under evolving user interactions. Unlike previous manually curated datasets, DySQL-Bench is built through an automated two-stage pipeline of task synthesis and verification. Structured tree representations derived from raw database tables guide LLM-based task generation, followed by interaction-oriented filtering and expert validation. Human evaluation confirms 100% correctness of the synthesized data. We further propose a multi-turn evaluation framework simulating realistic interactions among an LLM-simulated user, the model under test, and an executable database. The model must adapt its reasoning and SQL generation as user intents change. DySQL-Bench covers 13 domains across BIRD and Spider 2 databases, totaling 1,072 tasks. Even GPT-4o attains only 58.34% overall accuracy and 23.81% on the Pass@5 metric, underscoring the benchmark's difficulty. All code and data are released at https://github.com/Aurora-slz/Real-World-SQL-Bench .

PSEO: Optimizing Post-hoc Stacking Ensemble Through Hyperparameter Tuning

The Combined Algorithm Selection and Hyperparameter Optimization (CASH) problem is fundamental in Automated Machine Learning (AutoML). Inspired by the success of ensemble learning, recent AutoML systems construct post-hoc ensembles for final predictions rather than relying on the best single model. However, while most CASH methods conduct extensive searches for the optimal single model, they typically employ fixed strategies during the ensemble phase that fail to adapt to specific task characteristics. To tackle this issue, we propose PSEO, a framework for post-hoc stacking ensemble optimization. First, we conduct base model selection through binary quadratic programming, with a trade-off between diversity and performance. Furthermore, we introduce two mechanisms to fully realize the potential of multi-layer stacking. Finally, PSEO builds a hyperparameter space and searches for the optimal post-hoc ensemble strategy within it. Empirical results on 80 public datasets show that \sys achieves the best average test rank (2.96) among 16 methods, including post-hoc designs in recent AutoML systems and state-of-the-art ensemble learning methods.

PilotRL: Training Language Model Agents via Global Planning-Guided Progressive Reinforcement Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advancements in tackling agent-oriented tasks. Despite their potential, existing work faces challenges when deploying LLMs in agent-based environments. The widely adopted agent paradigm ReAct centers on integrating single-step reasoning with immediate action execution, which limits its effectiveness in complex tasks requiring long-term strategic planning. Furthermore, the coordination between the planner and executor during problem-solving is also a critical factor to consider in agent design. Additionally, current approaches predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning, which often leads models to memorize established task completion trajectories, thereby restricting their generalization ability when confronted with novel problem contexts. To address these challenges, we introduce an adaptive global plan-based agent paradigm AdaPlan, aiming to synergize high-level explicit guidance with execution to support effective long-horizon decision-making. Based on the proposed paradigm, we further put forward PilotRL, a global planning-guided training framework for LLM agents driven by progressive reinforcement learning. We first develop the model's ability to follow explicit guidance from global plans when addressing agent tasks. Subsequently, based on this foundation, we focus on optimizing the quality of generated plans. Finally, we conduct joint optimization of the model's planning and execution coordination. Experiments indicate that PilotRL could achieve state-of-the-art performances, with LLaMA3.1-8B-Instruct + PilotRL surpassing closed-sourced GPT-4o by 3.60%, while showing a more substantial gain of 55.78% comparing to GPT-4o-mini at a comparable parameter scale.