Bridging the Long-Term Gap: A Memory-Active Policy for Multi-Session Task-Oriented Dialogue

Existing Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems primarily focus on single-session dialogues, limiting their effectiveness in long-term memory augmentation. To address this challenge, we introduce a MS-TOD dataset, the first multi-session TOD dataset designed to retain long-term memory across sessions, enabling fewer turns and more efficient task completion. This defines a new benchmark task for evaluating long-term memory in multi-session TOD. Based on this new dataset, we propose a Memory-Active Policy (MAP) that improves multi-session dialogue efficiency through a two-stage approach. 1) Memory-Guided Dialogue Planning retrieves intent-aligned history, identifies key QA units via a memory judger, refines them by removing redundant questions, and generates responses based on the reconstructed memory. 2) Proactive Response Strategy detects and correct errors or omissions, ensuring efficient and accurate task completion. We evaluate MAP on MS-TOD dataset, focusing on response quality and effectiveness of the proactive strategy. Experiments on MS-TOD demonstrate that MAP significantly improves task success and turn efficiency in multi-session scenarios, while maintaining competitive performance on conventional single-session tasks.

T$^2$: An Adaptive Test-Time Scaling Strategy for Contextual Question Answering

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in Contextual Question Answering (CQA). However, prior approaches typically employ elaborate reasoning strategies regardless of question complexity, leading to low adaptability. Recent efficient test-time scaling methods introduce budget constraints or early stop mechanisms to avoid overthinking for straightforward questions. But they add human bias to the reasoning process and fail to leverage models' inherent reasoning capabilities. To address these limitations, we present T$^2$: Think-to-Think, a novel framework that dynamically adapts reasoning depth based on question complexity. T$^2$ leverages the insight that if an LLM can effectively solve similar questions using specific reasoning strategies, it can apply the same strategy to the original question. This insight enables to adoption of concise reasoning for straightforward questions while maintaining detailed analysis for complex problems. T$^2$ works through four key steps: decomposing questions into structural elements, generating similar examples with candidate reasoning strategies, evaluating these strategies against multiple criteria, and applying the most appropriate strategy to the original question. Experimental evaluation across seven diverse CQA benchmarks demonstrates that T$^2$ not only achieves higher accuracy than baseline methods but also reduces computational overhead by up to 25.2\%.

MemeReaCon: Probing Contextual Meme Understanding in Large Vision-Language Models

Memes have emerged as a popular form of multimodal online communication, where their interpretation heavily depends on the specific context in which they appear. Current approaches predominantly focus on isolated meme analysis, either for harmful content detection or standalone interpretation, overlooking a fundamental challenge: the same meme can express different intents depending on its conversational context. This oversight creates an evaluation gap: although humans intuitively recognize how context shapes meme interpretation, Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) can hardly understand context-dependent meme intent. To address this critical limitation, we introduce MemeReaCon, a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate how LVLMs understand memes in their original context. We collected memes from five different Reddit communities, keeping each meme's image, the post text, and user comments together. We carefully labeled how the text and meme work together, what the poster intended, how the meme is structured, and how the community responded. Our tests with leading LVLMs show a clear weakness: models either fail to interpret critical information in the contexts, or overly focus on visual details while overlooking communicative purpose. MemeReaCon thus serves both as a diagnostic tool exposing current limitations and as a challenging benchmark to drive development toward more sophisticated LVLMs of the context-aware understanding.

Bounded and Uniform Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection for Graphs

Given the critical role of graphs in real-world applications and their high-security requirements, improving the ability of graph neural networks (GNNs) to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) data is an urgent research problem. The recent work GNNSAFE proposes a framework based on the aggregation of negative energy scores that significantly improves the performance of GNNs to detect node-level OOD data. However, our study finds that score aggregation among nodes is susceptible to extreme values due to the unboundedness of the negative energy scores and logit shifts, which severely limits the accuracy of GNNs in detecting node-level OOD data. In this paper, we propose NODESAFE: reducing the generation of extreme scores of nodes by adding two optimization terms that make the negative energy scores bounded and mitigate the logit shift. Experimental results show that our approach dramatically improves the ability of GNNs to detect OOD data at the node level, e.g., in detecting OOD data induced by Structure Manipulation, the metric of FPR95 (lower is better) in scenarios without (with) OOD data exposure are reduced from the current SOTA by 28.4% (22.7%).

Steady-State Drifting Equilibrium Analysis of Single-Track Two-Wheeled Robots for Controller Design

Drifting is an advanced driving technique where the wheeled robot's tire-ground interaction breaks the common non-holonomic pure rolling constraint. This allows high-maneuverability tasks like quick cornering, and steady-state drifting control enhances motion stability under lateral slip conditions. While drifting has been successfully achieved in four-wheeled robot systems, its application to single-track two-wheeled (STTW) robots, such as unmanned motorcycles or bicycles, has not been thoroughly studied. To bridge this gap, this paper extends the drifting equilibrium theory to STTW robots and reveals the mechanism behind the steady-state drifting maneuver. Notably, the counter-steering drifting technique used by skilled motorcyclists is explained through this theory. In addition, an analytical algorithm based on intrinsic geometry and kinematics relationships is proposed, reducing the computation time by four orders of magnitude while maintaining less than 6% error compared to numerical methods. Based on equilibrium analysis, a model predictive controller (MPC) is designed to achieve steady-state drifting and equilibrium points transition, with its effectiveness and robustness validated through simulations.

WHERE and WHICH: Iterative Debate for Biomedical Synthetic Data Augmentation

In Biomedical Natural Language Processing (BioNLP) tasks, such as Relation Extraction, Named Entity Recognition, and Text Classification, the scarcity of high-quality data remains a significant challenge. This limitation poisons large language models to correctly understand relationships between biological entities, such as molecules and diseases, or drug interactions, and further results in potential misinterpretation of biomedical documents. To address this issue, current approaches generally adopt the Synthetic Data Augmentation method which involves similarity computation followed by word replacement, but counterfactual data are usually generated. As a result, these methods disrupt meaningful word sets or produce sentences with meanings that deviate substantially from the original context, rendering them ineffective in improving model performance. To this end, this paper proposes a biomedical-dedicated rationale-based synthetic data augmentation method. Beyond the naive lexicon similarity, specific bio-relation similarity is measured to hold the augmented instance having a strong correlation with bio-relation instead of simply increasing the diversity of augmented data. Moreover, a multi-agents-involved reflection mechanism helps the model iteratively distinguish different usage of similar entities to escape falling into the mis-replace trap. We evaluate our method on the BLURB and BigBIO benchmark, which includes 9 common datasets spanning four major BioNLP tasks. Our experimental results demonstrate consistent performance improvements across all tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach in addressing the challenges associated with data scarcity and enhancing the overall performance of biomedical NLP models.

FReM: A Flexible Reasoning Mechanism for Balancing Quick and Slow Thinking in Long-Context Question Answering

Long-context question-answering (LCQA) systems have greatly benefited from the powerful reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), which can be categorized into slow and quick reasoning modes. However, both modes have their limitations. Slow thinking generally leans to explore every possible reasoning path, which leads to heavy overthinking and wastes time. Quick thinking usually relies on pattern matching rather than truly understanding the query logic, which misses proper understanding. To address these issues, we propose FReM: Flexible Reasoning Mechanism, a method that adjusts reasoning depth according to the complexity of each question. Specifically, FReM leverages synthetic reference QA examples to provide an explicit chain of thought, enabling efficient handling of simple queries while allowing deeper reasoning for more complex ones. By doing so, FReM helps quick-thinking models move beyond superficial pattern matching and narrows the reasoning space for slow-thinking models to avoid unnecessary exploration. Experiments on seven QA datasets show that FReM improves reasoning accuracy and scalability, particularly for complex multihop questions, indicating its potential to advance LCQA methodologies.

EventWeave: A Dynamic Framework for Capturing Core and Supporting Events in Dialogue Systems

Existing large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in dialogue systems. However, many approaches still overlook the fundamental role of events throughout multi-turn interactions, leading to \textbf{incomplete context tracking}. Without tracking these events, dialogue systems often lose coherence and miss subtle shifts in user intent, causing disjointed responses. To bridge this gap, we present \textbf{EventWeave}, an event-centric framework that identifies and updates both core and supporting events as the conversation unfolds. Specifically, we organize these events into a dynamic event graph, which represents the interplay between \textbf{core events} that shape the primary idea and \textbf{supporting events} that provide critical context during the whole dialogue. By leveraging this dynamic graph, EventWeave helps models focus on the most relevant events when generating responses, thus avoiding repeated visits of the entire dialogue history. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that EventWeave improves response quality and event relevance without fine-tuning.

Multimodal Machine Learning for Real Estate Appraisal: A Comprehensive Survey

Real estate appraisal has undergone a significant transition from manual to automated valuation and is entering a new phase of evolution. Leveraging comprehensive attention to various data sources, a novel approach to automated valuation, multimodal machine learning, has taken shape. This approach integrates multimodal data to deeply explore the diverse factors influencing housing prices. Furthermore, multimodal machine learning significantly outperforms single-modality or fewer-modality approaches in terms of prediction accuracy, with enhanced interpretability. However, systematic and comprehensive survey work on the application in the real estate domain is still lacking. In this survey, we aim to bridge this gap by reviewing the research efforts. We begin by reviewing the background of real estate appraisal and propose two research questions from the perspecve of performance and fusion aimed at improving the accuracy of appraisal results. Subsequently, we explain the concept of multimodal machine learning and provide a comprehensive classification and definition of modalities used in real estate appraisal for the first time. To ensure clarity, we explore works related to data and techniques, along with their evaluation methods, under the framework of these two research questions. Furthermore, specific application domains are summarized. Finally, we present insights into future research directions including multimodal complementarity, technology and modality contribution.

Unity RL Playground: A Versatile Reinforcement Learning Framework for Mobile Robots

This paper introduces Unity RL Playground, an open-source reinforcement learning framework built on top of Unity ML-Agents. Unity RL Playground automates the process of training mobile robots to perform various locomotion tasks such as walking, running, and jumping in simulation, with the potential for seamless transfer to real hardware. Key features include one-click training for imported robot models, universal compatibility with diverse robot configurations, multi-mode motion learning capabilities, and extreme performance testing to aid in robot design optimization and morphological evolution. The attached video can be found at https://linqi-ye.github.io/video/iros25.mp4 and the code is coming soon.