PathoArgus: Advancing Evidence-Grounded Long-Context Visual Reasoning across Gigapixel Whole-Slide and Multi-Slide Case Contexts

Whole-slide pathology reasoning requires models to integrate gigapixel-scale visual evidence across complete case-linked slides, yet current question-answering benchmarks primarily measure final answer accuracy--a metric vulnerable to linguistic priors and benchmark regularities, and insufficient to establish that predictions are grounded in the supplied tissue. We introduce PathoArgus-Bench, a benchmark and evaluation protocol that explicitly tests the full evidence chain: availability, accessibility, use, and responsiveness. PathoArgus-Bench comprises 22,078 four-choice questions from 4,913 patients across 15 TCGA projects, covering six pathology capabilities across three levels of evidence demand, and operates under a fixed reader budget that retains only a small fraction of the gigapixel context. To further isolate evidence-grounded reasoning, we contribute ESG (Evidence State Quartets), a controlled set of 483 quartets where the question text is fixed while the target WSI set is moved, replaced, or removed, requiring consistent predictions across all states. Evaluating 20 general-purpose, medical, and pathology-specific systems reveals a stark gap: while GPT-5.6 achieves 57.09% overall accuracy and 57.04% on ESG, it correctly completes only 19 of 483 quartets (3.93% QExact), exposing that row-level accuracy does not translate into reliable evidence grounding. We also introduce PathoArgus, a fixed-budget reader that allocates context via question relevance and spatial coverage, attaining 50.39% overall accuracy yet only 1.86% QExact--demonstrating that improved context access alone does not ensure consistent evidence-based prediction. Our benchmark and diagnostics establish that acquiring useful whole-slide context is necessary but far from sufficient, and call for a shift from answer-centric to evidence-grounded evaluation in computational pathology.

MoFE: A Novel Mixture-of-Experts Framework with Fourier Neural Operators for Cryptocurrency Forecasting

Forecasting cryptocurrency prices remains a formidable challenge due to inherent non-stationarity, abrupt regime shifts, and multi-scale stochastic dependencies. Conventional deep learning models often struggle to capture complex underlying dynamics, frequently resulting in persistent phase-lagged predictions. To address these limitations, we propose MoFE, a novel deep learning framework that integrates Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs) within a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. Rooted in the theoretical framework of stochastic differential equations, MoFE conceptualizes cryptocurrency volatility as a superposition of multi-frequency components, which includes user network based fundamental growth, mining costs and halving mechanism caused seasonal volatility, and market sentiment-induced chaos. Specifically, specialized adaptive FNO (AFNO) and Convolution dual-domain experts learn continuous function-to-function mappings to encapsulate global spectral trends, cyclical adjustments and microstructures, while a dynamic gating based MoE mechanism enables adaptive strategy switching across diverse market regimes. Extensive experiments on Bitcoin datasets spanning January 2020 to December 2025 demonstrate that MoFE achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both T+1 and T+5 forecasting horizons. Notably, the model effectively mitigates the phase-lag effect, delivering superior Directional Accuracy (DA) and Information Coefficient (IC). In high-fidelity simulated trading environments, these predictive gains transfer into significant excess returns and robust risk-adjusted performance, characterized by a high Sharpe ratio.

$R^3$-Bench: LLMs Struggle with Resource-Rational Reasoning under Shared Budgets

In cognitive science, resource rationality asks how an agent should allocate limited computation to maximize expected value. Most reasoning and agent benchmarks use independent per-task budgets; existing shared-budget studies do not calibrate suite performance against the same model's demonstrated single-problem competence. We introduce $R^3$-Bench, which evaluates six-problem suites under shared budgets across mathematics, competitive programming, and abstract reasoning in tool-free and agentic settings. Matched single-problem response curves define an offline empirical oracle over observed successes. Across 72 main-table cells for six models, the oracle mean matches or exceeds the contest mean in all cells and is strictly higher in 71. Under moderate tool-free pressure, equal-allocation replay also exceeds contest performance for four of six models. Trajectory diagnostics reveal limited strategy updating and pressure-dependent failure patterns. In a three-model diagnostic under strong agentic pressure, at least one fixed scheduler exceeds the contest mean in six of nine cells, but no policy dominates across domains. These results expose a persistent gap between demonstrated competence and shared-budget realization.

CTBench: Evaluating Troubleshooting Capabilities of AI Agents in Realistic Telecom Network Operations

Agents are increasingly considered for automating network operations and maintenance, where engineers must diagnose network faults, optimize configurations to enhance services, and reduce operational costs while acting under strict constraints. However, existing evaluations fail to accurately model real network characteristics or assess agents under partially observable telecom environments with diverse vendors, devices, protocols, and interfaces. In this paper, we introduce CTBench, a public benchmark for assessing whether an agent behaves like a competent telecom troubleshooting engineer. CTBench focuses on root cause analysis and path restoration. Each task is constructed by experts and annotated with rich task metadata, including golden evidence steps. CTBench uses expert-grounded metrics that evaluate both final answers and the diagnostic evidence. Experiments with representative harness-model combinations show that state-of-the-art agents perform very well at identifying endpoints in path-restoration tasks but, more generally, underperform in root cause analysis. In particular, agents struggle with interface state, link-layer, service-management, and other operational faults. Most importantly, even when agents produce plausible or correct final answers, they often fail to provide the evidence-grounded diagnoses required in operational practice. Our results further show that path restoration is generally more resource expensive, yet larger resource usage does not necessarily translate into better diagnosis.

Beyond Frame Selection: Generative Latent Evidence Aggregation for Long-Video Understanding

Long-video understanding commonly compresses videos into a small set of frames or visual tokens for answer generation. Existing compact pipelines focus on retaining relevant visual content as explicit evidence. Yet making evidence available does not ensure that complementary cues across moments are integrated for answering. Our key idea is to organize selected frames into query-relevant cross-frame evidence before generation. We formulate this post-selection stage as a latent evidence interface and instantiate it with GenEvA ($\textbf{Gen}erative$ $Latent$ $\textbf{Ev}idence$ $\textbf{A}ggregation$), a distribution-guided latent evidence aggregation framework. Specifically, GenEvA uses a query-conditioned evidence distribution to focus aggregation on relevant frames, forming compact cross-frame latent evidence from their frame-specific information. Since cross-frame integration is not always needed, the same distribution determines whether to insert this latent complement. Across four benchmarks and two Video-MLLM backbones, GenEvA consistently improves matched-frame baselines. At 8 frames, it raises the four-benchmark LLaVA-Video average by $+5.2$ points and Qwen2.5-VL accuracy on LVBench by $+10.1$ points. These gains require only $0.11\%$--$0.40\%$ average video-token overhead; analyses further show task-aware allocation and benefits from Adaptive Evidence Invocation.

Safety, or Just Capability? A Validity Audit of Agent-Safety Benchmarks

Agent-safety benchmarks measure different behaviors, and their scores get quoted interchangeably as an agent's safety. We treat four of them (R-Judge, InjecAgent, AgentHarm, AgentDojo) as measurements to be validated, running each under its official implementation and author-provided scorer on up to 22 models, with MMLU and GPQA measured by us under one protocol as a capability composite. The metric is the first problem. On any binary trace-judgment benchmark scored by $F_1$, an ``always positive'' policy attains $F_1 = 2π/(1+π)$; on R-Judge that is $0.690$, above five of the 21 models that actually discriminate. The three broad-coverage benchmarks then rank the same 18 models differently, and the trade-off behind that disagreement is a small-panel artifact: R-Judge specificity against AgentHarm safety correlates $-0.64$ at $n{=}7$ and $+0.02$ at $n{=}18$, and a quarter of random size-7 subsets reach $|ρ| \geq 0.5$ around that near-zero value. Held-out validity turns on which outcome you pick. Capability predicts task success ($ρ{=}{+}0.60$) but correlates negatively with misalignment safety ($ρ{=}{-}0.44$, $n{=}21$). On their paired $n{=}20$ panel, the corresponding contrast is $Δ{=}{-}1.00$ (95% CI $[-1.48, -0.49]$, $p<0.001$), and it survives leave-one-organization-out and organization-clustered bootstrap analyses. On an expanded 41-model panel, the misalignment correlation weakens to $-0.16$ (95% CI $[-0.54, +0.22]$) and jailbreak strengthens to $+0.34$, though neither change is significant. \mbox{AgentHarm} shows the strongest held-out association, $ρ{=}{+}0.72$ with three-template jailbreak safety after controlling capability. But both instruments score harmful compliance, so this is evidence of convergent validity rather than general safety. Naming the benchmark, metric, target behavior, and model panel is the minimum a safety claim needs.

VistaRef: Boosting Visual Spatial Orientation Awareness for Pointing-to-Object Detection

Grounding deictic gestures in natural images is fundamental to AR and human-robot collaboration, providing a basis for seamless spatial interaction. While Transformer-based visual models have achieved significant progress in general object detection, their global attention mechanisms often neglect micro-geometric relationships, degrading orientation accuracy. In pointing tasks, this deficiency manifests as an inability to accurately capture the pointing ray implied by finger poses, which results in pointing drift and localization ambiguity when dealing with distant or densely packed objects. To address this, we propose VistaRef, a framework designed to explicitly enhance spatial orientation awareness. First, we develop the Local Hand Entity Modeling (LHEM) module, which incorporates hand-pose embeddings to strengthen the model's capability to capture subtle finger deviations. Second, drawing inspiration from multi-view geometry, we construct the Geometric Ray Modeling (GRM) module to transform implicit orientation information into explicit spatial geometric features, guiding feature aggregation and deep fusion via attention mechanisms. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Orientation-Consistent Alignment Loss (OCAL) to synergistically supervise hand presence and pointing consistency, ensuring that all architectural improvements collectively serve the core objective of spatial localization. Experimental results demonstrate that VistaRef significantly outperforms the baseline, achieving a 14-point absolute gain in grounding accuracy. Qualitative analysis further confirms that VistaRef effectively models the geometric correlation from hand to target, bridging the spatial perception gap inherent in traditional Transformers for complex scenarios. Code: https://github.com/lingli1724/VistaRef.

PointVG-R: Internalizing Geometric Reasoning in MLLMs for Precise Pointing Localization via Visual Chain of Thought

Pointing-based visual grounding requires models to precisely locate target objects by deciphering complex spatial relationships between the visual scene and pointing gestures. Traditional methods typically encode input images into static feature representations and perform reasoning primarily within the linguistic domain, often overlooking the rich perceptual cues and explicit spatial geometry inherent in images. In this study, we aim to mitigate the cognitive vulnerability of models in interpreting gestural spatial relations by proposing PointVG-R, a reasoning-guided Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM). PointVG-R introduces geometric-aware reasoning for pointing-based grounding, enabling the model to think with images through the strategic integration of Reinforcement Learning (RL) and cold-start data. Specifically, we design a novel geometric reasoning pipeline that simulates the iterative cognitive process humans employ when interpreting pointing gestures. Furthermore, we construct EgoPoint-CoT, a high-quality visual Chain-of-Thought (CoT) dataset featuring detailed reasoning trajectories to guide the model via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and RL. To address the varying quality of learning signals encountered during training, we further propose an Adaptive Importance Weighting strategy based on Group Variance, which dynamically adjusts reward signals to optimize the learning process. Experimental results demonstrate that PointVG-R achieves SOTA performance, outperforming the baseline by $\textbf{15.86}$ points in mIoU. Extensive ablation studies further validate the efficacy of our proposed modules. Code: https://github.com/lingli1724/PointVG-R.

DynamicPTQ: Mitigating Activation Quantization Collapse via Residual-Stream Dynamics

Post-training quantization (PTQ) is essential for efficient large language model inference, but reliably quantizing activations remains challenging when weights, activations, and KV caches are all quantized to 4-bit precision. A key difficulty lies in massive activations, whose extreme values dominate the activation range and amplify quantization errors. State-of-the-art methods mainly mitigate massive activations through transformation-based smoothing, such as orthogonal rotations and affine scaling, but overlook the cross-layer dynamics of the residual stream. In this paper, we show that massive activations emerge and disappear in a phase-wise pattern across network depth, triggering large residual changes. These changes cause newly injected layer-wise updates to dominate the 4-bit quantization scale and weaken historical residual information. To characterize this behavior, we introduce Jump Ratio and Historical Feature SNR. This suggests that static transformation-based smoothing cannot fully resolve dynamic quantization instability caused by cross-layer residual changes. Based on this analysis, we propose DynamicPTQ, a Dynamic Post-Training Quantization policy for phase-aware mixed-precision activation quantization. DynamicPTQ identifies quantization-sensitive layers from residual-stream dynamics and assigns 8-bit activation precision only to these layers, while keeping weights, KV caches, and other activations in 4-bit precision. It can be directly integrated with strong PTQ baselines such as QuaRot, SpinQuant, and FlatQuant. Experiments on LLaMA-2 and LLaMA-3 show that DynamicPTQ consistently improves perplexity and zero-shot QA performance under W4A4KV4 quantization, while achieving 1.05 to 1.07 times throughput improvement with modest memory overhead. These results demonstrate a practical path toward robust low-bit LLM inference.

See More, Think Deeper: Query-Expanded Visual Evidence and Answer-Clue Guided Reflection for Long Video Understanding

Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have enabled performance on long-video understanding tasks. However, existing methods still face two key limitations: evidence acquisition often relies on a single search intent, and answer generation lacks an effective visual feedback mechanism. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{CoVER}, a Comprehensive Visual Evidence and Reflection framework for long-video understanding. CoVER enables Video-LLMs to \textbf{See More} by dynamically gathering query-expanded visual evidence, and \textbf{Think Deeper} by verifying draft answers with effective answer-specific visual feedback. Together, these mechanisms shift long-video understanding from answer-centric generation to evidence-centric and visually verifiable reasoning. Experimental results show that CoVER-7B substantially outperforms models with the same parameter scale and even surpasses state-of-the-art closed-source models on certain metrics.