DeAR: Decentralized Agentic Reasoning via Capability Grounding and Collaborative Thought Navigation

Existing agentic reasoning systems typically rely on centralized protocols. This design introduces routing bottlenecks and static role allocations that often fail when handling complex multimodal queries. We propose DeAR (Decentralized Agentic Reasoning), a framework that shifts from central control to autonomous peer-to-peer collaboration. DeAR is built on three mechanisms: (1) decentralized capability grounding for query-dependent agent specialization, (2) thought map navigation for targeted peer interactions, and (3) topology update for adaptive error correction. Evaluations across 9 diverse multimodal reasoning and text-based QA benchmarks indicate that DeAR consistently outperforms recent baseline methods, validating that decentralized and adaptive collaboration among agents enhances accuracy in knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks. The source code will be available at https://open_upon_acceptance.

Aligning Clinical Needs and AI Capabilities: A Survey on LLMs for Medical Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as important tools in healthcare, showing growing potential for clinical reasoning and patient care. This survey examines recent progress in medical LLMs, focusing on reasoning applications and requirements. We present a dual-view approach that connects clinical practice with computational methods. On the clinical side, we establish a five-level competency scheme following Miller's Pyramid, progressing from knowledge recall to dynamic case management. On the computational side, we link deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning patterns to common medical goals and tasks. We also introduce a benchmark dataset spanning five levels of medical reasoning capability and report results on 18 state-of-the-art models, revealing that medical specialist models excel in diagnosis-centric tasks while general models lead in decision support and dialogue. We conclude by discussing current progress and open challenges, including data limitations, hallucination, and grounding issues, and outline directions toward safer, more reliable, and workflow-ready systems.

Do LLMs Truly Generalize in the Molecular Domain? A Perturbation-Based Analysis

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown promise in molecular discovery, yet a gap remains between their probabilistic nature over discrete sequential tokens and the rigid topological constraints of chemical space. This raises the question of whether molecular LLMs can generalize beyond the local neighborhoods induced by their sequence-based representations. To systematically investigate this question, we introduce a Molecular Perturbation framework that generates syntax-valid structural variants of training molecules under controlled Graph Edit Distance (GED) to probe the manifold regularity of molecular LLMs. Our analysis shows that even a single edit can cause substantial performance drops on common molecular tasks, revealing a narrow local trust region and fragile sensitivity to structural changes. Since similar molecules tend to exhibit similar properties, In-Context Tuning (ICT), which anchors predictions on structurally similar molecules, offers a natural way to mitigate such fragility. Our experiments also examine whether ICT confers robustness under controlled structural perturbations, and the results suggest that it can partially expand the local trust region and offer a promising direction for stabilizing molecular LLMs against structural variation.

Mixture of Debaters: Learn to Debate at Architectural Level in Multi-Agent Reasoning

Existing multi-agent debate frameworks suffer from two critical limitations: they rely on static architectures where agent roles and coordination patterns are fixed at design time, and they require instantiating multiple model copies, incurring substantial computational overhead. We propose Mixture of Debaters (MoD), a unified framework that enables dynamic self-debate within a single model by leveraging the Mixture-of-Experts paradigm. We address three key challenges in adapting MoE for dialectical reasoning: (1) dual-routing that decouples role allocation from process flow, dynamically determining when to debate versus when to synthesize; (2) momentum switching that smooths token-level routing with local context, reducing expert-switch jitter; and (3) unified self-debate that encapsulates diverse debating personas into lightweight expert modules, eliminating inter-agent communication while preserving behavioral diversity. Extensive experiments on multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that MoD outperforms both single-model baselines and conventional multi-agent systems, achieving superior accuracy with 3.7x lower latency and 87% reduction in token consumption.The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/YongLD/MoD.

MolViBench: Evaluating LLMs on Molecular Vibe Coding

Molecular Vibe Coding, a paradigm where chemists interact with LLMs to generate executable programs for molecular tasks, has emerged as a flexible alternative to chemical agents with predefined tools, enabling chemists to express arbitrarily complex, customized workflows. Unlike general coding tasks, molecular coding imposes a distinctive challenge that LLMs should jointly equip programming, molecular understanding, and domain-specific reasoning capabilities. However, existing benchmarks remain disconnected. General code generation benchmarks such as HumanEval and SWE-bench require no chemistry knowledge, while chemistry-focused benchmarks such as S^2-Bench and ChemCoTBench evaluate knowledge recall or property prediction rather than executable code generation. To bridge this gap, we introduce MolViBench, the first benchmark tailored for Molecular Vibe Coding. MolViBench comprises 358 curated tasks across five cognitive levels, ranging from single-API recall to end-to-end virtual screening pipeline design, spanning 12 real-world drug discovery workflows. To rigorously assess generated code, we also propose a multi-layered evaluation framework that combines type-aware output comparison and AST-based API-semantic fallback analysis, which jointly measures executability and chemical correctness. We systematically evaluate 9 frontier coding LLMs and compare three real-world Molecular Vibe Coding paradigms, providing a practical and fine-grained testbed for diagnosing LLMs' coding capabilities in AI-accelerated molecular discovery.

Multi-agent Undercover Gaming: Hallucination Removal via Counterfactual Test for Multimodal Reasoning

Hallucination continues to pose a major obstacle in the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Although the Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) paradigm offers a promising solution by promoting consensus among multiple agents to enhance reliability, it relies on the unrealistic assumption that all debaters are rational and reflective, which is a condition that may not hold when agents themselves are prone to hallucinations. To address this gap, we introduce the Multi-agent Undercover Gaming (MUG) protocol, inspired by social deduction games like "Who is Undercover?". MUG reframes MAD as a process of detecting "undercover" agents (those suffering from hallucinations) by employing multimodal counterfactual tests. Specifically, we modify reference images to introduce counterfactual evidence and observe whether agents can accurately identify these changes, providing ground-truth for identifying hallucinating agents and enabling robust, crowd-powered multimodal reasoning. MUG advances MAD protocols along three key dimensions: (1) enabling factual verification beyond statistical consensus through counterfactual testing; (2) introducing cross-evidence reasoning via dynamically modified evidence sources instead of relying on static inputs; and (3) fostering active reasoning, where agents engage in probing discussions rather than passively answering questions. Collectively, these innovations offer a more reliable and effective framework for multimodal reasoning in LLMs. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/YongLD/MUG.git.

Mol-R1: Towards Explicit Long-CoT Reasoning in Molecule Discovery

Large language models (LLMs), especially Explicit Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning models like DeepSeek-R1 and QWQ, have demonstrated powerful reasoning capabilities, achieving impressive performance in commonsense reasoning and mathematical inference. Despite their effectiveness, Long-CoT reasoning models are often criticized for their limited ability and low efficiency in knowledge-intensive domains such as molecule discovery. Success in this field requires a precise understanding of domain knowledge, including molecular structures and chemical principles, which is challenging due to the inherent complexity of molecular data and the scarcity of high-quality expert annotations. To bridge this gap, we introduce Mol-R1, a novel framework designed to improve explainability and reasoning performance of R1-like Explicit Long-CoT reasoning LLMs in text-based molecule generation. Our approach begins with a high-quality reasoning dataset curated through Prior Regulation via In-context Distillation (PRID), a dedicated distillation strategy to effectively generate paired reasoning traces guided by prior regulations. Building upon this, we introduce MoIA, Molecular Iterative Adaptation, a sophisticated training strategy that iteratively combines Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) with Reinforced Policy Optimization (RPO), tailored to boost the reasoning performance of R1-like reasoning models for molecule discovery. Finally, we examine the performance of Mol-R1 in the text-based molecule reasoning generation task, showing superior performance against existing baselines.

Seeing Beyond the Scene: Enhancing Vision-Language Models with Interactional Reasoning

Traditional scene graphs primarily focus on spatial relationships, limiting vision-language models' (VLMs) ability to reason about complex interactions in visual scenes. This paper addresses two key challenges: (1) conventional detection-to-construction methods produce unfocused, contextually irrelevant relationship sets, and (2) existing approaches fail to form persistent memories for generalizing interaction reasoning to new scenes. We propose Interaction-augmented Scene Graph Reasoning (ISGR), a framework that enhances VLMs' interactional reasoning through three complementary components. First, our dual-stream graph constructor combines SAM-powered spatial relation extraction with interaction-aware captioning to generate functionally salient scene graphs with spatial grounding. Second, we employ targeted interaction queries to activate VLMs' latent knowledge of object functionalities, converting passive recognition into active reasoning about how objects work together. Finally, we introduce a lone-term memory reinforcement learning strategy with a specialized interaction-focused reward function that transforms transient patterns into long-term reasoning heuristics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms baseline methods on interaction-heavy reasoning benchmarks, with particularly strong improvements on complex scene understanding tasks. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/open_upon_acceptance.

A Picture Is Worth a Graph: Blueprint Debate on Graph for Multimodal Reasoning

This paper presents a pilot study aimed at introducing multi-agent debate into multimodal reasoning. The study addresses two key challenges: the trivialization of opinions resulting from excessive summarization and the diversion of focus caused by distractor concepts introduced from images. These challenges stem from the inductive (bottom-up) nature of existing debating schemes. To address the issue, we propose a deductive (top-down) debating approach called Blueprint Debate on Graphs (BDoG). In BDoG, debates are confined to a blueprint graph to prevent opinion trivialization through world-level summarization. Moreover, by storing evidence in branches within the graph, BDoG mitigates distractions caused by frequent but irrelevant concepts. Extensive experiments validate BDoG, achieving state-of-the-art results in Science QA and MMBench with significant improvements over previous methods.