Sink-Token-Aware Pruning for Fine-Grained Video Understanding in Efficient Video LLMs

Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) incur high inference latency due to a large number of visual tokens provided to LLMs. To address this, training-free visual token pruning has emerged as a solution to reduce computational costs; however, existing methods are primarily validated on Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) benchmarks, where coarse-grained cues often suffice. In this work, we reveal that these methods suffer a sharp performance collapse on fine-grained understanding tasks requiring precise visual grounding, such as hallucination evaluation. To explore this gap, we conduct a systematic analysis and identify sink tokens--semantically uninformative tokens that attract excessive attention--as a key obstacle to fine-grained video understanding. When these sink tokens survive pruning, they distort the model's visual evidence and hinder fine-grained understanding. Motivated by these insights, we propose Sink-Token-aware Pruning (SToP), a simple yet effective plug-and-play method that introduces a sink score to quantify each token's tendency to behave as a sink and applies this score to existing spatial and temporal pruning methods to suppress them, thereby enhancing video understanding. To validate the effectiveness of SToP, we apply it to state-of-the-art pruning methods (VisionZip, FastVid, and Holitom) and evaluate it across diverse benchmarks covering hallucination, open-ended generation, compositional reasoning, and MCQA. Our results demonstrate that SToP significantly boosts performance, even when pruning up to 90% of visual tokens.

Reasoning Structure Matters for Safety Alignment of Reasoning Models

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks but often generate harmful responses to malicious user queries. This paper investigates the underlying cause of these safety risks and shows that the issue lies in the reasoning structure itself. Based on this insight, we claim that effective safety alignment can be achieved by altering the reasoning structure. We propose AltTrain, a simple yet effective post training method that explicitly alters the reasoning structure of LRMs. AltTrain is both practical and generalizable, requiring no complex reinforcement learning (RL) training or reward design, only supervised finetuning (SFT) with a lightweight 1K training examples. Experiments across LRM backbones and model sizes demonstrate strong safety alignment, along with robust generalization across reasoning, QA, summarization, and multilingual setting.

Why and When Visual Token Pruning Fails? A Study on Relevant Visual Information Shift in MLLMs Decoding

Recently, visual token pruning has been studied to handle the vast number of visual tokens in Multimodal Large Language Models. However, we observe that while existing pruning methods perform reliably on simple visual understanding, they struggle to effectively generalize to complex visual reasoning tasks, a critical gap underexplored in previous studies. Through a systematic analysis, we identify Relevant Visual Information Shift (RVIS) during decoding as the primary failure driver. To address this, we propose Decoding-stage Shift-aware Token Pruning (DSTP), a training-free add-on framework that enables existing pruning methods to align visual tokens with shifting reasoning requirements during the decoding stage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DSTP significantly mitigates performance degradation of pruning methods in complex reasoning tasks, while consistently yielding performance gains even across visual understanding benchmarks. Furthermore, DSTP demonstrates effectiveness across diverse state-of-the-art architectures, highlighting its generalizability and efficiency with minimal computational overhead.

Rethinking Failure Attribution in Multi-Agent Systems: A Multi-Perspective Benchmark and Evaluation

Failure attribution is essential for diagnosing and improving multi-agent systems (MAS), yet existing benchmarks and methods largely assume a single deterministic root cause for each failure. In practice, MAS failures often admit multiple plausible attributions due to complex inter-agent dependencies and ambiguous execution trajectories. We revisit MAS failure attribution from a multi-perspective standpoint and propose multi-perspective failure attribution, a practical paradigm that explicitly accounts for attribution ambiguity. To support this setting, we introduce MP-Bench, the first benchmark designed for multi-perspective failure attribution in MAS, along with a new evaluation protocol tailored to this paradigm. Through extensive experiments, we find that prior conclusions suggesting LLMs struggle with failure attribution are largely driven by limitations in existing benchmark designs. Our results highlight the necessity of multi-perspective benchmarks and evaluation protocols for realistic and reliable MAS debugging.

Self-EvolveRec: Self-Evolving Recommender Systems with LLM-based Directional Feedback

Traditional methods for automating recommender system design, such as Neural Architecture Search (NAS), are often constrained by a fixed search space defined by human priors, limiting innovation to pre-defined operators. While recent LLM-driven code evolution frameworks shift fixed search space target to open-ended program spaces, they primarily rely on scalar metrics (e.g., NDCG, Hit Ratio) that fail to provide qualitative insights into model failures or directional guidance for improvement. To address this, we propose Self-EvolveRec, a novel framework that establishes a directional feedback loop by integrating a User Simulator for qualitative critiques and a Model Diagnosis Tool for quantitative internal verification. Furthermore, we introduce a Diagnosis Tool - Model Co-Evolution strategy to ensure that evaluation criteria dynamically adapt as the recommendation architecture evolves. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Self-EvolveRec significantly outperforms state-of-the-art NAS and LLM-driven code evolution baselines in both recommendation performance and user satisfaction. Our code is available at https://github.com/Sein-Kim/self_evolverec.

PathCRF: Ball-Free Soccer Event Detection via Possession Path Inference from Player Trajectories

Despite recent advances in AI, event data collection in soccer still relies heavily on labor-intensive manual annotation. Although prior work has explored automatic event detection using player and ball trajectories, ball tracking also remains difficult to scale due to high infrastructural and operational costs. As a result, comprehensive data collection in soccer is largely confined to top-tier competitions, limiting the broader adoption of data-driven analysis in this domain. To address this challenge, this paper proposes PathCRF, a framework for detecting on-ball soccer events using only player tracking data. We model player trajectories as a fully connected dynamic graph and formulate event detection as the problem of selecting exactly one edge corresponding to the current possession state at each time step. To ensure logical consistency of the resulting edge sequence, we employ a Conditional Random Field (CRF) that forbids impossible transitions between consecutive edges. Both emission and transition scores dynamically computed from edge embeddings produced by a Set Attention-based backbone architecture. During inference, the most probable edge sequence is obtained via Viterbi decoding, and events such as ball controls or passes are detected whenever the selected edge changes between adjacent time steps. Experiments show that PathCRF produces accurate, logically consistent possession paths, enabling reliable downstream analyses while substantially reducing the need for manual event annotation. The source code is available at https://github.com/hyunsungkim-ds/pathcrf.git.

MSP-LLM: A Unified Large Language Model Framework for Complete Material Synthesis Planning

Material synthesis planning (MSP) remains a fundamental and underexplored bottleneck in AI-driven materials discovery, as it requires not only identifying suitable precursor materials but also designing coherent sequences of synthesis operations to realize a target material. Although several AI-based approaches have been proposed to address isolated subtasks of MSP, a unified methodology for solving the entire MSP task has yet to be established. We propose MSP-LLM, a unified LLM-based framework that formulates MSP as a structured process composed of two constituent subproblems: precursor prediction (PP) and synthesis operation prediction (SOP). Our approach introduces a discrete material class as an intermediate decision variable that organizes both tasks into a chemically consistent decision chain. For OP, we further incorporate hierarchical precursor types as synthesis-relevant inductive biases and employ an explicit conditioning strategy that preserves precursor-related information in the autoregressive decoding state. Extensive experiments show that MSP-LLM consistently outperforms existing methods on both PP and SOP, as well as on the complete MSP task, demonstrating an effective and scalable framework for MSP that can accelerate real-world materials discovery.

Progressive Multi-Agent Reasoning for Biological Perturbation Prediction

Predicting gene regulation responses to biological perturbations requires reasoning about underlying biological causalities. While large language models (LLMs) show promise for such tasks, they are often overwhelmed by the entangled nature of high-dimensional perturbation results. Moreover, recent works have primarily focused on genetic perturbations in single-cell experiments, leaving bulk-cell chemical perturbations, which is central to drug discovery, largely unexplored. Motivated by this, we present LINCSQA, a novel benchmark for predicting target gene regulation under complex chemical perturbations in bulk-cell environments. We further propose PBio-Agent, a multi-agent framework that integrates difficulty-aware task sequencing with iterative knowledge refinement. Our key insight is that genes affected by the same perturbation share causal structure, allowing confidently predicted genes to contextualize more challenging cases. The framework employs specialized agents enriched with biological knowledge graphs, while a synthesis agent integrates outputs and specialized judges ensure logical coherence. PBio-Agent outperforms existing baselines on both LINCSQA and PerturbQA, enabling even smaller models to predict and explain complex biological processes without additional training.

Electron-Informed Coarse-Graining Molecular Representation Learning for Real-World Molecular Physics

Various representation learning methods for molecular structures have been devised to accelerate data-driven chemistry. However, the representation capabilities of existing methods are essentially limited to atom-level information, which is not sufficient to describe real-world molecular physics. Although electron-level information can provide fundamental knowledge about chemical compounds beyond the atom-level information, obtaining the electron-level information in real-world molecules is computationally impractical and sometimes infeasible. We propose a method for learning electron-informed molecular representations without additional computation costs by transferring readily accessible electron-level information about small molecules to large molecules of our interest. The proposed method achieved state-of-the-art prediction accuracy on extensive benchmark datasets containing experimentally observed molecular physics. The source code for HEDMoL is available at https://github.com/ngs00/HEDMoL.

PULSE: Socially-Aware User Representation Modeling Toward Parameter-Efficient Graph Collaborative Filtering

Graph-based social recommendation (SocialRec) has emerged as a powerful extension of graph collaborative filtering (GCF), which leverages graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture multi-hop collaborative signals from user-item interactions. These methods enrich user representations by incorporating social network information into GCF, thereby integrating additional collaborative signals from social relations. However, existing GCF and graph-based SocialRec approaches face significant challenges: they incur high computational costs and suffer from limited scalability due to the large number of parameters required to assign explicit embeddings to all users and items. In this work, we propose PULSE (Parameter-efficient User representation Learning with Social Knowledge), a framework that addresses this limitation by constructing user representations from socially meaningful signals without creating an explicit learnable embedding for each user. PULSE reduces the parameter size by up to 50% compared to the most lightweight GCF baseline. Beyond parameter efficiency, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming 13 GCF and graph-based social recommendation baselines across varying levels of interaction sparsity, from cold-start to highly active users, through a time- and memory-efficient modeling process.