Abstract:Paralinguistic cues are essential for natural human-computer interaction, yet their evaluation in Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) remains limited by coarse feature coverage and the inherent subjectivity of assessment. To address these challenges, we introduce SpeechParaling-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for paralinguistic-aware speech generation. It expands existing coverage from fewer than 50 to over 100 fine-grained features, supported by more than 1,000 English-Chinese parallel speech queries, and is organized into three progressively challenging tasks: fine-grained control, intra-utterance variation, and context-aware adaptation. To enable reliable evaluation, we further develop a pairwise comparison pipeline, in which candidate responses are evaluated against a fixed baseline by an LALM-based judge. By framing evaluation as relative preference rather than absolute scoring, this approach mitigates subjectivity and yields more stable and scalable assessments without costly human annotation. Extensive experiments reveal substantial limitations in current LALMs. Even leading proprietary models struggle with comprehensive static control and dynamic modulation of paralinguistic features, while failure to correctly interpret paralinguistic cues accounts for 43.3% of errors in situational dialogue. These findings underscore the need for more robust paralinguistic modeling toward human-aligned voice assistants.
Abstract:Token pruning has emerged as a mainstream approach for developing efficient Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs). This work revisits and advances the two predominant token-pruning paradigms: attention-based selection and similarity-based clustering. Our study reveals two critical limitations in existing methods: (1) conventional top-k selection strategies fail to fully account for the attention distribution, which is often spatially multi-modal and long-tailed in magnitude; and (2) direct similarity-based clustering frequently generates fragmented clusters, resulting in distorted representations after pooling. To address these bottlenecks, we propose Tango, a novel framework designed to optimize the utilization of visual signals. Tango integrates a diversity-driven strategy to enhance attention-based token selection, and introduces Spatio-temporal Rotary Position Embedding (ST-RoPE) to preserve geometric structure via locality priors. Comprehensive experiments across various Video LLMs and video understanding benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach. Notably, when retaining only 10% of the video tokens, Tango preserves 98.9% of the original performance on LLaVA-OV while delivering a 1.88$\times$ inference speedup.
Abstract:Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have created new opportunities for facial expression recognition (FER), moving it beyond pure label prediction toward reasoning-based affect understanding. However, existing MLLM-based FER methods still follow a passive paradigm: they rely on externally prepared facial inputs and perform single-pass reasoning over fixed visual evidence, without the capability for active facial perception. To address this limitation, we propose ActFER, an agentic framework that reformulates FER as active visual evidence acquisition followed by multimodal reasoning. Specifically, ActFER dynamically invokes tools for face detection and alignment, selectively zooms into informative local regions, and reasons over facial Action Units (AUs) and emotions through a visual Chain-of-Thought. To realize such behavior, we further develop Utility-Calibrated GRPO (UC-GRPO), a reinforcement learning algorithm tailored to agentic FER. UC-GRPO uses AU-grounded multi-level verifiable rewards to densify supervision, query-conditional contrastive utility estimation to enable sample-aware dynamic credit assignment for local inspection, and emotion-aware EMA calibration to reduce noisy utility estimates while capturing emotion-wise inspection tendencies. This algorithm enables ActFER to learn both when local inspection is beneficial and how to reason over the acquired evidence. Comprehensive experiments show that ActFER trained with UC-GRPO consistently outperforms passive MLLM-based FER baselines and substantially improves AU prediction accuracy.
Abstract:With the rapid advancement of video understanding, existing benchmarks are becoming increasingly saturated, exposing a critical discrepancy between inflated leaderboard scores and real-world model capabilities. To address this widening gap, we introduce Video-MME-v2, a comprehensive benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate the robustness and faithfulness of video understanding. To systematically evaluate model capabilities, we design a \textbf{progressive tri-level hierarchy} that incrementally increases the complexity of video comprehension, ranging from multi-point visual information aggregation, to temporal dynamics modeling, and ultimately to complex multimodal reasoning. Besides, in contrast to conventional per-question accuracy, we propose a \textbf{group-based non-linear evaluation} strategy that enforces both consistency across related queries and coherence in multi-step reasoning. It penalizes fragmented or guess-based correctness and assigns credit only to answers supported by valid reasoning. To guarantee data quality, Video-MME-v2 is constructed through a rigorously controlled human annotation pipeline, involving 12 annotators and 50 independent reviewers. Backed by \textbf{3,300 human-hours} and up to \textbf{5 rounds} of quality assurance, Video-MME-v2 aims to serve as one of the most authoritative video benchmarks. Extensive experiments reveal a substantial gap between current best model Gemini-3-Pro and human experts, and uncover a clear hierarchical bottleneck where errors in visual information aggregation and temporal modeling propagate to limit high-level reasoning. We further find that thinking-based reasoning is highly dependent on textual cues, improving performance with subtitles but sometimes degrading it in purely visual settings. By exposing these limitations, Video-MME-v2 establishes a demanding new testbed for the development of next-generation video MLLMs.
Abstract:Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are evolving from passive observers into active agents, solving problems through Visual Expansion (invoking visual tools) and Knowledge Expansion (open-web search). However, existing evaluations fall short: they lack flexible tool integration, test visual and search tools separately, and evaluate primarily by final answers. Consequently, they cannot verify if tools were actually invoked, applied correctly, or used efficiently. To address this, we introduce Agentic-MME, a process-verified benchmark for Multimodal Agentic Capabilities. It contains 418 real-world tasks across 6 domains and 3 difficulty levels to evaluate capability synergy, featuring over 2,000 stepwise checkpoints that average 10+ person-hours of manual annotation per task. Each task includes a unified evaluation framework supporting sandboxed code and APIs, alongside a human reference trajectory annotated with stepwise checkpoints along dual-axis: S-axis and V-axis. To enable true process-level verification, we audit fine-grained intermediate states rather than just final answers, and quantify efficiency via an overthinking metric relative to human trajectories. Experimental results show the best model, Gemini3-pro, achieves 56.3% overall accuracy, which falls significantly to 23.0% on Level-3 tasks, underscoring the difficulty of real-world multimodal agentic problem solving.
Abstract:AI-assisted coding has rapidly reshaped software practice and research workflows, yet today's models still struggle to produce correct code for complex 3D geometric vision. If models could reliably write such code, the research of our community would change substantially. To measure progress toward that goal, we introduce GeoCodeBench, a PhD-level benchmark that evaluates coding for 3D vision. Each problem is a fill-in-the-function implementation task curated from representative papers at recent venues: we first let a tool propose candidate functions from official repositories, then perform careful human screening to select core 3D geometric components. For every target, we generate diverse, edge-case unit tests, enabling fully automatic, reproducible scoring. We evaluate eight representative open- and closed-source models to reflect the current ecosystem. The best model, GPT-5, attains only 36.6% pass rate, revealing a large gap between current capabilities and dependable 3D scientific coding. GeoCodeBench organizes tasks into a two-level hierarchy: General 3D capability (geometric transformations and mechanics/optics formulation) and Research capability (novel algorithm implementation and geometric logic routing). Scores are positively correlated across these axes, but research-oriented tasks are markedly harder. Context ablations further show that "more paper text" is not always better: cutting off at the Method section statistically outperforms full-paper inputs, highlighting unresolved challenges in long-context scientific comprehension. Together, these findings position GeoCodeBench as a rigorous testbed for advancing from generic coding to trustworthy 3D geometric vision coding.
Abstract:Long video understanding remains challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to limited context windows, which necessitate identifying sparse query-relevant video segments. However, existing methods predominantly localize clues based solely on the query, overlooking the video's intrinsic structure and varying relevance across segments. To address this, we propose VideoDetective, a framework that integrates query-to-segment relevance and inter-segment affinity for effective clue hunting in long-video question answering. Specifically, we divide a video into various segments and represent them as a visual-temporal affinity graph built from visual similarity and temporal proximity. We then perform a Hypothesis-Verification-Refinement loop to estimate relevance scores of observed segments to the query and propagate them to unseen segments, yielding a global relevance distribution that guides the localization of the most critical segments for final answering with sparse observation. Experiments show our method consistently achieves substantial gains across a wide range of mainstream MLLMs on representative benchmarks, with accuracy improvements of up to 7.5% on VideoMME-long. Our code is available at https://videodetective.github.io/
Abstract:Multi-attribution learning (MAL), which enhances model performance by learning from conversion labels yielded by multiple attribution mechanisms, has emerged as a promising learning paradigm for conversion rate (CVR) prediction. However, the conversion labels in public CVR datasets are generated by a single attribution mechanism, hindering the development of MAL approaches. To address this data gap, we establish the Multi-Attribution Benchmark (MAC), the first public CVR dataset featuring labels from multiple attribution mechanisms. Besides, to promote reproducible research on MAL, we develop PyMAL, an open-source library covering a wide array of baseline methods. We conduct comprehensive experimental analyses on MAC and reveal three key insights: (1) MAL brings consistent performance gains across different attribution settings, especially for users featuring long conversion paths. (2) The performance growth scales up with objective complexity in most settings; however, when predicting first-click conversion targets, simply adding auxiliary objectives is counterproductive, underscoring the necessity of careful selection of auxiliary objectives. (3) Two architectural design principles are paramount: first, to fully learn the multi-attribution knowledge, and second, to fully leverage this knowledge to serve the main task. Motivated by these findings, we propose Mixture of Asymmetric Experts (MoAE), an effective MAL approach incorporating multi-attribution knowledge learning and main task-centric knowledge utilization. Experiments on MAC show that MoAE substantially surpasses the existing state-of-the-art MAL method. We believe that our benchmark and insights will foster future research in the MAL field. Our MAC benchmark and the PyMAL algorithm library are publicly available at https://github.com/alimama-tech/PyMAL.
Abstract:The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has expanded their capabilities from basic dialogue to advanced scientific reasoning. However, existing benchmarks in biology often fail to assess a critical skill required of researchers: the ability to integrate experimental results with contextual knowledge to derive meaningful conclusions. To address this gap, we introduce BABE(Biology Arena BEnchmark), a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the experimental reasoning capabilities of biological AI systems. BABE is uniquely constructed from peer-reviewed research papers and real-world biological studies, ensuring that tasks reflect the complexity and interdisciplinary nature of actual scientific inquiry. BABE challenges models to perform causal reasoning and cross-scale inference. Our benchmark provides a robust framework for assessing how well AI systems can reason like practicing scientists, offering a more authentic measure of their potential to contribute to biological research.
Abstract:Vision-Language Action (VLA) models significantly advance robotic manipulation by leveraging the strong perception capabilities of pretrained vision-language models (VLMs). By integrating action modules into these pretrained models, VLA methods exhibit improved generalization. However, training them from scratch is costly. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective distillation-based framework that equips VLMs with action-execution capability by transferring knowledge from pretrained small action models. Our architecture retains the original VLM structure, adding only an action token and a state encoder to incorporate physical inputs. To distill action knowledge, we adopt a two-stage training strategy. First, we perform lightweight alignment by mapping VLM hidden states into the action space of the small action model, enabling effective reuse of its pretrained action decoder and avoiding expensive pretraining. Second, we selectively fine-tune the language model, state encoder, and action modules, enabling the system to integrate multimodal inputs with precise action generation. Specifically, the action token provides the VLM with a direct handle for predicting future actions, while the state encoder allows the model to incorporate robot dynamics not captured by vision alone. This design yields substantial efficiency gains over training large VLA models from scratch. Compared with previous state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves 97.3% average success rate on LIBERO (11.8% improvement) and 93.5% on LIBERO-LONG (24.5% improvement). In real-world experiments across five manipulation tasks, our method consistently outperforms the teacher model, achieving 82.0% success rate (17% improvement), which demonstrate that action distillation effectively enables VLMs to generate precise actions while substantially reducing training costs.