DECEPTICON: How Dark Patterns Manipulate Web Agents

Deceptive UI designs, widely instantiated across the web and commonly known as dark patterns, manipulate users into performing actions misaligned with their goals. In this paper, we show that dark patterns are highly effective in steering agent trajectories, posing a significant risk to agent robustness. To quantify this risk, we introduce DECEPTICON, an environment for testing individual dark patterns in isolation. DECEPTICON includes 700 web navigation tasks with dark patterns -- 600 generated tasks and 100 real-world tasks, designed to measure instruction-following success and dark pattern effectiveness. Across state-of-the-art agents, we find dark patterns successfully steer agent trajectories towards malicious outcomes in over 70% of tested generated and real-world tasks -- compared to a human average of 31%. Moreover, we find that dark pattern effectiveness correlates positively with model size and test-time reasoning, making larger, more capable models more susceptible. Leading countermeasures against adversarial attacks, including in-context prompting and guardrail models, fail to consistently reduce the success rate of dark pattern interventions. Our findings reveal dark patterns as a latent and unmitigated risk to web agents, highlighting the urgent need for robust defenses against manipulative designs.

Perplexity-Aware Data Scaling Law: Perplexity Landscapes Predict Performance for Continual Pre-training

Continual Pre-training (CPT) serves as a fundamental approach for adapting foundation models to domain-specific applications. Scaling laws for pre-training define a power-law relationship between dataset size and the test loss of an LLM. However, the marginal gains from simply increasing data for CPT diminish rapidly, yielding suboptimal data utilization and inefficient training. To address this challenge, we propose a novel perplexity-aware data scaling law to establish a predictive relationship between the perplexity landscape of domain-specific data and the test loss. Our approach leverages the perplexity derived from the pre-trained model on domain data as a proxy for estimating the knowledge gap, effectively quantifying the informational perplexity landscape of candidate training samples. By fitting this scaling law across diverse perplexity regimes, we enable adaptive selection of high-utility data subsets, prioritizing content that maximizes knowledge absorption while minimizing redundancy and noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently identifies near-optimal training subsets and achieves superior performance on both medical and general-domain benchmarks.

Transductive Visual Programming: Evolving Tool Libraries from Experience for Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning in 3D scenes requires precise geometric calculations that challenge vision-language models. Visual programming addresses this by decomposing problems into steps calling specialized tools, yet existing methods rely on either fixed toolsets or speculative tool induction before solving problems, resulting in suboptimal programs and poor utilization of induced tools. We present Transductive Visual Programming (TVP), a novel framework that builds new tools from its own experience rather than speculation. TVP first solves problems using basic tools while accumulating experiential solutions into an Example Library, then abstracts recurring patterns from these programs into reusable higher-level tools for an evolving Tool Library. This allows TVP to tackle new problems with increasingly powerful tools learned from experience. On Omni3D-Bench, TVP achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming GPT-4o by 22% and the previous best visual programming system by 11%. Our transductively learned tools are used 5x more frequently as core program dependency than inductively created ones, demonstrating more effective tool discovery and reuse. The evolved tools also show strong generalization to unseen spatial tasks, achieving superior performance on benchmarks from SpatialScore-Hard collection without any testset-specific modification. Our work establishes experience-driven transductive tool creation as a powerful paradigm for building self-evolving visual programming agents that effectively tackle challenging spatial reasoning tasks. We release our code at https://transductive-visualprogram.github.io/.

DeX-Portrait: Disentangled and Expressive Portrait Animation via Explicit and Latent Motion Representations

Portrait animation from a single source image and a driving video is a long-standing problem. Recent approaches tend to adopt diffusion-based image/video generation models for realistic and expressive animation. However, none of these diffusion models realizes high-fidelity disentangled control between the head pose and facial expression, hindering applications like expression-only or pose-only editing and animation. To address this, we propose DeX-Portrait, a novel approach capable of generating expressive portrait animation driven by disentangled pose and expression signals. Specifically, we represent the pose as an explicit global transformation and the expression as an implicit latent code. First, we design a powerful motion trainer to learn both pose and expression encoders for extracting precise and decomposed driving signals. Then we propose to inject the pose transformation into the diffusion model through a dual-branch conditioning mechanism, and the expression latent through cross attention. Finally, we design a progressive hybrid classifier-free guidance for more faithful identity consistency. Experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both animation quality and disentangled controllability.

RcAE: Recursive Reconstruction Framework for Unsupervised Industrial Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised industrial anomaly detection requires accurately identifying defects without labeled data. Traditional autoencoder-based methods often struggle with incomplete anomaly suppression and loss of fine details, as their single-pass decoding fails to effectively handle anomalies with varying severity and scale. We propose a recursive architecture for autoencoder (RcAE), which performs reconstruction iteratively to progressively suppress anomalies while refining normal structures. Unlike traditional single-pass models, this recursive design naturally produces a sequence of reconstructions, progressively exposing suppressed abnormal patterns. To leverage this reconstruction dynamics, we introduce a Cross Recursion Detection (CRD) module that tracks inconsistencies across recursion steps, enhancing detection of both subtle and large-scale anomalies. Additionally, we incorporate a Detail Preservation Network (DPN) to recover high-frequency textures typically lost during reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing non-diffusion methods, and achieves performance on par with recent diffusion models with only 10% of their parameters and offering substantially faster inference. These results highlight the practicality and efficiency of our approach for real-world applications.

Split-Layer: Enhancing Implicit Neural Representation by Maximizing the Dimensionality of Feature Space

Implicit neural representation (INR) models signals as continuous functions using neural networks, offering efficient and differentiable optimization for inverse problems across diverse disciplines. However, the representational capacity of INR defined by the range of functions the neural network can characterize, is inherently limited by the low-dimensional feature space in conventional multilayer perceptron (MLP) architectures. While widening the MLP can linearly increase feature space dimensionality, it also leads to a quadratic growth in computational and memory costs. To address this limitation, we propose the split-layer, a novel reformulation of MLP construction. The split-layer divides each layer into multiple parallel branches and integrates their outputs via Hadamard product, effectively constructing a high-degree polynomial space. This approach significantly enhances INR's representational capacity by expanding the feature space dimensionality without incurring prohibitive computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the split-layer substantially improves INR performance, surpassing existing methods across multiple tasks, including 2D image fitting, 2D CT reconstruction, 3D shape representation, and 5D novel view synthesis.

Hierarchical Direction Perception via Atomic Dot-Product Operators for Rotation-Invariant Point Clouds Learning

Point cloud processing has become a cornerstone technology in many 3D vision tasks. However, arbitrary rotations introduce variations in point cloud orientations, posing a long-standing challenge for effective representation learning. The core of this issue is the disruption of the point cloud's intrinsic directional characteristics caused by rotational perturbations. Recent methods attempt to implicitly model rotational equivariance and invariance, preserving directional information and propagating it into deep semantic spaces. Yet, they often fall short of fully exploiting the multiscale directional nature of point clouds to enhance feature representations. To address this, we propose the Direction-Perceptive Vector Network (DiPVNet). At its core is an atomic dot-product operator that simultaneously encodes directional selectivity and rotation invariance--endowing the network with both rotational symmetry modeling and adaptive directional perception. At the local level, we introduce a Learnable Local Dot-Product (L2DP) Operator, which enables interactions between a center point and its neighbors to adaptively capture the non-uniform local structures of point clouds. At the global level, we leverage generalized harmonic analysis to prove that the dot-product between point clouds and spherical sampling vectors is equivalent to a direction-aware spherical Fourier transform (DASFT). This leads to the construction of a global directional response spectrum for modeling holistic directional structures. We rigorously prove the rotation invariance of both operators. Extensive experiments on challenging scenarios involving noise and large-angle rotations demonstrate that DiPVNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on point cloud classification and segmentation tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/wxszreal0/DiPVNet.

Pressure2Motion: Hierarchical Motion Synthesis from Ground Pressure with Text Guidance

We present Pressure2Motion, a novel motion capture algorithm that synthesizes human motion from a ground pressure sequence and text prompt. It eliminates the need for specialized lighting setups, cameras, or wearable devices, making it suitable for privacy-preserving, low-light, and low-cost motion capture scenarios. Such a task is severely ill-posed due to the indeterminate nature of the pressure signals to full-body motion. To address this issue, we introduce Pressure2Motion, a generative model that leverages pressure features as input and utilizes a text prompt as a high-level guiding constraint. Specifically, our model utilizes a dual-level feature extractor that accurately interprets pressure data, followed by a hierarchical diffusion model that discerns broad-scale movement trajectories and subtle posture adjustments. Both the physical cues gained from the pressure sequence and the semantic guidance derived from descriptive texts are leveraged to guide the motion generation with precision. To the best of our knowledge, Pressure2Motion is a pioneering work in leveraging both pressure data and linguistic priors for motion generation, and the established MPL benchmark is the first benchmark for this task. Experiments show our method generates high-fidelity, physically plausible motions, establishing a new state-of-the-art for this task. The codes and benchmarks will be publicly released upon publication.

Real-Time Reasoning Agents in Evolving Environments

Agents in the real world must make not only logical but also timely judgments. This requires continuous awareness of the dynamic environment: hazards emerge, opportunities arise, and other agents act, while the agent's reasoning is still unfolding. Despite advances in language model reasoning, existing approaches fail to account for this dynamic nature. We introduce real-time reasoning as a new problem formulation for agents in evolving environments and build Real-Time Reasoning Gym to demonstrate it. We study two paradigms for deploying language models in agents: (1) reactive agents, which employ language models with bounded reasoning computation for rapid responses, and (2) planning agents, which allow extended reasoning computation for complex problems. Our experiments show that even state-of-the-art models struggle with making logical and timely judgments in either paradigm. To address this limitation, we propose AgileThinker, which simultaneously engages both reasoning paradigms. AgileThinker consistently outperforms agents engaging only one reasoning paradigm as the task difficulty and time pressure rise, effectively balancing reasoning depth and response latency. Our work establishes real-time reasoning as a critical testbed for developing practical agents and provides a foundation for research in temporally constrained AI systems, highlighting a path toward real-time capable agents.

Fitting Reinforcement Learning Model to Behavioral Data under Bandits

We consider the problem of fitting a reinforcement learning (RL) model to some given behavioral data under a multi-armed bandit environment. These models have received much attention in recent years for characterizing human and animal decision making behavior. We provide a generic mathematical optimization problem formulation for the fitting problem of a wide range of RL models that appear frequently in scientific research applications, followed by a detailed theoretical analysis of its convexity properties. Based on the theoretical results, we introduce a novel solution method for the fitting problem of RL models based on convex relaxation and optimization. Our method is then evaluated in several simulated bandit environments to compare with some benchmark methods that appear in the literature. Numerical results indicate that our method achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art, while significantly reducing computation time. We also provide an open-source Python package for our proposed method to empower researchers to apply it in the analysis of their datasets directly, without prior knowledge of convex optimization.