What You Think is What You See: Driving Exploration in VLM Agents via Visual-Linguistic Curiosity

To navigate partially observable visual environments, recent VLM agents increasingly internalize world modeling capabilities into their policies via explicit CoT reasoning, enabling them to mentally simulate futures before acting. However, relying solely on passive reasoning over visited states is insufficient for sparse-reward tasks, as it lacks the epistemic drive to actively uncover the ``known unknown'' required for robust generalization. We ask: Can VLM agents actively find signals that challenge and refine their internal world model through curiosity-driven exploration? In this work, we propose GLANCE, a unified framework that bridges reasoning and exploration by grounding the agent's linguistic world model into the stable visual representations of an evolving target network. Crucially, GLANCE leverages the discrepancy between linguistic prediction and visual reality as an intrinsic curiosity signal within reinforcement learning, steering the agent to actively explore areas where its internal model is uncertain. Extensive experiments across a series of agentic tasks show the effectiveness of GLANCE, and demonstrate that aligning ``what the agent thinks'' with ``what the agent sees'' is key to solving complex or sparse agentic tasks.

TTVS: Boosting Self-Exploring Reinforcement Learning via Test-time Variational Synthesis

Despite significant advances in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) driven by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), this paradigm is fundamentally limited in specialized or novel domains where such supervision is prohibitively expensive or unavailable, posing a key challenge for test-time adaptation. While existing test-time methods offer a potential solution, they are constrained by learning from static query sets, risking overfitting to textual patterns. To address this gap, we introduce Test-Time Variational Synthesis (TTVS), a novel framework that enables LRMs to self-evolve by dynamically augmenting the training stream from unlabeled test queries. TTVS comprises two synergistic modules: (1) Online Variational Synthesis, which transforms static test queries into a dynamic stream of diverse, semantically-equivalent variations, enforcing the model to learn underlying problem logic rather than superficial patterns; (2) Test-time Hybrid Exploration, which balances accuracy-driven exploitation with consistency-driven exploration across synthetic variants. Extensive experiments show TTVS yields superior performance across eight model architectures. Notably, using only unlabeled test-time data, TTVS not only surpasses other test-time adaptation methods but also outperforms state-of-the-art supervised RL-based techniques trained on vast, high-quality labeled data.

DiEP: Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts Compression through Differentiable Expert Pruning

Despite the significant breakthrough of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), the increasing scale of these MoE models presents huge memory and storage challenges. Existing MoE pruning methods, which involve reducing parameter size with a uniform sparsity across all layers, often lead to suboptimal outcomes and performance degradation due to varying expert redundancy in different MoE layers. To address this, we propose a non-uniform pruning strategy, dubbed \textbf{Di}fferentiable \textbf{E}xpert \textbf{P}runing (\textbf{DiEP}), which adaptively adjusts pruning rates at the layer level while jointly learning inter-layer importance, effectively capturing the varying redundancy across different MoE layers. By transforming the global discrete search space into a continuous one, our method handles exponentially growing non-uniform expert combinations, enabling adaptive gradient-based pruning. Extensive experiments on five advanced MoE models demonstrate the efficacy of our method across various NLP tasks. Notably, \textbf{DiEP} retains around 92\% of original performance on Mixtral 8$\times$7B with only half the experts, outperforming other pruning methods by up to 7.1\% on the challenging MMLU dataset.

CoRE: Enhancing Metacognition with Label-free Self-evaluation in LRMs

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in domains like mathematics and program synthesis. Despite their strong performance, LRMs often exhibit overthinking -- excessive and redundant reasoning steps that introduce inefficiencies during inference. This phenomenon raises an important question for LRM self-evaluation: How can a model autonomously assess the correctness of its own reasoning trajectory without external labels? To address this, we propose Chain-of-Reasoning Embedding (CoRE), a series of hidden states in latent space to enable label-free self-evaluation on intermediate reasoning steps of LRMs, so as to enhance metacognition abilities for improved reasoning efficiency. By analyzing the geometric properties of the CoRE trajectories, we reveal that redundant reasoning usually presents cyclical fluctuations, which correspond to repetitive and unconscious reflection/exploration. Leveraging this insight, we further introduce a training-free, label-free self-evaluation framework, CoRE-Eval, to detect such patterns and dynamically determine whether to terminate reasoning early. Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks (GSM8K, MATH-500, and AIME) and across model sizes from 7B to 32B demonstrate that CoRE-Eval reduces chain-of-thought length by 13.7% to 33.2% while improving answer accuracy by around 10%, achieving 70.0% accuracy on the challenging AIME benchmark with the 32B model.

Think How to Think: Mitigating Overthinking with Autonomous Difficulty Cognition in Large Reasoning Models

Recent Long Reasoning Models(LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling complex reasoning tasks, but are hindered by excessive overthinking. To explore its essence, our empirical analysis reveals that LRMs are primarily limited to recognizing task properties (i.e., difficulty levels) like humans before solving the problem, leading to a one-size-fits-all reasoning process. Inspired by this, a pressing and natural question emerges: Can we bootstrap such ability to further alleviate the overthinking phenomenon in LRMs? In this paper, we propose Think-How-to-Think (TH2T), a novel two-stage fine-tuning strategy that progressively inspires LRMs' difficulty cognition and redundancy cognition. First, we introduce difficulty-hypnosis in the prefixes of model outputs to intervene in the internal reasoning trajectory. Combined with a heterogeneous short and long reasoning dataset, the trained model enhances its sensitivity to task difficulty, enabling native, differentiated reasoning strategies across various tasks. Second, we further extend redundancy-hypnosis to the internal reasoning process, guiding the model to identify redundant structures within the reasoning steps and generate more concise reasoning outputs. Experiments on 7B/14B/32B models demonstrate that TH2T significantly reduces inference costs (more than 70% on easy tasks and 40% on hard tasks) while maintaining performance stability. The resulting outputs exhibit clear difficulty-aware capabilities and reduced redundancy (e.g., reflection).

SAFEFLOW: A Principled Protocol for Trustworthy and Transactional Autonomous Agent Systems

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled powerful autonomous agents capable of complex reasoning and multi-modal tool use. Despite their growing capabilities, today's agent frameworks remain fragile, lacking principled mechanisms for secure information flow, reliability, and multi-agent coordination. In this work, we introduce SAFEFLOW, a new protocol-level framework for building trustworthy LLM/VLM-based agents. SAFEFLOW enforces fine-grained information flow control (IFC), precisely tracking provenance, integrity, and confidentiality of all the data exchanged between agents, tools, users, and environments. By constraining LLM reasoning to respect these security labels, SAFEFLOW prevents untrusted or adversarial inputs from contaminating high-integrity decisions. To ensure robustness in concurrent multi-agent settings, SAFEFLOW introduces transactional execution, conflict resolution, and secure scheduling over shared state, preserving global consistency across agents. We further introduce mechanisms, including write-ahead logging, rollback, and secure caches, that further enhance resilience against runtime errors and policy violations. To validate the performances, we built SAFEFLOWBENCH, a comprehensive benchmark suite designed to evaluate agent reliability under adversarial, noisy, and concurrent operational conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that agents built with SAFEFLOW maintain impressive task performance and security guarantees even in hostile environments, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art. Together, SAFEFLOW and SAFEFLOWBENCH lay the groundwork for principled, robust, and secure agent ecosystems, advancing the frontier of reliable autonomy.