Mind the Gap: Learning Implicit Impedance in Visuomotor Policies via Intent-Execution Mismatch

Teleoperation inherently relies on the human operator acting as a closed-loop controller to actively compensate for hardware imperfections, including latency, mechanical friction, and lack of explicit force feedback. Standard Behavior Cloning (BC), by mimicking the robot's executed trajectory, fundamentally ignores this compensatory mechanism. In this work, we propose a Dual-State Conditioning framework that shifts the learning objective to "Intent Cloning" (master command). We posit that the Intent-Execution Mismatch, the discrepancy between master command and slave response, is not noise, but a critical signal that physically encodes implicit interaction forces and algorithmically reveals the operator's strategy for overcoming system dynamics. By predicting the master intent, our policy learns to generate a "virtual equilibrium point", effectively realizing implicit impedance control. Furthermore, by explicitly conditioning on the history of this mismatch, the model performs implicit system identification, perceiving tracking errors as external forces to close the control loop. To bridge the temporal gap caused by inference latency, we further formulate the policy as a trajectory inpainter to ensure continuous control. We validate our approach on a sensorless, low-cost bi-manual setup. Empirical results across tasks requiring contact-rich manipulation and dynamic tracking reveal a decisive gap: while standard execution-cloning fails due to the inability to overcome contact stiffness and tracking lag, our mismatch-aware approach achieves robust success. This presents a minimalist behavior cloning framework for low-cost hardware, enabling force perception and dynamic compensation without relying on explicit force sensing. Videos are available on the \href{https://xucj98.github.io/mind-the-gap-page/}{project page}.

Geospatial-Reasoning-Driven Vocabulary-Agnostic Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation has emerged as a promising research direction in remote sensing, enabling the recognition of diverse land-cover types beyond pre-defined category sets. However, existing methods predominantly rely on the passive mapping of visual features and textual embeddings. This ``appearance-based" paradigm lacks geospatial contextual awareness, leading to severe semantic ambiguity and misclassification when encountering land-cover classes with similar spectral features but distinct semantic attributes. To address this, we propose a Geospatial Reasoning Chain-of-Thought (GR-CoT) framework designed to enhance the scene understanding capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), thereby guiding open-vocabulary segmentation models toward precise mapping. The framework comprises two collaborative components: an offline knowledge distillation stream and an online instance reasoning stream. The offline stream establishes fine-grained category interpretation standards to resolve semantic conflicts between similar land-cover types. During online inference, the framework executes a sequential reasoning process involving macro-scenario anchoring, visual feature decoupling, and knowledge-driven decision synthesis. This process generates an image-adaptive vocabulary that guides downstream models to achieve pixel-level alignment with correct geographical semantics. Extensive experiments on the LoveDA and GID5 benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our approach.

Process-of-Thought Reasoning for Videos

Video understanding requires not only recognizing visual content but also performing temporally grounded, multi-step reasoning over long and noisy observations. We propose Process-of-Thought (PoT) Reasoning for Videos, a framework that makes the reasoning process explicit by structuring video inference into a sequence of lightweight, verifiable steps. PoT interleaves (i) temporal evidence selection, (ii) step-wise state updates, and (iii) constrained answer synthesis, enabling the model to progressively refine hypotheses while maintaining traceability to video evidence. The framework is designed to be model-agnostic and can be plugged into existing vision-language backbones, supporting both closed-book reasoning and evidence-augmented reasoning with external tools. We further introduce a unified representation for PoT traces that aligns intermediate decisions with temporal segments, which improves robustness to distractors and reduces hallucinated explanations. Extensive experiments on standard video reasoning tasks demonstrate that PoT consistently improves factual correctness and temporal grounding, while providing interpretable reasoning traces for diagnosis and downstream use.

MarkovScale: Towards Optimal Sequential Scaling at Inference Time

Sequential scaling is a prominent inference-time scaling paradigm, yet its performance improvements are typically modest and not well understood, largely due to the prevalence of heuristic, non-principled approaches that obscure clear optimality bounds. To address this, we propose a principled framework that models sequential scaling as a two-state Markov process. This approach reveals the underlying properties of sequential scaling and yields closed-form solutions for essential aspects, such as the specific conditions under which accuracy is improved and the theoretical upper, neutral, and lower performance bounds. Leveraging this formulation, we develop MarkovScale, a practical system that applies these optimality criteria to achieve a theoretically grounded balance between accuracy and efficiency. Comprehensive experiments across 3 backbone LLMs, 5 benchmarks, and over 20 configurations show that MarkovScale consistently outperforms state-of-the-art parallel and sequential scaling methods, representing a significant step toward optimal and resource-efficient inference in LLMs. The source code will be open upon acceptance at https://open-upon-acceptance.

AMGFormer: Adaptive Multi-Granular Transformer for Brain Tumor Segmentation with Missing Modalities

Multimodal MRI is essential for brain tumor segmentation, yet missing modalities in clinical practice cause existing methods to exhibit >40% performance variance across modality combinations, rendering them clinically unreliable. We propose AMGFormer, achieving significantly improved stability through three synergistic modules: (1) QuadIntegrator Bridge (QIB) enabling spatially adaptive fusion maintaining consistent predictions regardless of available modalities, (2) Multi-Granular Attention Orchestrator (MGAO) focusing on pathological regions to reduce background sensitivity, and (3) Modality Quality-Aware Enhancement (MQAE) preventing error propagation from corrupted sequences. On BraTS 2018, our method achieves 89.33% WT, 82.70% TC, 67.23% ET Dice scores with <0.5% variance across 15 modality combinations, solving the stability crisis. Single-modality ET segmentation shows 40-81% relative improvements over state-of-the-art methods. The method generalizes to BraTS 2020/2021, achieving up to 92.44% WT, 89.91% TC, 84.57% ET. The model demonstrates potential for clinical deployment with 1.2s inference. Code: https://github.com/guochengxiangives/AMGFormer.

Why Keep Your Doubts to Yourself? Trading Visual Uncertainties in Multi-Agent Bandit Systems

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable powerful multi-agent systems, but scaling them is economically unsustainable: coordinating heterogeneous agents under information asymmetry often spirals costs. Existing paradigms, such as Mixture-of-Agents and knowledge-based routers, rely on heuristic proxies that ignore costs and collapse uncertainty structure, leading to provably suboptimal coordination. We introduce Agora, a framework that reframes coordination as a decentralized market for uncertainty. Agora formalizes epistemic uncertainty into a structured, tradable asset (perceptual, semantic, inferential), and enforces profitability-driven trading among agents based on rational economic rules. A market-aware broker, extending Thompson Sampling, initiates collaboration and guides the system toward cost-efficient equilibria. Experiments on five multimodal benchmarks (MMMU, MMBench, MathVision, InfoVQA, CC-OCR) show that Agora outperforms strong VLMs and heuristic multi-agent strategies, e.g., achieving +8.5% accuracy over the best baseline on MMMU while reducing cost by over 3x. These results establish market-based coordination as a principled and scalable paradigm for building economically viable multi-agent visual intelligence systems.

S$^2$GR: Stepwise Semantic-Guided Reasoning in Latent Space for Generative Recommendation

Generative Recommendation (GR) has emerged as a transformative paradigm with its end-to-end generation advantages. However, existing GR methods primarily focus on direct Semantic ID (SID) generation from interaction sequences, failing to activate deeper reasoning capabilities analogous to those in large language models and thus limiting performance potential. We identify two critical limitations in current reasoning-enhanced GR approaches: (1) Strict sequential separation between reasoning and generation steps creates imbalanced computational focus across hierarchical SID codes, degrading quality for SID codes; (2) Generated reasoning vectors lack interpretable semantics, while reasoning paths suffer from unverifiable supervision. In this paper, we propose stepwise semantic-guided reasoning in latent space (S$^2$GR), a novel reasoning enhanced GR framework. First, we establish a robust semantic foundation via codebook optimization, integrating item co-occurrence relationship to capture behavioral patterns, and load balancing and uniformity objectives that maximize codebook utilization while reinforcing coarse-to-fine semantic hierarchies. Our core innovation introduces the stepwise reasoning mechanism inserting thinking tokens before each SID generation step, where each token explicitly represents coarse-grained semantics supervised via contrastive learning against ground-truth codebook cluster distributions ensuring physically grounded reasoning paths and balanced computational focus across all SID codes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of S$^2$GR, and online A/B test confirms efficacy on large-scale industrial short video platform.

Finding RELIEF: Shaping Reasoning Behavior without Reasoning Supervision via Belief Engineering

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable success in complex problem-solving, yet they often suffer from computational redundancy or reasoning unfaithfulness. Current methods for shaping LRM behavior typically rely on reinforcement learning or fine-tuning with gold-standard reasoning traces, a paradigm that is both computationally expensive and difficult to scale. In this paper, we reveal that LRMs possess latent \textit{reasoning beliefs} that internally track their own reasoning traits, which can be captured through simple logit probing. Building upon this insight, we propose Reasoning Belief Engineering (RELIEF), a simple yet effective framework that shapes LRM behavior by aligning the model's self-concept with a target belief blueprint. Crucially, RELIEF completely bypasses the need for reasoning-trace supervision. It internalizes desired traits by fine-tuning on synthesized, self-reflective question-answering pairs that affirm the target belief. Extensive experiments on efficiency and faithfulness tasks demonstrate that RELIEF matches or outperforms behavior-supervised and preference-based baselines while requiring lower training costs. Further analysis validates that shifting a model's reasoning belief effectively shapes its actual behavior.

MetaToolAgent: Towards Generalizable Tool Usage in LLMs through Meta-Learning

Tool learning is increasingly important for large language models (LLMs) to effectively coordinate and utilize a diverse set of tools in order to solve complex real-world tasks. By selecting and integrating appropriate tools, LLMs extend their capabilities beyond pure language understanding to perform specialized functions. However, existing methods for tool selection often focus on limited tool sets and struggle to generalize to novel tools encountered in practical deployments. To address these challenges, we introduce a comprehensive dataset spanning 7 domains, containing 155 tools and 9,377 question-answer pairs, which simulates realistic integration scenarios. Additionally, we propose MetaToolAgent (MTA), a meta-learning approach designed to improve cross-tool generalization. Experimental results show that MTA significantly outperforms baseline methods on unseen tools, demonstrating its promise for building flexible and scalable systems that require dynamic tool coordination.

To Retrieve or To Think? An Agentic Approach for Context Evolution

Current context augmentation methods, such as retrieval-augmented generation, are essential for solving knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks.However, they typically adhere to a rigid, brute-force strategy that executes retrieval at every step. This indiscriminate approach not only incurs unnecessary computational costs but also degrades performance by saturating the context with irrelevant noise. To address these limitations, we introduce Agentic Context Evolution (ACE), a framework inspired by human metacognition that dynamically determines whether to seek new evidence or reason with existing knowledge. ACE employs a central orchestrator agent to make decisions strategically via majority voting.It aims to alternate between activating a retriever agent for external retrieval and a reasoner agent for internal analysis and refinement. By eliminating redundant retrieval steps, ACE maintains a concise and evolved context. Extensive experiments on challenging multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that ACE significantly outperforms competitive baselines in accuracy while achieving efficient token consumption.Our work provides valuable insights into advancing context-evolved generation for complex, knowledge-intensive tasks.