Explicit Stair Geometry Conditioning for Robust Humanoid Locomotion

Robust humanoid stair climbing remains challenging due to geometric discontinuities, sensitivity to step height variations, and perception uncertainty in real-world environments. Existing learning-based locomotion policies often rely on implicit terrain representations or blind proprioceptive feedback, limiting their ability to generalize across varying stair geometries and to anticipate required gait adjustments. This paper proposes an explicit stair geometry conditioning framework for robust humanoid stair climbing. Instead of encoding terrain as high-dimensional latent features, we extract a compact set of interpretable geometric parameters, including step height, step depth, and current yaw angle relative to the robot heading. These explicit stair parameters directly condition a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)-based locomotion policy, enabling proactive modulation of swing-foot clearance and stride characteristics according to stair structure. Simulation experiments demonstrate improved generalization across unseen stair heights beyond the training distribution. Real-world experiments on the Unitree G1 humanoid validate reliable indoor and outdoor stair traversal. In challenging outdoor scenarios, the robot successfully ascends 33 consecutive steps without failure, demonstrating robustness and practical deployability.

Position: Vector Prompt Interfaces Should Be Exposed to Enable Customization of Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) transition from research prototypes to real-world systems, customization has emerged as a central bottleneck. While text prompts can already customize LLM behavior, we argue that text-only prompting does not constitute a suitable control interface for scalable, stable, and inference-only customization. This position paper argues that model providers should expose \emph{vector prompt inputs} as part of the public interface for customizing LLMs. We support this position with diagnostic evidence showing that vector prompt tuning continues to improve with increasing supervision whereas text-based prompt optimization saturates early, and that vector prompts exhibit dense, global attention patterns indicative of a distinct control mechanism. We further discuss why inference-only customization is increasingly important under realistic deployment constraints, and why exposing vector prompts need not fundamentally increase model leakage risk under a standard black-box threat model. We conclude with a call to action for the community to rethink prompt interfaces as a core component of LLM customization.

AudioCapBench: Quick Evaluation on Audio Captioning across Sound, Music, and Speech

We introduce AudioCapBench, a benchmark for evaluating audio captioning capabilities of large multimodal models. \method covers three distinct audio domains, including environmental sound, music, and speech, with 1,000 curated evaluation samples drawn from established datasets. We evaluate 13 models across two providers (OpenAI, Google Gemini) using both reference-based metrics (METEOR, BLEU, ROUGE-L) and an LLM-as-Judge framework that scores predictions on three orthogonal dimensions: \textit{accuracy} (semantic correctness), \textit{completeness} (coverage of reference content), and \textit{hallucination} (absence of fabricated content). Our results reveal that Gemini models generally outperform OpenAI models on overall captioning quality, with Gemini~3~Pro achieving the highest overall score (6.00/10), while OpenAI models exhibit lower hallucination rates. All models perform best on speech captioning and worst on music captioning. We release the benchmark as well as evaluation code to facilitate reproducible audio understanding research.

Virtual Biopsy for Intracranial Tumors Diagnosis on MRI

Deep intracranial tumors situated in eloquent brain regions controlling vital functions present critical diagnostic challenges. Clinical practice has shifted toward stereotactic biopsy for pathological confirmation before treatment. Yet biopsy carries inherent risks of hemorrhage and neurological deficits and struggles with sampling bias due to tumor spatial heterogeneity, because pathological changes are typically region-selective rather than tumor-wide. Therefore, advancing non-invasive MRI-based pathology prediction is essential for holistic tumor assessment and modern clinical decision-making. The primary challenge lies in data scarcity: low tumor incidence requires long collection cycles, and annotation demands biopsy-verified pathology from neurosurgical experts. Additionally, tiny lesion volumes lacking segmentation masks cause critical features to be overwhelmed by background noise. To address these challenges, we construct the ICT-MRI dataset - the first public biopsy-verified benchmark with 249 cases across four categories. We propose a Virtual Biopsy framework comprising: MRI-Processor for standardization; Tumor-Localizer employing vision-language models for coarse-to-fine localization via weak supervision; and Adaptive-Diagnoser with a Masked Channel Attention mechanism fusing local discriminative features with global contexts. Experiments demonstrate over 90% accuracy, outperforming baselines by more than 20%.

ReBA-Pred-Net: Weakly-Supervised Regional Brain Age Prediction on MRI

Brain age has become a prominent biomarker of brain health. Yet most prior work targets whole brain age (WBA), a coarse paradigm that struggles to support tasks such as disease characterization and research on development and aging patterns, because relevant changes are typically region-selective rather than brain-wide. Therefore, robust regional brain age (ReBA) estimation is critical, yet a widely generalizable model has yet to be established. In this paper, we propose the Regional Brain Age Prediction Network (ReBA-Pred-Net), a Teacher-Student framework designed for fine-grained brain age estimation. The Teacher produces soft ReBA to guide the Student to yield reliable ReBA estimates with a clinical-prior consistency constraint (regions within the same function should change similarly). For rigorous evaluation, we introduce two indirect metrics: Healthy Control Similarity (HCS), which assesses statistical consistency by testing whether regional brain-age-gap (ReBA minus chronological age) distributions align between training and unseen HC; and Neuro Disease Correlation (NDC), which assesses factual consistency by checking whether clinically confirmed patients show elevated brain-age-gap in disease-associated regions. Experiments across multiple backbones demonstrate the statistical and factual validity of our method.

LoCoBench-Agent: An Interactive Benchmark for LLM Agents in Long-Context Software Engineering

As large language models (LLMs) evolve into sophisticated autonomous agents capable of complex software development tasks, evaluating their real-world capabilities becomes critical. While existing benchmarks like LoCoBench~\cite{qiu2025locobench} assess long-context code understanding, they focus on single-turn evaluation and cannot capture the multi-turn interactive nature, tool usage patterns, and adaptive reasoning required by real-world coding agents. We introduce \textbf{LoCoBench-Agent}, a comprehensive evaluation framework specifically designed to assess LLM agents in realistic, long-context software engineering workflows. Our framework extends LoCoBench's 8,000 scenarios into interactive agent environments, enabling systematic evaluation of multi-turn conversations, tool usage efficiency, error recovery, and architectural consistency across extended development sessions. We also introduce an evaluation methodology with 9 metrics across comprehension and efficiency dimensions. Our framework provides agents with 8 specialized tools (file operations, search, code analysis) and evaluates them across context lengths ranging from 10K to 1M tokens, enabling precise assessment of long-context performance. Through systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art models, we reveal several key findings: (1) agents exhibit remarkable long-context robustness; (2) comprehension-efficiency trade-off exists with negative correlation, where thorough exploration increases comprehension but reduces efficiency; and (3) conversation efficiency varies dramatically across models, with strategic tool usage patterns differentiating high-performing agents. As the first long-context LLM agent benchmark for software engineering, LoCoBench-Agent establishes a rigorous foundation for measuring agent capabilities, identifying performance gaps, and advancing autonomous software development at scale.

TripleFDS: Triple Feature Disentanglement and Synthesis for Scene Text Editing

Scene Text Editing (STE) aims to naturally modify text in images while preserving visual consistency, the decisive factors of which can be divided into three parts, i.e., text style, text content, and background. Previous methods have struggled with incomplete disentanglement of editable attributes, typically addressing only one aspect - such as editing text content - thus limiting controllability and visual consistency. To overcome these limitations, we propose TripleFDS, a novel framework for STE with disentangled modular attributes, and an accompanying dataset called SCB Synthesis. SCB Synthesis provides robust training data for triple feature disentanglement by utilizing the "SCB Group", a novel construct that combines three attributes per image to generate diverse, disentangled training groups. Leveraging this construct as a basic training unit, TripleFDS first disentangles triple features, ensuring semantic accuracy through inter-group contrastive regularization and reducing redundancy through intra-sample multi-feature orthogonality. In the synthesis phase, TripleFDS performs feature remapping to prevent "shortcut" phenomena during reconstruction and mitigate potential feature leakage. Trained on 125,000 SCB Groups, TripleFDS achieves state-of-the-art image fidelity (SSIM of 44.54) and text accuracy (ACC of 93.58%) on the mainstream STE benchmarks. Besides superior performance, the more flexible editing of TripleFDS supports new operations such as style replacement and background transfer. Code: https://github.com/yusenbao01/TripleFDS

GeoGNN: Quantifying and Mitigating Semantic Drift in Text-Attributed Graphs

Graph neural networks (GNNs) on text--attributed graphs (TAGs) typically encode node texts using pretrained language models (PLMs) and propagate these embeddings through linear neighborhood aggregation. However, the representation spaces of modern PLMs are highly non--linear and geometrically structured, where textual embeddings reside on curved semantic manifolds rather than flat Euclidean spaces. Linear aggregation on such manifolds inevitably distorts geometry and causes semantic drift--a phenomenon where aggregated representations deviate from the intrinsic manifold, losing semantic fidelity and expressive power. To quantitatively investigate this problem, this work introduces a local PCA--based metric that measures the degree of semantic drift and provides the first quantitative framework to analyze how different aggregation mechanisms affect manifold structure. Building upon these insights, we propose Geodesic Aggregation, a manifold--aware mechanism that aggregates neighbor information along geodesics via log--exp mappings on the unit sphere, ensuring that representations remain faithful to the semantic manifold during message passing. We further develop GeoGNN, a practical instantiation that integrates spherical attention with manifold interpolation. Extensive experiments across four benchmark datasets and multiple text encoders show that GeoGNN substantially mitigates semantic drift and consistently outperforms strong baselines, establishing the importance of manifold--aware aggregation in text--attributed graph learning.

Grounded Test-Time Adaptation for LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM)-based agents struggle to generalize to novel and complex environments, such as unseen websites or new sets of functions, due to a fundamental mismatch between their pre-training and test-time conditions. This challenge stems from two distinct failure modes: a syntactic misunderstanding of environment-specific components like observation formats, and a semantic misunderstanding of state-transition dynamics, which are only revealed at test time. To address these issues, we propose two distinct and complementary strategies for adapting LLM agents by leveraging environment-specific information available during deployment. First, an online distributional adaptation method parameterizes environmental nuances by learning a lightweight adaptation vector that biases the model's output distribution, enabling rapid alignment with an environment response format. Second, a deployment-time dynamics grounding method employs a persona-driven exploration phase to systematically probe and learn the environment's causal dynamics before task execution, equipping the agent with a nonparametric world model. We evaluate these strategies across diverse agentic benchmarks, including function calling and web navigation. Our empirical results show the effectiveness of both strategies across all benchmarks with minimal computational cost. We find that dynamics grounding is particularly effective in complex environments where unpredictable dynamics pose a major obstacle, demonstrating a robust path toward more generalizable and capable LLM-based agents. For example, on the WebArena multi-site split, this method increases the agent's success rate from 2% to 23%.

ToolLibGen: Scalable Automatic Tool Creation and Aggregation for LLM Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) equipped with external tools have demonstrated enhanced performance on complex reasoning tasks. The widespread adoption of this tool-augmented reasoning is hindered by the scarcity of domain-specific tools. For instance, in domains such as physics question answering, suitable and specialized tools are often missing. Recent work has explored automating tool creation by extracting reusable functions from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning traces; however, these approaches face a critical scalability bottleneck. As the number of generated tools grows, storing them in an unstructured collection leads to significant retrieval challenges, including an expanding search space and ambiguity between function-related tools. To address this, we propose a systematic approach to automatically refactor an unstructured collection of tools into a structured tool library. Our system first generates discrete, task-specific tools and clusters them into semantically coherent topics. Within each cluster, we introduce a multi-agent framework to consolidate scattered functionalities: a code agent refactors code to extract shared logic and creates versatile, aggregated tools, while a reviewing agent ensures that these aggregated tools maintain the complete functional capabilities of the original set. This process transforms numerous question-specific tools into a smaller set of powerful, aggregated tools without loss of functionality. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves tool retrieval accuracy and overall reasoning performance across multiple reasoning tasks. Furthermore, our method shows enhanced scalability compared with baselines as the number of question-specific increases.