Abstract:Earth observation (EO) agents construct scientifically valid tool workflows and ground their conclusions in current geospatial evidence. This is challenging because EO workflows are constrained by sensing semantics, product dependencies, spatial and temporal compatibility, and parameter requirements. Existing agents often search a broad operation space for each query, while recent self-evolving systems do not fully organize heterogeneous EO trajectories into reusable knowledge across different decision levels. To solve this problem, we present GeoForge, a training-free, self-evolving framework that transforms completed trajectories into a structured nonparametric execution state. GeoForge constrains the operation space according to the sensing context, then retrieves a task-conditioned prior from three complementary memories. Workflow Graph Memory captures global operation order, Action-Level Experiences provide local corrections, and the Adapted Skill Standard Operating Procedure preserves procedural and data constraints. The retrieved prior guides tool execution, while current observations remain the basis of the final answer. After each task, a safety-gated distillation process converts grounded trajectories into reusable execution knowledge for future retrieval. This execution, distillation, and reuse loop improves planning without updating the backbone LLM. Experiments on multiple geospatial benchmarks demonstrate that GeoForge consistently improves both task accuracy and tool-use trajectory quality across diverse LLM backbones, while substantially reducing tool-planning and reasoning errors for most LLMs.
Abstract:Metaphor enables the understanding of abstract concepts through cross-domain mappings while conveying affective attitudes. In multimodal scenarios, visual and textual information jointly construct Target--Source mappings, requiring both conceptual understanding and cross-modal reasoning. However, existing benchmarks mainly evaluate metaphor understanding through isolated subtasks and lack evidence-grounded explanations, making it difficult to assess whether models establish mappings grounded in visual and textual cues.To address these limitations, we introduce M$^3$R-Bench, a unified and evidence-grounded benchmark containing 1,000 image--text instances with human-verified annotations. Guided by Conceptual Metaphor Theory and theories of nonliteral language understanding, M$^3$R-Bench provides joint annotations for metaphor occurrence, Target--Source mapping, sentiment, and stage-wise explanations following ``evidence identification--mapping establishment--sentiment inference.''Evaluations on M$^3$R-Bench reveal that existing models often overlook visual evidence, rely on superficial textual cues, and produce inaccurate Target--Source mappings, exposing a cross-modal evidence--mapping mismatch. To address this mismatch, we propose M$^3$R-Reasoner, which combines curriculum-based reasoning supervision with task-aware reinforcement learning to align model reasoning with metaphor interpretation. Experiments show that, with only an 8B-parameter backbone, M$^3$R-Reasoner outperforms larger proprietary MLLMs across four unified-task metrics and improves Visual Evidence and Sentiment Justification scores over GPT-5.5 by 28.45 and 30.11 points, respectively, while surpassing Claude-Sonnet-4.6 by 8.00 points in mean rubric score. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/hongshi4/M3R-Bench.
Abstract:Long-video understanding requires models to efficiently acquire and reuse sparse visual evidence from long and redundant video streams. Recent video tool-use agents address this challenge by iteratively invoking visual Tools at different temporal scales, but their Tool-Planner communication typically relies on textual observations. Such text-only interfaces provide lossy summaries of Tool computations, causing previously computed visual evidence not verbalized to be discarded and unavailable for subsequent planning. We identify this limitation as the Tool observation bottleneck and propose Latent Visual Evidence-Enhanced Planning (LAVE), a training-free framework for reusing latent visual evidence from completed Tool calls. LAVE introduces a dual-channel observation interface: the visible channel preserves the original textual trajectory, while the latent channel stores pre-verbal visual updates with their Tool roles, source-frame timestamps, and visual locations. During planning, LAVE retrieves evidence relevant to the current Planner state but not covered by textual observations, and integrates it through bounded timestamp-aligned latent updates with entropy-constrained frame-time routing. This enables video agents to reuse existing visual computation without additional training, frame replay, or modifications to the original orchestration. Extensive experiments on Video-MME, LongVideoBench, and CG-Bench show that LAVE consistently improves video tool-use agents across backbones. Under a comparable frame budget, LAVE improves the Video-MME overall score by 3.76 points over the strongest baseline, demonstrating the effectiveness of latent visual evidence reuse for multi-step video-agent planning.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on isolated psychiatric tasks, including dialogue, diagnosis, and treatment planning, yet existing benchmarks rarely simulate complete psychiatric clinical encounters. We introduce $\textbf{MentalHospital}$, a virtual evaluation environment for LLM-based psychiatric clinical encounters. MentalHospital instantiates the Subjective Interviewing, Objective Examination, Diagnostic Assessment, and Treatment Planning (S.O.A.P.) workflow, using skill-augmented standardized patients constructed from 1,193 de-identified psychiatric electronic health record (EHR) cases spanning all major ICD-11 categories and 76 disorders. Each encounter is assessed through a dual-track protocol that combines objective comparison against EHR-derived references with subjective assessment of clinical process quality. To scale specialist judgment, we develop $\textbf{MentalEval}$, five domain-specific evaluators covering communication empathy, interviewing professionalism, clinical-note quality, diagnostic rigor, and treatment appropriateness, trained with rubric-grounded SFT and expert-guided DPO. Survey responses from 22 clinicians support MentalHospital's clinical fidelity (3.88/5), while MentalEval achieves strong expert alignment with an average QWK of 0.944. Benchmarking shows that even the strongest LLM trails clinicians by 37.28 percentage points in objective psychiatric competence, with mental status assessment as a key bottleneck.
Abstract:Knowledge editing aims to efficiently update factual information in Large Language Models (LLMs) without full retraining. However, existing methods still suffer from performance degradation in batch knowledge editing. We identify that semantic representation entanglement, such as overlapping concepts and shared syntactic patterns, accumulates interference in the representation space and reduces editing precision. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose Orthogonal Representation Editing (ORE), which performs edits in the hidden representation space of LLMs by constructing a general semantic subspace and enforcing orthogonal constraints on edit vectors, effectively decoupling semantic entanglement. Furthermore, we introduce a gated non-linear representation head to enable adaptive learning of editing locations and precise control over knowledge injection. Extensive experiments show that ORE outperforms existing methods and achieves superior performance in cross-lingual knowledge editing scenarios. We release our code at https://github.com/YVVH/ORE.
Abstract:Diagnosing pulmonary diseases requires integrating heterogeneous evidence amid phenotypic variability and cross-disease overlap. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown progress on pulmonary knowledge question answering (QA) and information-processing tasks, reliable pulmonary diagnosis requires patient-specific, relation-aware reasoning over electronic medical record (EMR) evidence rather than isolated knowledge recall. We define this gap between pulmonary knowledge and case-level diagnostic reasoning as the Pulmonary Knowledge-to-Diagnosis Gap. To address it, we introduce LungKG, the first structured pulmonary knowledge graph for diagnostic knowledge organization and record-grounded reasoning. LungKG contains 59,038 nodes and 164,308 edges across 15 entity types and 112 relation types, serving as both a reusable pulmonary knowledge resource and the foundation for LungKG-guided model adaptation. Built on LungKG, we propose Lung-R1, a LungKG-guided pulmonary LLM trained through KG-constrained reasoning-chain construction and KG-guided reinforcement learning. In a 20-system evaluation, Lung-R1-14B achieves state-of-the-art performance across Choice, Pulmonary-QA, and EMR Diagnosis, reaching an EMR Diagnosis score of 4.3583 and surpassing the strongest non-Lung-R1 baseline by 0.1476 points. These results demonstrate the value of LungKG-guided training for EMR-based pulmonary diagnosis.
Abstract:Video understanding requires active evidence seeking, motivating tool-augmented video agents for temporal reasoning, cross-modal understanding, and complex question answering. Existing video agents have improved video reasoning with retrieval, memory, frame inspection, and verifier tools, but they still face two limitations: (1) a coarse tool space that lacks fine-grained operations for compositional reasoning; and (2) a flat action space that forces high-level video intents into primitive executable tool calls. In this paper, we address these challenges with two complementary designs. First, we construct a MetaAug-Video Tool Library (MVTL), an extensible tool library with 134 registered tools, including 26 base tools for general multimodal signal processing and 108 meta tools for filtering, aggregation, reranking, formatting, and other intermediate-result operations. MVTL supports dual-level access to both structured video information and raw modal evidence, enabling diverse video reasoning scenarios. Second, we propose ReTool-Video, a recursive tool-using method that grounds high-level video intents into executable tool chains. In ReTool-Video, matched actions are executed directly, while unmatched intents are delegated to a resolver for parameter repair, tool substitution, or decomposition. This allows abstract actions such as temporal merging, cross-modal verification, or repeated-event aggregation to be progressively translated into concrete multimodal operations at runtime. Experiments on MVBench, MLVU, and Video-MME w/o sub. show that ReTool-Video consistently outperforms strong baselines. Further analysis demonstrates that recursive grounding and fine-grained meta tools improve the stability and effectiveness of complex video understanding.
Abstract:Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are gaining increasing attention. Due to the heterogeneity of their input features, they face significant challenges in terms of jailbreak defenses. Current defense methods rely on costly fine-tuning or inefficient post-hoc interventions, limiting their ability to address novel attacks and involving performance trade-offs. To address the above issues, we explore the inherent safety capabilities within MLLMs and quantify their intrinsic ability to discern harmfulness at decoding stage. We observe that 1) MLLMs can distinguish the harmful and harmless inputs during decoding process, 2) Image-based attacks are more stealthy. Based on these insights, we introduce SafeSteer, a decoding-level defense mechanism for MLLMs. Specifically, it includes a Decoding-Probe, a lightweight probe for detecting and correcting harmful output during decoding, which iteratively steers the decoding process toward safety. Furthermore, a modal semantic alignment vector is integrated to transfer the strong textual safety alignment to the vision modality. Experiments on multiple MLLMs demonstrate that SafeSterr can improve MLLMs' safety by up to 33.40\% without fine-tuning. Notably, it can maintain the effectiveness of MLLMs, ensuring a balance between their helpfulness and harmlessness.
Abstract:Mental health disorders represent a burgeoning global public health challenge. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in psychiatric assessment, their clinical utility is severely constrained by benchmarks that lack ecological validity and fine-grained diagnostic supervision. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{MentalDx Bench}, the first benchmark dedicated to disorder-level psychiatric diagnosis within real-world clinical settings. Comprising 712 de-identified electronic health records annotated by board-certified psychiatrists under ICD-11 guidelines, the benchmark covers 76 disorders across 16 diagnostic categories. Evaluation of 18 LLMs reveals a critical \textit{paradigm misalignment}: strong performance at coarse diagnostic categorization contrasts with systematic failure at disorder-level diagnosis, underscoring a gap between pattern-based modeling and clinical hypothetico-deductive reasoning. In response, we propose \textbf{MentalSeek-Dx}, a medical-specialized LLM trained to internalize this clinical reasoning process through supervised trajectory construction and curriculum-based reinforcement learning. Experiments on MentalDx Bench demonstrate that MentalSeek-Dx achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with only 14B parameters, establishing a clinically grounded framework for reliable psychiatric diagnosis.
Abstract:Large Language Model (LLM)-based mobile agents have made significant performance advancements. However, these agents often follow explicit user instructions while overlooking personalized needs, leading to significant limitations for real users, particularly without personalized context: (1) inability to interpret ambiguous instructions, (2) lack of learning from user interaction history, and (3) failure to handle personalized instructions. To alleviate the above challenges, we propose Me-Agent, a learnable and memorable personalized mobile agent. Specifically, Me-Agent incorporates a two-level user habit learning approach. At the prompt level, we design a user preference learning strategy enhanced with a Personal Reward Model to improve personalization performance. At the memory level, we design a Hierarchical Preference Memory, which stores users' long-term memory and app-specific memory in different level memory. To validate the personalization capabilities of mobile agents, we introduce User FingerTip, a new benchmark featuring numerous ambiguous instructions for daily life. Extensive experiments on User FingerTip and general benchmarks demonstrate that Me-Agent achieves state-of-the-art performance in personalization while maintaining competitive instruction execution performance.