No Action Without a NOD: A Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Architecture for Reliable Service Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents have increasingly advanced service applications, such as booking flight tickets. However, these service agents suffer from unreliability in long-horizon tasks, as they often produce policy violations, tool hallucinations, and misaligned actions, which greatly impedes their real-world deployment. To address these challenges, we propose NOD (Navigator-Operator-Director), a heterogeneous multi-agent architecture for service agents. Instead of maintaining task state implicitly in dialogue context as in prior work, we externalize a structured Global State to enable explicit task state tracking and consistent decision-making by the Navigator. Besides, we introduce selective external oversight before critical actions, allowing an independent Director agent to verify execution and intervene when necessary. As such, NOD effectively mitigates error propagation and unsafe behavior in long-horizon tasks. Experiments on $τ^2$-Bench demonstrate that NOD achieves higher task success rates and critical action precision over baselines. More importantly, NOD improves the reliability of service agents by reducing policy violations, tool hallucinations, and user-intent misalignment.

Diagnosing CFG Interpretation in LLMs

As LLMs are increasingly integrated into agentic systems, they must adhere to dynamically defined, machine-interpretable interfaces. We evaluate LLMs as in-context interpreters: given a novel context-free grammar, can LLMs generate syntactically valid, behaviorally functional, and semantically faithful outputs? We introduce RoboGrid, a framework that disentangles syntax, behavior, and semantics through controlled stress-tests of recursion depth, expression complexity, and surface styles. Our experiments reveal a consistent hierarchical degradation: LLMs often maintain surface syntax but fail to preserve structural semantics. Despite the partial mitigation provided by CoT reasoning, performance collapses under structural density, specifically deep recursion and high branching, with semantic alignment vanishing at extreme depths. Furthermore, "Alien" lexicons reveal that LLMs rely on semantic bootstrapping from keywords rather than pure symbolic induction. These findings pinpoint critical gaps in hierarchical state-tracking required for reliable, grammar-agnostic agents.

Transcriptomic Models for Immunotherapy Response Prediction Show Limited Cross-cohort Generalisability

Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have transformed cancer therapy; yet substantial proportion of patients exhibit intrinsic or acquired resistance, making accurate pre-treatment response prediction a critical unmet need. Transcriptomics-based biomarkers derived from bulk and single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) offer a promising avenue for capturing tumour-immune interactions, yet the cross-cohort generalisability of existing prediction models remains unclear.We systematically benchmark nine state-of-the-art transcriptomic ICI response predictors, five bulk RNA-seq-based models (COMPASS, IRNet, NetBio, IKCScore, and TNBC-ICI) and four scRNA-seq-based models (PRECISE, DeepGeneX, Tres and scCURE), using publicly available independent datasets unseen during model development. Overall, predictive performance was modest: bulk RNA-seq models performed at or near chance level across most cohorts, while scRNA-seq models showed only marginal improvements. Pathway-level analyses revealed sparse and inconsistent biomarker signals across models. Although scRNA-seq-based predictors converged on immune-related programs such as allograft rejection, bulk RNA-seq-based models exhibited little reproducible overlap. PRECISE and NetBio identified the most coherent immune-related themes, whereas IRNet predominantly captured metabolic pathways weakly aligned with ICI biology. Together, these findings demonstrate the limited cross-cohort robustness and biological consistency of current transcriptomic ICI prediction models, underscoring the need for improved domain adaptation, standardised preprocessing, and biologically grounded model design.

CharTool: Tool-Integrated Visual Reasoning for Chart Understanding

Charts are ubiquitous in scientific and financial literature for presenting structured data. However, chart reasoning remains challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to the lack of high-quality training data, as well as the need for fine-grained visual grounding and precise numerical computation. To address these challenges, we first propose DuoChart, a scalable dual-source data pipeline that combines synthesized charts with real-world charts to construct diverse, high-quality chart training data. We then introduce CharTool, which equips MLLMs with external tools, including image cropping for localized visual perception and code-based computation for accurate numerical reasoning. Through agentic reinforcement learning on DuoChart, CharTool learns tool-integrated reasoning grounded in chart content. Extensive experiments on six chart benchmarks show that our method consistently improves over strong MLLM baselines across model scales. Notably, CharTool-7B outperforms the base model by **+8.0%** on CharXiv (Reasoning) and **+9.78%** on ChartQAPro, while achieving competitive performance with substantially larger or proprietary models. Moreover, CharTool demonstrates positive generalization to out-of-domain visual math reasoning benchmarks.

GUIDE: Resolving Domain Bias in GUI Agents through Real-Time Web Video Retrieval and Plug-and-Play Annotation

Large vision-language models have endowed GUI agents with strong general capabilities for interface understanding and interaction. However, due to insufficient exposure to domain-specific software operation data during training, these agents exhibit significant domain bias - they lack familiarity with the specific operation workflows (planning) and UI element layouts (grounding) of particular applications, limiting their real-world task performance. In this paper, we present GUIDE (GUI Unbiasing via Instructional-Video Driven Expertise), a training-free, plug-and-play framework that resolves GUI agent domain bias by autonomously acquiring domain-specific expertise from web tutorial videos through a retrieval-augmented automated annotation pipeline. GUIDE introduces two key innovations. First, a subtitle-driven Video-RAG pipeline unlocks video semantics through subtitle analysis, performing progressive three-stage retrieval - domain classification, topic extraction, and relevance matching - to identify task-relevant tutorial videos. Second, a fully automated annotation pipeline built on an inverse dynamics paradigm feeds consecutive keyframes enhanced with UI element detection into VLMs, inferring the required planning and grounding knowledge that are injected into the agent's corresponding modules to address both manifestations of domain bias. Extensive experiments on OSWorld demonstrate GUIDE's generality as a plug-and-play component for both multi-agent systems and single-model agents. It consistently yields over 5% improvements and reduces execution steps - without modifying any model parameters or architecture - validating GUIDE as an architecture-agnostic enhancement to bridge GUI agent domain bias.

FEAT: A Linear-Complexity Foundation Model for Extremely Large Structured Data

Structured data is foundational to healthcare, finance, e-commerce, and scientific data management. Large structured-data models (LDMs) extend the foundation model paradigm to unify heterogeneous datasets for tasks such as classification, regression, and decision support. However, existing LDMs face major limitations. First, most rely on sample-wise self-attention, whose O(N^2) complexity limits the sample count. Second, linear sequence models often degrade representations due to hidden-state compression and artificial causal bias. Third, synthetic-only pre-training often fails to match real-world distributions. We propose FEAT, a linear-complexity foundation model for extremely large structured data. FEAT introduces a multi-layer dual-axis architecture that replaces quadratic attention with hybrid linear encoding. The architecture combines adaptive-fusion bi-Mamba-2 (AFBM) for local sample dependencies and convolutional gated linear attention (Conv-GLA) for global memory. This design enables linear-complexity cross-sample modeling while preserving expressive representations. To improve robustness, FEAT adopts a hybrid structural causal model pipeline and a stable reconstruction objective. Experiments on 11 real-world datasets show that FEAT consistently outperforms baselines in zero-shot performance, while scaling linearly and achieving up to 40x faster inference.

Federated Learning and Unlearning for Recommendation with Personalized Data Sharing

Federated recommender systems (FedRS) have emerged as a paradigm for protecting user privacy by keeping interaction data on local devices while coordinating model training through a central server. However, most existing federated recommender systems adopt a one-size-fits-all assumption on user privacy, where all users are required to keep their data strictly local. This setting overlooks users who are willing to share their data with the server in exchange for better recommendation performance. Although several recent studies have explored personalized user data sharing in FedRS, they assume static user privacy preferences and cannot handle user requests to remove previously shared data and its corresponding influence on the trained model. To address this limitation, we propose FedShare, a federated learn-unlearn framework for recommender systems with personalized user data sharing. FedShare not only allows users to control how much interaction data is shared with the server, but also supports data unsharing requests by removing the influence of the unshared data from the trained model. Specifically, FedShare leverages shared data to construct a server-side high-order user-item graph and uses contrastive learning to jointly align local and global representations. In the unlearning phase, we design a contrastive unlearning mechanism that selectively removes representations induced by the unshared data using a small number of historical embedding snapshots, avoiding the need to store large amounts of historical gradient information as required by existing federated recommendation unlearning methods. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that FedShare achieves strong recommendation performance in both the learning and unlearning phases, while significantly reducing storage overhead in the unlearning phase compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

Replacing Multi-Step Assembly of Data Preparation Pipelines with One-Step LLM Pipeline Generation for Table QA

Table Question Answering (TQA) aims to answer natural language questions over structured tables. Large Language Models (LLMs) enable promising solutions to this problem, with operator-centric solutions that generate table manipulation pipelines in a multi-step manner offering state-of-the-art performance. However, these solutions rely on multiple LLM calls, resulting in prohibitive latencies and computational costs. We propose Operation-R1, the first framework that trains lightweight LLMs (e.g., Qwen-4B/1.7B) via a novel variant of reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards to produce high-quality data-preparation pipelines for TQA in a single inference step. To train such an LLM, we first introduce a self-supervised rewarding mechanism to automatically obtain fine-grained pipeline-wise supervision signals for LLM training. We also propose variance-aware group resampling to mitigate training instability. To further enhance robustness of pipeline generation, we develop two complementary mechanisms: operation merge, which filters spurious operations through multi-candidate consensus, and adaptive rollback, which offers runtime protection against information loss in data transformation. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that, with the same LLM backbone, Operation-R1 achieves average absolute accuracy gains of 9.55 and 6.08 percentage points over multi-step preparation baselines, with 79\% table compression and a 2.2$\times$ reduction in monetary cost.

GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering

We present GLM-5, a next-generation foundation model designed to transition the paradigm of vibe coding to agentic engineering. Building upon the agentic, reasoning, and coding (ARC) capabilities of its predecessor, GLM-5 adopts DSA to significantly reduce training and inference costs while maintaining long-context fidelity. To advance model alignment and autonomy, we implement a new asynchronous reinforcement learning infrastructure that drastically improves post-training efficiency by decoupling generation from training. Furthermore, we propose novel asynchronous agent RL algorithms that further improve RL quality, enabling the model to learn from complex, long-horizon interactions more effectively. Through these innovations, GLM-5 achieves state-of-the-art performance on major open benchmarks. Most critically, GLM-5 demonstrates unprecedented capability in real-world coding tasks, surpassing previous baselines in handling end-to-end software engineering challenges. Code, models, and more information are available at https://github.com/zai-org/GLM-5.

Direction Matters: Learning Force Direction Enables Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Manipulation

Sim-to-real transfer for contact-rich manipulation remains challenging due to the inherent discrepancy in contact dynamics. While existing methods often rely on costly real-world data or utilize blind compliance through fixed controllers, we propose a framework that leverages expert-designed controller logic for transfer. Inspired by the success of privileged supervision in kinematic tasks, we employ a human-designed finite state machine based position/force controller in simulation to provide privileged guidance. The resulting policy is trained to predict the end-effector pose, contact state, and crucially the desired contact force direction. Unlike force magnitudes, which are highly sensitive to simulation inaccuracies, force directions encode high-level task geometry and remain robust across the sim-to-real gap. At deployment, these predictions configure a force-aware admittance controller. By combining the policy's directional intent with a constant, low-cost manually tuned force magnitude, the system generates adaptive, task-aligned compliance. This tuning is lightweight, typically requiring only a single scalar per contact state. We provide theoretical analysis for stability and robustness to disturbances. Experiments on four real-world tasks, i.e., microwave opening, peg-in-hole, whiteboard wiping, and door opening, demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines in both success rate and robustness. Videos are available at: https://yifei-y.github.io/project-pages/DirectionMatters/.