Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation in Continuous Environments

Audio-visual navigation enables embodied agents to navigate toward sound-emitting targets by leveraging both auditory and visual cues. However, most existing approaches rely on precomputed room impulse responses (RIRs) for binaural audio rendering, restricting agents to discrete grid positions and leading to spatially discontinuous observations. To establish a more realistic setting, we introduce Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation in Continuous Environments (SAVN-CE), where agents can move freely in 3D spaces and perceive temporally and spatially coherent audio-visual streams. In this setting, targets may intermittently become silent or stop emitting sound entirely, causing agents to lose goal information. To tackle this challenge, we propose MAGNet, a multimodal transformer-based model that jointly encodes spatial and semantic goal representations and integrates historical context with self-motion cues to enable memory-augmented goal reasoning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MAGNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to a 12.1\% absolute improvement in success rate. These results also highlight its robustness to short-duration sounds and long-distance navigation scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/yichenzeng24/SAVN-CE.

VideoTemp-o3: Harmonizing Temporal Grounding and Video Understanding in Agentic Thinking-with-Videos

In long-video understanding, conventional uniform frame sampling often fails to capture key visual evidence, leading to degraded performance and increased hallucinations. To address this, recent agentic thinking-with-videos paradigms have emerged, adopting a localize-clip-answer pipeline in which the model actively identifies relevant video segments, performs dense sampling within those clips, and then produces answers. However, existing methods remain inefficient, suffer from weak localization, and adhere to rigid workflows. To solve these issues, we propose VideoTemp-o3, a unified agentic thinking-with-videos framework that jointly models video grounding and question answering. VideoTemp-o3 exhibits strong localization capability, supports on-demand clipping, and can refine inaccurate localizations. Specifically, in the supervised fine-tuning stage, we design a unified masking mechanism that encourages exploration while preventing noise. For reinforcement learning, we introduce dedicated rewards to mitigate reward hacking. Besides, from the data perspective, we develop an effective pipeline to construct high-quality long video grounded QA data, along with a corresponding benchmark for systematic evaluation across various video durations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves remarkable performance on both long video understanding and grounding.

Deep Temporal Graph Clustering: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Datasets

Temporal Graph Clustering (TGC) is a new task with little attention, focusing on node clustering in temporal graphs. Compared with existing static graph clustering, it can find the balance between time requirement and space requirement (Time-Space Balance) through the interaction sequence-based batch-processing pattern. However, there are two major challenges that hinder the development of TGC, i.e., inapplicable clustering techniques and inapplicable datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a comprehensive benchmark, called BenchTGC. Specially, we design a BenchTGC Framework to illustrate the paradigm of temporal graph clustering and improve existing clustering techniques to fit temporal graphs. In addition, we also discuss problems with public temporal graph datasets and develop multiple datasets suitable for TGC task, called BenchTGC Datasets. According to extensive experiments, we not only verify the advantages of BenchTGC, but also demonstrate the necessity and importance of TGC task. We wish to point out that the dynamically changing and complex scenarios in real world are the foundation of temporal graph clustering. The code and data is available at: https://github.com/MGitHubL/BenchTGC.

Agent-as-a-Judge

LLM-as-a-Judge has revolutionized AI evaluation by leveraging large language models for scalable assessments. However, as evaluands become increasingly complex, specialized, and multi-step, the reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge has become constrained by inherent biases, shallow single-pass reasoning, and the inability to verify assessments against real-world observations. This has catalyzed the transition to Agent-as-a-Judge, where agentic judges employ planning, tool-augmented verification, multi-agent collaboration, and persistent memory to enable more robust, verifiable, and nuanced evaluations. Despite the rapid proliferation of agentic evaluation systems, the field lacks a unified framework to navigate this shifting landscape. To bridge this gap, we present the first comprehensive survey tracing this evolution. Specifically, we identify key dimensions that characterize this paradigm shift and establish a developmental taxonomy. We organize core methodologies and survey applications across general and professional domains. Furthermore, we analyze frontier challenges and identify promising research directions, ultimately providing a clear roadmap for the next generation of agentic evaluation.

When Eyes and Ears Disagree: Can MLLMs Discern Audio-Visual Confusion?

Can Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) discern confused objects that are visually present but audio-absent? To study this, we introduce a new benchmark, AV-ConfuseBench, which simulates an ``Audio-Visual Confusion'' scene by modifying the corresponding sound of an object in the video, e.g., mute the sounding object and ask MLLMs Is there a/an muted-object sound''. Experimental results reveal that MLLMs, such as Qwen2.5-Omni and Gemini 2.5, struggle to discriminate non-existent audio due to visually dominated reasoning. Motivated by this observation, we introduce RL-CoMM, a Reinforcement Learning-based Collaborative Multi-MLLM that is built upon the Qwen2.5-Omni foundation. RL-CoMM includes two stages: 1) To alleviate visually dominated ambiguities, we introduce an external model, a Large Audio Language Model (LALM), as the reference model to generate audio-only reasoning. Then, we design a Step-wise Reasoning Reward function that enables MLLMs to self-improve audio-visual reasoning with the audio-only reference. 2) To ensure an accurate answer prediction, we introduce Answer-centered Confidence Optimization to reduce the uncertainty of potential heterogeneous reasoning differences. Extensive experiments on audio-visual question answering and audio-visual hallucination show that RL-CoMM improves the accuracy by 10~30\% over the baseline model with limited training data. Follow: https://github.com/rikeilong/AVConfusion.

Task-Aware 3D Affordance Segmentation via 2D Guidance and Geometric Refinement

Understanding 3D scene-level affordances from natural language instructions is essential for enabling embodied agents to interact meaningfully in complex environments. However, this task remains challenging due to the need for semantic reasoning and spatial grounding. Existing methods mainly focus on object-level affordances or merely lift 2D predictions to 3D, neglecting rich geometric structure information in point clouds and incurring high computational costs. To address these limitations, we introduce Task-Aware 3D Scene-level Affordance segmentation (TASA), a novel geometry-optimized framework that jointly leverages 2D semantic cues and 3D geometric reasoning in a coarse-to-fine manner. To improve the affordance detection efficiency, TASA features a task-aware 2D affordance detection module to identify manipulable points from language and visual inputs, guiding the selection of task-relevant views. To fully exploit 3D geometric information, a 3D affordance refinement module is proposed to integrate 2D semantic priors with local 3D geometry, resulting in accurate and spatially coherent 3D affordance masks. Experiments on SceneFun3D demonstrate that TASA significantly outperforms the baselines in both accuracy and efficiency in scene-level affordance segmentation.

Decoding the Ear: A Framework for Objectifying Expressiveness from Human Preference Through Efficient Alignment

Recent speech-to-speech (S2S) models generate intelligible speech but still lack natural expressiveness, largely due to the absence of a reliable evaluation metric. Existing approaches, such as subjective MOS ratings, low-level acoustic features, and emotion recognition are costly, limited, or incomplete. To address this, we present DeEAR (Decoding the Expressive Preference of eAR), a framework that converts human preference for speech expressiveness into an objective score. Grounded in phonetics and psychology, DeEAR evaluates speech across three dimensions: Emotion, Prosody, and Spontaneity, achieving strong alignment with human perception (Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient, SRCC = 0.86) using fewer than 500 annotated samples. Beyond reliable scoring, DeEAR enables fair benchmarking and targeted data curation. It not only distinguishes expressiveness gaps across S2S models but also selects 14K expressive utterances to form ExpressiveSpeech, which improves the expressive score (from 2.0 to 23.4 on a 100-point scale) of S2S models. Demos and codes are available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/ExpressiveSpeech

Parallel Test-Time Scaling for Latent Reasoning Models

Parallel test-time scaling (TTS) is a pivotal approach for enhancing large language models (LLMs), typically by sampling multiple token-based chains-of-thought in parallel and aggregating outcomes through voting or search. Recent advances in latent reasoning, where intermediate reasoning unfolds in continuous vector spaces, offer a more efficient alternative to explicit Chain-of-Thought, yet whether such latent models can similarly benefit from parallel TTS remains open, mainly due to the absence of sampling mechanisms in continuous space, and the lack of probabilistic signals for advanced trajectory aggregation. \ This work enables parallel TTS for latent reasoning models by addressing the above issues. For sampling, we introduce two uncertainty-inspired stochastic strategies: Monte Carlo Dropout and Additive Gaussian Noise. For aggregation, we design a Latent Reward Model (LatentRM) trained with step-wise contrastive objective to score and guide latent reasoning. Extensive experiments and visualization analyses show that both sampling strategies scale effectively with compute and exhibit distinct exploration dynamics, while LatentRM enables effective trajectory selection. Together, our explorations open a new direction for scalable inference in continuous spaces. Code released at https://github.com/YRYangang/LatentTTS.

Rethinking Molecule Synthesizability with Chain-of-Reaction

A well-known pitfall of molecular generative models is that they are not guaranteed to generate synthesizable molecules. There have been considerable attempts to address this problem, but given the exponentially large combinatorial space of synthesizable molecules, existing methods have shown limited coverage of the space and poor molecular optimization performance. To tackle these problems, we introduce ReaSyn, a generative framework for synthesizable projection where the model explores the neighborhood of given molecules in the synthesizable space by generating pathways that result in synthesizable analogs. To fully utilize the chemical knowledge contained in the synthetic pathways, we propose a novel perspective that views synthetic pathways akin to reasoning paths in large language models (LLMs). Specifically, inspired by chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in LLMs, we introduce the chain-of-reaction (CoR) notation that explicitly states reactants, reaction types, and intermediate products for each step in a pathway. With the CoR notation, ReaSyn can get dense supervision in every reaction step to explicitly learn chemical reaction rules during supervised training and perform step-by-step reasoning. In addition, to further enhance the reasoning capability of ReaSyn, we propose reinforcement learning (RL)-based finetuning and goal-directed test-time compute scaling tailored for synthesizable projection. ReaSyn achieves the highest reconstruction rate and pathway diversity in synthesizable molecule reconstruction and the highest optimization performance in synthesizable goal-directed molecular optimization, and significantly outperforms previous synthesizable projection methods in synthesizable hit expansion. These results highlight ReaSyn's superior ability to navigate combinatorially-large synthesizable chemical space.

Convergence of Spectral Principal Paths: How Deep Networks Distill Linear Representations from Noisy Inputs

High-level representations have become a central focus in enhancing AI transparency and control, shifting attention from individual neurons or circuits to structured semantic directions that align with human-interpretable concepts. Motivated by the Linear Representation Hypothesis (LRH), we propose the Input-Space Linearity Hypothesis (ISLH), which posits that concept-aligned directions originate in the input space and are selectively amplified with increasing depth. We then introduce the Spectral Principal Path (SPP) framework, which formalizes how deep networks progressively distill linear representations along a small set of dominant spectral directions. Building on this framework, we further demonstrate the multimodal robustness of these representations in Vision-Language Models (VLMs). By bridging theoretical insights with empirical validation, this work advances a structured theory of representation formation in deep networks, paving the way for improving AI robustness, fairness, and transparency.