PuzzleWorld: A Benchmark for Multimodal, Open-Ended Reasoning in Puzzlehunts

Puzzlehunts are a genre of complex, multi-step puzzles lacking well-defined problem definitions. In contrast to conventional reasoning benchmarks consisting of tasks with clear instructions, puzzlehunts require models to discover the underlying problem structure from multimodal evidence and iterative reasoning, mirroring real-world domains such as scientific discovery, exploratory data analysis, or investigative problem-solving. Despite recent progress in foundation models, their performance on such open-ended settings remains largely untested. In this paper, we introduce PuzzleWorld, a large-scale benchmark of 667 puzzlehunt-style problems designed to assess step-by-step, open-ended, and creative multimodal reasoning. Each puzzle is annotated with the final solution, detailed reasoning traces, and cognitive skill labels, enabling holistic benchmarking and fine-grained diagnostic analysis. Most state-of-the-art models achieve only 1-2% final answer accuracy, with the best model solving only 14% of puzzles and reaching 40% stepwise accuracy. To demonstrate the value of our reasoning annotations, we show that fine-tuning a small model on reasoning traces improves stepwise reasoning from 4% to 11%, while training on final answers alone degrades performance to near zero. Our error analysis reveals that current models exhibit myopic reasoning, are bottlenecked by the limitations of language-based inference, and lack sketching capabilities crucial for visual and spatial reasoning. We release PuzzleWorld at https://github.com/MIT-MI/PuzzleWorld to support future work on building more general, open-ended, and creative reasoning systems.

Deriving Strategic Market Insights with Large Language Models: A Benchmark for Forward Counterfactual Generation

Counterfactual reasoning typically involves considering alternatives to actual events. While often applied to understand past events, a distinct form-forward counterfactual reasoning-focuses on anticipating plausible future developments. This type of reasoning is invaluable in dynamic financial markets, where anticipating market developments can powerfully unveil potential risks and opportunities for stakeholders, guiding their decision-making. However, performing this at scale is challenging due to the cognitive demands involved, underscoring the need for automated solutions. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promise, but remain unexplored for this application. To address this gap, we introduce a novel benchmark, Fin-Force-FINancial FORward Counterfactual Evaluation. By curating financial news headlines and providing structured evaluation, Fin-Force supports LLM based forward counterfactual generation. This paves the way for scalable and automated solutions for exploring and anticipating future market developments, thereby providing structured insights for decision-making. Through experiments on Fin-Force, we evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs and counterfactual generation methods, analyzing their limitations and proposing insights for future research.

REGen: Multimodal Retrieval-Embedded Generation for Long-to-Short Video Editing

Short videos are an effective tool for promoting contents and improving knowledge accessibility. While existing extractive video summarization methods struggle to produce a coherent narrative, existing abstractive methods cannot `quote' from the input videos, i.e., inserting short video clips in their outputs. In this work, we explore novel video editing models for generating shorts that feature a coherent narrative with embedded video insertions extracted from a long input video. We propose a novel retrieval-embedded generation framework that allows a large language model to quote multimodal resources while maintaining a coherent narrative. Our proposed REGen system first generates the output story script with quote placeholders using a finetuned large language model, and then uses a novel retrieval model to replace the quote placeholders by selecting a video clip that best supports the narrative from a pool of candidate quotable video clips. We examine the proposed method on the task of documentary teaser generation, where short interview insertions are commonly used to support the narrative of a documentary. Our objective evaluations show that the proposed method can effectively insert short video clips while maintaining a coherent narrative. In a subjective survey, we show that our proposed method outperforms existing abstractive and extractive approaches in terms of coherence, alignment, and realism in teaser generation.

RAVENEA: A Benchmark for Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Visual Culture Understanding

As vision-language models (VLMs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, the need for accurate visual culture understanding is becoming critical. Yet, these models frequently fall short in interpreting cultural nuances effectively. Prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in enhancing cultural understanding in text-only settings, while its application in multimodal scenarios remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce RAVENEA (Retrieval-Augmented Visual culturE uNdErstAnding), a new benchmark designed to advance visual culture understanding through retrieval, focusing on two tasks: culture-focused visual question answering (cVQA) and culture-informed image captioning (cIC). RAVENEA extends existing datasets by integrating over 10,000 Wikipedia documents curated and ranked by human annotators. With RAVENEA, we train and evaluate seven multimodal retrievers for each image query, and measure the downstream impact of retrieval-augmented inputs across fourteen state-of-the-art VLMs. Our results show that lightweight VLMs, when augmented with culture-aware retrieval, outperform their non-augmented counterparts (by at least 3.2% absolute on cVQA and 6.2% absolute on cIC). This highlights the value of retrieval-augmented methods and culturally inclusive benchmarks for multimodal understanding.

POET: Supporting Prompting Creativity and Personalization with Automated Expansion of Text-to-Image Generation

State-of-the-art visual generative AI tools hold immense potential to assist users in the early ideation stages of creative tasks -- offering the ability to generate (rather than search for) novel and unprecedented (instead of existing) images of considerable quality that also adhere to boundless combinations of user specifications. However, many large-scale text-to-image systems are designed for broad applicability, yielding conventional output that may limit creative exploration. They also employ interaction methods that may be difficult for beginners. Given that creative end users often operate in diverse, context-specific ways that are often unpredictable, more variation and personalization are necessary. We introduce POET, a real-time interactive tool that (1) automatically discovers dimensions of homogeneity in text-to-image generative models, (2) expands these dimensions to diversify the output space of generated images, and (3) learns from user feedback to personalize expansions. An evaluation with 28 users spanning four creative task domains demonstrated POET's ability to generate results with higher perceived diversity and help users reach satisfaction in fewer prompts during creative tasks, thereby prompting them to deliberate and reflect more on a wider range of possible produced results during the co-creative process. Focusing on visual creativity, POET offers a first glimpse of how interaction techniques of future text-to-image generation tools may support and align with more pluralistic values and the needs of end users during the ideation stages of their work.

TAMP: Token-Adaptive Layerwise Pruning in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable versatility in understanding diverse multimodal data and tasks. However, these capabilities come with an increased model scale. While post-training pruning reduces model size in unimodal models, its application to MLLMs often yields limited success. Our analysis discovers that conventional methods fail to account for the unique token attributes across layers and modalities inherent to MLLMs. Inspired by this observation, we propose TAMP, a simple yet effective pruning framework tailored for MLLMs, featuring two key components: (1) Diversity-Aware Sparsity, which adjusts sparsity ratio per layer based on diversities among multimodal output tokens, preserving more parameters in high-diversity layers; and (2) Adaptive Multimodal Input Activation, which identifies representative multimodal input tokens using attention scores to guide unstructured weight pruning. We validate our method on two state-of-the-art MLLMs: LLaVA-NeXT, designed for vision-language tasks, and VideoLLaMA2, capable of processing audio, visual, and language modalities. Empirical experiments across various multimodal evaluation benchmarks demonstrate that each component of our approach substantially outperforms existing pruning techniques.

Alice: Proactive Learning with Teacher's Demonstrations for Weak-to-Strong Generalization

The growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) present a key challenge of maintaining effective human oversight. Weak-to-strong generalization (W2SG) offers a promising framework for supervising increasingly capable LLMs using weaker ones. Traditional W2SG methods rely on passive learning, where a weak teacher provides noisy demonstrations to train a strong student. This hinders students from employing their knowledge during training and reaching their full potential. In this work, we introduce Alice (pro{A}ctive {l}earning w{i}th tea{c}her's D{e}monstrations), a framework that leverages complementary knowledge between teacher and student to enhance the learning process.We probe the knowledge base of the teacher model by eliciting their uncertainty, and then use these insights together with teachers' responses as demonstrations to guide student models in self-generating improved responses for supervision. In addition, for situations with significant capability gaps between teacher and student models, we introduce cascade Alice, which employs a hierarchical training approach where weak teachers initially supervise intermediate models, who then guide stronger models in sequence. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the W2SG performance, yielding substantial improvements in three key tasks compared to the original W2SG: knowledge-based reasoning (+4.0%), mathematical reasoning (+22.62%), and logical reasoning (+12.11%). This highlights the effectiveness of our new W2SG paradigm that enables more robust knowledge transfer and supervision outcome.

Can A Society of Generative Agents Simulate Human Behavior and Inform Public Health Policy? A Case Study on Vaccine Hesitancy

Can we simulate a sandbox society with generative agents to model human behavior, thereby reducing the over-reliance on real human trials for assessing public policies? In this work, we investigate the feasibility of simulating health-related decision-making, using vaccine hesitancy, defined as the delay in acceptance or refusal of vaccines despite the availability of vaccination services (MacDonald, 2015), as a case study. To this end, we introduce the VacSim framework with 100 generative agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). VacSim simulates vaccine policy outcomes with the following steps: 1) instantiate a population of agents with demographics based on census data; 2) connect the agents via a social network and model vaccine attitudes as a function of social dynamics and disease-related information; 3) design and evaluate various public health interventions aimed at mitigating vaccine hesitancy. To align with real-world results, we also introduce simulation warmup and attitude modulation to adjust agents' attitudes. We propose a series of evaluations to assess the reliability of various LLM simulations. Experiments indicate that models like Llama and Qwen can simulate aspects of human behavior but also highlight real-world alignment challenges, such as inconsistent responses with demographic profiles. This early exploration of LLM-driven simulations is not meant to serve as definitive policy guidance; instead, it serves as a call for action to examine social simulation for policy development.

Data Foundations for Large Scale Multimodal Clinical Foundation Models

Recent advances in clinical AI have enabled remarkable progress across many clinical domains. However, existing benchmarks and models are primarily limited to a small set of modalities and tasks, which hinders the development of large-scale multimodal methods that can make holistic assessments of patient health and well-being. To bridge this gap, we introduce Clinical Large-Scale Integrative Multimodal Benchmark (CLIMB), a comprehensive clinical benchmark unifying diverse clinical data across imaging, language, temporal, and graph modalities. CLIMB comprises 4.51 million patient samples totaling 19.01 terabytes distributed across 2D imaging, 3D video, time series, graphs, and multimodal data. Through extensive empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that multitask pretraining significantly improves performance on understudied domains, achieving up to 29% improvement in ultrasound and 23% in ECG analysis over single-task learning. Pretraining on CLIMB also effectively improves models' generalization capability to new tasks, and strong unimodal encoder performance translates well to multimodal performance when paired with task-appropriate fusion strategies. Our findings provide a foundation for new architecture designs and pretraining strategies to advance clinical AI research. Code is released at https://github.com/DDVD233/climb.

Language Models' Factuality Depends on the Language of Inquiry

Multilingual language models (LMs) are expected to recall factual knowledge consistently across languages, yet they often fail to transfer knowledge between languages even when they possess the correct information in one of the languages. For example, we find that an LM may correctly identify Rashed Al Shashai as being from Saudi Arabia when asked in Arabic, but consistently fails to do so when asked in English or Swahili. To systematically investigate this limitation, we introduce a benchmark of 10,000 country-related facts across 13 languages and propose three novel metrics: Factual Recall Score, Knowledge Transferability Score, and Cross-Lingual Factual Knowledge Transferability Score-to quantify factual recall and knowledge transferability in LMs across different languages. Our results reveal fundamental weaknesses in today's state-of-the-art LMs, particularly in cross-lingual generalization where models fail to transfer knowledge effectively across different languages, leading to inconsistent performance sensitive to the language used. Our findings emphasize the need for LMs to recognize language-specific factual reliability and leverage the most trustworthy information across languages. We release our benchmark and evaluation framework to drive future research in multilingual knowledge transfer.