Dynamic Spectral Denoising with Global-Context Attention for Multi-Behavior Recommendation

Multi-behavior recommendation improves target-behavior prediction by exploiting heterogeneous auxiliary feedback (e.g., view, collect, and cart), yet its robustness is undermined by behavior-dependent noise and inconsistency. We argue that the key bottleneck is a representation-level failure caused by two coupled heterogeneities. First, intra-behavior representation entanglement arises when multi-hop propagation blends incidental signals with true preferences in the embedding space, making coarse spatial denoising unable to suppress noise without sacrificing informative niche signals. Second, inter-behavior reliability heterogeneity complicates cross-behavior fusion because the predictive value of auxiliary behaviors varies across users and contexts. Without reliability calibration, frequent yet unreliable signals may dominate aggregation and cause target-intent drift. To address this bottleneck, we propose Dynamic Spectral Denoising with Global-Context Attention for Multi-Behavior Recommendation (SpectraMB), a target-oriented model that performs representation purification before reliability-aware fusion. SpectraMB introduces Dynamic Feature-Level Spectral Filtering, which re-parameterizes embeddings along the feature dimension into a feature-frequency space and learns view-adaptive spectral modulation under target supervision, enabling component-wise purification without hand-crafted frequency assumptions. It further proposes Global-Context Attention Fusion, which uses a purified global representation as a context anchor to assess view compatibility and perform reliability-aware aggregation, while a residual global backbone preserves collaborative structure. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that SpectraMB achieves the best results in most evaluation settings and exhibits improved robustness under noisy interactions.

FineVerify: Scaling Test-Time Compute with Fine-Grained Self-Verification for Agentic Search

Agentic search requires language model agents to explore many sources and answer complex information-seeking questions. Scaling test-time compute is a promising way to improve these agents, but current approaches can fail, because correct answers are often sparse and score-based selection depends on model calibration. We propose FineVerify, a fine-grained self-verification framework that decomposes each question into checkable sub-questions, verifies sampled candidates against each sub-question, and selects the candidate with the highest aggregated score. This per-check structure turns selection into simpler local judgments and produces scores under the same explicit criteria. Across four agentic search benchmarks and two models, FineVerify consistently outperforms standard scaling baselines. With only four sampled trajectories, it improves GPT-5-mini by 8.2 accuracy points and Gemini-3-flash by 5.6% on average. With 12 samples, FineVerify enables GPT-5-mini to surpass frontier GPT-5 on BrowseComp-Plus. Beyond accuracy, FineVerify produces interpretable verification traces that help audit benchmark errors, suggesting broader applications for inspecting agentic search systems. Code and data are available at https://github.com/XuZhao0/fineverify

De-attribute to Forget for LLM Unlearning

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns on the use of inappropriate data for training, which has led to a growing interest in LLM unlearning. Many existing LLM unlearning approaches rely on optimizing prediction loss(es), such as maximizing the loss on the forget set, but often face critical issues like over-forgetting and poor model utility. To address them, this paper novelly frames the optimization objective for LLM unlearning as one of zeroing out data attribution instead. In particular, we propose the first LLM unlearning framework based on data attribution rewards called DareU that performs reinforcement learning to update the LLM by reducing the attribution score of its generated responses (i.e., de-attributing) to the forget data owners. Empirical evaluation using an LLM classifier as an efficient approximation of attribution shows that DareU outperforms existing baselines by achieving effective unlearning while balancing forget quality and model utility well.

Mixture-of-Experts Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multi-Agent LLM-based Recommendation

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been adopted for recommendations due to their ability to understand user intent and item semantics. However, LLM-based recommender systems often rely on parametric knowledge and suffer from outdated knowledge, motivating knowledge graph retrieval-augmented generation (KG-RAG) to ground recommendations on structured, up-to-date KGs. Despite this promise, effective KG-RAG in recommendations faces great challenges. First, users' queries vary in complexity and require KG knowledge at different granularities, whereas existing methods adopt a one-size-fits-all retrieval strategy, leading to over-retrieval for simple queries and under-retrieval for complex ones. In addition, augmenting LLMs with KG knowledge requires translating graph-structured data into linear text, which may introduce noise and cause structural information loss. Moreover, the selection of retrieval granularity lacks direct supervision and must be inferred from the final recommendation after alignment and downstream utilization, making query-aware retrieval hard to learn end-to-end. To address these issues, we propose MixRAGRec, a cooperative multi-agent framework for KG-RAG recommendations. MixRAGRec integrates a Mixture-of-Experts Retrieval Agent that routes each query to a KG retrieval expert with different granularities, a Knowledge Preference Alignment Agent that converts structured knowledge into LLM-friendly natural language, and a Contrastive Learning-reinforced Recommendation Agent trained with contrastive preference feedback. Notably, we introduce Mixture-of-Experts Multi-Agent Policy Optimization (MMAPO) to train three agents under a unified objective. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

When In-Distribution Gains Fail: Evaluating Weak-to-Strong Reward Models under Preference Shift

Weak-to-strong (W2S) generalization is a promising framework for scalable oversight, yet existing evaluations often test students under matched train-test distributions. Therefore, we study W2S preference learning under zero-shot distribution shift and find that strong students trained on weak preference labels can appear successful in-distribution while failing to transfer across preference datasets. We provide evidence for a representational failure mode in which weak-supervised fine-tuning can pull the strong model toward source-domain features instead of maintaining broadly transferable preference representations. To mitigate this, we propose Representation Anchoring (Anchor), a simple yet effective regularizer that constrains excessive drift from the pretrained strong model's representation space during fine-tuning, while still allowing task-relevant adaptation. Across preference domains, datasets, and model families, Anchor consistently improves out-of-distribution transfer while maintaining competitive in-distribution performance. Together, our evaluation protocol, transfer-aware metrics, and method expose hidden brittleness in current W2S reward modeling and provide a practical path toward more robust preference transfer.

Empowering VLMs for Few-Shot Multimodal Time Series Classification via Tailored Agentic Reasoning

In this paper, we propose the first VL$\underline{\textbf{M}}$ $\underline{\textbf{a}}$gentic $\underline{\textbf{r}}$easoning framework for few-$\underline{\textbf{s}}$hot multimodal $\underline{\textbf{T}}$ime $\underline{\textbf{S}}$eries $\underline{\textbf{C}}$lassification ($\textbf{MarsTSC}$), which introduces a self-evolving knowledge bank as a dynamic context iteratively refined via reflective agentic reasoning. The framework comprises three collaborative roles: i) Generator conducts reliable classification via reasoning; ii) Reflector diagnoses the root causes of reasoning errors to yield discriminative insights targeting the temporal features overlooked by Generator; iii) Modifier applies verified updates to the knowledge bank to prevent context collapse. We further introduce a test-time update strategy to enable cautious, continuous knowledge bank refinement to mitigate few-shot bias and distribution shift. Extensive experiments across 12 mainstream time series benchmarks demonstrate that $\textbf{MarsTSC}$ delivers substantial and consistent performance gains across 6 VLM backbones, outperforming both classical and foundation model-based time series baselines under few-shot conditions, while producing interpretable rationales that ground each classification decision in human-readable feature evidence.

Perception Without Engagement: Dissecting the Causal Discovery Deficit in LMMs

Although Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved strong performance on general video understanding, their susceptibility to textual prior shortcuts during causal discovery has been recognized as a critical deficit. The underlying mechanisms of this phenomenon remain incompletely understood, as existing benchmarks only measure response accuracy without revealing the sources and extent of the deficit. We introduce ProCauEval, a perturbation-based evaluation protocol that shifts from outcome assessment to mechanism diagnosis, probing causal discovery through five controlled configurations that systematically manipulate visual and textual modalities to decompose their respective contributions to model behavior and dissect the failure modes. Evaluating 17 mainstream LMMs, we find that models faithfully perceive video content yet systematically underexploit it during causal reasoning. We further observe that stronger post-training amplifies rather than mitigates textual prior reliance, and that higher baseline performance correlates with greater fragility under perturbation. To address these, we propose Anti-Distillation Policy Optimization (ADPO), a reinforcement learning framework built on negative teacher alignment, which augments GRPO by explicitly pushing the policy away from a prior-only counterfactual teacher induced by visual corruption. Specifically, ADPO maximizes the divergence between the policy distributions conditioned on the original and visually corrupted inputs, thereby forcing the model to ground its reasoning in visual evidence rather than textual shortcuts. Extensive experiments show that ADPO improves visual engagement without sacrificing fundamental comprehension, thus offering a preliminary step toward reliable causal discovery.

Eulerian Motion Guidance: Robust Image Animation via Bidirectional Geometric Consistency

Recent advancements in image animation have utilized diffusion models to breathe life into static images. However, existing controllable frameworks typically rely on Lagrangian motion guidance, where optical flow is estimated relative to the initial frame. This paper revisits the same optical-flow primitive through a more local supervision design: we use adjacent-frame Eulerian motion fields to guide generation, where the motion signal always describes a short temporal hop. This shift enables parallelized training and provides bounded-error supervision throughout the generation process. To mitigate the drift artifacts common in adjacent frame generation, we introduce a Bidirectional Geometric Consistency mechanism, which computes a forward-backward cycle check to mathematically identify and mask occluded regions, preventing the model from learning incorrect warping objectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach accelerates training, preserves temporal coherence, and reduces dynamic artifacts compared to reference-based baselines.

Agentic World Modeling: Foundations, Capabilities, Laws, and Beyond

As AI systems move from generating text to accomplishing goals through sustained interaction, the ability to model environment dynamics becomes a central bottleneck. Agents that manipulate objects, navigate software, coordinate with others, or design experiments require predictive environment models, yet the term world model carries different meanings across research communities. We introduce a "levels x laws" taxonomy organized along two axes. The first defines three capability levels: L1 Predictor, which learns one-step local transition operators; L2 Simulator, which composes them into multi-step, action-conditioned rollouts that respect domain laws; and L3 Evolver, which autonomously revises its own model when predictions fail against new evidence. The second identifies four governing-law regimes: physical, digital, social, and scientific. These regimes determine what constraints a world model must satisfy and where it is most likely to fail. Using this framework, we synthesize over 400 works and summarize more than 100 representative systems spanning model-based reinforcement learning, video generation, web and GUI agents, multi-agent social simulation, and AI-driven scientific discovery. We analyze methods, failure modes, and evaluation practices across level-regime pairs, propose decision-centric evaluation principles and a minimal reproducible evaluation package, and outline architectural guidance, open problems, and governance challenges. The resulting roadmap connects previously isolated communities and charts a path from passive next-step prediction toward world models that can simulate, and ultimately reshape, the environments in which agents operate.

Beyond Prompt: Fine-grained Simulation of Cognitively Impaired Standardized Patients via Stochastic Steering

Simulating Standardized Patients with cognitive impairment offers a scalable and ethical solution for clinical training. However, existing methods rely on discrete prompt engineering and fail to capture the heterogeneity of deficits across varying domains and severity levels. To address this limitation, we propose StsPatient for the fine-grained simulation of cognitively impaired patients. We innovatively capture domain-specific features by extracting steering vectors from contrastive pairs of instructions and responses. Furthermore, we introduce a Stochastic Token Modulation (STM) mechanism to regulate the intervention probability. STM enables precise control over impairment severity while mitigating the instability of conventional vector methods. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that StsPatient significantly outperforms baselines in both clinical authenticity and severity controllability.