Thinking Traps in Long Chain-of-Thought: A Measurable Study and Trap-Aware Adaptive Restart

Scaling test-time compute via Long Chain-of-Thought (Long-CoT) significantly enhances reasoning capabilities, yet extended generation does not guarantee correctness: after an early wrong commitment, models may keep elaborating a self-consistent but incorrect prefix. Through fine-grained trajectory analysis, we identify Thinking Traps, prefix-dominant deadlocks where later reflection, alternative attempts, or verification fails to revise the root error. On a curated subset of DAPO-MATH, 89\% of failures exhibit such traps. To solve this problem, we introduce TAAR (Trap-Aware Adaptive Restart), a test-time control framework that trains a diagnostic policy to predict two signals from partial trajectories: a trap index for where to truncate and an escape probability for whether and how strongly to intervene. At inference time, TAAR truncates the trajectory before the predicted trap segment and adaptively restarts decoding; for severely trapped cases, it applies stronger perturbations, including higher-temperature resampling and an optional structured reboot suffix. Experiments on challenging mathematical and scientific reasoning benchmarks (AIME24, AIME25, GPQA-Diamond, HMMT25, BRUMO25) show that TAAR improves reasoning performance without fine-tuning base model parameters.

$μ$NeuFMT: Optical-Property-Adaptive Fluorescence Molecular Tomography via Implicit Neural Representation

Fluorescence Molecular Tomography (FMT) is a promising technique for non-invasive 3D visualization of fluorescent probes, but its reconstruction remains challenging due to the inherent ill-posedness and reliance on inaccurate or often-unknown tissue optical properties. While deep learning methods have shown promise, their supervised nature limits generalization beyond training data. To address these problems, we propose $\mu$NeuFMT, a self-supervised FMT reconstruction framework that integrates implicit neural-based scene representation with explicit physical modeling of photon propagation. Its key innovation lies in jointly optimize both the fluorescence distribution and the optical properties ($\mu$) during reconstruction, eliminating the need for precise prior knowledge of tissue optics or pre-conditioned training data. We demonstrate that $\mu$NeuFMT robustly recovers accurate fluorophore distributions and optical coefficients even with severely erroneous initial values (0.5$\times$ to 2$\times$ of ground truth). Extensive numerical, phantom, and in vivo validations show that $\mu$NeuFMT outperforms conventional and supervised deep learning approaches across diverse heterogeneous scenarios. Our work establishes a new paradigm for robust and accurate FMT reconstruction, paving the way for more reliable molecular imaging in complex clinically related scenarios, such as fluorescence guided surgery.

Multi-Objective Covariance Matrix Adaptation MAP-Annealing

Quality-Diversity (QD) optimization is an emerging field that focuses on finding a set of behaviorally diverse and high-quality solutions. While the quality is typically defined w.r.t. a single objective function, recent work on Multi-Objective Quality-Diversity (MOQD) extends QD optimization to simultaneously optimize multiple objective functions. This opens up multi-objective applications for QD, such as generating a diverse set of game maps that maximize difficulty, realism, or other properties. Existing MOQD algorithms use non-adaptive methods such as mutation and crossover to search for non-dominated solutions and construct an archive of Pareto Sets (PS). However, recent work in QD has demonstrated enhanced performance through the use of covariance-based evolution strategies for adaptive solution search. We propose bringing this insight into the MOQD problem, and introduce MO-CMA-MAE, a new MOQD algorithm that leverages Covariance Matrix Adaptation-Evolution Strategies (CMA-ES) to optimize the hypervolume associated with every PS within the archive. We test MO-CMA-MAE on three MOQD domains, and for generating maps of a co-operative video game, showing significant improvements in performance.