Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Automated Feature Generation on Tabular Data

Automated feature generation extracts informative features from raw tabular data without manual intervention and is crucial for accurate, generalizable machine learning. Traditional methods rely on predefined operator libraries and cannot leverage task semantics, limiting their ability to produce diverse, high-value features for complex tasks. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based approaches introduce richer semantic signals, but still suffer from a restricted feature space due to fixed generation patterns and from the absence of feedback from the learning objective. To address these challenges, we propose a Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System (\textbf{MALMAS}) for automated feature generation. MALMAS decomposes the generation process into agents with distinct responsibilities, and a Router Agent activates an appropriate subset of agents per iteration, further broadening exploration of the feature space. We further integrate a memory module comprising procedural memory, feedback memory, and conceptual memory, enabling iterative refinement that adaptively guides subsequent feature generation and improves feature quality and diversity. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets against state-of-the-art baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/fxdong24/MALMAS

STRIDE: Strategic Iterative Decision-Making for Retrieval-Augmented Multi-Hop Question Answering

Multi-hop question answering (MHQA) enables accurate answers to complex queries by retrieving and reasoning over evidence dispersed across multiple documents. Existing MHQA approaches mainly rely on iterative retrieval-augmented generation, which suffer from the following two major issues. 1) Existing methods prematurely commit to surface-level entities rather than underlying reasoning structures, making question decomposition highly vulnerable to lexical ambiguity. 2) Existing methods overlook the logical dependencies among reasoning steps, resulting in uncoordinated execution. To address these issues, we propose STRIDE, a framework that separates strategic planning, dynamic control, and grounded execution. At its core, a Meta-Planner first constructs an entity-agnostic reasoning skeleton to capture the abstract logic of the query, thereby deferring entity grounding until after the reasoning structure is established, which mitigates disambiguation errors caused by premature lexical commitment. A Supervisor then orchestrates sub-question execution in a dependency-aware manner, enabling efficient parallelization where possible and sequential coordination when necessary. By dynamically deciding whether to retrieve new evidence or infer from existing facts, it avoids redundant queries and error propagation, while fusing cross-branch information and reformulating failed queries to enhance robustness. Grounded fact extraction and logical inference are delegated to specialized execution modules, ensuring faithfulness through explicit separation of retrieval and reasoning. We further propose STRIDE-FT, a modular fine-tuning framework that uses self-generated execution trajectories from STRIDE, requiring neither human annotations nor stronger teacher models. Experiments show that STRIDE achieves robust and accurate reasoning, while STRIDE-FT effectively enhances open-source LLMs.

ActFER: Agentic Facial Expression Recognition via Active Tool-Augmented Visual Reasoning

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have created new opportunities for facial expression recognition (FER), moving it beyond pure label prediction toward reasoning-based affect understanding. However, existing MLLM-based FER methods still follow a passive paradigm: they rely on externally prepared facial inputs and perform single-pass reasoning over fixed visual evidence, without the capability for active facial perception. To address this limitation, we propose ActFER, an agentic framework that reformulates FER as active visual evidence acquisition followed by multimodal reasoning. Specifically, ActFER dynamically invokes tools for face detection and alignment, selectively zooms into informative local regions, and reasons over facial Action Units (AUs) and emotions through a visual Chain-of-Thought. To realize such behavior, we further develop Utility-Calibrated GRPO (UC-GRPO), a reinforcement learning algorithm tailored to agentic FER. UC-GRPO uses AU-grounded multi-level verifiable rewards to densify supervision, query-conditional contrastive utility estimation to enable sample-aware dynamic credit assignment for local inspection, and emotion-aware EMA calibration to reduce noisy utility estimates while capturing emotion-wise inspection tendencies. This algorithm enables ActFER to learn both when local inspection is beneficial and how to reason over the acquired evidence. Comprehensive experiments show that ActFER trained with UC-GRPO consistently outperforms passive MLLM-based FER baselines and substantially improves AU prediction accuracy.

SyncBreaker:Stage-Aware Multimodal Adversarial Attacks on Audio-Driven Talking Head Generation

Diffusion-based audio-driven talking-head generation enables realistic portrait animation, but also introduces risks of misuse, such as fraud and misinformation. Existing protection methods are largely limited to a single modality, and neither image-only nor audio-only attacks can effectively suppress speech-driven facial dynamics. To address this gap, we propose SyncBreaker, a stage-aware multimodal protection framework that jointly perturbs portrait and audio inputs under modality-specific perceptual constraints. Our key contributions are twofold. First, for the image stream, we introduce nullifying supervision with Multi-Interval Sampling (MIS) across diffusion stages to steer the generation toward the static reference portrait by aggregating guidance from multiple denoising intervals. Second, for the audio stream, we propose Cross-Attention Fooling (CAF), which suppresses interval-specific audio-conditioned cross-attention responses. Both streams are optimized independently and combined at inference time to enable flexible deployment. We evaluate SyncBreaker in a white-box proactive protection setting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SyncBreaker more effectively degrades lip synchronization and facial dynamics than strong single-modality baselines, while preserving input perceptual quality and remaining robust under purification. Code: https://github.com/kitty384/SyncBreaker.

VehicleMemBench: An Executable Benchmark for Multi-User Long-Term Memory in In-Vehicle Agents

With the growing demand for intelligent in-vehicle experiences, vehicle-based agents are evolving from simple assistants to long-term companions. This evolution requires agents to continuously model multi-user preferences and make reliable decisions in the face of inter-user preference conflicts and changing habits over time. However, existing benchmarks are largely limited to single-user, static question-answer settings, failing to capture the temporal evolution of preferences and the multi-user, tool-interactive nature of real vehicle environments. To address this gap, we introduce VehicleMemBench, a multi-user long-context memory benchmark built on an executable in-vehicle simulation environment. The benchmark evaluates tool use and memory by comparing the post-action environment state with a predefined target state, enabling objective and reproducible evaluation without LLM-based or human scoring. VehicleMemBench includes 23 tool modules, and each sample contains over 80 historical memory events. Experiments show that powerful models perform well on direct instruction tasks but struggle in scenarios involving memory evolution, particularly when user preferences change dynamically. Even advanced memory systems struggle to handle domain-specific memory requirements in this environment. These findings highlight the need for more robust and specialized memory management mechanisms to support long-term adaptive decision-making in real-world in-vehicle systems. To facilitate future research, we release the data and code.

PERMA: Benchmarking Personalized Memory Agents via Event-Driven Preference and Realistic Task Environments

Empowering large language models with long-term memory is crucial for building agents that adapt to users' evolving needs. However, prior evaluations typically interleave preference-related dialogues with irrelevant conversations, reducing the task to needle-in-a-haystack retrieval while ignoring relationships between events that drive the evolution of user preferences. Such settings overlook a fundamental characteristic of real-world personalization: preferences emerge gradually and accumulate across interactions within noisy contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce PERMA, a benchmark designed to evaluate persona consistency over time beyond static preference recall. Additionally, we incorporate (1) text variability and (2) linguistic alignment to simulate erratic user inputs and individual idiolects in real-world data. PERMA consists of temporally ordered interaction events spanning multiple sessions and domains, with preference-related queries inserted over time. We design both multiple-choice and interactive tasks to probe the model's understanding of persona along the interaction timeline. Experiments demonstrate that by linking related interactions, advanced memory systems can extract more precise preferences and reduce token consumption, outperforming traditional semantic retrieval of raw dialogues. Nevertheless, they still struggle to maintain a coherent persona across temporal depth and cross-domain interference, highlighting the need for more robust personalized memory management in agents. Our code and data are open-sourced at https://github.com/PolarisLiu1/PERMA.

How Foundational Skills Influence VLM-based Embodied Agents:A Native Perspective

Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise for human-level embodied intelligence. However, existing benchmarks for VLM-driven embodied agents often rely on high-level commands or discretized action spaces, which are non-native settings that differ markedly from real-world control. In addition, current benchmarks focus primarily on high-level tasks and lack joint evaluation and analysis at both low and high levels. To address these limitations, we present NativeEmbodied, a challenging benchmark for VLM-driven embodied agents that uses a unified, native low-level action space. Built on diverse simulated scenes, NativeEmbodied includes three representative high-level tasks in complex scenarios to evaluate overall performance. For more detailed analysis, we further decouple the skills required by complex tasks and construct four types of low-level tasks, each targeting a fundamental embodied skill. This joint evaluation across task and skill granularities enables fine-grained assessment of embodied agents. Experiments with state-of-the-art VLMs reveal clear deficiencies in several fundamental embodied skills, and further analysis shows that these bottlenecks significantly limit performance on high-level tasks. NativeEmbodied highlights key challenges for current VLM-driven embodied agents and provides insights to guide future research.

PRIME: A Process-Outcome Alignment Benchmark for Verifiable Reasoning in Mathematics and Engineering

While model-based verifiers are essential for scaling Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), current outcome-centric verification paradigms primarily focus on the consistency between the final result and the ground truth, often neglecting potential errors in the derivation process. This leads to assigning positive rewards to correct answers produced from incorrect derivations. To bridge this gap, we introduce PRIME, a benchmark for evaluating verifiers on Process-Outcome Alignment verification in Mathematics and Engineering. Curated from a comprehensive collection of college-level STEM problems, PRIME comprises 2,530 high-difficulty samples through a consistency-based filtering pipeline. Through extensive evaluation, we find that current verifiers frequently fail to detect derivation flaws. Furthermore, we propose a process-aware RLVR training paradigm utilizing verifiers selected via PRIME. This approach substantially outperforms the outcome-only verification baseline, achieving absolute performance gains of 8.29%, 9.12%, and 7.31% on AIME24, AIME25, and Beyond-AIME, respectively, for the Qwen3-14B-Base model. Finally, we demonstrate a strong linear correlation ($R^2 > 0.92$) between verifier accuracy on PRIME and RLVR training effectiveness, validating PRIME as a reliable predictor for verifier selection.

Mock Worlds, Real Skills: Building Small Agentic Language Models with Synthetic Tasks, Simulated Environments, and Rubric-Based Rewards

Small LLMs often struggle to match the agentic capabilities of large, costly models. While reinforcement learning can help, progress has been limited by two structural bottlenecks: existing open-source agentic training data are narrow in task variety and easily solved; real-world APIs lack diversity and are unstable for large-scale reinforcement learning rollout processes. We address these challenges with SYNTHAGENT, a framework that jointly synthesizes diverse tool-use training data and simulates complete environments. Specifically, a strong teacher model creates novel tasks and tool ecosystems, then rewrites them into intentionally underspecified instructions. This compels agents to actively query users for missing details. When handling synthetic tasks, an LLM-based user simulator provides user-private information, while a mock tool system delivers stable tool responses. For rewards, task-level rubrics are constructed based on required subgoals, user-agent interactions, and forbidden behaviors. Across 14 challenging datasets in math, search, and tool use, models trained on our synthetic data achieve substantial gains, with small models outperforming larger baselines.

Token-level Collaborative Alignment for LLM-based Generative Recommendation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong potential for generative recommendation by leveraging rich semantic knowledge. However, existing LLM-based recommender systems struggle to effectively incorporate collaborative filtering (CF) signals, due to a fundamental mismatch between item-level preference modeling in CF and token-level next-token prediction (NTP) optimization in LLMs. Prior approaches typically treat CF as contextual hints or representation bias, and resort to multi-stage training to reduce behavioral semantic space discrepancies, leaving CF unable to explicitly regulate LLM generation. In this work, we propose Token-level Collaborative Alignment for Recommendation (TCA4Rec), a model-agnostic and plug-and-play framework that establishes an explicit optimization-level interface between CF supervision and LLM generation. TCA4Rec consists of (i) Collaborative Tokenizer, which projects raw item-level CF logits into token-level distributions aligned with the LLM token space, and (ii) Soft Label Alignment, which integrates these CF-informed distributions with one-hot supervision to optimize a soft NTP objective. This design preserves the generative nature of LLM training while enabling collaborative alignment with essential user preference of CF models. We highlight TCA4Rec is compatible with arbitrary traditional CF models and generalizes across a wide range of decoder-based LLM recommender architectures. Moreover, it provides an explicit mechanism to balance behavioral alignment and semantic fluency, yielding generative recommendations that are both accurate and controllable. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TCA4Rec consistently improves recommendation performance across a broad spectrum of CF models and LLM-based recommender systems.