BABE: Biology Arena BEnchmark

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has expanded their capabilities from basic dialogue to advanced scientific reasoning. However, existing benchmarks in biology often fail to assess a critical skill required of researchers: the ability to integrate experimental results with contextual knowledge to derive meaningful conclusions. To address this gap, we introduce BABE(Biology Arena BEnchmark), a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the experimental reasoning capabilities of biological AI systems. BABE is uniquely constructed from peer-reviewed research papers and real-world biological studies, ensuring that tasks reflect the complexity and interdisciplinary nature of actual scientific inquiry. BABE challenges models to perform causal reasoning and cross-scale inference. Our benchmark provides a robust framework for assessing how well AI systems can reason like practicing scientists, offering a more authentic measure of their potential to contribute to biological research.

PQTNet: Pixel-wise Quantitative Thermography Neural Network for Estimating Defect Depth in Polylactic Acid Parts by Additive Manufacturing

Defect depth quantification in additively manufactured (AM) components remains a significant challenge for non-destructive testing (NDT). This study proposes a Pixel-wise Quantitative Thermography Neural Network (PQT-Net) to address this challenge for polylactic acid (PLA) parts. A key innovation is a novel data augmentation strategy that reconstructs thermal sequence data into two-dimensional stripe images, preserving the complete temporal evolution of heat diffusion for each pixel. The PQT-Net architecture incorporates a pre-trained EfficientNetV2-S backbone and a custom Residual Regression Head (RRH) with learnable parameters to refine outputs. Comparative experiments demonstrate the superiority of PQT-Net over other deep learning models, achieving a minimum Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.0094 mm and a coefficient of determination (R) exceeding 99%. The high precision of PQT-Net underscores its potential for robust quantitative defect characterization in AM.

Towards Agentic Intelligence for Materials Science

The convergence of artificial intelligence and materials science presents a transformative opportunity, but achieving true acceleration in discovery requires moving beyond task-isolated, fine-tuned models toward agentic systems that plan, act, and learn across the full discovery loop. This survey advances a unique pipeline-centric view that spans from corpus curation and pretraining, through domain adaptation and instruction tuning, to goal-conditioned agents interfacing with simulation and experimental platforms. Unlike prior reviews, we treat the entire process as an end-to-end system to be optimized for tangible discovery outcomes rather than proxy benchmarks. This perspective allows us to trace how upstream design choices-such as data curation and training objectives-can be aligned with downstream experimental success through effective credit assignment. To bridge communities and establish a shared frame of reference, we first present an integrated lens that aligns terminology, evaluation, and workflow stages across AI and materials science. We then analyze the field through two focused lenses: From the AI perspective, the survey details LLM strengths in pattern recognition, predictive analytics, and natural language processing for literature mining, materials characterization, and property prediction; from the materials science perspective, it highlights applications in materials design, process optimization, and the acceleration of computational workflows via integration with external tools (e.g., DFT, robotic labs). Finally, we contrast passive, reactive approaches with agentic design, cataloging current contributions while motivating systems that pursue long-horizon goals with autonomy, memory, and tool use. This survey charts a practical roadmap towards autonomous, safety-aware LLM agents aimed at discovering novel and useful materials.

PowerGenie: Analytically-Guided Evolutionary Discovery of Superior Reconfigurable Power Converters

Discovering superior circuit topologies requires navigating an exponentially large design space-a challenge traditionally reserved for human experts. Existing AI methods either select from predefined templates or generate novel topologies at a limited scale without rigorous verification, leaving large-scale performance-driven discovery underexplored. We present PowerGenie, a framework for automated discovery of higher-performance reconfigurable power converters at scale. PowerGenie introduces: (1) an automated analytical framework that determines converter functionality and theoretical performance limits without component sizing or SPICE simulation, and (2) an evolutionary finetuning method that co-evolves a generative model with its training distribution through fitness selection and uniqueness verification. Unlike existing methods that suffer from mode collapse and overfitting, our approach achieves higher syntax validity, function validity, novelty rate, and figure-of-merit (FoM). PowerGenie discovers a novel 8-mode reconfigurable converter with 23% higher FoM than the best training topology. SPICE simulations confirm average absolute efficiency gains of 10% across 8 modes and up to 17% at a single mode. Code is available at https://github.com/xz-group/PowerGenie.

TabularMath: Evaluating Computational Extrapolation in Tabular Learning via Program-Verified Synthesis

Standard tabular benchmarks mainly focus on the evaluation of a model's capability to interpolate values inside a data manifold, where models good at performing local statistical smoothing are rewarded. However, there exists a very large category of high-value tabular data, including financial modeling and physical simulations, which are generated based upon deterministic computational processes, as opposed to stochastic and noisy relationships. Therefore, we investigate if tabular models can provide an extension from statistical interpolation to computational extrapolation. We propose TabularMath, a diagnostic benchmark of 114 deterministic problems (233,472 rows) generated from verified programs based on GSM8K and AIME. We evaluate 9 tabular architectures and in-context learning (ICL) with GPT-OSS-120B. On standard regression metrics, TabPFN v2.5 performs remarkably well, achieving R^2=0.998 in-distribution and maintaining positive R^2 even under distribution shift, which is unique among the tabular models we tested. When we measure rounded consistency (exact integer match), a different picture emerges: TabPFN v2.5 drops below 10% on out-of-distribution data, while ICL maintains around 40%. This gap between R^2 and exact-match accuracy suggests that tabular models learn smooth function approximations but struggle to recover precise computational outputs under extrapolation. The two paradigms appear complementary: TabPFN scales efficiently with data; ICL achieves exact computation from few examples. We release all code and data to support further investigation.

FutureX-Pro: Extending Future Prediction to High-Value Vertical Domains

Building upon FutureX, which established a live benchmark for general-purpose future prediction, this report introduces FutureX-Pro, including FutureX-Finance, FutureX-Retail, FutureX-PublicHealth, FutureX-NaturalDisaster, and FutureX-Search. These together form a specialized framework extending agentic future prediction to high-value vertical domains. While generalist agents demonstrate proficiency in open-domain search, their reliability in capital-intensive and safety-critical sectors remains under-explored. FutureX-Pro targets four economically and socially pivotal verticals: Finance, Retail, Public Health, and Natural Disaster. We benchmark agentic Large Language Models (LLMs) on entry-level yet foundational prediction tasks -- ranging from forecasting market indicators and supply chain demands to tracking epidemic trends and natural disasters. By adapting the contamination-free, live-evaluation pipeline of FutureX, we assess whether current State-of-the-Art (SOTA) agentic LLMs possess the domain grounding necessary for industrial deployment. Our findings reveal the performance gap between generalist reasoning and the precision required for high-value vertical applications.

The Molecular Structure of Thought: Mapping the Topology of Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) often fail to learn effective long chain-of-thought (Long CoT) reasoning from human or non-Long-CoT LLMs imitation. To understand this, we propose that effective and learnable Long CoT trajectories feature stable molecular-like structures in unified view, which are formed by three interaction types: Deep-Reasoning (covalent-like), Self-Reflection (hydrogen-bond-like), and Self-Exploration (van der Waals-like). Analysis of distilled trajectories reveals these structures emerge from Long CoT fine-tuning, not keyword imitation. We introduce Effective Semantic Isomers and show that only bonds promoting fast entropy convergence support stable Long CoT learning, while structural competition impairs training. Drawing on these findings, we present Mole-Syn, a distribution-transfer-graph method that guides synthesis of effective Long CoT structures, boosting performance and RL stability across benchmarks.

Dynamic Large Concept Models: Latent Reasoning in an Adaptive Semantic Space

Large Language Models (LLMs) apply uniform computation to all tokens, despite language exhibiting highly non-uniform information density. This token-uniform regime wastes capacity on locally predictable spans while under-allocating computation to semantically critical transitions. We propose $\textbf{Dynamic Large Concept Models (DLCM)}$, a hierarchical language modeling framework that learns semantic boundaries from latent representations and shifts computation from tokens to a compressed concept space where reasoning is more efficient. DLCM discovers variable-length concepts end-to-end without relying on predefined linguistic units. Hierarchical compression fundamentally changes scaling behavior. We introduce the first $\textbf{compression-aware scaling law}$, which disentangles token-level capacity, concept-level reasoning capacity, and compression ratio, enabling principled compute allocation under fixed FLOPs. To stably train this heterogeneous architecture, we further develop a $\textbf{decoupled $μ$P parametrization}$ that supports zero-shot hyperparameter transfer across widths and compression regimes. At a practical setting ($R=4$, corresponding to an average of four tokens per concept), DLCM reallocates roughly one-third of inference compute into a higher-capacity reasoning backbone, achieving a $\textbf{+2.69$\%$ average improvement}$ across 12 zero-shot benchmarks under matched inference FLOPs.

Encyclo-K: Evaluating LLMs with Dynamically Composed Knowledge Statements

Benchmarks play a crucial role in tracking the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and identifying their capability boundaries. However, existing benchmarks predominantly curate questions at the question level, suffering from three fundamental limitations: vulnerability to data contamination, restriction to single-knowledge-point assessment, and reliance on costly domain expert annotation. We propose Encyclo-K, a statement-based benchmark that rethinks benchmark construction from the ground up. Our key insight is that knowledge statements, not questions, can serve as the unit of curation, and questions can then be constructed from them. We extract standalone knowledge statements from authoritative textbooks and dynamically compose them into evaluation questions through random sampling at test time. This design directly addresses all three limitations: the combinatorial space is too vast to memorize, and model rankings remain stable across dynamically generated question sets, enabling reliable periodic dataset refresh; each question aggregates 8-10 statements for comprehensive multi-knowledge assessment; annotators only verify formatting compliance without requiring domain expertise, substantially reducing annotation costs. Experiments on over 50 LLMs demonstrate that Encyclo-K poses substantial challenges with strong discriminative power. Even the top-performing OpenAI-GPT-5.1 achieves only 62.07% accuracy, and model performance displays a clear gradient distribution--reasoning models span from 16.04% to 62.07%, while chat models range from 9.71% to 50.40%. These results validate the challenges introduced by dynamic evaluation and multi-statement comprehensive understanding. These findings establish Encyclo-K as a scalable framework for dynamic evaluation of LLMs' comprehensive understanding over multiple fine-grained disciplinary knowledge statements.

LLM Swiss Round: Aggregating Multi-Benchmark Performance via Competitive Swiss-System Dynamics

The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) and diverse specialized benchmarks necessitates a shift from fragmented, task-specific metrics to a holistic, competitive ranking system that effectively aggregates performance across multiple ability dimensions. Primarily using static scoring, current evaluation methods are fundamentally limited. They struggle to determine the proper mix ratio across diverse benchmarks, and critically, they fail to capture a model's dynamic competitive fitness or its vulnerability when confronted with sequential, high-stakes tasks. To address this, we introduce the novel Competitive Swiss-System Dynamics (CSD) framework. CSD simulates a multi-round, sequential contest where models are dynamically paired across a curated sequence of benchmarks based on their accumulated win-loss record. And Monte Carlo Simulation ($N=100,000$ iterations) is used to approximate the statistically robust Expected Win Score ($E[S_m]$), which eliminates the noise of random pairing and early-round luck. Furthermore, we implement a Failure Sensitivity Analysis by parameterizing the per-round elimination quantity ($T_k$), which allows us to profile models based on their risk appetite--distinguishing between robust generalists and aggressive specialists. We demonstrate that CSD provides a more nuanced and context-aware ranking than traditional aggregate scoring and static pairwise models, representing a vital step towards risk-informed, next-generation LLM evaluation.