Cognitive Mismatch in Multimodal Large Language Models for Discrete Symbol Understanding

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in interpreting natural scenes, their ability to process discrete symbols -- the fundamental building blocks of human cognition -- remains a critical open question. Unlike continuous visual data, symbols such as mathematical formulas, chemical structures, and linguistic characters require precise, deeper interpretation. This paper introduces a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate how top-tier MLLMs navigate these "discrete semantic spaces" across five domains: language, culture, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Our investigation uncovers a counterintuitive phenomenon: models often fail at basic symbol recognition yet succeed in complex reasoning tasks, suggesting they rely on linguistic probability rather than true visual perception. By exposing this "cognitive mismatch", we highlight a significant gap in current AI capabilities: the struggle to truly perceive and understand the symbolic languages that underpin scientific discovery and abstract thought. This work offers a roadmap for developing more rigorous, human-aligned intelligent systems.

OddGridBench: Exposing the Lack of Fine-Grained Visual Discrepancy Sensitivity in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of vision language tasks. However, their ability in low-level visual perception, particularly in detecting fine-grained visual discrepancies, remains underexplored and lacks systematic analysis. In this work, we introduce OddGridBench, a controllable benchmark for evaluating the visual discrepancy sensitivity of MLLMs. OddGridBench comprises over 1,400 grid-based images, where a single element differs from all others by one or multiple visual attributes such as color, size, rotation, or position. Experiments reveal that all evaluated MLLMs, including open-source families such as Qwen3-VL and InternVL3.5, and proprietary systems like Gemini-2.5-Pro and GPT-5, perform far below human levels in visual discrepancy detection. We further propose OddGrid-GRPO, a reinforcement learning framework that integrates curriculum learning and distance-aware reward. By progressively controlling the difficulty of training samples and incorporating spatial proximity constraints into the reward design, OddGrid-GRPO significantly enhances the model's fine-grained visual discrimination ability. We hope OddGridBench and OddGrid-GRPO will lay the groundwork for advancing perceptual grounding and visual discrepancy sensitivity in multimodal intelligence. Code and dataset are available at https://wwwtttjjj.github.io/OddGridBench/.

LEA: Label Enumeration Attack in Vertical Federated Learning

A typical Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) scenario involves several participants collaboratively training a machine learning model, where each party has different features for the same samples, with labels held exclusively by one party. Since labels contain sensitive information, VFL must ensure the privacy of labels. However, existing VFL-targeted label inference attacks are either limited to specific scenarios or require auxiliary data, rendering them impractical in real-world applications. We introduce a novel Label Enumeration Attack (LEA) that, for the first time, achieves applicability across multiple VFL scenarios and eschews the need for auxiliary data. Our intuition is that an adversary, employing clustering to enumerate mappings between samples and labels, ascertains the accurate label mappings by evaluating the similarity between the benign model and the simulated models trained under each mapping. To achieve that, the first challenge is how to measure model similarity, as models trained on the same data can have different weights. Drawing from our findings, we propose an efficient approach for assessing congruence based on the cosine similarity of the first-round loss gradients, which offers superior efficiency and precision compared to the comparison of parameter similarities. However, the computational cost may be prohibitive due to the necessity of training and comparing the vast number of simulated models generated through enumeration. To overcome this challenge, we propose Binary-LEA from the perspective of reducing the number of models and eliminating futile training, which lowers the number of enumerations from n! to n^3. Moreover, LEA is resilient against common defense mechanisms such as gradient noise and gradient compression.

Enhancing Geometric Perception in VLMs via Translator-Guided Reinforcement Learning

Vision-language models (VLMs) often struggle with geometric reasoning due to their limited perception of fundamental diagram elements. To tackle this challenge, we introduce GeoPerceive, a benchmark comprising diagram instances paired with domain-specific language (DSL) representations, along with an efficient automatic data generation pipeline. This design enables the isolated evaluation of geometric perception independently from reasoning. To exploit the data provided by GeoPerceive for enhancing the geometric perception capabilities of VLMs, we propose GeoDPO, a translator-guided reinforcement learning (RL) framework. GeoDPO employs an NL-to-DSL translator, which is trained on synthetic pairs generated by the data engine of GeoPerceive, to bridge natural language and DSL. This translator facilitates the computation of fine-grained, DSL-level scores, which serve as reward signals in reinforcement learning. We assess GeoDPO on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets, spanning tasks in geometric perception as well as downstream reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that, while supervised fine-tuning (SFT) offers only marginal improvements and may even impair performance in out-of-domain scenarios, GeoDPO achieves substantial gains: $+26.5\%$ on in-domain data, $+8.0\%$ on out-of-domain data, and $+39.0\%$ on downstream reasoning tasks. These findings underscore the superior performance and generalization ability of GeoDPO over SFT. All codes are released at https://github.com/Longin-Yu/GeoPerceive to ensure reproducibility.

BEAP-Agent: Backtrackable Execution and Adaptive Planning for GUI Agents

GUI agents are designed to automate repetitive tasks and enhance productivity. However, existing GUI agents struggle to recover once they follow an incorrect exploration path, often leading to task failure. In this work, we model GUI task execution as a DFS process and propose BEAP-Agent, a DFS-based framework that supports long-range, multi-level state backtracking with dynamic task tracking and updating. The framework consists of three collaborative components: Planner, Executor, and Tracker. Together, they enable effective task exploration and execution. BEAP-Agent fills the gap in systematic backtracking mechanisms for GUI agents, offering a systematic solution for long-horizon task exploration. We conducted a systematic evaluation on the OSWorld benchmark, where BEAP-Agent achieved an accuracy of 28.2%, validating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

RM-Distiller: Exploiting Generative LLM for Reward Model Distillation

Reward models (RMs) play a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Due to the difficulty of obtaining high-quality human preference annotations, distilling preferences from generative LLMs has emerged as a standard practice. However, existing approaches predominantly treat teacher models as simple binary annotators, failing to fully exploit the rich knowledge and capabilities for RM distillation. To address this, we propose RM-Distiller, a framework designed to systematically exploit the multifaceted capabilities of teacher LLMs: (1) Refinement capability, which synthesizes highly correlated response pairs to create fine-grained and contrastive signals. (2) Scoring capability, which guides the RM in capturing precise preference strength via a margin-aware optimization objective. (3) Generation capability, which incorporates the teacher's generative distribution to regularize the RM to preserve its fundamental linguistic knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RM-Distiller significantly outperforms traditional distillation methods both on RM benchmarks and reinforcement learning-based alignment, proving that exploiting multifaceted teacher capabilities is critical for effective reward modeling. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic research on RM distillation from generative LLMs.

SDE-SQL: Enhancing Text-to-SQL Generation in Large Language Models via Self-Driven Exploration with SQL Probes

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved performance on the Text-to-SQL task. However, prior approaches typically rely on static, pre-processed database information provided at inference time, which limits the model's ability to fully understand the database contents. Without dynamic interaction, LLMs are constrained to fixed, human-provided context and cannot autonomously explore the underlying data. To address this limitation, we propose SDE-SQL, a framework that enables large language models to perform self-driven exploration of databases during inference. This is accomplished by generating and executing SQL probes, which allow the model to actively retrieve information from the database and iteratively update its understanding of the data. Unlike prior methods, SDE-SQL operates in a zero-shot setting, without relying on any question-SQL pairs as in-context demonstrations. When evaluated on the BIRD benchmark with Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct, SDE-SQL achieves an 8.02% relative improvement in execution accuracy over the vanilla Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct baseline, establishing a new state-of-the-art among methods based on open-source models without supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or model ensembling. Moreover, with SFT, the performance of SDE-SQL can be further enhanced, yielding an additional 0.52% improvement.

SCOUT: Teaching Pre-trained Language Models to Enhance Reasoning via Flow Chain-of-Thought

Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by encouraging step by step thinking. However, CoT-based methods depend on intermediate reasoning steps, which limits scalability and generalization. Recent work explores recursive reasoning, where LLMs reuse internal layers across iterations to refine latent representations without explicit CoT supervision. While promising, these approaches often require costly pretraining and lack a principled framework for how reasoning should evolve across iterations. We address this gap by introducing Flow Chain of Thought (Flow CoT), a reasoning paradigm that models recursive inference as a progressive trajectory of latent cognitive states. Flow CoT frames each iteration as a distinct cognitive stage deepening reasoning across iterations without relying on manual supervision. To realize this, we propose SCOUT (Stepwise Cognitive Optimization Using Teachers), a lightweight fine tuning framework that enables Flow CoT style reasoning without the need for pretraining. SCOUT uses progressive distillation to align each iteration with a teacher of appropriate capacity, and a cross attention based retrospective module that integrates outputs from previous iterations while preserving the models original computation flow. Experiments across eight reasoning benchmarks show that SCOUT consistently improves both accuracy and explanation quality, achieving up to 1.8% gains under fine tuning. Qualitative analyses further reveal that SCOUT enables progressively deeper reasoning across iterations refining both belief formation and explanation granularity. These results not only validate the effectiveness of SCOUT, but also demonstrate the practical viability of Flow CoT as a scalable framework for enhancing reasoning in LLMs.

LlamaSeg: Image Segmentation via Autoregressive Mask Generation

We present LlamaSeg, a visual autoregressive framework that unifies multiple image segmentation tasks via natural language instructions. We reformulate image segmentation as a visual generation problem, representing masks as "visual" tokens and employing a LLaMA-style Transformer to predict them directly from image inputs. By adhering to the next-token prediction paradigm, our approach naturally integrates segmentation tasks into autoregressive architectures. To support large-scale training, we introduce a data annotation pipeline and construct the SA-OVRS dataset, which contains 2M segmentation masks annotated with over 5,800 open-vocabulary labels or diverse textual descriptions, covering a wide spectrum of real-world scenarios. This enables our model to localize objects in images based on text prompts and to generate fine-grained masks. To more accurately evaluate the quality of masks produced by visual generative models, we further propose a composite metric that combines Intersection over Union (IoU) with Average Hausdorff Distance (AHD), offering a more precise assessment of contour fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses existing generative models across multiple datasets and yields more detailed segmentation masks.

ReEx-SQL: Reasoning with Execution-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL

In Text-to-SQL, execution feedback is essential for guiding large language models (LLMs) to reason accurately and generate reliable SQL queries. However, existing methods treat execution feedback solely as a post-hoc signal for correction or selection, failing to integrate it into the generation process. This limitation hinders their ability to address reasoning errors as they occur, ultimately reducing query accuracy and robustness. To address this issue, we propose ReEx-SQL (Reasoning with Execution-Aware Reinforcement Learning), a framework for Text-to-SQL that enables models to interact with the database during decoding and dynamically adjust their reasoning based on execution feedback. ReEx-SQL introduces an execution-aware reasoning paradigm that interleaves intermediate SQL execution into reasoning paths, facilitating context-sensitive revisions. It achieves this through structured prompts with markup tags and a stepwise rollout strategy that integrates execution feedback into each stage of generation. To supervise policy learning, we develop a composite reward function that includes an exploration reward, explicitly encouraging effective database interaction. Additionally, ReEx-SQL adopts a tree-based decoding strategy to support exploratory reasoning, enabling dynamic expansion of alternative reasoning paths. Notably, ReEx-SQL achieves 88.8% on Spider and 64.9% on BIRD at the 7B scale, surpassing the standard reasoning baseline by 2.7% and 2.6%, respectively. It also shows robustness, achieving 85.2% on Spider-Realistic with leading performance. In addition, its tree-structured decoding improves efficiency and performance over linear decoding, reducing inference time by 51.9% on the BIRD development set.