MiniCPM4: Ultra-Efficient LLMs on End Devices

This paper introduces MiniCPM4, a highly efficient large language model (LLM) designed explicitly for end-side devices. We achieve this efficiency through systematic innovation in four key dimensions: model architecture, training data, training algorithms, and inference systems. Specifically, in terms of model architecture, we propose InfLLM v2, a trainable sparse attention mechanism that accelerates both prefilling and decoding phases for long-context processing. Regarding training data, we propose UltraClean, an efficient and accurate pre-training data filtering and generation strategy, and UltraChat v2, a comprehensive supervised fine-tuning dataset. These datasets enable satisfactory model performance to be achieved using just 8 trillion training tokens. Regarding training algorithms, we propose ModelTunnel v2 for efficient pre-training strategy search, and improve existing post-training methods by introducing chunk-wise rollout for load-balanced reinforcement learning and data-efficient tenary LLM, BitCPM. Regarding inference systems, we propose CPM.cu that integrates sparse attention, model quantization, and speculative sampling to achieve efficient prefilling and decoding. To meet diverse on-device requirements, MiniCPM4 is available in two versions, with 0.5B and 8B parameters, respectively. Sufficient evaluation results show that MiniCPM4 outperforms open-source models of similar size across multiple benchmarks, highlighting both its efficiency and effectiveness. Notably, MiniCPM4-8B demonstrates significant speed improvements over Qwen3-8B when processing long sequences. Through further adaptation, MiniCPM4 successfully powers diverse applications, including trustworthy survey generation and tool use with model context protocol, clearly showcasing its broad usability.

SpaCE-10: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models in Compositional Spatial Intelligence

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in various multimodal tasks. To pursue higher intelligence in space, MLLMs require integrating multiple atomic spatial capabilities to handle complex and dynamic tasks. However, existing benchmarks struggle to comprehensively evaluate the spatial intelligence of common MLLMs from the atomic level to the compositional level. To fill this gap, we present SpaCE-10, a comprehensive benchmark for compositional spatial evaluations. In SpaCE-10, we define 10 atomic spatial capabilities, which are combined to form 8 compositional capabilities. Based on these definitions, we propose a novel hierarchical annotation pipeline to generate high-quality and diverse question-answer (QA) pairs. With over 150+ hours of human expert effort, we obtain over 5k QA pairs for 811 real indoor scenes in SpaCE-10, which covers various evaluation settings like point cloud input and multi-choice QA. We conduct an extensive evaluation of common MLLMs on SpaCE-10 and find that even the most advanced MLLM still lags behind humans by large margins. Through our careful study, we also draw several significant findings that benefit the MLLM community. For example, we reveal that the shortcoming of counting capability greatly limits the compositional spatial capabilities of existing MLLMs. The evaluation code and benchmark datasets are available at https://github.com/Cuzyoung/SpaCE-10.

Shapley-Coop: Credit Assignment for Emergent Cooperation in Self-Interested LLM Agents

Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong collaborative performance in multi-agent systems with predefined roles and workflows. However, in open-ended environments lacking coordination rules, agents tend to act in self-interested ways. The central challenge in achieving coordination lies in credit assignment -- fairly evaluating each agent's contribution and designing pricing mechanisms that align their heterogeneous goals. This problem is critical as LLMs increasingly participate in complex human-AI collaborations, where fair compensation and accountability rely on effective pricing mechanisms. Inspired by how human societies address similar coordination challenges (e.g., through temporary collaborations such as employment or subcontracting), we propose a cooperative workflow, Shapley-Coop. Shapley-Coop integrates Shapley Chain-of-Thought -- leveraging marginal contributions as a principled basis for pricing -- with structured negotiation protocols for effective price matching, enabling LLM agents to coordinate through rational task-time pricing and post-task reward redistribution. This approach aligns agent incentives, fosters cooperation, and maintains autonomy. We evaluate Shapley-Coop across two multi-agent games and a software engineering simulation, demonstrating that it consistently enhances LLM agent collaboration and facilitates equitable credit assignment. These results highlight the effectiveness of Shapley-Coop's pricing mechanisms in accurately reflecting individual contributions during task execution.

Information Bargaining: Bilateral Commitment in Bayesian Persuasion

Bayesian persuasion, an extension of cheap-talk communication, involves an informed sender committing to a signaling scheme to influence a receiver's actions. Compared to cheap talk, this sender's commitment enables the receiver to verify the incentive compatibility of signals beforehand, facilitating cooperation. While effective in one-shot scenarios, Bayesian persuasion faces computational complexity (NP-hardness) when extended to long-term interactions, where the receiver may adopt dynamic strategies conditional on past outcomes and future expectations. To address this complexity, we introduce the bargaining perspective, which allows: (1) a unified framework and well-structured solution concept for long-term persuasion, with desirable properties such as fairness and Pareto efficiency; (2) a clear distinction between two previously conflated advantages: the sender's informational advantage and first-proposer advantage. With only modest modifications to the standard setting, this perspective makes explicit the common knowledge of the game structure and grants the receiver comparable commitment capabilities, thereby reinterpreting classic one-sided persuasion as a balanced information bargaining framework. The framework is validated through a two-stage validation-and-inference paradigm: We first demonstrate that GPT-o3 and DeepSeek-R1, out of publicly available LLMs, reliably handle standard tasks; We then apply them to persuasion scenarios to test that the outcomes align with what our information-bargaining framework suggests. All code, results, and terminal logs are publicly available at github.com/YueLin301/InformationBargaining.

Bayesian Persuasion as a Bargaining Game

Bayesian persuasion, an extension of cheap-talk communication, involves an informed sender committing to a signaling scheme to influence a receiver's actions. Compared to cheap talk, this sender's commitment enables the receiver to verify the incentive compatibility of signals beforehand, facilitating cooperation. While effective in one-shot scenarios, Bayesian persuasion faces computational complexity (NP-hardness) when extended to long-term interactions, where the receiver may adopt dynamic strategies conditional on past outcomes and future expectations. To address this complexity, we introduce the bargaining perspective, which allows: (1) a unified framework and well-structured solution concept for long-term persuasion, with desirable properties such as fairness and Pareto efficiency; (2) a clear distinction between two previously conflated advantages: the sender's informational advantage and first-proposer advantage. With only modest modifications to the standard setting, this perspective makes explicit the common knowledge of the game structure and grants the receiver comparable commitment capabilities, thereby reinterpreting classic one-sided persuasion as a balanced information bargaining framework. The framework is validated through a two-stage validation-and-inference paradigm: We first demonstrate that GPT-o3 and DeepSeek-R1, out of publicly available LLMs, reliably handle standard tasks; We then apply them to persuasion scenarios to test that the outcomes align with what our information-bargaining framework suggests. All code, results, and terminal logs are publicly available at github.com/YueLin301/InformationBargaining.

TextAtari: 100K Frames Game Playing with Language Agents

We present TextAtari, a benchmark for evaluating language agents on very long-horizon decision-making tasks spanning up to 100,000 steps. By translating the visual state representations of classic Atari games into rich textual descriptions, TextAtari creates a challenging test bed that bridges sequential decision-making with natural language processing. The benchmark includes nearly 100 distinct tasks with varying complexity, action spaces, and planning horizons, all rendered as text through an unsupervised representation learning framework (AtariARI). We evaluate three open-source large language models (Qwen2.5-7B, Gemma-7B, and Llama3.1-8B) across three agent frameworks (zero-shot, few-shot chain-of-thought, and reflection reasoning) to assess how different forms of prior knowledge affect performance on these long-horizon challenges. Four scenarios-Basic, Obscured, Manual Augmentation, and Reference-based-investigate the impact of semantic understanding, instruction comprehension, and expert demonstrations on agent decision-making. Our results reveal significant performance gaps between language agents and human players in extensive planning tasks, highlighting challenges in sequential reasoning, state tracking, and strategic planning across tens of thousands of steps. TextAtari provides standardized evaluation protocols, baseline implementations, and a framework for advancing research at the intersection of language models and planning.

Hybrid Learning for Cold-Start-Aware Microservice Scheduling in Dynamic Edge Environments

With the rapid growth of IoT devices and their diverse workloads, container-based microservices deployed at edge nodes have become a lightweight and scalable solution. However, existing microservice scheduling algorithms often assume static resource availability, which is unrealistic when multiple containers are assigned to an edge node. Besides, containers suffer from cold-start inefficiencies during early-stage training in currently popular reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. In this paper, we propose a hybrid learning framework that combines offline imitation learning (IL) with online Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) optimization to enable a cold-start-aware microservice scheduling with dynamic allocation for computing resources. We first formulate a delay-and-energy-aware scheduling problem and construct a rule-based expert to generate demonstration data for behavior cloning. Then, a GRU-enhanced policy network is designed in the policy network to extract the correlation among multiple decisions by separately encoding slow-evolving node states and fast-changing microservice features, and an action selection mechanism is given to speed up the convergence. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly accelerates convergence and achieves superior final performance. Compared with baselines, our algorithm improves the total objective by $50\%$ and convergence speed by $70\%$, and demonstrates the highest stability and robustness across various edge configurations.

Reinforced Reasoning for Embodied Planning

Embodied planning requires agents to make coherent multi-step decisions based on dynamic visual observations and natural language goals. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) excel at static perception tasks, they struggle with the temporal reasoning, spatial understanding, and commonsense grounding needed for planning in interactive environments. In this work, we introduce a reinforcement fine-tuning framework that brings R1-style reasoning enhancement into embodied planning. We first distill a high-quality dataset from a powerful closed-source model and perform supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to equip the model with structured decision-making priors. We then design a rule-based reward function tailored to multi-step action quality and optimize the policy via Generalized Reinforced Preference Optimization (GRPO). Our approach is evaluated on Embench, a recent benchmark for interactive embodied tasks, covering both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms models of similar or larger scale, including GPT-4o-mini and 70B+ open-source baselines, and exhibits strong generalization to unseen environments. This work highlights the potential of reinforcement-driven reasoning to advance long-horizon planning in embodied AI.

Where Paths Collide: A Comprehensive Survey of Classic and Learning-Based Multi-Agent Pathfinding

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a fundamental problem in artificial intelligence and robotics, requiring the computation of collision-free paths for multiple agents navigating from their start locations to designated goals. As autonomous systems become increasingly prevalent in warehouses, urban transportation, and other complex environments, MAPF has evolved from a theoretical challenge to a critical enabler of real-world multi-robot coordination. This comprehensive survey bridges the long-standing divide between classical algorithmic approaches and emerging learning-based methods in MAPF research. We present a unified framework that encompasses search-based methods (including Conflict-Based Search, Priority-Based Search, and Large Neighborhood Search), compilation-based approaches (SAT, SMT, CSP, ASP, and MIP formulations), and data-driven techniques (reinforcement learning, supervised learning, and hybrid strategies). Through systematic analysis of experimental practices across 200+ papers, we uncover significant disparities in evaluation methodologies, with classical methods typically tested on larger-scale instances (up to 200 by 200 grids with 1000+ agents) compared to learning-based approaches (predominantly 10-100 agents). We provide a comprehensive taxonomy of evaluation metrics, environment types, and baseline selections, highlighting the need for standardized benchmarking protocols. Finally, we outline promising future directions including mixed-motive MAPF with game-theoretic considerations, language-grounded planning with large language models, and neural solver architectures that combine the rigor of classical methods with the flexibility of deep learning. This survey serves as both a comprehensive reference for researchers and a practical guide for deploying MAPF solutions in increasingly complex real-world applications.

Teaching Large Language Models to Maintain Contextual Faithfulness via Synthetic Tasks and Reinforcement Learning

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to be faithful in the provided context is crucial for building reliable information-seeking systems. Therefore, we propose a systematic framework, CANOE, to improve the faithfulness of LLMs in both short-form and long-form generation tasks without human annotations. Specifically, we first synthesize short-form question-answering (QA) data with four diverse tasks to construct high-quality and easily verifiable training data without human annotation. Also, we propose Dual-GRPO, a rule-based reinforcement learning method that includes three tailored rule-based rewards derived from synthesized short-form QA data, while simultaneously optimizing both short-form and long-form response generation. Notably, Dual-GRPO eliminates the need to manually label preference data to train reward models and avoids over-optimizing short-form generation when relying only on the synthesized short-form QA data. Experimental results show that CANOE greatly improves the faithfulness of LLMs across 11 different downstream tasks, even outperforming the most advanced LLMs, e.g., GPT-4o and OpenAI o1.