VC-Soup: Value-Consistency Guided Multi-Value Alignment for Large Language Models

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly shape content generation, interaction, and decision-making across the Web, aligning them with human values has become a central objective in trustworthy AI. This challenge becomes even more pronounced when aligning multiple, potentially conflicting human values. Although recent approaches, such as reward reweighting, prompt-based supervised fine-tuning, and model merging, attempt to tackle multi-value alignment, they still face two major limitations: (1) training separate models for each value combination is prohibitively expensive; (2) value conflicts substantially degrade alignment performance. These limitations make it difficult to achieve favorable trade-offs across diverse human values. To address these challenges, we revisit multi-value alignment from the perspective of value consistency in data and propose VC-soup, a data filtering and parameter merging framework grounded in value-consistent learning. We first design a value consistency metric based on the cosine similarity between the reward-gap vector of each preference pair and an all-ones vector, which quantifies its cross-value coherence. We then filter out low-consistency preference pairs in each value dataset and train on the remaining data to obtain smooth, value-consistent policy models that better preserve linear mode connectivity. Finally, we linearly combine these policies and apply Pareto filtering across values to obtain solutions with balanced multi-value performance. Extensive experiments and theoretical analysis demonstrate that VC-soup effectively mitigates conflicts and consistently outperforms existing multi-value alignment methods.

AsgardBench - Evaluating Visually Grounded Interactive Planning Under Minimal Feedback

With AsgardBench we aim to evaluate visually grounded, high-level action sequence generation and interactive planning, focusing specifically on plan adaptation during execution based on visual observations rather than navigation or low-level manipulation. In the landscape of embodied AI benchmarks, AsgardBench targets the capability category of interactive planning, which is more sophisticated than offline high-level planning as it requires agents to revise plans in response to environmental feedback, yet remains distinct from low-level execution. Unlike prior embodied AI benchmarks that conflate reasoning with navigation or provide rich corrective feedback that substitutes for perception, AsgardBench restricts agent input to images, action history, and lightweight success/failure signals, isolating interactive planning in a controlled simulator without low-level control noise. The benchmark contains 108 task instances spanning 12 task types, each systematically varied through object state, placement, and scene configuration. These controlled variations create conditional branches in which a single instruction can require different action sequences depending on what the agent observes, emphasizing conditional branching and plan repair during execution. Our evaluations of leading vision language models show that performance drops sharply without visual input, revealing weaknesses in visual grounding and state tracking that ultimately undermine interactive planning. Our benchmark zeroes in on a narrower question: can a model actually use what it sees to adapt a plan when things do not go as expected?

Exposing Cross-Modal Consistency for Fake News Detection in Short-Form Videos

Short-form video platforms are major channels for news but also fertile ground for multimodal misinformation where each modality appears plausible alone yet cross-modal relationships are subtly inconsistent, like mismatched visuals and captions. On two benchmark datasets, FakeSV (Chinese) and FakeTT (English), we observe a clear asymmetry: real videos exhibit high text-visual but moderate text-audio consistency, while fake videos show the opposite pattern. Moreover, a single global consistency score forms an interpretable axis along which fake probability and prediction errors vary smoothly. Motivated by these observations, we present MAGIC3 (Modal-Adversarial Gated Interaction and Consistency-Centric Classifier), a detector that explicitly models and exposes cross-tri-modal consistency signals at multiple granularities. MAGIC3 combines explicit pairwise and global consistency modeling with token- and frame-level consistency signals derived from cross-modal attention, incorporates multi-style LLM rewrites to obtain style-robust text representations, and employs an uncertainty-aware classifier for selective VLM routing. Using pre-extracted features, MAGIC3 consistently outperforms the strongest non-VLM baselines on FakeSV and FakeTT. While matching VLM-level accuracy, the two-stage system achieves 18-27x higher throughput and 93% VRAM savings, offering a strong cost-performance tradeoff.

R3-REC: Reasoning-Driven Recommendation via Retrieval-Augmented LLMs over Multi-Granular Interest Signals

This paper addresses two persistent challenges in sequential recommendation: (i) evidence insufficiency-cold-start sparsity together with noisy, length-varying item texts; and (ii) opaque modeling of dynamic, multi-faceted intents across long/short horizons. We propose R3-REC (Reasoning-Retrieval-Recommendation), a prompt-centric, retrieval-augmented framework that unifies Multi-level User Intent Reasoning, Item Semantic Extraction, Long-Short Interest Polarity Mining, Similar User Collaborative Enhancement, and Reasoning-based Interest Matching and Scoring. Across ML-1M, Games, and Bundle, R3-REC consistently surpasses strong neural and LLM baselines, yielding improvements up to +10.2% (HR@1) and +6.4% (HR@5) with manageable end-to-end latency. Ablations corroborate complementary gains of all modules.

Senna-2: Aligning VLM and End-to-End Driving Policy for Consistent Decision Making and Planning

Vision-language models (VLMs) enhance the planning capability of end-to-end (E2E) driving policy by leveraging high-level semantic reasoning. However, existing approaches often overlook the dual-system consistency between VLM's high-level decision and E2E's low-level planning. As a result, the generated trajectories may misalign with the intended driving decisions, leading to weakened top-down guidance and decision-following ability of the system. To address this issue, we propose Senna-2, an advanced VLM-E2E driving policy that explicitly aligns the two systems for consistent decision-making and planning. Our method follows a consistency-oriented three-stage training paradigm. In the first stage, we conduct driving pre-training to achieve preliminary decision-making and planning, with a decision adapter transmitting VLM decisions to E2E policy in the form of implicit embeddings. In the second stage, we align the VLM and the E2E policy in an open-loop setting. In the third stage, we perform closed-loop alignment via bottom-up Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning in 3DGS environments to reinforce the safety and efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Senna-2 achieves superior dual-system consistency (19.3% F1 score improvement) and significantly enhances driving safety in both open-loop (5.7% FDE reduction) and closed-loop settings (30.6% AF-CR reduction).

InfinityStory: Unlimited Video Generation with World Consistency and Character-Aware Shot Transitions

Generating long-form storytelling videos with consistent visual narratives remains a significant challenge in video synthesis. We present a novel framework, dataset, and a model that address three critical limitations: background consistency across shots, seamless multi-subject shot-to-shot transitions, and scalability to hour-long narratives. Our approach introduces a background-consistent generation pipeline that maintains visual coherence across scenes while preserving character identity and spatial relationships. We further propose a transition-aware video synthesis module that generates smooth shot transitions for complex scenarios involving multiple subjects entering or exiting frames, going beyond the single-subject limitations of prior work. To support this, we contribute with a synthetic dataset of 10,000 multi-subject transition sequences covering underrepresented dynamic scene compositions. On VBench, InfinityStory achieves the highest Background Consistency (88.94), highest Subject Consistency (82.11), and the best overall average rank (2.80), showing improved stability, smoother transitions, and better temporal coherence.

MAGE: Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Language Agents toward Strategic Exploration and Exploitation

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in learned tasks, yet they often struggle to adapt to non-stationary environments with feedback. While In-Context Learning and external memory offer some flexibility, they fail to internalize the adaptive ability required for long-term improvement. Meta-Reinforcement Learning (meta-RL) provides an alternative by embedding the learning process directly within the model. However, existing meta-RL approaches for LLMs focus primarily on exploration in single-agent settings, neglecting the strategic exploitation necessary for multi-agent environments. We propose MAGE, a meta-RL framework that empowers LLM agents for strategic exploration and exploitation. MAGE utilizes a multi-episode training regime where interaction histories and reflections are integrated into the context window. By using the final episode reward as the objective, MAGE incentivizes the agent to refine its strategy based on past experiences. We further combine population-based training with an agent-specific advantage normalization technique to enrich agent diversity and ensure stable learning. Experiment results show that MAGE outperforms existing baselines in both exploration and exploitation tasks. Furthermore, MAGE exhibits strong generalization to unseen opponents, suggesting it has internalized the ability for strategic exploration and exploitation. Code is available at https://github.com/Lu-Yang666/MAGE.

Spatial Causal Prediction in Video

Spatial reasoning, the ability to understand spatial relations, causality, and dynamic evolution, is central to human intelligence and essential for real-world applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. Existing studies, however, primarily assess models on visible spatio-temporal understanding, overlooking their ability to infer unseen past or future spatial states. In this work, we introduce Spatial Causal Prediction (SCP), a new task paradigm that challenges models to reason beyond observation and predict spatial causal outcomes. We further construct SCP-Bench, a benchmark comprising 2,500 QA pairs across 1,181 videos spanning diverse viewpoints, scenes, and causal directions, to support systematic evaluation. Through comprehensive experiments on {23} state-of-the-art models, we reveal substantial gaps between human and model performance, limited temporal extrapolation, and weak causal grounding. We further analyze key factors influencing performance and propose perception-enhancement and reasoning-guided strategies toward advancing spatial causal intelligence. The project page is https://guangstrip.github.io/SCP-Bench.

GraphScout: Empowering Large Language Models with Intrinsic Exploration Ability for Agentic Graph Reasoning

Knowledge graphs provide structured and reliable information for many real-world applications, motivating increasing interest in combining large language models (LLMs) with graph-based retrieval to improve factual grounding. Recent Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) methods therefore introduce iterative interaction between LLMs and knowledge graphs to enhance reasoning capability. However, existing approaches typically depend on manually designed guidance and interact with knowledge graphs through a limited set of predefined tools, which substantially constrains graph exploration. To address these limitations, we propose GraphScout, a training-centric agentic graph reasoning framework equipped with more flexible graph exploration tools. GraphScout enables models to autonomously interact with knowledge graphs to synthesize structured training data which are then used to post-train LLMs, thereby internalizing agentic graph reasoning ability without laborious manual annotation or task curation. Extensive experiments across five knowledge-graph domains show that a small model (e.g., Qwen3-4B) augmented with GraphScout outperforms baseline methods built on leading LLMs (e.g., Qwen-Max) by an average of 16.7\% while requiring significantly fewer inference tokens. Moreover, GraphScout exhibits robust cross-domain transfer performance. Our code will be made publicly available~\footnote{https://github.com/Ying-Yuchen/_GraphScout_}.

CLEAR: Null-Space Projection for Cross-Modal De-Redundancy in Multimodal Recommendation

Multimodal recommendation has emerged as an effective paradigm for enhancing collaborative filtering by incorporating heterogeneous content modalities. Existing multimodal recommenders predominantly focus on reinforcing cross-modal consistency to facilitate multimodal fusion. However, we observe that multimodal representations often exhibit substantial cross-modal redundancy, where dominant shared components overlap across modalities. Such redundancy can limit the effective utilization of complementary information, explaining why incorporating additional modalities does not always yield performance improvements. In this work, we propose CLEAR, a lightweight and plug-and-play cross-modal de-redundancy approach for multimodal recommendation. Rather than enforcing stronger cross-modal alignment, CLEAR explicitly characterizes the redundant shared subspace across modalities by modeling cross-modal covariance between visual and textual representations. By identifying dominant shared directions via singular value decomposition and projecting multimodal features onto the complementary null space, CLEAR reshapes the multimodal representation space by suppressing redundant cross-modal components while preserving modality-specific information. This subspace-level projection implicitly regulates representation learning dynamics, preventing the model from repeatedly amplifying redundant shared semantics during training. Notably, CLEAR can be seamlessly integrated into existing multimodal recommenders without modifying their architectures or training objectives. Extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that explicitly reducing cross-modal redundancy consistently improves recommendation performance across a wide range of multimodal recommendation models.