SG-WAM: Self-Guided World Modeling in Geometry-Aware Policy Space

World Action Models (WAMs) couple action generation with prediction of future states. Their effectiveness depends on whether future dynamics are modeled in a space that is both aligned with action generation and sufficiently geometry-aware to capture where and how actions change the scene. Existing WAMs typically satisfy only part of this requirement, relying on either perceptually heavy observation-space targets or auxiliary latent spaces that are not jointly structured for action relevance and geometry. We propose SG-WAM, a self-guided framework that learns geometry-aware action-conditioned dynamics directly in the policy-derived representation space. SG-WAM introduces learnable dynamics tokens and a Self-Guided World Predictor that forecasts their future latent states conditioned on intervening robot actions. Prediction targets are generated by an exponential moving average copy of the same policy backbone, providing stable supervision within the representation family used by the action expert. Geometric supervision further structures the policy image-token representations, providing spatially grounded context for the dynamics tokens and yielding a future-alignment space that is both action-relevant and geometry-aware. Latent future prediction, geometric grounding, and flow-matching action generation are jointly optimized end-to-end in a unified framework. Built on a 0.9B model without large-scale embodied pretraining, SG-WAM achieves 98.5% average success on LIBERO and 73% on LIBERO-Plus, while outperforming strong baselines in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution real-world evaluations.

CARA: Concept-Aware Risk Attention for Interpretable Collision Anticipation

Collision anticipation in autonomous driving requires not only accurate early warnings but also interpretable reasoning about what risk factors are being tracked and how risk evolves over time. Existing methods fall short in this regard: feature-driven models are opaque, post-hoc explanations often lack fidelity, and concept-based methods are mostly designed for static recognition rather than dynamic driving scenes. We propose CARA (Concept-Aware Risk Attention), an intrinsically interpretable spatio-temporal framework for collision anticipation. CARA derives domain-grounded risk concepts from accident narratives, aligns them with video frames via vision-language similarity, and organizes them into evolving concept trajectories. These trajectories provide explicit risk evidence that guides spatial attention, temporal attention, and anticipation, allowing semantic concepts to directly influence both where the model attends and how it predicts risk over time. By treating semantic risk factors as dynamic intermediate evidence rather than auxiliary post-hoc explanations, CARA tightly couples interpretability with the predictive process. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks show that CARA consistently improves anticipation accuracy and warning earliness over strong baselines, while providing sparse and semantically grounded concept evidence.

SciText2Eq: Assessing LLMs for Explainable Equation Generation for Scientific Creativity

This work investigates the ability of large language models (LLMs) to generate mathematical equations from scientific texts. Prior work faces challenges in unstructured grounding, multi-equation dependency, and humanaligned evaluation. To this end, we construct a dataset of AI research papers, pairing contextual passages with ground-truth equations and variable descriptions. We develop an explainable equation generation workflow and evaluate it across diverse open- and closed-source LLM backbones. We introduce an evaluation protocol combining automatic metrics, LLM-based rubrics, and human judgments to assess accuracy, explainability, and human-LLM alignment. Results indicate that LLMs perform moderately on lexical- and syntactic-based similarity, while struggling with semantic accuracy. Comparisons between LLM-based evaluations and human judgments reveal limited alignment, highlighting challenges in using LLMs to assess equation quality. These findings offer insights for improving equation generation models and developing more reliable evaluation methods for scientific text. We provide code and data for reproducibility.

Towards Generalist Game Players: An Investigation of Foundation Models in the Game Multiverse

The real world unfolds along a single set of physics laws, yet human intelligence demonstrates a remarkable capacity to generalize experiences from this singular physical existence into a multiverse of games, each governed by entirely different rules, aesthetics, physics, and objectives. This omni-reality adaptability is a hallmark of general intelligence. As Artificial Intelligence progresses towards Artificial General Intelligence, the multiverse of games has evolved from mere entertainment into the ultimate ground for training and evaluating AGI. The pursuit of this generality has unfolded across four eras: from environment-specific symbolic and reinforcement learning agents, to current large foundation models acting as generalist players, and toward a future creator stage where agent both creates new game worlds and continually evolves within them. We trace the full lifecycle of a generalist game player along four interdependent pillars: Dataset, Model, Harness, and Benchmark. Every advance across these pillars can be read as an attempt to break one of five fundamental trade-offs that currently bound the whole system. Building on this end-to-end view, we chart a five-level roadmap, progressing from single-game mastery to the ultimate creator stage in which the agent simultaneously creates and evolves within theoretical game multiverse. Taken together, our work offers a unified lens onto a rapidly shifting field,and a principled path toward the omnipotent generalist agent capable of seamlessly mastering any challenge within the multiverse of games, thereby paving the way for AGI.

ClawTrace: Cost-Aware Tracing for LLM Agent Skill Distillation

Skill-distillation pipelines learn reusable rules from LLM agent trajectories, but they lack a key signal: how much each step costs. Without per-step cost, a pipeline cannot distinguish adding a missing step to fix a bug from removing an expensive step that never affected the outcome. We introduce ClawTrace, an agent tracing platform that records every LLM call, tool use, and sub-agent spawn during an agent session and compiles each session into a TraceCard: a compact YAML summary with per-step USD cost, token counts, and redundancy flags. Built on ClawTrace, CostCraft is a distillation pipeline that reads TraceCards and produces three types of skill patches. Preserve patches keep behaviors that led to success. Prune patches remove expensive steps that did not matter, each backed by a counterfactual argument against a named high-cost step. Repair patches fix failures grounded in oracle evidence. Ablations on 30 held-out SpreadsheetBench tasks show that both cost attribution and prune patches independently reduce quality regressions. When the same skill is applied to 30 unrelated SkillsBench tasks, an unexpected asymmetry emerges: prune rules transferred across benchmarks and cut median cost by 32%, while preserve rules, trained on benchmark-specific conventions, caused regressions on new task types. We release ClawTrace and TraceCards as open infrastructure for cost-aware agent research.

Aligning Human-AI-Interaction Trust for Mental Health Support: Survey and Position for Multi-Stakeholders

Building trustworthy AI systems for mental health support is a shared priority across stakeholders from multiple disciplines. However, "trustworthy" remains loosely defined and inconsistently operationalized. AI research often focuses on technical criteria (e.g., robustness, explainability, and safety), while therapeutic practitioners emphasize therapeutic fidelity (e.g., appropriateness, empathy, and long-term user outcomes). To bridge the fragmented landscape, we propose a three-layer trust framework, covering human-oriented, AI-oriented, and interaction-oriented trust, integrating the viewpoints of key stakeholders (e.g., practitioners, researchers, regulators). Using this framework, we systematically review existing AI-driven research in mental health domain and examine evaluation practices for ``trustworthy'' ranging from automatic metrics to clinically validated approaches. We highlight critical gaps between what NLP currently measures and what real-world mental health contexts require, and outline a research agenda for building socio-technically aligned and genuinely trustworthy AI for mental health support.

Diagnosing Retrieval vs. Utilization Bottlenecks in LLM Agent Memory

Memory-augmented LLM agents store and retrieve information from prior interactions, yet the relative importance of how memories are written versus how they are retrieved remains unclear. We introduce a diagnostic framework that analyzes how performance differences manifest across write strategies, retrieval methods, and memory utilization behavior, and apply it to a 3x3 study crossing three write strategies (raw chunks, Mem0-style fact extraction, MemGPT-style summarization) with three retrieval methods (cosine, BM25, hybrid reranking). On LoCoMo, retrieval method is the dominant factor: average accuracy spans 20 points across retrieval methods (57.1% to 77.2%) but only 3-8 points across write strategies. Raw chunked storage, which requires zero LLM calls, matches or outperforms expensive lossy alternatives, suggesting that current memory pipelines may discard useful context that downstream retrieval mechanisms fail to compensate for. Failure analysis shows that performance breakdowns most often manifest at the retrieval stage rather than at utilization. We argue that, under current retrieval practices, improving retrieval quality yields larger gains than increasing write-time sophistication. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/boqiny/memory-probe.

World Guidance: World Modeling in Condition Space for Action Generation

Leveraging future observation modeling to facilitate action generation presents a promising avenue for enhancing the capabilities of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, existing approaches struggle to strike a balance between maintaining efficient, predictable future representations and preserving sufficient fine-grained information to guide precise action generation. To address this limitation, we propose WoG (World Guidance), a framework that maps future observations into compact conditions by injecting them into the action inference pipeline. The VLA is then trained to simultaneously predict these compressed conditions alongside future actions, thereby achieving effective world modeling within the condition space for action inference. We demonstrate that modeling and predicting this condition space not only facilitates fine-grained action generation but also exhibits superior generalization capabilities. Moreover, it learns effectively from substantial human manipulation videos. Extensive experiments across both simulation and real-world environments validate that our method significantly outperforms existing methods based on future prediction. Project page is available at: https://selen-suyue.github.io/WoGNet/

NeuroWise: A Multi-Agent LLM "Glass-Box" System for Practicing Double-Empathy Communication with Autistic Partners

The double empathy problem frames communication difficulties between neurodivergent and neurotypical individuals as arising from mutual misunderstanding, yet most interventions focus on autistic individuals. We present NeuroWise, a multi-agent LLM-based coaching system that supports neurotypical users through stress visualization, interpretation of internal experiences, and contextual guidance. In a between-subjects study (N=30), NeuroWise was rated as helpful by all participants and showed a significant condition-time effect on deficit-based attributions (p=0.02): NeuroWise users reduced deficit framing, while baseline users shifted toward blaming autistic "deficits" after difficult interactions. NeuroWise users also completed conversations more efficiently (37% fewer turns, p=0.03). These findings suggest that AI-based interpretation can support attributional change by helping users recognize communication challenges as mutual.

Combinatorial Optimization Augmented Machine Learning

Combinatorial optimization augmented machine learning (COAML) has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for integrating predictive models with combinatorial decision-making. By embedding combinatorial optimization oracles into learning pipelines, COAML enables the construction of policies that are both data-driven and feasibility-preserving, bridging the traditions of machine learning, operations research, and stochastic optimization. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in COAML. We introduce a unifying framework for COAML pipelines, describe their methodological building blocks, and formalize their connection to empirical cost minimization. We then develop a taxonomy of problem settings based on the form of uncertainty and decision structure. Using this taxonomy, we review algorithmic approaches for static and dynamic problems, survey applications across domains such as scheduling, vehicle routing, stochastic programming, and reinforcement learning, and synthesize methodological contributions in terms of empirical cost minimization, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning. Finally, we identify key research frontiers. This survey aims to serve both as a tutorial introduction to the field and as a roadmap for future research at the interface of combinatorial optimization and machine learning.