ToolMisuseBench: An Offline Deterministic Benchmark for Tool Misuse and Recovery in Agentic Systems

Tool using agents often fail for operational reasons even when language understanding is strong. Common causes include invalid arguments, interface drift, weak recovery, and inefficient retry behavior. We introduce ToolMisuseBench, an offline deterministic benchmark for evaluating tool misuse and recovery under explicit step, call, and retry budgets. The benchmark covers CRUD, retrieval, file, and scheduling environments with replayable fault injection. It reports success, invalid call behavior, policy violations, recovery quality, and budgeted efficiency. We release a public dataset with 6800 tasks and a reproducible evaluation pipeline. Baseline results show fault specific recovery gains for schema aware methods, while overall success remains limited under the released authorization and hard failure settings.

PhiNet: Speaker Verification with Phonetic Interpretability

Despite remarkable progress, automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems typically lack the transparency required for high-accountability applications. Motivated by how human experts perform forensic speaker comparison (FSC), we propose a speaker verification network with phonetic interpretability, PhiNet, designed to enhance both local and global interpretability by leveraging phonetic evidence in decision-making. For users, PhiNet provides detailed phonetic-level comparisons that enable manual inspection of speaker-specific features and facilitate a more critical evaluation of verification outcomes. For developers, it offers explicit reasoning behind verification decisions, simplifying error tracing and informing hyperparameter selection. In our experiments, we demonstrate PhiNet's interpretability with practical examples, including its application in analyzing the impact of different hyperparameters. We conduct both qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the proposed interpretability methods and assess speaker verification performance across multiple benchmark datasets, including VoxCeleb, SITW, and LibriSpeech. Results show that PhiNet achieves performance comparable to traditional black-box ASV models while offering meaningful, interpretable explanations for its decisions, bridging the gap between ASV and forensic analysis.

Posterior Optimization with Clipped Objective for Bridging Efficiency and Stability in Generative Policy Learning

Expressive generative models have advanced robotic manipulation by capturing complex, multi-modal action distributions over temporally extended trajectories. However, fine-tuning these policies via RL remains challenging due to instability and sample inefficiency. We introduce Posterior Optimization with Clipped Objective (POCO), a principled RL framework that formulates policy improvement as a posterior inference problem tailored for temporal action chunks. Through an Expectation-Maximization procedure, POCO distills a reward-weighted implicit posterior into the policy without likelihood estimation. Furthermore, POCO adopts an offline-to-online paradigm that anchors online exploration to pre-trained priors, and its model-agnostic design scales to fine-tune large VLA models without architectural modifications. Evaluations across 7 simulation benchmarks and 4 contact-rich real-world tasks demonstrate that POCO prevents catastrophic policy collapse, outperforms SOTA baselines, and achieves a 96.7% success rate on real-world tasks. Videos are available at our project website https://cccedric.github.io/poco/.

NED-Tree: Bridging the Semantic Gap with Nonlinear Element Decomposition Tree for LLM Nonlinear Optimization Modeling

Automating the translation of Operations Research (OR) problems from natural language to executable models is a critical challenge. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in linear tasks, they suffer from severe performance degradation in real-world nonlinear scenarios due to semantic misalignment between mathematical formulations and solver codes, as well as unstable information extraction. In this study, we introduce NED-Tree, a systematic framework designed to bridge the semantic gap. NED-Tree employs (a) a sentence-by-sentence extraction strategy to ensure robust parameter mapping and traceability; and (b) a recursive tree-based structure that adaptively decomposes complex nonlinear terms into solver-compatible sub-elements. Additionally, we present NEXTOR, a novel benchmark specifically designed for complex nonlinear, extensive-constraint OR problems. Experiments across 10 benchmarks demonstrate that NED-Tree establishes a new state-of-the-art with 72.51% average accuracy, NED-Tree is the first framework that drives LLMs to resolve nonlinear modeling difficulties through element decomposition, achieving alignment between modeling semantics and code semantics. The NED-Tree framework and benchmark are accessible in the anonymous repository https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NORA-NEXTOR.

PHMForge: A Scenario-Driven Agentic Benchmark for Industrial Asset Lifecycle Maintenance

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed for complex tool-orchestration tasks, yet existing benchmarks fail to capture the rigorous demands of industrial domains where incorrect decisions carry significant safety and financial consequences. To address this critical gap, we introduce PHMForge, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLM agents on Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) tasks through realistic interactions with domain-specific MCP servers. Our benchmark encompasses 75 expert-curated scenarios spanning 7 industrial asset classes (turbofan engines, bearings, electric motors, gearboxes, aero-engines) across 5 core task categories: Remaining Useful Life (RUL) Prediction, Fault Classification, Engine Health Analysis, Cost-Benefit Analysis, and Safety/Policy Evaluation. To enable rigorous evaluation, we construct 65 specialized tools across two MCP servers and implement execution-based evaluators with task-commensurate metrics: MAE/RMSE for regression, F1-score for classification, and categorical matching for health assessments. Through extensive evaluation of leading frameworks (ReAct, Cursor Agent, Claude Code) paired with frontier LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.0, GPT-4o, Granite-3.0-8B), we find that even top-performing configurations achieve only 68\% task completion, with systematic failures in tool orchestration (23\% incorrect sequencing), multi-asset reasoning (14.9 percentage point degradation), and cross-equipment generalization (42.7\% on held-out datasets). We open-source our complete benchmark, including scenario specifications, ground truth templates, tool implementations, and evaluation scripts, to catalyze research in agentic industrial AI.

Modulate-and-Map: Crossmodal Feature Mapping with Cross-View Modulation for 3D Anomaly Detection

We present ModMap, a natively multiview and multimodal framework for 3D anomaly detection and segmentation. Unlike existing methods that process views independently, our method draws inspiration from the crossmodal feature mapping paradigm to learn to map features across both modalities and views, while explicitly modelling view-dependent relationships through feature-wise modulation. We introduce a cross-view training strategy that leverages all possible view combinations, enabling effective anomaly scoring through multiview ensembling and aggregation. To process high-resolution 3D data, we train and publicly release a foundational depth encoder tailored to industrial datasets. Experiments on SiM3D, a recent benchmark that introduces the first multiview and multimodal setup for 3D anomaly detection and segmentation, demonstrate that ModMap attains state-of-the-art performance by surpassing previous methods by wide margins.

Batched Contextual Reinforcement: A Task-Scaling Law for Efficient Reasoning

Large Language Models employing Chain-of-Thought reasoning achieve strong performance but suffer from excessive token consumption that inflates inference costs. Existing efficiency methods such as explicit length penalties, difficulty estimators, or multi-stage curricula either degrade reasoning quality or require complex training pipelines. We introduce Batched Contextual Reinforcement, a minimalist, single-stage training paradigm that unlocks efficient reasoning through a simple structural modification: training the model to solve N problems simultaneously within a shared context window, rewarded purely by per-instance accuracy. This formulation creates an implicit token budget that yields several key findings: (1) We identify a novel task-scaling law: as the number of concurrent problems N increases during inference, per-problem token usage decreases monotonically while accuracy degrades far more gracefully than baselines, establishing N as a controllable throughput dimension. (2) BCR challenges the traditional accuracy-efficiency trade-off by demonstrating a "free lunch" phenomenon at standard single-problem inference. Across both 1.5B and 4B model families, BCR reduces token usage by 15.8% to 62.6% while consistently maintaining or improving accuracy across five major mathematical benchmarks. (3) Qualitative analyses reveal emergent self-regulated efficiency, where models autonomously eliminate redundant metacognitive loops without explicit length supervision. (4) Crucially, we empirically demonstrate that implicit budget constraints successfully circumvent the adversarial gradients and catastrophic optimization collapse inherent to explicit length penalties, offering a highly stable, constraint-based alternative for length control. These results prove BCR practical, showing simple structural incentives unlock latent high-density reasoning in LLMs.

A virtual-variable-length method for robust inverse kinematics of multi-segment continuum robots

This paper proposes a new, robust method to solve the inverse kinematics (IK) of multi-segment continuum manipulators. Conventional Jacobian-based solvers, especially when initialized from neutral/rest configurations, often exhibit slow convergence and, in certain conditions, may fail to converge (deadlock). The Virtual-Variable-Length (VVL) method proposed here introduces fictitious variations of segments' length during the solution iteration, conferring virtual axial degrees of freedom that alleviate adverse behaviors and constraints, thus enabling or accelerating convergence. Comprehensive numerical experiments were conducted to compare the VVL method against benchmark Jacobian-based and Damped Least Square IK solvers. Across more than $1.8\times 10^6$ randomized trials covering manipulators with two to seven segments, the proposed approach achieved up to a 20$\%$ increase in convergence success rate over the benchmark and a 40-80$\%$ reduction in average iteration count under equivalent accuracy thresholds ($10^{-4}-10^{-8}$). While deadlocks are not restricted to workspace boundaries and may occur at arbitrary poses, our empirical study identifies boundary-proximal configurations as a frequent cause of failed convergence and the VVL method mitigates such occurrences over a statistical sample of test cases.

UAV-Track VLA: Embodied Aerial Tracking via Vision-Language-Action Models

Embodied visual tracking is crucial for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) executing complex real-world tasks. In dynamic urban scenarios with complex semantic requirements, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show great promise due to their cross-modal fusion and continuous action generation capabilities. To benchmark multimodal tracking in such environments, we construct a dedicated evaluation benchmark and a large-scale dataset encompassing over 890K frames, 176 tasks, and 85 diverse objects. Furthermore, to address temporal feature redundancy and the lack of spatial geometric priors in existing VLA models, we propose an improved VLA tracking model, UAV-Track VLA. Built upon the $π_{0.5}$ architecture, our model introduces a temporal compression net to efficiently capture inter-frame dynamics. Additionally, a parallel dual-branch decoder comprising a spatial-aware auxiliary grounding head and a flow matching action expert is designed to decouple cross-modal features and generate fine-grained continuous actions. Systematic experiments in the CARLA simulator validate the superior end-to-end performance of our method. Notably, in challenging long-distance pedestrian tracking tasks, UAV-Track VLA achieves a 61.76\% success rate and 269.65 average tracking frames, significantly outperforming existing baselines. Furthermore, it demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization in unseen environments and reduces single-step inference latency by 33.4\% (to 0.0571s) compared to the original $π_{0.5}$, enabling highly efficient, real-time UAV control. Data samples and demonstration videos are available at: https://github.com/Hub-Tian/UAV-Track\_VLA.

Do Emotions in Prompts Matter? Effects of Emotional Framing on Large Language Models

Emotional tone is pervasive in human communication, yet its influence on large language model (LLM) behaviour remains unclear. Here, we examine how first-person emotional framing in user-side queries affect LLM performance across six benchmark domains, including mathematical reasoning, medical question answering, reading comprehension, commonsense reasoning and social inference. Across models and tasks, static emotional prefixes usually produce only small changes in accuracy, suggesting that affective phrasing is typically a mild perturbation rather than a reliable general-purpose intervention. This stability is not uniform: effects are more variable in socially grounded tasks, where emotional context more plausibly interacts with interpersonal reasoning. Additional analyses show that stronger emotional wording induces only modest extra change, and that human-written prefixes reproduce the same qualitative pattern as LLM-generated ones. We then introduce EmotionRL, an adaptive emotional prompting framework that selects emotional framing adaptively for each query. Although no single emotion is consistently beneficial, adaptive selection yields more reliable gains than fixed emotional prompting. Together, these findings show that emotional tone is neither a dominant driver of LLM performance nor irrelevant noise, but a weak and input-dependent signal that can be exploited through adaptive control.