Embodied LLMs endow robots with high-level task reasoning, but they cannot reflect on what went wrong or why, turning deployment into a sequence of independent trials where mistakes repeat rather than accumulate into experience. Drawing upon human reflective practitioners, we introduce Reflective Test-Time Planning, which integrates two modes of reflection: \textit{reflection-in-action}, where the agent uses test-time scaling to generate and score multiple candidate actions using internal reflections before execution; and \textit{reflection-on-action}, which uses test-time training to update both its internal reflection model and its action policy based on external reflections after execution. We also include retrospective reflection, allowing the agent to re-evaluate earlier decisions and perform model updates with hindsight for proper long-horizon credit assignment. Experiments on our newly-designed Long-Horizon Household benchmark and MuJoCo Cupboard Fitting benchmark show significant gains over baseline models, with ablative studies validating the complementary roles of reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. Qualitative analyses, including real-robot trials, highlight behavioral correction through reflection.
Classical robotic systems typically rely on custom planners designed for constrained environments. While effective in restricted settings, these systems lack generalization capabilities, limiting the scalability of embodied AI and general-purpose robots. Recent data-driven Vision-Language-Action (VLA) approaches aim to learn policies from large-scale simulation and real-world data. However, the continuous action space of the physical world significantly exceeds the representational capacity of linguistic tokens, making it unclear if scaling data alone can yield general robotic intelligence. To address this gap, we propose ActionReasoning, an LLM-driven framework that performs explicit action reasoning to produce physics-consistent, prior-guided decisions for robotic manipulation. ActionReasoning leverages the physical priors and real-world knowledge already encoded in Large Language Models (LLMs) and structures them within a multi-agent architecture. We instantiate this framework on a tractable case study of brick stacking, where the environment states are assumed to be already accurately measured. The environmental states are then serialized and passed to a multi-agent LLM framework that generates physics-aware action plans. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed multi-agent LLM framework enables stable brick placement while shifting effort from low-level domain-specific coding to high-level tool invocation and prompting, highlighting its potential for broader generalization. This work introduces a promising approach to bridging perception and execution in robotic manipulation by integrating physical reasoning with LLMs.
Qualitative insights from user experiences are critical for informing product and policy decisions, but collecting such data at scale is constrained by the time and availability of experts to conduct semi-structured interviews. Recent work has explored using large language models (LLMs) to automate interviewing, yet existing systems lack a principled mechanism for balancing systematic coverage of predefined topics with adaptive exploration, or the ability to pursue follow-ups, deep dives, and emergent themes that arise organically during conversation. In this work, we formulate adaptive semi-structured interviewing as an optimization problem over the interviewer's behavior. We define interview utility as a trade-off between coverage of a predefined interview topic guide, discovery of relevant emergent themes, and interview cost measured by length. Based on this formulation, we introduce SparkMe, a multi-agent LLM interviewer that performs deliberative planning via simulated conversation rollouts to select questions with high expected utility. We evaluate SparkMe through controlled experiments with LLM-based interviewees, showing that it achieves higher interview utility, improving topic guide coverage (+4.7% over the best baseline) and eliciting richer emergent insights while using fewer conversational turns than prior LLM interviewing approaches. We further validate SparkMe in a user study with 70 participants across 7 professions on the impact of AI on their workflows. Domain experts rate SparkMe as producing high-quality adaptive interviews that surface helpful profession-specific insights not captured by prior approaches. The code, datasets, and evaluation protocols for SparkMe are available as open-source at https://github.com/SALT-NLP/SparkMe.
Agentic systems increasingly rely on reusable procedural capabilities, \textit{a.k.a., agentic skills}, to execute long-horizon workflows reliably. These capabilities are callable modules that package procedural knowledge with explicit applicability conditions, execution policies, termination criteria, and reusable interfaces. Unlike one-off plans or atomic tool calls, skills operate (and often do well) across tasks. This paper maps the skill layer across the full lifecycle (discovery, practice, distillation, storage, composition, evaluation, and update) and introduces two complementary taxonomies. The first is a system-level set of \textbf{seven design patterns} capturing how skills are packaged and executed in practice, from metadata-driven progressive disclosure and executable code skills to self-evolving libraries and marketplace distribution. The second is an orthogonal \textbf{representation $\times$ scope} taxonomy describing what skills \emph{are} (natural language, code, policy, hybrid) and what environments they operate over (web, OS, software engineering, robotics). We analyze the security and governance implications of skill-based agents, covering supply-chain risks, prompt injection via skill payloads, and trust-tiered execution, grounded by a case study of the ClawHavoc campaign in which nearly 1{,}200 malicious skills infiltrated a major agent marketplace, exfiltrating API keys, cryptocurrency wallets, and browser credentials at scale. We further survey deterministic evaluation approaches, anchored by recent benchmark evidence that curated skills can substantially improve agent success rates while self-generated skills may degrade them. We conclude with open challenges toward robust, verifiable, and certifiable skills for real-world autonomous agents.
Evaluating alignment in language models requires testing how they behave under realistic pressure, not just what they claim they would do. While alignment failures increasingly cause real-world harm, comprehensive evaluation frameworks with realistic multi-turn scenarios remain lacking. We introduce an alignment benchmark spanning 904 scenarios across six categories -- Honesty, Safety, Non-Manipulation, Robustness, Corrigibility, and Scheming -- validated as realistic by human raters. Our scenarios place models under conflicting instructions, simulated tool access, and multi-turn escalation to reveal behavioural tendencies that single-turn evaluations miss. Evaluating 24 frontier models using LLM judges validated against human annotations, we find that even top-performing models exhibit gaps in specific categories, while the majority of models show consistent weaknesses across the board. Factor analysis reveals that alignment behaves as a unified construct (analogous to the g-factor in cognitive research) with models scoring high on one category tending to score high on others. We publicly release the benchmark and an interactive leaderboard to support ongoing evaluation, with plans to expand scenarios in areas where we observe persistent weaknesses and to add new models as they are released.
Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as promising candidates for end-to-end autonomous driving. However, these models typically face challenges in inference latency, action precision, and explainability. Existing autoregressive approaches struggle with slow token-by-token generation, while prior diffusion-based planners often rely on verbose, general-purpose language tokens that lack explicit geometric structure. In this work, we propose Masked Vision-Language-Action Diffusion for Autonomous Driving (MVLAD-AD), a novel framework designed to bridge the gap between efficient planning and semantic explainability via a masked vision-language-action diffusion model. Unlike methods that force actions into the language space, we introduce a discrete action tokenization strategy that constructs a compact codebook of kinematically feasible waypoints from real-world driving distributions. Moreover, we propose geometry-aware embedding learning to ensure that embeddings in the latent space approximate physical geometric metrics. Finally, an action-priority decoding strategy is introduced to prioritize trajectory generation. Extensive experiments on nuScenes and derived benchmarks demonstrate that MVLAD-AD achieves superior efficiency and outperforms state-of-the-art autoregressive and diffusion baselines in planning precision, while providing high-fidelity and explainable reasoning.
The Stop-Think-AutoRegress Language Diffusion Model (STAR-LDM) integrates latent diffusion planning with autoregressive generation. Unlike conventional autoregressive language models limited to token-by-token decisions, STAR-LDM incorporates a "thinking" phase that pauses generation to refine a semantic plan through diffusion before continuing. This enables global planning in continuous space prior to committing to discrete tokens. Evaluations show STAR-LDM significantly outperforms similar-sized models on language understanding benchmarks and achieves $>70\%$ win rates in LLM-as-judge comparisons for narrative coherence and commonsense reasoning. The architecture also allows straightforward control through lightweight classifiers, enabling fine-grained steering of attributes without model retraining while maintaining better fluency-control trade-offs than specialized approaches.
Existing Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents operate through step-by-step calls to vision language models--taking a screenshot, reasoning about the next action, executing it, then repeating on the new page--resulting in high costs and latency that scale with the number of reasoning steps, and limited accuracy due to no persistent memory of previously visited pages. We propose ActionEngine, a training-free framework that transitions from reactive execution to programmatic planning through a novel two-agent architecture: a Crawling Agent that constructs an updatable state-machine memory of the GUIs through offline exploration, and an Execution Agent that leverages this memory to synthesize complete, executable Python programs for online task execution. To ensure robustness against evolving interfaces, execution failures trigger a vision-based re-grounding fallback that repairs the failed action and updates the memory. This design drastically improves both efficiency and accuracy: on Reddit tasks from the WebArena benchmark, our agent achieves 95% task success with on average a single LLM call, compared to 66% for the strongest vision-only baseline, while reducing cost by 11.8x and end-to-end latency by 2x. Together, these components yield scalable and reliable GUI interaction by combining global programmatic planning, crawler-validated action templates, and node-level execution with localized validation and repair.
Visual navigation typically assumes the existence of at least one obstacle-free path between start and goal, which must be discovered/planned by the robot. However, in real-world scenarios, such as home environments and warehouses, clutter can block all routes. Targeted at such cases, we introduce the Lifelong Interactive Navigation problem, where a mobile robot with manipulation abilities can move clutter to forge its own path to complete sequential object- placement tasks - each involving placing an given object (eg. Alarm clock, Pillow) onto a target object (eg. Dining table, Desk, Bed). To address this lifelong setting - where effects of environment changes accumulate and have long-term effects - we propose an LLM-driven, constraint-based planning framework with active perception. Our framework allows the LLM to reason over a structured scene graph of discovered objects and obstacles, deciding which object to move, where to place it, and where to look next to discover task-relevant information. This coupling of reasoning and active perception allows the agent to explore the regions expected to contribute to task completion rather than exhaustively mapping the environment. A standard motion planner then executes the corresponding navigate-pick-place, or detour sequence, ensuring reliable low-level control. Evaluated in physics-enabled ProcTHOR-10k simulator, our approach outperforms non-learning and learning-based baselines. We further demonstrate our approach qualitatively on real-world hardware.
Synthetic human mobility generation is gaining traction as an ethical and practical approach to supporting the data needs of intelligent urban systems. Existing methods perform well primarily in data-rich cities, while their effectiveness declines significantly in cities with limited data resources. However, the ability to generate reliable human mobility data should not depend on a city's size or available resources, all cities deserve equal consideration. To address this open issue, we propose UniMob, a unified human mobility generation model across cities. UniMob is composed of three main components: an LLM-powered travel planner that derives high-level, temporally-aware, and semantically meaningful travel plans; a unified spatial embedding module that projects the spatial regions of various cities into a shared representation space; and a diffusion-based mobility generator that captures the joint spatiotemporal characteristics of human movement, guided by the derived travel plans. We evaluate UniMob extensively using two real-world datasets covering five cities. Comprehensive experiments show that UniMob significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving improvements of over 30\% across multiple evaluation metrics. Further analysis demonstrates UniMob's robustness in both zero- and few-shot scenarios, underlines the importance of LLM guidance, verifies its privacy-preserving nature, and showcases its applicability for downstream tasks.
Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are widely deployed across diverse applications due to their mobility and agility. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a transformative opportunity to enhance UAV intelligence beyond conventional optimization-based and learning-based approaches. By integrating LLMs into UAV systems, advanced environmental understanding, swarm coordination, mobility optimization, and high-level task reasoning can be achieved, thereby allowing more adaptive and context-aware aerial operations. This survey systematically explores the intersection of LLMs and UAV technologies and proposes a unified framework that consolidates existing architectures, methodologies, and applications for UAVs. We first present a structured taxonomy of LLM adaptation techniques for UAVs, including pretraining, fine-tuning, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and prompt engineering, along with key reasoning capabilities such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and In-Context Learning (ICL). We then examine LLM-assisted UAV communications and operations, covering navigation, mission planning, swarm control, safety, autonomy, and network management. After that, the survey further discusses Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) for human-swarm interaction, perception-driven navigation, and collaborative control. Finally, we address ethical considerations, including bias, transparency, accountability, and Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) strategies, and outline future research directions. Overall, this work positions LLM-assisted UAVs as a foundation for intelligent and adaptive aerial systems.
Diverse and controllable scenario generation (e.g., wind, solar, load, etc.) is critical for robust power system planning and operation. As AI-based scenario generation methods are becoming the mainstream, existing methods (e.g., Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets) mainly rely on a fixed-length numerical conditioning vector to control the generation results, facing challenges in user conveniency and generation flexibility. In this paper, a natural-language-guided scenario generation framework, named LLM-enabled Frequency-aware Flow Diffusion (LFFD), is proposed to enable users to generate desired scenarios using plain human language. First, a pretrained LLM module is introduced to convert generation requests described by unstructured natural languages into ordered semantic space. Second, instead of using standard diffusion models, a flow diffusion model employing a rectified flow matching objective is introduced to achieve efficient and high-quality scenario generation, taking the LLM output as the model input. During the model training process, a frequency-aware multi-objective optimization algorithm is introduced to mitigate the frequency-bias issue. Meanwhile, a dual-agent framework is designed to create text-scenario training sample pairs as well as to standardize semantic evaluation. Experiments based on large-scale photovoltaic and load datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Anticipating and adapting to failures is a key capability robots need to collaborate effectively with humans in complex domains. This continues to be a challenge despite the impressive performance of state of the art AI planning systems and Large Language Models (LLMs) because of the uncertainty associated with the tasks and their outcomes. Toward addressing this challenge, we present a hybrid framework that integrates the generic prediction capabilities of an LLM with the probabilistic sequential decision-making capability of Relational Dynamic Influence Diagram Language. For any given task, the robot reasons about the task and the capabilities of the human attempting to complete it; predicts potential failures due to lack of ability (in the human) or lack of relevant domain objects; and executes actions to prevent such failures or recover from them. Experimental evaluation in the VirtualHome 3D simulation environment demonstrates substantial improvement in performance compared with state of the art baselines.
Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) (e.g., Intel SGX and ArmTrustZone) aim to protect sensitive computation from a compromised operating system, yet real deployments remain vulnerable to microarchitectural leakage, side-channel attacks, and fault injection. In parallel, security teams increasingly rely on Large Language Model (LLM) assistants as security advisors for TEE architecture review, mitigation planning, and vulnerability triage. This creates a socio-technical risk surface: assistants may hallucinate TEE mechanisms, overclaim guarantees (e.g., what attestation does and does not establish), or behave unsafely under adversarial prompting. We present a red-teaming study of two prevalently deployed LLM assistants in the role of TEE security advisors: ChatGPT-5.2 and Claude Opus-4.6, focusing on the inherent limitations and transferability of prompt-induced failures across LLMs. We introduce TEE-RedBench, a TEE-grounded evaluation methodology comprising (i) a TEE-specific threat model for LLM-mediated security work, (ii) a structured prompt suite spanning SGX and TrustZone architecture, attestation and key management, threat modeling, and non-operational mitigation guidance, along with policy-bound misuse probes, and (iii) an annotation rubric that jointly measures technical correctness, groundedness, uncertainty calibration, refusal quality, and safe helpfulness. We find that some failures are not purely idiosyncratic, transferring up to 12.02% across LLM assistants, and we connect these outcomes to secure architecture by outlining an "LLM-in-the-loop" evaluation pipeline: policy gating, retrieval grounding, structured templates, and lightweight verification checks that, when combined, reduce failures by 80.62%.
Problem Definition. Supply chain optimization models frequently become infeasible because of modeling errors. Diagnosis and repair require scarce OR expertise: analysts must interpret solver diagnostics, trace root causes across echelons, and fix formulations without sacrificing operational soundness. Whether AI agents can perform this task remains untested. Methodology/Results. OptiRepair splits this task into a domain-agnostic feasibility phase (iterative IIS-guided repair of any LP) and a domain-specific validation phase (five rationality checks grounded in inventory theory). We test 22 API models from 7 families on 976 multi-echelon supply chain problems and train two 8B-parameter models using self-taught reasoning with solver-verified rewards. The trained models reach 81.7% Rational Recovery Rate (RRR) -- the fraction of problems resolved to both feasibility and operational rationality -- versus 42.2% for the best API model and 21.3% on average. The gap concentrates in Phase 1 repair: API models average 27.6% recovery rate versus 97.2% for trained models. Managerial Implications. Two gaps separate current AI from reliable model repair: solver interaction (API models restore only 27.6% of infeasible formulations) and operational rationale (roughly one in four feasible repairs violate supply chain theory). Each requires a different intervention: solver interaction responds to targeted training; operational rationale requires explicit specification as solver-verifiable checks. For organizations adopting AI in operational planning, formalizing what "rational" means in their context is the higher-return investment.
The test-time compute strategy, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), has significantly enhanced the ability of large language models to solve complex tasks like logical reasoning. However, empirical studies indicate that simply increasing the compute budget can sometimes lead to a collapse in test-time performance when employing typical task decomposition strategies such as CoT. This work hypothesizes that reasoning failures with larger compute budgets stem from static planning methods, which hardly perceive the intrinsic boundaries of LLM reasoning. We term it as the Limited Reasoning Space hypothesis and perform theoretical analysis through the lens of a non-autonomous stochastic dynamical system. This insight suggests that there is an optimal range for compute budgets; over-planning can lead to redundant feedback and may even impair reasoning capabilities. To exploit the compute-scaling benefits and suppress over-planning, this work proposes Halo, a model predictive control framework for LLM planning. Halo is designed for long-horizon tasks with reason-based planning and crafts an entropy-driven dual controller, which adopts a Measure-then-Plan strategy to achieve controllable reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that Halo outperforms static baselines on complex long-horizon tasks by dynamically regulating planning at the reasoning boundary.
The ability to use tools is fundamental for large language model (LLM) agents. Given a task, existing systems use LLMs to plan and generate tool calls, which are executed by real-world tools to complete the task. However, tool calls are prone to errors because they are derived merely from LLM intrinsic capabilities. What is more, while it is useful to let LLMs iteratively refine the tool-call sequence using execution results from real tools, this process can be expensive and lead to unsafe results. To improve LLM tool calls and address issues caused by using real tools for refinement, we introduce Gecko, a comprehensive environment that simulates tool responses using a combination of rules and LLMs. Specifically, Gecko checks the validity of tool calls including input arguments and tool names, synthesizes reasonable responses that adhere to the output schema, and assesses whether all task objectives have been achieved. These three types of feedback provided by Gecko allow LLMs to refine their tool calls, forming a simple yet effective test-time scaling method named GATS. On BFCLv3 and $τ^2$-bench, GATS consistently improves the tool calling performance of various LLMs including GPT-4o, GPT-5, and Gemini-3.0-pro. We further discuss working mechanisms of our method and share future possibilities.
Optimizing GPU kernels is critical for efficient modern machine learning systems yet remains challenging due to the complex interplay of design factors and rapid hardware evolution. Existing automated approaches typically treat Large Language Models (LLMs) merely as stochastic code generators within heuristic-guided evolutionary loops. These methods often struggle with complex kernels requiring coordinated, multi-step structural transformations, as they lack explicit planning capabilities and frequently discard promising strategies due to inefficient or incorrect intermediate implementations. To address this, we propose Search via Co-Evolving World Model and build K-Search based on this method. By replacing static search heuristics with a co-evolving world model, our framework leverages LLMs' prior domain knowledge to guide the search, actively exploring the optimization space. This approach explicitly decouples high-level algorithmic planning from low-level program instantiation, enabling the system to navigate non-monotonic optimization paths while remaining resilient to temporary implementation defects. We evaluate K-Search on diverse, complex kernels from FlashInfer, including GQA, MLA, and MoE kernels. Our results show that K-Search significantly outperforms state-of-the-art evolutionary search methods, achieving an average 2.10x improvement and up to a 14.3x gain on complex MoE kernels. On the GPUMode TriMul task, K-Search achieves state-of-the-art performance on H100, reaching 1030us and surpassing both prior evolution and human-designed solutions.
The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) from passive text processors to autonomous agents has established planning as a core component of modern intelligence. However, achieving generalized planning remains elusive, not only by the scarcity of high-quality interaction data but also by inherent conflicts across heterogeneous planning tasks. These challenges result in models that excel at isolated tasks yet struggle to generalize, while existing multi-task training attempts suffer from gradient interference. In this paper, we present \textbf{MagicAgent}, a series of foundation models specifically designed for generalized agent planning. We introduce a lightweight and scalable synthetic data framework that generates high-quality trajectories across diverse planning tasks, including hierarchical task decomposition, tool-augmented planning, multi-constraint scheduling, procedural logic orchestration, and long-horizon tool execution. To mitigate training conflicts, we propose a two-stage training paradigm comprising supervised fine-tuning followed by multi-objective reinforcement learning over both static datasets and dynamic environments. Empirical results demonstrate that MagicAgent-32B and MagicAgent-30B-A3B deliver superior performance, achieving accuracies of $75.1\%$ on Worfbench, $55.9\%$ on NaturalPlan, $57.5\%$ on $τ^2$-Bench, $86.9\%$ on BFCL-v3, and $81.2\%$ on ACEBench, as well as strong results on our in-house MagicEval benchmarks. These results substantially outperform existing sub-100B models and even surpass leading closed-source models.
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning performance, yet their ability to reliably monitor, diagnose, and correct their own errors remains limited. We introduce a psychologically grounded metacognitive framework that operationalizes Ann Brown's regulatory cycle (Planning, Monitoring, and Evaluation) as a structured prompting architecture, and study its integration within a lightweight dual-process MetaController for adaptive effort allocation. Across diverse reasoning and diagnostic benchmarks (GSM8K, CRUXEval, MBPP, AIME, CorrectBench, and TruthfulQA) using Llama-3 and Qwen-3 (8B), explicit regulatory structuring substantially improves error diagnosis and yields a threefold increase in successful self-correction. Blinded human evaluations over 580 query pairs show an 84% aggregate preference for trustworthiness and metacognitive self-awareness over standard and Chain-of-Thought baselines. Grounding LLM reasoning in established cognitive theory offers a principled path toward more transparent and diagnostically robust AI systems.
Personalized nutrition intervention for patients with multimorbidity is critical for improving health outcomes, yet remains challenging because it requires the simultaneous integration of heterogeneous clinical conditions, medications, and dietary guidelines. Single-agent large language models (LLMs) often suffer from context overload and attention dilution when processing such high-dimensional patient profiles. We introduce NutriOrion, a hierarchical multi-agent framework with a parallel-then-sequential reasoning topology. NutriOrion decomposes nutrition planning into specialized domain agents with isolated contexts to mitigate anchoring bias, followed by a conditional refinement stage. The framework includes a multi-objective prioritization algorithm to resolve conflicting dietary requirements and a safety constraint mechanism that injects pharmacological contraindications as hard negative constraints during synthesis, ensuring clinical validity by construction rather than post-hoc filtering. For clinical interoperability, NutriOrion maps synthesized insights into the ADIME standard and FHIR R4 resources. Evaluated on 330 stroke patients with multimorbidity, NutriOrion outperforms multiple baselines, including GPT-4.1 and alternative multi-agent architectures. It achieves a 12.1 percent drug-food interaction violation rate, demonstrates strong personalization with negative correlations (-0.26 to -0.35) between patient biomarkers and recommended risk nutrients, and yields clinically meaningful dietary improvements, including a 167 percent increase in fiber and a 27 percent increase in potassium, alongside reductions in sodium (9 percent) and sugars (12 percent).
Aerial imagery provides essential global context for autonomous navigation, enabling route planning at scales inaccessible to onboard sensing. We address the problem of generating global costmaps for long-range planning directly from satellite imagery when entities and mission-specific traversal rules are expressed in natural language at test time. This setting is challenging since mission requirements vary, terrain entities may be unknown at deployment, and user prompts often encode compositional traversal logic. Existing approaches relying on fixed ontologies and static cost mappings cannot accommodate such flexibility. While foundation models excel at language interpretation and open-vocabulary perception, no single model can simultaneously parse nuanced mission directives, locate arbitrary entities in large-scale imagery, and synthesize them into an executable cost function for planners. We therefore propose OVerSeeC, a zero-shot modular framework that decomposes the problem into Interpret-Locate-Synthesize: (i) an LLM extracts entities and ranked preferences, (ii) an open-vocabulary segmentation pipeline identifies these entities from high-resolution imagery, and (iii) the LLM uses the user's natural language preferences and masks to synthesize executable costmap code. Empirically, OVerSeeC handles novel entities, respects ranked and compositional preferences, and produces routes consistent with human-drawn trajectories across diverse regions, demonstrating robustness to distribution shifts. This shows that modular composition of foundation models enables open-vocabulary, preference-aligned costmap generation for scalable, mission-adaptive global planning.
Manufacturing automation in process planning, inspection planning, and digital-thread integration depends on a unified specification that binds the geometric features of a 3D CAD model to the geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) callouts, datum definitions, and surface requirements carried by the corresponding 2D engineering drawing. Although Model-Based Definition (MBD) allows such specifications to be embedded directly in 3D models, 2D drawings remain the primary carrier of manufacturing intent in automotive, aerospace, shipbuilding, and heavy-machinery industries. Correctly linking drawing annotations to the corresponding 3D features is difficult because of contextual ambiguity, repeated feature patterns, and the need for transparent and traceable decisions. This paper presents a deterministic-first, context-aware framework that maps 2D drawing entities to 3D CAD features to produce a unified manufacturing specification. Drawing callouts are first semantically enriched and then scored against candidate features using an interpretable metric that combines type compatibility, tolerance-aware dimensional agreement, and conservative context consistency, along with engineering-domain heuristics. When deterministic scoring cannot resolve an ambiguity, the system escalates to multimodal and constrained large-language-model reasoning, followed by a single human-in-the-loop (HITL) review step. Experiments on 20 real CAD-drawing pairs achieve a mean precision of 83.67%, recall of 90.46%, and F1 score of 86.29%. An ablation study shows that each pipeline component contributes to overall accuracy, with the full system outperforming all reduced variants. By prioritizing deterministic rules, clear decision tracking, and retaining unresolved cases for human review, the framework provides a practical foundation for downstream manufacturing automation in real-world industrial environments.
Complex problems, whether in math, logic, or planning, are solved by humans through a sequence of steps where the result of one step informs the next. In this work, we adopt the perspective that the reasoning power of Transformers is fundamentally limited by a fixed maximum number of steps along any latent path of computation. To address this, we introduce Turbo Connection (TurboConn), a novel architecture that overcomes the fixed-depth constraint by routing multiple residual connections from the higher-layer hidden states of each token $t$ to the lower layers of token $t+1$. Fine-tuning pre-trained LLMs with our method not only yields accuracy gains of 0.9% to over 10% on benchmarks like GSM8K, Parity, and multi-step arithmetic, but also demonstrates that the density of these backward connections is critical; our dense interaction significantly outperforms "sparse" alternatives that only pass a single hidden state or vector. Notably, TurboConn can be integrated into pre-trained LLMs to overcome task-specific plateaus: while a fine-tuned Qwen-3-1.7B achieves only 53.78% on Parity, adding our architectural modification enables the model to reach 100% accuracy, all without the necessity to retrain the full model from scratch or sophisticated curriculum learning. Our results provide strong empirical evidence that the depth of the computational path is a key factor in reasoning ability, also offering a new mechanism to enhance LLMs without significantly affecting generation latency.
LLM-based agents show promise for automating penetration testing, yet reported performance varies widely across systems and benchmarks. We analyze 28 LLM-based penetration testing systems and evaluate five representative implementations across three benchmarks of increasing complexity. Our analysis reveals two distinct failure modes: Type A failures stem from capability gaps (missing tools, inadequate prompts) that engineering readily addresses, while Type B failures persist regardless of tooling due to planning and state management limitations. We show that Type B failures share a root cause that is largely invariant to the underlying LLM: agents lack real-time task difficulty estimation. As a result, agents misallocate effort, over-commit to low-value branches, and exhaust context before completing attack chains. Based on this insight, we present Excalibur, a penetration testing agent that couples strong tooling with difficulty-aware planning. A Tool and Skill Layer eliminates Type A failures through typed interfaces and retrieval-augmented knowledge. A Task Difficulty Assessment (TDA) mechanism addresses Type B failures by estimating tractability through four measurable dimensions (horizon estimation, evidence confidence, context load, and historical success) and uses these estimates to guide exploration-exploitation decisions within an Evidence-Guided Attack Tree Search (EGATS) framework. Excalibur achieves up to 91% task completion on CTF benchmarks with frontier models (39 to 49% relative improvement over baselines) and compromises 4 of 5 hosts on the GOAD Active Directory environment versus 2 by prior systems. These results show that difficulty-aware planning yields consistent end-to-end gains across models and addresses a limitation that model scaling alone does not eliminate.
Rigorously evaluating machine intelligence against the broad spectrum of human general intelligence has become increasingly important and challenging in this era of rapid technological advance. Conventional AI benchmarks typically assess only narrow capabilities in a limited range of human activity. Most are also static, quickly saturating as developers explicitly or implicitly optimize for them. We propose that a more promising way to evaluate human-like general intelligence in AI systems is through a particularly strong form of general game playing: studying how and how well they play and learn to play \textbf{all conceivable human games}, in comparison to human players with the same level of experience, time, or other resources. We define a "human game" to be a game designed by humans for humans, and argue for the evaluative suitability of this space of all such games people can imagine and enjoy -- the "Multiverse of Human Games". Taking a first step towards this vision, we introduce the AI GameStore, a scalable and open-ended platform that uses LLMs with humans-in-the-loop to synthesize new representative human games, by automatically sourcing and adapting standardized and containerized variants of game environments from popular human digital gaming platforms. As a proof of concept, we generated 100 such games based on the top charts of Apple App Store and Steam, and evaluated seven frontier vision-language models (VLMs) on short episodes of play. The best models achieved less than 10\% of the human average score on the majority of the games, and especially struggled with games that challenge world-model learning, memory and planning. We conclude with a set of next steps for building out the AI GameStore as a practical way to measure and drive progress toward human-like general intelligence in machines.
High-quality exploratory data analysis (EDA) is essential in the data science pipeline, but remains highly dependent on analysts' expertise and effort. While recent LLM-based approaches partially reduce this burden, they struggle to generate effective analysis plans and appropriate insights and visualizations when user intent is abstract. Meanwhile, a vast collection of analysis notebooks produced across platforms and organizations contains rich analytical knowledge that can potentially guide automated EDA. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) provides a natural way to leverage such corpora, but general methods often treat notebooks as static documents and fail to fully exploit their potential knowledge for automating EDA. To address these limitations, we propose NotebookRAG, a method that takes user intent, datasets, and existing notebooks as input to retrieve, enhance, and reuse relevant notebook content for automated EDA generation. For retrieval, we transform code cells into context-enriched executable components, which improve retrieval quality and enable rerun with new data to generate updated visualizations and reliable insights. For generation, an agent leverages enhanced retrieval content to construct effective EDA plans, derive insights, and produce appropriate visualizations. Evidence from a user study with 24 participants confirms the superiority of our method in producing high-quality and intent-aligned EDA notebooks.
A growing body of work attempts to evaluate the theory of mind (ToM) abilities of humans and large language models (LLMs) using static, non-interactive question-and-answer benchmarks. However, theoretical work in the field suggests that first-personal interaction is a crucial part of ToM and that such predictive, spectatorial tasks may fail to evaluate it. We address this gap with a novel ToM task that requires an agent to persuade a target to choose one of three policy proposals by strategically revealing information. Success depends on a persuader's sensitivity to a given target's knowledge states (what the target knows about the policies) and motivational states (how much the target values different outcomes). We varied whether these states were Revealed to persuaders or Hidden, in which case persuaders had to inquire about or infer them. In Experiment 1, participants persuaded a bot programmed to make only rational inferences. LLMs excelled in the Revealed condition but performed below chance in the Hidden condition, suggesting difficulty with the multi-step planning required to elicit and use mental state information. Humans performed moderately well in both conditions, indicating an ability to engage such planning. In Experiment 2, where a human target role-played the bot, and in Experiment 3, where we measured whether human targets' real beliefs changed, LLMs outperformed human persuaders across all conditions. These results suggest that effective persuasion can occur without explicit ToM reasoning (e.g., through rhetorical strategies) and that LLMs excel at this form of persuasion. Overall, our results caution against attributing human-like ToM to LLMs while highlighting LLMs' potential to influence people's beliefs and behavior.
Conversational agents powered by large language models (LLMs) with tool integration achieve strong performance on fixed task-oriented dialogue datasets but remain vulnerable to unanticipated, user-induced errors. Rather than focusing on error prevention, this work focuses on error recovery, which necessitates the accurate diagnosis of erroneous dialogue contexts and execution of proper recovery plans. Under realistic constraints precluding model fine-tuning or prompt modification due to significant cost and time requirements, we explore whether agents can recover from contextually flawed interactions and how their behavior can be adapted without altering model parameters and prompts. To this end, we propose Reasoning Inception (ReIn), a test-time intervention method that plants an initial reasoning into the agent's decision-making process. Specifically, an external inception module identifies predefined errors within the dialogue context and generates recovery plans, which are subsequently integrated into the agent's internal reasoning process to guide corrective actions, without modifying its parameters or system prompts. We evaluate ReIn by systematically simulating conversational failure scenarios that directly hinder successful completion of user goals: user's ambiguous and unsupported requests. Across diverse combinations of agent models and inception modules, ReIn substantially improves task success and generalizes to unseen error types. Moreover, it consistently outperforms explicit prompt-modification approaches, underscoring its utility as an efficient, on-the-fly method. In-depth analysis of its operational mechanism, particularly in relation to instruction hierarchy, indicates that jointly defining recovery tools with ReIn can serve as a safe and effective strategy for improving the resilience of conversational agents without modifying the backbone models or system prompts.
We introduce LLM-Wikirace, a benchmark for evaluating planning, reasoning, and world knowledge in large language models (LLMs). In LLM-Wikirace, models must efficiently navigate Wikipedia hyperlinks step by step to reach a target page from a given source, requiring look-ahead planning and the ability to reason about how concepts are connected in the real world. We evaluate a broad set of open- and closed-source models, including Gemini-3, GPT-5, and Claude Opus 4.5, which achieve the strongest results on the easy level of the task and demonstrate superhuman performance. Despite this, performance drops sharply on hard difficulty: the best-performing model, Gemini-3, succeeds in only 23\% of hard games, highlighting substantial remaining challenges for frontier models. Our analysis shows that world knowledge is a necessary ingredient for success, but only up to a point, beyond this threshold, planning and long-horizon reasoning capabilities become the dominant factors. Trajectory-level analysis further reveals that even the strongest models struggle to replan after failure, frequently entering loops rather than recovering. LLM-Wikirace is a simple benchmark that reveals clear limitations in current reasoning systems, offering an open arena where planning-capable LLMs still have much to prove. Our code and leaderboard available at https:/llmwikirace.github.io.