Document understanding aims to perform question answering and information extraction over document images, where the visual content is highly information-dense and most queries rely on only a few relevant layout regions. However, existing methods either adopt a one-pass strategy that implicitly assumes all layouts are equally important, or focus excessively on small regions at the cost of losing critical layout information. To address these limitations, we introduce Doc-CoB (Chain-of-Boxes), a simple-yet-effective framework that integrates coarse-to-fine layout-aware visual reasoning into multimodal large language models. Instead of directly zooming into small regions, Doc-CoB progressively focuses on query-relevant layouts while preserving global document information. Specifically, it first selects key layout boxes and then focuses on them for further understanding with visual prompting. To support this paradigm, we introduce two reasoning tasks for box recognition and box reasoning, with an automatic pipeline that constructs 249k training samples with intermediate visual supervision. Experiments on seven benchmarks with four popular models show that Doc-CoB significantly improves performance, demonstrating its effectiveness and wide applicability. The code and the data are available at https://github.com/Doc-CoB/Doc-CoB.

Deep Research Agents (DR-Agents) extend LLMs with multi-step retrieval, tool use, and intermediate computation to solve complex problems. However, their execution logs often contain redundant context, noisy evidence, and brittle dependencies among intermediate decisions. As a result, final answers can be sensitive to irrelevant or weakly verified information. We propose DualResearch, a log-based post-processing framework for answer reconstruction. Given a query and a completed DR-Agent log, DualResearch normalizes the log into event records and constructs two evidence graphs: a breadth semantic graph for declarative evidence and a depth causal graph for procedural provenance. It then retrieves breadth nodes and depth paths, assigns higher weights to retrieval channels with more concentrated retained candidate distributions, and jointly considers relevance and cross-view agreement to select evidence for reconstruction; the concentration measure reflects retrieval confidence rather than factual correctness. Experiments on HLE, GAIA, and GPQA show consistent accuracy improvements over underlying DR-Agents and controlled log-reuse baselines.

Online lifelong learning agents must decide not only how to act but also when to consult prior experience to continually improve on long-horizon tasks. Existing methods typically retrieve memories passively, such as at task initialization or after each step, and therefore miss knowledge gaps that arise during interaction. We propose ProactAgent, an experience-driven lifelong learning framework for proactive retrieval over a structured Experience Base. ProactAgent continually improves through ExpOnEvo, which jointly updates policies and refines memory, organizing past interactions into factual, episodic, and skill repositories. It further introduces ProactRL, which treats retrieval as an explicit policy action and learns when and what to retrieve. By comparing paired continuations from identical interaction prefixes with and without retrieval, ProactRL provides step-level process rewards that encourage retrieval only when it improves task outcomes or efficiency. Experiments on SciWorld, AlfWorld, and StuLife show that ProactAgent consistently outperforms all baselines, achieving up to 32% relative improvement in success rate and over 33% reduction in interaction rounds.

As AI research increasingly moves beyond systems optimized for static tasks, a central challenge is building agents that learn continuously through experience-driven lifelong learning (ELL). In this paper, we introduce StuLife, a synthetic benchmark designed to evaluate selected operational capabilities relevant to ELL. Particularly, StuLife simulates a student’s college journey, from enrollment to academic and personal development, across three core phases and ten detailed sub-scenarios. StuLife is designed around four key design principles: From Isolated Tasks to Stateful Interaction, From Passive to Proactive, From Context to Memory, and From Imitation to Learning. In this dynamic environment, agents must acquire and distill practical skills and maintain persistent memory to make decisions based on evolving state variables (e.g., resource availability and time), and are also expected to initiate actions without external prompting. To this end, StuLife provides an evaluation protocol with dedicated metrics (e.g., StuGPA) for these capabilities. Our evaluation reveals that even the highest-StuGPA model, GPT-5, scores only 17.9/100, highlighting large gaps in long-term retention and proactive task initiation. Beyond evaluating LLMs on StuLife, we also explore the role of context engineering in improving agent performance on lifelong learning tasks.

Reward modeling aligns language models with human preferences, yet coding tasks, requiring strict logic and syntax, pose challenges due to their domain diversity. In this paper, we propose RewardCode, a generalist code reward model trained via a two-stage pipeline, enabling scalable and precise evaluation through principle-based scoring and unit test generation. Specifically, the first stage combines Structured Fine-Tuning and Rejective Fine-Tuning to distill cross-domain summarization and code evaluation capabilities from advanced LLMs. The second stage introduces Pairwise-GRPO, a reinforcement learning method that uses preference pairs to improve solution discrimination, while ensuring the generation of consistent and verifiable unit tests. Further, to train a cross-domain code reward model, we construct CodePair-18K, a dataset of verifiable code preference pairs and executable unit tests. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that RewardCode outperforms strong baselines in evaluation accuracy, verifying its effectiveness in advancing general-purpose code LLMs.

Previous LLMs-based RL studies typically follow either supervised learning with high annotation costs, or unsupervised paradigms using voting or entropy-based rewards. However, their performance remains far from satisfactory due to the substantial annotation cost and issues such as model collapse or reward hacking. To address these issues, we introduce a new perspective inspired by cognitive learning theory and propose a novel approach called EasyRL. The core of EasyRL is to simulate the human cognitive acquisition curve by integrating reliable knowledge transfer from easy labeled data with a progressive divide-and-conquer strategy that tackles increasingly difficult unlabeled data. Specifically, we initialize a warm-up model using supervised RL with few-shot labeled data. This is followed by a divide-and-conquer pseudo-labeling strategy on difficult unlabeled data, combining consistency-based selection for low-uncertainty cases and reflection-based resolution for medium-uncertainty cases. Finally, difficulty-progressive self-training with iterative pseudo-labeling and RL further strengthens the model’s reasoning capability. EasyRL provides a unified self-evolving framework that facilitates data-efficient post-training of LLMs. Experimental results on mathematical and scientific benchmarks demonstrate that EasyRL, using only 10% of easy labeled data, consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) is effective for knowledge-intensive and multi-hop query tasks; however, many existing methods primarily seed entity-based graphs and rely on implicit semantic relevance propagation. This often (i) under-retrieves when user queries are abstract and semantically sparse at the entity level, and (ii) suffers from brittle multi-hop reasoning, where noisy activations can derail entity-to-entity transitions and corrupt the inferred relation chain, yielding unreliable conclusions. To this end, we propose FlowRAG, a semantic-aware retrieval framework that improves both semantic recall and explicit reasoning. Specifically, FlowRAG constructs a quad-level heterogeneous graph over passages, summaries, sentences, and entities, where summary nodes serve as a coarse semantic hub. At retrieval time, a dual-granularity activation module combines summary–query alignment with sentence-level matching to activate relevant entities under paraphrase and abstraction robustly. We then introduce a frequency-aware weighted flow module that routes relevance through entity–passage links weighted by within-passage term frequency, pruning noisy connections and extracting high-confidence reasoning paths as an explicit logic skeleton for generation. Extensive experiments show that FlowRAG obtains state-of-the-art performance on complex reasoning benchmarks.

Recent progress in video generative models has enabled the creation of high-quality videos from multimodal prompts that combine text and images. While these systems offer greater controllability, they also introduce new safety risks, as harmful content can arise from individual modalities or their interaction. Existing safety methods are often limited to text-only inputs, require the user to manually specify the risk category in advance, or only audit content after generation, making them unable to proactively address compositional multimodal risks. We present ConceptGuard, a safeguard framework that proactively detects and mitigates unsafe semantics in multimodal video generation before harmful content is produced. ConceptGuard operates in two stages. First, a contrastive detection module fuses image and text inputs and computes their similarity against the risk concept set , automatically retrieving the top-k concepts most relevant to the input without requiring any prior assumption about the risk category. Second, a semantic suppression mechanism uses these identified concepts to remove unsafe semantics from both the text and the visual input during early generation steps. To support training and evaluation, we introduce ConceptRisk, a large-scale dataset for multimodal risk detection, and T2VSafetyBench-TI2V, the first benchmark for evaluating safety in Text-and-Image-to-Video generation. Experiments on both benchmarks show that ConceptGuard outperforms existing baselines in both risk detection and safe video generation.

Deep research is an inherently challenging task that demands both breadth and depth of thinking. It involves navigating diverse knowledge spaces and reasoning over complex, multi-step dependencies, which presents substantial challenges for agentic systems. To address this, we propose FlowSearch, a multi-agent framework that actively constructs and evolves a dynamic structured knowledge flow to drive subtask execution and reasoning. FlowSearch is capable of strategically planning and expanding the knowledge flow to enable parallel exploration and hierarchical task decomposition, while also adjusting the knowledge flow in real time based on feedback from intermediate reasoning outcomes and insights. FlowSearch achieves competitive performance on both general and scientific benchmarks, including GAIA, HLE, GPQA and TRQA, demonstrating its effectiveness in multi-disciplinary research scenarios and its potential to advance scientific discovery. The code will be available.

Existing multi-LLM collaboration systems often encounter scalability challenges when integrating new LLMs and tasks, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose SMCS, a Scalable Multi-LLM Collaboration System designed to effectively coordinate multiple open-source LLMs. The system consists of two core components: a Retrieval-based Prior Selection (RPS) module, which dynamically selects the most suitable LLMs for each input, and an Exploration–Exploitation-Driven Posterior Enhancement (EPE) module, which fosters response diversity and selects high-quality outputs through a hybrid scoring mechanism. Experiments on eight mainstream benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our system: by integrating fifteen open-source LLMs, SMCS outperforms prevailing closed-source LLMs, e.g., GPT-4.1(+5.36%) and GPT-o3-mini(+5.28%) across multiple tasks. Remarkably, it even exceeds the average of best results on different datasets with open-source LLMs (+2.86%), significantly advancing the empirical performance frontier of open-source collaboration. The code is released at https://github.com/magent4aci/SMCS.

Multi-turn, long-horizon tasks are increasingly common for large language models (LLMs), but solving them typically requires many sequential model invocations, accumulating substantial inference costs. Here, we study cost-aware multi-turn LLM routing: selecting which model to invoke at each turn from a model pool, given a fixed cost budget. We propose MTRouter, which encodes the interaction history and candidate models into joint history–model embeddings, and learns an outcome estimator from logged trajectories to predict turn-level model utility. Experiments show that MTRouter improves the performance–cost trade-off: on ScienceWorld, it surpasses GPT-5 while reducing total cost by 58.7%; on Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE), it achieves competitive accuracy while reducing total cost by 43.4% relative to GPT-5, and these gains even carry over to held-out tasks. Further analyses reveal several mechanisms underlying its effectiveness: relative to prior multi-turn routers, MTRouter makes fewer model switches, is more tolerant to transient errors, and exhibits emergent specialization across models.Code: https://github.com/ZhangYiqun018/MTRouter

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, reinforcement learning for LLMs faces substantial data scarcity challenges, including the limited availability of high-quality external supervision and the constrained volume of model-generated experience. These limitations make data-efficient reinforcement learning a critical research direction. In this survey, we present the first systematic review of reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity. We propose a bottom-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: the data-centric perspective, the training-centric perspective, and the framework-centric perspective. We develop a taxonomy of existing methods, summarize representative approaches in each category, and analyze their strengths and limitations. Our taxonomy aims to provide a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for LLMs and to guide researchers working in this emerging area. We hope this survey offers a comprehensive roadmap for future research and inspires new directions toward more efficient and scalable reinforcement learning post-training for LLMs.

We introduce MinerU2.5, a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that achieves state-of-the-art recognition accuracy while maintaining exceptional computational efficiency. Our approach employs a coarse-to-fine, two-stage parsing strategy that decouples global layout analysis from local content recognition. In the first stage, the model performs efficient layout analysis on downsampled images to identify structural elements, circumventing the computational overhead of processing high-resolution inputs. In the second stage, guided by the global layout, it performs targeted content recognition on native-resolution crops extracted from the original image, preserving fine-grained details in dense text, complex formulas, and tables. To support this strategy, we developed a comprehensive data engine that generates diverse, large-scale training corpora for both pretraining and fine-tuning. Ultimately, MinerU2.5 demonstrates strong document parsing ability, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks, surpassing both general-purpose and domain-specific models across various recognition tasks, while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead.

Survey paper plays a crucial role in scientific research, especially given the rapid growth of research publications. Recently, researchers have begun using LLMs to automate survey generation for better efficiency. However, the quality gap between LLM-generated surveys and those written by human remains significant, particularly in terms of outline quality and citation accuracy. To close these gaps, we introduce SURVEYFORGE, which first generates the outline by analyzing the logical structure of human-written outlines and referring to the retrieved domain-related articles. Subsequently, leveraging high-quality papers retrieved from memory by our scholar navigation agent, SURVEYFORGE can automatically generate and refine the content of the generated article. Moreover, to achieve a comprehensive evaluation, we construct SurveyBench, which includes 100 human-written survey papers for win-rate comparison and assesses AI-generated survey papers across three dimensions: reference, outline, and content quality. Experiments demonstrate that SURVEYFORGEcan outperform previous works such as AutoSurvey.

The scientific research paradigm is undergoing a profound transformation owing to the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Recent works demonstrate that various AI-assisted research methods can largely improve research efficiency by improving data analysis, accelerating computation, and fostering novel idea generation. To further move towards the ultimate goal (i.e., automatic scientific research), in this paper, we introduce Dolphin, a closed-loop LLM-driven framework to enhance the automation level of scientific research. Dolphin first generates novel ideas based on feedback from previous experiments and relevant papers ranked by the topic and task attributes. Then, the generated ideas can be implemented using a code template refined and debugged with the designed exception-traceback-guided local code structure. Finally, Dolphin automatically analyzes the results of each idea and feeds the results back to the next round of idea generation. Experiments are conducted on the benchmark datasets of different topics and a subset of MLE-bench. Results show that Dolphin can continuously improve the performance of the input topic in a loop. We highlight that Dolphin can automatically propose methods that are comparable to the state-of-the-art in some tasks such as 3D point classification.