User-centric multi-turn agents must act on an evolving task situation shaped by changing user intents, accumulated tool-grounded facts, missing information, and execution constraints. Existing context-management methods improve the use of past interaction history, but rarely maintain an explicit situation state that separates grounded facts from task-state judgments. As a result, agents often need to infer fine-grained attributes, task dependencies, and constraint satisfaction implicitly from dialogue traces. We propose Intent-Driven Situation States (IDSS), a training-free framework that maintains an explicit situation state alongside the dialogue. IDSS parses tool returns into provenance-aware entities and attributes, tracks user intents, required variables, constraints, and execution status, and propagates new facts to task constraints to update action executability. This allows agents to avoid infeasible actions, advance dependent goals, and reuse relevant information without repeatedly searching raw history. Experiments on three interactive benchmarks across eight LLMs show that IDSS improves task completion, preference elicitation, and interaction efficiency, with clear gains on tasks involving multi-entity coordination, evolving user constraints, and constraint-aware replanning. Ablations and error analyses show that these improvements come from the interaction between fact persistence, intent-centered state tracking, and constraint modeling. These results suggest that explicit situation tracking offers an effective alternative to history-centric context management for reliable user-centric multi-turn agents.

Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) for 3D CT scans is severely constrained by the massive GPU memory required for high-resolution volumes and large contrastive batches. We propose ECT-CLIP, a resource-efficient CT VLP framework that achieves negative scaling—scaling up both the quantity and quality of negative samples—under limited computational resources. To scale the quantity, we exploit the memory asymmetry between CT and text encoding to decouple the image and text batch sizes, thereby enlarging the negative pool. To scale the quality, we design two complementary strategies: (1) deterministically separating false negatives from informative hard negatives via UMLS concept normalization, and (2) fusing multiple frozen medical text encoders to enrich semantic diversity without extra training cost. Trained on a single consumer-grade RTX 4090 GPU, ECT-CLIP achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot classification AUCs of 83.4% on CT-RATE and 75.0% on the external RAD-ChestCT benchmark, outperforming prior methods that require 4–8 high-performance GPUs. Extensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each negative-scaling component.

Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is a crucial cross-modal task that objectively evaluates the capabilities of language understanding, image comprehension, and language-to-image grounding. Consequently, it serves as an ideal testing ground for Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In pursuit of this goal, we have established a new REC dataset characterized by two key features: Firstly, it is designed with controllable varying levels of difficulty, necessitating multi-level fine-grained reasoning across object categories, attributes, and multi-hop relationships. Secondly, it includes negative text and images created through fine-grained editing and generation based on existing data, thereby testing the model’s ability to correctly reject scenarios where the target object is not visible in the image—an essential aspect often overlooked in existing datasets and approaches. Utilizing this high-quality dataset, we conducted comprehensive evaluations of both state-of-the-art specialist models and MLLMs. Our findings indicate that there remains a significant gap in achieving satisfactory grounding performance. We anticipate that our dataset will inspire new approaches to enhance visual reasoning and develop more advanced cross-modal interaction strategies, ultimately unlocking the full potential of MLLMs.