Multi-chapter novel generation requires models to balance two quality dimensions simultaneously: chapter-level reader engagement and global narrative rhythm. Existing approaches have mainly focused on planning, memory, and execution, while paying limited attention to the mismatch between training signals and reader experience. We propose **ChapterRL**, which reformulates multi-chapter generation as a reward design problem. Specifically, ChapterRL introduces two complementary reward signals. **Reading Depth Residual** (RDR) derives debiased chapter-level quality signals from reader continuation and completion behavior through genre–position stratified normalization. **Dynamic Rhythm Trajectory** (DRT) uses an arousal estimator to impose a threshold-gated penalty on systematic rhythm collapse in the later part of a story. The two signals correspond to chapter attractiveness and global narrative momentum, and are jointly integrated into reinforcement learning training. We evaluate the full ChapterRL policy on three automatic benchmarks and separately validate its RDR reward model on task-aligned narrative domains of the Chinese WritingPreferenceBench. Results show that ChapterRL improves chapter quality and rhythm stability over supervised fine-tuning and single-reward variants, while RDR exhibits strong narrative preference alignment as an efficient scalar reward model.Code is available at [ChapterRL](https://github.com/SorBetQ/ChapterRL).

Reasoning-driven universal multimodal embedding has advanced rapidly by introducing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning into the embedding pipeline. Despite the strong performance across both general and complex tasks, this paradigm suffers from two core limitations: (i) autoregressive CoT reasoning incurs high computational cost, making it impractical for low-latency retrieval; and (ii) embedding performance is heavily coupled with CoT annotation quality, making large-scale training unreliable. These raise fundamental questions:Is textual CoT the optimal form of reasoning for embedding, and can effective embedding reasoning be accomplished in latent space? To this end, we propose LaME (Latent Reasoning Multimodal Embedding), which formulates embedding-oriented latent reasoning as a weakly supervised information bottleneck. LaME employs K learnable reason tokens as a fixed-capacity bottleneck, completing all reasoning within a single forward pass. The two weak supervision signals structurally decouple contrastive from autoregressive objectives and eliminate dependence on CoT annotations, while a two-stage training pipeline ensures stable convergence. Experiments on MMEB-v2 and MRMR show that LaME achieves competitive performance, surpassing some explicit CoT-based models, while delivering 60× faster inference than explicit CoT methods and 2× faster than latent baselines with throughput comparable to discriminative embedding models. The code is available at https://github.com/PeppaWu/LaME.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has shown significant promise for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, prevailing algorithms like GRPO broadcast a uniform advantage signal across all tokens in a sequence. This coarse-grained approach overlooks the pivotal role of uncertain, high-stakes decisions during reasoning, leading to inefficient exploration and the well-documented problem of entropy collapse. To address this, we introduce UnCertainty-aware Advantage Shaping (UCAS), a model-free method that refines credit assignment by leveraging the model’s internal uncertainty signals. UCAS operates in two stages: it first modulates the response-level advantage using the model’s overall self-confidence, and then applies a token-level penalty based on raw logit certainty. This dual mechanism encourages exploration of high-uncertainty paths that yield correct answers while penalizing overconfident yet erroneous reasoning, effectively balancing the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Extensive experiments on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that UCAS significantly outperforms strong RLVR baselines across multiple model scales, including 1.5B and 7B. Our analysis confirms that UCAS not only achieves higher rewards but also promotes greater reasoning diversity and successfully mitigates entropy collapse.

Recently, large language models have made remarkable progress in reasoning, largely driven by scaling data and model size. In parallel, several studies argue that for smaller models, high-quality distillation can yield strong reasoning performance with minimal resources. However, a framework for understanding machine reasoning that explains why low-resource distillation can boost model performance is still missing. In this paper, we conduct a controlled case study: using less than 920 examples, a simple distillation based on the base model can actually achieve notable reasoning performance improvement, compared with the base model and even the zero-RL models. By analyzing the token frequency in model outputs, we find that the distilled model shows more flexible reasoning. It uses anthropomorphic tokens and logical connectors much more often than the base and zero-RL model. Further analysis reveals that distillation enhances the presence of two advanced cognitive behaviors: Multi-Perspective Thinking or Attempting and Metacognitive Awareness. Frequent occurrences of these two advanced cognitive behaviors give rise to flexible reasoning, which is essential for solving reasoning problems.

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved significant success in understanding static pre-recorded video scenarios (e.g., event-centric or narrative-driven content). However, existing MLLMs are largely trained on datasets restricted to static content due to the scarcity of high-quality interleaved data, causing them to struggle with dynamic interactions. Distinct from pre-recorded videos, live streaming is characterized by high-density, interleaved multimodal turns, where viewer comments (danmaku) are tightly coupled with real-time audio-visual evidence and evolving dialogue context. In such settings, purely textual annotations fail to capture fine-grained visual and temporal dependencies. To bridge this gap, we introduce Live-Aid, the first large-scale interleaved live interaction Chinese dataset with human-annotated, temporally aligned video responses, spanning over 1,100 hours and 80,037 dialogue turns across 8,053 video sessions. Building on this, we leverage these high-quality annotations within a novel multi-agent pipeline to construct evaluation tasks targeting core capabilities of live interactions. Extensive evaluations of strong Video-LLMs and Omni-LLMs reveal critical limitations in interleaved multi-turn interactions requiring temporal reasoning, highlighting the value of Live-Aid in advancing interleaved multimodal reasoning and dynamic audio-visual dependencies.

Awakening dormant users, who remain engaged but exhibit low conversion, is a key driver for incremental GMV growth in e-commerce platforms. Existing methods often underperform since they typically rely on single-step estimation of an item’s intrinsic value (e.g., immediate click probability). This overlooks the instrumental effect of items, where specific interactions act as triggers to shape latent intent and drive subsequent decisions along a conversion trajectory. To bridge this gap, we propose RoleGen, a framework that synergizes a Conversion Trajectory Reasoner with a Generative Collaborative Executor. Specifically, the LLM-based Reasoner explicitly models the context-dependent Functional Role of items to reconstruct intent evolution. It further uses counterfactual role exploration to mitigate interest collapse and generate diverse conversion-oriented candidates. These reasoned candidate items are then injected into the Executor, which is optimized via a feedback-driven co-training mechanism to ensure grounded execution. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B testing on a large-scale e-commerce platform show a 5.82% gain in Recall@1 and a 6.71% increase in online order volume, confirming RoleGen’s effectiveness in activating dormant users.

Multimodal Large Language Models advance multimodal representation learning by acquiring transferable semantic embeddings, thereby substantially enhancing performance across a range of vision-language tasks, including cross-modal retrieval, clustering, and classification. An effective embedding is expected to comprehensively preserve the semantic content of the input while simultaneously emphasizing features that are discriminative for downstream tasks. Recent approaches demonstrate that MLLMs can be adapted into competitive embedding models via large-scale contrastive learning, enabling the simultaneous optimization of two complementary objectives. We argue that the two aforementioned objectives can be decoupled: a comprehensive understanding of the input enables the embedding model to achieve superior performance on downstream tasks via contrastive learning. In this paper, we propose CoMa, a compressed pre-training phase, which serves as a warm-up stage for contrastive learning. Experiments demonstrate that with only a small amount of pre-training data, we can transform an MLLM into a competitive embedding model. CoMa achieves new state-of-the-art results among MLLMs of comparable size on the MMEB, realizing optimization in both efficiency and effectiveness. Our project is available at https://github.com/Trustworthy-Information-Access/CoMa.

Enhancing the fine-grained instance spatiotemporal motion perception capabilities of Video Large Language Models is crucial for improving their temporal and general video understanding. However, current models struggle to perceive detailed and complex instance motions. To address these challenges, we have made improvements from both data and model perspectives. In terms of data, we have meticulously curated iMOVE-IT, the first large-scale instance-motion-aware video instruction-tuning dataset. This dataset is enriched with comprehensive instance motion annotations and spatiotemporal mutual-supervision tasks, providing extensive training for the model’s instance-motion-awareness. Building on this foundation, we introduce iMOVE, an instance-motion-aware video foundation model that utilizes Event-aware Spatiotemporal Efficient Modeling to retain informative instance spatiotemporal motion details while maintaining computational efficiency. It also incorporates Relative Spatiotemporal Position Tokens to ensure awareness of instance spatiotemporal positions. Evaluations indicate that iMOVE excels not only in video temporal understanding and general video understanding but also demonstrates significant advantages in long-term video understanding. We will release the data, code, and model weights after acceptance.

Video Comment Art enhances user engagement by providing creative content that conveys humor, satire, or emotional resonance, requiring a nuanced and comprehensive grasp of cultural and contextual subtleties. Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities in STEM tasks (e.g. mathematics and coding), they still struggle to generate creative expressions such as resonant jokes and insightful satire. Moreover, existing benchmarks are constrained by their limited modalities and insufficient categories, hindering the exploration of comprehensive creativity in video-based Comment Art creation. To address these limitations, we introduce GODBench, a novel benchmark that integrates video and text modalities to systematically evaluate MLLMs’ abilities to compose Comment Art. Furthermore, inspired by the propagation patterns of waves in physics, we propose Ripple of Thought (RoT), a multi-step reasoning framework designed to enhance the creativity of MLLMs. Extensive experiments on GODBench reveal that existing MLLMs and CoT methods still face significant challenges in understanding and generating creative video comments. In contrast, RoT provides an effective approach to improving creative composing, highlighting its potential to drive meaningful advancements in MLLM-based creativity.