Abundant procedural knowledge on the Web holds great potential for helping agents solve long-horizon tasks. However, such knowledge is often multimodal, heterogeneous, noisy, and implicitly assumes human executors, making it difficult to use directly as the skills required by agents. To bridge the gap between human-oriented guides and agent-executable skills, we formalize this problem as guide-to-skill learning: converting in-the-wild guides into executable skills and continuously improving them from trajectories observable to the agent. To evaluate the capability of existing agents on this task, we introduce MMG2Skill-Bench, the first benchmark designed for this problem. We further propose MMG2Skill, a closed-loop framework that compiles guides into editable skills, conditions a fixed vision-language model (VLM) agent on these skills during execution, and revises the skills from trajectory-level root-cause feedback without using benchmark scores. Across GUI control, open-ended gameplay, and strategic card play with six VLM backbones, MMG2Skill consistently outperforms vanilla baseline agents in every model–domain setting, achieving macro-average gains of +12.8 to +25.3 percentage points across backbones. Ablation studies show that directly prompting agents with raw guides can degrade performance, while both structured skill construction and trajectory-driven revision are necessary for the observed improvements. On success-inferable tasks, analyzer-based early stopping further prevents late-stage performance regressions and saves 25%–53% of attempts when the success signal is properly calibrated.

Multilingual fluency often invites a stronger assumption: a model that can speak a user’s language must also understand the culture encoded by that language. We call this the Illusion of Cultural Alignment. To test this assumption directly, we introduce MMC-QA, a benchmark of 1,086 natively sourced questions across 11 language groups, five cultural dimensions, and three difficulty tiers. Unlike translated benchmarks, MMC-QA targets locally grounded knowledge and reduces shortcuts from English-centric cross-lingual transfer. Evaluating 15 LLMs, we find substantial cultural degradation and a pronounced Locality Effect: cultural competence tracks pre-training exposure more closely than general reasoning ability. We further show that common inference-time remedies do not dissolve the illusion. Models remain overconfident on unfamiliar cultural questions, repeated sampling yields unstable rather than reliable correctness, and retrieval augmentation helps unevenly on long-tail facts. These findings indicate that cultural alignment cannot be inferred from multilingual ability alone and requires deeper intervention than calibration, sampling, or retrieval at inference time.

Large language models are increasingly deployed as interactive coding agents for end-to-end web development, yet existing benchmarks evaluate narrow slices of this workflow—typically text-conditioned generation with static correctness metrics—overlooking visual fidelity, interactivity, and codebase-level reasoning. We introduce WebCompass, a benchmark that covers the full web development lifecycle by spanning three input modalities (text, image, video) and three task types (generation, editing, repair). To match the diverse nature of these tasks, we pair checklist-guided LLM-as-a-Judge for patch-based evaluation with a novel Agent-as-a-Judge protocol that executes generated websites in a real browser and synthesizes targeted test cases. Experiments on ten models reveal a 25-point gap between the best closed- and open-source models, persistent weaknesses in visual aesthetics even among frontier systems, and divergent performance profiles across task types that challenge the notion of a single "best" web coding agent.

Large Language Models (LLMs) hold significant promise for accelerating academic ideation but face critical challenges in grounding ideas and mitigating confirmation bias during refinement. To address these limitations, we propose MotivGraph-SoIQ, a novel framework that enhances LLM ideation by integrating a Motivational Knowledge Graph (MotivGraph), which provides essential grounding from research literature, with a Q-Driven Socratic Ideator. The Ideator, a dual-agent system utilizing Socratic questioning, facilitates a rigorous refinement process that mitigates confirmation bias and significantly improves idea quality across dimensions of novelty, experimental feasibility, and motivation. Our experimental results demonstrate MotivGraph-SoIQ’s effectiveness. Comparative studies show significant quantitative improvements over SOTA methods across LLM-based scoring, ELO ranking, and human evaluation. Ablation studies further validate the crucial contributions of both the MotivGraph for enhancing idea novelty and practicality, and the Socratic dialogue with the teacher agent for substantial quality improvement. This work underscores the potential of combining structured knowledge with interactive, critique-based refinement for robust LLM ideation.