Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved remarkable success in visual understanding, yet they struggle with knowledge-intensive queries involving long-tail entities or evolving information due to static parametric knowledge. Recent search-augmented approaches attempt to address this limitation, but existing methods rely on indiscriminate whole-image retrieval that introduces substantial visual redundancy and noise, and lack deep iterative reflection, limiting their effectiveness on complex visual queries. To overcome these challenges, we propose Glance-or-Gaze (GoG), a fully autonomous framework that shifts from passive perception to active visual planning. GoG introduces a Selective Gaze mechanism that dynamically chooses whether to glance at global context or gaze into high-value regions, filtering irrelevant information before retrieval. We design a dual-stage training strategy: Reflective GoG Behavior Alignment via supervised fine-tuning instills the fundamental GoG paradigm, while Complexity-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning further enhances the model’s capability to handle complex queries through iterative reasoning. Experiments across six benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Ablation studies confirm that both Selective Gaze and complexity-aware RL are essential for effective visual search. We will release our data and models for further exploration soon.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents that alter real-world states, ensuring operational safety across multi-step workflows has become a critical challenge. While recent work has moved beyond single-turn evaluation toward multi-turn paradigms, key limitations persist: step-level methods treat actions in isolation, missing how risks accumulate, and trajectory-level evaluations operate post-hoc, offering no opportunity for timely intervention. To address this, we formalize Decoupled Proactive Safety Monitoring along three dimensions—whether, when to intervene, and what the risk is—and introduce PASTABench, a benchmark of 1,139 multi-turn trajectories spanning 5 risk categories and 13 sub-categories. We further propose the Optimal Intervention Window (OIW), anchored by annotated Earliest-Signal and Trigger turns, to quantify intervention timeliness. Evaluation of 16 LLMs reveals that proactive intervention remains largely unsolved, with the best model achieving only 40.74% optimal-timing interventions. Fine-grained diagnosis further uncovers pervasive lexical overfitting: competitive safety scores of smaller models mask keyword hypersensitivity rather than genuine risk comprehension, as their proactive capability largely collapses once hazard vocabulary is neutralized.

Despite remarkable capability in multi-modal understanding, deploying Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in open-ended conversational scenarios introduces safety risks that remain poorly addressed by existing alignment methods. Unlike simple malicious visual question and answer (VQA) pairs , multi-turn interactions enable adversaries to incrementally reconstruct harmful intent across dialogues, progressively bypassing safety constraints in ways that are difficult to detect at any individual turn. Meanwhile, conventional reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) approaches are unsuitable for this situation: designed primarily for VQA tasks, they neither capture cross-turn risk dynamics nor scale efficiently without costly manual preference annotation. To close this gap, we introduce MINT-Safe, an open-source visual multi-turn training dataset comprising 11,270 multi-image dialogues and 500 refusal VQA pairs, constructed via multi-agent interaction with text-to-image (T2I) tool-call augmentation. Building on MINT-Safe, we propose TAD-Align, a dialogue safety alignment framework centered on a turn-aware dual-objective reward function. Rather than treating all dialogue turns uniformly, TAD-Align leverages rollout-based safety score variance to dynamically identify turns where the model exhibits inconsistent safety behavior, and adaptively up-weights these turns during optimization. Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and LLaVA-NeXT-7B demonstrate reductions of over 10% in Attack Success Rate (ASR), alongside improvements of at least 8% in harmlessness and 13% in helpfulness on multi-modal multi-turn safety benchmarks, while preserving general model capabilities.

As large language models are increasingly deployed as tool-augmented legal agents, they introduce agentic hallucinations where tool-call and reasoning errors cascade into fabricated holdings and miscited authority. However, existing legal benchmarks evaluate only single-turn QA with outcome-level metrics, while agentic hallucination benchmarks lack legal-specific diagnostic capability. Neither answers to what extent and how a legal agent hallucinates along its trajectory. To address these limitations, we introduce LexAgentHallu, a legal agentic hallucination benchmark designed to evaluate to what extent and how legal agents fail along multi-step trajectories. Built through a four-stage expert-in-the-loop pipeline, LexAgentHallu contains 3,414 instances across 17 legal categories and 6 task types. Each instance is annotated under a dual-layer hallucination taxonomy of 7 high-level categories and 27 fine-grained subclasses, covering both substantive errors and agent-procedural failures. We further design fine-grained metrics that quantify to what extent and localize how each failure occurs along an agent’s execution path. Our evaluation across 18 proprietary and open-source agents uncovers a Right-Answer-Wrong-Reason effect and reveals that hallucination subclasses cluster rather than scatter, forming distinct agentic framework, legal task, and category profiles. These findings, invisible to outcome-level evaluation, validate the diagnostic power of LexAgentHallu for evaluating agentic hallucination in law.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is often viewed as a window into LLM decision-making, yet recent work suggests it may function merely as post-hoc rationalization. This raises a critical alignment question: Does the reasoning trace causally shape model generalization independent of the final answer? To isolate reasoning’s causal effect, we hold final harmful answers constant while varying reasoning paths across three types, Evil (embracing malice), Misleading (rationalizing harm), and Submissive (yielding to pressure), and train models (Qwen 0.6B–14B) under QTA, QT, T-only, and QA paradigms, evaluating in both think and no-think modes. We find that: (1) CoT training amplifies harmful generalization beyond standard fine-tuning; (2) distinct reasoning types induce distinct behavioral patterns despite identical answers; (3) training on reasoning without answer supervision suffices to alter behavior; and (4) these effects persist when CoT is suppressed at inference. We validate these findings with naturally generated CoT, on GPT-OSS-20B, and under RLVR training, reporting bootstrap 95% CIs throughout. Our findings demonstrate that reasoning content is causally potent for downstream alignment, challenging strategies that supervise only final outputs.

The rise of Omni-modality Large Language Models (OLLMs) capable of jointly processing text, audio, and visual inputs marks a major step toward general intelligence. Ensuring their alignment with human preferences requires effective Omni-modality Reward Models (ORMs), which serve as surrogates for human judgment to guide OLLMs behavior. However, ORMs evaluation remains underdeveloped in the previous literature. Existing benchmarks are largely text-centric or limited to bimodal tasks, restricting comprehensive assessment for ORMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce Omni-RewardBench, the first benchmark for comprehensive evaluation of ORMs across modalities. In short, our contributions are threefold: (1) a hybrid automatic-annotation and human-verification pipeline to construct high-quality evaluation data; (2) extensive experiments on 20+ models, including inherently omni-modal and modality-bridged systems. Our experimental results demonstrate that current OLLMs fall short as reward models, revealing several common failure modes such as perception failure, modality dominance failure, and cross-modal fusion failure; and (3) strong correlations between Omni-RewardBench scores and downstream performance (IID r = 0.94, OOD r = 0.72), validating its reliability as a predictor of real-world capability and alignment quality.