Yuxin Meng

Author directory

2026

Vision-language-action (VLA) models for autonomous driving typically express intermediate reasoning entirely in text, which may discard decision-relevant visual information. We propose Latent Dreaming (LatDM), a latent–text reasoning framework that complements textual chain-of-thought with continuous latent states. LatDM uses latent blocks to preserve visually grounded spatial and temporal information, while text handles semantic abstraction and decision communication. A pretrained visual encoder provides latent supervision during training, and the model autonomously interleaves latent and textual reasoning at inference. Experiments on VLADBench, CODA-LM, and NuInstruct show consistent improvements over the underlying VLA backbone, while ablations confirm that the latent channel contributes beyond standard textual fine-tuning.
Evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on long-form scientific papers requires measuring not only answer correctness, but also whether answers are supported by traceable cross-modal evidence. Existing answer-only metrics and synthetic “Needle-In-A-Haystack” tests mainly assess answer matching or isolated retrieval, leaving evidence-grounded support under-examined. We introduce “Fish-in-the-Ocean” (FITO), an evidence-chain evaluation lens for native scientific documents, and instantiate it with SIN-Data, a scientific interleaved corpus that preserves text–figure coupling. Built on SIN-Data, SIN-Bench comprises four evidence-auditing tasks: evidence discovery, hypothesis verification, grounded QA, and evidence-anchored synthesis. We further propose “No Evidence, No Score”, which credits predictions only when linked to verifiable anchors and diagnoses evidence quality through matching, relevance, and logic. Experiments on 10 MLLMs show a clear correctness–grounding gap: Gemini-3-pro obtains the best average overall score (0.566), while GPT-5 reaches the highest SIN-QA answer accuracy (0.767) but lower evidence-aligned scores. Code and data are available at https://github.com/IIGROUP/sin-bench .
Existing benchmarks for MLLM-generated web artifacts assess interaction through local evidence and miss the requirement-induced states and transitions that determine whether a page works. We introduce WebRISE, which compiles task requirements into Interaction Contract Graphs (ICGs) of observable states, user-intent transitions, and DOM/visual assertions for implementation-agnostic browser execution. WebRISE spans 442 tasks across five input modalities (Text, Markdown, Sketch, Image, Video), with 5,495 transitions and 5,271 requirement checks that separate user-stated functions from implicit product-level constraints. Across 14 MLLMs, even the strongest model reaches only 65.6% transition validity and 66.3% requirement coverage, and visual quality is no proxy for behavior (Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on Markdown: V=80.8 yet T=15.5). Video gives the strongest interaction signal (+10.6pp implicit coverage over Text), while implicit constraints persist; defect injection shows ICG-based scoring detects state errors at 2–16× the rate of checkpoint-style evaluation.