As AI research increasingly moves beyond systems optimized for static tasks, a central challenge is building agents that learn continuously through experience-driven lifelong learning (ELL). In this paper, we introduce StuLife, a synthetic benchmark designed to evaluate selected operational capabilities relevant to ELL. Particularly, StuLife simulates a student’s college journey, from enrollment to academic and personal development, across three core phases and ten detailed sub-scenarios. StuLife is designed around four key design principles: From Isolated Tasks to Stateful Interaction, From Passive to Proactive, From Context to Memory, and From Imitation to Learning. In this dynamic environment, agents must acquire and distill practical skills and maintain persistent memory to make decisions based on evolving state variables (e.g., resource availability and time), and are also expected to initiate actions without external prompting. To this end, StuLife provides an evaluation protocol with dedicated metrics (e.g., StuGPA) for these capabilities. Our evaluation reveals that even the highest-StuGPA model, GPT-5, scores only 17.9/100, highlighting large gaps in long-term retention and proactive task initiation. Beyond evaluating LLMs on StuLife, we also explore the role of context engineering in improving agent performance on lifelong learning tasks.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) commonly suffer from hallucinations, which appear as fabricating non-existent objects or outputting incorrect attributes and spatial relationships in images. Previous works empirically indicate that CLIP-style vision encoders tend to focus on primary objects while ignoring image details, which is one of the causes of hallucinations. To address this issue, we propose plug-and-play fine-grained visual experts (PLANE) comprising two components: LoRA visual experts operating on CLIP for multi-aspect image encoding, and an instruction-aware gate network for adaptive image feature fusion. During training, we construct a fine-grained image-caption pairs dataset, where images are described from three aspects: objects, attributes, and relations between objects. Image-caption pairs from different aspects are used to train the three fine-grained LoRA experts respectively. Aiming at comprehensively evaluate our method’s capabilities, we manually annotate a fine-grained hallucination evaluation benchmark for LVLMs which is GPT4-independent during evaluation phase (GIFT). We conduct experiments both on popular hallucination evaluation benchmarks and GIFT. The results show that our method effectively reduces hallucinations across models of different types and sizes while introducing minimal inference latency. Compared to advanced baselines, our model also demonstrates superior performance.

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous agents has expanded the scope of AI coding from localized code generation to complex, repository-level, and execution-driven problem solving. However, current benchmarks predominantly evaluate code logic in static contexts, neglecting the dynamic, full-process requirements of real-world engineering, particularly in backend development which demands rigorous environment configuration and service deployment. To address this gap, we introduce ABC-Bench, a benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow. Using a scalable automated pipeline, we curated 224 practical tasks spanning 8 languages and 19 frameworks from open-source repositories. Distinct from previous evaluations, ABC-Bench require the agents to manage the entire development lifecycle from repository exploration to instantiating containerized services and pass the external end-to-end API tests. Our extensive evaluation reveals that even state-of-the-art models struggle to deliver reliable performance on these holistic tasks, highlighting a substantial disparity between current model capabilities and the demands of practical backend engineering.

Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents that reason over documents rather than answer from parametric knowledge. We study _archive-grounded reasoning_: locating sparse evidence across a large, messy collection of workplace files, reconciling inconsistent terminology, units, and time conventions, and computing an answer. Existing benchmarks address only parts of this setting and none jointly stresses archive-groundedness, agentic exploration, and cross-domain coverage. We introduce **Agora**, a benchmark pairing 362 questions with eight domain collections of 9,664 authentic documents and 372M tokens, far exceeding any model’s context window, so agents must explore deliberately rather than scan exhaustively. Agora is built by an agentic pipeline combining cross-document task synthesis, leakage-preventing obfuscation, and difficulty filtering. Evaluating eight models, we find the task far from solved: even the strongest reaches only 59.4% accuracy, with notable variation across domains.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is usually integrated into large language models (LLMs) to mitigate hallucinations and knowledge obsolescence. Whereas, conventional one-step retrieve-and-read methods are insufficient for multi-hop question answering, facing challenges of retrieval semantic mismatching and the high cost in handling interdependent subquestions. In this paper, we propose Optimizing Question Semantic Space for Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Multi-hop Question Answering (Q-DREAM). Q-DREAM consists of three key modules: (1) the Question Decomposition Module (QDM), which decomposes multi-hop questions into fine-grained subquestions; (2) the Subquestion Dependency Optimizer Module (SDOM), which models the interdependent relations of subquestions for better understanding; and (3) the Dynamic Passage Retrieval Module (DPRM), which aligns subquestions with relevant passages by optimizing the semantic embeddings.Experimental results across various benchmarks demonstrate that Q-DREAM significantly outperforms existing RAG methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings. Notably, Q-DREAM also improves retrieval efficiency while maintaining high accuracy compared with recent baselines.