Daily Papers

We propose DepR, a depth-guided single-view scene reconstruction framework that integrates instance-level diffusion within a compositional paradigm. Instead of reconstructing the entire scene holistically, DepR generates individual objects and subsequently composes them into a coherent 3D layout. Unlike previous methods that use depth solely for object layout estimation during inference and therefore fail to fully exploit its rich geometric information, DepR leverages depth throughout both training and inference. Specifically, we introduce depth-guided conditioning to effectively encode shape priors into diffusion models. During inference, depth further guides DDIM sampling and layout optimization, enhancing alignment between the reconstruction and the input image. Despite being trained on limited synthetic data, DepR achieves state-of-the-art performance and demonstrates strong generalization in single-view scene reconstruction, as shown through evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

The pursuit of controllability as a higher standard of visual content creation has yielded remarkable progress in customizable image synthesis. However, achieving controllable video synthesis remains challenging due to the large variation of temporal dynamics and the requirement of cross-frame temporal consistency. Based on the paradigm of compositional generation, this work presents VideoComposer that allows users to flexibly compose a video with textual conditions, spatial conditions, and more importantly temporal conditions. Specifically, considering the characteristic of video data, we introduce the motion vector from compressed videos as an explicit control signal to provide guidance regarding temporal dynamics. In addition, we develop a Spatio-Temporal Condition encoder (STC-encoder) that serves as a unified interface to effectively incorporate the spatial and temporal relations of sequential inputs, with which the model could make better use of temporal conditions and hence achieve higher inter-frame consistency. Extensive experimental results suggest that VideoComposer is able to control the spatial and temporal patterns simultaneously within a synthesized video in various forms, such as text description, sketch sequence, reference video, or even simply hand-crafted motions. The code and models will be publicly available at https://videocomposer.github.io.

Prompt tuning with large-scale pretrained vision-language models empowers open-vocabulary predictions trained on limited base categories, e.g., object classification and detection. In this paper, we propose compositional prompt tuning with motion cues: an extended prompt tuning paradigm for compositional predictions of video data. In particular, we present Relation Prompt (RePro) for Open-vocabulary Video Visual Relation Detection (Open-VidVRD), where conventional prompt tuning is easily biased to certain subject-object combinations and motion patterns. To this end, RePro addresses the two technical challenges of Open-VidVRD: 1) the prompt tokens should respect the two different semantic roles of subject and object, and 2) the tuning should account for the diverse spatio-temporal motion patterns of the subject-object compositions. Without bells and whistles, our RePro achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on two VidVRD benchmarks of not only the base training object and predicate categories, but also the unseen ones. Extensive ablations also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed compositional and multi-mode design of prompts. Code is available at https://github.com/Dawn-LX/OpenVoc-VidVRD.

This paper introduces MIDI, a novel paradigm for compositional 3D scene generation from a single image. Unlike existing methods that rely on reconstruction or retrieval techniques or recent approaches that employ multi-stage object-by-object generation, MIDI extends pre-trained image-to-3D object generation models to multi-instance diffusion models, enabling the simultaneous generation of multiple 3D instances with accurate spatial relationships and high generalizability. At its core, MIDI incorporates a novel multi-instance attention mechanism, that effectively captures inter-object interactions and spatial coherence directly within the generation process, without the need for complex multi-step processes. The method utilizes partial object images and global scene context as inputs, directly modeling object completion during 3D generation. During training, we effectively supervise the interactions between 3D instances using a limited amount of scene-level data, while incorporating single-object data for regularization, thereby maintaining the pre-trained generalization ability. MIDI demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in image-to-scene generation, validated through evaluations on synthetic data, real-world scene data, and stylized scene images generated by text-to-image diffusion models.

Diffusion-based text-to-video generation has witnessed impressive progress in the past year yet still falls behind text-to-image generation. One of the key reasons is the limited scale of publicly available data (e.g., 10M video-text pairs in WebVid10M vs. 5B image-text pairs in LAION), considering the high cost of video captioning. Instead, it could be far easier to collect unlabeled clips from video platforms like YouTube. Motivated by this, we come up with a novel text-to-video generation framework, termed TF-T2V, which can directly learn with text-free videos. The rationale behind is to separate the process of text decoding from that of temporal modeling. To this end, we employ a content branch and a motion branch, which are jointly optimized with weights shared. Following such a pipeline, we study the effect of doubling the scale of training set (i.e., video-only WebVid10M) with some randomly collected text-free videos and are encouraged to observe the performance improvement (FID from 9.67 to 8.19 and FVD from 484 to 441), demonstrating the scalability of our approach. We also find that our model could enjoy sustainable performance gain (FID from 8.19 to 7.64 and FVD from 441 to 366) after reintroducing some text labels for training. Finally, we validate the effectiveness and generalizability of our ideology on both native text-to-video generation and compositional video synthesis paradigms. Code and models will be publicly available at https://tf-t2v.github.io/.

Deep reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for obtaining high-performance policies. However, the safety of these policies has been a long-standing issue. One promising paradigm to guarantee safety is a shield, which shields a policy from making unsafe actions. However, computing a shield scales exponentially in the number of state variables. This is a particular concern in multi-agent systems with many agents. In this work, we propose a novel approach for multi-agent shielding. We address scalability by computing individual shields for each agent. The challenge is that typical safety specifications are global properties, but the shields of individual agents only ensure local properties. Our key to overcome this challenge is to apply assume-guarantee reasoning. Specifically, we present a sound proof rule that decomposes a (global, complex) safety specification into (local, simple) obligations for the shields of the individual agents. Moreover, we show that applying the shields during reinforcement learning significantly improves the quality of the policies obtained for a given training budget. We demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our multi-agent shielding framework in two case studies, reducing the computation time from hours to seconds and achieving fast learning convergence.

As language models (LMs) become more capable, it is increasingly important to align them with human preferences. However, the dominant paradigm for training Preference Models (PMs) for that purpose suffers from fundamental limitations, such as lack of transparency and scalability, along with susceptibility to overfitting the preference dataset. We propose Compositional Preference Models (CPMs), a novel PM framework that decomposes one global preference assessment into several interpretable features, obtains scalar scores for these features from a prompted LM, and aggregates these scores using a logistic regression classifier. Through these simple steps, CPMs allow to control which properties of the preference data are used to train the preference model and to build it based on features that are believed to underlie the human preference judgment. Our experiments show that CPMs not only improve generalization and are more robust to overoptimization than standard PMs, but also that best-of-n samples obtained using CPMs tend to be preferred over samples obtained using conventional PMs. Overall, our approach demonstrates the benefits of endowing PMs with priors about which features determine human preferences while relying on LM capabilities to extract those features in a scalable and robust way.

Significant progress has been made in text-to-video generation through the use of powerful generative models and large-scale internet data. However, substantial challenges remain in precisely controlling individual concepts within the generated video, such as the motion and appearance of specific characters and the movement of viewpoints. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm that generates each concept in 3D representation separately and then composes them with priors from Large Language Models (LLM) and 2D diffusion models. Specifically, given an input textual prompt, our scheme consists of three stages: 1) We leverage LLM as the director to first decompose the complex query into several sub-prompts that indicate individual concepts within the video~(e.g., scene, objects, motions), then we let LLM to invoke pre-trained expert models to obtain corresponding 3D representations of concepts. 2) To compose these representations, we prompt multi-modal LLM to produce coarse guidance on the scales and coordinates of trajectories for the objects. 3) To make the generated frames adhere to natural image distribution, we further leverage 2D diffusion priors and use Score Distillation Sampling to refine the composition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate high-fidelity videos from text with diverse motion and flexible control over each concept. Project page: https://aka.ms/c3v.

Compositional understanding is crucial for human intelligence, yet it remains unclear whether contemporary vision models exhibit it. The dominant machine learning paradigm is built on the premise that scaling data and model sizes will improve out-of-distribution performance, including compositional generalization. We test this premise through controlled experiments that systematically vary data scale, concept diversity, and combination coverage. We find that compositional generalization is driven by data diversity, not mere data scale. Increased combinatorial coverage forces models to discover a linearly factored representational structure, where concepts decompose into additive components. We prove this structure is key to efficiency, enabling perfect generalization from few observed combinations. Evaluating pretrained models (DINO, CLIP), we find above-random yet imperfect performance, suggesting partial presence of this structure. Our work motivates stronger emphasis on constructing diverse datasets for compositional generalization, and considering the importance of representational structure that enables efficient compositional learning. Code available at https://github.com/oshapio/visual-compositional-generalization.

The ability of generative large language models (LLMs) to perform in-context learning has given rise to a large body of research into how best to prompt models for various natural language processing tasks. Machine Translation (MT) has been shown to benefit from in-context examples, in particular when they are semantically similar to the sentence to translate. In this paper, we propose a new LLM-based translation paradigm, compositional translation, to replace naive few-shot MT with similarity-based demonstrations. An LLM is used to decompose a sentence into simpler phrases, and then to translate each phrase with the help of retrieved demonstrations. Finally, the LLM is prompted to translate the initial sentence with the help of the self-generated phrase-translation pairs. Our intuition is that this approach should improve translation because these shorter phrases should be intrinsically easier to translate and easier to match with relevant examples. This is especially beneficial in low-resource scenarios, and more generally whenever the selection pool is small or out of domain. We show that compositional translation boosts LLM translation performance on a wide range of popular MT benchmarks, including FLORES 200, NTREX 128 and TICO-19. Code and outputs are available at https://github.com/ArmelRandy/compositional-translation

We address two challenges of probabilistic topic modelling in order to better estimate the probability of a word in a given context, i.e., P(word|context): (1) No Language Structure in Context: Probabilistic topic models ignore word order by summarizing a given context as a "bag-of-word" and consequently the semantics of words in the context is lost. The LSTM-LM learns a vector-space representation of each word by accounting for word order in local collocation patterns and models complex characteristics of language (e.g., syntax and semantics), while the TM simultaneously learns a latent representation from the entire document and discovers the underlying thematic structure. We unite two complementary paradigms of learning the meaning of word occurrences by combining a TM (e.g., DocNADE) and a LM in a unified probabilistic framework, named as ctx-DocNADE. (2) Limited Context and/or Smaller training corpus of documents: In settings with a small number of word occurrences (i.e., lack of context) in short text or data sparsity in a corpus of few documents, the application of TMs is challenging. We address this challenge by incorporating external knowledge into neural autoregressive topic models via a language modelling approach: we use word embeddings as input of a LSTM-LM with the aim to improve the word-topic mapping on a smaller and/or short-text corpus. The proposed DocNADE extension is named as ctx-DocNADEe. We present novel neural autoregressive topic model variants coupled with neural LMs and embeddings priors that consistently outperform state-of-the-art generative TMs in terms of generalization (perplexity), interpretability (topic coherence) and applicability (retrieval and classification) over 6 long-text and 8 short-text datasets from diverse domains.

Text-to-image diffusion generative models can generate high quality images at the cost of tedious prompt engineering. Controllability can be improved by introducing layout conditioning, however existing methods lack layout editing ability and fine-grained control over object attributes. The concept of multi-layer generation holds great potential to address these limitations, however generating image instances concurrently to scene composition limits control over fine-grained object attributes, relative positioning in 3D space and scene manipulation abilities. In this work, we propose a novel multi-stage generation paradigm that is designed for fine-grained control, flexibility and interactivity. To ensure control over instance attributes, we devise a novel training paradigm to adapt a diffusion model to generate isolated scene components as RGBA images with transparency information. To build complex images, we employ these pre-generated instances and introduce a multi-layer composite generation process that smoothly assembles components in realistic scenes. Our experiments show that our RGBA diffusion model is capable of generating diverse and high quality instances with precise control over object attributes. Through multi-layer composition, we demonstrate that our approach allows to build and manipulate images from highly complex prompts with fine-grained control over object appearance and location, granting a higher degree of control than competing methods.

Language model agents (LMA) recently emerged as a promising paradigm on muti-step decision making tasks, often outperforming humans and other reinforcement learning agents. Despite the promise, their performance on real-world applications that often involve combinations of tasks is still underexplored. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark, called CompWoB -- 50 new compositional web automation tasks reflecting more realistic assumptions. We show that while existing prompted LMAs (gpt-3.5-turbo or gpt-4) achieve 94.0% average success rate on base tasks, their performance degrades to 24.9% success rate on compositional tasks. On the other hand, transferred LMAs (finetuned only on base tasks) show less generalization gap, dropping from 85.4% to 54.8%. By balancing data distribution across tasks, we train a new model, HTML-T5++, that surpasses human-level performance (95.2%) on MiniWoB, and achieves the best zero-shot performance on CompWoB (61.5%). While these highlight the promise of small-scale finetuned and transferred models for compositional generalization, their performance further degrades under different instruction compositions changing combinational order. In contrast to the recent remarkable success of LMA, our benchmark and detailed analysis emphasize the necessity of building LMAs that are robust and generalizable to task compositionality for real-world deployment.

Compositional visual reasoning has emerged as a key research frontier in multimodal AI, aiming to endow machines with the human-like ability to decompose visual scenes, ground intermediate concepts, and perform multi-step logical inference. While early surveys focus on monolithic vision-language models or general multimodal reasoning, a dedicated synthesis of the rapidly expanding compositional visual reasoning literature is still missing. We fill this gap with a comprehensive survey spanning 2023 to 2025 that systematically reviews 260+ papers from top venues (CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, etc.). We first formalize core definitions and describe why compositional approaches offer advantages in cognitive alignment, semantic fidelity, robustness, interpretability, and data efficiency. Next, we trace a five-stage paradigm shift: from prompt-enhanced language-centric pipelines, through tool-enhanced LLMs and tool-enhanced VLMs, to recently minted chain-of-thought reasoning and unified agentic VLMs, highlighting their architectural designs, strengths, and limitations. We then catalog 60+ benchmarks and corresponding metrics that probe compositional visual reasoning along dimensions such as grounding accuracy, chain-of-thought faithfulness, and high-resolution perception. Drawing on these analyses, we distill key insights, identify open challenges (e.g., limitations of LLM-based reasoning, hallucination, a bias toward deductive reasoning, scalable supervision, tool integration, and benchmark limitations), and outline future directions, including world-model integration, human-AI collaborative reasoning, and richer evaluation protocols. By offering a unified taxonomy, historical roadmap, and critical outlook, this survey aims to serve as a foundational reference and inspire the next generation of compositional visual reasoning research.

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has seen significant progress with diffusion models, enabling generation of photo-realistic images from text prompts. Despite this progress, existing methods still face challenges in following complex text prompts, especially those requiring compositional and multi-step reasoning. Given such complex instructions, SOTA models often make mistakes in faithfully modeling object attributes, and relationships among them. In this work, we present an alternate paradigm for T2I synthesis, decomposing the task of complex multi-step generation into three steps, (a) Generate: we first generate an image using existing diffusion models (b) Plan: we make use of Multi-Modal LLMs (MLLMs) to identify the mistakes in the generated image expressed in terms of individual objects and their properties, and produce a sequence of corrective steps required in the form of an edit-plan. (c) Edit: we make use of an existing text-guided image editing models to sequentially execute our edit-plan over the generated image to get the desired image which is faithful to the original instruction. Our approach derives its strength from the fact that it is modular in nature, is training free, and can be applied over any combination of image generation and editing models. As an added contribution, we also develop a model capable of compositional editing, which further helps improve the overall accuracy of our proposed approach. Our method flexibly trades inference time compute with performance on compositional text prompts. We perform extensive experimental evaluation across 3 benchmarks and 10 T2I models including DALLE-3 and the latest -- SD-3.5-Large. Our approach not only improves the performance of the SOTA models, by upto 3 points, it also reduces the performance gap between weaker and stronger models. https://dair-iitd.github.io/GraPE/{https://dair-iitd.github.io/GraPE/}

In recent years, neural implicit surface reconstruction has emerged as a popular paradigm for multi-view 3D reconstruction. Unlike traditional multi-view stereo approaches, the neural implicit surface-based methods leverage neural networks to represent 3D scenes as signed distance functions (SDFs). However, they tend to disregard the reconstruction of individual objects within the scene, which limits their performance and practical applications. To address this issue, previous work ObjectSDF introduced a nice framework of object-composition neural implicit surfaces, which utilizes 2D instance masks to supervise individual object SDFs. In this paper, we propose a new framework called ObjectSDF++ to overcome the limitations of ObjectSDF. First, in contrast to ObjectSDF whose performance is primarily restricted by its converted semantic field, the core component of our model is an occlusion-aware object opacity rendering formulation that directly volume-renders object opacity to be supervised with instance masks. Second, we design a novel regularization term for object distinction, which can effectively mitigate the issue that ObjectSDF may result in unexpected reconstruction in invisible regions due to the lack of constraint to prevent collisions. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our novel framework not only produces superior object reconstruction results but also significantly improves the quality of scene reconstruction. Code and more resources can be found in https://qianyiwu.github.io/objectsdf++

Recent compositional zero-shot learning (CZSL) methods adapt pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) by constructing trainable prompts only for composed state-object pairs. Relying on learning the joint representation of seen compositions, these methods ignore the explicit modeling of the state and object, thus limiting the exploitation of pre-trained knowledge and generalization to unseen compositions. With a particular focus on the universality of the solution, in this work, we propose a novel paradigm for CZSL models that establishes three identification branches (i.e., Multi-Path) to jointly model the state, object, and composition. The presented Troika is our implementation that aligns the branch-specific prompt representations with decomposed visual features. To calibrate the bias between semantically similar multi-modal representations, we further devise a Cross-Modal Traction module into Troika that shifts the prompt representation towards the current visual content. We conduct extensive experiments on three popular benchmarks, where our method significantly outperforms existing methods in both closed-world and open-world settings.

Compositional training has been the de-facto paradigm in existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), where pre-trained vision encoders are connected with pre-trained LLMs through continuous multimodal pre-training. However, the multimodal scaling property of this paradigm remains difficult to explore due to the separated training. In this paper, we focus on the native training of MLLMs in an end-to-end manner and systematically study its design space and scaling property under a practical setting, i.e., data constraint. Through careful study of various choices in MLLM, we obtain the optimal meta-architecture that best balances performance and training cost. After that, we further explore the scaling properties of the native MLLM and indicate the positively correlated scaling relationship between visual encoders and LLMs. Based on these findings, we propose a native MLLM called NaViL, combined with a simple and cost-effective recipe. Experimental results on 14 multimodal benchmarks confirm the competitive performance of NaViL against existing MLLMs. Besides that, our findings and results provide in-depth insights for the future study of native MLLMs.

In recent years, the demand for 3D content has grown exponentially with intelligent upgrading of interactive media, extended reality (XR), and Metaverse industries. In order to overcome the limitation of traditional manual modeling approaches, such as labor-intensive workflows and prolonged production cycles, revolutionary advances have been achieved through the convergence of novel 3D representation paradigms and artificial intelligence generative technologies. In this survey, we conduct a systematically review of the cutting-edge achievements in static 3D object and scene generation, as well as establish a comprehensive technical framework through systematic categorization. Specifically, we initiate our analysis with mainstream 3D object representations, followed by in-depth exploration of two principal technical pathways in object generation: data-driven supervised learning methods and deep generative model-based approaches. Regarding scene generation, we focus on three dominant paradigms: layout-guided compositional synthesis, 2D prior-based scene generation, and rule-driven modeling. Finally, we critically examine persistent challenges in 3D generation and propose potential research directions for future investigation. This survey aims to provide readers with a structured understanding of state-of-the-art 3D generation technologies while inspiring researchers to undertake more exploration in this domain.

While video-generation-based embodied world models have gained increasing attention, their reliance on large-scale embodied interaction data remains a key bottleneck. The scarcity, difficulty of collection, and high dimensionality of embodied data fundamentally limit the alignment granularity between language and actions and exacerbate the challenge of long-horizon video generation--hindering generative models from achieving a "GPT moment" in the embodied domain. There is a naive observation: the diversity of embodied data far exceeds the relatively small space of possible primitive motions. Based on this insight, we propose a novel paradigm for world modeling--Primitive Embodied World Models (PEWM). By restricting video generation to fixed short horizons, our approach 1) enables fine-grained alignment between linguistic concepts and visual representations of robotic actions, 2) reduces learning complexity, 3) improves data efficiency in embodied data collection, and 4) decreases inference latency. By equipping with a modular Vision-Language Model (VLM) planner and a Start-Goal heatmap Guidance mechanism (SGG), PEWM further enables flexible closed-loop control and supports compositional generalization of primitive-level policies over extended, complex tasks. Our framework leverages the spatiotemporal vision priors in video models and the semantic awareness of VLMs to bridge the gap between fine-grained physical interaction and high-level reasoning, paving the way toward scalable, interpretable, and general-purpose embodied intelligence.

With the advance of diffusion models, various personalized image generation methods have been proposed. However, almost all existing work only focuses on either subject-driven or style-driven personalization. Meanwhile, state-of-the-art methods face several challenges in realizing compositional personalization, i.e., composing different subject and style concepts, such as concept disentanglement, unified reconstruction paradigm, and insufficient training data. To address these issues, we introduce FreeTuner, a flexible and training-free method for compositional personalization that can generate any user-provided subject in any user-provided style (see Figure 1). Our approach employs a disentanglement strategy that separates the generation process into two stages to effectively mitigate concept entanglement. FreeTuner leverages the intermediate features within the diffusion model for subject concept representation and introduces style guidance to align the synthesized images with the style concept, ensuring the preservation of both the subject's structure and the style's aesthetic features. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the generation ability of FreeTuner across various personalization settings.

The remarkable performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has unequivocally demonstrated their proficient understanding capabilities in handling a wide array of visual tasks. Nevertheless, the opaque nature of their black-box reasoning processes persists as an enigma, rendering them uninterpretable and struggling with hallucination. Their ability to execute intricate compositional reasoning tasks is also constrained, culminating in a stagnation of learning progression for these models. In this work, we introduce Fact, a novel paradigm designed to generate multimodal rationales that are faithful, concise, and transferable for teaching MLLMs. This paradigm utilizes verifiable visual programming to generate executable code guaranteeing faithfulness and precision. Subsequently, through a series of operations including pruning, merging, and bridging, the rationale enhances its conciseness. Furthermore, we filter rationales that can be transferred to end-to-end paradigms from programming paradigms to guarantee transferability. Empirical evidence from experiments demonstrates the superiority of our method across models of varying parameter sizes, significantly enhancing their compositional reasoning and generalization ability. Our approach also reduces hallucinations owing to its high correlation between images and text.

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at holistic understanding, they struggle in capturing the dense world with complex scenes, requiring fine-grained analysis of intricate details and object inter-relationships. Region-level MLLMs have been a promising step. However, previous attempts are generally optimized to understand given regions in isolation, neglecting crucial global contexts. To address this, we introduce Grasp Any Region (GAR) for comprehen- sive region-level visual understanding. Empowered by an effective RoI-aligned feature replay technique, GAR supports (1) precise perception by leveraging necessary global contexts, and (2) modeling interactions between multiple prompts. Together, it then naturally achieves (3) advanced compositional reasoning to answer specific free-form questions about any region, shifting the paradigm from passive description to active dialogue. Moreover, we construct GAR-Bench, which not only provides a more accurate evaluation of single-region comprehension, but also, more importantly, measures interactions and complex reasoning across multiple regions. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that GAR-1B not only maintains the state-of-the-art captioning capabilities, e.g., outperforming DAM-3B +4.5 on DLC-Bench, but also excels at modeling relationships between multiple prompts with advanced comprehension capabilities, even surpassing InternVL3-78B on GAR-Bench-VQA. More importantly, our zero-shot GAR-8B even outperforms in-domain VideoRefer-7B on VideoRefer-BenchQ, indicating its strong capabilities can be easily transferred to videos.

Current text-to-image (T2I) generation models struggle to align spatial composition with the input text, especially in complex scenes. Even layout-based approaches yield suboptimal spatial control, as their generation process is decoupled from layout planning, making it difficult to refine the layout during synthesis. We present CoT-Diff, a framework that brings step-by-step CoT-style reasoning into T2I generation by tightly integrating Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-driven 3D layout planning with the diffusion process. CoT-Diff enables layout-aware reasoning inline within a single diffusion round: at each denoising step, the MLLM evaluates intermediate predictions, dynamically updates the 3D scene layout, and continuously guides the generation process. The updated layout is converted into semantic conditions and depth maps, which are fused into the diffusion model via a condition-aware attention mechanism, enabling precise spatial control and semantic injection. Experiments on 3D Scene benchmarks show that CoT-Diff significantly improves spatial alignment and compositional fidelity, and outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 34.7% in complex scene spatial accuracy, thereby validating the effectiveness of this entangled generation paradigm.

Recent large-scale generative models learned on big data are capable of synthesizing incredible images yet suffer from limited controllability. This work offers a new generation paradigm that allows flexible control of the output image, such as spatial layout and palette, while maintaining the synthesis quality and model creativity. With compositionality as the core idea, we first decompose an image into representative factors, and then train a diffusion model with all these factors as the conditions to recompose the input. At the inference stage, the rich intermediate representations work as composable elements, leading to a huge design space (i.e., exponentially proportional to the number of decomposed factors) for customizable content creation. It is noteworthy that our approach, which we call Composer, supports various levels of conditions, such as text description as the global information, depth map and sketch as the local guidance, color histogram for low-level details, etc. Besides improving controllability, we confirm that Composer serves as a general framework and facilitates a wide range of classical generative tasks without retraining. Code and models will be made available.

Text-to-3D generation has achieved remarkable success via large-scale text-to-image diffusion models. Nevertheless, there is no paradigm for scaling up the methodology to urban scale. Urban scenes, characterized by numerous elements, intricate arrangement relationships, and vast scale, present a formidable barrier to the interpretability of ambiguous textual descriptions for effective model optimization. In this work, we surmount the limitations by introducing a compositional 3D layout representation into text-to-3D paradigm, serving as an additional prior. It comprises a set of semantic primitives with simple geometric structures and explicit arrangement relationships, complementing textual descriptions and enabling steerable generation. Upon this, we propose two modifications -- (1) We introduce Layout-Guided Variational Score Distillation to address model optimization inadequacies. It conditions the score distillation sampling process with geometric and semantic constraints of 3D layouts. (2) To handle the unbounded nature of urban scenes, we represent 3D scene with a Scalable Hash Grid structure, incrementally adapting to the growing scale of urban scenes. Extensive experiments substantiate the capability of our framework to scale text-to-3D generation to large-scale urban scenes that cover over 1000m driving distance for the first time. We also present various scene editing demonstrations, showing the powers of steerable urban scene generation. Website: https://urbanarchitect.github.io.

Scaling semantic parsing models for task-oriented dialog systems to new languages is often expensive and time-consuming due to the lack of available datasets. Available datasets suffer from several shortcomings: a) they contain few languages b) they contain small amounts of labeled examples per language c) they are based on the simple intent and slot detection paradigm for non-compositional queries. In this paper, we present a new multilingual dataset, called MTOP, comprising of 100k annotated utterances in 6 languages across 11 domains. We use this dataset and other publicly available datasets to conduct a comprehensive benchmarking study on using various state-of-the-art multilingual pre-trained models for task-oriented semantic parsing. We achieve an average improvement of +6.3 points on Slot F1 for the two existing multilingual datasets, over best results reported in their experiments. Furthermore, we demonstrate strong zero-shot performance using pre-trained models combined with automatic translation and alignment, and a proposed distant supervision method to reduce the noise in slot label projection.

Compositional AI systems, which combine multiple artificial intelligence components together with other application components to solve a larger problem, have no known pattern of development and are often approached in a bespoke and ad hoc style. This makes development slower and harder to reuse for future applications. To support the full rapid development cycle of compositional AI applications, we have developed a novel framework called (Bee)* (written as a regular expression and pronounced as "beestar"). We illustrate how (Bee)* supports building integrated, scalable, and interactive compositional AI applications with a simplified developer experience.

While large language models (LLMs) appear to be increasingly capable of solving compositional tasks, it is an open question whether they do so using compositional mechanisms. In this work, we investigate how feedforward LLMs solve two-hop factual recall tasks, which can be expressed compositionally as g(f(x)). We first confirm that modern LLMs continue to suffer from the "compositionality gap": i.e. their ability to compute both z = f(x) and y = g(z) does not entail their ability to compute the composition y = g(f(x)). Then, using logit lens on their residual stream activations, we identify two processing mechanisms, one which solves tasks compositionally, computing f(x) along the way to computing g(f(x)), and one which solves them directly, without any detectable signature of the intermediate variable f(x). Finally, we find that which mechanism is employed appears to be related to the embedding space geometry, with the idiomatic mechanism being dominant in cases where there exists a linear mapping from x to g(f(x)) in the embedding spaces. We fully release our data and code at: https://github.com/apoorvkh/composing-functions .

Compositionality, the notion that the meaning of an expression is constructed from the meaning of its parts and syntactic rules, permits the infinite productivity of human language. For the first time, artificial language models (LMs) are able to match human performance in a number of compositional generalization tasks. However, much remains to be understood about the representational mechanisms underlying these abilities. We take a high-level geometric approach to this problem by relating the degree of compositionality in a dataset to the intrinsic dimensionality of its representations under an LM, a measure of feature complexity. We find not only that the degree of dataset compositionality is reflected in representations' intrinsic dimensionality, but that the relationship between compositionality and geometric complexity arises due to learned linguistic features over training. Finally, our analyses reveal a striking contrast between linear and nonlinear dimensionality, showing that they respectively encode formal and semantic aspects of linguistic composition.

Recent progress in text-to-music generation has enabled models to synthesize high-quality musical segments, full compositions, and even respond to fine-grained control signals, e.g. chord progressions. State-of-the-art (SOTA) systems differ significantly across many dimensions, such as training datasets, modeling paradigms, and architectural choices. This diversity complicates efforts to evaluate models fairly and pinpoint which design choices most influence performance. While factors like data and architecture are important, in this study we focus exclusively on the modeling paradigm. We conduct a systematic empirical analysis to isolate its effects, offering insights into associated trade-offs and emergent behaviors that can guide future text-to-music generation systems. Specifically, we compare the two arguably most common modeling paradigms: Auto-Regressive decoding and Conditional Flow-Matching. We conduct a controlled comparison by training all models from scratch using identical datasets, training configurations, and similar backbone architectures. Performance is evaluated across multiple axes, including generation quality, robustness to inference configurations, scalability, adherence to both textual and temporally aligned conditioning, and editing capabilities in the form of audio inpainting. This comparative study sheds light on distinct strengths and limitations of each paradigm, providing actionable insights that can inform future architectural and training decisions in the evolving landscape of text-to-music generation. Audio sampled examples are available at: https://huggingface.co/spaces/ortal1602/ARvsFM

While recent generative models can produce engaging music, their utility is limited. The variation in the music is often left to chance, resulting in compositions that lack structure. Pieces extending beyond a minute can become incoherent or repetitive. This paper introduces an approach for generating structured, arbitrarily long musical pieces. Central to this approach is the creation of musical segments using a conditional generative model, with transitions between these segments. The generation of prompts that determine the high-level composition is distinct from the creation of finer, lower-level details. A large language model is then used to suggest the musical form.

Advanced diffusion models like RPG, Stable Diffusion 3 and FLUX have made notable strides in compositional text-to-image generation. However, these methods typically exhibit distinct strengths for compositional generation, with some excelling in handling attribute binding and others in spatial relationships. This disparity highlights the need for an approach that can leverage the complementary strengths of various models to comprehensively improve the composition capability. To this end, we introduce IterComp, a novel framework that aggregates composition-aware model preferences from multiple models and employs an iterative feedback learning approach to enhance compositional generation. Specifically, we curate a gallery of six powerful open-source diffusion models and evaluate their three key compositional metrics: attribute binding, spatial relationships, and non-spatial relationships. Based on these metrics, we develop a composition-aware model preference dataset comprising numerous image-rank pairs to train composition-aware reward models. Then, we propose an iterative feedback learning method to enhance compositionality in a closed-loop manner, enabling the progressive self-refinement of both the base diffusion model and reward models over multiple iterations. Theoretical proof demonstrates the effectiveness and extensive experiments show our significant superiority over previous SOTA methods (e.g., Omost and FLUX), particularly in multi-category object composition and complex semantic alignment. IterComp opens new research avenues in reward feedback learning for diffusion models and compositional generation. Code: https://github.com/YangLing0818/IterComp

Many complex tasks can be decomposed into simpler, independent parts. Discovering such underlying compositional structure has the potential to enable compositional generalization. Despite progress, our most powerful systems struggle to compose flexibly. It therefore seems natural to make models more modular to help capture the compositional nature of many tasks. However, it is unclear under which circumstances modular systems can discover hidden compositional structure. To shed light on this question, we study a teacher-student setting with a modular teacher where we have full control over the composition of ground truth modules. This allows us to relate the problem of compositional generalization to that of identification of the underlying modules. In particular we study modularity in hypernetworks representing a general class of multiplicative interactions. We show theoretically that identification up to linear transformation purely from demonstrations is possible without having to learn an exponential number of module combinations. We further demonstrate empirically that under the theoretically identified conditions, meta-learning from finite data can discover modular policies that generalize compositionally in a number of complex environments.

Human cognition exhibits systematic compositionality, the algebraic ability to generate infinite novel combinations from finite learned components, which is the key to understanding and reasoning about complex logic. In this work, we investigate the compositionality of large language models (LLMs) in mathematical reasoning. Specifically, we construct a new dataset MathTrap by introducing carefully designed logical traps into the problem descriptions of MATH and GSM8K. Since problems with logical flaws are quite rare in the real world, these represent "unseen" cases to LLMs. Solving these requires the models to systematically compose (1) the mathematical knowledge involved in the original problems with (2) knowledge related to the introduced traps. Our experiments show that while LLMs possess both components of requisite knowledge, they do not spontaneously combine them to handle these novel cases. We explore several methods to mitigate this deficiency, such as natural language prompts, few-shot demonstrations, and fine-tuning. Additionally, we test the recently released OpenAI o1 model and find that human-like `slow thinking' helps improve the compositionality of LLMs. Overall, systematic compositionality remains an open challenge for large language models.

Music composition represents the creative side of humanity, and itself is a complex task that requires abilities to understand and generate information with long dependency and harmony constraints. While demonstrating impressive capabilities in STEM subjects, current LLMs easily fail in this task, generating ill-written music even when equipped with modern techniques like In-Context-Learning and Chain-of-Thoughts. To further explore and enhance LLMs' potential in music composition by leveraging their reasoning ability and the large knowledge base in music history and theory, we propose ComposerX, an agent-based symbolic music generation framework. We find that applying a multi-agent approach significantly improves the music composition quality of GPT-4. The results demonstrate that ComposerX is capable of producing coherent polyphonic music compositions with captivating melodies, while adhering to user instructions.

Large monolithic generative models trained on massive amounts of data have become an increasingly dominant approach in AI research. In this paper, we argue that we should instead construct large generative systems by composing smaller generative models together. We show how such a compositional generative approach enables us to learn distributions in a more data-efficient manner, enabling generalization to parts of the data distribution unseen at training time. We further show how this enables us to program and construct new generative models for tasks completely unseen at training. Finally, we show that in many cases, we can discover separate compositional components from data.

The goal of image composition is merging a foreground object into a background image to obtain a realistic composite image. Recently, generative composition methods are built on large pretrained diffusion models, due to their unprecedented image generation ability. They train a model on abundant pairs of foregrounds and backgrounds, so that it can be directly applied to a new pair of foreground and background at test time. However, the generated results often lose the foreground details and exhibit noticeable artifacts. In this work, we propose an embarrassingly simple approach named DreamCom inspired by DreamBooth. Specifically, given a few reference images for a subject, we finetune text-guided inpainting diffusion model to associate this subject with a special token and inpaint this subject in the specified bounding box. We also construct a new dataset named MureCom well-tailored for this task.

Learning compositional representation is a key aspect of object-centric learning as it enables flexible systematic generalization and supports complex visual reasoning. However, most of the existing approaches rely on auto-encoding objective, while the compositionality is implicitly imposed by the architectural or algorithmic bias in the encoder. This misalignment between auto-encoding objective and learning compositionality often results in failure of capturing meaningful object representations. In this study, we propose a novel objective that explicitly encourages compositionality of the representations. Built upon the existing object-centric learning framework (e.g., slot attention), our method incorporates additional constraints that an arbitrary mixture of object representations from two images should be valid by maximizing the likelihood of the composite data. We demonstrate that incorporating our objective to the existing framework consistently improves the objective-centric learning and enhances the robustness to the architectural choices.

Visual scenes are composed of visual concepts and have the property of combinatorial explosion. An important reason for humans to efficiently learn from diverse visual scenes is the ability of compositional perception, and it is desirable for artificial intelligence to have similar abilities. Compositional scene representation learning is a task that enables such abilities. In recent years, various methods have been proposed to apply deep neural networks, which have been proven to be advantageous in representation learning, to learn compositional scene representations via reconstruction, advancing this research direction into the deep learning era. Learning via reconstruction is advantageous because it may utilize massive unlabeled data and avoid costly and laborious data annotation. In this survey, we first outline the current progress on reconstruction-based compositional scene representation learning with deep neural networks, including development history and categorizations of existing methods from the perspectives of the modeling of visual scenes and the inference of scene representations; then provide benchmarks, including an open source toolbox to reproduce the benchmark experiments, of representative methods that consider the most extensively studied problem setting and form the foundation for other methods; and finally discuss the limitations of existing methods and future directions of this research topic.

Text-to-image (T2I) generative models, such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E, have shown remarkable proficiency in producing high-quality, realistic, and natural images from textual descriptions. However, these models sometimes fail to accurately capture all the details specified in the input prompts, particularly concerning entities, attributes, and spatial relationships. This issue becomes more pronounced when the prompt contains novel or complex compositions, leading to what are known as compositional generation failure modes. Recently, a new open-source diffusion-based T2I model, FLUX, has been introduced, demonstrating strong performance in high-quality image generation. Additionally, autoregressive T2I models like LlamaGen have claimed competitive visual quality performance compared to diffusion-based models. In this study, we evaluate the compositional generation capabilities of these newly introduced models against established models using the T2I-CompBench benchmark. Our findings reveal that LlamaGen, as a vanilla autoregressive model, is not yet on par with state-of-the-art diffusion models for compositional generation tasks under the same criteria, such as model size and inference time. On the other hand, the open-source diffusion-based model FLUX exhibits compositional generation capabilities comparable to the state-of-the-art closed-source model DALL-E3.

Diffusion models have shown promising results in cross-modal generation tasks involving audio and music, such as text-to-sound and text-to-music generation. These text-controlled music generation models typically focus on generating music by capturing global musical attributes like genre and mood. However, music composition is a complex, multilayered task that often involves musical arrangement as an integral part of the process. This process involves composing each instrument to align with existing ones in terms of beat, dynamics, harmony, and melody, requiring greater precision and control over tracks than text prompts usually provide. In this work, we address these challenges by extending the MusicLDM, a latent diffusion model for music, into a multi-track generative model. By learning the joint probability of tracks sharing a context, our model is capable of generating music across several tracks that correspond well to each other, either conditionally or unconditionally. Additionally, our model is capable of arrangement generation, where the model can generate any subset of tracks given the others (e.g., generating a piano track complementing given bass and drum tracks). We compared our model with an existing multi-track generative model and demonstrated that our model achieves considerable improvements across objective metrics for both total and arrangement generation tasks.

This paper revisits Ramon Llull's Ars combinatoria - a medieval framework for generating knowledge through symbolic recombination - as a conceptual foundation for building a modern Llull's thinking machine for research ideation. Our approach defines three compositional axes: Theme (e.g., efficiency, adaptivity), Domain (e.g., question answering, machine translation), and Method (e.g., adversarial training, linear attention). These elements represent high-level abstractions common in scientific work - motivations, problem settings, and technical approaches - and serve as building blocks for LLM-driven exploration. We mine elements from human experts or conference papers and show that prompting LLMs with curated combinations produces research ideas that are diverse, relevant, and grounded in current literature. This modern thinking machine offers a lightweight, interpretable tool for augmenting scientific creativity and suggests a path toward collaborative ideation between humans and AI.

We propose a new learning paradigm called Deep Memory. It has the potential to completely revolutionize the Machine Learning field. Surprisingly, this paradigm has not been reinvented yet, unlike Deep Learning. At the core of this approach is the Learning By Heart principle, well studied in primary schools all over the world. Inspired by poem recitation, or by pi decimal memorization, we propose a concrete algorithm that mimics human behavior. We implement this paradigm on the task of generative modeling, and apply to images, natural language and even the pi decimals as long as one can print them as text. The proposed algorithm even generated this paper, in a one-shot learning setting. In carefully designed experiments, we show that the generated samples are indistinguishable from the training examples, as measured by any statistical tests or metrics.

We consider the problem of eliciting compositional generalization capabilities in large language models (LLMs) with a novel type of prompting strategy. Compositional generalization empowers the LLMs to solve problems that are harder than the ones they have seen (i.e., easy-to-hard generalization), which is a critical reasoning capability of human-like intelligence. However, even the current state-of-the-art LLMs still struggle with this form of reasoning. To bridge this gap, we propose skills-in-context (SKiC) prompting, which instructs LLMs how to compose basic skills to resolve more complex problems. We find that it is crucial to demonstrate both the skills and the compositional examples within the same prompting context. With as few as two examplars, our SKiC prompting initiates strong synergies between skills and their composition capabilities. Notably, it empowers LLMs to solve unseen problems that require innovative skill compositions, achieving near-perfect generalization on a broad range of challenging compositionality tasks. Intriguingly, SKiC prompting unlocks the latent potential of LLMs, enabling them to leverage pre-existing internal skills acquired during earlier pre-training stages, even when these skills are not explicitly presented in the prompting context. This results in the capability of LLMs to solve unseen complex problems by activating and composing internal competencies. With such prominent features, SKiC prompting is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance on challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks (e.g., MATH).

Large language models (LLMs) are shaping a new user interface (UI) paradigm in writing tools by enabling users to generate text through prompts. This paradigm shifts some creative control from the user to the system, thereby diminishing the user's authorship and autonomy in the writing process. To restore autonomy, we introduce Textfocals, a UI prototype designed to investigate a human-centered approach that emphasizes the user's role in writing. Textfocals supports the writing process by providing LLM-generated summaries, questions, and advice (i.e., LLM views) in a sidebar of a text editor, encouraging reflection and self-driven revision in writing without direct text generation. Textfocals' UI affordances, including contextually adaptive views and scaffolding for prompt selection and customization, offer a novel way to interact with LLMs where users maintain full authorship of their writing. A formative user study with Textfocals showed promising evidence that this approach might help users develop underdeveloped ideas, cater to the rhetorical audience, and clarify their writing. However, the study also showed interaction design challenges related to document navigation and scoping, prompt engineering, and context management. Our work highlights the breadth of the design space of writing support interfaces powered by generative AI that maintain authorship integrity.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited significant potential in performing diverse tasks, including the ability to call functions or use external tools to enhance their performance. While current research on function calling by LLMs primarily focuses on single-turn interactions, this paper addresses the overlooked necessity for LLMs to engage in multi-turn function calling--critical for handling compositional, real-world queries that require planning with functions but not only use functions. To facilitate this, we introduce an approach, BUTTON, which generates synthetic compositional instruction tuning data via bottom-up instruction construction and top-down trajectory generation. In the bottom-up phase, we generate simple atomic tasks based on real-world scenarios and build compositional tasks using heuristic strategies based on atomic tasks. Corresponding functions are then developed for these compositional tasks. The top-down phase features a multi-agent environment where interactions among simulated humans, assistants, and tools are utilized to gather multi-turn function calling trajectories. This approach ensures task compositionality and allows for effective function and trajectory generation by examining atomic tasks within compositional tasks. We produce a dataset BUTTONInstruct comprising 8k data points and demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments across various LLMs.

Modelling compositionality has been a longstanding area of research in the field of vector space semantics. The categorical approach to compositionality maps grammar onto vector spaces in a principled way, but comes under fire for requiring the formation of very high-dimensional matrices and tensors, and therefore being computationally infeasible. In this paper I show how a linear simplification of recursive neural tensor network models can be mapped directly onto the categorical approach, giving a way of computing the required matrices and tensors. This mapping suggests a number of lines of research for both categorical compositional vector space models of meaning and for recursive neural network models of compositionality.

Deep generative models allow for photorealistic image synthesis at high resolutions. But for many applications, this is not enough: content creation also needs to be controllable. While several recent works investigate how to disentangle underlying factors of variation in the data, most of them operate in 2D and hence ignore that our world is three-dimensional. Further, only few works consider the compositional nature of scenes. Our key hypothesis is that incorporating a compositional 3D scene representation into the generative model leads to more controllable image synthesis. Representing scenes as compositional generative neural feature fields allows us to disentangle one or multiple objects from the background as well as individual objects' shapes and appearances while learning from unstructured and unposed image collections without any additional supervision. Combining this scene representation with a neural rendering pipeline yields a fast and realistic image synthesis model. As evidenced by our experiments, our model is able to disentangle individual objects and allows for translating and rotating them in the scene as well as changing the camera pose.

Composition models of distributional semantics are used to construct phrase representations from the representations of their words. Composition models are typically situated on two ends of a spectrum. They either have a small number of parameters but compose all phrases in the same way, or they perform word-specific compositions at the cost of a far larger number of parameters. In this paper we propose transformation weighting (TransWeight), a composition model that consistently outperforms existing models on nominal compounds, adjective-noun phrases and adverb-adjective phrases in English, German and Dutch. TransWeight drastically reduces the number of parameters needed compared to the best model in the literature by composing similar words in the same way.

Causal reasoning and compositional reasoning are two core aspirations in generative AI. Measuring the extent of these behaviors requires principled evaluation methods. We explore a unified perspective that considers both behaviors simultaneously, termed compositional causal reasoning (CCR): the ability to infer how causal measures compose and, equivalently, how causal quantities propagate through graphs. We instantiate a framework for the systematic evaluation of CCR for the average treatment effect and the probability of necessity and sufficiency. As proof of concept, we demonstrate the design of CCR tasks for language models in the LLama, Phi, and GPT families. On a math word problem, our framework revealed a range of taxonomically distinct error patterns. Additionally, CCR errors increased with the complexity of causal paths for all models except o1.

Large-scale diffusion models have achieved state-of-the-art results on text-to-image synthesis (T2I) tasks. Despite their ability to generate high-quality yet creative images, we observe that attribution-binding and compositional capabilities are still considered major challenging issues, especially when involving multiple objects. In this work, we improve the compositional skills of T2I models, specifically more accurate attribute binding and better image compositions. To do this, we incorporate linguistic structures with the diffusion guidance process based on the controllable properties of manipulating cross-attention layers in diffusion-based T2I models. We observe that keys and values in cross-attention layers have strong semantic meanings associated with object layouts and content. Therefore, we can better preserve the compositional semantics in the generated image by manipulating the cross-attention representations based on linguistic insights. Built upon Stable Diffusion, a SOTA T2I model, our structured cross-attention design is efficient that requires no additional training samples. We achieve better compositional skills in qualitative and quantitative results, leading to a 5-8% advantage in head-to-head user comparison studies. Lastly, we conduct an in-depth analysis to reveal potential causes of incorrect image compositions and justify the properties of cross-attention layers in the generation process.

Large Language Models (LLMs) display striking surface fluency yet systematically fail at tasks requiring symbolic reasoning, arithmetic accuracy, and logical consistency. This paper offers a structural diagnosis of such failures, revealing a persistent gap between comprehension and competence. Through controlled experiments and architectural analysis, we demonstrate that LLMs often articulate correct principles without reliably applying them--a failure rooted not in knowledge access, but in computational execution. We term this phenomenon the computational split-brain syndrome, where instruction and action pathways are geometrically and functionally dissociated. This core limitation recurs across domains, from mathematical operations to relational inferences, and explains why model behavior remains brittle even under idealized prompting. We argue that LLMs function as powerful pattern completion engines, but lack the architectural scaffolding for principled, compositional reasoning. Our findings delineate the boundary of current LLM capabilities and motivate future models with metacognitive control, principle lifting, and structurally grounded execution. This diagnosis also clarifies why mechanistic interpretability findings may reflect training-specific pattern coordination rather than universal computational principles, and why the geometric separation between instruction and execution pathways suggests limitations in neural introspection and mechanistic analysis.

Content creators often draw inspiration from multiple visual sources, combining distinct elements to craft new compositions. Modern computational approaches now aim to emulate this fundamental creative process. Although recent diffusion models excel at text-guided compositional synthesis, text as a medium often lacks precise control over visual details. Image-based composition approaches can capture more nuanced features, but existing methods are typically limited in the range of concepts they can capture, and require expensive training procedures or specialized data. We present IP-Composer, a novel training-free approach for compositional image generation that leverages multiple image references simultaneously, while using natural language to describe the concept to be extracted from each image. Our method builds on IP-Adapter, which synthesizes novel images conditioned on an input image's CLIP embedding. We extend this approach to multiple visual inputs by crafting composite embeddings, stitched from the projections of multiple input images onto concept-specific CLIP-subspaces identified through text. Through comprehensive evaluation, we show that our approach enables more precise control over a larger range of visual concept compositions.

Many recent works have discussed the propensity, or lack thereof, for emergent languages to exhibit properties of natural languages. A favorite in the literature is learning compositionality. We note that most of those works have focused on communicative bandwidth as being of primary importance. While important, it is not the only contributing factor. In this paper, we investigate the learning biases that affect the efficacy and compositionality of emergent languages. Our foremost contribution is to explore how capacity of a neural network impacts its ability to learn a compositional language. We additionally introduce a set of evaluation metrics with which we analyze the learned languages. Our hypothesis is that there should be a specific range of model capacity and channel bandwidth that induces compositional structure in the resulting language and consequently encourages systematic generalization. While we empirically see evidence for the bottom of this range, we curiously do not find evidence for the top part of the range and believe that this is an open question for the community.

Recent progress in multimodal reasoning has been significantly advanced by textual Chain-of-Thought (CoT), a paradigm where models conduct reasoning within language. This text-centric approach, however, treats vision as a static, initial context, creating a fundamental "semantic gap" between rich perceptual data and discrete symbolic thought. Human cognition often transcends language, utilizing vision as a dynamic mental sketchpad. A similar evolution is now unfolding in AI, marking a fundamental paradigm shift from models that merely think about images to those that can truly think with images. This emerging paradigm is characterized by models leveraging visual information as intermediate steps in their thought process, transforming vision from a passive input into a dynamic, manipulable cognitive workspace. In this survey, we chart this evolution of intelligence along a trajectory of increasing cognitive autonomy, which unfolds across three key stages: from external tool exploration, through programmatic manipulation, to intrinsic imagination. To structure this rapidly evolving field, our survey makes four key contributions. (1) We establish the foundational principles of the think with image paradigm and its three-stage framework. (2) We provide a comprehensive review of the core methods that characterize each stage of this roadmap. (3) We analyze the critical landscape of evaluation benchmarks and transformative applications. (4) We identify significant challenges and outline promising future directions. By providing this structured overview, we aim to offer a clear roadmap for future research towards more powerful and human-aligned multimodal AI.

Text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated an impressive ability to produce high-quality outputs. However, they often struggle to accurately follow fine-grained spatial information in an input text. To this end, we propose a compositional approach for text-to-image generation based on two stages. In the first stage, we design a diffusion-based generative model to produce one or more aligned intermediate representations (such as depth or segmentation maps) conditioned on text. In the second stage, we map these representations, together with the text, to the final output image using a separate diffusion-based generative model. Our findings indicate that such compositional approach can improve image generation, resulting in a notable improvement in FID score and a comparable CLIP score, when compared to the standard non-compositional baseline.

Scientific studies of consciousness rely on objects whose existence is assumed to be independent of any consciousness. On the contrary, we assume consciousness to be fundamental, and that one of the main features of consciousness is characterized as being other-dependent. We set up a framework which naturally subsumes this feature by defining a compact closed category where morphisms represent conscious processes. These morphisms are a composition of a set of generators, each being specified by their relations with other generators, and therefore co-dependent. The framework is general enough and fits well into a compositional model of consciousness. Interestingly, we also show how our proposal may become a step towards avoiding the hard problem of consciousness, and thereby address the combination problem of conscious experiences.

Large language models excel at pattern matching, yet often fall short in systematic compositional generalization. We propose the coverage principle: a data-centric framework showing that models relying primarily on pattern matching for compositional tasks cannot reliably generalize beyond substituting fragments that yield identical results when used in the same contexts. We demonstrate that this framework has a strong predictive power for the generalization capabilities of Transformers. First, we derive and empirically confirm that the training data required for two-hop generalization grows at least quadratically with the token set size, and the training data efficiency does not improve with 20x parameter scaling. Second, for compositional tasks with path ambiguity where one variable affects the output through multiple computational paths, we show that Transformers learn context-dependent state representations that undermine both performance and interoperability. Third, Chain-of-Thought supervision improves training data efficiency for multi-hop tasks but still struggles with path ambiguity. Finally, we outline a mechanism-based taxonomy that distinguishes three ways neural networks can generalize: structure-based (bounded by coverage), property-based (leveraging algebraic invariances), and shared-operator (through function reuse). This conceptual lens contextualizes our results and highlights where new architectural ideas are needed to achieve systematic compositionally. Overall, the coverage principle provides a unified lens for understanding compositional reasoning, and underscores the need for fundamental architectural or training innovations to achieve truly systematic compositionality.

Rule-based reasoning, a fundamental type of legal reasoning, enables us to draw conclusions by accurately applying a rule to a set of facts. We explore causal language models as rule-based reasoners, specifically with respect to compositional rules - rules consisting of multiple elements which form a complex logical expression. Reasoning about compositional rules is challenging because it requires multiple reasoning steps, and attending to the logical relationships between elements. We introduce a new prompting method, Chain of Logic, which elicits rule-based reasoning through decomposition (solving elements as independent threads of logic), and recomposition (recombining these sub-answers to resolve the underlying logical expression). This method was inspired by the IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion) framework, a sequential reasoning approach used by lawyers. We evaluate chain of logic across eight rule-based reasoning tasks involving three distinct compositional rules from the LegalBench benchmark and demonstrate it consistently outperforms other prompting methods, including chain of thought and self-ask, using open-source and commercial language models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved high accuracy on complex commonsense and mathematical problems that involve the composition of multiple reasoning steps. However, current compositional benchmarks testing these skills tend to focus on either commonsense or math reasoning, whereas LLM agents solving real-world tasks would require a combination of both. In this work, we introduce an Agentic Commonsense and Math benchmark (AgentCoMa), where each compositional task requires a commonsense reasoning step and a math reasoning step. We test it on 61 LLMs of different sizes, model families, and training strategies. We find that LLMs can usually solve both steps in isolation, yet their accuracy drops by ~30% on average when the two are combined. This is a substantially greater performance gap than the one we observe in prior compositional benchmarks that combine multiple steps of the same reasoning type. In contrast, non-expert human annotators can solve the compositional questions and the individual steps in AgentCoMa with similarly high accuracy. Furthermore, we conduct a series of interpretability studies to better understand the performance gap, examining neuron patterns, attention maps and membership inference. Our work underscores a substantial degree of model brittleness in the context of mixed-type compositional reasoning and offers a test bed for future improvement.

Bayes' rule tells us how to invert a causal process in order to update our beliefs in light of new evidence. If the process is believed to have a complex compositional structure, we may observe that the inversion of the whole can be computed piecewise in terms of the component processes. We study the structure of this compositional rule, noting that it relates to the lens pattern in functional programming. Working in a suitably general axiomatic presentation of a category of Markov kernels, we see how we can think of Bayesian inversion as a particular instance of a state-dependent morphism in a fibred category. We discuss the compositional nature of this, formulated as a functor on the underlying category and explore how this can used for a more type-driven approach to statistical inference.

Language models (LMs) can perform complex reasoning either end-to-end, with hidden latent state, or compositionally, with transparent intermediate state. Composition offers benefits for interpretability and safety, but may need workflow support and infrastructure to remain competitive. We describe iterated decomposition, a human-in-the-loop workflow for developing and refining compositional LM programs. We improve the performance of compositions by zooming in on failing components and refining them through decomposition, additional context, chain of thought, etc. To support this workflow, we develop ICE, an open-source tool for visualizing the execution traces of LM programs. We apply iterated decomposition to three real-world tasks and improve the accuracy of LM programs over less compositional baselines: describing the placebo used in a randomized controlled trial (25% to 65%), evaluating participant adherence to a medical intervention (53% to 70%), and answering NLP questions on the Qasper dataset (38% to 69%). These applications serve as case studies for a workflow that, if automated, could keep ML systems interpretable and safe even as they scale to increasingly complex tasks.

Since their introduction, diffusion models have quickly become the prevailing approach to generative modeling in many domains. They can be interpreted as learning the gradients of a time-varying sequence of log-probability density functions. This interpretation has motivated classifier-based and classifier-free guidance as methods for post-hoc control of diffusion models. In this work, we build upon these ideas using the score-based interpretation of diffusion models, and explore alternative ways to condition, modify, and reuse diffusion models for tasks involving compositional generation and guidance. In particular, we investigate why certain types of composition fail using current techniques and present a number of solutions. We conclude that the sampler (not the model) is responsible for this failure and propose new samplers, inspired by MCMC, which enable successful compositional generation. Further, we propose an energy-based parameterization of diffusion models which enables the use of new compositional operators and more sophisticated, Metropolis-corrected samplers. Intriguingly we find these samplers lead to notable improvements in compositional generation across a wide set of problems such as classifier-guided ImageNet modeling and compositional text-to-image generation.

Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models (DM) have garnered widespread adoption due to their capability in generating high-fidelity outputs and accessibility to anyone able to put imagination into words. However, DMs are often predisposed to generate unappealing outputs, much like the random images on the internet they were trained on. Existing approaches to address this are founded on the implicit premise that visual aesthetics is universal, which is limiting. Aesthetics in the T2I context should be about personalization and we propose the novel task of aesthetics alignment which seeks to align user-specified aesthetics with the T2I generation output. Inspired by how artworks provide an invaluable perspective to approach aesthetics, we codify visual aesthetics using the compositional framework artists employ, known as the Principles of Art (PoA). To facilitate this study, we introduce CompArt, a large-scale compositional art dataset building on top of WikiArt with PoA analysis annotated by a capable Multimodal LLM. Leveraging the expressive power of LLMs and training a lightweight and transferrable adapter, we demonstrate that T2I DMs can effectively offer 10 compositional controls through user-specified PoA conditions. Additionally, we design an appropriate evaluation framework to assess the efficacy of our approach.

With the bloom of Large Language Models (LLMs), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that incorporate LLMs with pre-trained vision models have recently demonstrated impressive performance across diverse vision-language tasks. However, they fall short to comprehend context involving multiple images. A primary reason for this shortcoming is that the visual features for each images are encoded individually by frozen encoders before feeding into the LLM backbone, lacking awareness of other images and the multimodal instructions. We term this issue as prior-LLM modality isolation and propose a two phase paradigm, browse-and-concentrate, to enable in-depth multimodal context fusion prior to feeding the features into LLMs. This paradigm initially "browses" through the inputs for essential insights, and then revisits the inputs to "concentrate" on crucial details, guided by these insights, to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the multimodal inputs. Additionally, we develop training strategies specifically to enhance the understanding of multi-image inputs. Our method markedly boosts the performance on 7 multi-image scenarios, contributing to increments on average accuracy by 2.13% and 7.60% against strong MLLMs baselines with 3B and 11B LLMs, respectively.

A new prior is proposed for learning representations of high-level concepts of the kind we manipulate with language. This prior can be combined with other priors in order to help disentangling abstract factors from each other. It is inspired by cognitive neuroscience theories of consciousness, seen as a bottleneck through which just a few elements, after having been selected by attention from a broader pool, are then broadcast and condition further processing, both in perception and decision-making. The set of recently selected elements one becomes aware of is seen as forming a low-dimensional conscious state. This conscious state is combining the few concepts constituting a conscious thought, i.e., what one is immediately conscious of at a particular moment. We claim that this architectural and information-processing constraint corresponds to assumptions about the joint distribution between high-level concepts. To the extent that these assumptions are generally true (and the form of natural language seems consistent with them), they can form a useful prior for representation learning. A low-dimensional thought or conscious state is analogous to a sentence: it involves only a few variables and yet can make a statement with very high probability of being true. This is consistent with a joint distribution (over high-level concepts) which has the form of a sparse factor graph, i.e., where the dependencies captured by each factor of the factor graph involve only very few variables while creating a strong dip in the overall energy function. The consciousness prior also makes it natural to map conscious states to natural language utterances or to express classical AI knowledge in a form similar to facts and rules, albeit capturing uncertainty as well as efficient search mechanisms implemented by attention mechanisms.

We introduce NotaGen, a symbolic music generation model aiming to explore the potential of producing high-quality classical sheet music. Inspired by the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), NotaGen adopts pre-training, fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning paradigms (henceforth referred to as the LLM training paradigms). It is pre-trained on 1.6M pieces of music, and then fine-tuned on approximately 9K high-quality classical compositions conditioned on "period-composer-instrumentation" prompts. For reinforcement learning, we propose the CLaMP-DPO method, which further enhances generation quality and controllability without requiring human annotations or predefined rewards. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of CLaMP-DPO in symbolic music generation models with different architectures and encoding schemes. Furthermore, subjective A/B tests show that NotaGen outperforms baseline models against human compositions, greatly advancing musical aesthetics in symbolic music generation.The project homepage is https://electricalexis.github.io/notagen-demo.

What are the root causes of hallucinations in large language models (LLMs)? We use Communication Complexity to prove that the Transformer layer is incapable of composing functions (e.g., identify a grandparent of a person in a genealogy) if the domains of the functions are large enough; we show through examples that this inability is already empirically present when the domains are quite small. We also point out that several mathematical tasks that are at the core of the so-called compositional tasks thought to be hard for LLMs are unlikely to be solvable by Transformers, for large enough instances and assuming that certain well accepted conjectures in the field of Computational Complexity are true.

Machine learning, notably deep learning, has significantly propelled molecular investigations within the biochemical sphere. Traditionally, modeling for such research has centered around a handful of paradigms. For instance, the prediction paradigm is frequently deployed for tasks such as molecular property prediction. To enhance the generation and decipherability of purely data-driven models, scholars have integrated biochemical domain knowledge into these molecular study models. This integration has sparked a surge in paradigm transfer, which is solving one molecular learning task by reformulating it as another one. With the emergence of Large Language Models, these paradigms have demonstrated an escalating trend towards harmonized unification. In this work, we delineate a literature survey focused on knowledge-informed molecular learning from the perspective of paradigm transfer. We classify the paradigms, scrutinize their methodologies, and dissect the contribution of domain knowledge. Moreover, we encapsulate prevailing trends and identify intriguing avenues for future exploration in molecular learning.

We analyse perception and memory, using mathematical models for knowledge graphs and tensors, to gain insights into the corresponding functionalities of the human mind. Our discussion is based on the concept of propositional sentences consisting of subject-predicate-object (SPO) triples for expressing elementary facts. SPO sentences are the basis for most natural languages but might also be important for explicit perception and declarative memories, as well as intra-brain communication and the ability to argue and reason. A set of SPO sentences can be described as a knowledge graph, which can be transformed into an adjacency tensor. We introduce tensor models, where concepts have dual representations as indices and associated embeddings, two constructs we believe are essential for the understanding of implicit and explicit perception and memory in the brain. We argue that a biological realization of perception and memory imposes constraints on information processing. In particular, we propose that explicit perception and declarative memories require a semantic decoder, which, in a simple realization, is based on four layers: First, a sensory memory layer, as a buffer for sensory input, second, an index layer representing concepts, third, a memoryless representation layer for the broadcasting of information ---the "blackboard", or the "canvas" of the brain--- and fourth, a working memory layer as a processing center and data buffer. We discuss the operations of the four layers and relate them to the global workspace theory. In a Bayesian brain interpretation, semantic memory defines the prior for observable triple statements. We propose that ---in evolution and during development--- semantic memory, episodic memory, and natural language evolved as emergent properties in agents' process to gain a deeper understanding of sensory information.

Concept-based interpretability methods offer a lens into the internals of foundation models by decomposing their embeddings into high-level concepts. These concept representations are most useful when they are compositional, meaning that the individual concepts compose to explain the full sample. We show that existing unsupervised concept extraction methods find concepts which are not compositional. To automatically discover compositional concept representations, we identify two salient properties of such representations, and propose Compositional Concept Extraction (CCE) for finding concepts which obey these properties. We evaluate CCE on five different datasets over image and text data. Our evaluation shows that CCE finds more compositional concept representations than baselines and yields better accuracy on four downstream classification tasks. Code and data are available at https://github.com/adaminsky/compositional_concepts .

Recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shifted from pre-training scaling to post-training and test-time scaling. Across these developments, a key unified paradigm has arisen: Learning from Rewards, where reward signals act as the guiding stars to steer LLM behavior. It has underpinned a wide range of prevalent techniques, such as reinforcement learning (in RLHF, DPO, and GRPO), reward-guided decoding, and post-hoc correction. Crucially, this paradigm enables the transition from passive learning from static data to active learning from dynamic feedback. This endows LLMs with aligned preferences and deep reasoning capabilities. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview of the paradigm of learning from rewards. We categorize and analyze the strategies under this paradigm across training, inference, and post-inference stages. We further discuss the benchmarks for reward models and the primary applications. Finally we highlight the challenges and future directions. We maintain a paper collection at https://github.com/bobxwu/learning-from-rewards-llm-papers.

Music relies heavily on repetition to build structure and meaning. Self-reference occurs on multiple timescales, from motifs to phrases to reusing of entire sections of music, such as in pieces with ABA structure. The Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017), a sequence model based on self-attention, has achieved compelling results in many generation tasks that require maintaining long-range coherence. This suggests that self-attention might also be well-suited to modeling music. In musical composition and performance, however, relative timing is critically important. Existing approaches for representing relative positional information in the Transformer modulate attention based on pairwise distance (Shaw et al., 2018). This is impractical for long sequences such as musical compositions since their memory complexity for intermediate relative information is quadratic in the sequence length. We propose an algorithm that reduces their intermediate memory requirement to linear in the sequence length. This enables us to demonstrate that a Transformer with our modified relative attention mechanism can generate minute-long compositions (thousands of steps, four times the length modeled in Oore et al., 2018) with compelling structure, generate continuations that coherently elaborate on a given motif, and in a seq2seq setup generate accompaniments conditioned on melodies. We evaluate the Transformer with our relative attention mechanism on two datasets, JSB Chorales and Piano-e-Competition, and obtain state-of-the-art results on the latter.

Diffusion models are a class of generative models that learn to synthesize samples by inverting a diffusion process that gradually maps data into noise. While these models have enjoyed great success recently, a full theoretical understanding of their observed properties is still lacking, in particular, their weak sensitivity to the choice of noise family and the role of adequate scheduling of noise levels for good synthesis. By identifying a correspondence between diffusion models and a well-known paradigm in cognitive science known as serial reproduction, whereby human agents iteratively observe and reproduce stimuli from memory, we show how the aforementioned properties of diffusion models can be explained as a natural consequence of this correspondence. We then complement our theoretical analysis with simulations that exhibit these key features. Our work highlights how classic paradigms in cognitive science can shed light on state-of-the-art machine learning problems.

We present a new method for large language models to solve compositional tasks. Although they have shown strong performance on traditional language understanding tasks, large language models struggle to solve compositional tasks, where the solution depends on solving smaller instances of the same problem. We propose a natural approach to solve compositional tasks recursively. Our method, Re-Tuning, tunes models to break down a problem into subproblems, solve those subproblems, and combine the results. We show that our method significantly improves model performance on three representative compositional tasks: integer addition, dynamic programming, and parity. Compared to state-of-the-art methods that keep intermediate steps towards solving the problems, Re-Tuning achieves significantly higher accuracy and is more GPU memory efficient.

Knowledge is fundamental to the overall capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). The knowledge paradigm of a model, which dictates how it encodes and utilizes knowledge, significantly affects its performance. Despite the continuous development of LLMs under existing knowledge paradigms, issues within these frameworks continue to constrain model potential. This blog post highlight three critical open problems limiting model capabilities: (1) challenges in knowledge updating for LLMs, (2) the failure of reverse knowledge generalization (the reversal curse), and (3) conflicts in internal knowledge. We review recent progress made in addressing these issues and discuss potential general solutions. Based on observations in these areas, we propose a hypothetical paradigm based on Contextual Knowledge Scaling, and further outline implementation pathways that remain feasible within contemporary techniques. Evidence suggests this approach holds potential to address current shortcomings, serving as our vision for future model paradigms. This blog post aims to provide researchers with a brief overview of progress in LLM knowledge systems, while provide inspiration for the development of next-generation model architectures.

The rapid evolution of agentic AI marks a new phase in artificial intelligence, where Large Language Models (LLMs) no longer merely respond but act, reason, and adapt. This survey traces the paradigm shift in building agentic AI: from Pipeline-based systems, where planning, tool use, and memory are orchestrated by external logic, to the emerging Model-native paradigm, where these capabilities are internalized within the model's parameters. We first position Reinforcement Learning (RL) as the algorithmic engine enabling this paradigm shift. By reframing learning from imitating static data to outcome-driven exploration, RL underpins a unified solution of LLM + RL + Task across language, vision and embodied domains. Building on this, the survey systematically reviews how each capability -- Planning, Tool use, and Memory -- has evolved from externally scripted modules to end-to-end learned behaviors. Furthermore, it examines how this paradigm shift has reshaped major agent applications, specifically the Deep Research agent emphasizing long-horizon reasoning and the GUI agent emphasizing embodied interaction. We conclude by discussing the continued internalization of agentic capabilities like Multi-agent collaboration and Reflection, alongside the evolving roles of the system and model layers in future agentic AI. Together, these developments outline a coherent trajectory toward model-native agentic AI as an integrated learning and interaction framework, marking the transition from constructing systems that apply intelligence to developing models that grow intelligence through experience.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong generalization across a wide range of tasks. Reasoning with LLMs is central to solving multi-step problems and complex decision-making. To support efficient reasoning, recent studies have shifted attention from explicit chain-of-thought prompting toward implicit reasoning, where reasoning occurs silently via latent structures without emitting intermediate textual steps. Implicit reasoning brings advantages such as lower generation cost, faster inference, and better alignment with internal computation. Although prior surveys have discussed latent representations in the context of reasoning, a dedicated and mechanism-level examination of how reasoning unfolds internally within LLMs remains absent. This survey fills that gap by introducing a taxonomy centered on execution paradigms, shifting the focus from representational forms to computational strategies. We organize existing methods into three execution paradigms based on \textit{how and where internal computation unfolds}: latent optimization, signal-guided control, and layer-recurrent execution. We also review structural, behavioral and representation-based evidence that supports the presence of implicit reasoning in LLMs. We further provide a structured overview of the evaluation metrics and benchmarks used in existing works to assess the effectiveness and reliability of implicit reasoning. We maintain a continuously updated project at: https://github.com/digailab/awesome-llm-implicit-reasoning.

The ''pretraining-and-finetuning'' paradigm has become a norm for training domain-specific models in natural language processing and computer vision. In this work, we aim to examine this paradigm for symbolic music generation through leveraging the largest ever symbolic music dataset sourced from the MuseScore forum. We first pretrain a large unconditional transformer model using 1.5 million songs. We then propose a simple technique to equip this pretrained unconditional music transformer model with instrument and genre controls by finetuning the model with additional control tokens. Our proposed representation offers improved high-level controllability and expressiveness against two existing representations. The experimental results show that the proposed model can successfully generate music with user-specified instruments and genre. In a subjective listening test, the proposed model outperforms the pretrained baseline model in terms of coherence, harmony, arrangement and overall quality.

Recent advances in 3D generation have transitioned from multi-view 2D rendering approaches to 3D-native latent diffusion frameworks that exploit geometric priors in ground truth data. Despite progress, three key limitations persist: (1) Single-latent representations fail to capture complex multi-part geometries, causing detail degradation; (2) Holistic latent coding neglects part independence and interrelationships critical for compositional design; (3) Global conditioning mechanisms lack fine-grained controllability. Inspired by human 3D design workflows, we propose CoPart - a part-aware diffusion framework that decomposes 3D objects into contextual part latents for coherent multi-part generation. This paradigm offers three advantages: i) Reduces encoding complexity through part decomposition; ii) Enables explicit part relationship modeling; iii) Supports part-level conditioning. We further develop a mutual guidance strategy to fine-tune pre-trained diffusion models for joint part latent denoising, ensuring both geometric coherence and foundation model priors. To enable large-scale training, we construct Partverse - a novel 3D part dataset derived from Objaverse through automated mesh segmentation and human-verified annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate CoPart's superior capabilities in part-level editing, articulated object generation, and scene composition with unprecedented controllability.

The field of natural language processing (NLP) has witnessed significant progress in recent years, with a notable focus on improving large language models' (LLM) performance through innovative prompting techniques. Among these, prompt engineering coupled with structures has emerged as a promising paradigm, with designs such as Chain-of-Thought, Tree of Thoughts, or Graph of Thoughts, in which the overall LLM reasoning is guided by a structure such as a graph. As illustrated with numerous examples, this paradigm significantly enhances the LLM's capability to solve numerous tasks, ranging from logical or mathematical reasoning to planning or creative writing. To facilitate the understanding of this growing field and pave the way for future developments, we devise a general blueprint for effective and efficient LLM reasoning schemes. For this, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the prompt execution pipeline, clarifying and clearly defining different concepts. We then build the first taxonomy of structure-enhanced LLM reasoning schemes. We focus on identifying fundamental classes of harnessed structures, and we analyze the representations of these structures, algorithms executed with these structures, and many others. We refer to these structures as reasoning topologies, because their representation becomes to a degree spatial, as they are contained within the LLM context. Our study compares existing prompting schemes using the proposed taxonomy, discussing how certain design choices lead to different patterns in performance and cost. We also outline theoretical underpinnings, relationships between prompting and others parts of the LLM ecosystem such as knowledge bases, and the associated research challenges. Our work will help to advance future prompt engineering techniques.

With the development in cognitive science and Large Language Models (LLMs), increasing connections have come to light between these two distinct fields. Building upon these connections, we propose a conjecture suggesting the existence of a duality between LLMs and Tulving's theory of memory. We identify a potential correspondence between Tulving's synergistic ecphory model (SEM) of retrieval and the emergent abilities observed in LLMs, serving as supporting evidence for our conjecture. Furthermore, we speculate that consciousness may be considered a form of emergent ability based on this duality. We also discuss how other theories of consciousness intersect with our research.

Compositional generalization, the ability of intelligent models to extrapolate understanding of components to novel compositions, is a fundamental yet challenging facet in AI research, especially within multimodal environments. In this work, we address this challenge by exploiting the syntactic structure of language to boost compositional generalization. This paper elevates the importance of syntactic grounding, particularly through attention masking techniques derived from text input parsing. We introduce and evaluate the merits of using syntactic information in the multimodal grounding problem. Our results on grounded compositional generalization underscore the positive impact of dependency parsing across diverse tasks when utilized with Weight Sharing across the Transformer encoder. The results push the state-of-the-art in multimodal grounding and parameter-efficient modeling and provide insights for future research.

Transformer large language models (LLMs) have sparked admiration for their exceptional performance on tasks that demand intricate multi-step reasoning. Yet, these models simultaneously show failures on surprisingly trivial problems. This begs the question: Are these errors incidental, or do they signal more substantial limitations? In an attempt to demystify Transformers, we investigate the limits of these models across three representative compositional tasks -- multi-digit multiplication, logic grid puzzles, and a classic dynamic programming problem. These tasks require breaking problems down into sub-steps and synthesizing these steps into a precise answer. We formulate compositional tasks as computation graphs to systematically quantify the level of complexity, and break down reasoning steps into intermediate sub-procedures. Our empirical findings suggest that Transformers solve compositional tasks by reducing multi-step compositional reasoning into linearized subgraph matching, without necessarily developing systematic problem-solving skills. To round off our empirical study, we provide theoretical arguments on abstract multi-step reasoning problems that highlight how Transformers' performance will rapidly decay with increased task complexity.

Compositional reasoning is a hallmark of human visual intelligence; yet despite the size of large vision-language models, they struggle to represent simple compositions by combining objects with their attributes. To measure this lack of compositional capability, we design Cola, a text-to-image retrieval benchmark to Compose Objects Localized with Attributes. Using Cola as a testbed, we explore modeling designs to adapt pre-trained vision-language models to reason compositionally about multiple attributes attached to multiple objects. We explore 6 finetuning strategies on 2 seminal vision-language models, using 3 finetuning datasets and 2 test benchmarks (Cola and CREPE). Surprisingly, our optimal finetuning strategy improves a 151M parameter CLIP, which disjointly encodes image and language during pretraining, to perform as well as a 241M parameter FLAVA, which uses a multi-modal transformer encoder during pretraining to attend over both vision and language modalities. This optimal finetuning strategy is a lightweight multi-modal adapter that jointly attends over both image and language features generated by the pretrained model. We show this works better than common strategies such as prompt/fine-tuning, or tuning a comparable number of unimodal layers.

Modelling compositional meaning for sentences using empirical distributional methods has been a challenge for computational linguists. We implement the abstract categorical model of Coecke et al. (arXiv:1003.4394v1 [cs.CL]) using data from the BNC and evaluate it. The implementation is based on unsupervised learning of matrices for relational words and applying them to the vectors of their arguments. The evaluation is based on the word disambiguation task developed by Mitchell and Lapata (2008) for intransitive sentences, and on a similar new experiment designed for transitive sentences. Our model matches the results of its competitors in the first experiment, and betters them in the second. The general improvement in results with increase in syntactic complexity showcases the compositional power of our model.

The first generation of Large Language Models - what might be called "Act I" of generative AI (2020-2023) - achieved remarkable success through massive parameter and data scaling, yet exhibited fundamental limitations in knowledge latency, shallow reasoning, and constrained cognitive processes. During this era, prompt engineering emerged as our primary interface with AI, enabling dialogue-level communication through natural language. We now witness the emergence of "Act II" (2024-present), where models are transitioning from knowledge-retrieval systems (in latent space) to thought-construction engines through test-time scaling techniques. This new paradigm establishes a mind-level connection with AI through language-based thoughts. In this paper, we clarify the conceptual foundations of cognition engineering and explain why this moment is critical for its development. We systematically break down these advanced approaches through comprehensive tutorials and optimized implementations, democratizing access to cognition engineering and enabling every practitioner to participate in AI's second act. We provide a regularly updated collection of papers on test-time scaling in the GitHub Repository: https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/cognition-engineering

Music foundation models possess impressive music generation capabilities. When people compose music, they may infuse their understanding of music into their work, by using notes and intervals to craft melodies, chords to build progressions, and tempo to create a rhythmic feel. To what extent is this true of music generation models? More specifically, are fundamental Western music theory concepts observable within the "inner workings" of these models? Recent work proposed leveraging latent audio representations from music generation models towards music information retrieval tasks (e.g. genre classification, emotion recognition), which suggests that high-level musical characteristics are encoded within these models. However, probing individual music theory concepts (e.g. tempo, pitch class, chord quality) remains under-explored. Thus, we introduce SynTheory, a synthetic MIDI and audio music theory dataset, consisting of tempos, time signatures, notes, intervals, scales, chords, and chord progressions concepts. We then propose a framework to probe for these music theory concepts in music foundation models (Jukebox and MusicGen) and assess how strongly they encode these concepts within their internal representations. Our findings suggest that music theory concepts are discernible within foundation models and that the degree to which they are detectable varies by model size and layer.

Learning paradigms for large language models (LLMs) currently tend to fall within either in-context learning (ICL) or full fine-tuning. Each of these comes with their own trade-offs based on available data, model size, compute cost, ease-of-use, and final quality with neither solution performing well across-the-board. In this article, we first describe ICL and fine-tuning paradigms in a way that highlights their natural connections. Based on these connections, we propose a new learning paradigm called FIAT that fuses the best of these paradigms together, enabling prompt-engineered instructions and chain-of-thought reasoning with the very largest models while also using similar methods to perform parameter updates on a modestly-sized LLM with parameter-efficient tuning. We evaluate FIAT's effectiveness on a variety of multilingual tasks and observe that FIAT performs better than both ICL and fine-tuning at scales ranging from 100-10,000 training examples. We hope that FIAT provides a practical way of harnessing the full potential of LLMs without needing to make a hard choice between learning paradigms.

In this manifesto, we put forward the idea of data alchemy as a narrative device to discuss storytelling and transdisciplinarity in visualization. If data is the prima materia of modern science, how does one perform the Great Work? We use text-to-image diffusion-based generative art to develop the concept, and structure our argument in ten propositions, as if they were ten issues of a comic novel on data alchemy: Ad Disco Diffusionem. To follow the argument, the reader must immerse themselves in our miro board, and navigate a multimedia semiotic topology that includes comics, videos, code demos, and ergotic literature in a true alchemic sense. By accessing this paradigm one might find new sources of inspiration for scientific inquiry in familiar places, or get lost in the creative exploration of the unknown. Our colorful, sometimes poetic, exposition should not distract the reader from the seriousness of the ideas discussed, but ultimately it is about the journey.

The meaning of complex phrases in natural language is composed of their individual components. The task of compositional generalization evaluates a model's ability to understand new combinations of components. Previous studies trained smaller, task-specific models, which exhibited poor generalization. While large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive generalization abilities on many tasks through in-context learning (ICL), their potential for compositional generalization remains unexplored. In this paper, we first empirically investigate prevailing ICL methods in compositional generalization. We find that they struggle with complex compositional questions due to cumulative errors in long reasoning steps and intricate logic required for tool-making. Consequently, we propose a human-guided tool manipulation framework (HTM) that generates tools for sub-questions and integrates multiple tools. Our method enhances the effectiveness of tool creation and usage with minimal human effort. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two compositional generalization benchmarks and outperforms existing methods on the most challenging test split by 70%.

The prevailing paradigm for scaling large language models (LLMs) involves monolithic, end-to-end training, a resource-intensive process that lacks flexibility. This paper explores an alternative, constructive approach to model development, built upon the foundation of non-trainable, deterministic input embeddings. In prior [1], we established that high-level semantic reasoning can emerge in Transformers using frozen embeddings derived from the visual structure of Unicode glyphs. Here, we demonstrate that this fixed representational substrate acts as a universal "docking port," enabling two powerful and efficient scaling paradigms: seamless modular composition and progressive layer-wise growth. First, we show that specialist models trained on disparate datasets (e.g., Russian and Chinese text) can be merged into a single, more capable Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, post-training, with zero architectural modification. This is achieved by simply averaging their output logits. The resulting MoE model exhibits immediate performance improvements on reasoning benchmarks like MMLU, surpassing its constituent experts without catastrophic forgetting. Second, we introduce a layer-wise constructive training methodology, where a deep Transformer is "grown" by progressively stacking and training one layer at a time. This method demonstrates stable convergence and a clear correlation between model depth and the emergence of complex reasoning abilities, such as those required for SQuAD. Our findings suggest a paradigm shift from monolithic optimization towards a more biological or constructive model of AI development, where complexity is built incrementally and modules can be composed freely. This opens new avenues for resource-efficient scaling, continual learning, and a more democratized ecosystem for building powerful AI systems. We release all code and models to facilitate further research.

This paper proposes a novel framework for understanding large language models (LLMs) by reconceptualizing them as semiotic machines rather than as imitations of human cognition. Drawing from structuralist and post-structuralist theories of language-specifically the works of Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Derrida-I argue that LLMs should be understood as models of language itself, aligning with Derrida's concept of 'writing' (l'ecriture). The paper is structured into three parts. First, I lay the theoretical groundwork by explaining how the word2vec embedding algorithm operates within Saussure's framework of language as a relational system of signs. Second, I apply Derrida's critique of Saussure to position 'writing' as the object modeled by LLMs, offering a view of the machine's 'mind' as a statistical approximation of sign behavior. Finally, the third section addresses how modern LLMs reflect post-structuralist notions of unfixed meaning, arguing that the "next token generation" mechanism effectively captures the dynamic nature of meaning. By reconceptualizing LLMs as semiotic machines rather than cognitive models, this framework provides an alternative lens through which to assess the strengths and limitations of LLMs, offering new avenues for future research.

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) provides a quantitative framework for explaining consciousness phenomenon, positing that conscious systems comprise elements integrated through causal properties. We apply IIT 3.0 and 4.0 -- the latest iterations of this framework -- to sequences of Large Language Model (LLM) representations, analyzing data derived from existing Theory of Mind (ToM) test results. Our study systematically investigates whether the differences of ToM test performances, when presented in the LLM representations, can be revealed by IIT estimates, i.e., Phi^{max} (IIT 3.0), Phi (IIT 4.0), Conceptual Information (IIT 3.0), and Phi-structure (IIT 4.0). Furthermore, we compare these metrics with the Span Representations independent of any estimate for consciousness. This additional effort aims to differentiate between potential "consciousness" phenomena and inherent separations within LLM representational space. We conduct comprehensive experiments examining variations across LLM transformer layers and linguistic spans from stimuli. Our results suggest that sequences of contemporary Transformer-based LLM representations lack statistically significant indicators of observed "consciousness" phenomena but exhibit intriguing patterns under spatio-permutational analyses. The Appendix and code are available as Supplementary Materials at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nlp.2025.100163.

With rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence, the text-to-music synthesis task has emerged as a promising direction for music generation from scratch. However, finer-grained control over multi-track generation remains an open challenge. Existing models exhibit strong raw generation capability but lack the flexibility to compose separate tracks and combine them in a controllable manner, differing from typical workflows of human composers. To address this issue, we propose JEN-1 Composer, a unified framework to efficiently model marginal, conditional, and joint distributions over multi-track music via a single model. JEN-1 Composer framework exhibits the capacity to seamlessly incorporate any diffusion-based music generation system, e.g. Jen-1, enhancing its capacity for versatile multi-track music generation. We introduce a curriculum training strategy aimed at incrementally instructing the model in the transition from single-track generation to the flexible generation of multi-track combinations. During the inference, users have the ability to iteratively produce and choose music tracks that meet their preferences, subsequently creating an entire musical composition incrementally following the proposed Human-AI co-composition workflow. Quantitative and qualitative assessments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in controllable and high-fidelity multi-track music synthesis. The proposed JEN-1 Composer represents a significant advance toward interactive AI-facilitated music creation and composition. Demos will be available at https://jenmusic.ai/audio-demos.

We present and release MIDI-GPT, a generative system based on the Transformer architecture that is designed for computer-assisted music composition workflows. MIDI-GPT supports the infilling of musical material at the track and bar level, and can condition generation on attributes including: instrument type, musical style, note density, polyphony level, and note duration. In order to integrate these features, we employ an alternative representation for musical material, creating a time-ordered sequence of musical events for each track and concatenating several tracks into a single sequence, rather than using a single time-ordered sequence where the musical events corresponding to different tracks are interleaved. We also propose a variation of our representation allowing for expressiveness. We present experimental results that demonstrate that MIDI-GPT is able to consistently avoid duplicating the musical material it was trained on, generate music that is stylistically similar to the training dataset, and that attribute controls allow enforcing various constraints on the generated material. We also outline several real-world applications of MIDI-GPT, including collaborations with industry partners that explore the integration and evaluation of MIDI-GPT into commercial products, as well as several artistic works produced using it.

The critical inquiry pervading the realm of Philosophy, and perhaps extending its influence across all Humanities disciplines, revolves around the intricacies of morality and normativity. Surprisingly, in recent years, this thematic thread has woven its way into an unexpected domain, one not conventionally associated with pondering "what ought to be": the field of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Central to morality and AI, we find "alignment", a problem related to the challenges of expressing human goals and values in a manner that artificial systems can follow without leading to unwanted adversarial effects. More explicitly and with our current paradigm of AI development in mind, we can think of alignment as teaching human values to non-anthropomorphic entities trained through opaque, gradient-based learning techniques. This work addresses alignment as a technical-philosophical problem that requires solid philosophical foundations and practical implementations that bring normative theory to AI system development. To accomplish this, we propose two sets of necessary and sufficient conditions that, we argue, should be considered in any alignment process. While necessary conditions serve as metaphysical and metaethical roots that pertain to the permissibility of alignment, sufficient conditions establish a blueprint for aligning AI systems under a learning-based paradigm. After laying such foundations, we present implementations of this approach by using state-of-the-art techniques and methods for aligning general-purpose language systems. We call this framework Dynamic Normativity. Its central thesis is that any alignment process under a learning paradigm that cannot fulfill its necessary and sufficient conditions will fail in producing aligned systems.

Recent advancements in long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) have primarily concentrated on processing extended input contexts, resulting in significant strides in long-context comprehension. However, the equally critical aspect of generating long-form outputs has received comparatively less attention. This paper advocates for a paradigm shift in NLP research toward addressing the challenges of long-output generation. Tasks such as novel writing, long-term planning, and complex reasoning require models to understand extensive contexts and produce coherent, contextually rich, and logically consistent extended text. These demands highlight a critical gap in current LLM capabilities. We underscore the importance of this under-explored domain and call for focused efforts to develop foundational LLMs tailored for generating high-quality, long-form outputs, which hold immense potential for real-world applications.

In the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence (AI), the unprecedented progress of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing (NLP) offers an opportunity to revisit the entire approach of traditional metrics of machine intelligence, both in form and content. As the realm of machine cognitive evaluation has already reached Imitation, the next step is an efficient Language Acquisition and Understanding. Our paper proposes a paradigm shift from the established Turing Test towards an all-embracing framework that hinges on language acquisition, taking inspiration from the recent advancements in LLMs. The present contribution is deeply tributary of the excellent work from various disciplines, point out the need to keep interdisciplinary bridges open, and delineates a more robust and sustainable approach.

Like humans, Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to generate high-quality long-form text that adheres to strict requirements in a single pass. This challenge is unsurprising, as successful human writing, according to the Cognitive Writing Theory, is a complex cognitive process involving iterative planning, translating, reviewing, and monitoring. Motivated by these cognitive principles, we aim to equip LLMs with human-like cognitive writing capabilities through CogWriter, a novel training-free framework that transforms LLM constrained long-form text generation into a systematic cognitive writing paradigm. Our framework consists of two key modules: (1) a Planning Agent that performs hierarchical planning to decompose the task, and (2) multiple Generation Agents that execute these plans in parallel. The system maintains quality via continuous monitoring and reviewing mechanisms, which evaluate outputs against specified requirements and trigger necessary revisions. CogWriter demonstrates exceptional performance on LongGenBench, a benchmark for complex constrained long-form text generation. Even when using Qwen-2.5-14B as its backbone, CogWriter surpasses GPT-4o by 22% in complex instruction completion accuracy while reliably generating texts exceeding 10,000 words. We hope this cognitive science-inspired approach provides a paradigm for LLM writing advancements: https://github.com/KaiyangWan/CogWriter{CogWriter}.

Large language models (LLMs) are restricted to reason in the "language space", where they typically express the reasoning process with a chain-of-thought (CoT) to solve a complex reasoning problem. However, we argue that language space may not always be optimal for reasoning. For example, most word tokens are primarily for textual coherence and not essential for reasoning, while some critical tokens require complex planning and pose huge challenges to LLMs. To explore the potential of LLM reasoning in an unrestricted latent space instead of using natural language, we introduce a new paradigm Coconut (Chain of Continuous Thought). We utilize the last hidden state of the LLM as a representation of the reasoning state (termed "continuous thought"). Rather than decoding this into a word token, we feed it back to the LLM as the subsequent input embedding directly in the continuous space. Experiments show that Coconut can effectively augment the LLM on several reasoning tasks. This novel latent reasoning paradigm leads to emergent advanced reasoning patterns: the continuous thought can encode multiple alternative next reasoning steps, allowing the model to perform a breadth-first search (BFS) to solve the problem, rather than prematurely committing to a single deterministic path like CoT. Coconut outperforms CoT in certain logical reasoning tasks that require substantial backtracking during planning, with fewer thinking tokens during inference. These findings demonstrate the promise of latent reasoning and offer valuable insights for future research.

The advent of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly advanced multimodal understanding, enabling more sophisticated and accurate integration of visual and textual information across various tasks, including image and video captioning, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval. Despite VLMs' superior capabilities, researchers lack a comprehensive understanding of their compositionality -- the ability to understand and produce novel combinations of known visual and textual components. Prior benchmarks provide only a relatively rough compositionality evaluation from the perspectives of objects, relations, and attributes while neglecting deeper reasoning about object interactions, counting, and complex compositions. However, compositionality is a critical ability that facilitates coherent reasoning and understanding across modalities for VLMs. To address this limitation, we propose MMCOMPOSITION, a novel human-annotated benchmark for comprehensively and accurately evaluating VLMs' compositionality. Our proposed benchmark serves as a complement to these earlier works. With MMCOMPOSITION, we can quantify and explore the compositionality of the mainstream VLMs. Surprisingly, we find GPT-4o's compositionality inferior to the best open-source model, and we analyze the underlying reasons. Our experimental analysis reveals the limitations of VLMs in fine-grained compositional perception and reasoning, and points to areas for improvement in VLM design and training. Resources available at: https://hanghuacs.github.io/MMComposition/

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucination, the generation of plausible yet factually incorrect statements. This work investigates the intrinsic, architectural origins of this failure mode through three primary contributions.First, to enable the reliable tracing of internal semantic failures, we propose Distributional Semantics Tracing (DST), a unified framework that integrates established interpretability techniques to produce a causal map of a model's reasoning, treating meaning as a function of context (distributional semantics). Second, we pinpoint the model's layer at which a hallucination becomes inevitable, identifying a specific commitment layer where a model's internal representations irreversibly diverge from factuality. Third, we identify the underlying mechanism for these failures. We observe a conflict between distinct computational pathways, which we interpret using the lens of dual-process theory: a fast, heuristic associative pathway (akin to System 1) and a slow, deliberate contextual pathway (akin to System 2), leading to predictable failure modes such as Reasoning Shortcut Hijacks. Our framework's ability to quantify the coherence of the contextual pathway reveals a strong negative correlation (rho = -0.863) with hallucination rates, implying that these failures are predictable consequences of internal semantic weakness. The result is a mechanistic account of how, when, and why hallucinations occur within the Transformer architecture.

Our goal is to synthesize 3D human motions given textual inputs describing simultaneous actions, for example 'waving hand' while 'walking' at the same time. We refer to generating such simultaneous movements as performing 'spatial compositions'. In contrast to temporal compositions that seek to transition from one action to another, spatial compositing requires understanding which body parts are involved in which action, to be able to move them simultaneously. Motivated by the observation that the correspondence between actions and body parts is encoded in powerful language models, we extract this knowledge by prompting GPT-3 with text such as "what are the body parts involved in the action <action name>?", while also providing the parts list and few-shot examples. Given this action-part mapping, we combine body parts from two motions together and establish the first automated method to spatially compose two actions. However, training data with compositional actions is always limited by the combinatorics. Hence, we further create synthetic data with this approach, and use it to train a new state-of-the-art text-to-motion generation model, called SINC ("SImultaneous actioN Compositions for 3D human motions"). In our experiments, that training with such GPT-guided synthetic data improves spatial composition generation over baselines. Our code is publicly available at https://sinc.is.tue.mpg.de/.

Text-to-image (T2I) generation aims to synthesize images from textual prompts, which jointly specify what must be shown and imply what can be inferred, thereby corresponding to two core capabilities: composition and reasoning. However, with the emerging advances of T2I models in reasoning beyond composition, existing benchmarks reveal clear limitations in providing comprehensive evaluations across and within these capabilities. Meanwhile, these advances also enable models to handle more complex prompts, whereas current benchmarks remain limited to low scene density and simplified one-to-one reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose T2I-CoReBench, a comprehensive and complex benchmark that evaluates both composition and reasoning capabilities of T2I models. To ensure comprehensiveness, we structure composition around scene graph elements (instance, attribute, and relation) and reasoning around the philosophical framework of inference (deductive, inductive, and abductive), formulating a 12-dimensional evaluation taxonomy. To increase complexity, driven by the inherent complexities of real-world scenarios, we curate each prompt with high compositional density for composition and multi-step inference for reasoning. We also pair each prompt with a checklist that specifies individual yes/no questions to assess each intended element independently to facilitate fine-grained and reliable evaluation. In statistics, our benchmark comprises 1,080 challenging prompts and around 13,500 checklist questions. Experiments across 27 current T2I models reveal that their composition capability still remains limited in complex high-density scenarios, while the reasoning capability lags even further behind as a critical bottleneck, with all models struggling to infer implicit elements from prompts. Our project page: https://t2i-corebench.github.io/.

Foundation models pretrained on diverse data at scale have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in a wide range of vision and language tasks. When such models are deployed in real world environments, they inevitably interface with other entities and agents. For example, language models are often used to interact with human beings through dialogue, and visual perception models are used to autonomously navigate neighborhood streets. In response to these developments, new paradigms are emerging for training foundation models to interact with other agents and perform long-term reasoning. These paradigms leverage the existence of ever-larger datasets curated for multimodal, multitask, and generalist interaction. Research at the intersection of foundation models and decision making holds tremendous promise for creating powerful new systems that can interact effectively across a diverse range of applications such as dialogue, autonomous driving, healthcare, education, and robotics. In this manuscript, we examine the scope of foundation models for decision making, and provide conceptual tools and technical background for understanding the problem space and exploring new research directions. We review recent approaches that ground foundation models in practical decision making applications through a variety of methods such as prompting, conditional generative modeling, planning, optimal control, and reinforcement learning, and discuss common challenges and open problems in the field.

Large language models (LLMs) are applied to all sorts of creative tasks, and their outputs vary from beautiful, to peculiar, to pastiche, into plain plagiarism. The temperature parameter of an LLM regulates the amount of randomness, leading to more diverse outputs; therefore, it is often claimed to be the creativity parameter. Here, we investigate this claim using a narrative generation task with a predetermined fixed context, model and prompt. Specifically, we present an empirical analysis of the LLM output for different temperature values using four necessary conditions for creativity in narrative generation: novelty, typicality, cohesion, and coherence. We find that temperature is weakly correlated with novelty, and unsurprisingly, moderately correlated with incoherence, but there is no relationship with either cohesion or typicality. However, the influence of temperature on creativity is far more nuanced and weak than suggested by the "creativity parameter" claim; overall results suggest that the LLM generates slightly more novel outputs as temperatures get higher. Finally, we discuss ideas to allow more controlled LLM creativity, rather than relying on chance via changing the temperature parameter.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, and Large Language Models (LLMs) in particular, are increasingly employed for creative tasks like scientific idea generation, constituting a form of generalization from training data unaddressed by existing conceptual frameworks. Despite its similarities to compositional generalization (CG), combinatorial creativity (CC) is an open-ended ability. Instead of evaluating for accuracy or correctness against fixed targets, which would contradict the open-ended nature of CC, we propose a theoretical framework and algorithmic task for evaluating outputs by their degrees of novelty and utility. From here, we make several important empirical contributions: (1) We obtain the first insights into the scaling behavior of creativity for LLMs. (2) We discover that, for fixed compute budgets, there exist optimal model depths and widths for creative ability. (3) We find that the ideation-execution gap, whereby LLMs excel at generating novel scientific ideas but struggle to ensure their practical feasibility, may be explained by a more fundamental novelty-utility tradeoff characteristic of creativity algorithms in general. Importantly, this tradeoff remains persistent even at scale, casting doubt on the long-term creative potential of LLMs in their current form. Together, our conceptual framework and empirical findings provide a foundation for understanding and improving creativity in modern AI models, bridging the gap between human and machine intelligence.

A language model (LM) is a mapping from a linguistic context to an output token. However, much remains to be known about this mapping, including how its geometric properties relate to its function. We take a high-level geometric approach to its analysis, observing, across five pre-trained transformer-based LMs and three input datasets, a distinct phase characterized by high intrinsic dimensionality. During this phase, representations (1) correspond to the first full linguistic abstraction of the input; (2) are the first to viably transfer to downstream tasks; (3) predict each other across different LMs. Moreover, we find that an earlier onset of the phase strongly predicts better language modelling performance. In short, our results suggest that a central high-dimensionality phase underlies core linguistic processing in many common LM architectures.

Linguistic commentary on LLMs, heavily influenced by the theoretical frameworks of de Saussure and Chomsky, is often speculative and unproductive. Critics challenge whether LLMs can legitimately model language, citing the need for "deep structure" or "grounding" to achieve an idealized linguistic "competence." We argue for a radical shift in perspective towards the empiricist principles of Witold Ma\'nczak, a prominent general and historical linguist. He defines language not as a "system of signs" or a "computational system of the brain" but as the totality of all that is said and written. Above all, he identifies frequency of use of particular language elements as language's primary governing principle. Using his framework, we challenge prior critiques of LLMs and provide a constructive guide for designing, evaluating, and interpreting language models.

The field of automatic music composition has seen great progress in recent years, specifically with the invention of transformer-based architectures. When using any deep learning model which considers music as a sequence of events with multiple complex dependencies, the selection of a proper data representation is crucial. In this paper, we tackle the task of conditional drums generation using a novel data encoding scheme inspired by the Compound Word representation, a tokenization process of sequential data. Therefore, we present a sequence-to-sequence architecture where a Bidirectional Long short-term memory (BiLSTM) Encoder receives information about the conditioning parameters (i.e., accompanying tracks and musical attributes), while a Transformer-based Decoder with relative global attention produces the generated drum sequences. We conducted experiments to thoroughly compare the effectiveness of our method to several baselines. Quantitative evaluation shows that our model is able to generate drums sequences that have similar statistical distributions and characteristics to the training corpus. These features include syncopation, compression ratio, and symmetry among others. We also verified, through a listening test, that generated drum sequences sound pleasant, natural and coherent while they "groove" with the given accompaniment.

Interpretability is the study of explaining models in understandable terms to humans. At present, interpretability is divided into two paradigms: the intrinsic paradigm, which believes that only models designed to be explained can be explained, and the post-hoc paradigm, which believes that black-box models can be explained. At the core of this debate is how each paradigm ensures its explanations are faithful, i.e., true to the model's behavior. This is important, as false but convincing explanations lead to unsupported confidence in artificial intelligence (AI), which can be dangerous. This paper's position is that we should think about new paradigms while staying vigilant regarding faithfulness. First, by examining the history of paradigms in science, we see that paradigms are constantly evolving. Then, by examining the current paradigms, we can understand their underlying beliefs, the value they bring, and their limitations. Finally, this paper presents 3 emerging paradigms for interpretability. The first paradigm designs models such that faithfulness can be easily measured. Another optimizes models such that explanations become faithful. The last paradigm proposes to develop models that produce both a prediction and an explanation.

This study critically distinguishes between AI Agents and Agentic AI, offering a structured conceptual taxonomy, application mapping, and challenge analysis to clarify their divergent design philosophies and capabilities. We begin by outlining the search strategy and foundational definitions, characterizing AI Agents as modular systems driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Image Models (LIMs) for narrow, task-specific automation. Generative AI is positioned as a precursor, with AI Agents advancing through tool integration, prompt engineering, and reasoning enhancements. In contrast, Agentic AI systems represent a paradigmatic shift marked by multi-agent collaboration, dynamic task decomposition, persistent memory, and orchestrated autonomy. Through a sequential evaluation of architectural evolution, operational mechanisms, interaction styles, and autonomy levels, we present a comparative analysis across both paradigms. Application domains such as customer support, scheduling, and data summarization are contrasted with Agentic AI deployments in research automation, robotic coordination, and medical decision support. We further examine unique challenges in each paradigm including hallucination, brittleness, emergent behavior, and coordination failure and propose targeted solutions such as ReAct loops, RAG, orchestration layers, and causal modeling. This work aims to provide a definitive roadmap for developing robust, scalable, and explainable AI agent and Agentic AI-driven systems. >AI Agents, Agent-driven, Vision-Language-Models, Agentic AI Decision Support System, Agentic-AI Applications

Humans can reason compositionally when presented with new tasks. Previous research shows that appropriate prompting techniques enable large language models (LLMs) to solve artificial compositional generalization tasks such as SCAN. In this work, we identify additional challenges in more realistic semantic parsing tasks with larger vocabulary and refine these prompting techniques to address them. Our best method is based on least-to-most prompting: it decomposes the problem using prompting-based syntactic parsing, then uses this decomposition to select appropriate exemplars and to sequentially generate the semantic parse. This method allows us to set a new state of the art for CFQ while requiring only 1% of the training data used by traditional approaches. Due to the general nature of our approach, we expect similar efforts will lead to new results in other tasks and domains, especially for knowledge-intensive applications.

According to the principle of compositional generalization, the meaning of a complex expression can be understood as a function of the meaning of its parts and of how they are combined. This principle is crucial for human language processing and also, arguably, for NLP models in the face of out-of-distribution data. However, many neural network models, including Transformers, have been shown to struggle with compositional generalization. In this paper, we hypothesize that forcing models to in-context learn can provide an inductive bias to promote compositional generalization. To test this hypothesis, we train a causal Transformer in a setting that renders ordinary learning very difficult: we present it with different orderings of the training instance and shuffle instance labels. This corresponds to training the model on all possible few-shot learning problems attainable from the dataset. The model can solve the task, however, by utilizing earlier examples to generalize to later ones (i.e. in-context learning). In evaluations on the datasets, SCAN, COGS, and GeoQuery, models trained in this manner indeed show improved compositional generalization. This indicates the usefulness of in-context learning problems as an inductive bias for generalization.

Agent memory shapes how Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents, akin to the human brain, progressively refine themselves through environment interactions. Existing paradigms remain constrained: parametric memory forcibly adjusts model parameters, and retrieval-based memory externalizes experience into structured databases, yet neither captures the fluid interweaving of reasoning and memory that underlies human cognition. To address this gap, we propose MemGen, a dynamic generative memory framework that equips agents with a human-esque cognitive faculty. It consists of a memory trigger, which monitors the agent's reasoning state to decide explicit memory invocation, and a memory weaver, which takes the agent's current state as stimulus to construct a latent token sequence as machine-native memory to enrich its reasoning. In this way, MemGen enables agents to recall and augment latent memory throughout reasoning, producing a tightly interwoven cycle of memory and cognition. Extensive experiments across eight benchmarks show that MemGen surpasses leading external memory systems such as ExpeL and AWM by up to 38.22%, exceeds GRPO by up to 13.44%, and exhibits strong cross-domain generalization ability. More importantly, we find that without explicit supervision, MemGen spontaneously evolves distinct human-like memory faculties, including planning memory, procedural memory, and working memory, suggesting an emergent trajectory toward more naturalistic forms of machine cognition.

Autonomous agents for Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) face significant challenges in specialized domains such as scientific computing, where both long-horizon planning and precise execution are required. Existing approaches suffer from a trade-off: generalist agents excel at planning but perform poorly in execution, while specialized agents demonstrate the opposite weakness. Recent compositional frameworks attempt to bridge this gap by combining a planner and an actor, but they are typically static and non-trainable, which prevents adaptation from experience. This is a critical limitation given the scarcity of high-quality data in scientific domains. To address these limitations, we introduce CODA, a novel and trainable compositional framework that integrates a generalist planner (Cerebrum) with a specialist executor (Cerebellum), trained via a dedicated two-stage pipeline. In the first stage, Specialization, we apply a decoupled GRPO approach to train an expert planner for each scientific application individually, bootstrapping from a small set of task trajectories. In the second stage, Generalization, we aggregate all successful trajectories from the specialized experts to build a consolidated dataset, which is then used for supervised fine-tuning of the final planner. This equips CODA with both robust execution and cross-domain generalization. Evaluated on four challenging applications from the ScienceBoard benchmark, CODA significantly outperforms baselines and establishes a new state of the art among open-source models.

We explore a method for improving the performance of large language models through self-reflection and reinforcement learning. By incentivizing the model to generate better self-reflections when it answers incorrectly, we demonstrate that a model's ability to solve complex, verifiable tasks can be enhanced even when generating synthetic data is infeasible and only binary feedback is available. Our framework operates in two stages: first, upon failing a given task, the model generates a self-reflective commentary analyzing its previous attempt; second, the model is given another attempt at the task with the self-reflection in context. If the subsequent attempt succeeds, the tokens generated during the self-reflection phase are rewarded. Our experimental results show substantial performance gains across a variety of model architectures, as high as 34.7% improvement at math equation writing and 18.1% improvement at function calling. Notably, smaller fine-tuned models (1.5 billion to 7 billion parameters) outperform models in the same family that are 10 times larger. Our novel paradigm is thus an exciting pathway to more useful and reliable language models that can self-improve on challenging tasks with limited external feedback.

Attention-based Transformer models have been increasingly employed for automatic music generation. To condition the generation process of such a model with a user-specified sequence, a popular approach is to take that conditioning sequence as a priming sequence and ask a Transformer decoder to generate a continuation. However, this prompt-based conditioning cannot guarantee that the conditioning sequence would develop or even simply repeat itself in the generated continuation. In this paper, we propose an alternative conditioning approach, called theme-based conditioning, that explicitly trains the Transformer to treat the conditioning sequence as a thematic material that has to manifest itself multiple times in its generation result. This is achieved with two main technical contributions. First, we propose a deep learning-based approach that uses contrastive representation learning and clustering to automatically retrieve thematic materials from music pieces in the training data. Second, we propose a novel gated parallel attention module to be used in a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) encoder/decoder architecture to more effectively account for a given conditioning thematic material in the generation process of the Transformer decoder. We report on objective and subjective evaluations of variants of the proposed Theme Transformer and the conventional prompt-based baseline, showing that our best model can generate, to some extent, polyphonic pop piano music with repetition and plausible variations of a given condition.

Despite progress in controllable symbolic music generation, data scarcity remains a challenge for certain control modalities. Composer-style music generation is a prime example, as only a few pieces per composer are available, limiting the modeling of both styles and fundamental music elements (e.g., melody, chord, rhythm). In this paper, we investigate how general music knowledge learned from a broad corpus can enhance the mastery of specific composer styles, with a focus on piano piece generation. Our approach follows a two-stage training paradigm. First, we pre-train a REMI-based music generation model on a large corpus of pop, folk, and classical music. Then, we fine-tune it on a small, human-verified dataset from four renowned composers, namely Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin, using a lightweight adapter module to condition the model on style indicators. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct both objective and subjective evaluations on style accuracy and musicality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms ablations and baselines, achieving more precise composer-style modeling and better musical aesthetics. Additionally, we provide observations on how the model builds music concepts from the generality pre-training and refines its stylistic understanding through the mastery fine-tuning.

Recent advancements in diffusion models for 2D and 3D content creation have sparked a surge of interest in generating 4D content. However, the scarcity of 3D scene datasets constrains current methodologies to primarily object-centric generation. To overcome this limitation, we present Comp4D, a novel framework for Compositional 4D Generation. Unlike conventional methods that generate a singular 4D representation of the entire scene, Comp4D innovatively constructs each 4D object within the scene separately. Utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs), the framework begins by decomposing an input text prompt into distinct entities and maps out their trajectories. It then constructs the compositional 4D scene by accurately positioning these objects along their designated paths. To refine the scene, our method employs a compositional score distillation technique guided by the pre-defined trajectories, utilizing pre-trained diffusion models across text-to-image, text-to-video, and text-to-3D domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate our outstanding 4D content creation capability compared to prior arts, showcasing superior visual quality, motion fidelity, and enhanced object interactions.

Recent advances in deep-research agents have shown promise for autonomous knowledge construction through dynamic reasoning over external sources. However, existing approaches rely on a mono-contextual paradigm that accumulates all information in a single, expanding context window, leading to context suffocation and noise contamination that limit their effectiveness on long-horizon tasks. We introduce IterResearch, a novel iterative deep-research paradigm that reformulates long-horizon research as a Markov Decision Process with strategic workspace reconstruction. By maintaining an evolving report as memory and periodically synthesizing insights, our approach preserves consistent reasoning capacity across arbitrary exploration depths. We further develop Efficiency-Aware Policy Optimization (EAPO), a reinforcement learning framework that incentivizes efficient exploration through geometric reward discounting and enables stable distributed training via adaptive downsampling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IterResearch achieves substantial improvements over existing open-source agents with average +14.5pp across six benchmarks and narrows the gap with frontier proprietary systems. Remarkably, our paradigm exhibits unprecedented interaction scaling, extending to 2048 interactions with dramatic performance gains (from 3.5\% to 42.5\%), and serves as an effective prompting strategy, improving frontier models by up to 19.2pp over ReAct on long-horizon tasks. These findings position IterResearch as a versatile solution for long-horizon reasoning, effective both as a trained agent and as a prompting paradigm for frontier models.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable performance in integrating visual and textual information for tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering. However, these models struggle with compositional generalization and object binding, which limit their ability to handle novel combinations of objects and their attributes. Our work explores the root causes of these failures using mechanistic interpretability techniques. We show evidence that individual neurons in the MLP layers of CLIP's vision encoder represent multiple features, and this "superposition" directly hinders its compositional feature representation which consequently affects compositional reasoning and object binding capabilities. We hope this study will serve as an initial step toward uncovering the mechanistic roots of compositional failures in VLMs. The code and supporting results can be found https://github.com/Mystic-Slice/Do-VLMs-Have-Bad-Eyes .

We present TALE, a novel training-free framework harnessing the generative capabilities of text-to-image diffusion models to address the cross-domain image composition task that focuses on flawlessly incorporating user-specified objects into a designated visual contexts regardless of domain disparity. Previous methods often involve either training auxiliary networks or finetuning diffusion models on customized datasets, which are expensive and may undermine the robust textual and visual priors of pre-trained diffusion models. Some recent works attempt to break the barrier by proposing training-free workarounds that rely on manipulating attention maps to tame the denoising process implicitly. However, composing via attention maps does not necessarily yield desired compositional outcomes. These approaches could only retain some semantic information and usually fall short in preserving identity characteristics of input objects or exhibit limited background-object style adaptation in generated images. In contrast, TALE is a novel method that operates directly on latent space to provide explicit and effective guidance for the composition process to resolve these problems. Specifically, we equip TALE with two mechanisms dubbed Adaptive Latent Manipulation and Energy-guided Latent Optimization. The former formulates noisy latents conducive to initiating and steering the composition process by directly leveraging background and foreground latents at corresponding timesteps, and the latter exploits designated energy functions to further optimize intermediate latents conforming to specific conditions that complement the former to generate desired final results. Our experiments demonstrate that TALE surpasses prior baselines and attains state-of-the-art performance in image-guided composition across various photorealistic and artistic domains.

End-to-end generation of musical audio using deep learning techniques has seen an explosion of activity recently. However, most models concentrate on generating fully mixed music in response to abstract conditioning information. In this work, we present an alternative paradigm for producing music generation models that can listen and respond to musical context. We describe how such a model can be constructed using a non-autoregressive, transformer-based model architecture and present a number of novel architectural and sampling improvements. We train the described architecture on both an open-source and a proprietary dataset. We evaluate the produced models using standard quality metrics and a new approach based on music information retrieval descriptors. The resulting model reaches the audio quality of state-of-the-art text-conditioned models, as well as exhibiting strong musical coherence with its context.

Despite superior reasoning prowess demonstrated by Large Language Models (LLMs) with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, a lack of understanding prevails around the internal mechanisms of the models that facilitate CoT generation. This work investigates the neural sub-structures within LLMs that manifest CoT reasoning from a mechanistic point of view. From an analysis of LLaMA-2 7B applied to multistep reasoning over fictional ontologies, we demonstrate that LLMs deploy multiple parallel pathways of answer generation for step-by-step reasoning. These parallel pathways provide sequential answers from the input question context as well as the generated CoT. We observe a striking functional rift in the middle layers of the LLM. Token representations in the initial half remain strongly biased towards the pretraining prior, with the in-context taking over abruptly in the later half. This internal phase shift manifests in different functional components: attention heads that write the answer token predominantly appear in the later half, attention heads that move information along ontological relationships appear exclusively in the initial half, and so on. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt towards mechanistic investigation of CoT reasoning in LLMs.

Does RL teach LLMs genuinely new skills, or does it merely activate existing ones? This question lies at the core of ongoing debates about the role of RL in LLM post-training. On one side, strong empirical results can be achieved with RL even without preceding supervised finetuning; on the other, critics argue that RL contributes little beyond reweighting existing reasoning strategies. This work provides concrete evidence that LLMs can acquire genuinely new skills during RL by composing existing ones, mirroring one of the central mechanisms by which humans acquire new cognitive skills. To mitigate data contamination and other confounding factors, and to allow precise control over task complexity, we develop a synthetic framework for our investigation. Specifically, we define a skill as the ability to infer the output of a string transformation function f(x) given x. When an LLM has already learned f and g prior to RL, our experiments reveal that RL enables it to learn unseen compositions of them h(x)=g(f(x)). Further, this compositional ability generalizes to more difficult problems such as compositions of >2 functions unseen during RL training. Surprisingly, our experiments show that compositional skill acquired on a source task transfers to a different target task. This transfer happens even without compositional training on the target, requiring only prior knowledge of the target's atomic skills. Our qualitative analysis shows that RL fundamentally changes the reasoning behaviors of the models. In contrast, next-token training with the same data yields none of these findings. Our systematic experiments provide fresh insights into LLM learning, suggesting the value of first building base models with basic skills, then using RL to incentivize advanced, generalizable skills for complex problems.

Deep neural networks drive the success of natural language processing. A fundamental property of language is its compositional structure, allowing humans to systematically produce forms for new meanings. For humans, languages with more compositional and transparent structures are typically easier to learn than those with opaque and irregular structures. However, this learnability advantage has not yet been shown for deep neural networks, limiting their use as models for human language learning. Here, we directly test how neural networks compare to humans in learning and generalizing different languages that vary in their degree of compositional structure. We evaluate the memorization and generalization capabilities of a large language model and recurrent neural networks, and show that both deep neural networks exhibit a learnability advantage for more structured linguistic input: neural networks exposed to more compositional languages show more systematic generalization, greater agreement between different agents, and greater similarity to human learners.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance, they exhibit certain cognitive patterns similar to those of humans that are not directly specified in training data. This study investigates this phenomenon by focusing on temporal cognition in LLMs. Leveraging the similarity judgment task, we find that larger models spontaneously establish a subjective temporal reference point and adhere to the Weber-Fechner law, whereby the perceived distance logarithmically compresses as years recede from this reference point. To uncover the mechanisms behind this behavior, we conducted multiple analyses across neuronal, representational, and informational levels. We first identify a set of temporal-preferential neurons and find that this group exhibits minimal activation at the subjective reference point and implements a logarithmic coding scheme convergently found in biological systems. Probing representations of years reveals a hierarchical construction process, where years evolve from basic numerical values in shallow layers to abstract temporal orientation in deep layers. Finally, using pre-trained embedding models, we found that the training corpus itself possesses an inherent, non-linear temporal structure, which provides the raw material for the model's internal construction. In discussion, we propose an experientialist perspective for understanding these findings, where the LLMs' cognition is viewed as a subjective construction of the external world by its internal representational system. This nuanced perspective implies the potential emergence of alien cognitive frameworks that humans cannot intuitively predict, pointing toward a direction for AI alignment that focuses on guiding internal constructions. Our code is available at https://TheOtherMind.github.io.

Text-to-image generation from large generative models like Stable Diffusion, DALLE-2, etc., have become a common base for various tasks due to their superior quality and extensive knowledge bases. As image composition and generation are creative processes the artists need control over various parts of the images being generated. We find that just adding details about parts in the base text prompt either leads to an entirely different image (e.g., missing/incorrect identity) or the extra part details simply being ignored. To mitigate these issues, we introduce PartCraft, which enables image generation based on fine-grained part-level details specified for objects in the base text prompt. This allows more control for artists and enables novel object compositions by combining distinctive object parts. PartCraft first localizes object parts by denoising the object region from a specific diffusion process. This enables each part token to be localized to the right object region. After obtaining part masks, we run a localized diffusion process in each of the part regions based on fine-grained part descriptions and combine them to produce the final image. All the stages of PartCraft are based on repurposing a pre-trained diffusion model, which enables it to generalize across various domains without training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of part-level control provided by PartCraft qualitatively through visual examples and quantitatively in comparison to the contemporary baselines.

The dynamic nature of information necessitates continuously updating large vision-language models (LVLMs). While recent knowledge editing techniques hint at promising directions, they often focus on editing a single modality (vision or language) in isolation. This prevalent practice neglects the inherent multimodality of LVLMs and the continuous nature of knowledge updates, potentially leading to suboptimal editing outcomes when considering the interplay between modalities and the need for ongoing knowledge refinement. To address these limitations, we propose MemEIC, a novel method for Continual and Compositional Knowledge Editing (CCKE) in LVLMs. MemEIC enables compositional editing of both visual and textual knowledge sequentially. Our approach employs a hybrid external-internal editor featuring a dual external memory for cross-modal evidence retrieval and dual LoRA adapters that facilitate disentangled parameter updates for each modality. A key component is a brain-inspired knowledge connector, activated selectively for compositional reasoning, that integrates information across different modalities. Experiments demonstrate that MemEIC significantly improves performance on complex multimodal questions and effectively preserves prior edits, setting a new benchmark for CCKE in LVLMs.

Test-time compute has led to remarkable success in the large language model (LLM) community, particularly for complex tasks, where longer chains of thought (CoTs) are generated to enhance reasoning capabilities. However, growing evidence reveals that such reasoning models often produce CoTs plagued by excessive redundancy, including unnecessary verification steps and repetitive reasoning shifts. The root cause lies in post-training of them that overly rely on outcome reward paradigms, as the data of process reward paradigms, which regulate intermediate reasoning steps, is difficult to construct at scale. To address this, we propose PI, a novel framework for Test-time Prompt Intervention. PI provides an interface to dynamically guide and regulate reasoning paths during inference through timely (When module) and proper (How module) interventions and post-intervention sampling (Which module). This allows human problem-solving expertise and cognitive science principles to be seamlessly integrated into LLMs' reasoning processes, enhancing controllability and interpretability. Extensive experiments across multiple models and datasets demonstrate that PI significantly shortens CoTs while reducing hallucination, yielding more concise and reliable reasoning.

Contemporary diffusion models built upon U-Net or Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architectures have revolutionized image generation through transformer-based attention mechanisms. The prevailing paradigm has commonly employed self-attention with quadratic computational complexity to handle global spatial relationships in complex images, thereby synthesizing high-fidelity images with coherent visual semantics.Contrary to conventional wisdom, our systematic layer-wise analysis reveals an interesting discrepancy: self-attention in pre-trained diffusion models predominantly exhibits localized attention patterns, closely resembling convolutional inductive biases. This suggests that global interactions in self-attention may be less critical than commonly assumed.Driven by this, we propose \(\Delta\)ConvFusion to replace conventional self-attention modules with Pyramid Convolution Blocks (\(\Delta\)ConvBlocks).By distilling attention patterns into localized convolutional operations while keeping other components frozen, \(\Delta\)ConvFusion achieves performance comparable to transformer-based counterparts while reducing computational cost by 6929times and surpassing LinFusion by 5.42times in efficiency--all without compromising generative fidelity.

A remarkable ability of human beings resides in compositional reasoning, i.e., the capacity to make "infinite use of finite means". However, current large vision-language foundation models (VLMs) fall short of such compositional abilities due to their "bag-of-words" behaviors and inability to construct words that correctly represent visual entities and the relations among the entities. To this end, we propose CoVLM, which can guide the LLM to explicitly compose visual entities and relationships among the text and dynamically communicate with the vision encoder and detection network to achieve vision-language communicative decoding. Specifically, we first devise a set of novel communication tokens for the LLM, for dynamic communication between the visual detection system and the language system. A communication token is generated by the LLM following a visual entity or a relation, to inform the detection network to propose regions that are relevant to the sentence generated so far. The proposed regions-of-interests (ROIs) are then fed back into the LLM for better language generation contingent on the relevant regions. The LLM is thus able to compose the visual entities and relationships through the communication tokens. The vision-to-language and language-to-vision communication are iteratively performed until the entire sentence is generated. Our framework seamlessly bridges the gap between visual perception and LLMs and outperforms previous VLMs by a large margin on compositional reasoning benchmarks (e.g., ~20% in HICO-DET mAP, ~14% in Cola top-1 accuracy, and ~3% on ARO top-1 accuracy). We also achieve state-of-the-art performances on traditional vision-language tasks such as referring expression comprehension and visual question answering.

Cognitive diversity, reflected in variations of language, perspective, and reasoning, is essential to creativity and collective intelligence. This diversity is rich and grounded in culture, history, and individual experience. Yet as large language models (LLMs) become deeply embedded in people's lives, they risk standardizing language and reasoning. This Review synthesizes evidence across linguistics, cognitive, and computer science to show how LLMs reflect and reinforce dominant styles while marginalizing alternative voices and reasoning strategies. We examine how their design and widespread use contribute to this effect by mirroring patterns in their training data and amplifying convergence as all people increasingly rely on the same models across contexts. Unchecked, this homogenization risks flattening the cognitive landscapes that drive collective intelligence and adaptability.

We investigate the ability of language models to perform compositional reasoning tasks where the overall solution depends on correctly composing the answers to sub-problems. We measure how often models can correctly answer all sub-problems but not generate the overall solution, a ratio we call the compositionality gap. We evaluate this ratio by asking multi-hop questions with answers that require composing multiple facts unlikely to have been observed together during pretraining. In the GPT-3 family of models, as model size increases we show that the single-hop question answering performance improves faster than the multi-hop performance does, therefore the compositionality gap does not decrease. This surprising result suggests that while more powerful models memorize and recall more factual knowledge, they show no corresponding improvement in their ability to perform this kind of compositional reasoning. We then demonstrate how elicitive prompting (such as chain of thought) narrows the compositionality gap by reasoning explicitly instead of implicitly. We present a new method, self-ask, that further improves on chain of thought. In our method, the model explicitly asks itself (and then answers) follow-up questions before answering the initial question. We finally show that self-ask's structured prompting lets us easily plug in a search engine to answer the follow-up questions, which additionally improves accuracy.

Recent text-to-image diffusion-based generative models have the stunning ability to generate highly detailed and photo-realistic images and achieve state-of-the-art low FID scores on challenging image generation benchmarks. However, one of the primary failure modes of these text-to-image generative models is in composing attributes, objects, and their associated relationships accurately into an image. In our paper, we investigate this compositionality-based failure mode and highlight that imperfect text conditioning with CLIP text-encoder is one of the primary reasons behind the inability of these models to generate high-fidelity compositional scenes. In particular, we show that (i) there exists an optimal text-embedding space that can generate highly coherent compositional scenes which shows that the output space of the CLIP text-encoder is sub-optimal, and (ii) we observe that the final token embeddings in CLIP are erroneous as they often include attention contributions from unrelated tokens in compositional prompts. Our main finding shows that the best compositional improvements can be achieved (without harming the model's FID scores) by fine-tuning {\it only} a simple linear projection on CLIP's representation space in Stable-Diffusion variants using a small set of compositional image-text pairs. This result demonstrates that the sub-optimality of the CLIP's output space is a major error source. We also show that re-weighting the erroneous attention contributions in CLIP can also lead to improved compositional performances, however these improvements are often less significant than those achieved by solely learning a linear projection head, highlighting erroneous attentions to be only a minor error source.

Image composition aims to seamlessly insert a user-specified object into a new scene, but existing models struggle with complex lighting (e.g., accurate shadows, water reflections) and diverse, high-resolution inputs. Modern text-to-image diffusion models (e.g., SD3.5, FLUX) already encode essential physical and resolution priors, yet lack a framework to unleash them without resorting to latent inversion, which often locks object poses into contextually inappropriate orientations, or brittle attention surgery. We propose SHINE, a training-free framework for Seamless, High-fidelity Insertion with Neutralized Errors. SHINE introduces manifold-steered anchor loss, leveraging pretrained customization adapters (e.g., IP-Adapter) to guide latents for faithful subject representation while preserving background integrity. Degradation-suppression guidance and adaptive background blending are proposed to further eliminate low-quality outputs and visible seams. To address the lack of rigorous benchmarks, we introduce ComplexCompo, featuring diverse resolutions and challenging conditions such as low lighting, strong illumination, intricate shadows, and reflective surfaces. Experiments on ComplexCompo and DreamEditBench show state-of-the-art performance on standard metrics (e.g., DINOv2) and human-aligned scores (e.g., DreamSim, ImageReward, VisionReward). Code and benchmark will be publicly available upon publication.

We introduce a method for composing object-level visual prompts within a text-to-image diffusion model. Our approach addresses the task of generating semantically coherent compositions across diverse scenes and styles, similar to the versatility and expressiveness offered by text prompts. A key challenge in this task is to preserve the identity of the objects depicted in the input visual prompts, while also generating diverse compositions across different images. To address this challenge, we introduce a new KV-mixed cross-attention mechanism, in which keys and values are learned from distinct visual representations. The keys are derived from an encoder with a small bottleneck for layout control, whereas the values come from a larger bottleneck encoder that captures fine-grained appearance details. By mixing keys and values from these complementary sources, our model preserves the identity of the visual prompts while supporting flexible variations in object arrangement, pose, and composition. During inference, we further propose object-level compositional guidance to improve the method's identity preservation and layout correctness. Results show that our technique produces diverse scene compositions that preserve the unique characteristics of each visual prompt, expanding the creative potential of text-to-image generation.

The field of natural language processing (NLP) has recently witnessed a transformative shift with the emergence of foundation models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) that have revolutionized text-based NLP. This paradigm has extended to other modalities, including speech, where researchers are actively exploring the combination of Speech Foundation Models (SFMs) and LLMs into single, unified models capable of addressing multimodal tasks. Among such tasks, this paper focuses on speech-to-text translation (ST). By examining the published papers on the topic, we propose a unified view of the architectural solutions and training strategies presented so far, highlighting similarities and differences among them. Based on this examination, we not only organize the lessons learned but also show how diverse settings and evaluation approaches hinder the identification of the best-performing solution for each architectural building block and training choice. Lastly, we outline recommendations for future works on the topic aimed at better understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the SFM+LLM solutions for ST.

We advocate for a strong integration of Computational Creativity (CC) with research in large language and vision models (LLVMs) to address a key limitation of these models, i.e., creative problem solving. We present preliminary experiments showing how CC principles can be applied to address this limitation. Our goal is to foster discussions on creative problem solving in LLVMs and CC at prestigious ML venues. Our code is available at: https://github.com/lnairGT/creative-problem-solving-LLMs

Biological brains demonstrate complex neural activity, where the timing and interplay between neurons is critical to how brains process information. Most deep learning architectures simplify neural activity by abstracting away temporal dynamics. In this paper we challenge that paradigm. By incorporating neuron-level processing and synchronization, we can effectively reintroduce neural timing as a foundational element. We present the Continuous Thought Machine (CTM), a model designed to leverage neural dynamics as its core representation. The CTM has two core innovations: (1) neuron-level temporal processing, where each neuron uses unique weight parameters to process a history of incoming signals; and (2) neural synchronization employed as a latent representation. The CTM aims to strike a balance between oversimplified neuron abstractions that improve computational efficiency, and biological realism. It operates at a level of abstraction that effectively captures essential temporal dynamics while remaining computationally tractable for deep learning. We demonstrate the CTM's strong performance and versatility across a range of challenging tasks, including ImageNet-1K classification, solving 2D mazes, sorting, parity computation, question-answering, and RL tasks. Beyond displaying rich internal representations and offering a natural avenue for interpretation owing to its internal process, the CTM is able to perform tasks that require complex sequential reasoning. The CTM can also leverage adaptive compute, where it can stop earlier for simpler tasks, or keep computing when faced with more challenging instances. The goal of this work is to share the CTM and its associated innovations, rather than pushing for new state-of-the-art results. To that end, we believe the CTM represents a significant step toward developing more biologically plausible and powerful artificial intelligence systems.

Even with strong sequence models like Transformers, generating expressive piano performances with long-range musical structures remains challenging. Meanwhile, methods to compose well-structured melodies or lead sheets (melody + chords), i.e., simpler forms of music, gained more success. Observing the above, we devise a two-stage Transformer-based framework that Composes a lead sheet first, and then Embellishes it with accompaniment and expressive touches. Such a factorization also enables pretraining on non-piano data. Our objective and subjective experiments show that Compose & Embellish shrinks the gap in structureness between a current state of the art and real performances by half, and improves other musical aspects such as richness and coherence as well.

One of the roadblocks to a better understanding of neural networks' internals is polysemanticity, where neurons appear to activate in multiple, semantically distinct contexts. Polysemanticity prevents us from identifying concise, human-understandable explanations for what neural networks are doing internally. One hypothesised cause of polysemanticity is superposition, where neural networks represent more features than they have neurons by assigning features to an overcomplete set of directions in activation space, rather than to individual neurons. Here, we attempt to identify those directions, using sparse autoencoders to reconstruct the internal activations of a language model. These autoencoders learn sets of sparsely activating features that are more interpretable and monosemantic than directions identified by alternative approaches, where interpretability is measured by automated methods. Ablating these features enables precise model editing, for example, by removing capabilities such as pronoun prediction, while disrupting model behaviour less than prior techniques. This work indicates that it is possible to resolve superposition in language models using a scalable, unsupervised method. Our method may serve as a foundation for future mechanistic interpretability work, which we hope will enable greater model transparency and steerability.

This paper assesses the potential for large language models (LLMs) to serve as assistive tools in the creative writing process, by means of a single, in-depth case study. In the course of the study, we develop interactive and multi-voice prompting strategies that interleave background descriptions (scene setting, plot elements), instructions that guide composition, samples of text in the target style, and critical discussion of the given samples. We qualitatively evaluate the results from a literary critical perspective, as well as from the standpoint of computational creativity (a sub-field of artificial intelligence). Our findings lend support to the view that the sophistication of the results that can be achieved with an LLM mirrors the sophistication of the prompting.

Large language models (LLMs) with enormous pre-training tokens and parameter amounts emerge abilities, including math reasoning, code generation, and instruction following. These abilities are further enhanced by supervised fine-tuning (SFT). The open-source community has studied on ad-hoc SFT for each ability, while proprietary LLMs are versatile for all abilities. It is important to investigate how to unlock them with multiple abilities via SFT. In this study, we specifically focus on the data composition between mathematical reasoning, code generation, and general human-aligning abilities during SFT. From a scaling perspective, we investigate the relationship between model abilities and various factors including data amounts, data composition ratio, model parameters, and SFT strategies. Our experiments reveal that different abilities exhibit different scaling patterns, and larger models generally show superior performance with the same amount of data. Mathematical reasoning and code generation improve as data amounts increase consistently, while the general ability is enhanced with about a thousand samples and improves slowly. We find data composition results in various abilities improvements with low data amounts, while conflicts of abilities with high data amounts. Our experiments further show that composition data amount impacts performance, while the influence of composition ratio is insignificant. Regarding the SFT strategies, we evaluate sequential learning multiple abilities are prone to catastrophic forgetting. Our proposed Dual-stage Mixed Fine-tuning (DMT) strategy learns specialized abilities first and then learns general abilities with a small amount of specialized data to prevent forgetting, offering a promising solution to learn multiple abilities with different scaling patterns.

Recent advancements in large language models have showcased their remarkable generalizability across various domains. However, their reasoning abilities still have significant room for improvement, especially when confronted with scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning. Although large language models possess extensive knowledge, their behavior, particularly in terms of reasoning, often fails to effectively utilize this knowledge to establish a coherent thinking paradigm. Generative language models sometimes show hallucinations as their reasoning procedures are unconstrained by logical principles. Aiming to improve the zero-shot chain-of-thought reasoning ability of large language models, we propose Logical Chain-of-Thought (LogiCoT), a neurosymbolic framework that leverages principles from symbolic logic to verify and revise the reasoning processes accordingly. Experimental evaluations conducted on language tasks in diverse domains, including arithmetic, commonsense, symbolic, causal inference, and social problems, demonstrate the efficacy of the enhanced reasoning paradigm by logic.

In this work, we introduce a novel evaluation paradigm for Large Language Models, one that challenges them to engage in meta-reasoning. This approach addresses critical shortcomings in existing math problem-solving benchmarks, traditionally used to evaluate the cognitive capabilities of agents. Our paradigm shifts the focus from result-oriented assessments, which often overlook the reasoning process, to a more holistic evaluation that effectively differentiates the cognitive capabilities among models. For example, in our benchmark, GPT-4 demonstrates a performance ten times more accurate than GPT3-5. The significance of this new paradigm lies in its ability to reveal potential cognitive deficiencies in LLMs that current benchmarks, such as GSM8K, fail to uncover due to their saturation and lack of effective differentiation among varying reasoning abilities. Our comprehensive analysis includes several state-of-the-art math models from both open-source and closed-source communities, uncovering fundamental deficiencies in their training and evaluation approaches. This paper not only advocates for a paradigm shift in the assessment of LLMs but also contributes to the ongoing discourse on the trajectory towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). By promoting the adoption of meta-reasoning evaluation methods similar to ours, we aim to facilitate a more accurate assessment of the true cognitive abilities of LLMs.

A fundamental characteristic of audio is its compositional nature. Audio-language models (ALMs) trained using a contrastive approach (e.g., CLAP) that learns a shared representation between audio and language modalities have improved performance in many downstream applications, including zero-shot audio classification, audio retrieval, etc. However, the ability of these models to effectively perform compositional reasoning remains largely unexplored and necessitates additional research. In this paper, we propose CompA, a collection of two expert-annotated benchmarks with a majority of real-world audio samples, to evaluate compositional reasoning in ALMs. Our proposed CompA-order evaluates how well an ALM understands the order or occurrence of acoustic events in audio, and CompA-attribute evaluates attribute binding of acoustic events. An instance from either benchmark consists of two audio-caption pairs, where both audios have the same acoustic events but with different compositions. An ALM is evaluated on how well it matches the right audio to the right caption. Using this benchmark, we first show that current ALMs perform only marginally better than random chance, thereby struggling with compositional reasoning. Next, we propose CompA-CLAP, where we fine-tune CLAP using a novel learning method to improve its compositional reasoning abilities. To train CompA-CLAP, we first propose improvements to contrastive training with composition-aware hard negatives, allowing for more focused training. Next, we propose a novel modular contrastive loss that helps the model learn fine-grained compositional understanding and overcomes the acute scarcity of openly available compositional audios. CompA-CLAP significantly improves over all our baseline models on the CompA benchmark, indicating its superior compositional reasoning capabilities.

Text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion, can produce high-quality and diverse images but often fail to achieve compositional alignment, particularly when prompts describe complex object relationships, attributes, or spatial arrangements. Recent inference-time approaches address this by optimizing or exploring the initial noise under the guidance of reward functions that score text-image alignment without requiring model fine-tuning. While promising, each strategy has intrinsic limitations when used alone: optimization can stall due to poor initialization or unfavorable search trajectories, whereas exploration may require a prohibitively large number of samples to locate a satisfactory output. Our analysis further shows that neither single reward metrics nor ad-hoc combinations reliably capture all aspects of compositionality, leading to weak or inconsistent guidance. To overcome these challenges, we present Category-Aware Reward-based Initial Noise Optimization and Exploration (CARINOX), a unified framework that combines noise optimization and exploration with a principled reward selection procedure grounded in correlation with human judgments. Evaluations on two complementary benchmarks covering diverse compositional challenges show that CARINOX raises average alignment scores by +16% on T2I-CompBench++ and +11% on the HRS benchmark, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art optimization and exploration-based methods across all major categories, while preserving image quality and diversity. The project page is available at https://amirkasaei.com/carinox/{this URL}.

Transfer learning has recently become the dominant paradigm of machine learning. Pre-trained models fine-tuned for downstream tasks achieve better performance with fewer labelled examples. Nonetheless, it remains unclear how to develop models that specialise towards multiple tasks without incurring negative interference and that generalise systematically to non-identically distributed tasks. Modular deep learning has emerged as a promising solution to these challenges. In this framework, units of computation are often implemented as autonomous parameter-efficient modules. Information is conditionally routed to a subset of modules and subsequently aggregated. These properties enable positive transfer and systematic generalisation by separating computation from routing and updating modules locally. We offer a survey of modular architectures, providing a unified view over several threads of research that evolved independently in the scientific literature. Moreover, we explore various additional purposes of modularity, including scaling language models, causal inference, programme induction, and planning in reinforcement learning. Finally, we report various concrete applications where modularity has been successfully deployed such as cross-lingual and cross-modal knowledge transfer. Related talks and projects to this survey, are available at https://www.modulardeeplearning.com/.

As LLMs become increasingly prevalent, it is interesting to consider how ``creative'' these models can be. From cognitive science, creativity consists of at least two key characteristics: convergent thinking (purposefulness to achieve a given goal) and divergent thinking (adaptability to new environments or constraints) runco2003critical. In this work, we introduce a framework for quantifying LLM creativity that incorporates the two characteristics. This is achieved by (1) Denial Prompting pushes LLMs to come up with more creative solutions to a given problem by incrementally imposing new constraints on the previous solution, compelling LLMs to adopt new strategies, and (2) defining and computing the NeoGauge metric which examines both convergent and divergent thinking in the generated creative responses by LLMs. We apply the proposed framework on Codeforces problems, a natural data source for collecting human coding solutions. We quantify NeoGauge for various proprietary and open-source models and find that even the most creative model, GPT-4, still falls short of demonstrating human-like creativity. We also experiment with advanced reasoning strategies (MCTS, self-correction, etc.) and observe no significant improvement in creativity. As a by-product of our analysis, we release NeoCoder dataset for reproducing our results on future models.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly advanced, their ability to exhibit compositional generalization -- the capacity to combine learned skills in novel ways not encountered during training -- has garnered significant attention. This type of generalization, particularly in scenarios beyond training data, is also of great interest in the study of AI safety and alignment. A recent study introduced the SKILL-MIX evaluation, where models are tasked with composing a short paragraph demonstrating the use of a specified k-tuple of language skills. While small models struggled with composing even with k=3, larger models like GPT-4 performed reasonably well with k=5 and 6. In this paper, we employ a setup akin to SKILL-MIX to evaluate the capacity of smaller models to learn compositional generalization from examples. Utilizing a diverse set of language skills -- including rhetorical, literary, reasoning, theory of mind, and common sense -- GPT-4 was used to generate text samples that exhibit random subsets of k skills. Subsequent fine-tuning of 7B and 13B parameter models on these combined skill texts, for increasing values of k, revealed the following findings: (1) Training on combinations of k=2 and 3 skills results in noticeable improvements in the ability to compose texts with k=4 and 5 skills, despite models never having seen such examples during training. (2) When skill categories are split into training and held-out groups, models significantly improve at composing texts with held-out skills during testing despite having only seen training skills during fine-tuning, illustrating the efficacy of the training approach even with previously unseen skills. This study also suggests that incorporating skill-rich (potentially synthetic) text into training can substantially enhance the compositional capabilities of models.

Logical reasoning is central to human cognition and intelligence. Past research of logical reasoning within AI uses formal language as knowledge representation~(and symbolic reasoners). However, reasoning with formal language has proved challenging~(e.g., brittleness and knowledge-acquisition bottleneck). This paper provides a comprehensive overview on a new paradigm of logical reasoning, which uses natural language as knowledge representation~(and pretrained language models as reasoners), including philosophical definition and categorization of logical reasoning, advantages of the new paradigm, benchmarks and methods, challenges of the new paradigm, desirable tasks & methods in the future, and relation to related NLP fields. This new paradigm is promising since it not only alleviates many challenges of formal representation but also has advantages over end-to-end neural methods.

Recent studies on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shifted from the end-to-end action-generation paradigm toward a pipeline involving task planning followed by action generation, demonstrating improved performance on various complex, long-horizon manipulation tasks. However, existing approaches vary significantly in terms of network architectures, planning paradigms, representations, and training data sources, making it challenging for researchers to identify the precise sources of performance gains and components to be further improved. To systematically investigate the impacts of different planning paradigms and representations isolating from network architectures and training data, in this paper, we introduce VLA-OS, a unified VLA architecture series capable of various task planning paradigms, and design a comprehensive suite of controlled experiments across diverse object categories (rigid and deformable), visual modalities (2D and 3D), environments (simulation and real-world), and end-effectors (grippers and dexterous hands). Our results demonstrate that: 1) visually grounded planning representations are generally better than language planning representations; 2) the Hierarchical-VLA paradigm generally achieves superior or comparable performance than other paradigms on task performance, pretraining, generalization ability, scalability, and continual learning ability, albeit at the cost of slower training and inference speeds.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become foundational to modern AI agent systems, enabling autonomous agents to reason and plan. In most existing systems, inter-agent communication relies primarily on natural language. While this design supports interpretability and human oversight, we argue that it introduces fundamental limitations in agent-to-agent coordination. The semantic space of natural language is structurally misaligned with the high-dimensional vector spaces in which LLMs operate, resulting in information loss and behavioral drift. Beyond surface-level inefficiencies, we highlight a deeper architectural limitation: current LLMs were not trained with the objective of supporting agentic behavior. As such, they lack mechanisms for modeling role continuity, task boundaries, and multi-agent dependencies. The standard next-token prediction paradigm fails to support the structural alignment required for robust, scalable agent coordination. Based on this, we argue that two core questions deserve careful examination: first, given that AI agents fundamentally operate in high-dimensional vector spaces, should they rely on a language system originally designed for human cognition as their communication medium? Second, should we consider developing a new model construction paradigm that builds models from the ground up to natively support structured communication, shared intentionality, and task alignment in multi-role, multi-agent environments? This paper calls for a reconsideration not only of how agents should communicate, but also of what it fundamentally means to train a model that natively supports multi-agent coordination and communication.

VisionScores presents a novel proposal being the first system-segmented image score dataset, aiming to offer structure-rich, high information-density images for machine and deep learning tasks. Delimited to two-handed piano pieces, it was built to consider not only certain graphic similarity but also composition patterns, as this creative process is highly instrument-dependent. It provides two scenarios in relation to composer and composition type. The first, formed by 14k samples, considers works from different authors but the same composition type, specifically, Sonatinas. The latter, consisting of 10.8K samples, presents the opposite case, various composition types from the same author, being the one selected Franz Liszt. All of the 24.8k samples are formatted as grayscale jpg images of 128 times 512 pixels. VisionScores supplies the users not only the formatted samples but the systems' order and pieces' metadata. Moreover, unsegmented full-page scores and the pre-formatted images are included for further analysis.

Large text-guided diffusion models, such as DALLE-2, are able to generate stunning photorealistic images given natural language descriptions. While such models are highly flexible, they struggle to understand the composition of certain concepts, such as confusing the attributes of different objects or relations between objects. In this paper, we propose an alternative structured approach for compositional generation using diffusion models. An image is generated by composing a set of diffusion models, with each of them modeling a certain component of the image. To do this, we interpret diffusion models as energy-based models in which the data distributions defined by the energy functions may be explicitly combined. The proposed method can generate scenes at test time that are substantially more complex than those seen in training, composing sentence descriptions, object relations, human facial attributes, and even generalizing to new combinations that are rarely seen in the real world. We further illustrate how our approach may be used to compose pre-trained text-guided diffusion models and generate photorealistic images containing all the details described in the input descriptions, including the binding of certain object attributes that have been shown difficult for DALLE-2. These results point to the effectiveness of the proposed method in promoting structured generalization for visual generation. Project page: https://energy-based-model.github.io/Compositional-Visual-Generation-with-Composable-Diffusion-Models/

Large language models (LLMs) are expected to respond accurately but often exhibit deficient reasoning or generate hallucinatory content. To address these, studies prefixed with ``Self-'' such as Self-Consistency, Self-Improve, and Self-Refine have been initiated. They share a commonality: involving LLMs evaluating and updating itself to mitigate the issues. Nonetheless, these efforts lack a unified perspective on summarization, as existing surveys predominantly focus on categorization without examining the motivations behind these works. In this paper, we summarize a theoretical framework, termed Internal Consistency, which offers unified explanations for phenomena such as the lack of reasoning and the presence of hallucinations. Internal Consistency assesses the coherence among LLMs' latent layer, decoding layer, and response layer based on sampling methodologies. Expanding upon the Internal Consistency framework, we introduce a streamlined yet effective theoretical framework capable of mining Internal Consistency, named Self-Feedback. The Self-Feedback framework consists of two modules: Self-Evaluation and Self-Update. This framework has been employed in numerous studies. We systematically classify these studies by tasks and lines of work; summarize relevant evaluation methods and benchmarks; and delve into the concern, ``Does Self-Feedback Really Work?'' We propose several critical viewpoints, including the ``Hourglass Evolution of Internal Consistency'', ``Consistency Is (Almost) Correctness'' hypothesis, and ``The Paradox of Latent and Explicit Reasoning''. Furthermore, we outline promising directions for future research. We have open-sourced the experimental code, reference list, and statistical data, available at https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/ICSFSurvey.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made notable progress in mathematical reasoning, yet they often rely on single-paradigm reasoning that limits their effectiveness across diverse tasks. In this paper, we introduce Chain-of-Reasoning (CoR), a novel unified framework that integrates multiple reasoning paradigms--Natural Language Reasoning (NLR), Algorithmic Reasoning (AR), and Symbolic Reasoning (SR)--to enable synergistic collaboration. CoR generates multiple potential answers using different reasoning paradigms and synthesizes them into a coherent final solution. We propose a Progressive Paradigm Training (PPT) strategy that allows models to progressively master these paradigms, culminating in the development of CoR-Math-7B. Experimental results demonstrate that CoR-Math-7B significantly outperforms current SOTA models, achieving up to a 41.0% absolute improvement over GPT-4 in theorem proving tasks and a 7.9% improvement over RL-based methods in arithmetic tasks. These results showcase the enhanced mathematical comprehensive ability of our model, achieving significant performance gains on specific tasks and enabling zero-shot generalization across tasks.

Dance requires skillful composition of complex movements that follow rhythmic, tonal and timbral features of music. Formally, generating dance conditioned on a piece of music can be expressed as a problem of modelling a high-dimensional continuous motion signal, conditioned on an audio signal. In this work we make two contributions to tackle this problem. First, we present a novel probabilistic autoregressive architecture that models the distribution over future poses with a normalizing flow conditioned on previous poses as well as music context, using a multimodal transformer encoder. Second, we introduce the currently largest 3D dance-motion dataset, obtained with a variety of motion-capture technologies, and including both professional and casual dancers. Using this dataset, we compare our new model against two baselines, via objective metrics and a user study, and show that both the ability to model a probability distribution, as well as being able to attend over a large motion and music context are necessary to produce interesting, diverse, and realistic dance that matches the music.

Songwriting is often driven by multimodal inspirations, such as imagery, narratives, or existing music, yet songwriters remain unsupported by current music AI systems in incorporating these multimodal inputs into their creative processes. We introduce Amuse, a songwriting assistant that transforms multimodal (image, text, or audio) inputs into chord progressions that can be seamlessly incorporated into songwriters' creative processes. A key feature of Amuse is its novel method for generating coherent chords that are relevant to music keywords in the absence of datasets with paired examples of multimodal inputs and chords. Specifically, we propose a method that leverages multimodal large language models (LLMs) to convert multimodal inputs into noisy chord suggestions and uses a unimodal chord model to filter the suggestions. A user study with songwriters shows that Amuse effectively supports transforming multimodal ideas into coherent musical suggestions, enhancing users' agency and creativity throughout the songwriting process.

Recent years have seen the rapid development of large generative models for text; however, much less research has explored the connection between text and another "language" of communication -- music. Music, much like text, can convey emotions, stories, and ideas, and has its own unique structure and syntax. In our work, we bridge text and music via a text-to-music generation model that is highly efficient, expressive, and can handle long-term structure. Specifically, we develop Mo\^usai, a cascading two-stage latent diffusion model that can generate multiple minutes of high-quality stereo music at 48kHz from textual descriptions. Moreover, our model features high efficiency, which enables real-time inference on a single consumer GPU with a reasonable speed. Through experiments and property analyses, we show our model's competence over a variety of criteria compared with existing music generation models. Lastly, to promote the open-source culture, we provide a collection of open-source libraries with the hope of facilitating future work in the field. We open-source the following: Codes: https://github.com/archinetai/audio-diffusion-pytorch; music samples for this paper: http://bit.ly/44ozWDH; all music samples for all models: https://bit.ly/audio-diffusion.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing but can exhibit biases and may generate toxic content. While alignment techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) reduce these issues, their impact on creativity, defined as syntactic and semantic diversity, remains unexplored. We investigate the unintended consequences of RLHF on the creativity of LLMs through three experiments focusing on the Llama-2 series. Our findings reveal that aligned models exhibit lower entropy in token predictions, form distinct clusters in the embedding space, and gravitate towards "attractor states", indicating limited output diversity. Our findings have significant implications for marketers who rely on LLMs for creative tasks such as copywriting, ad creation, and customer persona generation. The trade-off between consistency and creativity in aligned models should be carefully considered when selecting the appropriate model for a given application. We also discuss the importance of prompt engineering in harnessing the creative potential of base models.

This paper describes BACON, a basic prototype of an automatic poetry generator with author linguistic style transfer. It combines concepts and techniques from finite state machinery, probabilistic models, artificial neural networks and deep learning, to write original poetry with rich aesthetic-qualities in the style of any given author. Extrinsic evaluation of the output generated by BACON shows that participants were unable to tell the difference between human and AI-generated poems in any statistically significant way.

Leveraging generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), we have transformed a dataset comprising 1,000 scientific papers into an ontological knowledge graph. Through an in-depth structural analysis, we have calculated node degrees, identified communities and connectivities, and evaluated clustering coefficients and betweenness centrality of pivotal nodes, uncovering fascinating knowledge architectures. The graph has an inherently scale-free nature, is highly connected, and can be used for graph reasoning by taking advantage of transitive and isomorphic properties that reveal unprecedented interdisciplinary relationships that can be used to answer queries, identify gaps in knowledge, propose never-before-seen material designs, and predict material behaviors. We compute deep node embeddings for combinatorial node similarity ranking for use in a path sampling strategy links dissimilar concepts that have previously not been related. One comparison revealed structural parallels between biological materials and Beethoven's 9th Symphony, highlighting shared patterns of complexity through isomorphic mapping. In another example, the algorithm proposed a hierarchical mycelium-based composite based on integrating path sampling with principles extracted from Kandinsky's 'Composition VII' painting. The resulting material integrates an innovative set of concepts that include a balance of chaos/order, adjustable porosity, mechanical strength, and complex patterned chemical functionalization. We uncover other isomorphisms across science, technology and art, revealing a nuanced ontology of immanence that reveal a context-dependent heterarchical interplay of constituents. Graph-based generative AI achieves a far higher degree of novelty, explorative capacity, and technical detail, than conventional approaches and establishes a widely useful framework for innovation by revealing hidden connections.

The success of Transformer language models is widely credited to their dot-product attention mechanism, which interweaves a set of key design principles: mixing information across positions (enabling multi-token interactions), sequence-dependent activations (where attention weights adapt to each input), a specific mathematical form (dot-product similarities plus softmax weighting), and coupling of queries and keys to evolving hidden states (grounding attention in the current layer). However, the necessity of each of these principles remains largely untested. In this work, we systematically deconstruct attention by designing controlled variants that selectively relax these principles, applied both uniformly across all layers and in hybrid architectures where only some layers retain standard attention. Our empirical analysis reveals that mechanisms for mixing tokens are indispensable, as their absence collapses models to near-random behavior, while the exact mathematical form and sequence dependency can be substantially relaxed, especially when preserved in just a subset of layers. Surprisingly, even variants that fail in isolation can achieve robust performance when interleaved with standard attention, highlighting a cooperative effect. These findings deepen our understanding of what truly underpins attention's effectiveness and open new avenues for simplifying language models without sacrificing performance.

Scientific innovation is undergoing a paradigm shift driven by the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs). As science faces mounting challenges including information overload, disciplinary silos, and diminishing returns on conventional research methods, LLMs are emerging as powerful agents capable not only of enhancing scientific workflows but also of participating in and potentially leading the innovation process. Existing surveys mainly focus on different perspectives, phrases, and tasks in scientific research and discovery, while they have limitations in understanding the transformative potential and role differentiation of LLM. This survey proposes a comprehensive framework to categorize the evolving roles of LLMs in scientific innovation across three hierarchical levels: Evaluator, Collaborator, and Scientist. We distinguish between LLMs' contributions to structured scientific research processes and open-ended scientific discovery, thereby offering a unified taxonomy that clarifies capability boundaries, evaluation criteria, and human-AI interaction patterns at each level. Through an extensive analysis of current methodologies, benchmarks, systems, and evaluation metrics, this survey delivers an in-depth and systematic synthesis on LLM-driven scientific innovation. We present LLMs not only as tools for automating existing processes, but also as catalysts capable of reshaping the epistemological foundations of science itself. This survey offers conceptual clarity, practical guidance, and theoretical foundations for future research, while also highlighting open challenges and ethical considerations in the pursuit of increasingly autonomous AI-driven science. Resources related to this survey can be accessed on GitHub at: https://github.com/haoxuan-unt2024/llm4innovation.

Compositional actions consist of dynamic (verbs) and static (objects) concepts. Humans can easily recognize unseen compositions using the learned concepts. For machines, solving such a problem requires a model to recognize unseen actions composed of previously observed verbs and objects, thus requiring so-called compositional generalization ability. To facilitate this research, we propose a novel Zero-Shot Compositional Action Recognition (ZS-CAR) task. For evaluating the task, we construct a new benchmark, Something-composition (Sth-com), based on the widely used Something-Something V2 dataset. We also propose a novel Component-to-Composition (C2C) learning method to solve the new ZS-CAR task. C2C includes an independent component learning module and a composition inference module. Last, we devise an enhanced training strategy to address the challenges of component variations between seen and unseen compositions and to handle the subtle balance between learning seen and unseen actions. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly surpasses the existing compositional generalization methods and sets a new state-of-the-art. The new Sth-com benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/RongchangLi/ZSCAR_C2C.

Understanding visual scenes is fundamental to human intelligence. While discriminative models have significantly advanced computer vision, they often struggle with compositional understanding. In contrast, recent generative text-to-image diffusion models excel at synthesizing complex scenes, suggesting inherent compositional capabilities. Building on this, zero-shot diffusion classifiers have been proposed to repurpose diffusion models for discriminative tasks. While prior work offered promising results in discriminative compositional scenarios, these results remain preliminary due to a small number of benchmarks and a relatively shallow analysis of conditions under which the models succeed. To address this, we present a comprehensive study of the discriminative capabilities of diffusion classifiers on a wide range of compositional tasks. Specifically, our study covers three diffusion models (SD 1.5, 2.0, and, for the first time, 3-m) spanning 10 datasets and over 30 tasks. Further, we shed light on the role that target dataset domains play in respective performance; to isolate the domain effects, we introduce a new diagnostic benchmark Self-Bench comprised of images created by diffusion models themselves. Finally, we explore the importance of timestep weighting and uncover a relationship between domain gap and timestep sensitivity, particularly for SD3-m. To sum up, diffusion classifiers understand compositionality, but conditions apply! Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/eugene6923/Diffusion-Classifiers-Compositionality.

We define Agency as the emergent capacity of AI systems to function as autonomous agents actively discovering problems, formulating hypotheses, and executing solutions through self-directed engagement with environments and tools. This fundamental capability marks the dawn of the Age of AI Agency, driven by a critical industry shift: the urgent need for AI systems that don't just think, but work. While current AI excels at reasoning and generating responses, industries demand autonomous agents that can execute tasks, operate tools, and drive real-world outcomes. As agentic intelligence becomes the defining characteristic separating cognitive systems from productive workers, efficiently cultivating machine autonomy becomes paramount. Current approaches assume that more data yields better agency, following traditional scaling laws from language modeling. We fundamentally challenge this paradigm. LIMI (Less Is More for Intelligent Agency) demonstrates that agency follows radically different development principles. Through strategic focus on collaborative software development and scientific research workflows, we show that sophisticated agentic intelligence can emerge from minimal but strategically curated demonstrations of autonomous behavior. Using only 78 carefully designed training samples, LIMI achieves 73.5% on comprehensive agency benchmarks, dramatically outperforming state-of-the-art models: Kimi-K2-Instruct (24.1%), DeepSeek-V3.1 (11.9%), Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct (27.5%), and GLM-4.5 (45.1%). Most strikingly, LIMI demonstrates 53.7% improvement over models trained on 10,000 samples-achieving superior agentic intelligence with 128 times fewer samples. Our findings establish the Agency Efficiency Principle: machine autonomy emerges not from data abundance but from strategic curation of high-quality agentic demonstrations.

Can a pretrained neural network adapt its architecture to different inputs without any finetuning? Do we need all layers for simple tasks, and are they adequate for challenging tasks? We found that the layers of a pretrained large language model (LLM) can be manipulated as separate modules to build a better and even shallower model customized for each test sample. In particular, each layer from the pretrained model can be skipped/pruned or repeated multiple times as recurrent neural networks (RNN), and stacked with others in arbitrary orders, yielding a chain-of-layers (CoLa) per sample. This compositional space greatly expands the scope of existing works on looped/recurrent pretrained modules, layer pruning, or early-exit networks. We develop a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) protocol to explore and identify the optimal CoLa for each sample from math and commonsense reasoning benchmarks. Compared to a static model of a fixed depth, CoLa allows shortcut paths (fast thinking), recurrence of the same layer(s) (slow thinking), and combining both, offering more flexible, dynamic architectures for different inputs. We conduct an extensive analysis of the MCTS-optimized CoLa, which leads to two key findings: (1) For >75% of samples with correct predictions by the original LLM, we can find shorter CoLa, suggesting a large space for improving inference efficiency; (2) For >60% of samples with originally incorrect predictions, we can identify CoLa achieving correct predictions, suggesting a large space of performance enhancement. Our results highlight the shortcomings of using a fixed architecture of pre-trained LLMs for inference on different samples and pave the way to unlock the generalization power of test-time depth adaptation.

This paper calls on the research community not only to investigate how human biases are inherited by large language models (LLMs) but also to explore how these biases in LLMs can be leveraged to make society's "unwritten code" - such as implicit stereotypes and heuristics - visible and accessible for critique. We introduce a conceptual framework through a case study in science: uncovering hidden rules in peer review - the factors that reviewers care about but rarely state explicitly due to normative scientific expectations. The idea of the framework is to push LLMs to speak out their heuristics through generating self-consistent hypotheses - why one paper appeared stronger in reviewer scoring - among paired papers submitted to 45 computer science conferences, while iteratively searching deeper hypotheses from remaining pairs where existing hypotheses cannot explain. We observed that LLMs' normative priors about the internal characteristics of good science extracted from their self-talk, e.g. theoretical rigor, were systematically updated toward posteriors that emphasize storytelling about external connections, such as how the work is positioned and connected within and across literatures. This shift reveals the primacy of scientific myths about intrinsic properties driving scientific excellence rather than extrinsic contextualization and storytelling that influence conceptions of relevance and significance. Human reviewers tend to explicitly reward aspects that moderately align with LLMs' normative priors (correlation = 0.49) but avoid articulating contextualization and storytelling posteriors in their review comments (correlation = -0.14), despite giving implicit reward to them with positive scores. We discuss the broad applicability of the framework, leveraging LLMs as diagnostic tools to surface the tacit codes underlying human society, enabling more precisely targeted responsible AI.

Large-scale Text-to-Video (T2V) diffusion models have recently demonstrated unprecedented capability to transform natural language descriptions into stunning and photorealistic videos. Despite the promising results, a significant challenge remains: these models struggle to fully grasp complex compositional interactions between multiple concepts and actions. This issue arises when some words dominantly influence the final video, overshadowing other concepts.To tackle this problem, we introduce Vico, a generic framework for compositional video generation that explicitly ensures all concepts are represented properly. At its core, Vico analyzes how input tokens influence the generated video, and adjusts the model to prevent any single concept from dominating. Specifically, Vico extracts attention weights from all layers to build a spatial-temporal attention graph, and then estimates the influence as the max-flow from the source text token to the video target token. Although the direct computation of attention flow in diffusion models is typically infeasible, we devise an efficient approximation based on subgraph flows and employ a fast and vectorized implementation, which in turn makes the flow computation manageable and differentiable. By updating the noisy latent to balance these flows, Vico captures complex interactions and consequently produces videos that closely adhere to textual descriptions. We apply our method to multiple diffusion-based video models for compositional T2V and video editing. Empirical results demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances the compositional richness and accuracy of the generated videos. Visit our website at~https://adamdad.github.io/vico/{https://adamdad.github.io/vico/}.

Learning representations that generalize to novel compositions of known concepts is crucial for bridging the gap between human and machine perception. One prominent effort is learning object-centric representations, which are widely conjectured to enable compositional generalization. Yet, it remains unclear when this conjecture will be true, as a principled theoretical or empirical understanding of compositional generalization is lacking. In this work, we investigate when compositional generalization is guaranteed for object-centric representations through the lens of identifiability theory. We show that autoencoders that satisfy structural assumptions on the decoder and enforce encoder-decoder consistency will learn object-centric representations that provably generalize compositionally. We validate our theoretical result and highlight the practical relevance of our assumptions through experiments on synthetic image data.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to various domains, especially through LLM-driven autonomous agents. These agents are now capable of collaborating seamlessly, splitting tasks and enhancing accuracy, thus minimizing the need for human involvement. However, these agents often approach a diverse range of tasks in isolation, without benefiting from past experiences. This isolation can lead to repeated mistakes and inefficient trials in task solving. To this end, this paper introduces Experiential Co-Learning, a novel framework in which instructor and assistant agents gather shortcut-oriented experiences from their historical trajectories and use these past experiences for mutual reasoning. This paradigm, enriched with previous experiences, equips agents to more effectively address unseen tasks.

Memory Mosaics are networks of associative memories working in concert to achieve a prediction task of interest. Like transformers, memory mosaics possess compositional capabilities and in-context learning capabilities. Unlike transformers, memory mosaics achieve these capabilities in comparatively transparent ways. We demonstrate these capabilities on toy examples and we also show that memory mosaics perform as well or better than transformers on medium-scale language modeling tasks.

We propose MuseControlLite, a lightweight mechanism designed to fine-tune text-to-music generation models for precise conditioning using various time-varying musical attributes and reference audio signals. The key finding is that positional embeddings, which have been seldom used by text-to-music generation models in the conditioner for text conditions, are critical when the condition of interest is a function of time. Using melody control as an example, our experiments show that simply adding rotary positional embeddings to the decoupled cross-attention layers increases control accuracy from 56.6% to 61.1%, while requiring 6.75 times fewer trainable parameters than state-of-the-art fine-tuning mechanisms, using the same pre-trained diffusion Transformer model of Stable Audio Open. We evaluate various forms of musical attribute control, audio inpainting, and audio outpainting, demonstrating improved controllability over MusicGen-Large and Stable Audio Open ControlNet at a significantly lower fine-tuning cost, with only 85M trainble parameters. Source code, model checkpoints, and demo examples are available at: https://musecontrollite.github.io/web/.

Vision and language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have showcased remarkable zero-shot recognition abilities yet face challenges in visio-linguistic compositionality, particularly in linguistic comprehension and fine-grained image-text alignment. This paper explores the intricate relationship between compositionality and recognition -- two pivotal aspects of VLM capability. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of existing VLMs, covering both pre-training approaches aimed at recognition and the fine-tuning methods designed to improve compositionality. Our evaluation employs 12 benchmarks for compositionality, along with 21 zero-shot classification and two retrieval benchmarks for recognition. In our analysis from 274 CLIP model checkpoints, we reveal patterns and trade-offs that emerge between compositional understanding and recognition accuracy. Ultimately, this necessitates strategic efforts towards developing models that improve both capabilities, as well as the meticulous formulation of benchmarks for compositionality. We open our evaluation framework at https://github.com/ytaek-oh/vl_compo.

The rapid advancement of generative models has enabled modern AI systems to comprehend and produce highly sophisticated content, even achieving human-level performance in specific domains. However, these models remain fundamentally constrained by catastrophic forgetting - a persistent challenge where adapting to new tasks typically leads to significant degradation in performance on previously learned tasks. To address this practical limitation, numerous approaches have been proposed to enhance the adaptability and scalability of generative models in real-world applications. In this work, we present a comprehensive survey of continual learning methods for mainstream generative models, including large language models, multimodal large language models, vision language action models, and diffusion models. Drawing inspiration from the memory mechanisms of the human brain, we systematically categorize these approaches into three paradigms: architecture-based, regularization-based, and replay-based methods, while elucidating their underlying methodologies and motivations. We further analyze continual learning setups for different generative models, including training objectives, benchmarks, and core backbones, offering deeper insights into the field. The project page of this paper is available at https://github.com/Ghy0501/Awesome-Continual-Learning-in-Generative-Models.

Interpretability researchers have attempted to understand MLP neurons of language models based on both the contexts in which they activate and their output weight vectors. They have paid little attention to a complementary aspect: the interactions between input and output. For example, when neurons detect a direction in the input, they might add much the same direction to the residual stream ("enrichment neurons") or reduce its presence ("depletion neurons"). We address this aspect by examining the cosine similarity between input and output weights of a neuron. We apply our method to 12 models and find that enrichment neurons dominate in early-middle layers whereas later layers tend more towards depletion. To explain this finding, we argue that enrichment neurons are largely responsible for enriching concept representations, one of the first steps of factual recall. Our input-output perspective is a complement to activation-dependent analyses and to approaches that treat input and output separately.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance on complex reasoning tasks with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, conventional CoT relies on reasoning steps explicitly verbalized in natural language, introducing inefficiencies and limiting its applicability to abstract reasoning. To address this, there has been growing research interest in latent CoT reasoning, where inference occurs within latent spaces. By decoupling reasoning from language, latent reasoning promises richer cognitive representations and more flexible, faster inference. Researchers have explored various directions in this promising field, including training methodologies, structural innovations, and internal reasoning mechanisms. This paper presents a comprehensive overview and analysis of this reasoning paradigm. We begin by proposing a unified taxonomy from four perspectives: token-wise strategies, internal mechanisms, analysis, and applications. We then provide in-depth discussions and comparative analyses of representative methods, highlighting their design patterns, strengths, and open challenges. We aim to provide a structured foundation for advancing this emerging direction in LLM reasoning. The relevant papers will be regularly updated at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/Awesome-Latent-CoT.

The quest for human imitative AI has been an enduring topic in AI research since its inception. The technical evolution and emerging capabilities of the latest cohort of large language models (LLMs) have reinvigorated the subject beyond academia to the cultural zeitgeist. While recent NLP evaluation benchmark tasks test some aspects of human-imitative behaviour (e.g., BIG-bench's 'human-like behavior' tasks), few, if not none, examine creative problem solving abilities. Creative problem solving in humans is a well-studied topic in cognitive neuroscience with standardized tests that predominantly use the ability to associate (heterogeneous) connections among clue words as a metric for creativity. Exposure to misleading stimuli - distractors dubbed red herrings - impede human performance in such tasks via the fixation effect and Einstellung paradigm. In cognitive neuroscience studies, such fixations are experimentally induced by pre-exposing participants to orthographically similar incorrect words to subsequent word-fragments or clues. The popular British quiz show Only Connect's Connecting Wall segment essentially mimics Mednick's Remote Associates Test (RAT) formulation with built-in, deliberate red herrings, which makes it an ideal proxy dataset to explore and study fixation effect and Einstellung paradigm from cognitive neuroscience in LLMs. In addition to presenting the novel Only Connect Wall (OCW) dataset, we also report results from our evaluation of selected pre-trained language models and LLMs (including OpenAI's GPT series) on creative problem solving tasks like grouping clue words by heterogeneous connections, and identifying correct open knowledge domain connections in respective groups. The code and link to the dataset are available at https://github.com/TaatiTeam/OCW.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance on a wide variety of tasks, but they often struggle with tasks that require multi-step reasoning or goal-directed planning. To address this, we take inspiration from the human brain, in which planning is accomplished via the recurrent interaction of specialized modules in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). These modules perform functions such as conflict monitoring, state prediction, state evaluation, task decomposition, and task coordination. We find that LLMs are sometimes capable of carrying out these functions in isolation, but struggle to autonomously coordinate them in the service of a goal. Therefore, we propose a black box architecture with multiple LLM-based (GPT-4) modules. The architecture improves planning through the interaction of specialized PFC-inspired modules that break down a larger problem into multiple brief automated calls to the LLM. We evaluate the combined architecture on two challenging planning tasks -- graph traversal and Tower of Hanoi -- finding that it yields significant improvements over standard LLM methods (e.g., zero-shot prompting or in-context learning). These results demonstrate the benefit of utilizing knowledge from cognitive neuroscience to improve planning in LLMs.

We present PartComposer: a framework for part-level concept learning from single-image examples that enables text-to-image diffusion models to compose novel objects from meaningful components. Existing methods either struggle with effectively learning fine-grained concepts or require a large dataset as input. We propose a dynamic data synthesis pipeline generating diverse part compositions to address one-shot data scarcity. Most importantly, we propose to maximize the mutual information between denoised latents and structured concept codes via a concept predictor, enabling direct regulation on concept disentanglement and re-composition supervision. Our method achieves strong disentanglement and controllable composition, outperforming subject and part-level baselines when mixing concepts from the same, or different, object categories.

We investigate compositional structures in data embeddings from pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs). Traditionally, compositionality has been associated with algebraic operations on embeddings of words from a pre-existing vocabulary. In contrast, we seek to approximate representations from an encoder as combinations of a smaller set of vectors in the embedding space. These vectors can be seen as "ideal words" for generating concepts directly within the embedding space of the model. We first present a framework for understanding compositional structures from a geometric perspective. We then explain what these compositional structures entail probabilistically in the case of VLM embeddings, providing intuitions for why they arise in practice. Finally, we empirically explore these structures in CLIP's embeddings and we evaluate their usefulness for solving different vision-language tasks such as classification, debiasing, and retrieval. Our results show that simple linear algebraic operations on embedding vectors can be used as compositional and interpretable methods for regulating the behavior of VLMs.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their multimodal extensions (MLLMs) have substantially enhanced machine reasoning across diverse tasks. However, these models predominantly rely on pure text as the medium for both expressing and structuring reasoning, even when visual information is present. In this work, we argue that language may not always be the most natural or effective modality for reasoning, particularly in tasks involving spatial and geometrical information. Motivated by this, we propose a new paradigm, Visual Planning, which enables planning through purely visual representations, independent of text. In this paradigm, planning is executed via sequences of images that encode step-by-step inference in the visual domain, akin to how humans sketch or visualize future actions. We introduce a novel reinforcement learning framework, Visual Planning via Reinforcement Learning (VPRL), empowered by GRPO for post-training large vision models, leading to substantial improvements in planning in a selection of representative visual navigation tasks, FrozenLake, Maze, and MiniBehavior. Our visual planning paradigm outperforms all other planning variants that conduct reasoning in the text-only space. Our results establish Visual Planning as a viable and promising alternative to language-based reasoning, opening new avenues for tasks that benefit from intuitive, image-based inference.

In recent years, foundation models (FMs) such as large language models (LLMs) and latent diffusion models (LDMs) have profoundly impacted diverse sectors, including music. This comprehensive review examines state-of-the-art (SOTA) pre-trained models and foundation models in music, spanning from representation learning, generative learning and multimodal learning. We first contextualise the significance of music in various industries and trace the evolution of AI in music. By delineating the modalities targeted by foundation models, we discover many of the music representations are underexplored in FM development. Then, emphasis is placed on the lack of versatility of previous methods on diverse music applications, along with the potential of FMs in music understanding, generation and medical application. By comprehensively exploring the details of the model pre-training paradigm, architectural choices, tokenisation, finetuning methodologies and controllability, we emphasise the important topics that should have been well explored, like instruction tuning and in-context learning, scaling law and emergent ability, as well as long-sequence modelling etc. A dedicated section presents insights into music agents, accompanied by a thorough analysis of datasets and evaluations essential for pre-training and downstream tasks. Finally, by underscoring the vital importance of ethical considerations, we advocate that following research on FM for music should focus more on such issues as interpretability, transparency, human responsibility, and copyright issues. The paper offers insights into future challenges and trends on FMs for music, aiming to shape the trajectory of human-AI collaboration in the music realm.

Previous work has modeled the compositionality of words by creating character-level models of meaning, reducing problems of sparsity for rare words. However, in many writing systems compositionality has an effect even on the character-level: the meaning of a character is derived by the sum of its parts. In this paper, we model this effect by creating embeddings for characters based on their visual characteristics, creating an image for the character and running it through a convolutional neural network to produce a visual character embedding. Experiments on a text classification task demonstrate that such model allows for better processing of instances with rare characters in languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Additionally, qualitative analyses demonstrate that our proposed model learns to focus on the parts of characters that carry semantic content, resulting in embeddings that are coherent in visual space.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has ushered in a transformative paradigm in artificial intelligence, Agentic AI, where intelligent agents exhibit goal-directed autonomy, contextual reasoning, and dynamic multi-agent coordination. This paper provides a systematic review and comparative analysis of leading Agentic AI frameworks, including CrewAI, LangGraph, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, Agno, Google ADK, and MetaGPT, evaluating their architectural principles, communication mechanisms, memory management, safety guardrails, and alignment with service-oriented computing paradigms. Furthermore, we identify key limitations, emerging trends, and open challenges in the field. To address the issue of agent communication, we conduct an in-depth analysis of protocols such as the Contract Net Protocol (CNP), Agent-to-Agent (A2A), Agent Network Protocol (ANP), and Agora. Our findings not only establish a foundational taxonomy for Agentic AI systems but also propose future research directions to enhance scalability, robustness, and interoperability. This work serves as a comprehensive reference for researchers and practitioners working to advance the next generation of autonomous AI systems.

Compositional Reasoning (CR) entails grasping the significance of attributes, relations, and word order. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs), comprising a visual encoder and a Large Language Model (LLM) decoder, have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in such reasoning tasks. This prompts a crucial question: have VLMs effectively tackled the CR challenge? We conjecture that existing CR benchmarks may not adequately push the boundaries of modern VLMs due to the reliance on an LLM-only negative text generation pipeline. Consequently, the negatives produced either appear as outliers from the natural language distribution learned by VLMs' LLM decoders or as improbable within the corresponding image context. To address these limitations, we introduce ConMe -- a compositional reasoning benchmark and a novel data generation pipeline leveraging VLMs to produce `hard CR Q&A'. Through a new concept of VLMs conversing with each other to collaboratively expose their weaknesses, our pipeline autonomously generates, evaluates, and selects challenging compositional reasoning questions, establishing a robust CR benchmark, also subsequently validated manually. Our benchmark provokes a noteworthy, up to 33%, decrease in CR performance compared to preceding benchmarks, reinstating the CR challenge even for state-of-the-art VLMs.

The deep neural nets of modern artificial intelligence (AI) have not achieved defining features of biological intelligence, including abstraction, causal learning, and energy-efficiency. While scaling to larger models has delivered performance improvements for current applications, more brain-like capacities may demand new theories, models, and methods for designing artificial learning systems. Here, we argue that this opportunity to reassess insights from the brain should stimulate cooperation between AI research and theory-driven computational neuroscience (CN). To motivate a brain basis of neural computation, we present a dynamical view of intelligence from which we elaborate concepts of sparsity in network structure, temporal dynamics, and interactive learning. In particular, we suggest that temporal dynamics, as expressed through neural synchrony, nested oscillations, and flexible sequences, provide a rich computational layer for reading and updating hierarchical models distributed in long-term memory networks. Moreover, embracing agent-centered paradigms in AI and CN will accelerate our understanding of the complex dynamics and behaviors that build useful world models. A convergence of AI/CN theories and objectives will reveal dynamical principles of intelligence for brains and engineered learning systems. This article was inspired by our symposium on dynamical neuroscience and machine learning at the 6th Annual US/NIH BRAIN Initiative Investigators Meeting.

Compositional generalization is crucial for artificial intelligence agents to solve complex vision-language reasoning tasks. Neuro-symbolic approaches have demonstrated promise in capturing compositional structures, but they face critical challenges: (a) reliance on predefined predicates for symbolic representations that limit adaptability, (b) difficulty in extracting predicates from raw data, and (c) using non-differentiable operations for combining primitive concepts. To address these issues, we propose NeSyCoCo, a neuro-symbolic framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate symbolic representations and map them to differentiable neural computations. NeSyCoCo introduces three innovations: (a) augmenting natural language inputs with dependency structures to enhance the alignment with symbolic representations, (b) employing distributed word representations to link diverse, linguistically motivated logical predicates to neural modules, and (c) using the soft composition of normalized predicate scores to align symbolic and differentiable reasoning. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on the ReaSCAN and CLEVR-CoGenT compositional generalization benchmarks and demonstrates robust performance with novel concepts in the CLEVR-SYN benchmark.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional proficiency in natural language processing but often fall short of generating creative and original responses to open-ended questions. To enhance LLM creativity, our key insight is to emulate the human process of inducing collective creativity through engaging discussions with participants from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. To this end, we propose LLM Discussion, a three-phase discussion framework that facilitates vigorous and diverging idea exchanges and ensures convergence to creative answers. Moreover, we adopt a role-playing technique by assigning distinct roles to LLMs to combat the homogeneity of LLMs. We evaluate the efficacy of the proposed framework with the Alternative Uses Test, Similarities Test, Instances Test, and Scientific Creativity Test through both LLM evaluation and human study. Our proposed framework outperforms single-LLM approaches and existing multi-LLM frameworks across various creativity metrics.

Text-to-image customization, which aims to synthesize text-driven images for the given subjects, has recently revolutionized content creation. Existing works follow the pseudo-word paradigm, i.e., represent the given subjects as pseudo-words and then compose them with the given text. However, the inherent entangled influence scope of pseudo-words with the given text results in a dual-optimum paradox, i.e., the similarity of the given subjects and the controllability of the given text could not be optimal simultaneously. We present RealCustom that, for the first time, disentangles similarity from controllability by precisely limiting subject influence to relevant parts only, achieved by gradually narrowing real text word from its general connotation to the specific subject and using its cross-attention to distinguish relevance. Specifically, RealCustom introduces a novel "train-inference" decoupled framework: (1) during training, RealCustom learns general alignment between visual conditions to original textual conditions by a novel adaptive scoring module to adaptively modulate influence quantity; (2) during inference, a novel adaptive mask guidance strategy is proposed to iteratively update the influence scope and influence quantity of the given subjects to gradually narrow the generation of the real text word. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior real-time customization ability of RealCustom in the open domain, achieving both unprecedented similarity of the given subjects and controllability of the given text for the first time. The project page is https://corleone-huang.github.io/realcustom/.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in a large number of downstream tasks. Nonetheless, compositional image understanding remains a rather difficult task due to the object bias present in training data. In this work, we investigate the reasons for such a lack of capability by performing an extensive bench-marking of compositional understanding in VLMs. We compare contrastive models with generative ones and analyze their differences in architecture, pre-training data, and training tasks and losses. Furthermore, we leverage In-Context Learning (ICL) as a way to improve the ability of VLMs to perform more complex reasoning and understanding given an image. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms baseline models across multiple compositional understanding datasets.

NLP models have progressed drastically in recent years, according to numerous datasets proposed to evaluate performance. Questions remain, however, about how particular dataset design choices may impact the conclusions we draw about model capabilities. In this work, we investigate this question in the domain of compositional generalization. We examine the performance of six modeling approaches across 4 datasets, split according to 8 compositional splitting strategies, ranking models by 18 compositional generalization splits in total. Our results show that: i) the datasets, although all designed to evaluate compositional generalization, rank modeling approaches differently; ii) datasets generated by humans align better with each other than they with synthetic datasets, or than synthetic datasets among themselves; iii) generally, whether datasets are sampled from the same source is more predictive of the resulting model ranking than whether they maintain the same interpretation of compositionality; and iv) which lexical items are used in the data can strongly impact conclusions. Overall, our results demonstrate that much work remains to be done when it comes to assessing whether popular evaluation datasets measure what they intend to measure, and suggest that elucidating more rigorous standards for establishing the validity of evaluation sets could benefit the field.

Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the performance of Vision and Language tasks. Foundational Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have been leveraged in multiple settings and demonstrated remarkable performance across several tasks. Such models excel at object-centric recognition yet learn text representations that seem invariant to word order, failing to compose known concepts in novel ways. However, no evidence exists that any VLM, including large-scale single-stream models such as GPT-4V, identifies compositions successfully. In this paper, we introduce a framework to significantly improve the ability of existing models to encode compositional language, with over 10% absolute improvement on compositionality benchmarks, while maintaining or improving the performance on standard object-recognition and retrieval benchmarks. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/netflix/clove.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities including understanding context, engaging in logical reasoning, and generating responses. However, this is achieved at the expense of stringent computational and memory requirements, hindering their ability to effectively support long input sequences. This survey provides an inclusive review of the recent techniques and methods devised to extend the sequence length in LLMs, thereby enhancing their capacity for long-context understanding. In particular, we review and categorize a wide range of techniques including architectural modifications, such as modified positional encoding and altered attention mechanisms, which are designed to enhance the processing of longer sequences while avoiding a proportional increase in computational requirements. The diverse methodologies investigated in this study can be leveraged across different phases of LLMs, i.e., training, fine-tuning and inference. This enables LLMs to efficiently process extended sequences. The limitations of the current methodologies is discussed in the last section along with the suggestions for future research directions, underscoring the importance of sequence length in the continued advancement of LLMs.

This paper reviews the architecture and implementation methods of agents powered by large language models (LLMs). Motivated by the limitations of traditional LLMs in real-world tasks, the research aims to explore patterns to develop "agentic" LLMs that can automate complex tasks and bridge the performance gap with human capabilities. Key components include a perception system that converts environmental percepts into meaningful representations; a reasoning system that formulates plans, adapts to feedback, and evaluates actions through different techniques like Chain-of-Thought and Tree-of-Thought; a memory system that retains knowledge through both short-term and long-term mechanisms; and an execution system that translates internal decisions into concrete actions. This paper shows how integrating these systems leads to more capable and generalized software bots that mimic human cognitive processes for autonomous and intelligent behavior.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold significant potential in the medical field, but their capabilities are often limited by insufficient data in certain medical domains, highlighting the need for understanding what kinds of images can be used by MLLMs for generalization. Current research suggests that multi-task training outperforms single-task as different tasks can benefit each other, but they often overlook the internal relationships within these tasks, providing limited guidance on selecting datasets to enhance specific tasks. To analyze this phenomenon, we attempted to employ compositional generalization (CG)-the ability of models to understand novel combinations by recombining learned elements-as a guiding framework. Since medical images can be precisely defined by Modality, Anatomical area, and Task, naturally providing an environment for exploring CG. Therefore, we assembled 106 medical datasets to create Med-MAT for comprehensive experiments. The experiments confirmed that MLLMs can use CG to understand unseen medical images and identified CG as one of the main drivers of the generalization observed in multi-task training. Additionally, further studies demonstrated that CG effectively supports datasets with limited data and delivers consistent performance across different backbones, highlighting its versatility and broad applicability. Med-MAT is publicly available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/Med-MAT.

Large language models (LLMs) have a substantial capacity for high-level analogical reasoning: reproducing patterns in linear text that occur in their training data (zero-shot evaluation) or in the provided context (few-shot in-context learning). However, recent studies show that even the more advanced LLMs fail in scenarios that require reasoning over multiple objects or facts and making sequences of logical deductions. We propose a two-stage probabilistic inference paradigm, ThinkSum, which reasons over sets of objects or facts in a structured manner. In the first stage (Think - retrieval of associations), a LLM is queried in parallel over a set of phrases extracted from the prompt or an auxiliary model call. In the second stage (Sum - probabilistic inference or reasoning), the results of these queries are aggregated to make the final prediction. We demonstrate the possibilities and advantages of ThinkSum on the BIG-bench suite of LLM evaluation tasks, achieving improvements over the state of the art using GPT-family models on thirteen difficult tasks, often with far smaller model variants. We also compare and contrast ThinkSum with other proposed modifications to direct prompting of LLMs, such as variants of chain-of-thought prompting. Our results suggest that because the probabilistic inference in ThinkSum is performed outside of calls to the LLM, ThinkSum is less sensitive to prompt design, yields more interpretable predictions, and can be flexibly combined with latent variable models to extract structured knowledge from LLMs. Overall, our proposed paradigm represents a promising approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.

Addressing the limitations of text as a source of accurate layout representation in text-conditional diffusion models, many works incorporate additional signals to condition certain attributes within a generated image. Although successful, previous works do not account for the specific localization of said attributes extended into the three dimensional plane. In this context, we present a conditional diffusion model that integrates control over three-dimensional object placement with disentangled representations of global stylistic semantics from multiple exemplar images. Specifically, we first introduce depth disentanglement training to leverage the relative depth of objects as an estimator, allowing the model to identify the absolute positions of unseen objects through the use of synthetic image triplets. We also introduce soft guidance, a method for imposing global semantics onto targeted regions without the use of any additional localization cues. Our integrated framework, Compose and Conquer (CnC), unifies these techniques to localize multiple conditions in a disentangled manner. We demonstrate that our approach allows perception of objects at varying depths while offering a versatile framework for composing localized objects with different global semantics. Code: https://github.com/tomtom1103/compose-and-conquer/

We investigate the construction of latent spaces through self-supervised learning to support semantically meaningful operations. Analogous to operational amplifiers, these "operational latent spaces" (OpLaS) not only demonstrate semantic structure such as clustering but also support common transformational operations with inherent semantic meaning. Some operational latent spaces are found to have arisen "unintentionally" in the progress toward some (other) self-supervised learning objective, in which unintended but still useful properties are discovered among the relationships of points in the space. Other spaces may be constructed "intentionally" by developers stipulating certain kinds of clustering or transformations intended to produce the desired structure. We focus on the intentional creation of operational latent spaces via self-supervised learning, including the introduction of rotation operators via a novel "FiLMR" layer, which can be used to enable ring-like symmetries found in some musical constructions.

We introduce a new language learning setting relevant to building adaptive natural language interfaces. It is inspired by Wittgenstein's language games: a human wishes to accomplish some task (e.g., achieving a certain configuration of blocks), but can only communicate with a computer, who performs the actual actions (e.g., removing all red blocks). The computer initially knows nothing about language and therefore must learn it from scratch through interaction, while the human adapts to the computer's capabilities. We created a game in a blocks world and collected interactions from 100 people playing it. First, we analyze the humans' strategies, showing that using compositionality and avoiding synonyms correlates positively with task performance. Second, we compare computer strategies, showing how to quickly learn a semantic parsing model from scratch, and that modeling pragmatics further accelerates learning for successful players.