Singapore

We introduce **FinMMDocR**, a novel bilingual multimodal benchmark for evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on real-world financial numerical reasoning. Compared to existing benchmarks, our work delivers three major advancements. (1) **Scenario Awareness**: 57.9\% of 1,200 expert-annotated problems incorporate 9 types of implicit financial scenarios (*e.g.,* Portfolio Management), challenging models to perform expert-level reasoning based on assumptions; (2) **Document Understanding**: 837 Chinese/English documents spanning 9 types (*e.g.,* Company Research) average 50.8 pages with rich visual elements, significantly surpassing existing benchmarks in both breadth and depth of financial documents; (3) **Multi-Step Computation**: Problems demand 11-step reasoning on average (5.3 extraction + 5.7 calculation steps), with 65.0\% requiring cross-page evidence (2.4 pages average). The best-performing MLLM achieves only 58.0\% accuracy, and different retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods show significant performance variations on this task. We expect FinMMDocR to advance the improvement of MLLMs and reasoning-enhanced methods on complex multimodal reasoning tasks in real-world scenarios. Data and code are available in the supplementary material.

AAAI 2026

FinMMDocR: Benchmarking Financial Multimodal Reasoning with Scenario Awareness, Document Understanding, and Multi-Step Computation

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

In this paper, we establish non-asymptotic central limit theorems for linear two-timescale stochastic approximation (TTSA) algorithms driven by martingale difference or Markov noise. Focusing on both the last iterate and Polyak–Ruppert averaging regimes, we derive bounds for normal approximation in terms of the convex distance between probability distributions. Our analysis reveals a non-trivial interaction between the fast and slow timescales: the CLT convergence rate for the last iterate improves as the timescale separation increases, while it decreases in the Polyak–Ruppert averaged setting. We also provide the high-order moment bounds for the error of linear TTSA algorithm, which may be of independent interest.

Gaussian Approximation for Two-Timescale Linear Stochastic Approximation

To relieve intensive human-expertise required to design optimization algorithms, recent Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) researches leverage generalization strength of meta-learning to train neural network-based algorithm design policies over a predefined training problem set, which automates the adaptability of the low-level optimizers on unseen problem instances. Currently, a common training problem set choice in existing MetaBBOs is well-known benchmark suites CoCo-BBOB. Although such choice facilitates the MetaBBO's development, problem instances in CoCo-BBOB are more or less limited in diversity, raising the risk of overfitting of MetaBBOs, which might further results in poor generalization. In this paper, we propose an instance generation approach, termed as \textbf{LSRE}, which could generate diverse training problem instances for MetaBBOs to learn more generalizable policies. LSRE first trains an autoencoder which maps high-dimensional problem features into a 2-dimensional latent space. Uniform-grid sampling in this latent space leads to hidden representations of problem instances with sufficient diversity. By leveraging a genetic-programming approach to search function formulas with minimal L2-distance to these hidden representations, LSRE reverse engineers a diversified problem set, termed as \textbf{Diverse-BBO}. We validate the effectiveness of LSRE by training various MetaBBOs on Diverse-BBO and observe their generalization performances on either synthetic or realistic scenarios. Extensive experimental results underscore the superiority of Diverse-BBO to existing training set choices in MetaBBOs. Further ablation studies not only demonstrate the effectiveness of design choices in LSRE, but also reveal interesting insights on instance diversity and MetaBBO's generalization. We provide the code of LSRE and Diverse-BBO at \url{https://github.com/MetaEvo/Diverse-BBO}.

Instance Generation for Meta-Black-Box Optimization Through Latent Space Reverse Engineering

Understanding enzyme thermal properties is essential for biotechnology and protein engineering, yet experimental measurements of attributes such as temperature optimum, stability, and range remain labor-intensive and costly. Prior studies have shown that specific regions within enzyme sequences disproportionately influence thermal behavior—an aspect often overlooked by existing deep learning models. In this work, we introduce PatchET, a biologically inspired deep learning model that predicts enzyme thermal properties directly from amino acid sequences. PatchET employs a dual-stage, patch-based architecture that captures both intra-patch local features and inter-patch global dependencies, reflecting the hierarchical nature of protein thermal adaptation. Alongside the model, we curate a comprehensive benchmark, including a refined dataset for temperature optimum and the first publicly available dataset for temperature range prediction. PatchET achieves state-of-the-art performance across three key tasks—temperature optimum, stability, and range—and serves as the first dedicated model for temperature range prediction. Extensive ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of our architectural design. Together, PatchET and the accompanying benchmark provide a unified and generalizable framework for modeling enzyme thermal properties, offering new tools for the rational design of thermostable enzymes.

PatchET: Learning Enzyme Temperature Properties Through Patch-Based Neural Architectures

Vision large language models (VLLMs) are focusing primarily on handling complex and fine-grained visual information by incorporating advanced vision encoders and scaling up visual models. However, these approaches face high training and inference costs, as well as challenges in extracting visual details, effectively bridging across modalities. In this work, we propose a novel visual framework, **MoCHA**, to address these issues. Our framework integrates four vision backbones (i.e., CLIP, SigLIP, DINOv2 and ConvNeXt) to extract complementary visual features and is equipped with a sparse **M**ixture **o**f Experts **C**onnectors (MoECs) module to dynamically select experts tailored to different visual dimensions. To mitigate redundant or insufficient use of the visual information encoded by the MoECs module, we further design a **H**ierarchical Group **A**ttention (HGA) with intra- and inter-group operations and an adaptive gating strategy for encoded visual features. We train MoCHA on two mainstream LLMs (e.g., Phi2-2.7B and Vicuna-7B) and evaluate their performance across various benchmarks. Notably, MoCHA outperforms state-of-the-art open-weight models on various tasks. For example, compared to CuMo (Mistral-7B), our MoCHA (Phi2-2.7B) presents outstanding abilities to mitigate hallucination by showing improvements of 3.25% in POPE and to follow visual instructions by raising 158 points on MME. Finally, ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed MoECs and HGA in improving the overall performance of MoCHA. Code is available in the supplementary material.

MoCHA: Advanced Vision-Language Reasoning with MoE Connector and Hierarchical Group Attention

In controllable image synthesis, generating coherent and consistent images from multiple references with spatial layout awareness remains an open challenge. We propose LAMIC, a Layout-Aware Multi-Image Composition framework that, for the first time, extends single-reference diffusion models to multi-reference scenarios in a training-free manner. Built upon the MMDiT model, LAMIC introduces two plug-and-play attention mechanisms: 1) Group Isolation Attention (GIA) to enhance entity disentanglement; and 2) Region-Modulated Attention (RMA) to enable layout-aware generation. To comprehensively evaluate model capabilities, we further introduce three metrics: 1) Inclusion Ratio (IN-R) and Fill Ratio (FI-R) for assessing layout control; and 2) Background Similarity (BG-S) for measuring background consistency. Extensive experiments show that LAMIC achieves state-of-the-art performance across most major metrics: it consistently outperforms existing multi-reference baselines in ID-S, BG-S, IN-R and AVG scores across all settings, and achieves the best DPG in complex composition tasks. These results demonstrate LAMIC's superior abilities in identity keeping, background preservation, layout control, and prompt-following, all achieved without any training or fine-tuning, showcasing strong zero-shot generalization ability. By inheriting the strengths of advanced single-reference models and enabling seamless extension to multi-image scenarios, LAMIC establishes a new training-free paradigm for controllable multi-image composition. As foundation models continue to evolve, LAMIC's performance is expected to scale accordingly.

LAMIC: Layout-Aware Multi-Image Composition via Scalability of Multimodal Diffusion Transformer

Recently, with the increasing capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), AI applications have gradually emerged to solve various problems in people's daily lives, so accurately measuring their performance and reliability is paramount. However, existing benchmarks predominantly rely on closed-ended, multiple-choice or short-answer question formats. While useful for assessment, these formats exhibit a significant gap compared to the diverse and open-ended nature of questions posed by real-world users. To bridge this gap, we produce OmniBench, a comprehensive open-domain benchmark. OmniBench is uniquely composed of authentic, user-generated questions harvested from real-world interactions on various websites and applications, covering 16 rigorously defined knowledge domains and 5 crucial user intents derived from a large-scale analysis of the mass corpus. Crucially, we propose three automated data construction pipelines that enable the continuous and periodic updating of the benchmark dataset. This approach not only ensures that the questions can keep up with current events, but also effectively mitigates the critical issue of data contamination prevalent in static benchmarks. Moreover, a multi-dimensional hybrid evaluation framework named OmniEval is proposed for evaluating the responses. This framework combines diverse metrics and evaluation methods to capture nuanced aspects of answer performance. Extensive validation demonstrates that this evaluation framework exhibits strong alignment with human judgments, ensuring the reliability of the benchmark results.

OmniBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark Integrating Real-World, Time-sensitive, and Multi-Hop Questions with a Multi-Dimensional Hybrid Evaluation Framework

Existing reinforcement learning methods for Chain-of-Thought reasoning suffer from two critical limitations. First, they operate as monolithic black boxes that provide undifferentiated reward signals, obscuring individual step contributions and hindering error diagnosis. Second, sequential decoding has O(n) time complexity. This makes real-time deployment impractical for complex reasoning tasks.
We present DeCoRL (Decoupled Reasoning Chains via Coordinated Reinforcement Learning), a novel framework that transforms reasoning from sequential processing into collaborative modular orchestration. DeCoRL trains lightweight specialized models to generate reasoning sub-steps concurrently, eliminating sequential bottlenecks through parallel processing. To enable precise error attribution, the framework designs modular reward functions that score each sub-step independently. Cascaded DRPO optimization then coordinates these rewards while preserving inter-step dependencies.
Comprehensive evaluation demonstrates state-of-the-art results across RM-Bench, RMB, and RewardBench, outperforming existing methods including large-scale models. DeCoRL delivers 3.8 times faster inference while maintaining superior solution quality and offers a 22.7\% improvement in interpretability through explicit reward attribution. These advancements, combined with a 72.4\% reduction in energy consumption and a 68\% increase in throughput, make real-time deployment of complex reasoning systems a reality.

DeCoRL: Decoupling Reasoning Chains via Parallel Sub-Step Generation and Cascaded Reinforcement for Interpretable and Scalable RLHF

Aligning large language models with multiple human expectations and values is crucial for ensuring that they adequately serve a variety of user needs. To this end, offline multiobjective alignment algorithms such as the Rewards-in-Context algorithm have shown strong performance and efficiency. However, inappropriate preference representations and training with imbalanced reward scores limit the performance of such algorithms. In this work, we introduce ParetoHqD that addresses the above issues by representing human preferences as preference directions in the objective space and regarding data near the Pareto front as ''high-quality'' data. For each preference, ParetoHqD follows a two-stage supervised fine-tuning process, where each stage uses an individual Pareto high-quality training set that best matches its preference direction. The experimental results have demonstrated the superiority of ParetoHqD over five baselines on two multiobjective alignment tasks.

ParetoHqD: Fast Offline Multiobjective Alignment of Large Language Models Using Pareto High-Quality Data

Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) in unseen environments remains a challenging problem for household robots, requiring strong perceptual understanding and decision-making capabilities. While recent methods leverage metric maps and Large Language Models (LLMs), they often depend on depth sensors or prebuilt maps, limiting the spatial reasoning ability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Mapless ZSON approaches have emerged to address this, but they typically make short-sighted decisions, leading to local deadlocks due to a lack of historical context. We propose PanoNav, a fully RGB-only, mapless ZSON framework that integrates a Panoramic Scene Parsing module to unlock the spatial parsing potential of MLLMs from panoramic RGB inputs, and a Memory-guided Decision-Making mechanism enhanced by a Dynamic Bounded Memory Queue to incorporate exploration history and avoid local deadlocks. Experiments on the public navigation benchmark show that PanoNav significantly outperforms representative baselines in both SR and SPL metrics.

PanoNav: Mapless Zero-Shot Object Navigation with Panoramic Scene Parsing and Dynamic Memory

While text embeddings enable efficient semantic processing in LLMs, they remain vulnerable to inversion attacks that reconstruct sensitive original text. However, current defense methods typically treat text embeddings from the feature level independently, ignoring the exploitation of the mutual relation among the embedding construction pipeline. To address this limitation, we propose Eguard, a framework that effectively disrupts chains of relationships between the original semantic space and defended functional space. Our improvements manifest at two levels, i.e., the global-level and local-level mutual information. At the global level, we propose to minimize the statistical dependency between protected embeddings and their original inputs, effectively decoupling sensitive content from the semantic space accessible to adversaries. At the local level, we apply keyword-antonym contrastive learning to enforce semantic discriminability within the space of downstream utility. This synergy of global privacy control and local semantic alignment allows Eguard to achieve a superior privacy-utility trade-off than traditional defenses. Our approach significantly reduces privacy risks, protecting over 95\% of tokens from inversion while maintaining high performance across downstream tasks consistent with original embeddings.

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Gaussian Approximation for Two-Timescale Linear Stochastic Approximation

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