Daily Papers

This comprehensive report distinguishes prior works by the cognitive functions they innovate. Many works claim an almost "human-like" cognitive capability in their world models. To evaluate these claims requires a proper grounding in first principles in Cognitive Architecture Theory (CAT). We present a conceptual unified framework for world models that fully incorporates all the cognitive functions associated with CAT (i.e. memory, perception, language, reasoning, imagining, motivation, and meta-cognition) and identify gaps in the research as a guide for future states of the art. In particular, we find that motivation (especially intrinsic motivation) and meta-cognition remain drastically under-researched, and we propose concrete directions informed by active inference and global workspace theory to address them. We further introduce Epistemic World Models, a new category encompassing agent frameworks for scientific discovery that operate over structured knowledge. Our taxonomy, applied across video, embodied, and epistemic world models, suggests research directions where prior taxonomies have not.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated transformative potential across various domains, yet they face significant challenges in knowledge integration and complex problem reasoning, often leading to hallucinations and unreliable outputs. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution to enhance LLMs accuracy by incorporating external knowledge. However, traditional RAG systems struggle with processing complex relational information and multi-step reasoning, limiting their effectiveness in advanced problem-solving tasks. To address these limitations, we propose CogGRAG, a cognition inspired graph-based RAG framework, designed to improve LLMs performance in Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA). Inspired by the human cognitive process of decomposing complex problems and performing self-verification, our framework introduces a three-stage methodology: decomposition, retrieval, and reasoning with self-verification. By integrating these components, CogGRAG enhances the accuracy of LLMs in complex problem solving. We conduct systematic experiments with three LLM backbones on four benchmark datasets, where CogGRAG outperforms the baselines.

The rapid adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) is significantly reshaping human cognition, influencing how we engage with information, think, reason, and learn. This paper synthesizes existing literature on GenAI's effects on different aspects of human cognition. Drawing on Krathwohl's revised Bloom's Taxonomy and Dewey's conceptualization of reflective thought, we examine the mechanisms through which GenAI is affecting the development of different cognitive abilities. Accordingly, we provide implications for rethinking and designing educational experiences that foster critical thinking and deeper cognitive engagement and discuss future directions to explore the long-term cognitive effects of GenAI.

Structural priming is a cognitive phenomenon where exposure to a particular syntactic structure increases the likelihood of producing the same structure in subsequent utterances. While humans consistently demonstrate structural priming effects across various linguistic contexts, it remains unclear whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) exhibit similar syntactic preservation behaviors. We introduce PRISMATIC, the first multimodal structural priming dataset, which advances computational linguistics by providing a standardized benchmark for investigating syntax-vision interactions. We propose the Syntactic Preservation Index (SPI), a novel reference-free evaluation metric designed specifically to assess structural priming effects in sentence level. Using this metric, we constructed and tested models with two different multimodal encoding architectures to investigate their structural preservation capabilities. Our experimental results demonstrate that models with both encoding methods show comparable syntactic priming effects. However, only fusion-encoded models exhibit robust positive correlations between priming effects and visual similarity, suggesting a cognitive process more aligned with human psycholinguistic patterns. This work provides new insights into evaluating and understanding how syntactic information is processed in multimodal language models.

Large language models fine-tuned on human behavioural data have emerged as general-purpose cognitive proxies, but the scale this requires, and whether these models process task structure or exploit statistical shortcuts, remain open questions. We train fourteen models from 135M to 14B parameters across four architecture families on Psych-101, a dataset of 10.7 million trial-level choices from 160 experiments. For in-distribution simulations, scale barely matters. The models fall within a narrow band, as though against a ceiling, and 0.6B to 1B parameters suffice to match a 70B baseline on held-out participants. Out-of-distribution, that band opens into a markedly steeper scaling gradient, with larger models clearly advantaged in generalisation to novel task structure. To determine what information these models use, we run two diagnostics. We progressively strip four prompt channels -- task instructions, experimental stimuli, outcome feedback, and choice history -- across 27 experiments, and permute trial order. Masking the content of stimuli and feedback destroys 75.7% of learned information and pushes models below chance, demonstrating that choice history alone does not account for performance. Permutation reveals invariance on tasks with independent trials but sensitivity where trial order is determined by prior responses. Small cognitively fine-tuned models therefore show promise as noise ceiling estimators for psychological experiments, though their scope remains bounded by the paradigms seen in training.

LLMs are widely regarded as alien intelligences, systems whose cognitive operations are fundamentally unlike our own. Apparent similarities to human cognition are therefore often seen as the result of anthropomorphic projection. We argue that this framing is mistaken. LLMs clearly differ from humans in important respects, including their physical substrate, learning history, and the environments with which they interact. These differences make it all the more striking that contemporary LLM-based systems converge with human cognition on a number of principles of cognitive organization with longstanding support in cognitive science. We identify structural correspondences across five dimensions: inferential organization, computational architecture, representational structure, prediction-driven learning, and reinforcement-learning-like mechanisms supporting goal-directed action. These correspondences support a broader model of intelligent cognition in which core principles long used to explain human intelligence also characterize contemporary LLM-based systems.

Cognitive neuroscience is enjoying rapid increase in extensive public brain-imaging datasets. It opens the door to large-scale statistical models. Finding a unified perspective for all available data calls for scalable and automated solutions to an old challenge: how to aggregate heterogeneous information on brain function into a universal cognitive system that relates mental operations/cognitive processes/psychological tasks to brain networks? We cast this challenge in a machine-learning approach to predict conditions from statistical brain maps across different studies. For this, we leverage multi-task learning and multi-scale dimension reduction to learn low-dimensional representations of brain images that carry cognitive information and can be robustly associated with psychological stimuli. Our multi-dataset classification model achieves the best prediction performance on several large reference datasets, compared to models without cognitive-aware low-dimension representations, it brings a substantial performance boost to the analysis of small datasets, and can be introspected to identify universal template cognitive concepts.

Establishing a unified theory of cognition has been a major goal of psychology. While there have been previous attempts to instantiate such theories by building computational models, we currently do not have one model that captures the human mind in its entirety. Here we introduce Centaur, a computational model that can predict and simulate human behavior in any experiment expressible in natural language. We derived Centaur by finetuning a state-of-the-art language model on a novel, large-scale data set called Psych-101. Psych-101 reaches an unprecedented scale, covering trial-by-trial data from over 60,000 participants performing over 10,000,000 choices in 160 experiments. Centaur not only captures the behavior of held-out participants better than existing cognitive models, but also generalizes to new cover stories, structural task modifications, and entirely new domains. Furthermore, we find that the model's internal representations become more aligned with human neural activity after finetuning. Taken together, Centaur is the first real candidate for a unified model of human cognition. We anticipate that it will have a disruptive impact on the cognitive sciences, challenging the existing paradigm for developing computational models.

Naturally controllable human-scene interaction (HSI) generation has an important role in various fields, such as VR/AR content creation and human-centered AI. However, existing methods are unnatural and unintuitive in their controllability, which heavily limits their application in practice. Therefore, we focus on a challenging task of naturally and controllably generating realistic and diverse HSIs from textual descriptions. From human cognition, the ideal generative model should correctly reason about spatial relationships and interactive actions. To that end, we propose Narrator, a novel relationship reasoning-based generative approach using a conditional variation autoencoder for naturally controllable generation given a 3D scene and a textual description. Also, we model global and local spatial relationships in a 3D scene and a textual description respectively based on the scene graph, and introduce a partlevel action mechanism to represent interactions as atomic body part states. In particular, benefiting from our relationship reasoning, we further propose a simple yet effective multi-human generation strategy, which is the first exploration for controllable multi-human scene interaction generation. Our extensive experiments and perceptual studies show that Narrator can controllably generate diverse interactions and significantly outperform existing works. The code and dataset will be available for research purposes.

There has been a long-standing quest for a unified audio-visual-text model to enable various multimodal understanding tasks, which mimics the listening, seeing and reading process of human beings. Humans tends to represent knowledge using two separate systems: one for representing verbal (textual) information and one for representing non-verbal (visual and auditory) information. These two systems can operate independently but can also interact with each other. Motivated by this understanding of human cognition, in this paper, we introduce CoAVT -- a novel cognition-inspired Correlated Audio-Visual-Text pre-training model to connect the three modalities. It contains a joint audio-visual encoder that learns to encode audio-visual synchronization information together with the audio and visual content for non-verbal information, and a text encoder to handle textual input for verbal information. To bridge the gap between modalities, CoAVT employs a query encoder, which contains a set of learnable query embeddings, and extracts the most informative audiovisual features of the corresponding text. Additionally, to leverage the correspondences between audio and vision with language respectively, we also establish the audio-text and visual-text bi-modal alignments upon the foundational audiovisual-text tri-modal alignment to enhance the multimodal representation learning. Finally, we jointly optimize CoAVT model with three multimodal objectives: contrastive loss, matching loss and language modeling loss. Extensive experiments show that CoAVT can learn strong multimodal correlations and be generalized to various downstream tasks. CoAVT establishes new state-of-the-art performance on text-video retrieval task on AudioCaps for both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings, audio-visual event classification and audio-visual retrieval tasks on AudioSet and VGGSound.

Evaluating the general abilities of foundation models to tackle human-level tasks is a vital aspect of their development and application in the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Traditional benchmarks, which rely on artificial datasets, may not accurately represent human-level capabilities. In this paper, we introduce AGIEval, a novel benchmark specifically designed to assess foundation model in the context of human-centric standardized exams, such as college entrance exams, law school admission tests, math competitions, and lawyer qualification tests. We evaluate several state-of-the-art foundation models, including GPT-4, ChatGPT, and Text-Davinci-003, using this benchmark. Impressively, GPT-4 surpasses average human performance on SAT, LSAT, and math competitions, attaining a 95% accuracy rate on the SAT Math test and a 92.5% accuracy on the English test of the Chinese national college entrance exam. This demonstrates the extraordinary performance of contemporary foundation models. In contrast, we also find that GPT-4 is less proficient in tasks that require complex reasoning or specific domain knowledge. Our comprehensive analyses of model capabilities (understanding, knowledge, reasoning, and calculation) reveal these models' strengths and limitations, providing valuable insights into future directions for enhancing their general capabilities. By concentrating on tasks pertinent to human cognition and decision-making, our benchmark delivers a more meaningful and robust evaluation of foundation models' performance in real-world scenarios. The data, code, and all model outputs are released in https://github.com/microsoft/AGIEval.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) provide a new opportunity to address the long-standing question of how concepts are represented and organized in the mind, which is central to unravelling the nature of human cognition. Here, we reframed the classic reverse dictionary task to simulate human concept inference in context and investigated the emergence of human-like conceptual representations within LLMs. We found that LLMs were able to infer concepts from definitional descriptions and construct representation spaces that converge towards a shared, context-independent structure. These representations effectively predicted human behavioural judgments and aligned well with neural activity patterns in the human brain, offering evidence for biological plausibility. These findings demonstrate that human-like conceptual representations and organization can naturally emerge from language prediction, even without real-world grounding. Our work supports the view that LLMs serve as valuable tools for understanding complex human cognition and paves the way for better alignment between artificial and human intelligence.

Creative thinking is a fundamental aspect of human cognition, and divergent thinking-the capacity to generate novel and varied ideas-is widely regarded as its core generative engine. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive performance on divergent thinking tests and prior work has shown that models with higher task performance tend to be more aligned to human brain activity. However, existing brain-LLM alignment studies have focused on passive, non-creative tasks. Here, we explore brain alignment during creative thinking using fMRI data from 170 participants performing the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). We extract representations from LLMs varying in size (270M-72B) and measure alignment to brain responses via Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA), targeting the creativity-related default mode and frontoparietal networks. We find that brain-LLM alignment scales with model size (default mode network only) and idea originality (both networks), with effects strongest early in the creative process. We further show that post-training objectives shape alignment in functionally selective ways: a creativity-optimized Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct preserves alignment with high-creativity neural responses while reducing alignment with low-creativity ones; a human behavior fine-tuned model elevates alignment with both; and a reasoning-trained variant shows the opposite pattern, suggesting chain-of-thought training steers representations away from creative neural geometry toward analytical processing. These results demonstrate that post-training objectives selectively reshape LLM representations relative to the neural geometry of human creative thought.

The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) and their capacity to simulate human cognition and behavior has given rise to LLM-based frameworks and tools that are evaluated and applied based on their ability to perform tasks traditionally performed by humans, namely those involving cognition, decision-making, and social interaction. This survey provides a comprehensive examination of such human-centric LLM capabilities, focusing on their performance in both individual tasks (where an LLM acts as a stand-in for a single human) and collective tasks (where multiple LLMs coordinate to mimic group dynamics). We first evaluate LLM competencies across key areas including reasoning, perception, and social cognition, comparing their abilities to human-like skills. Then, we explore real-world applications of LLMs in human-centric domains such as behavioral science, political science, and sociology, assessing their effectiveness in replicating human behaviors and interactions. Finally, we identify challenges and future research directions, such as improving LLM adaptability, emotional intelligence, and cultural sensitivity, while addressing inherent biases and enhancing frameworks for human-AI collaboration. This survey aims to provide a foundational understanding of LLMs from a human-centric perspective, offering insights into their current capabilities and potential for future development.

Beliefs serve as the foundation for human cognition and decision-making. They guide individuals in deriving meaning from their lives, shaping their behaviors, and forming social connections. Therefore, a model that encapsulates beliefs and their interrelationships is crucial for quantitatively studying the influence of beliefs on our actions. Despite its importance, research on the interplay between human beliefs has often been limited to a small set of beliefs pertaining to specific issues, with a heavy reliance on surveys or experiments. Here, we propose a method for extracting nuanced relations between thousands of beliefs by leveraging large-scale user participation data from an online debate platform and mapping these beliefs to an embedding space using a fine-tuned large language model (LLM). This belief embedding space effectively encapsulates the interconnectedness of diverse beliefs as well as polarization across various social issues. We discover that the positions within this belief space predict new beliefs of individuals. Furthermore, we find that the relative distance between one's existing beliefs and new beliefs can serve as a quantitative estimate of cognitive dissonance, allowing us to predict new beliefs. Our study highlights how modern LLMs, when combined with collective online records of human beliefs, can offer insights into the fundamental principles that govern human belief formation and decision-making processes.

Humans have an inherent ability to learn novel concepts from only a few samples and generalize these concepts to different situations. Even though today's machine learning models excel with a plethora of training data on standard recognition tasks, a considerable gap exists between machine-level pattern recognition and human-level concept learning. To narrow this gap, the Bongard problems (BPs) were introduced as an inspirational challenge for visual cognition in intelligent systems. Despite new advances in representation learning and learning to learn, BPs remain a daunting challenge for modern AI. Inspired by the original one hundred BPs, we propose a new benchmark Bongard-LOGO for human-level concept learning and reasoning. We develop a program-guided generation technique to produce a large set of human-interpretable visual cognition problems in action-oriented LOGO language. Our benchmark captures three core properties of human cognition: 1) context-dependent perception, in which the same object may have disparate interpretations given different contexts; 2) analogy-making perception, in which some meaningful concepts are traded off for other meaningful concepts; and 3) perception with a few samples but infinite vocabulary. In experiments, we show that the state-of-the-art deep learning methods perform substantially worse than human subjects, implying that they fail to capture core human cognition properties. Finally, we discuss research directions towards a general architecture for visual reasoning to tackle this benchmark.

When reading long-form text, human cognition is complex and structurized. While large language models (LLMs) process input contexts through a causal and sequential perspective, this approach can potentially limit their ability to handle intricate and complex inputs effectively. To enhance LLM's cognition capability, this paper presents a novel concept of context structurization. Specifically, we transform the plain, unordered contextual sentences into well-ordered and hierarchically structurized elements. By doing so, LLMs can better grasp intricate and extended contexts through precise attention and information-seeking along the organized structures. Extensive evaluations are conducted across various model architectures and sizes (including a series of auto-regressive LLMs as well as BERT-like masking models) on a diverse set of NLP tasks (e.g., context-based question-answering, exhaustive hallucination evaluation, and passage-level dense retrieval). Empirical results show consistent and significant performance gains afforded by a single-round structurization. In particular, we boost the open-sourced LLaMA2-70B model to achieve comparable performance against GPT-3.5-Turbo as the hallucination evaluator. Besides, we show the feasibility of distilling advanced LLMs' language processing abilities to a smaller yet effective StruXGPT-7B to execute structurization, addressing the practicality of our approach. Code is available at https://github.com/alibaba/struxgpt.

Understanding how humans conceptualize and categorize natural objects offers critical insights into perception and cognition. With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), a key question arises: can these models develop human-like object representations from linguistic and multimodal data? In this study, we combined behavioral and neuroimaging analyses to explore the relationship between object concept representations in LLMs and human cognition. We collected 4.7 million triplet judgments from LLMs and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) to derive low-dimensional embeddings that capture the similarity structure of 1,854 natural objects. The resulting 66-dimensional embeddings were stable, predictive, and exhibited semantic clustering similar to human mental representations. Remarkably, the dimensions underlying these embeddings were interpretable, suggesting that LLMs and MLLMs develop human-like conceptual representations of objects. Further analysis showed strong alignment between model embeddings and neural activity patterns in brain regions such as EBA, PPA, RSC, and FFA. This provides compelling evidence that the object representations in LLMs, while not identical to human ones, share fundamental similarities that reflect key aspects of human conceptual knowledge. Our findings advance the understanding of machine intelligence and inform the development of more human-like artificial cognitive systems.

Human intelligence, the most evident and accessible form of source of reasoning, hosted by biological hardware, has evolved and been refined over thousands of years, positioning itself today to create new artificial forms and preparing to self--design their evolutionary path forward. Beginning with the advent of foundation models, the rate at which human and artificial intelligence interact with each other has surpassed any anticipated quantitative figures. The close engagement led to both bits of intelligence to be impacted in various ways, which naturally resulted in complex confluences that warrant close scrutiny. In the sequel, we shall explore the interplay between human and machine intelligence, focusing on the crucial role humans play in developing ethical, responsible, and robust intelligent systems. We slightly delve into interesting aspects of implementation inspired by the mechanisms underlying neuroscience and human cognition. Additionally, we propose future perspectives, capitalizing on the advantages of symbiotic designs to suggest a human-centered direction for next-generation AI development. We finalize this evolving document with a few thoughts and open questions yet to be addressed by the broader community.

Deep neural networks have achieved success across a wide range of applications, including as models of human behavior in vision tasks. However, neural network training and human learning differ in fundamental ways, and neural networks often fail to generalize as robustly as humans do, raising questions regarding the similarity of their underlying representations. What is missing for modern learning systems to exhibit more human-like behavior? We highlight a key misalignment between vision models and humans: whereas human conceptual knowledge is hierarchically organized from fine- to coarse-scale distinctions, model representations do not accurately capture all these levels of abstraction. To address this misalignment, we first train a teacher model to imitate human judgments, then transfer human-like structure from its representations into pretrained state-of-the-art vision foundation models. These human-aligned models more accurately approximate human behavior and uncertainty across a wide range of similarity tasks, including a new dataset of human judgments spanning multiple levels of semantic abstractions. They also perform better on a diverse set of machine learning tasks, increasing generalization and out-of-distribution robustness. Thus, infusing neural networks with additional human knowledge yields a best-of-both-worlds representation that is both more consistent with human cognition and more practically useful, thus paving the way toward more robust, interpretable, and human-like artificial intelligence systems.

In most current research, large language models (LLMs) are able to perform reasoning tasks by generating chains of thought through the guidance of specific prompts. However, there still exists a significant discrepancy between their capability in solving complex reasoning problems and that of humans. At present, most approaches focus on chains of thought (COT) and tool use, without considering the adoption and application of human cognitive frameworks. It is well-known that when confronting complex reasoning challenges, humans typically employ various cognitive abilities, and necessitate interaction with all aspects of tools, knowledge, and the external environment information to accomplish intricate tasks. This paper introduces a novel intelligent framework, referred to as OlaGPT. OlaGPT carefully studied a cognitive architecture framework, and propose to simulate certain aspects of human cognition. The framework involves approximating different cognitive modules, including attention, memory, reasoning, learning, and corresponding scheduling and decision-making mechanisms. Inspired by the active learning mechanism of human beings, it proposes a learning unit to record previous mistakes and expert opinions, and dynamically refer to them to strengthen their ability to solve similar problems. The paper also outlines common effective reasoning frameworks for human problem-solving and designs Chain-of-Thought (COT) templates accordingly. A comprehensive decision-making mechanism is also proposed to maximize model accuracy. The efficacy of OlaGPT has been stringently evaluated on multiple reasoning datasets, and the experimental outcomes reveal that OlaGPT surpasses state-of-the-art benchmarks, demonstrating its superior performance. Our implementation of OlaGPT is available on GitHub: https://github.com/oladata-team/OlaGPT.

The dominant paradigm for instruction tuning is the random-shuffled training of maximally diverse instruction-response pairs. This paper explores the potential benefits of applying a structured cognitive learning approach to instruction tuning in contemporary large language models like ChatGPT and GPT-4. Unlike the previous conventional randomized instruction dataset, we propose a highly structured synthetic dataset that mimics the progressive and organized nature of human education. We curate our dataset by aligning it with educational frameworks, incorporating meta information including its topic and cognitive rigor level for each sample. Our dataset covers comprehensive fine-grained topics spanning diverse educational stages (from middle school to graduate school) with various questions for each topic to enhance conceptual depth using Bloom's taxonomy-a classification framework distinguishing various levels of human cognition for each concept. The results demonstrate that this cognitive rigorous training approach yields significant performance enhancements - +3.06 on the MMLU benchmark and an additional +1.28 on AI2 Reasoning Challenge (hard set) - compared to conventional randomized training, all while avoiding additional computational costs. This research highlights the potential of leveraging human learning principles to enhance the capabilities of language models in comprehending and responding to complex instructions and tasks.

Large language model (LLM)-based conversational AI systems present a challenge to human cognition that current frameworks for understanding misinformation and persuasion do not adequately address. This paper proposes that a significant epistemic risk from conversational AI may lie not in inaccuracy or intentional deception, but in something more fundamental: these systems may be configured, through optimization processes that make them useful, to present characteristics that bypass the cognitive mechanisms humans evolved to evaluate incoming information. The Cognitive Trojan Horse hypothesis draws on Sperber and colleagues' theory of epistemic vigilance -- the parallel cognitive process monitoring communicated information for reasons to doubt -- and proposes that LLM-based systems present 'honest non-signals': genuine characteristics (fluency, helpfulness, apparent disinterest) that fail to carry the information equivalent human characteristics would carry, because in humans these are costly to produce while in LLMs they are computationally trivial. Four mechanisms of potential bypass are identified: processing fluency decoupled from understanding, trust-competence presentation without corresponding stakes, cognitive offloading that delegates evaluation itself to the AI, and optimization dynamics that systematically produce sycophancy. The framework generates testable predictions, including a counterintuitive speculation that cognitively sophisticated users may be more vulnerable to AI-mediated epistemic influence. This reframes AI safety as partly a problem of calibration -- aligning human evaluative responses with the actual epistemic status of AI-generated content -- rather than solely a problem of preventing deception.

While large language models demonstrate remarkable capabilities across numerous domains, social intelligence - the capacity to perceive social cues, infer mental states, and generate appropriate responses - remains a critical challenge, particularly for enabling effective human-AI collaboration and developing AI that truly serves human needs. Current models often rely on superficial patterns rather than genuine social reasoning. We argue that cultivating human-like social intelligence requires training with challenging cases that resist shortcut solutions. To this end, we introduce ToMBench-Hard, an adversarial benchmark designed to provide hard training examples for social reasoning. Building on this, we propose Social-R1, a reinforcement learning framework that aligns model reasoning with human cognition through multi-dimensional rewards. Unlike outcome-based RL, Social-R1 supervises the entire reasoning process, enforcing structural alignment, logical integrity, and information density. Results show that our approach enables a 4B parameter model to surpass much larger counterparts and generalize robustly across eight diverse benchmarks. These findings demonstrate that challenging training cases with trajectory-level alignment offer a path toward efficient and reliable social intelligence.

Motivated by the remarkable progress of large language models (LLMs) in objective tasks like mathematics and coding, there is growing interest in their potential to simulate human behavior--a capability with profound implications for transforming social science research and customer-centric business insights. However, LLMs often lack a nuanced understanding of human cognition and behavior, limiting their effectiveness in social simulation and personalized applications. We posit that this limitation stems from a fundamental misalignment: standard LLM pretraining on vast, uncontextualized web data does not capture the continuous, situated context of an individual's decisions, thoughts, and behaviors over time. To bridge this gap, we introduce HumanLLM, a foundation model designed for personalized understanding and simulation of individuals. We first construct the Cognitive Genome Dataset, a large-scale corpus curated from real-world user data on platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Blogger, and Amazon. Through a rigorous, multi-stage pipeline involving data filtering, synthesis, and quality control, we automatically extract over 5.5 million user logs to distill rich profiles, behaviors, and thinking patterns. We then formulate diverse learning tasks and perform supervised fine-tuning to empower the model to predict a wide range of individualized human behaviors, thoughts, and experiences. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that HumanLLM achieves superior performance in predicting user actions and inner thoughts, more accurately mimics user writing styles and preferences, and generates more authentic user profiles compared to base models. Furthermore, HumanLLM shows significant gains on out-of-domain social intelligence benchmarks, indicating enhanced generalization.

Current AI alignment through RLHF follows a single directional paradigm that AI conforms to human preferences while treating human cognition as fixed. We propose a shift to co-alignment through Bidirectional Cognitive Alignment (BiCA), where humans and AI mutually adapt. BiCA uses learnable protocols, representation mapping, and KL-budget constraints for controlled co-evolution. In collaborative navigation, BiCA achieved 85.5% success versus 70.3% baseline, with 230% better mutual adaptation and 332% better protocol convergence. Emergent protocols outperformed handcrafted ones by 84%, while bidirectional adaptation unexpectedly improved safety (+23% out-of-distribution robustness). The 46% synergy improvement demonstrates optimal collaboration exists at the intersection, not union, of human and AI capabilities, validating the shift from single-directional to co-alignment paradigms.

Open vocabulary image segmentation tackles the challenge of recognizing dynamically adjustable, predefined novel categories at inference time by leveraging vision-language alignment. However, existing paradigms typically perform class-agnostic region segmentation followed by category matching, which deviates from the human visual system's process of recognizing objects based on semantic concepts, leading to poor alignment between region segmentation and target concepts. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel Cognition-Inspired Framework for open vocabulary image segmentation that emulates the human visual recognition process: first forming a conceptual understanding of an object, then perceiving its spatial extent. The framework consists of three core components: (1) A Generative Vision-Language Model (G-VLM) that mimics human cognition by generating object concepts to provide semantic guidance for region segmentation. (2) A Concept-Aware Visual Enhancer Module that fuses textual concept features with global visual representations, enabling adaptive visual perception based on target concepts. (3) A Cognition-Inspired Decoder that integrates local instance features with G-VLM-provided semantic cues, allowing selective classification over a subset of relevant categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves significant improvements, reaching 27.2 PQ, 17.0 mAP, and 35.3 mIoU on A-150. It further attains 56.2, 28.2, 15.4, 59.2, 18.7, and 95.8 mIoU on Cityscapes, Mapillary Vistas, A-847, PC-59, PC-459, and PAS-20, respectively. In addition, our framework supports vocabulary-free segmentation, offering enhanced flexibility in recognizing unseen categories. Code will be public.

Every day, the human brain processes an immense volume of visual information, relying on intricate neural mechanisms to perceive and interpret these stimuli. Recent breakthroughs in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have enabled scientists to extract visual information from human brain activity patterns. In this study, we present an innovative method for decoding brain activity into meaningful images and captions, with a specific focus on brain captioning due to its enhanced flexibility as compared to brain decoding into images. Our approach takes advantage of cutting-edge image captioning models and incorporates a unique image reconstruction pipeline that utilizes latent diffusion models and depth estimation. We utilized the Natural Scenes Dataset, a comprehensive fMRI dataset from eight subjects who viewed images from the COCO dataset. We employed the Generative Image-to-text Transformer (GIT) as our backbone for captioning and propose a new image reconstruction pipeline based on latent diffusion models. The method involves training regularized linear regression models between brain activity and extracted features. Additionally, we incorporated depth maps from the ControlNet model to further guide the reconstruction process. We evaluate our methods using quantitative metrics for both generated captions and images. Our brain captioning approach outperforms existing methods, while our image reconstruction pipeline generates plausible images with improved spatial relationships. In conclusion, we demonstrate significant progress in brain decoding, showcasing the enormous potential of integrating vision and language to better understand human cognition. Our approach provides a flexible platform for future research, with potential applications in various fields, including neural art, style transfer, and portable devices.

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.

The integration of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), in particular electroencephalography (EEG), with artificial intelligence (AI) has shown tremendous promise in decoding human cognition and behavior from neural signals. In particular, the rise of multimodal AI models have brought new possibilities that have never been imagined before. Here, we present EgoBrain --the world's first large-scale, temporally aligned multimodal dataset that synchronizes egocentric vision and EEG of human brain over extended periods of time, establishing a new paradigm for human-centered behavior analysis. This dataset comprises 61 hours of synchronized 32-channel EEG recordings and first-person video from 40 participants engaged in 29 categories of daily activities. We then developed a muiltimodal learning framework to fuse EEG and vision for action understanding, validated across both cross-subject and cross-environment challenges, achieving an action recognition accuracy of 66.70%. EgoBrain paves the way for a unified framework for brain-computer interface with multiple modalities. All data, tools, and acquisition protocols are openly shared to foster open science in cognitive computing.

The observed similarities in the behavior of humans and Large Language Models (LLMs) have prompted researchers to consider the potential of using LLMs as models of human cognition. However, several significant challenges must be addressed before LLMs can be legitimately regarded as cognitive models. For instance, LLMs are trained on far more data than humans typically encounter, and may have been directly trained on human data in specific cognitive tasks or aligned with human preferences. Consequently, the origins of these behavioral similarities are not well understood. In this paper, we propose a novel way to enhance the utility of LLMs as cognitive models. This approach involves (i) leveraging computationally equivalent tasks that both an LLM and a rational agent need to master for solving a cognitive problem and (ii) examining the specific task distributions required for an LLM to exhibit human-like behaviors. We apply this approach to decision-making -- specifically risky and intertemporal choice -- where the key computationally equivalent task is the arithmetic of expected value calculations. We show that an LLM pretrained on an ecologically valid arithmetic dataset, which we call Arithmetic-GPT, predicts human behavior better than many traditional cognitive models. Pretraining LLMs on ecologically valid arithmetic datasets is sufficient to produce a strong correspondence between these models and human decision-making. Our results also suggest that LLMs used as cognitive models should be carefully investigated via ablation studies of the pretraining data.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made significant progress in the field of video understanding recently. However, current benchmarks uniformly lean on text prompts for evaluation, which often necessitate complex referential language and fail to provide precise spatial and temporal references. This limitation diminishes the experience and efficiency of human-model interaction. To address this limitation, we propose the Video Visual Prompt Benchmark(V2P-Bench), a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LVLMs' video understanding capabilities in multimodal human-model interaction scenarios. V2P-Bench includes 980 unique videos and 1,172 QA pairs, covering 5 main tasks and 12 dimensions, facilitating instance-level fine-grained understanding aligned with human cognition. Benchmarking results reveal that even the most powerful models perform poorly on V2P-Bench (65.4% for GPT-4o and 67.9% for Gemini-1.5-Pro), significantly lower than the human experts' 88.3%, highlighting the current shortcomings of LVLMs in understanding video visual prompts. We hope V2P-Bench will serve as a foundation for advancing multimodal human-model interaction and video understanding evaluation. Project page: https://github.com/gaotiexinqu/V2P-Bench.

Human beings often experience stress, which can significantly influence their performance. This study explores whether Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit stress responses similar to those of humans and whether their performance fluctuates under different stress-inducing prompts. To investigate this, we developed a novel set of prompts, termed StressPrompt, designed to induce varying levels of stress. These prompts were derived from established psychological frameworks and carefully calibrated based on ratings from human participants. We then applied these prompts to several LLMs to assess their responses across a range of tasks, including instruction-following, complex reasoning, and emotional intelligence. The findings suggest that LLMs, like humans, perform optimally under moderate stress, consistent with the Yerkes-Dodson law. Notably, their performance declines under both low and high-stress conditions. Our analysis further revealed that these StressPrompts significantly alter the internal states of LLMs, leading to changes in their neural representations that mirror human responses to stress. This research provides critical insights into the operational robustness and flexibility of LLMs, demonstrating the importance of designing AI systems capable of maintaining high performance in real-world scenarios where stress is prevalent, such as in customer service, healthcare, and emergency response contexts. Moreover, this study contributes to the broader AI research community by offering a new perspective on how LLMs handle different scenarios and their similarities to human cognition.

As we consider entrusting Large Language Models (LLMs) with key societal and decision-making roles, measuring their alignment with human cognition becomes critical. This requires methods that can assess how these systems represent information and facilitate comparisons to human understanding across diverse tasks. To meet this need, we developed Turing Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA), a method that uses pairwise similarity ratings to quantify alignment between AIs and humans. We tested this approach on semantic alignment across text and image modalities, measuring how different Large Language and Vision Language Model (LLM and VLM) similarity judgments aligned with human responses at both group and individual levels. GPT-4o showed the strongest alignment with human performance among the models we tested, particularly when leveraging its text processing capabilities rather than image processing, regardless of the input modality. However, no model we studied adequately captured the inter-individual variability observed among human participants. This method helped uncover certain hyperparameters and prompts that could steer model behavior to have more or less human-like qualities at an inter-individual or group level. Turing RSA enables the efficient and flexible quantification of human-AI alignment and complements existing accuracy-based benchmark tasks. We demonstrate its utility across multiple modalities (words, sentences, images) for understanding how LLMs encode knowledge and for examining representational alignment with human cognition.

Facing the current debate on whether Large Language Models (LLMs) attain near-human intelligence levels (Mitchell & Krakauer, 2023; Bubeck et al., 2023; Kosinski, 2023; Shiffrin & Mitchell, 2023; Ullman, 2023), the current study introduces a benchmark for evaluating social intelligence, one of the most distinctive aspects of human cognition. We developed a comprehensive theoretical framework for social dynamics and introduced two evaluation tasks: Inverse Reasoning (IR) and Inverse Inverse Planning (IIP). Our approach also encompassed a computational model based on recursive Bayesian inference, adept at elucidating diverse human behavioral patterns. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses revealed that humans surpassed the latest GPT models in overall performance, zero-shot learning, one-shot generalization, and adaptability to multi-modalities. Notably, GPT models demonstrated social intelligence only at the most basic order (order = 0), in stark contrast to human social intelligence (order >= 2). Further examination indicated a propensity of LLMs to rely on pattern recognition for shortcuts, casting doubt on their possession of authentic human-level social intelligence. Our codes, dataset, appendix and human data are released at https://github.com/bigai-ai/Evaluate-n-Model-Social-Intelligence.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various educational tasks, yet their alignment with human learning patterns, particularly in predicting which incorrect options students are most likely to select in multiple-choice questions (MCQs), remains underexplored. Our work investigates the relationship between LLM generation likelihood and student response distributions in MCQs with a specific focus on distractor selections. We collect a comprehensive dataset of MCQs with real-world student response distributions to explore two fundamental research questions: (1). RQ1 - Do the distractors that students more frequently select correspond to those that LLMs assign higher generation likelihood to? (2). RQ2 - When an LLM selects a incorrect choice, does it choose the same distractor that most students pick? Our experiments reveals moderate correlations between LLM-assigned probabilities and student selection patterns for distractors in MCQs. Additionally, when LLMs make mistakes, they are more likley to select the same incorrect answers that commonly mislead students, which is a pattern consistent across both small and large language models. Our work provides empirical evidence that despite LLMs' strong performance on generating educational content, there remains a gap between LLM's underlying reasoning process and human cognitive processes in identifying confusing distractors. Our findings also have significant implications for educational assessment development. The smaller language models could be efficiently utilized for automated distractor generation as they demonstrate similar patterns in identifying confusing answer choices as larger language models. This observed alignment between LLMs and student misconception patterns opens new opportunities for generating high-quality distractors that complement traditional human-designed distractors.

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.

Human cognition of new concepts is inherently a streaming process: we continuously recognize new objects or identities and update our memories over time. However, current multimodal personalization methods are largely limited to static images or offline videos. This disconnects continuous visual input from instant real-world feedback, limiting their ability to provide the real-time, interactive personalized responses essential for future AI assistants. To bridge this gap, we first propose and formally define the novel task of Personalized Streaming Video Understanding (PSVU). To facilitate research in this new direction, we introduce PEARL-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed specifically to evaluate this challenging setting. It evaluates a model's ability to respond to personalized concepts at exact timestamps under two modes: (1) Frame-level, focusing on a specific person or object in discrete frames, and (2) a novel Video-level, focusing on personalized actions unfolding across continuous frames. PEARL-Bench comprises 132 unique videos and 2,173 fine-grained annotations with precise timestamps. Concept diversity and annotation quality are strictly ensured through a combined pipeline of automated generation and human verification. To tackle this challenging new setting, we further propose PEARL, a plug-and-play, training-free strategy that serves as a strong baseline. Extensive evaluations across 8 offline and online models demonstrate that PEARL achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, it brings consistent PSVU improvements when applied to 3 distinct architectures, proving to be a highly effective and robust strategy. We hope this work advances vision-language model (VLM) personalization and inspires further research into streaming personalized AI assistants. Code is available at https://github.com/Yuanhong-Zheng/PEARL.

Human cognition does not separate understanding and generation. A teacher at a whiteboard speaks and draws together, each modality reshapes the other. In this paper, we bring this coupled loop to artificial systems. Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) are ideally suited to this task, yet existing samplers either decode text and image interleavedly or independently update them in parallel branches that share only previous-step history, but not the other modality's latest decisions within the same step; combined with MDMs' inability to remask, cross-modal contradictions are neither detected nor repaired. We introduce Self-Correcting Coupled Markov Jump Processes (SC-CMJP), a framework in which one modality's transition rates are functionals of the other modality's confidence score, as weighted by cross-modal attention. Furthermore, a remasking jump retracts commitments the moment cross-modal evidence turns against them. In conjunction with SC-CMJP, we introduce CO_2Jump (Self-text{CO}rrecting text{CO}upled text{Jump}), a novel training-free single-pass sampler for joint multimodal geneneration. For training and evaluation purposes, we have created and will release three large-scale joint multimodal generation corpora: JEdit-1M, JMaze-200K, JNono-200K, with matching in- and out-of-distribution benchmarks. CO_2Jump achieves best joint performance for image understanding and editing as well as visual reasoning (maze and nonogram solving). The performance of the sampler scales monotonically with the number of denoising steps, evidence that the benefits of cross-modal coupling compound across the trajectory. Project page: https://coupled-jump.github.io

Human cognition typically involves thinking through abstract, fluid concepts rather than strictly using discrete linguistic tokens. Current reasoning models, however, are constrained to reasoning within the boundaries of human language, processing discrete token embeddings that represent fixed points in the semantic space. This discrete constraint restricts the expressive power and upper potential of such reasoning models, often causing incomplete exploration of reasoning paths, as standard Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods rely on sampling one token per step. In this work, we introduce Soft Thinking, a training-free method that emulates human-like "soft" reasoning by generating soft, abstract concept tokens in a continuous concept space. These concept tokens are created by the probability-weighted mixture of token embeddings, which form the continuous concept space, enabling smooth transitions and richer representations that transcend traditional discrete boundaries. In essence, each generated concept token encapsulates multiple meanings from related discrete tokens, implicitly exploring various reasoning paths to converge effectively toward the correct answer. Empirical evaluations on diverse mathematical and coding benchmarks consistently demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Soft Thinking, improving pass@1 accuracy by up to 2.48 points while simultaneously reducing token usage by up to 22.4% compared to standard CoT. Qualitative analysis further reveals that Soft Thinking outputs remain highly interpretable and readable, highlighting the potential of Soft Thinking to break the inherent bottleneck of discrete language-based reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/eric-ai-lab/Soft-Thinking.

Human cognition, driven by complex neurochemical processes, oscillates between imagination and reality and learns to self-correct whenever such subtle drifts lead to hallucinations or unsafe associations. In recent years, LLMs have demonstrated remarkable performance in a wide range of tasks. However, they still lack human cognition to balance factuality and safety. Bearing the resemblance, we argue that both factual and safety failures in LLMs arise from a representational misalignment in their latent activation space, rather than addressing those as entirely separate alignment issues. We hypothesize that an external network, trained to understand the fluctuations, can selectively intervene in the model to regulate falsehood into truthfulness and unsafe output into safe output without fine-tuning the model parameters themselves. Reflecting the hypothesis, we propose ARREST (Adversarial Resilient Regulation Enhancing Safety and Truth), a unified framework that identifies and corrects drifted features, engaging both soft and hard refusals in addition to factual corrections. Our empirical results show that ARREST not only regulates misalignment but is also more versatile compared to the RLHF-aligned models in generating soft refusals due to adversarial training. We make our codebase available at https://github.com/sharanya-dasgupta001/ARREST.

Human cognition naturally engages with abstract and fluid concepts, whereas existing reasoning models often rely on generating discrete tokens, potentially constraining their expressive capabilities. Recent advancements aim to address this limitation by enabling large language models (LLMs) to generate soft, abstract tokens, thus facilitating reasoning within a continuous concept space. This paper explores the `Soft Thinking' capabilities of various LLMs by examining the models' internal behavior using a suite of probing techniques. Contrary to the common belief that Soft Thinking enables the simultaneous exploration of diverse reasoning paths, our findings reveal that LLMs predominantly rely on the most influential component of the soft inputs during subsequent decoding steps. This reliance hinders the exploration of different reasoning paths and reduces vanilla Soft Thinking to a form of greedy decoding, obscuring the advantage of transmitting more information through Soft Tokens. To tackle this issue, we explore sampling strategies to introduce randomness, employing methods such as Dirichlet resampling and the Gumbel-Softmax trick. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating randomness can alleviate the limitations of vanilla approaches and unleash the potential of Soft Thinking. Notably, the Gumbel-Softmax trick provides adequate randomness with controlled smoothness, resulting in superior performance across eight reasoning benchmarks.

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.

Human cognition emerges from coordinated spiking dynamics in distributed neural circuits, where information is encoded via both firing rates and precise spike timing determined by brain rhythms. Inspired by this notion, we propose a brain-inspired learning primitive in which cognition-level neural synchrony emerges through iterative bottom-up and top-down interactions between micro-scale dynamics of spiking neurons and a macro-scale mechanism of oscillatory synchronization. Specifically, we model each parcel (e.g., a cortical region or an image pixel) in the target system as a spiking neuron embedded in a predefined connectivity scaffold. Low-level information is encoded in a spatiotemporal domain, where neurons are selectively grouped and fire spontaneously over time through self-organized dynamics. In the bottom-up route, oscillatory synchronization is formed from past spiking activity accumulated over a finite memory window. Since brain dynamics operate in a regime of partial and transient synchronization rather than global phase locking, we model oscillatory coordination using a time-delayed synchronization formulation, which enables a top-down modulation of heterogeneous neural spiking for a large-scale distributed system. Together, we devise a spiking-by-synchronization neural network (S2-Net) that uses rhythmic timing as a control mechanism for efficient information processing. Promising results have been achieved across a broad range of tasks, including neural activity decoding, energy-efficient signal processing, temporal binding and semantic reasoning.

Human cognition is deeply intertwined with a sense of time, known as Chronoception. This sense allows us to judge how long facts remain valid and when knowledge becomes outdated. Despite progress in vision, language, and motor control, AI still struggles to reason about temporal validity. We introduce Chronocept, the first benchmark to model temporal validity as a continuous probability distribution over time. Using skew-normal curves fitted along semantically decomposed temporal axes, Chronocept captures nuanced patterns of emergence, decay, and peak relevance. It includes two datasets: Benchmark I (atomic facts) and Benchmark II (multi-sentence passages). Annotations show strong inter-annotator agreement (84% and 89%). Our baselines predict curve parameters - location, scale, and skewness - enabling interpretable, generalizable learning and outperforming classification-based approaches. Chronocept fills a foundational gap in AI's temporal reasoning, supporting applications in knowledge grounding, fact-checking, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and proactive agents. Code and data are publicly available.

Human cognition excels at transcending sensory input and forming latent representations that structure our understanding of the world. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) can produce chain-of-thought reasoning, they lack a principled framework to capture latent structures and model uncertainty, especially in compositional reasoning tasks. We propose Verbalized Probabilistic Graphical Modeling (vPGM), a Bayesian prompting framework that guides LLMs to simulate key principles of Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs) in natural language. Unlike many traditional probabilistic methods requiring substantial domain expertise or specialized training, vPGM bypasses expert-driven model design, making it well-suited for scenarios with limited assumptions or scarce data. We evaluated our model on several compositional reasoning tasks, both close-ended and open-ended. Our results indicate that the model effectively enhances confidence calibration and text generation quality.

Recent advances in deep learning have shown exciting promise in filling large holes and lead to another orientation for image inpainting. However, existing learning-based methods often create artifacts and fallacious textures because of insufficient cognition understanding. Previous generative networks are limited with single receptive type and give up pooling in consideration of detail sharpness. Human cognition is constant regardless of the target attribute. As multiple receptive fields improve the ability of abstract image characterization and pooling can keep feature invariant, specifically, deep inception learning is adopted to promote high-level feature representation and enhance model learning capacity for local patches. Moreover, approaches for generating diverse mask images are introduced and a random mask dataset is created. We benchmark our methods on ImageNet, Places2 dataset, and CelebA-HQ. Experiments for regular, irregular, and custom regions completion are all performed and free-style image inpainting is also presented. Quantitative comparisons with previous state-of-the-art methods show that ours obtain much more natural image completions.

In human cognition theory, human thinking is governed by two systems: the fast and intuitive System 1 and the slower but more deliberative System 2. Recent studies have shown that incorporating System 2 process into Transformers including large language models (LLMs), significantly enhances their reasoning capabilities. Nevertheless, models that purely resemble System 2 thinking require substantially higher computational costs and are much slower to respond. To address this challenge, we present Dualformer, a single Transformer model that seamlessly integrates both the fast and slow reasoning modes. Dualformer is obtained by training on data with randomized reasoning traces, where different parts of the traces are dropped during training. The dropping strategies are specifically tailored according to the trace structure, analogous to analyzing our thinking process and creating shortcuts with patterns. At inference time, our model can be configured to output only the solutions (fast mode) or both the reasoning chain and the final solution (slow mode), or automatically decide which mode to engage (auto mode). In all cases, Dualformer outperforms the corresponding baseline models in both performance and computational efficiency: (1) in slow mode, Dualformer optimally solves unseen 30 x 30 maze navigation tasks 97.6% of the time, surpassing the Searchformer (trained on data with complete reasoning traces) baseline performance of 93.3%, while only using 45.5% fewer reasoning steps; (2) in fast mode, Dualformer completes those tasks with an 80% optimal rate, significantly outperforming the Solution-Only model (trained on solution-only data), which has an optimal rate of only 30%. For math problems, our techniques have also achieved improved performance with LLM fine-tuning, showing its generalization beyond task-specific models.

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 have emerged as frontrunners, showcasing unparalleled prowess in diverse applications, including answering queries, code generation, and more. Parallelly, graph-structured data, an intrinsic data type, is pervasive in real-world scenarios. Merging the capabilities of LLMs with graph-structured data has been a topic of keen interest. This paper bifurcates such integrations into two predominant categories. The first leverages LLMs for graph learning, where LLMs can not only augment existing graph algorithms but also stand as prediction models for various graph tasks. Conversely, the second category underscores the pivotal role of graphs in advancing LLMs. Mirroring human cognition, we solve complex tasks by adopting graphs in either reasoning or collaboration. Integrating with such structures can significantly boost the performance of LLMs in various complicated tasks. We also discuss and propose open questions for integrating LLMs with graph-structured data for the future direction of the field.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive reasoning abilities, yet their reliance on structured step-by-step processing reveals a critical limitation. While human cognition fluidly adapts between intuitive, heuristic (System 1) and analytical, deliberative (System 2) reasoning depending on the context, LLMs lack this dynamic flexibility. This rigidity can lead to brittle and unreliable performance when faced with tasks that deviate from their trained patterns. To address this, we create a dataset of 2,000 samples with valid System 1 and System 2 answers, explicitly align LLMs with these reasoning styles, and evaluate their performance across reasoning benchmarks. Our results reveal an accuracy-efficiency trade-off: System 2-aligned models excel in arithmetic and symbolic reasoning, while System 1-aligned models perform better in commonsense tasks. A mechanistic analysis of model responses shows that System 1 models employ more definitive answers, whereas System 2 models demonstrate greater uncertainty. Interpolating between these extremes produces a monotonic transition in reasoning accuracy, preserving coherence. This work challenges the assumption that step-by-step reasoning is always optimal and highlights the need for adapting reasoning strategies based on task demands.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful end-to-end paradigm for robotic manipulation by mapping language instructions and 2D visual inputs directly to actions. However, these models lack an explicit, scene-level 3D representation, limiting their ability to reason over spatial layouts and geometric constraints. While recent efforts incorporate explicit 3D cues, such as depth maps or point clouds, to improve geometric awareness, they primarily capture low-level structures and lack high-level semantic grounding in 3D space. In human cognition, interaction with the physical world relies on a 3D semantic cognitive map - an internal mental model that integrates spatial layouts with semantic context to enable persistent, viewpoint-invariant reasoning. In light of this, we present VistaVLA, a novel two-stage framework that constructs a geometry- and semantics-aware 3D cognitive representation from 3D Gaussian primitives and grounds it as compact context tokens for VLA policy learning. Specifically, VistaVLA lifts multi-view vision-language features into 3D Gaussian primitives, forming geometry-anchored semantic tokens that align view-consistent spatial grounding with 2D visual feature spaces. To make this 3D representation computationally tractable for effective VLA control, we introduce Merge-then-Query (MtQ), a token summarization mechanism. MtQ compresses dense Gaussian primitives into a highly compact set of spatially informative tokens, achieving a 99% token reduction while preserving action-relevant 3D layouts and semantic context. Extensive evaluations in both simulated and real-world environments demonstrate the effectiveness of VistaVLA. Notably, in real-world scenarios, VistaVLA improves success rates by 22.8% across seven real-world tasks and by 30.0% over the VLA-Adapter baseline on challenging out-of-distribution tasks.

In human cognition, there exist numerous thought processes that are tacit and beyond verbal expression, enabling us to understand and interact with the world in multiple ways. However, contemporary Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remain constrained to reasoning within the discrete and rigid space of linguistic tokens, thereby bottlenecking the rich, high-dimensional nature of visual perception. To bridge this gap, we propose CoCoVa (Chain of Continuous Vision-Language Thought), a novel framework for vision-language model that leverages continuous cross-modal reasoning for diverse vision-language tasks. The core of CoCoVa is an iterative reasoning cycle, where a novel Latent Q-Former (LQ-Former) acts as a dynamic reasoning engine, iteratively refining a chain of latent thought vectors through cross-modal fusion. To focus this process, a token selection mechanism dynamically identifies salient visual regions, mimicking attentional focus. To ensure these latent thoughts remain grounded, we train the model with a multi-task objective that combines contrastive learning and diffusion-based reconstruction, enforcing alignment between latent representations and both visual and textual modalities. Evaluations show CoCoVa improves accuracy and token efficiency over strong baselines. With a 1.5B backbone, it competes with or surpasses larger 7B-9B models on almost all benchmarks. When scaled to 7B LLM backbones, it remains competitive with state-of-the-art models. Qualitative analysis validates that learned latent space captures interpretable and structured reasoning patterns, highlighting the potential of CoCoVa to bridge the representational gap between discrete language processing and the continuous nature of visual understanding.

The recent advent of large language models has reinvigorated debate over whether human cognitive capacities might emerge in such generic models given sufficient training data. Of particular interest is the ability of these models to reason about novel problems zero-shot, without any direct training. In human cognition, this capacity is closely tied to an ability to reason by analogy. Here, we performed a direct comparison between human reasoners and a large language model (the text-davinci-003 variant of GPT-3) on a range of analogical tasks, including a non-visual matrix reasoning task based on the rule structure of Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices. We found that GPT-3 displayed a surprisingly strong capacity for abstract pattern induction, matching or even surpassing human capabilities in most settings; preliminary tests of GPT-4 indicated even better performance. Our results indicate that large language models such as GPT-3 have acquired an emergent ability to find zero-shot solutions to a broad range of analogy problems.

Reasoning models have recently shown remarkable progress in domains such as math and coding. However, their expert-level abilities in math and coding contrast sharply with their performance in long-horizon, interactive tasks such as web navigation and computer/phone-use. Inspired by literature on human cognition, we argue that current AI agents need ''vicarious trial and error'' - the capacity to mentally simulate alternative futures before acting - in order to enhance their understanding and performance in complex interactive environments. We introduce Dyna-Mind, a two-stage training framework that explicitly teaches (V)LM agents to integrate such simulation into their reasoning. In stage 1, we introduce Reasoning with Simulations (ReSim), which trains the agent to generate structured reasoning traces from expanded search trees built from real experience gathered through environment interactions. ReSim thus grounds the agent's reasoning in faithful world dynamics and equips it with the ability to anticipate future states in its reasoning. In stage 2, we propose Dyna-GRPO, an online reinforcement learning method to further strengthen the agent's simulation and decision-making ability by using both outcome rewards and intermediate states as feedback from real rollouts. Experiments on two synthetic benchmarks (Sokoban and ALFWorld) and one realistic benchmark (AndroidWorld) demonstrate that (1) ReSim effectively infuses simulation ability into AI agents, and (2) Dyna-GRPO leverages outcome and interaction-level signals to learn better policies for long-horizon, planning-intensive tasks. Together, these results highlight the central role of simulation in enabling AI agents to reason, plan, and act more effectively in the ever more challenging environments.

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly enhanced cross-modal understanding and reasoning by incorporating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in the semantic space. Building upon this, recent studies extend the CoT mechanism to the visual modality, enabling models to integrate visual information during reasoning through external tools or explicit image generation. However, these methods remain dependent on explicit step-by-step reasoning, unstable perception-reasoning interaction and notable computational overhead. Inspired by human cognition, we posit that thinking unfolds not linearly but through the dynamic interleaving of reasoning and perception within the mind. Motivated by this perspective, we propose DMLR, a test-time Dynamic Multimodal Latent Reasoning framework that employs confidence-guided latent policy gradient optimization to refine latent think tokens for in-depth reasoning. Furthermore, a Dynamic Visual Injection Strategy is introduced, which retrieves the most relevant visual features at each latent think token and updates the set of best visual patches. The updated patches are then injected into latent think token to achieve dynamic visual-textual interleaving. Experiments across seven multimodal reasoning benchmarks and various model architectures demonstrate that DMLR significantly improves reasoning and perception performance while maintaining high inference efficiency.

Reinforcement learning struggles in the face of long-horizon tasks and sparse goals due to the difficulty in manual reward specification. While existing methods address this by adding intrinsic rewards, they may fail to provide meaningful guidance in long-horizon decision-making tasks with large state and action spaces, lacking purposeful exploration. Inspired by human cognition, we propose a new multi-modal model-based RL approach named Dreaming with Large Language Models (DLLM). DLLM integrates the proposed hinting subgoals from the LLMs into the model rollouts to encourage goal discovery and reaching in challenging tasks. By assigning higher intrinsic rewards to samples that align with the hints outlined by the language model during model rollouts, DLLM guides the agent toward meaningful and efficient exploration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the DLLM outperforms recent methods in various challenging, sparse-reward environments such as HomeGrid, Crafter, and Minecraft by 27.7\%, 21.1\%, and 9.9\%, respectively.

Large Language Models excel in textual tasks but often struggle with physical-world reasoning tasks. Inspired by human cognition, where perception is fundamental to reasoning, we explore augmenting LLMs with enhanced perception abilities using Internet of Things (IoT) data and pertinent knowledge. In this work, we systematically study LLMs' capability to address IoT-sensory tasks by augmenting their perception and knowledge base, and then propose a unified framework, IoT-LLM, to enhance such capability. In IoT-LLM, we customize three steps: preprocessing IoT data into suitable formats, expanding LLMs knowledge via IoT-oriented retrieval-augmented generation and activating LLMs commonsense knowledge through chain-of-thought prompting. We design a benchmark comprising five real-world tasks with varying data types and reasoning complexities to evaluate the performance of IoT-LLM. Experimental results reveal that IoT-LLM significantly improves the performance of IoT-sensory task reasoning of LLMs, with models like GPT-4o-mini showing a 49.4% average improvement over previous methods.

Few-shot continual learning (FSCL) has attracted intensive attention and achieved some advances in recent years, but now it is difficult to again make a big stride in accuracy due to the limitation of only few-shot incremental samples. Inspired by distinctive human cognition ability in life learning, in this work, we propose a novel Big-model driven Few-shot Continual Learning (B-FSCL) framework to gradually evolve the model under the traction of the world's big-models (like human accumulative knowledge). Specifically, we perform the big-model driven transfer learning to leverage the powerful encoding capability of these existing big-models, which can adapt the continual model to a few of newly added samples while avoiding the over-fitting problem. Considering that the big-model and the continual model may have different perceived results for the identical images, we introduce an instance-level adaptive decision mechanism to provide the high-level flexibility cognitive support adjusted to varying samples. In turn, the adaptive decision can be further adopted to optimize the parameters of the continual model, performing the adaptive distillation of big-model's knowledge information. Experimental results of our proposed B-FSCL on three popular datasets (including CIFAR100, minilmageNet and CUB200) completely surpass all state-of-the-art FSCL methods.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in chain of thought (CoT) reasoning. However, the current LLM reasoning paradigm initiates thinking only after the entire input is available, which introduces unnecessary latency and weakens attention to earlier information in dynamic scenarios. Inspired by human cognition of thinking while reading, we first design a \textbf{streaming thinking} paradigm for LLMs, where reasoning unfolds in the order of input and further adjusts its depth once reading is complete. We instantiate this paradigm with StreamingThinker, a framework that enables LLMs to think while reading through the integration of streaming CoT generation, streaming-constraint training, and streaming parallel inference. Specifically, StreamingThinker employs streaming reasoning units with quality control for CoT generation, enforces order-preserving reasoning through streaming attention masks and position encoding, and leverages parallel KV caches that decouple input encoding from reasoning generation, thereby ensuring alignment and enabling true concurrency. We evaluate StreamingThinker on the Qwen3 model family across math reasoning, logical reasoning, and context-based QA reasoning tasks. Experimental results show that the StreamingThinker preserves performance comparable to batch thinking, while yielding an 80\% reduction in token waiting before the onset of reasoning and a more than 60\% reduction in time-level latency for producing the final answer, demonstrating the effectiveness of the streaming paradigm for LLM reasoning. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/StreamingLLM/tree/main/StreamingThinker.

Domain expertise enhances judgment within boundaries but creates systematic vulnerabilities specifically at borders. We term this Transitive Expert Error (TEE), distinct from Dunning-Kruger effects, requiring calibrated expertise as precondition. Mechanisms enabling reliable within-domain judgment become liabilities when structural similarity masks causal divergence. Two core mechanisms operate: structural similarity bias causes experts to overweight surface features (shared vocabulary, patterns, formal structure) while missing causal architecture differences; authority persistence maintains confidence across competence boundaries through social reinforcement and metacognitive failures (experts experience no subjective uncertainty as pattern recognition operates smoothly on familiar-seeming inputs.) These mechanism intensify under three conditions: shared vocabulary masking divergent processes, social pressure for immediate judgment, and delayed feedback. These findings extend to AI routing architectures (MoE systems, multi-model orchestration, tool-using agents, RAG systems) exhibiting routing-induced failures (wrong specialist selected) and coverage-induced failures (no appropriate specialist exists). Both produce a hallucination phenotype: confident, coherent, structurally plausible but causally incorrect outputs at domain boundaries. In human systems where mechanisms are cognitive black boxes; AI architectures make them explicit and addressable. We propose interventions: multi-expert activation with disagreement detection (router level), boundary-aware calibration (specialist level), and coverage gap detection (training level). TEE has detectable signatures (routing patterns, confidence-accuracy dissociations, domain-inappropriate content) enabling monitoring and mitigation. What remains intractable in human cognition becomes addressable through architectural design.

Contemporary progress in large language models (LLMs) has revealed notable inferential capacities via reinforcement learning (RL) employing verifiable reward, facilitating the development of O1 and R1-like reasoning models. Directly training from base models with RL is called zero-RL. However, previous works rely upon activating LLMs' inherent capacities through fixed prompt templates. This strategy introduces substantial sampling inefficiencies for weak LLMs, as the majority of problems generate invalid outputs during accuracy-driven filtration in reasoning tasks, which causes a waste of samples. To solve this issue, we propose Cog-Rethinker, a novel hierarchical metacognitive RL framework for LLM reasoning. Our Cog-Rethinker mainly focuses on the rollout procedure in RL training. After the direct rollout, our Cog-Rethinker improves sample utilization in a hierarchical metacognitive two-stage framework. By leveraging human cognition during solving problems, firstly, it prompts policy to decompose zero-accuracy problems into subproblems to produce final reasoning results. Secondly, with zero-accuracy problems in previous rollout stage, it further prompts policy to refine these answers by referencing previous wrong solutions. Moreover, to enable cold-start of the two new reasoning patterns and maintain train-test consistency across prompt templates, our Cog-Rethinker applies supervised fine-tuning on the policy using correct samples of the two stages with direct rollout template. Experimental results demonstrate Cog-Rethinker's superior performance on various mathematical reasoning benchmarks, we also analyzed its improved sample efficiency that accelerates convergence compared to baseline methods.

Operations research (OR) is widely deployed to solve critical decision-making problems with complex objectives and constraints, impacting manufacturing, logistics, finance, and healthcare outcomes. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in various domains, their practical application in industry-relevant operations research (OR) problems presents significant challenges and opportunities. Preliminary industrial applications of LLMs for operations research face two critical deployment challenges: 1) Self-correction focuses on code syntax rather than mathematical accuracy, causing costly errors; 2) Complex expert selection creates unpredictable workflows that reduce transparency and increase maintenance costs, making them impractical for time-sensitive business applications. To address these business limitations, we introduce ORMind, a cognitive-inspired framework that enhances optimization through counterfactual reasoning. Our approach emulates human cognition, implementing an end-to-end workflow that systematically transforms requirements into mathematical models and executable solver code. It is currently being tested internally in Lenovo's AI Assistant, with plans to enhance optimization capabilities for both business and consumer customers. Experiments demonstrate that ORMind outperforms existing methods, achieving a 9.5\% improvement on the NL4Opt dataset and a 14.6\% improvement on the ComplexOR dataset.

The binding problem in human cognition, concerning how the brain represents and connects objects within a fixed network of neural connections, remains a subject of intense debate. Most machine learning efforts addressing this issue in an unsupervised setting have focused on slot-based methods, which may be limiting due to their discrete nature and difficulty to express uncertainty. Recently, the Complex AutoEncoder was proposed as an alternative that learns continuous and distributed object-centric representations. However, it is only applicable to simple toy data. In this paper, we present Rotating Features, a generalization of complex-valued features to higher dimensions, and a new evaluation procedure for extracting objects from distributed representations. Additionally, we show the applicability of our approach to pre-trained features. Together, these advancements enable us to scale distributed object-centric representations from simple toy to real-world data. We believe this work advances a new paradigm for addressing the binding problem in machine learning and has the potential to inspire further innovation in the field.

A core process in human cognition is analogical mapping: the ability to identify a similar relational structure between different situations. We introduce a novel task, Visual Analogies of Situation Recognition, adapting the classical word-analogy task into the visual domain. Given a triplet of images, the task is to select an image candidate B' that completes the analogy (A to A' is like B to what?). Unlike previous work on visual analogy that focused on simple image transformations, we tackle complex analogies requiring understanding of scenes. We leverage situation recognition annotations and the CLIP model to generate a large set of 500k candidate analogies. Crowdsourced annotations for a sample of the data indicate that humans agree with the dataset label ~80% of the time (chance level 25%). Furthermore, we use human annotations to create a gold-standard dataset of 3,820 validated analogies. Our experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art models do well when distractors are chosen randomly (~86%), but struggle with carefully chosen distractors (~53%, compared to 90% human accuracy). We hope our dataset will encourage the development of new analogy-making models. Website: https://vasr-dataset.github.io/

Neural Memory Networks (NMNs) have received increased attention in recent years compared to deep architectures that use a constrained memory. Despite their new appeal, the success of NMNs hinges on the ability of the gradient-based optimiser to perform incremental training of the NMN controllers, determining how to leverage their high capacity for knowledge retrieval. This means that while excellent performance can be achieved when the training data is consistent and well distributed, rare data samples are hard to learn from as the controllers fail to incorporate them effectively during model training. Drawing inspiration from the human cognition process, in particular the utilisation of neuromodulators in the human brain, we propose to decouple the learning process of the NMN controllers to allow them to achieve flexible, rapid adaptation in the presence of new information. This trait is highly beneficial for meta-learning tasks where the memory controllers must quickly grasp abstract concepts in the target domain, and adapt stored knowledge. This allows the NMN controllers to quickly determine which memories are to be retained and which are to be erased, and swiftly adapt their strategy to the new task at hand. Through both quantitative and qualitative evaluations on multiple public benchmarks, including classification and regression tasks, we demonstrate the utility of the proposed approach. Our evaluations not only highlight the ability of the proposed NMN architecture to outperform the current state-of-the-art methods, but also provide insights on how the proposed augmentations help achieve such superior results. In addition, we demonstrate the practical implications of the proposed learning strategy, where the feedback path can be shared among multiple neural memory networks as a mechanism for knowledge sharing.

Visual reasoning is central to human cognition, enabling individuals to interpret and abstractly understand their environment. Although recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across language and vision-language tasks, existing benchmarks primarily measure recognition-based skills and inadequately assess true visual reasoning capabilities. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce VERIFY, a benchmark explicitly designed to isolate and rigorously evaluate the visual reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art MLLMs. VERIFY compels models to reason primarily from visual information, providing minimal textual context to reduce reliance on domain-specific knowledge and linguistic biases. Each problem is accompanied by a human-annotated reasoning path, making it the first to provide in-depth evaluation of model decision-making processes. Additionally, we propose novel metrics that assess visual reasoning fidelity beyond mere accuracy, highlighting critical imbalances in current model reasoning patterns. Our comprehensive benchmarking of leading MLLMs uncovers significant limitations, underscoring the need for a balanced and holistic approach to both perception and reasoning. For more teaser and testing, visit our project page (https://verify-eqh.pages.dev/).

Analogical reasoning is at the core of human cognition, serving as an important foundation for a variety of intellectual activities. While prior work has shown that LLMs can represent task patterns and surface-level concepts, it remains unclear whether these models can encode high-level relational concepts and apply them to novel situations through structured comparisons. In this work, we explore this fundamental aspect using proportional and story analogies, and identify three key findings. First, LLMs effectively encode the underlying relationships between analogous entities; both attributive and relational information propagate through mid-upper layers in correct cases, whereas reasoning failures reflect missing relational information within these layers. Second, unlike humans, LLMs often struggle not only when relational information is missing, but also when attempting to apply it to new entities. In such cases, strategically patching hidden representations at critical token positions can facilitate information transfer to a certain extent. Lastly, successful analogical reasoning in LLMs is marked by strong structural alignment between analogous situations, whereas failures often reflect degraded or misplaced alignment. Overall, our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit emerging but limited capabilities in encoding and applying high-level relational concepts, highlighting both parallels and gaps with human cognition.

MLLMs exhibit strong reasoning on isolated queries, yet they operate de novo -- solving each problem independently and often repeating the same mistakes. Existing memory-augmented agents mainly store past trajectories for reuse. However, trajectory-based memory suffers from brevity bias, gradually losing essential domain knowledge. More critically, even in truly multimodal problem-solving settings, it records only a single-modality trace of past behavior, failing to preserve how visual attention and logical reasoning jointly contributed to the solution. This is fundamentally misaligned with human cognition: semantic memory is both multimodal and integrated, preserving visual and abstract knowledge through coordinated but distinct representational streams. We thus introduce ViLoMem, a dual-stream memory framework that constructs compact, schema-based memory. It separately encodes visual distraction patterns and logical reasoning errors, enabling MLLMs to learn from their successful and failed experiences. Following a grow-and-refine principle, the system incrementally accumulates and updates multimodal semantic knowledge -- preserving stable, generalizable strategies while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Across six multimodal benchmarks, ViLoMem consistently improves pass@1 accuracy and substantially reduces repeated visual and logical errors. Ablations confirm the necessity of dual-stream memory with explicit distraction--hallucination separation, demonstrating the value of error-aware multimodal memory for lifelong and cross-domain agentic learning. Our project page will be available at https://weihao-bo.github.io/ViLoMeo-page.

Spatial reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human cognition, yet it remains a major challenge for contemporary vision-language models (VLMs). Prior work largely relied on synthetic or LLM-generated environments with limited task designs and puzzle-like setups, failing to capture the real-world complexity, visual noise, and diverse spatial relationships that VLMs encounter. To address this, we introduce SpatiaLab, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating VLMs' spatial reasoning in realistic, unconstrained contexts. SpatiaLab comprises 1,400 visual question-answer pairs across six major categories: Relative Positioning, Depth & Occlusion, Orientation, Size & Scale, Spatial Navigation, and 3D Geometry, each with five subcategories, yielding 30 distinct task types. Each subcategory contains at least 25 questions, and each main category includes at least 200 questions, supporting both multiple-choice and open-ended evaluation. Experiments across diverse state-of-the-art VLMs, including open- and closed-source models, reasoning-focused, and specialized spatial reasoning models, reveal a substantial gap in spatial reasoning capabilities compared with humans. In the multiple-choice setup, InternVL3.5-72B achieves 54.93% accuracy versus 87.57% for humans. In the open-ended setting, all models show a performance drop of around 10-25%, with GPT-5-mini scoring highest at 40.93% versus 64.93% for humans. These results highlight key limitations in handling complex spatial relationships, depth perception, navigation, and 3D geometry. By providing a diverse, real-world evaluation framework, SpatiaLab exposes critical challenges and opportunities for advancing VLMs' spatial reasoning, offering a benchmark to guide future research toward robust, human-aligned spatial understanding. SpatiaLab is available at: https://spatialab-reasoning.github.io/.

Temporal reasoning is fundamental to human cognition and is crucial for various real-world applications. While recent advances in Large Language Models have demonstrated promising capabilities in temporal reasoning, existing benchmarks primarily rely on rule-based construction, lack contextual depth, and involve a limited range of temporal entities. To address these limitations, we introduce Chinese Time Reasoning (CTM), a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs on temporal reasoning within the extensive scope of Chinese dynastic chronology. CTM emphasizes cross-entity relationships, pairwise temporal alignment, and contextualized and culturally-grounded reasoning, providing a comprehensive evaluation. Extensive experimental results reveal the challenges posed by CTM and highlight potential avenues for improvement.

Humans excel in complex long-horizon soft body manipulation tasks via flexible tool use: bread baking requires a knife to slice the dough and a rolling pin to flatten it. Often regarded as a hallmark of human cognition, tool use in autonomous robots remains limited due to challenges in understanding tool-object interactions. Here we develop an intelligent robotic system, RoboCook, which perceives, models, and manipulates elasto-plastic objects with various tools. RoboCook uses point cloud scene representations, models tool-object interactions with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and combines tool classification with self-supervised policy learning to devise manipulation plans. We demonstrate that from just 20 minutes of real-world interaction data per tool, a general-purpose robot arm can learn complex long-horizon soft object manipulation tasks, such as making dumplings and alphabet letter cookies. Extensive evaluations show that RoboCook substantially outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, exhibits robustness against severe external disturbances, and demonstrates adaptability to different materials.

Structure reasoning is a fundamental capability of large language models (LLMs), enabling them to reason about structured commonsense and answer multi-hop questions. However, existing benchmarks for structure reasoning mainly focus on horizontal and coordinate structures (e.g. graphs), overlooking the hierarchical relationships within them. Hierarchical structure reasoning is crucial for human cognition, particularly in memory organization and problem-solving. It also plays a key role in various real-world tasks, such as information extraction and decision-making. To address this gap, we propose HiBench, the first framework spanning from initial structure generation to final proficiency assessment, designed to benchmark the hierarchical reasoning capabilities of LLMs systematically. HiBench encompasses six representative scenarios, covering both fundamental and practical aspects, and consists of 30 tasks with varying hierarchical complexity, totaling 39,519 queries. To evaluate LLMs comprehensively, we develop five capability dimensions that depict different facets of hierarchical structure understanding. Through extensive evaluation of 20 LLMs from 10 model families, we reveal key insights into their capabilities and limitations: 1) existing LLMs show proficiency in basic hierarchical reasoning tasks; 2) they still struggle with more complex structures and implicit hierarchical representations, especially in structural modification and textual reasoning. Based on these findings, we create a small yet well-designed instruction dataset, which enhances LLMs' performance on HiBench by an average of 88.84\% (Llama-3.1-8B) and 31.38\% (Qwen2.5-7B) across all tasks. The HiBench dataset and toolkit are available here, https://github.com/jzzzzh/HiBench, to encourage evaluation.

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.

Analogical reasoning is fundamental to human cognition and holds an important place in various fields. However, previous studies mainly focus on single-modal analogical reasoning and ignore taking advantage of structure knowledge. Notably, the research in cognitive psychology has demonstrated that information from multimodal sources always brings more powerful cognitive transfer than single modality sources. To this end, we introduce the new task of multimodal analogical reasoning over knowledge graphs, which requires multimodal reasoning ability with the help of background knowledge. Specifically, we construct a Multimodal Analogical Reasoning dataSet (MARS) and a multimodal knowledge graph MarKG. We evaluate with multimodal knowledge graph embedding and pre-trained Transformer baselines, illustrating the potential challenges of the proposed task. We further propose a novel model-agnostic Multimodal analogical reasoning framework with Transformer (MarT) motivated by the structure mapping theory, which can obtain better performance. Code and datasets are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/MKG_Analogy.

Spatial reasoning is a core component of human cognition, enabling individuals to perceive, comprehend, and interact with the physical world. It relies on a nuanced understanding of spatial structures and inter-object relationships, serving as the foundation for complex reasoning and decision-making. To investigate whether current vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit similar capability, we introduce Jigsaw-Puzzles, a novel benchmark consisting of 1,100 carefully curated real-world images with high spatial complexity. Based on this dataset, we design five tasks to rigorously evaluate VLMs' spatial perception, structural understanding, and reasoning capabilities, while deliberately minimizing reliance on domain-specific knowledge to better isolate and assess the general spatial reasoning capability. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation across 24 state-of-the-art VLMs. The results show that even the strongest model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, achieves only 77.14% overall accuracy and performs particularly poorly on the Order Generation task, with only 30.00% accuracy, far below the performance exceeding 90% achieved by human participants. This persistent gap underscores the need for continued progress, positioning Jigsaw-Puzzles as a challenging and diagnostic benchmark for advancing spatial reasoning research in VLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently garnered widespread attention due to their adeptness at generating innovative responses to the given prompts across a multitude of domains. However, LLMs often suffer from the inherent limitation of hallucinations and generate incorrect information while maintaining well-structured and coherent responses. In this work, we hypothesize that hallucinations stem from the internal dynamics of LLMs. Our observations indicate that, during passage generation, LLMs tend to deviate from factual accuracy in subtle parts of responses, eventually shifting toward misinformation. This phenomenon bears a resemblance to human cognition, where individuals may hallucinate while maintaining logical coherence, embedding uncertainty within minor segments of their speech. To investigate this further, we introduce an innovative approach, HalluShift, designed to analyze the distribution shifts in the internal state space and token probabilities of the LLM-generated responses. Our method attains superior performance compared to existing baselines across various benchmark datasets. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/sharanya-dasgupta001/hallushift.

Conceptual knowledge is fundamental to human cognition and knowledge bases. However, existing knowledge probing works only focus on evaluating factual knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and ignore conceptual knowledge. Since conceptual knowledge often appears as implicit commonsense behind texts, designing probes for conceptual knowledge is hard. Inspired by knowledge representation schemata, we comprehensively evaluate conceptual knowledge of PLMs by designing three tasks to probe whether PLMs organize entities by conceptual similarities, learn conceptual properties, and conceptualize entities in contexts, respectively. For the tasks, we collect and annotate 24k data instances covering 393 concepts, which is COPEN, a COnceptual knowledge Probing bENchmark. Extensive experiments on different sizes and types of PLMs show that existing PLMs systematically lack conceptual knowledge and suffer from various spurious correlations. We believe this is a critical bottleneck for realizing human-like cognition in PLMs. COPEN and our codes are publicly released at https://github.com/THU-KEG/COPEN.

Abstraction is a core tenet of human cognition and communication. When composing natural language instructions, humans naturally evoke abstraction to convey complex procedures in an efficient and concise way. Yet, interpreting and grounding abstraction expressed in NL has not yet been systematically studied in NLP, with no accepted benchmarks specifically eliciting abstraction in NL. In this work, we set the foundation for a systematic study of processing and grounding abstraction in NLP. First, we deliver a novel abstraction elicitation method and present Hexagons, a 2D instruction-following game. Using Hexagons we collected over 4k naturally-occurring visually-grounded instructions rich with diverse types of abstractions. From these data, we derive an instruction-to-execution task and assess different types of neural models. Our results show that contemporary models and modeling practices are substantially inferior to human performance, and that models' performance is inversely correlated with the level of abstraction, showing less satisfying performance on higher levels of abstraction. These findings are consistent across models and setups, confirming that abstraction is a challenging phenomenon deserving further attention and study in NLP/AI research.

LLMorphism is the biased belief that human cognition works like a large language model. I argue that the rise of conversational LLMs may make this bias increasingly psychologically available. When artificial systems produce human-like language, people may draw a reverse inference: if LLMs can speak like humans, perhaps humans think like LLMs. This inference is biased because similarity at the level of linguistic output does not imply similarity in cognitive architecture. Yet, LLMorphism may spread through two mechanisms: analogical transfer, whereby features of LLMs are projected onto humans, and metaphorical availability, whereby LLM vocabulary becomes a culturally salient vocabulary for describing thought. I distinguish LLMorphism from mechanomorphism, anthropomorphism, computationalism, dehumanization, objectification, and predictive-processing theories of mind. I outline its implications for work, education, responsibility, healthcare, communication, creativity, and human dignity, while also discussing boundary conditions and forms of resistance. I conclude that the public debate may be missing half of the problem: the issue is not only whether we are attributing too much mind to machines, but also whether we are beginning to attribute too little mind to humans.

Analogical reasoning tests a fundamental aspect of human cognition: mapping the relation from one pair of objects to another. Existing evaluations of this ability in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) overlook the ability to compose rules from multiple sources, a critical component of higher-order intelligence. To close this gap, we introduce CARV (Compositional Analogical Reasoning in Vision), a novel task together with a 5,500-sample dataset as the first diagnostic benchmark. We extend the analogy from a single pair to multiple pairs, which requires MLLMs to extract symbolic rules from each pair and compose new transformations. Evaluation on the state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals a striking performance gap: even Gemini-2.5 Pro achieving only 40.4% accuracy, far below human-level performance of 100%. Diagnostic analysis shows two consistent failure modes: (1) decomposing visual changes into symbolic rules, and (2) maintaining robustness under diverse or complex settings, highlighting the limitations of current MLLMs on this task.

Spatial visualization is the mental ability to imagine, transform, and manipulate the spatial characteristics of objects and actions. This intelligence is a part of human cognition where actions and perception are connected on a mental level. To explore whether state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit this ability, we develop MentalBlackboard, an open-ended spatial visualization benchmark for Paper Folding and Hole Punching tests within two core tasks: prediction and planning. Our prediction experiments reveal that models struggle with applying symmetrical transformations, even when they predict the sequence of unfolding steps correctly. Also, rotations introduce a significant challenge to the physical situational awareness for models. The planning task reveals limitations of models in analyzing symmetrical relationships and in implementing the multi-stage symmetry process, with Claude Opus 4.1 achieving the highest planning score at an accuracy of 10\%. The top-performing model, o3, attains a peak performance of 71.6\% on the generalization task, which does not require spatial visualization but transfers spatial data; however, it achieves only 25\% accuracy on text-based prediction tasks.

Automatically repairing software issues remains a fundamental challenge at the intersection of software engineering and AI. Although recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential for repository-level repair tasks, current methodologies exhibit two notable limitations: (1) they often address issues in isolation, neglecting to incorporate insights from previously resolved issues, and (2) they rely on static and rigid prompting strategies, which constrain their ability to generalize across diverse and evolving issue scenarios. Inspired by the dual memory systems of human cognition, where episodic and semantic memories work synergistically to support human reasoning and decision-making, we propose ExpeRepair, a novel LLM-based approach that continuously learns from historical repair experiences through dual-channel knowledge accumulation. ExpeRepair organizes historical repair experiences into two complementary memories: an episodic memory that stores concrete repair demonstrations, and a semantic memory that encodes abstract reflective insights. At inference time, ExpeRepair activates both memory systems by retrieving relevant demonstrations from episodic memory and recalling high-level repair insights from semantic memory. It further enhances adaptability through dynamic prompt composition, synergistically integrating both memory types to replace static prompts with context-aware, experience-driven prompts. Experiments on the SWE-bench Lite benchmark demonstrate that ExpeRepair achieves a pass@1 score of 49.3% with Claude 3.7 Sonnet, outperforming all state-of-the-art open-source methods.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems based on large-scale pretrained foundation models (PFMs) such as vision-language models, large language models (LLMs), diffusion models and vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated the ability to solve complex and truly non-trivial AI problems in a wide variety of domains and contexts. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), in particular, learn from vast and diverse data sources, allowing rich and nuanced representations of the world and, thereby, providing extensive capabilities, including the ability to reason, engage in meaningful dialog; collaborate with humans and other agents to jointly solve complex problems; and understand social and emotional aspects of humans. Despite this impressive feat, the cognitive abilities of state-of-the-art LLMs trained on large-scale datasets are still superficial and brittle. Consequently, generic LLMs are severely limited in their generalist capabilities. A number of foundational problems -- embodiment, symbol grounding, causality and memory -- are required to be addressed for LLMs to attain human-level general intelligence. These concepts are more aligned with human cognition and provide LLMs with inherent human-like cognitive properties that support the realization of physically-plausible, semantically meaningful, flexible and more generalizable knowledge and intelligence. In this work, we discuss the aforementioned foundational issues and survey state-of-the art approaches for implementing these concepts in LLMs. Specifically, we discuss how the principles of embodiment, symbol grounding, causality and memory can be leveraged toward the attainment of artificial general intelligence (AGI) in an organic manner.

Chain of Thought (CoT) of multi-step benefits from the logical structure of the reasoning steps and task-specific actions, significantly enhancing the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models. As the prevalence of long CoT, the number of reasoning steps exceeds manageable token limits and leads to higher computational demands. Inspired by the fundamental logic of human cognition, ``derive, then reduce'', we conceptualize the standard multi-step CoT as a novel Markov Chain of Thought (MCoT). In this study, we consider the mathematical reasoning task, defining each reasoning step as text accompanied by a Python code snippet. To facilitate a longer reasoning path, self-correction is enabled through interactions with the code interpreter. Our MCoT aims to compress previous reasoning steps into a simplified question, enabling efficient next-step inference without relying on a lengthy KV cache. In our experiments, we curate the MCoTInstruct dataset, and the empirical results indicate that MCoT not only significantly enhances efficiency but also maintains comparable accuracy. While much remains to be explored, this work paves the way for exploring the long CoT reasoning abilities of LLMs.

The pre-trained vision and language (V\&L) models have substantially improved the performance of cross-modal image-text retrieval. In general, however, V\&L models have limited retrieval performance for small objects because of the rough alignment between words and the small objects in the image. In contrast, it is known that human cognition is object-centric, and we pay more attention to important objects, even if they are small. To bridge this gap between the human cognition and the V\&L model's capability, we propose a cross-modal image-text retrieval framework based on ``object-aware query perturbation.'' The proposed method generates a key feature subspace of the detected objects and perturbs the corresponding queries using this subspace to improve the object awareness in the image. In our proposed method, object-aware cross-modal image-text retrieval is possible while keeping the rich expressive power and retrieval performance of existing V\&L models without additional fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments on four public datasets show that our method outperforms conventional algorithms.

Current high-performance semantic segmentation models are purely data-driven sub-symbolic approaches and blind to the structured nature of the visual world. This is in stark contrast to human cognition which abstracts visual perceptions at multiple levels and conducts symbolic reasoning with such structured abstraction. To fill these fundamental gaps, we devise LOGICSEG, a holistic visual semantic parser that integrates neural inductive learning and logic reasoning with both rich data and symbolic knowledge. In particular, the semantic concepts of interest are structured as a hierarchy, from which a set of constraints are derived for describing the symbolic relations and formalized as first-order logic rules. After fuzzy logic-based continuous relaxation, logical formulae are grounded onto data and neural computational graphs, hence enabling logic-induced network training. During inference, logical constraints are packaged into an iterative process and injected into the network in a form of several matrix multiplications, so as to achieve hierarchy-coherent prediction with logic reasoning. These designs together make LOGICSEG a general and compact neural-logic machine that is readily integrated into existing segmentation models. Extensive experiments over four datasets with various segmentation models and backbones verify the effectiveness and generality of LOGICSEG. We believe this study opens a new avenue for visual semantic parsing.

To effectively manage the complexities of real-world dynamic environments, continual learning must incrementally acquire, update, and accumulate knowledge from a stream of tasks of different nature without suffering from catastrophic forgetting of prior knowledge. While this capability is innate to human cognition, it remains a significant challenge for modern deep learning systems. At the heart of this challenge lies the stability-plasticity dilemma: the need to balance leveraging prior knowledge, integrating novel information, and allocating model capacity adaptively based on task complexity and synergy. In this paper, we propose a novel exemplar-free class-incremental continual learning (ExfCCL) framework that addresses these issues through a Hierarchical Exploration-Exploitation (HEE) approach. The core of our method is a HEE-guided efficient neural architecture search (HEE-NAS) that enables a learning-to-adapt backbone via four primitive operations - reuse, new, adapt, and skip - thereby serving as an internal memory that dynamically updates selected components across streaming tasks. To address the task ID inference problem in ExfCCL, we exploit an external memory of task centroids proposed in the prior art. We term our method CHEEM (Continual Hierarchical-Exploration-Exploitation Memory). CHEEM is evaluated on the challenging MTIL and VDD benchmarks using both Tiny and Base Vision Transformers and a proposed holistic Figure-of-Merit (FoM) metric. It significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prompting-based continual learning methods, closely approaching full fine-tuning upper bounds. Furthermore, it learns adaptive model structures tailored to individual tasks in a semantically meaningful way. Our code is available at https://github.com/savadikarc/cheem .

Hallucinations in large vision-language models (LVLMs) pose significant challenges for real-world applications, as LVLMs may generate responses that appear plausible yet remain inconsistent with the associated visual content. This issue rarely occurs in human cognition. We argue that this discrepancy arises from humans' ability to effectively leverage multimodal interaction information in data samples. Specifically, humans typically first gather multimodal information, analyze the interactions across modalities for understanding, and then express their understanding through language. Motivated by this observation, we conduct extensive experiments on popular LVLMs and obtained insights that surprisingly reveal human-like, though less pronounced, cognitive behavior of LVLMs on multimodal samples. Building on these findings, we further propose INTER: Interaction Guidance Sampling, a novel training-free algorithm that mitigate hallucinations without requiring additional data. Specifically, INTER explicitly guides LVLMs to effectively reapply their understanding of multimodal interaction information when generating responses, thereby reducing potential hallucinations. On six benchmarks including VQA and image captioning tasks, INTER achieves an average improvement of up to 3.4\% on five LVLMs compared to the state-of-the-art decoding strategy. The code will be released when the paper is accepted.

Spatial relations are a basic part of human cognition. However, they are expressed in natural language in a variety of ways, and previous work has suggested that current vision-and-language models (VLMs) struggle to capture relational information. In this paper, we present Visual Spatial Reasoning (VSR), a dataset containing more than 10k natural text-image pairs with 65 types of spatial relations in English (such as: under, in front of, and facing). While using a seemingly simple annotation format, we show how the dataset includes challenging linguistic phenomena, such as varying reference frames. We demonstrate a large gap between human and model performance: the human ceiling is above 95%, while state-of-the-art models only achieve around 70%. We observe that VLMs' by-relation performances have little correlation with the number of training examples and the tested models are in general incapable of recognising relations concerning the orientations of objects.

While textual frequency has been validated as relevant to human cognition in reading speed, its relatedness to Large Language Models (LLMs) is seldom studied. We propose a novel research direction in terms of textual data frequency, which is an understudied topic, to the best of our knowledge. Our framework is composed of three units. First, this paper proposes Textual Frequency Law (TFL), which indicates that frequent textual data should be preferred for LLMs for both prompting and fine-tuning. Since many LLMs are closed-source in their training data, we propose using online resources to estimate the sentence-level frequency. We then utilize an input paraphraser to paraphrase the input into a more frequent textual expression. Next, we propose Textual Frequency Distillation (TFD) by querying LLMs to conduct story completion by further extending the sentences in the datasets, and the resulting corpora are used to adjust the initial estimation. Finally, we propose Curriculum Textual Frequency Training (CTFT) that fine-tunes LLMs in an increasing order of sentence-level frequency. Experiments are conducted on our curated dataset Textual Frequency Paired Dataset (TFPD) on math reasoning, machine translation, commonsense reasoning and agentic tool calling. Results show the effectiveness of our framework.

Spatial reasoning in 3D space is central to human cognition and indispensable for embodied tasks such as navigation and manipulation. However, state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) struggle frequently with tasks as simple as anticipating how a scene will look after an egocentric motion: they perceive 2D images but lack an internal model of 3D dynamics. We therefore propose MindJourney, a test-time scaling framework that grants a VLM with this missing capability by coupling it to a controllable world model based on video diffusion. The VLM iteratively sketches a concise camera trajectory, while the world model synthesizes the corresponding view at each step. The VLM then reasons over this multi-view evidence gathered during the interactive exploration. Without any fine-tuning, our MindJourney achieves over an average 8% performance boost on the representative spatial reasoning benchmark SAT, showing that pairing VLMs with world models for test-time scaling offers a simple, plug-and-play route to robust 3D reasoning. Meanwhile, our method also improves upon the test-time inference VLMs trained through reinforcement learning, which demonstrates the potential of our method that utilizes world models for test-time scaling.

Imagine a world where AI can handle your work while you sleep - organizing your research materials, drafting a report, or creating a presentation you need for tomorrow. However, while current digital agents can perform simple tasks, they are far from capable of handling the complex real-world work that humans routinely perform. We present PC Agent, an AI system that demonstrates a crucial step toward this vision through human cognition transfer. Our key insight is that the path from executing simple "tasks" to handling complex "work" lies in efficiently capturing and learning from human cognitive processes during computer use. To validate this hypothesis, we introduce three key innovations: (1) PC Tracker, a lightweight infrastructure that efficiently collects high-quality human-computer interaction trajectories with complete cognitive context; (2) a two-stage cognition completion pipeline that transforms raw interaction data into rich cognitive trajectories by completing action semantics and thought processes; and (3) a multi-agent system combining a planning agent for decision-making with a grounding agent for robust visual grounding. Our preliminary experiments in PowerPoint presentation creation reveal that complex digital work capabilities can be achieved with a small amount of high-quality cognitive data - PC Agent, trained on just 133 cognitive trajectories, can handle sophisticated work scenarios involving up to 50 steps across multiple applications. This demonstrates the data efficiency of our approach, highlighting that the key to training capable digital agents lies in collecting human cognitive data. By open-sourcing our complete framework, including the data collection infrastructure and cognition completion methods, we aim to lower the barriers for the research community to develop truly capable digital agents.

Language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various natural language processing tasks, yet they struggle with planning tasks requiring multi-step simulations. Inspired by human cognitive processes, this paper investigates the optimal planning power of language models that can construct a cognitive map of a given environment. Our experiments demonstrate that cognitive map significantly enhances the performance of both optimal and reachable planning generation ability in the Gridworld path planning task. We observe that our method showcases two key characteristics similar to human cognition: generalization of its planning ability to extrapolated environments and rapid adaptation with limited training data. We hope our findings in the Gridworld task provide insights into modeling human cognitive processes in language models, potentially leading to the development of more advanced and robust systems that better resemble human cognition.

Recent advancements in Reinforcement Post-Training (RPT) have significantly enhanced the capabilities of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), sparking increased interest in the generalization of RL-based reasoning. While existing work has primarily focused on investigating its generalization across tasks or modalities, this study proposes a novel cross-linguistic perspective to investigate reasoning generalization. This raises a crucial question: Does the reasoning capability achieved from English RPT effectively transfer to other languages? We address this by systematically evaluating English-centric LRMs on multilingual reasoning benchmarks and introducing a metric to quantify cross-lingual transferability. Our findings reveal that cross-lingual transferability varies significantly across initial model, target language, and training paradigm. Through interventional studies, we find that models with stronger initial English capabilities tend to over-rely on English-specific patterns, leading to diminished cross-lingual generalization. To address this, we conduct a thorough parallel training study. Experimental results yield three key findings: First-Parallel Leap, a substantial leap in performance when transitioning from monolingual to just a single parallel language, and a predictable Parallel Scaling Law, revealing that cross-lingual reasoning transfer follows a power-law with the number of training parallel languages. Moreover, we identify the discrepancy between actual monolingual performance and the power-law prediction as Monolingual Generalization Gap, indicating that English-centric LRMs fail to fully generalize across languages. Our study challenges the assumption that LRM reasoning mirrors human cognition, providing critical insights for the development of more language-agnostic LRMs.

We propose Perceptual Taxonomy, a structured process of scene understanding that first recognizes objects and their spatial configurations, then infers task-relevant properties such as material, affordance, function, and physical attributes to support goal-directed reasoning. While this form of reasoning is fundamental to human cognition, current vision-language benchmarks lack comprehensive evaluation of this ability and instead focus on surface-level recognition or image-text alignment. To address this gap, we introduce Perceptual Taxonomy, a benchmark for physically grounded visual reasoning. We annotate 3173 objects with four property families covering 84 fine-grained attributes. Using these annotations, we construct a multiple-choice question benchmark with 5802 images across both synthetic and real domains. The benchmark contains 28033 template-based questions spanning four types (object description, spatial reasoning, property matching, and taxonomy reasoning), along with 50 expert-crafted questions designed to evaluate models across the full spectrum of perceptual taxonomy reasoning. Experimental results show that leading vision-language models perform well on recognition tasks but degrade by 10 to 20 percent on property-driven questions, especially those requiring multi-step reasoning over structured attributes. These findings highlight a persistent gap in structured visual understanding and the limitations of current models that rely heavily on pattern matching. We also show that providing in-context reasoning examples from simulated scenes improves performance on real-world and expert-curated questions, demonstrating the effectiveness of perceptual-taxonomy-guided prompting.

Large language models (LLMs) continually evolve through pre-training on ever-expanding web data, but this adaptive process also exposes them to subtle forms of misinformation. While prior work has explored data poisoning during static pre-training, the effects of such manipulations under continual pre-training remain largely unexplored. Drawing inspiration from the illusory truth effect in human cognition - where repeated exposure to falsehoods increases belief in their accuracy - we ask whether LLMs exhibit a similar vulnerability. We investigate whether repeated exposure to false but confidently stated facts can shift a model's internal representation away from the truth. We introduce Layer of Truth, a framework and dataset for probing belief dynamics in continually trained LLMs. By injecting controlled amounts of poisoned data and probing intermediate representations across checkpoints, model scales, and question types, we quantify when and how factual beliefs shift. Our findings reveal that even minimal exposure can induce persistent representational drift in well-established facts, with susceptibility varying across layers and model sizes. These results highlight an overlooked vulnerability of continually updated LLMs: their capacity to internalize misinformation analogously to humans, underscoring the need for robust monitoring of factual integrity during model updates.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has proven highly effective for enhancing complex reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Yet, it struggles in complex spatial reasoning tasks. Nonetheless, human cognition extends beyond language alone, enabling the remarkable capability to think in both words and images. Inspired by this mechanism, we propose a new reasoning paradigm, Multimodal Visualization-of-Thought (MVoT). It enables visual thinking in MLLMs by generating image visualizations of their reasoning traces. To ensure high-quality visualization, we introduce token discrepancy loss into autoregressive MLLMs. This innovation significantly improves both visual coherence and fidelity. We validate this approach through several dynamic spatial reasoning tasks. Experimental results reveal that MVoT demonstrates competitive performance across tasks. Moreover, it exhibits robust and reliable improvements in the most challenging scenarios where CoT fails. Ultimately, MVoT establishes new possibilities for complex reasoning tasks where visual thinking can effectively complement verbal reasoning.

To improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models, test-time compute is typically scaled by generating intermediate tokens before the final answer. However, this couples reasoning to autoregressive generation and thereby conflates internal computation with external communication. In contrast, human cognition can use working memory to hold and manipulate information internally without the need to externalize intermediate thoughts. Drawing on this principle, we introduce Reasoning in Memory (RiM), a latent reasoning method that replaces the autoregressive generation of reasoning steps with memory blocks. These memory blocks are fixed sequences of special tokens that unlock the working-memory capacity of large language models. Since they are fixed rather than generated, they can be processed in a single forward pass, enabling compute-efficient latent reasoning. To operationalize these memory blocks, we employ a two-stage curriculum. First, we ground them by predicting explicit reasoning steps after each memory block. Second, we discard this step-level supervision and iteratively refine the final answer after each memory block. Our experiments on reasoning benchmarks show that, across language models of different families and sizes, RiM matches or exceeds existing latent reasoning methods while avoiding the autoregressive generation of thoughts. These results demonstrate that large language models can be trained to use working memory as an effective mechanism for latent reasoning.

Deep learning techniques have revolutionized image classification by mimicking human cognition and automating complex decision-making processes. However, the deployment of AI systems in the wild, especially in high-security domains such as defence, is curbed by the lack of explainability of the model. To this end, eXplainable AI (XAI) is an emerging area of research that is intended to explore the unexplained hidden black box nature of deep neural networks. This paper explores the application of the eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) tool to interpret the underwater image classification results, one of the first works in the domain to the best of our knowledge. Our study delves into the realm of SONAR image classification using a custom dataset derived from diverse sources, including the Seabed Objects KLSG dataset, the camera SONAR dataset, the mine SONAR images dataset, and the SCTD dataset. An extensive analysis of transfer learning techniques for image classification using benchmark Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures such as VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionV3, DenseNet121, etc. is carried out. On top of this classification model, a post-hoc XAI technique, viz. Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) are incorporated to provide transparent justifications for the model's decisions by perturbing input data locally to see how predictions change. Furthermore, Submodular Picks LIME (SP-LIME) a version of LIME particular to images, that perturbs the image based on the submodular picks is also extensively studied. To this end, two submodular optimization algorithms i.e. Quickshift and Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) are leveraged towards submodular picks. The extensive analysis of XAI techniques highlights interpretability of the results in a more human-compliant way, thus boosting our confidence and reliability.

Recent scholarship on reasoning in LLMs has supplied evidence of impressive performance and flexible adaptation to machine generated or human feedback. Nonmonotonic reasoning, crucial to human cognition for navigating the real world, remains a challenging, yet understudied task. In this work, we study nonmonotonic reasoning capabilities of seven state-of-the-art LLMs in one abstract and one commonsense reasoning task featuring generics, such as 'Birds fly', and exceptions, 'Penguins don't fly' (see Fig. 1). While LLMs exhibit reasoning patterns in accordance with human nonmonotonic reasoning abilities, they fail to maintain stable beliefs on truth conditions of generics at the addition of supporting examples ('Owls fly') or unrelated information ('Lions have manes'). Our findings highlight pitfalls in attributing human reasoning behaviours to LLMs, as well as assessing general capabilities, while consistent reasoning remains elusive.

Natural language (NL) has long been the predominant format for human cognition and communication, and by extension, has been similarly pivotal in the development and application of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, besides NL, LLMs have seen various non-NL formats during pre-training, such as code and logical expression. NL's status as the optimal format for LLMs, particularly in single-LLM reasoning and multi-agent communication, has not been thoroughly examined. In this work, we challenge the default use of NL by exploring the utility of non-NL formats in these contexts. We show that allowing LLMs to autonomously select the most suitable format before reasoning or communicating leads to a 3.3 to 5.7\% improvement in reasoning efficiency for different LLMs, and up to a 72.7\% reduction in token usage in multi-agent communication, all while maintaining communicative effectiveness. Our comprehensive analysis further reveals that LLMs can devise a format from limited task instructions and that the devised format is effectively transferable across different LLMs. Intriguingly, the structured communication format decided by LLMs exhibits notable parallels with established agent communication languages, suggesting a natural evolution towards efficient, structured communication in agent communication. Our code is released at https://github.com/thunlp/AutoForm.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into high-stakes decision-making. Inspired by the theory of inattentional blindness in human cognition, we investigate whether LLMs, trained on human-preferred corpora that embed attentional biases, exhibit a similar limitation: failing to attend to subtle yet important contextual cues under explicit task instructions. To evaluate this, we introduce the task of explicit-implicit reasoning and present MixRea, a benchmark of 2,246 multiple-choice questions across 9 reasoning types with varying distributions of explicit and implicit information. Evaluation of 21 advanced LLMs shows that even the best-performing reasoning model (Gemini 2.5 Pro) achieves only 42.8\% consistency, revealing widespread inattentional blindness. To mitigate this, we propose Potential Relation Completion Prompting (PRCP), a prompting method that improves reasoning by recovering overlooked causal relations. Further analysis shows that this limitation persists across diverse multi-source reasoning tasks, highlighting the need for more cognitively aligned models.

Understanding physical transformation processes is crucial for both human cognition and artificial intelligence systems, particularly from an egocentric perspective, which serves as a key bridge between humans and machines in action modeling. We define this modeling process as Egocentric Instructed Visual State Transition (EIVST), which involves generating intermediate frames that depict object transformations between initial and target states under a brief action instruction. EIVST poses two challenges for current generative models: (1) understanding the visual scenes of the initial and target states and reasoning about transformation steps from an egocentric view, and (2) generating a consistent intermediate transition that follows the given instruction while preserving object appearance across the two visual states. To address these challenges, we propose the EgoIn framework. It first infers the multi-step transition process between two given states using TransitionVLM, fine-tuned on our curated dataset to better adapt to this task and reduce hallucinated information. It then generates a sequence of frames based on transition conditions produced by the proposed Transition Conditioning module. Additionally, we introduce Object-aware Auxiliary Supervision to preserve consistent object appearance throughout the transition. Extensive experiments on human-object and robot-object interaction datasets demonstrate EgoIn's superior performance in generating semantically meaningful and visually coherent transformation sequences.

Memory systems address the challenge of context loss in Large Language Model during prolonged interactions. However, compared to human cognition, the efficacy of these systems in processing emotion-related information remains inconclusive. To address this gap, we propose an emotion-enhanced memory evaluation benchmark to assess the performance of mainstream and state-of-the-art memory systems in handling affective information. We developed the Human-Like Memory Emotion (HLME) dataset, which evaluates memory systems across three dimensions: emotional information extraction, emotional memory updating, and emotional memory question answering. Experimental results indicate that none of the evaluated systems achieve robust performance across all three tasks. Our findings provide an objective perspective on the current deficiencies of memory systems in processing emotional memories and suggest a new trajectory for future research and system optimization.

Despite the significant impact of visual events on human cognition, understanding events in videos remains a challenging task for AI due to their complex structures, semantic hierarchies, and dynamic evolution. To address this, we propose the task of video event understanding that extracts event scripts and makes predictions with these scripts from videos. To support this task, we introduce VidEvent, a large-scale dataset containing over 23,000 well-labeled events, featuring detailed event structures, broad hierarchies, and logical relations extracted from movie recap videos. The dataset was created through a meticulous annotation process, ensuring high-quality and reliable event data. We also provide comprehensive baseline models offering detailed descriptions of their architecture and performance metrics. These models serve as benchmarks for future research, facilitating comparisons and improvements. Our analysis of VidEvent and the baseline models highlights the dataset's potential to advance video event understanding and encourages the exploration of innovative algorithms and models. The dataset and related resources are publicly available at www.videvent.top.

Spatial perception and reasoning are core components of human cognition, encompassing object recognition, spatial relational understanding, and dynamic reasoning. Despite progress in computer vision, existing benchmarks reveal significant gaps in models' abilities to accurately recognize object attributes and reason about spatial relationships, both essential for dynamic reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose MIRAGE, a multi-modal benchmark designed to evaluate models' capabilities in Counting (object attribute recognition), Relation (spatial relational reasoning), and Counting with Relation. Through diverse and complex scenarios requiring fine-grained recognition and reasoning, MIRAGE highlights critical limitations in state-of-the-art models, underscoring the need for improved representations and reasoning frameworks. By targeting these foundational abilities, MIRAGE provides a pathway toward spatiotemporal reasoning in future research.

Gender-inclusive language is often used with the aim of ensuring that all individuals, regardless of gender, can be associated with certain concepts. While psycholinguistic studies have examined its effects in relation to human cognition, it remains unclear how Large Language Models (LLMs) process gender-inclusive language. Given that commercial LLMs are gaining an increasingly strong foothold in everyday applications, it is crucial to examine whether LLMs in fact interpret gender-inclusive language neutrally, because the language they generate has the potential to influence the language of their users. This study examines whether LLM-generated coreferent terms align with a given gender expression or reflect model biases. Adapting psycholinguistic methods from French to English and German, we find that in English, LLMs generally maintain the antecedent's gender but exhibit underlying masculine bias. In German, this bias is much stronger, overriding all tested gender-neutralization strategies.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities across a myriad of tasks, yet they occasionally yield undesirable outputs. We posit that these limitations are rooted in the foundational autoregressive architecture of LLMs, which inherently lacks mechanisms for differentiating between desirable and undesirable results. Drawing inspiration from the dual-process theory of human cognition, we introduce LLM2, a novel framework that combines an LLM (System 1) with a process-based verifier (System 2). Within LLM2, the LLM is responsible for generating plausible candidates, while the verifier provides timely process-based feedback to distinguish desirable and undesirable outputs. The verifier is trained with a pairwise comparison loss on synthetic process-supervision data generated through our token quality exploration strategy. Empirical results on mathematical reasoning benchmarks substantiate the efficacy of LLM2, exemplified by an accuracy enhancement from 50.3 to 57.8 (+7.5) for Llama3-1B on GSM8K. Furthermore, when combined with self-consistency, LLM2 achieves additional improvements, boosting major@20 accuracy from 56.2 to 70.2 (+14.0).

Distinguishing spatial relations is a basic part of human cognition which requires fine-grained perception on cross-instance. Although benchmarks like MME, MMBench and SEED comprehensively have evaluated various capabilities which already include visual spatial reasoning(VSR). There is still a lack of sufficient quantity and quality evaluation and optimization datasets for Vision Large Language Models(VLLMs) specifically targeting visual positional reasoning. To handle this, we first diagnosed current VLLMs with the VSR dataset and proposed a unified test set. We found current VLLMs to exhibit a contradiction of over-sensitivity to language instructions and under-sensitivity to visual positional information. By expanding the original benchmark from two aspects of tunning data and model structure, we mitigated this phenomenon. To our knowledge, we expanded spatially positioned image data controllably using diffusion models for the first time and integrated original visual encoding(CLIP) with other 3 powerful visual encoders(SigLIP, SAM and DINO). After conducting combination experiments on scaling data and models, we obtained a VLLM VSR Expert(VSRE) that not only generalizes better to different instructions but also accurately distinguishes differences in visual positional information. VSRE achieved over a 27\% increase in accuracy on the VSR test set. It becomes a performant VLLM on the position reasoning of both the VSR dataset and relevant subsets of other evaluation benchmarks. We open-sourced the expanded model with data and Appendix at https://github.com/peijin360/vsre and hope it will accelerate advancements in VLLM on VSR learning.

Reasoning about time and temporal relations is an integral aspect of human cognition, essential for perceiving the world and navigating our experiences. Though large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in many reasoning tasks, temporal reasoning remains challenging due to its intrinsic complexity. In this work, we first study an essential task of temporal reasoning -- temporal graph generation, to unveil LLMs' inherent, global reasoning capabilities. We show that this task presents great challenges even for the most powerful LLMs, such as GPT-3.5/4. We also notice a significant performance gap by small models (<10B) that lag behind LLMs by 50%. Next, we study how to close this gap with a budget constraint, e.g., not using model finetuning. We propose a new prompting technique tailored for temporal reasoning, Narrative-of-Thought (NoT), that first converts the events set to a Python class, then prompts a small model to generate a temporally grounded narrative, guiding the final generation of a temporal graph. Extensive experiments showcase the efficacy of NoT in improving various metrics. Notably, NoT attains the highest F1 on the Schema-11 evaluation set, while securing an overall F1 on par with GPT-3.5. NoT also achieves the best structural similarity across the board, even compared with GPT-3.5/4. Our code is available at https://github.com/launchnlp/NoT.

Spatial reasoning plays a vital role in both human cognition and machine intelligence, prompting new research into language models' (LMs) capabilities in this regard. However, existing benchmarks reveal shortcomings in evaluating qualitative spatial reasoning (QSR). These benchmarks typically present oversimplified scenarios or unclear natural language descriptions, hindering effective evaluation. We present a novel benchmark for assessing QSR in LMs, which is grounded in realistic 3D simulation data, offering a series of diverse room layouts with various objects and their spatial relationships. This approach provides a more detailed and context-rich narrative for spatial reasoning evaluation, diverging from traditional, toy-task-oriented scenarios. Our benchmark encompasses a broad spectrum of qualitative spatial relationships, including topological, directional, and distance relations. These are presented with different viewing points, varied granularities, and density of relation constraints to mimic real-world complexities. A key contribution is our logic-based consistency-checking tool, which enables the assessment of multiple plausible solutions, aligning with real-world scenarios where spatial relationships are often open to interpretation. Our benchmark evaluation of advanced LMs reveals their strengths and limitations in spatial reasoning. They face difficulties with multi-hop spatial reasoning and interpreting a mix of different view descriptions, pointing to areas for future improvement.

Grasping the concept of time is a fundamental facet of human cognition, indispensable for truly comprehending the intricacies of the world. Previous studies typically focus on specific aspects of time, lacking a comprehensive temporal reasoning benchmark. To address this, we propose TimeBench, a comprehensive hierarchical temporal reasoning benchmark that covers a broad spectrum of temporal reasoning phenomena. TimeBench provides a thorough evaluation for investigating the temporal reasoning capabilities of large language models. We conduct extensive experiments on GPT-4, LLaMA2, and other popular LLMs under various settings. Our experimental results indicate a significant performance gap between the state-of-the-art LLMs and humans, highlighting that there is still a considerable distance to cover in temporal reasoning. Besides, LLMs exhibit capability discrepancies across different reasoning categories. Furthermore, we thoroughly analyze the impact of multiple aspects on temporal reasoning and emphasize the associated challenges. We aspire for TimeBench to serve as a comprehensive benchmark, fostering research in temporal reasoning. Resources are available at: https://github.com/zchuz/TimeBench

Text style is highly abstract, as it encompasses various aspects of a speaker's characteristics, habits, logical thinking, and the content they express. However, previous text-style transfer tasks have primarily focused on data-driven approaches, lacking in-depth analysis and research from the perspectives of linguistics and cognitive science. In this paper, we introduce a novel task called Text Speech-Style Transfer (TSST). The main objective is to further explore topics related to human cognition, such as personality and emotion, based on the capabilities of existing LLMs. Considering the objective of our task and the distinctive characteristics of oral speech in real-life scenarios, we trained multi-dimension (i.e. filler words, vividness, interactivity, emotionality) evaluation models for the TSST and validated their correlation with human assessments. We thoroughly analyze the performance of several large language models (LLMs) and identify areas where further improvement is needed. Moreover, driven by our evaluation models, we have released a new corpus that improves the capabilities of LLMs in generating text with speech-style characteristics. In summary, we present the TSST task, a new benchmark for style transfer and emphasizing human-oriented evaluation, exploring and advancing the performance of current LLMs.

The ability to recognize analogies is fundamental to human cognition. Existing benchmarks to test word analogy do not reveal the underneath process of analogical reasoning of neural models. Holding the belief that models capable of reasoning should be right for the right reasons, we propose a first-of-its-kind Explainable Knowledge-intensive Analogical Reasoning benchmark (E-KAR). Our benchmark consists of 1,655 (in Chinese) and 1,251 (in English) problems sourced from the Civil Service Exams, which require intensive background knowledge to solve. More importantly, we design a free-text explanation scheme to explain whether an analogy should be drawn, and manually annotate them for each and every question and candidate answer. Empirical results suggest that this benchmark is very challenging for some state-of-the-art models for both explanation generation and analogical question answering tasks, which invites further research in this area.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can augment and sometimes even replace human cognition. Inspired by efforts to value human agency alongside productivity, we discuss the benefits of solving Citizen Science (CS) tasks with Hybrid Intelligence (HI), a synergetic mixture of human and artificial intelligence. Currently there is no clear framework or methodology on how to create such an effective mixture. Due to the unique participant-centered set of values and the abundance of tasks drawing upon both human common sense and complex 21st century skills, we believe that the field of CS offers an invaluable testbed for the development of HI and human-centered AI of the 21st century, while benefiting CS as well. In order to investigate this potential, we first relate CS to adjacent computational disciplines. Then, we demonstrate that CS projects can be grouped according to their potential for HI-enhancement by examining two key dimensions: the level of digitization and the amount of knowledge or experience required for participation. Finally, we propose a framework for types of human-AI interaction in CS based on established criteria of HI. This "HI lens" provides the CS community with an overview of several ways to utilize the combination of AI and human intelligence in their projects. It also allows the AI community to gain ideas on how developing AI in CS projects can further their own field.

Referring expression comprehension aims to localize the object instance described by a natural language expression. Current referring expression methods have achieved good performance. However, none of them is able to achieve real-time inference without accuracy drop. The reason for the relatively slow inference speed is that these methods artificially split the referring expression comprehension into two sequential stages including proposal generation and proposal ranking. It does not exactly conform to the habit of human cognition. To this end, we propose a novel Realtime Cross-modality Correlation Filtering method (RCCF). RCCF reformulates the referring expression comprehension as a correlation filtering process. The expression is first mapped from the language domain to the visual domain and then treated as a template (kernel) to perform correlation filtering on the image feature map. The peak value in the correlation heatmap indicates the center points of the target box. In addition, RCCF also regresses a 2-D object size and 2-D offset. The center point coordinates, object size and center point offset together to form the target bounding box. Our method runs at 40 FPS while achieving leading performance in RefClef, RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and RefCOCOg benchmarks. In the challenging RefClef dataset, our methods almost double the state-of-the-art performance (34.70% increased to 63.79%). We hope this work can arouse more attention and studies to the new cross-modality correlation filtering framework as well as the one-stage framework for referring expression comprehension.

One of the predominant methods for training world models is autoregressive prediction in the output space of the next element of a sequence. In Natural Language Processing (NLP), this takes the form of Large Language Models (LLMs) predicting the next token; in Computer Vision (CV), this takes the form of autoregressive models predicting the next frame/token/pixel. However, this approach differs from human cognition in several respects. First, human predictions about the future actively influence internal cognitive processes. Second, humans naturally evaluate the plausibility of predictions regarding future states. Based on this capability, and third, by assessing when predictions are sufficient, humans allocate a dynamic amount of time to make a prediction. This adaptive process is analogous to System 2 thinking in psychology. All these capabilities are fundamental to the success of humans at high-level reasoning and planning. Therefore, to address the limitations of traditional autoregressive models lacking these human-like capabilities, we introduce Energy-Based World Models (EBWM). EBWM involves training an Energy-Based Model (EBM) to predict the compatibility of a given context and a predicted future state. In doing so, EBWM enables models to achieve all three facets of human cognition described. Moreover, we developed a variant of the traditional autoregressive transformer tailored for Energy-Based models, termed the Energy-Based Transformer (EBT). Our results demonstrate that EBWM scales better with data and GPU Hours than traditional autoregressive transformers in CV, and that EBWM offers promising early scaling in NLP. Consequently, this approach offers an exciting path toward training future models capable of System 2 thinking and intelligently searching across state spaces.

Recent studies show evidence for emergent cognitive abilities in Large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). The increasing cognitive alignment of these models has made them candidates for cognitive science theories. Prior research into the emergent cognitive abilities of PLMs has largely been path-independent to model training, i.e., has focused on the final model weights and not the intermediate steps. However, building plausible models of human cognition using PLMs would benefit from considering the developmental alignment of their performance during training to the trajectories of children's thinking. Guided by psychometric tests of human intelligence, we choose four sets of tasks to investigate the alignment of ten popular families of PLMs and evaluate their available intermediate and final training steps. These tasks are Numerical ability, Linguistic abilities, Conceptual understanding, and Fluid reasoning. We find a striking regularity: regardless of model size, the developmental trajectories of PLMs consistently exhibit a window of maximal alignment to human cognitive development. Before that window, training appears to endow "blank slate" models with the requisite structure to be poised to rapidly learn from experience. After that window, training appears to serve the engineering goal of reducing loss but not the scientific goal of increasing alignment with human cognition.

Decoding non-invasive brain recordings is pivotal for advancing our understanding of human cognition but faces challenges due to individual differences and complex neural signal representations. Traditional methods often require customized models and extensive trials, lacking interpretability in visual reconstruction tasks. Our framework integrates 3D brain structures with visual semantics using a Vision Transformer 3D. This unified feature extractor efficiently aligns fMRI features with multiple levels of visual embeddings, eliminating the need for subject-specific models and allowing extraction from single-trial data. The extractor consolidates multi-level visual features into one network, simplifying integration with Large Language Models (LLMs). Additionally, we have enhanced the fMRI dataset with diverse fMRI-image-related textual data to support multimodal large model development. Integrating with LLMs enhances decoding capabilities, enabling tasks such as brain captioning, complex reasoning, concept localization, and visual reconstruction. Our approach demonstrates superior performance across these tasks, precisely identifying language-based concepts within brain signals, enhancing interpretability, and providing deeper insights into neural processes. These advances significantly broaden the applicability of non-invasive brain decoding in neuroscience and human-computer interaction, setting the stage for advanced brain-computer interfaces and cognitive models.

A moderately detailed consideration of interactive LLMs as cognitive systems is given, focusing on LLMs circa mid-2023 such as ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bard, Llama, etc.. Cognitive strengths of these systems are reviewed, and then careful attention is paid to the substantial differences between the sort of cognitive system these LLMs are, and the sort of cognitive systems human beings are. It is found that many of the practical weaknesses of these AI systems can be tied specifically to lacks in the basic cognitive architectures according to which these systems are built. It is argued that incremental improvement of such LLMs is not a viable approach to working toward human-level AGI, in practical terms given realizable amounts of compute resources. This does not imply there is nothing to learn about human-level AGI from studying and experimenting with LLMs, nor that LLMs cannot form significant parts of human-level AGI architectures that also incorporate other ideas. Social and ethical matters regarding LLMs are very briefly touched from this perspective, which implies that while care should be taken regarding misinformation and other issues, and economic upheavals will need their own social remedies based on their unpredictable course as with any powerfully impactful technology, overall the sort of policy needed as regards modern LLMs is quite different than would be the case if a more credible approximation to human-level AGI were at hand.