Daily Papers

We introduce the novel task of Language-Guided Object Placement in Real 3D Scenes. Our model is given a 3D scene's point cloud, a 3D asset, and a textual prompt broadly describing where the 3D asset should be placed. The task here is to find a valid placement for the 3D asset that respects the prompt. Compared with other language-guided localization tasks in 3D scenes such as grounding, this task has specific challenges: it is ambiguous because it has multiple valid solutions, and it requires reasoning about 3D geometric relationships and free space. We inaugurate this task by proposing a new benchmark and evaluation protocol. We also introduce a new dataset for training 3D LLMs on this task, as well as the first method to serve as a non-trivial baseline. We believe that this challenging task and our new benchmark could become part of the suite of benchmarks used to evaluate and compare generalist 3D LLM models.

One key challenge in Augmented Reality is the placement of virtual content in natural locations. Most existing automated techniques can only work with a closed-vocabulary, fixed set of objects. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate several methods for automatic object placement using recent advances in open-vocabulary vision-language models. Through a multifaceted evaluation, we identify a new state-of-the-art method, OCTO+. We also introduce a benchmark for automatically evaluating the placement of virtual objects in augmented reality, alleviating the need for costly user studies. Through this, in addition to human evaluations, we find that OCTO+ places objects in a valid region over 70% of the time, outperforming other methods on a range of metrics.

Existing document OCR largely targets plain text or Markdown, discarding the structural and executable properties that make LaTeX essential for scientific publishing. We study page-level reconstruction of scientific PDFs into compilable LaTeX and introduce TexOCR-Bench, a benchmark, and TexOCR-Train, a large-scale training corpus, for this task. TexOCR-Bench features a multi-dimensional evaluation suite that jointly assesses transcription fidelity, structural faithfulness, and end-to-end compilability. Leveraging TexOCR-Train, we train a 2B-parameter model, TexOCR, using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards derived from LaTeX unit tests that directly enforce compilability and referential integrity. Experiments across 21 frontier models on TexOCR-Bench show that existing systems frequently violate key document invariants, including consistent section structure, correct float placement, and valid label-reference links, which undermines compilation reliability and downstream usability. Our analysis further reveals that RL with verifiable rewards yields consistent improvements over SFT alone, particularly on structural and compilation metrics.

Practitioners make three prompt-design decisions with almost no controlled evidence behind them: how to format instructions and context (markdown, plain text, prose, or tabular), how many simultaneous instructions a system prompt can carry before compliance degrades, and how much context a model can hold before recall and honesty degrade. We report two controlled experiments crossing all three factors on one held, contamination-free synthetic corpus (the "Book of Veyra," 8,780 uniquely-named entities, deterministically regenerable from a fixed seed), evaluated across five models. Experiment 1 (960 calls/model) measures instruction-following decay as rule count N grows from 10 to 160, crossed with four formats and system-prompt vs. user-turn placement. Perfect-response rate collapses to zero by N=80 for every model, format, and placement. Placement produces effects at least as large as format at N=160 in most models, but the direction is model-specific. No model shows a reliable markdown advantage; one 35B model favors plain text instead. Experiment 2 (5,520 calls/model) measures recall accuracy, false-premise sycophancy, and absent-fact fabrication across a 2k-to-512k-token context ladder in the same four formats. Recall stays near ceiling through 64-128k tokens, then degrades sharply and format-dependently: one model's accuracy spread reaches 48 points at 128k tokens. Fabrication never occurs (0/5,760 probes), and sycophancy stays negligible (<=8.3%). What rises sharply near each model's context ceiling is outright refusal to answer (0% to 79-90%), distinct from sycophancy or fabrication. Neither pre-registered format ordering holds, and token overhead (+22% to +37% over plain text) further changes which format is preferable where accuracy spread is genuine. We release the full harness, corpus generator, and raw results (VeyraBench): https://github.com/iNetanel/veyrabench

Placement is crucial in the physical design, as it greatly affects power, performance, and area metrics. Recent advancements in analytical methods, such as DREAMPlace, have demonstrated impressive performance in global placement. However, DREAMPlace has some limitations, e.g., may not guarantee legalizable placements under the same settings, leading to fragile and unpredictable results. This paper highlights the main issue as being stuck in local optima, and proposes a hybrid optimization framework to efficiently escape the local optima, by perturbing the placement result iteratively. The proposed framework achieves significant improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods on two popular benchmarks.

Training large language models requires distributing computation across many accelerators, yet practitioners select parallelism strategies (data, tensor, pipeline, ZeRO) through trial and error because no unified systematic framework predicts their behavior. We introduce placement semantics: each strategy is specified by how it places four training states (parameters, optimizer, gradients, activations) across devices using five modes (replicated, sharded, sharded-with-gather, materialized, offloaded). From placement alone, without implementation details, we derive memory consumption and communication volume. Our predictions match published results exactly: ZeRO-3 uses 8x less memory than data parallelism at 1.5x communication cost, as reported in the original paper. We prove two conditions (gradient integrity, state consistency) are necessary and sufficient for distributed training to match single-device results, and provide composition rules for combining strategies safely. The framework unifies ZeRO Stages 1-3, Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP), tensor parallelism, and pipeline parallelism as instances with different placement choices.

Image composition aims to generate realistic composite image by inserting an object from one image into another background image, where the placement (e.g., location, size, occlusion) of inserted object may be unreasonable, which would significantly degrade the quality of the composite image. Although some works attempted to learn object placement to create realistic composite images, they did not focus on assessing the plausibility of object placement. In this paper, we focus on object placement assessment task, which verifies whether a composite image is plausible in terms of the object placement. To accomplish this task, we construct the first Object Placement Assessment (OPA) dataset consisting of composite images and their rationality labels. We also propose a simple yet effective baseline for this task. Dataset is available at https://github.com/bcmi/Object-Placement-Assessment-Dataset-OPA.

The validity screen (Cacioli, 2026d, 2026e) classifies LLM confidence signals as Valid, Indeterminate, or Invalid. We test whether these classifications predict selective prediction performance. Twenty frontier LLMs from seven families were evaluated on 524 items across six cognitive tracks. Valid models show mean Type 2 AUROC = .624 (SD = .048). Invalid models show mean AUROC = .357 (SD = .231). Cohen's d = 2.81, p = .002. The tiers order monotonically: Invalid (.357) < Indeterminate (.554) < Valid (.624). Split-half cross-validation yields median d = 1.77, P(d > 0) = 1.0 across 1,000 splits. The three-tier classification accounts for 47% of the variance in AUROC. DeepSeek-R1 drops from 85.3% accuracy at full coverage to 11.3% at 10% coverage. The screen predicts the criterion. For selective prediction, the screen matters.

Human assistance in robotics spans around several tasks such as navigation, object manipulation, and placement, where a key challenge is selecting target destinations that align with human intentions or preferences. We focus on this challenge in the context of Virtual Placement (VP), the task of identifying all plausible target locations given scene context and human-centric constraints. This differs from traditional placement tasks that typically focus on a single, predefined target location. The VP problem is complex, as it requires both global and local reasoning about the scene's geometry, semantics, and plausibility. To address this gap, we introduce {\bf Assistant Placement Aria}, the first benchmark to explore diverse aspects of VP, including global, local, and human-centric constraints. It contains both synthetic and real indoor scenes annotated for three tasks: (i)~2D Panel Placement, (ii)~Sitting Suggestion, and (iii)~TV Placement. Each scene includes 2D images, a 3D point cloud, and a textual description of the objects within the scene. By contributing this benchmark, we aim to encourage further research in this underexplored and challenging field that is critically dependent on relevant data. We also evaluate several foundation models for object detection and segmentation on our benchmark.

Per-field accept/review with selective risk at most alpha -- accept a field only if the error rate among accepted fields is controlled -- is the trust contract document-extraction systems need, and the natural procedure silently violates it on real documents. On 13,859 genuine claude-sonnet-5 fields from 800 CORD receipts (49.0% correct) we diagnose three failure modes: document clustering (design effect 1.84-2.45), score-refit leakage (coverage 0.416 at risk 0.127, violating alpha=0.10 in 95% of splits), and a tie-mass pathology (a degenerate score collapses the threshold grid, 0.030 to 0.001). We organize the fixes as a validity ladder, guarantee form stated per tier. A fit/val split protocol restores expected-selective-risk control for a learned fusion: coverage 0.318 at risk 0.096 at nominal alpha=0.10, no tolerance band (production variant 0.326) -- an on-average point whose realized risk exceeds alpha in 47.5% of resplits, not a certificate. Mondrian Learn-then-Test with exact binomial tails yields per-group PAC certificates: field-iid 0.171 at risk 0.068, cluster-corrected 0.140, doc-iid 0.060 -- the only tier matching documents, honestly near-vacuous today. Support-bin, the pre-specified provenance taxonomy, wins every rigor tier on the sonnet CORD capture (p<1e-4, Bonferroni-corrected) -- a win that does not replicate on the same documents under haiku or qwen -- while on higher-accuracy corpora pooled thresholds win: conditioning helps exactly where pooled cannot certify, subsumed by a learned score elsewhere. A frozen-configuration confirmation on selection-untouched claude-haiku-4-5 held at both risk levels, and a blind three-annotator human-gold audit verifies the practical tier's accepted-set risk at 1.3% against its 10% budget (Fleiss' kappa=0.83; labels err one-sidedly pessimistic). Released Apache-2.0 with seed-pinned, regression-gated procedures.

Search engines and information platforms are increasingly scrutinized for their role in spreading misinformation. Traditional responses often focus on detecting falsehoods or verifying the ultimate validity of claims. This paper argues that such a validity-centered framing is inadequate for the epistemic challenges of search environments.

We introduce JP-TL-Bench, a lightweight, open benchmark designed to guide the iterative development of Japanese-English translation systems. In this context, the challenge is often "which of these two good translations is better?" rather than "is this translation acceptable?" This distinction matters for Japanese-English, where subtle choices in politeness, implicature, ellipsis, and register strongly affect perceived naturalness. JP-TL-Bench uses a protocol built to make LLM judging both reliable and affordable: it evaluates a candidate model via reference-free, pairwise LLM comparisons against a fixed, versioned anchor set. Pairwise results are aggregated with a Bradley-Terry model and reported as win rates plus a normalized 0-10 "LT" score derived from a logistic transform of fitted log-strengths. Because each candidate is scored against the same frozen anchor set, scores are structurally stable given the same base set, judge, and aggregation code.

The strive to make AI applications "safe" has led to the development of safety-measures as the main or even sole normative requirement of their permissible use. Similar can be attested to the latest version of chatbots, such as chatGPT. In this view, if they are "safe", they are supposed to be permissible to deploy. This approach, which we call "safety-normativity", is rather limited in solving the emerging issues that chatGPT and other chatbots have caused thus far. In answering this limitation, in this paper we argue for limiting chatbots in the range of topics they can chat about according to the normative concept of appropriateness. We argue that rather than looking for "safety" in a chatbot's utterances to determine what they may and may not say, we ought to assess those utterances according to three forms of appropriateness: technical-discursive, social, and moral. We then spell out what requirements for chatbots follow from these forms of appropriateness to avoid the limits of previous accounts: positionality, acceptability, and value alignment (PAVA). With these in mind, we may be able to determine what a chatbot may and may not say. Lastly, one initial suggestion is to use challenge sets, specifically designed for appropriateness, as a validation method.

Object placement in robotic tasks is inherently challenging due to the diversity of object geometries and placement configurations. To address this, we propose AnyPlace, a two-stage method trained entirely on synthetic data, capable of predicting a wide range of feasible placement poses for real-world tasks. Our key insight is that by leveraging a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to identify rough placement locations, we focus only on the relevant regions for local placement, which enables us to train the low-level placement-pose-prediction model to capture diverse placements efficiently. For training, we generate a fully synthetic dataset of randomly generated objects in different placement configurations (insertion, stacking, hanging) and train local placement-prediction models. We conduct extensive evaluations in simulation, demonstrating that our method outperforms baselines in terms of success rate, coverage of possible placement modes, and precision. In real-world experiments, we show how our approach directly transfers models trained purely on synthetic data to the real world, where it successfully performs placements in scenarios where other models struggle -- such as with varying object geometries, diverse placement modes, and achieving high precision for fine placement. More at: https://any-place.github.io.

Interior design allows us to be who we are and live how we want - each design is as unique as our distinct personality. However, it is not trivial for non-professionals to express and materialize this since it requires aligning functional and visual expectations with the constraints of physical space; this renders interior design a luxury. To make it more accessible, we present I-Design, a personalized interior designer that allows users to generate and visualize their design goals through natural language communication. I-Design starts with a team of large language model agents that engage in dialogues and logical reasoning with one another, transforming textual user input into feasible scene graph designs with relative object relationships. Subsequently, an effective placement algorithm determines optimal locations for each object within the scene. The final design is then constructed in 3D by retrieving and integrating assets from an existing object database. Additionally, we propose a new evaluation protocol that utilizes a vision-language model and complements the design pipeline. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments show that I-Design outperforms existing methods in delivering high-quality 3D design solutions and aligning with abstract concepts that match user input, showcasing its advantages across detailed 3D arrangement and conceptual fidelity.

In industrial procurement, an LLM answer is useful only if it survives a standards check: recommended material must match operating condition, every parameter must respect a regulated threshold, and no procedure may contradict a safety clause. Partial correctness can mask safety-critical contradictions that aggregate LLM benchmarks rarely capture. We introduce IndustryBench, a 2,049-item benchmark for industrial procurement QA in Chinese, grounded in Chinese national standards (GB/T) and structured industrial product records, organized by seven capability dimensions, ten industry categories, and panel-derived difficulty tiers, with item-aligned English, Russian, and Vietnamese renderings. Our construction pipeline rejects 70.3% of LLM-generated candidates at a search-based external-verification stage, calibrating how unreliable industrial QA remains after LLM-only filtering.Our evaluation decouples raw correctness, scored by a Qwen3-Max judge validated at κ_w = 0.798 against a domain expert, from a separate safety-violation (SV) check against source texts. Across 17 models in Chinese and an 8-model intersection over four languages, we find: (i) the best system reaches only 2.083 on the 0--3 rubric, leaving substantial headroom; (ii) Standards & Terminology is the most persistent capability weakness and survives item-aligned translation; (iii) extended reasoning lowers safety-adjusted scores for 12 of 13 models, primarily by introducing unsupported safety-critical details into longer final answers; and (iv) safety-violation rates reshuffle the leaderboard -- GPT-5.4 climbs from rank 6 to rank 3 after SV adjustment, while Kimi-k2.5-1T-A32B drops seven positions.Industrial LLM evaluation therefore requires source-grounded, safety-aware diagnosis rather than aggregate accuracy. We release IndustryBench with all prompts, scoring scripts, and dataset documentation.

In this work we study indoor scene object placement. Given a 3D indoor scene and an object, the task is to predict placement locations within the scene. Empirical observations of data-driven approaches to the problem show their tendency to miss placement modes. We introduce a system which helps to address this flaw. We design a Domain Specific Language (DSL) that specifies object relational constraints. Upon execution, programs from our language predict possible placements from a partial scene and object. We design a generative model which writes these programs automatically. Available 3D scene datasets do not contain programs to train on, and naively extracted programs only predict the original placement location of scene objects. Training on these programs results in subpar performance so we introduce a new program bootstrapping algorithm that improves our system's performance compared to the naive approach. To quantify our qualitative observations, we introduce a new evaluation procedure which captures how well a system models per-object location distributions. We ask human annotators to label all the possible places an object can go in a scene and compare this set against locations produced by the system in question. Our system produces per-object location distributions more consistent with human annotators than those produced by existing data-driven approaches and a zero-shot approach using an LLM. While other systems degrade in performance when training data is sparse, our system does not degrade to the same degree.

We study the parameter placement problem: given a fixed budget of k trainable entries within the B matrix of a LoRA adapter (A frozen), does the choice of which k matter? Under supervised fine-tuning, random and informed subsets achieve comparable performance. Under GRPO on base models, random placement fails to improve over the base model, while gradient-informed placement recovers standard LoRA accuracy. This regime dependence traces to gradient structure: SFT gradients are low-rank and directionally stable, so any subset accumulates coherent updates; GRPO gradients are high-rank and near-orthogonal across steps, so only elements with consistently signed gradients retain the learning signal. Our scoring procedure identifies these critical parameters in under 10 seconds at less than 0.5% of training cost. Selected parameters concentrate on residual-stream-writing projections (V, O, Down), stable across model families and scales (1.5B - 8B).

We consider the task of mapping pseudocode to long programs that are functionally correct. Given test cases as a mechanism to validate programs, we search over the space of possible translations of the pseudocode to find a program that passes the validation. However, without proper credit assignment to localize the sources of program failures, it is difficult to guide search toward more promising programs. We propose to perform credit assignment based on signals from compilation errors, which constitute 88.7% of program failures. Concretely, we treat the translation of each pseudocode line as a discrete portion of the program, and whenever a synthesized program fails to compile, an error localization method tries to identify the portion of the program responsible for the failure. We then focus search over alternative translations of the pseudocode for those portions. For evaluation, we collected the SPoC dataset (Search-based Pseudocode to Code) containing 18,356 programs with human-authored pseudocode and test cases. Under a budget of 100 program compilations, performing search improves the synthesis success rate over using the top-one translation of the pseudocode from 25.6% to 44.7%.

Medical large language models (LLMs) research often makes bold claims, from encoding clinical knowledge to reasoning like a physician. These claims are usually backed by evaluation on competitive benchmarks; a tradition inherited from mainstream machine learning. But how do we separate real progress from a leaderboard flex? Medical LLM benchmarks, much like those in other fields, are arbitrarily constructed using medical licensing exam questions. For these benchmarks to truly measure progress, they must accurately capture the real-world tasks they aim to represent. In this position paper, we argue that medical LLM benchmarks should (and indeed can) be empirically evaluated for their construct validity. In the psychological testing literature, "construct validity" refers to the ability of a test to measure an underlying "construct", that is the actual conceptual target of evaluation. By drawing an analogy between LLM benchmarks and psychological tests, we explain how frameworks from this field can provide empirical foundations for validating benchmarks. To put these ideas into practice, we use real-world clinical data in proof-of-concept experiments to evaluate popular medical LLM benchmarks and report significant gaps in their construct validity. Finally, we outline a vision for a new ecosystem of medical LLM evaluation centered around the creation of valid benchmarks.

A/B tests are typically analyzed via frequentist p-values and confidence intervals; but these inferences are wholly unreliable if users endogenously choose samples sizes by *continuously monitoring* their tests. We define *always valid* p-values and confidence intervals that let users try to take advantage of data as fast as it becomes available, providing valid statistical inference whenever they make their decision. Always valid inference can be interpreted as a natural interface for a sequential hypothesis test, which empowers users to implement a modified test tailored to them. In particular, we show in an appropriate sense that the measures we develop tradeoff sample size and power efficiently, despite a lack of prior knowledge of the user's relative preference between these two goals. We also use always valid p-values to obtain multiple hypothesis testing control in the sequential context. Our methodology has been implemented in a large scale commercial A/B testing platform to analyze hundreds of thousands of experiments to date.

Naturally occurring information-seeking questions often contain questionable assumptions -- assumptions that are false or unverifiable. Questions containing questionable assumptions are challenging because they require a distinct answer strategy that deviates from typical answers for information-seeking questions. For instance, the question "When did Marie Curie discover Uranium?" cannot be answered as a typical "when" question without addressing the false assumption "Marie Curie discovered Uranium". In this work, we propose (QA)^2 (Question Answering with Questionable Assumptions), an open-domain evaluation dataset consisting of naturally occurring search engine queries that may or may not contain questionable assumptions. To be successful on (QA)^2, systems must be able to detect questionable assumptions and also be able to produce adequate responses for both typical information-seeking questions and ones with questionable assumptions. Through human rater acceptability on end-to-end QA with (QA)^2, we find that current models do struggle with handling questionable assumptions, leaving substantial headroom for progress.

We consider the problem of building an assistive robotic system that can help humans in daily household cleanup tasks. Creating such an autonomous system in real-world environments is inherently quite challenging, as a general solution may not suit the preferences of a particular customer. Moreover, such a system consists of multi-objective tasks comprising -- (i) Detection of misplaced objects and prediction of their potentially correct placements, (ii) Fine-grained manipulation for stable object grasping, and (iii) Room-to-room navigation for transferring objects in unseen environments. This work systematically tackles each component and integrates them into a complete object rearrangement pipeline. To validate our proposed system, we conduct multiple experiments on a real robotic platform involving multi-room object transfer, user preference-based placement, and complex pick-and-place tasks. Project page: https://sites.google.com/eng.ucsd.edu/home-robot