Sandboxed computer environments support multi-step reasoning with tools, executable programs, and persistent files, yet their extension from language models to vision-language models (VLMs) introduces a distinct state-management problem. Visual reasoning produces intermediate image-valued evidence---crops, masks, overlays, zoomed regions, and analytic renderings---that must remain addressable without accumulating unboundedly in multimodal context. We introduce VLM-in-Sandbox, a training-free framework for agentic multimodal reasoning in controlled computer environments. Its Visual Workspace registers generated artifacts in an image ledger, maintains a bounded active visual context, and lets the model explicitly promote selected evidence for subsequent inspection. This separates visual evidence generation, performed by sandbox tools, from visual evidence management. Across seven benchmarks and four base VLMs, VLM-in-Sandbox achieves the highest sample-weighted average accuracy among Vanilla VLM, Append-only Sandbox, and the proposed method. A compiler-matched 22 study on 1,260 examples further separates model-directed visibility from bounded retention: VLM-in-Sandbox reaches 66.27% accuracy with 18.6% fewer total tokens than the automatic, retain-all control. Over all 6,350 submitted GPT-4.1-mini examples, it produces 302 rescues and 142 regressions relative to Original Append-only. A local vLLM study with prefix caching confirms that the smaller request workload also reduces uncached tokens, time to first token, and end-to-end latency. These results identify explicit visual evidence state as a central abstraction for sandboxed VLM agents.
Image forensics is increasingly an open-world problem: manipulations range from fully synthetic images to localized edits, splicing and swapping, while most forensic detectors remain specialized to a single manipulation family. Agentic AI has recently emerged as a promising solution. In principle, such systems can assess the reliability of individual detectors, identify out-of-scope evidence, and arbitrate conflicting reports. However, it remains unclear which components actually drive performance and whether their benefits persist under distribution shift. To answer these questions, we study a training-free agentic framework built around specialist detectors, per-detector triage, and conflict-aware evidence arbitration. Using six configurations and three multimodal large language model backbones, we dissect the role of triage, prompting, and reasoning quality on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution data. Our results show that naive detector fusion suffers from severe false-positive rates on authentic images. Triage and prompting consistently improve performance by filtering unreliable evidence and exposing detector limitations. However, the dominant factor is represented by reasoning itself: A stronger judge substantially outperforms a weaker one, particularly under distribution shift. Most notably, manipulation recall is nearly saturated across all configurations, indicating that the main challenge of open-world image forensics is not detecting manipulations, but calibrating trust in specialized forensic tools and arbitrating conflicting evidence.
Predicting when maritime systems require maintenance can be critical, avoiding hazards and costly consequences. To address this problem, this paper proposes an explainable decision-making framework that integrates a neuro-fuzzy prediction model with a two-stage explainable component. The first stage of this component produces feature-attribution explanations, using gradient-based saliency maps, and the second stage extracts local rules using a fuzzy decision tree. The proposed framework is generic and can be integrated into any deep learning-based approach, rendering it explainable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fuzzy logic-based framework enabling both feature-level and local rule-based explanations of black box models. This approach aims to foster trustworthiness in decision making through user-understandable machine inferences. The performance of the proposed framework using a deep residual-based neural backbone is evaluated on various general-purpose public benchmark datasets, and its utility in maritime is demonstrated in the context of early fault detection in a naval propulsion system dataset. The results indicate that it can provide predictions outperforming relevant state-of-the-art approaches, with an average AUC-ROC (Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve) value, reaching up to 99%, while offering the advantage of explainability.
Cross-domain Named Entity Recognition (CD-NER) aims to transfer the rich knowledge in the source domain to the target domain. Recent studies adopting decomposition or generation paradigms have achieved significant performance improvements, demonstrating high accuracy in entity span detection. However, during entity type classification, models severely suffer from entity type confusion, the erroneous tendency that models classify entities of one type in the text as another similar but incorrect type. To address this issue, we first propose a Multidimensional Confusion Quantification Model (MCQM) that quantifies a model's confusion extent between entity types from three dimensions: source-target hierarchy analysis, semantic similarity analysis, and explicit data evaluation. Moreover, we propose the Progressive Bidirectional Reasoning Chain (PBRC). PBRC leverages the source-target hierarchy and confusion analysis from the MCQM to prompt the LLM to generate two-stage reasoning information. The two-stage reasoning information is utilized to augment the knowledge of the model, significantly mitigating entity type confusion and improving the model's generalization performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art results on all domains of the CrossNER dataset.
Large language models (LLMs), when acting as agents, are expected to take observed data in context, infer the latent state space underlying the world, and leverage it for downstream prediction. However, prior work demonstrated that LLMs struggle to use representations learned in context on a graph tracking task, where the model needs to construct a representation of the graph governing data generation process and use it for subsequent predictions. In this paper, we show that extending this to few-shot settings, where each demonstration is generated from a different world with either the same or different graph topologies, enhances its prediction on 6 models from 4 model families. To understand this improvement, we linearly probe a low-dimensional world representation that encodes graph information in the hidden states. Notably, we find that few-shot demonstrations relocate the world representation and increase its predictive use. Specifically, for each model, these world representations shift in directions nearly orthogonal to their original subspace, and interventions on these representations selectively impair performance more than interventions on other subspaces. Consistent with this insight, we show that few-shot demonstrations with observations from different worlds improve performance on ARC-AGI-1&2, web agent tasks, and Othello. Our findings elucidate the role and internal mechanisms of few-shot demonstrations in in-context world modeling. More broadly, our work advances our understanding of how LLM agents learn from in-context observations and provides implications for their further improvement.
Meta's Muse AI agent has been blocked from shopping Amazon on behalf of its users, GeekWire reports. A popup message started appearing on Sunday for…
Explore new OpenAI Academy learning paths for employees, developers, leaders, educators, and students to build and demonstrate practical AI skills.
New text-to-image model. Tags: gguf, qwen, image-generation, comfyui, comfyui-gguf, text-to-image, base_model:Qwen/Qwen-Image-2.1, base_model:quantized:Qwen/Qwen-Image-2.1