Instruction tuning plays a critical role in enhancing the performance and efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs). Its success depends not only on the quality of the instruction data but also on the inherent capabilities of the LLM itself. Some studies suggest that even a small amount of high-quality data can achieve instruction fine-tuning results that are on par with, or even exceed, those from using a full-scale dataset. However, rather than focusing solely on calculating data quality scores to evaluate instruction data, there is a growing need to select high-quality data that maximally enhances the performance of instruction tuning for a given LLM. In this paper, we propose the Model Instruction Weakness Value (MIWV) as a novel metric to quantify the importance of instruction data in enhancing model's capabilities. The MIWV metric is derived from the discrepancies in the model’s responses when using In-Context Learning (ICL), helping identify the most beneficial data for enhancing instruction tuning performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that selecting only the top 1% of data based on MIWV can outperform training on the full dataset. Furthermore, this approach extends beyond existing research that focuses on data quality scoring for data selection, offering strong empirical evidence supporting the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) task automation constitutes a critical frontier in artificial intelligence research. While effective GUI agents synergistically integrate planning and grounding capabilities, current methodologies exhibit two fundamental limitations: (1) insufficient exploitation of cross-model synergies, and (2) over-reliance on synthetic data generation without sufficient utilization. To address these challenges, we propose Co-EPG, a self-iterative training framework for Co-Evolution of Planning and Grounding. Co-EPG establishes an iterative positive feedback loop: through this loop, the planning model explores superior strategies under grounding-based reward guidance via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), generating diverse data to optimize the grounding model. Concurrently, the optimized Grounding model provides more effective rewards for subsequent GRPO training of the planning model, fostering continuous improvement. Co-EPG thus enables iterative enhancement of agent capabilities through self-play optimization and training data distillation. On the Multimodal-Mind2Web and AndroidControl benchmarks, our framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods after just three iterations without requiring external data. The agent consistently improves with each iteration, demonstrating robust self-enhancement capabilities. This work establishes a novel training paradigm for GUI agents, shifting from isolated optimization to an integrated, self-driven co-evolution approach.

Tables serve as a core format for representing structured data on the web, as their two-dimensional layouts effectively encode complex inter-entity relationships. However, real-world web tables often feature heterogeneous structures and rich semantics. Accurately interpreting such tables requires not only spatial layout perception but also multi-step reasoning across rows and columns, posing substantial challenges to web intelligence systems. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise in table question answering (TableQA) by leveraging visual layouts. However, their performance on complex web tables remains uneven, as existing benchmarks often blur the impact of individual difficulty factors, hindering precise capability analysis. To advance TableQA beyond superficial task difficulty and toward interpretable capability modeling, we introduce MMTableBench, a multi-level benchmark that systematically evaluates MLLMs along two fine-grained dimensions: layout complexity and reasoning complexity. By organizing table-question pairs along these axes, MMTableBench facilitates a detailed evaluation of model performance under varying structural and reasoning challenges, while revealing the respective strengths and limitations of multimodal inputs. Our comprehensive analysis shows that state-of-the-art MLLMs continue to exhibit notable limitations when confronted with complex layouts and deep reasoning tasks, underscoring persistent gaps despite the structural advantages offered by visual inputs. MMTableBench thus provides not only a rigorous evaluation framework but also a diagnostic tool for analyzing and interpreting model behaviors, enabling more transparent and explainable progress in multimodal TableQA development.

Multi-task learning (MTL) has been widely used in recommender systems, wherein predicting each type of user feedback on items (e.g, click, purchase) are treated as individual tasks and jointly trained with a unified model. Our key observation is that the prediction results of each task may contain task-specific knowledge about user’s fine-grained preference towards items. While such knowledge could be transferred to benefit other tasks, it is being overlooked under the current MTL paradigm. This paper, instead, proposes a Cross-Task Knowledge Distillation framework that attempts to leverage prediction results of one task as supervised signals to teach another task. However, integrating MTL and KD in a proper manner is non-trivial due to several challenges including task conflicts, inconsistent magnitude and requirement of synchronous optimization. As countermeasures, we 1) introduce auxiliary tasks with quadruplet loss functions to capture cross-task fine-grained ranking information and avoid task conflicts, 2) design a calibrated distillation approach to align and distill knowledge from auxiliary tasks, and 3) propose a novel error correction mechanism to enable and facilitate synchronous training of teacher and student models. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of our framework in real-world datasets.