Authors: Ayesha Siddique, Khurram Khalil, Khaza Anuarul Hoque
Abstract: Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) enhances AI system transparency by framing interpretability as an optimization problem. However, this approach often necessitates numerous iterations of computationally intensive operations, limiting its applicability in real-time scenarios. While recent research has focused on XAI hardware acceleration on FPGAs and TPU, these methods do not fully address energy efficiency in real-time settings. To address this limitation, we propose XAIedge, a novel framework that leverages approximate computing techniques into XAI algorithms, including integrated gradients, model distillation, and Shapley analysis. XAIedge translates these algorithms into approximate matrix computations and exploits the synergy between convolution, Fourier transform, and approximate computing paradigms. This approach enables efficient hardware acceleration on TPU-based edge devices, facilitating faster real-time outcome interpretations. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that XAIedge achieves a $2\times$ improvement in energy efficiency compared to existing accurate XAI hardware acceleration techniques while maintaining comparable accuracy. These results highlight the potential of XAIedge to significantly advance the deployment of explainable AI in energy-constrained real-time applications.
Authors: Kevin Song, Andrew Trotter, Jake Y. Chen
Abstract: Drug discovery remains a formidable challenge: more than 90 percent of candidate molecules fail in clinical evaluation, and development costs often exceed one billion dollars per approved therapy. Disparate data streams, from genomics and transcriptomics to chemical libraries and clinical records, hinder coherent mechanistic insight and slow progress. Meanwhile, large language models excel at reasoning and tool integration but lack the modular specialization and iterative memory required for regulated, hypothesis-driven workflows. We introduce PharmaSwarm, a unified multi-agent framework that orchestrates specialized LLM "agents" to propose, validate, and refine hypotheses for novel drug targets and lead compounds. Each agent accesses dedicated functionality--automated genomic and expression analysis; a curated biomedical knowledge graph; pathway enrichment and network simulation; interpretable binding affinity prediction--while a central Evaluator LLM continuously ranks proposals by biological plausibility, novelty, in silico efficacy, and safety. A shared memory layer captures validated insights and fine-tunes underlying submodels over time, yielding a self-improving system. Deployable on low-code platforms or Kubernetes-based microservices, PharmaSwarm supports literature-driven discovery, omics-guided target identification, and market-informed repurposing. We also describe a rigorous four-tier validation pipeline spanning retrospective benchmarking, independent computational assays, experimental testing, and expert user studies to ensure transparency, reproducibility, and real-world impact. By acting as an AI copilot, PharmaSwarm can accelerate translational research and deliver high-confidence hypotheses more efficiently than traditional pipelines.
Authors: Yazan Otoum, Amiya Nayak
Abstract: With the rapid digitalization of healthcare systems, there has been a substantial increase in the generation and sharing of private health data. Safeguarding patient information is essential for maintaining consumer trust and ensuring compliance with legal data protection regulations. Machine learning is critical in healthcare, supporting personalized treatment, early disease detection, predictive analytics, image interpretation, drug discovery, efficient operations, and patient monitoring. It enhances decision-making, accelerates research, reduces errors, and improves patient outcomes. In this paper, we utilize machine learning methodologies, including differential privacy and federated learning, to develop privacy-preserving models that enable healthcare stakeholders to extract insights without compromising individual privacy. Differential privacy introduces noise to data to guarantee statistical privacy, while federated learning enables collaborative model training across decentralized datasets. We explore applying these technologies to Heart Disease Data, demonstrating how they preserve privacy while delivering valuable insights and comprehensive analysis. Our results show that using a federated learning model with differential privacy achieved a test accuracy of 85%, ensuring patient data remained secure and private throughout the process.
Authors: Zheng Zhang, Nuoqian Xiao, Qi Chai, Deheng Ye, Hao Wang
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities in social deduction games (SDGs) like Werewolf, where strategic reasoning and social deception are essential. However, current approaches remain limited to textual information, ignoring crucial multimodal cues such as facial expressions and tone of voice that humans naturally use to communicate. Moreover, existing SDG agents primarily focus on inferring other players' identities without modeling how others perceive themselves or fellow players. To address these limitations, we use One Night Ultimate Werewolf (ONUW) as a testbed and present MultiMind, the first framework integrating multimodal information into SDG agents. MultiMind processes facial expressions and vocal tones alongside verbal content, while employing a Theory of Mind (ToM) model to represent each player's suspicion levels toward others. By combining this ToM model with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), our agent identifies communication strategies that minimize suspicion directed at itself. Through comprehensive evaluation in both agent-versus-agent simulations and studies with human players, we demonstrate MultiMind's superior performance in gameplay. Our work presents a significant advancement toward LLM agents capable of human-like social reasoning across multimodal domains.
Authors: Xiang Li, Haixu Ma, Guanyong Wu, Shi Mu, Chen Li, Shunpan Liang
Abstract: Medication recommendation is crucial in healthcare, offering effective treatments based on patient's electronic health records (EHR). Previous studies show that integrating more medication-related knowledge improves medication representation accuracy. However, not all medications encompass multiple types of knowledge data simultaneously. For instance, some medications provide only textual descriptions without structured data. This imbalance in data availability limits the performance of existing models, a challenge we term the "bucket effect" in medication recommendation. Our data analysis uncovers the severity of the "bucket effect" in medication recommendation. To fill this gap, we introduce a cross-modal medication encoder capable of seamlessly aligning data from different modalities and propose a medication recommendation framework to integrate Multiple types of Knowledge, named MKMed. Specifically, we first pre-train a cross-modal encoder with contrastive learning on five knowledge modalities, aligning them into a unified space. Then, we combine the multi-knowledge medication representations with patient records for recommendations. Extensive experiments on the MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV datasets demonstrate that MKMed mitigates the "bucket effect" in data, and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in recommendation accuracy and safety.
Authors: Simon Dold, Malte Helmert, Jakob Nordstr\"om, Gabriele R\"oger, Tanja Schindler
Abstract: We introduce lower-bound certificates for classical planning tasks, which can be used to prove the unsolvability of a task or the optimality of a plan in a way that can be verified by an independent third party. We describe a general framework for generating lower-bound certificates based on pseudo-Boolean constraints, which is agnostic to the planning algorithm used. As a case study, we show how to modify the $A^{*}$ algorithm to produce proofs of optimality with modest overhead, using pattern database heuristics and $h^\textit{max}$ as concrete examples. The same proof logging approach works for any heuristic whose inferences can be efficiently expressed as reasoning over pseudo-Boolean constraints.
Authors: Peiyuan Jing, Kinhei Lee, Zhenxuan Zhang, Huichi Zhou, Zhengqing Yuan, Zhifan Gao, Lei Zhu, Giorgos Papanastasiou, Yingying Fang, Guang Yang
Abstract: Radiology report generation is critical for efficiency but current models lack the structured reasoning of experts, hindering clinical trust and explainability by failing to link visual findings to precise anatomical locations. This paper introduces BoxMed-RL, a groundbreaking unified training framework for generating spatially verifiable and explainable radiology reports. Built on a large vision-language model, BoxMed-RL revolutionizes report generation through two integrated phases: (1) In the Pretraining Phase, we refine the model via medical concept learning, using Chain-of-Thought supervision to internalize the radiologist-like workflow, followed by spatially verifiable reinforcement, which applies reinforcement learning to align medical findings with bounding boxes. (2) In the Downstream Adapter Phase, we freeze the pretrained weights and train a downstream adapter to ensure fluent and clinically credible reports. This framework precisely mimics radiologists' workflow, compelling the model to connect high-level medical concepts with definitive anatomical evidence. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that BoxMed-RL achieves an average 7% improvement in both METEOR and ROUGE-L metrics compared to state-of-the-art methods. An average 5% improvement in large language model-based metrics further underscores BoxMed-RL's robustness in generating high-quality radiology reports.
Authors: Joshua Engels, David D. Baek, Subhash Kantamneni, Max Tegmark
Abstract: Scalable oversight, the process by which weaker AI systems supervise stronger ones, has been proposed as a key strategy to control future superintelligent systems. However, it is still unclear how scalable oversight itself scales. To address this gap, we propose a framework that quantifies the probability of successful oversight as a function of the capabilities of the overseer and the system being overseen. Specifically, our framework models oversight as a game between capability-mismatched players; the players have oversight-specific and deception-specific Elo scores that are a piecewise-linear function of their general intelligence, with two plateaus corresponding to task incompetence and task saturation. We validate our framework with a modified version of the game Nim and then apply it to four oversight games: "Mafia", "Debate", "Backdoor Code" and "Wargames". For each game, we find scaling laws that approximate how domain performance depends on general AI system capability (using Chatbot Arena Elo as a proxy for general capability). We then build on our findings in a theoretical study of Nested Scalable Oversight (NSO), a process in which trusted models oversee untrusted stronger models, which then become the trusted models in the next step. We identify conditions under which NSO succeeds and derive numerically (and in some cases analytically) the optimal number of oversight levels to maximize the probability of oversight success. In our numerical examples, the NSO success rate is below 52% when overseeing systems that are 400 Elo points stronger than the baseline overseer, and it declines further for overseeing even stronger systems.
Authors: Anna Katariina Wisakanto, Joe Rogero, Avyay M. Casheekar, Richard Mallah
Abstract: Modern general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) systems present an urgent risk management challenge, as their rapidly evolving capabilities and potential for catastrophic harm outpace our ability to reliably assess their risks. Current methods often rely on selective testing and undocumented assumptions about risk priorities, frequently failing to make a serious attempt at assessing the set of pathways through which Al systems pose direct or indirect risks to society and the biosphere. This paper introduces the probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) for AI framework, adapting established PRA techniques from high-reliability industries (e.g., nuclear power, aerospace) for the new challenges of advanced AI. The framework guides assessors in identifying potential risks, estimating likelihood and severity, and explicitly documenting evidence, underlying assumptions, and analyses at appropriate granularities. The framework's implementation tool synthesizes the results into a risk report card with aggregated risk estimates from all assessed risks. This systematic approach integrates three advances: (1) Aspect-oriented hazard analysis provides systematic hazard coverage guided by a first-principles taxonomy of AI system aspects (e.g. capabilities, domain knowledge, affordances); (2) Risk pathway modeling analyzes causal chains from system aspects to societal impacts using bidirectional analysis and incorporating prospective techniques; and (3) Uncertainty management employs scenario decomposition, reference scales, and explicit tracing protocols to structure credible projections with novelty or limited data. Additionally, the framework harmonizes diverse assessment methods by integrating evidence into comparable, quantified absolute risk estimates for critical decisions. We have implemented this as a workbook tool for AI developers, evaluators, and regulators, available on the project website.
Authors: Hauke Sandhaus, Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang, Wendy Ju, Qian Yang
Abstract: Safety-critical data, such as crash and near-crash records, are crucial to improving autonomous vehicle (AV) design and development. Sharing such data across AV companies, academic researchers, regulators, and the public can help make all AVs safer. However, AV companies rarely share safety-critical data externally. This paper aims to pinpoint why AV companies are reluctant to share safety-critical data, with an eye on how these barriers can inform new approaches to promote sharing. We interviewed twelve AV company employees who actively work with such data in their day-to-day work. Findings suggest two key, previously unknown barriers to data sharing: (1) Datasets inherently embed salient knowledge that is key to improving AV safety and are resource-intensive. Therefore, data sharing, even within a company, is fraught with politics. (2) Interviewees believed AV safety knowledge is private knowledge that brings competitive edges to their companies, rather than public knowledge for social good. We discuss the implications of these findings for incentivizing and enabling safety-critical AV data sharing, specifically, implications for new approaches to (1) debating and stratifying public and private AV safety knowledge, (2) innovating data tools and data sharing pipelines that enable easier sharing of public AV safety data and knowledge; (3) offsetting costs of curating safety-critical data and incentivizing data sharing.
Authors: S. L. Thomson, M. W. Przewozniczek
Abstract: Local optima networks (LONs) capture fitness landscape information. They are typically constructed in a black-box manner; information about the problem structure is not utilised. This also applies to the analysis of LONs: knowledge about the problem, such as interaction between variables, is not considered. We challenge this status-quo with an alternative approach: we consider how LON analysis can be improved by incorporating subfunction-based information - this can either be known a-priori or learned during search. To this end, LONs are constructed for several benchmark pseudo-boolean problems using three approaches: firstly, the standard algorithm; a second algorithm which uses deterministic grey-box crossover; and a third algorithm which selects perturbations based on learned information about variable interactions. Metrics related to subfunction changes in a LON are proposed and compared with metrics from previous literature which capture other aspects of a LON. Incorporating problem structure in LON construction and analysing it can bring enriched insight into optimisation dynamics. Such information may be crucial to understanding the difficulty of solving a given problem with state-of-the-art linkage learning optimisers. In light of the results, we suggest incorporation of problem structure as an alternative paradigm in landscape analysis for problems with known or suspected subfunction structure.
Authors: Xufeng Yao, Jiaxi Jiang, Yuxuan Zhao, Peiyu Liao, Yibo Lin, Bei Yu
Abstract: Optimization algorithms are widely employed to tackle complex problems, but designing them manually is often labor-intensive and requires significant expertise. Global placement is a fundamental step in electronic design automation (EDA). While analytical approaches represent the state-of-the-art (SOTA) in global placement, their core optimization algorithms remain heavily dependent on heuristics and customized components, such as initialization strategies, preconditioning methods, and line search techniques. This paper presents an automated framework that leverages large language models (LLM) to evolve optimization algorithms for global placement. We first generate diverse candidate algorithms using LLM through carefully crafted prompts. Then we introduce an LLM-based genetic flow to evolve selected candidate algorithms. The discovered optimization algorithms exhibit substantial performance improvements across many benchmarks. Specifically, Our design-case-specific discovered algorithms achieve average HPWL improvements of \textbf{5.05\%}, \text{5.29\%} and \textbf{8.30\%} on MMS, ISPD2005 and ISPD2019 benchmarks, and up to \textbf{17\%} improvements on individual cases. Additionally, the discovered algorithms demonstrate good generalization ability and are complementary to existing parameter-tuning methods.
Authors: Tri Nguyen, Kelly Cohen
Abstract: This paper explores the application of genetic fuzzy systems to efficiently generate schedules for a team of part-time student workers at a university. Given the preferred number of working hours and availability of employees, our model generates feasible solutions considering various factors, such as maximum weekly hours, required number of workers on duty, and the preferred number of working hours. The algorithm is trained and tested with availability data collected from students at the University of Cincinnati. The results demonstrate the algorithm's efficiency in producing schedules that meet operational criteria and its robustness in understaffed conditions.
Authors: Ze Yang, Yihong Jin, Juntian Liu, Xinhe Xu, Yihan Zhang, Shuyang Ji
Abstract: The rapidly evolving cloud platforms and the escalating complexity of network traffic demand proper network traffic monitoring and anomaly detection to ensure network security and performance. This paper introduces a large language model (LLM)-based network traffic monitoring and anomaly detection system. In addition to existing models such as autoencoders and decision trees, we harness the power of large language models for processing sequence data from network traffic, which allows us a better capture of underlying complex patterns, as well as slight fluctuations in the dataset. We show for a given detection task, the need for a hybrid model that incorporates the attention mechanism of the transformer architecture into a supervised learning framework in order to achieve better accuracy. A pre-trained large language model analyzes and predicts the probable network traffic, and an anomaly detection layer that considers temporality and context is added. Moreover, we present a novel transfer learning-based methodology to enhance the model's effectiveness to quickly adapt to unknown network structures and adversarial conditions without requiring extensive labeled datasets. Actual results show that the designed model outperforms traditional methods in detection accuracy and computational efficiency, effectively identify various network anomalies such as zero-day attacks and traffic congestion pattern, and significantly reduce the false positive rate.
Authors: Wenwen Li, Chia-Yu Hsu, Sizhe Wang, Zhining Gu, Yili Yang, Brendan M. Rogers, Anna Liljedahl
Abstract: Retrogressive Thaw Slumps (RTS) in Arctic regions are distinct permafrost landforms with significant environmental impacts. Mapping these RTS is crucial because their appearance serves as a clear indication of permafrost thaw. However, their small scale compared to other landform features, vague boundaries, and spatiotemporal variation pose significant challenges for accurate detection. In this paper, we employed a state-of-the-art deep learning model, the Cascade Mask R-CNN with a multi-scale vision transformer-based backbone, to delineate RTS features across the Arctic. Two new strategies were introduced to optimize multimodal learning and enhance the model's predictive performance: (1) a feature-level, residual cross-modality attention fusion strategy, which effectively integrates feature maps from multiple modalities to capture complementary information and improve the model's ability to understand complex patterns and relationships within the data; (2) pre-trained unimodal learning followed by multimodal fine-tuning to alleviate high computing demand while achieving strong model performance. Experimental results demonstrated that our approach outperformed existing models adopting data-level fusion, feature-level convolutional fusion, and various attention fusion strategies, providing valuable insights into the efficient utilization of multimodal data for RTS mapping. This research contributes to our understanding of permafrost landforms and their environmental implications.
Authors: Darcy Kim, Aida Kalender, Sennay Ghebreab, Giovanni Sileno
Abstract: While analysing challenges in pilot projects developing AI with marginalized communities, we found it difficult to express them within commonly used paradigms. We therefore constructed an alternative conceptual framework to ground AI development in the social fabric -- the Cloud Weaving Model -- inspired (amongst others) by indigenous knowledge, motifs from nature, and Eastern traditions. This paper introduces and elaborates on the fundamental elements of the model (clouds, spiders, threads, spiderwebs, and weather) and their interpretation in an AI context. The framework is then applied to comprehend patterns observed in co-creation pilots approaching marginalized communities, highlighting neglected yet relevant dimensions for responsible AI development.
Authors: Yibin Wang, Jiaxi Xie, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian
Abstract: The prevalence of Large Language Models (LLMs) is revolutionizing the process of writing code. General and code LLMs have shown impressive performance in generating standalone functions and code-completion tasks with one-shot queries. However, the ability to solve comprehensive programming tasks with recursive requests and bug fixes remains questionable. In this paper, we propose EduBot, an intelligent automated assistant system that combines conceptual knowledge teaching, end-to-end code development, personalized programming through recursive prompt-driven methods, and debugging with limited human interventions powered by LLMs. We show that EduBot can solve complicated programming tasks consisting of sub-tasks with increasing difficulties ranging from conceptual to coding questions by recursive automatic prompt-driven systems without finetuning on LLMs themselves. To further evaluate EduBot's performance, we design and conduct a benchmark suite consisting of 20 scenarios in algorithms, machine learning, and real-world problems. The result shows that EduBot can complete most scenarios in less than 20 minutes. Based on the benchmark suites, we perform a comparative study to take different LLMs as the backbone and to verify EduBot's compatibility and robustness across LLMs with varying capabilities. We believe that EduBot is an exploratory approach to explore the potential of pre-trained LLMs in multi-step reasoning and code generation for solving personalized assignments with knowledge learning and code generation.
Authors: Dehong Kong, Fan Li, Zhixin Wang, Jiaqi Xu, Renjing Pei, Wenbo Li, WenQi Ren
Abstract: Recent state-of-the-art image restoration methods mostly adopt latent diffusion models with U-Net backbones, yet still facing challenges in achieving high-quality restoration due to their limited capabilities. Diffusion transformers (DiTs), like SD3, are emerging as a promising alternative because of their better quality with scalability. In this paper, we introduce DPIR (Dual Prompting Image Restoration), a novel image restoration method that effectivly extracts conditional information of low-quality images from multiple perspectives. Specifically, DPIR consits of two branches: a low-quality image conditioning branch and a dual prompting control branch. The first branch utilizes a lightweight module to incorporate image priors into the DiT with high efficiency. More importantly, we believe that in image restoration, textual description alone cannot fully capture its rich visual characteristics. Therefore, a dual prompting module is designed to provide DiT with additional visual cues, capturing both global context and local appearance. The extracted global-local visual prompts as extra conditional control, alongside textual prompts to form dual prompts, greatly enhance the quality of the restoration. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that DPIR delivers superior image restoration performance.
Authors: Kaicheng Pang, Xingxing Zou, Waikeung Wong
Abstract: Fashion styling and personalized recommendations are pivotal in modern retail, contributing substantial economic value in the fashion industry. With the advent of vision-language models (VLM), new opportunities have emerged to enhance retailing through natural language and visual interactions. This work proposes FashionM3, a multimodal, multitask, and multiround fashion assistant, built upon a VLM fine-tuned for fashion-specific tasks. It helps users discover satisfying outfits by offering multiple capabilities including personalized recommendation, alternative suggestion, product image generation, and virtual try-on simulation. Fine-tuned on the novel FashionRec dataset, comprising 331,124 multimodal dialogue samples across basic, personalized, and alternative recommendation tasks, FashionM3 delivers contextually personalized suggestions with iterative refinement through multiround interactions. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations, alongside user studies, demonstrate FashionM3's superior performance in recommendation effectiveness and practical value as a fashion assistant.
Authors: Bingye Zhou, Caiyang Yu
Abstract: Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has gained widespread attention for its transformative potential in deep learning model design. However, the vast and complex search space of NAS leads to significant computational and time costs. Neural Architecture Generation (NAG) addresses this by reframing NAS as a generation problem, enabling the precise generation of optimal architectures for specific tasks. Despite its promise, mainstream methods like diffusion models face limitations in global search capabilities and are still hindered by high computational and time demands. To overcome these challenges, we propose Evolutionary Diffusion-based Neural Architecture Generation (EDNAG), a novel approach that achieves efficient and training-free architecture generation. EDNAG leverages evolutionary algorithms to simulate the denoising process in diffusion models, using fitness to guide the transition from random Gaussian distributions to optimal architecture distributions. This approach combines the strengths of evolutionary strategies and diffusion models, enabling rapid and effective architecture generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EDNAG achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in architecture optimization, with an improvement in accuracy of up to 10.45%. Furthermore, it eliminates the need for time-consuming training and boosts inference speed by an average of 50 times, showcasing its exceptional efficiency and effectiveness.
Authors: Bozheng Li, Yongliang Wu, Yi Lu, Jiashuo Yu, Licheng Tang, Jiawang Cao, Wenqing Zhu, Yuyang Sun, Jay Wu, Wenbo Zhu
Abstract: Widely shared videos on the internet are often edited. Recently, although Video Large Language Models (Vid-LLMs) have made great progress in general video understanding tasks, their capabilities in video editing understanding (VEU) tasks remain unexplored. To address this gap, in this paper, we introduce VEU-Bench (Video Editing Understanding Benchmark), a comprehensive benchmark that categorizes video editing components across various dimensions, from intra-frame features like shot size to inter-shot attributes such as cut types and transitions. Unlike previous video editing understanding benchmarks that focus mainly on editing element classification, VEU-Bench encompasses 19 fine-grained tasks across three stages: recognition, reasoning, and judging. To enhance the annotation of VEU automatically, we built an annotation pipeline integrated with an ontology-based knowledge base. Through extensive experiments with 11 state-of-the-art Vid-LLMs, our findings reveal that current Vid-LLMs face significant challenges in VEU tasks, with some performing worse than random choice. To alleviate this issue, we develop Oscars, a VEU expert model fine-tuned on the curated VEU-Bench dataset. It outperforms existing open-source Vid-LLMs on VEU-Bench by over 28.3% in accuracy and achieves performance comparable to commercial models like GPT-4o. We also demonstrate that incorporating VEU data significantly enhances the performance of Vid-LLMs on general video understanding benchmarks, with an average improvement of 8.3% across nine reasoning tasks.
Authors: Vlad Vasilescu, Ana Neacsu, Daniela Faur
Abstract: Single-image dehazing is an important topic in remote sensing applications, enhancing the quality of acquired images and increasing object detection precision. However, the reliability of such structures has not been sufficiently analyzed, which poses them to the risk of imperceptible perturbations that can significantly hinder their performance. In this work, we show that state-of-the-art image-to-image dehazing transformers are susceptible to adversarial noise, with even 1 pixel change being able to decrease the PSNR by as much as 2.8 dB. Next, we propose two lightweight fine-tuning strategies aimed at increasing the robustness of pre-trained transformers. Our methods results in comparable clean performance, while significantly increasing the protection against adversarial data. We further present their applicability in two remote sensing scenarios, showcasing their robust behavior for out-of-distribution data. The source code for adversarial fine-tuning and attack algorithms can be found at github.com/Vladimirescu/RobustDehazing.
Authors: Xiao Huang, Zhengzhong Tu, Xinyue Ye, Michael Goodchild
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI), offering new capabilities in data processing, spatial analysis, and decision support. This paper examines the open-source paradigm's pivotal role in this transformation. While proprietary LLMs offer accessibility, they often limit the customization, interoperability, and transparency vital for specialized geospatial tasks. Conversely, open-source alternatives significantly advance Geographic Information Science (GIScience) by fostering greater adaptability, reproducibility, and community-driven innovation. Open frameworks empower researchers to tailor solutions, integrate cutting-edge methodologies (e.g., reinforcement learning, advanced spatial indexing), and align with FAIR principles. However, the growing reliance on any LLM necessitates careful consideration of security vulnerabilities, ethical risks, and robust governance for AI-generated geospatial outputs. Ongoing debates on accessibility, regulation, and misuse underscore the critical need for responsible AI development strategies. This paper argues that GIScience advances best not through a single model type, but by cultivating a diverse, interoperable ecosystem combining open-source foundations for innovation, bespoke geospatial models, and interdisciplinary collaboration. By critically evaluating the opportunities and challenges of open-source LLMs within the broader GeoAI landscape, this work contributes to a nuanced discourse on leveraging AI to effectively advance spatial research, policy, and decision-making in an equitable, sustainable, and scientifically rigorous manner.
Authors: Bernhard Jaeger, Daniel Dauner, Jens Bei{\ss}wenger, Simon Gerstenecker, Kashyap Chitta, Andreas Geiger
Abstract: We investigate reinforcement learning (RL) for privileged planning in autonomous driving. State-of-the-art approaches for this task are rule-based, but these methods do not scale to the long tail. RL, on the other hand, is scalable and does not suffer from compounding errors like imitation learning. Contemporary RL approaches for driving use complex shaped rewards that sum multiple individual rewards, \eg~progress, position, or orientation rewards. We show that PPO fails to optimize a popular version of these rewards when the mini-batch size is increased, which limits the scalability of these approaches. Instead, we propose a new reward design based primarily on optimizing a single intuitive reward term: route completion. Infractions are penalized by terminating the episode or multiplicatively reducing route completion. We find that PPO scales well with higher mini-batch sizes when trained with our simple reward, even improving performance. Training with large mini-batch sizes enables efficient scaling via distributed data parallelism. We scale PPO to 300M samples in CARLA and 500M samples in nuPlan with a single 8-GPU node. The resulting model achieves 64 DS on the CARLA longest6 v2 benchmark, outperforming other RL methods with more complex rewards by a large margin. Requiring only minimal adaptations from its use in CARLA, the same method is the best learning-based approach on nuPlan. It scores 91.3 in non-reactive and 90.6 in reactive traffic on the Val14 benchmark while being an order of magnitude faster than prior work.
Authors: Max Muchen Sun, Allison Pinosky, Todd Murphey
Abstract: Ergodic coverage effectively generates exploratory behaviors for embodied agents by aligning the spatial distribution of the agent's trajectory with a target distribution, where the difference between these two distributions is measured by the ergodic metric. However, existing ergodic coverage methods are constrained by the limited set of ergodic metrics available for control synthesis, fundamentally limiting their performance. In this work, we propose an alternative approach to ergodic coverage based on flow matching, a technique widely used in generative inference for efficient and scalable sampling. We formally derive the flow matching problem for ergodic coverage and show that it is equivalent to a linear quadratic regulator problem with a closed-form solution. Our formulation enables alternative ergodic metrics from generative inference that overcome the limitations of existing ones. These metrics were previously infeasible for control synthesis but can now be supported with no computational overhead. Specifically, flow matching with the Stein variational gradient flow enables control synthesis directly over the score function of the target distribution, improving robustness to the unnormalized distributions; on the other hand, flow matching with the Sinkhorn divergence flow enables an optimal transport-based ergodic metric, improving coverage performance on non-smooth distributions with irregular supports. We validate the improved performance and competitive computational efficiency of our method through comprehensive numerical benchmarks and across different nonlinear dynamics. We further demonstrate the practicality of our method through a series of drawing and erasing tasks on a Franka robot.
Authors: Xu Wang, Yiquan Wang, Tin-yeh Huang
Abstract: In the looming post-quantum era, traditional cryptographic systems are increasingly vulnerable to quantum computing attacks that can compromise their mathematical foundations. To address this critical challenge, we propose crypto-ncRNA-a bio-convergent cryptographic framework that leverages the dynamic folding properties of non-coding RNA (ncRNA) to generate high-entropy, quantum-resistant keys and produce unpredictable ciphertexts. The framework employs a novel, multi-stage process: encoding plaintext into RNA sequences, predicting and manipulating RNA secondary structures using advanced algorithms, and deriving cryptographic keys through the intrinsic physical unclonability of RNA molecules. Experimental evaluations indicate that, although crypto-ncRNA's encryption speed is marginally lower than that of AES, it significantly outperforms RSA in terms of efficiency and scalability while achieving a 100% pass rate on the NIST SP 800-22 randomness tests. These results demonstrate that crypto-ncRNA offers a promising and robust approach for securing digital infrastructures against the evolving threats posed by quantum computing.
Authors: Yasmine Omri, Parth Shroff, Thierry Tambe
Abstract: The exponential growth of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has driven advancements in cross-modal reasoning but at significant computational costs. In this work, we focus on visual language models. We highlight the redundancy and inefficiency in current vision encoders, and seek to construct an adaptive compression method for multimodal data. In this work, we characterize a panoply of visual token selection and merging approaches through both benchmarking and qualitative analysis. In particular, we demonstrate that simple cluster-level token aggregation outperforms prior state-of-the-art works in token selection and merging, including merging at the vision encoder level and attention-based approaches. We underline the redundancy in current vision encoders, and shed light on several puzzling trends regarding principles of visual token selection through cross-modal attention visualizations. This work is a first effort towards more effective encoding and processing of high-dimensional data, and paves the way for more scalable and sustainable multimodal systems.
Authors: Benned Hedegaard, Ziyi Yang, Yichen Wei, Ahmed Jaafar, Stefanie Tellex, George Konidaris, Naman Shah
Abstract: Task and motion planning is a well-established approach for solving long-horizon robot planning problems. However, traditional methods assume that each task-level robot action, or skill, can be reduced to kinematic motion planning. In this work, we address the challenge of planning with both kinematic skills and closed-loop motor controllers that go beyond kinematic considerations. We propose a novel method that integrates these controllers into motion planning using Composable Interaction Primitives (CIPs), enabling the use of diverse, non-composable pre-learned skills in hierarchical robot planning. Toward validating our Task and Skill Planning (TASP) approach, we describe ongoing robot experiments in real-world scenarios designed to demonstrate how CIPs can allow a mobile manipulator robot to effectively combine motion planning with general-purpose skills to accomplish complex tasks.
Authors: Mateo Espinosa Zarlenga, Gabriele Dominici, Pietro Barbiero, Zohreh Shams, Mateja Jamnik
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate how concept-based models (CMs) respond to out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. CMs are interpretable neural architectures that first predict a set of high-level concepts (e.g., stripes, black) and then predict a task label from those concepts. In particular, we study the impact of concept interventions (i.e., operations where a human expert corrects a CM's mispredicted concepts at test time) on CMs' task predictions when inputs are OOD. Our analysis reveals a weakness in current state-of-the-art CMs, which we term leakage poisoning, that prevents them from properly improving their accuracy when intervened on for OOD inputs. To address this, we introduce MixCEM, a new CM that learns to dynamically exploit leaked information missing from its concepts only when this information is in-distribution. Our results across tasks with and without complete sets of concept annotations demonstrate that MixCEMs outperform strong baselines by significantly improving their accuracy for both in-distribution and OOD samples in the presence and absence of concept interventions.
Authors: Celia Chen, Alex Leitch
Abstract: This paper examines how graduate students develop frameworks for evaluating machine-generated expertise in web-based interactions with large language models (LLMs). Through a qualitative study combining surveys, LLM interaction transcripts, and in-depth interviews with 14 graduate students, we identify patterns in how these emerging professionals assess and engage with AI-generated content. Our findings reveal that students construct evaluation frameworks shaped by three main factors: professional identity, verification capabilities, and system navigation experience. Rather than uniformly accepting or rejecting LLM outputs, students protect domains central to their professional identities while delegating others--with managers preserving conceptual work, designers safeguarding creative processes, and programmers maintaining control over core technical expertise. These evaluation frameworks are further influenced by students' ability to verify different types of content and their experience navigating complex systems. This research contributes to web science by highlighting emerging human-genAI interaction patterns and suggesting how platforms might better support users in developing effective frameworks for evaluating machine-generated expertise signals in AI-mediated web environments.
Authors: Kaaustaaub Shankar, Wilhelm Louw, Bharadwaj Dogga, Nick Ernest, Tim Arnett, Kelly Cohen
Abstract: AI-driven semi-autonomous robotic surgery is essential for addressing the medical challenges of long-duration interplanetary missions, where limited crew sizes and communication delays restrict traditional surgical approaches. Current robotic surgery systems require full surgeon control, demanding extensive expertise and limiting feasibility in space. We propose a novel adaptation of the Fuzzy Rapidly-exploring Random Tree algorithm for obstacle avoidance and collaborative control in a two-degree-of-freedom robotic arm modeled on the Miniaturized Robotic-Assisted surgical system. It was found that the Fuzzy Rapidly-exploring Random Tree algorithm resulted in an 743 percent improvement to path search time and 43 percent improvement to path cost.
Authors: Zilin Huang, Zihao Sheng, Zhengyang Wan, Yansong Qu, Yuhao Luo, Boyue Wang, Pei Li, Yen-Jung Chen, Jiancong Chen, Keke Long, Jiayi Meng, Yue Leng, Sikai Chen
Abstract: Recent advances in autonomous system simulation platforms have significantly enhanced the safe and scalable testing of driving policies. However, existing simulators do not yet fully meet the needs of future transportation research, particularly in modeling socially-aware driving agents and enabling effective human-AI collaboration. This paper introduces Sky-Drive, a novel distributed multi-agent simulation platform that addresses these limitations through four key innovations: (a) a distributed architecture for synchronized simulation across multiple terminals; (b) a multi-modal human-in-the-loop framework integrating diverse sensors to collect rich behavioral data; (c) a human-AI collaboration mechanism supporting continuous and adaptive knowledge exchange; and (d) a digital twin (DT) framework for constructing high-fidelity virtual replicas of real-world transportation environments. Sky-Drive supports diverse applications such as autonomous vehicle (AV)-vulnerable road user (VRU) interaction modeling, human-in-the-loop training, socially-aware reinforcement learning, personalized driving policy, and customized scenario generation. Future extensions will incorporate foundation models for context-aware decision support and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing for real-world validation. By bridging scenario generation, data collection, algorithm training, and hardware integration, Sky-Drive has the potential to become a foundational platform for the next generation of socially-aware and human-centered autonomous transportation research. The demo video and code are available at:https://sky-lab-uw.github.io/Sky-Drive-website/
Authors: Zhuang Yu, Shiliang Sun, Jing Zhao, Tengfei Song, Hao Yang
Abstract: Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) aims to improve translation quality by leveraging auxiliary modalities such as images alongside textual input. While recent advances in large-scale pre-trained language and vision models have significantly benefited unimodal natural language processing tasks, their effectiveness and role in MMT remain underexplored. In this work, we conduct a systematic study on the impact of pre-trained encoders and decoders in multimodal translation models. Specifically, we analyze how different training strategies, from training from scratch to using pre-trained and partially frozen components, affect translation performance under a unified MMT framework. Experiments are carried out on the Multi30K and CoMMuTE dataset across English-German and English-French translation tasks. Our results reveal that pre-training plays a crucial yet asymmetrical role in multimodal settings: pre-trained decoders consistently yield more fluent and accurate outputs, while pre-trained encoders show varied effects depending on the quality of visual-text alignment. Furthermore, we provide insights into the interplay between modality fusion and pre-trained components, offering guidance for future architecture design in multimodal translation systems.
Authors: Emiliano Penaloza, Tianyue H. Zhan, Laurent Charlin, Mateo Espinosa Zarlenga
Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) propose to enhance the trustworthiness of AI systems by constraining their decisions on a set of human understandable concepts. However, CBMs typically assume that datasets contains accurate concept labels an assumption often violated in practice, which we show can significantly degrade performance (by 25% in some cases). To address this, we introduce the Concept Preference Optimization (CPO) objective, a new loss function based on Direct Preference Optimization, which effectively mitigates the negative impact of concept mislabeling on CBM performance. We provide an analysis on some key properties of the CPO objective showing it directly optimizes for the concept's posterior distribution, and contrast it against Binary Cross Entropy (BCE) where we show CPO is inherently less sensitive to concept noise. We empirically confirm our analysis finding that CPO consistently outperforms BCE in three real world datasets with and without added label noise.
Authors: Zezhou Chen, Zhaoxiang Liu, Kai Wang, Kohou Wang, Shiguo Lian
Abstract: It is a challenging task for visually impaired people to perceive their surrounding environment due to the complexity of the natural scenes. Their personal and social activities are thus highly limited. This paper introduces a Large Vision-Language Model(LVLM) based environment perception system which helps them to better understand the surrounding environment, by capturing the current scene they face with a wearable device, and then letting them retrieve the analysis results through the device. The visually impaired people could acquire a global description of the scene by long pressing the screen to activate the LVLM output, retrieve the categories of the objects in the scene resulting from a segmentation model by tapping or swiping the screen, and get a detailed description of the objects they are interested in by double-tapping the screen. To help visually impaired people more accurately perceive the world, this paper proposes incorporating the segmentation result of the RGB image as external knowledge into the input of LVLM to reduce the LVLM's hallucination. Technical experiments on POPE, MME and LLaVA-QA90 show that the system could provide a more accurate description of the scene compared to Qwen-VL-Chat, exploratory experiments show that the system helps visually impaired people to perceive the surrounding environment effectively.
Authors: Bang An, Shiyue Zhang, Mark Dredze
Abstract: Efforts to ensure the safety of large language models (LLMs) include safety fine-tuning, evaluation, and red teaming. However, despite the widespread use of the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, AI safety work focuses on standard LLMs, which means we know little about how RAG use cases change a model's safety profile. We conduct a detailed comparative analysis of RAG and non-RAG frameworks with eleven LLMs. We find that RAG can make models less safe and change their safety profile. We explore the causes of this change and find that even combinations of safe models with safe documents can cause unsafe generations. In addition, we evaluate some existing red teaming methods for RAG settings and show that they are less effective than when used for non-RAG settings. Our work highlights the need for safety research and red-teaming methods specifically tailored for RAG LLMs.
Authors: Omid Veisi, Sasan Bahrami, Roman Englert, Claudia M\"uller
Abstract: Using LLMs in healthcare, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Social Computing requires the examination of ethical and social norms to ensure safe incorporation into human life. We conducted a mixed-method study, including an online survey with 111 participants and an interview study with 38 experts, to investigate the AI ethics and social norms in ChatGPT as everyday life tools. This study aims to evaluate whether ChatGPT in an empirical context operates following ethics and social norms, which is critical for understanding actions in industrial and academic research and achieving machine ethics. The findings of this study provide initial insights into six important aspects of AI ethics, including bias, trustworthiness, security, toxicology, social norms, and ethical data. Significant obstacles related to transparency and bias in unsupervised data collection methods are identified as ChatGPT's ethical concerns.
Authors: Guohao Huo, Zibo Lin, Zitong Wang, Ruiting Dai, Hao Tang
Abstract: Ophthalmic diseases pose a significant global health challenge, yet traditional diagnosis methods and existing single-eye deep learning approaches often fail to account for binocular pathological correlations. To address this, we propose DMS-Net, a dual-modal multi-scale Siamese network for binocular fundus image classification. Our framework leverages weight-shared Siamese ResNet-152 backbones to extract deep semantic features from paired fundus images. To tackle challenges such as lesion boundary ambiguity and scattered pathological distributions, we introduce a Multi-Scale Context-Aware Module (MSCAM) that integrates adaptive pooling and attention mechanisms for multi-resolution feature aggregation. Additionally, a Dual-Modal Feature Fusion (DMFF) module enhances cross-modal interaction through spatial-semantic recalibration and bidirectional attention, effectively combining global context and local edge features. Evaluated on the ODIR-5K dataset, DMS-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance with 80.5% accuracy, 86.1% recall, and 83.8% Cohen's kappa, demonstrating superior capability in detecting symmetric pathologies and advancing clinical decision-making for ocular diseases.
Authors: Xin Li, Wenhui Zhu, Peijie Qiu, Oana M. Dumitrascu, Amal Youssef, Yalin Wang
Abstract: In the field of medical imaging, the advent of deep learning, especially the application of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has revolutionized the analysis and interpretation of medical images. Nevertheless, deep learning methods usually rely on large amounts of labeled data. In medical imaging research, the acquisition of high-quality labels is both expensive and difficult. The introduction of Vision Transformers (ViT) and self-supervised learning provides a pre-training strategy that utilizes abundant unlabeled data, effectively alleviating the label acquisition challenge while broadening the breadth of data utilization. However, ViT's high computational density and substantial demand for computing power, coupled with the lack of localization characteristics of its operations on image patches, limit its efficiency and applicability in many application scenarios. In this study, we employ nn-MobileNet, a lightweight CNN framework, to implement a BERT-style self-supervised learning approach. We pre-train the network on the unlabeled retinal fundus images from the UK Biobank to improve downstream application performance. We validate the results of the pre-trained model on Alzheimer's disease (AD), Parkinson's disease (PD), and various retinal diseases identification. The results show that our approach can significantly improve performance in the downstream tasks. In summary, this study combines the benefits of CNNs with the capabilities of advanced self-supervised learning in handling large-scale unlabeled data, demonstrating the potential of CNNs in the presence of label scarcity.
Authors: Mingwei Zheng, Danning Xie, Qingkai Shi, Chengpeng Wang, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract: Validating the correctness of network protocol implementations is highly challenging due to the oracle and traceability problems. The former determines when a protocol implementation can be considered buggy, especially when the bugs do not cause any observable symptoms. The latter allows developers to understand how an implementation violates the protocol specification, thereby facilitating bug fixes. Unlike existing works that rarely take both problems into account, this work considers both and provides an effective solution using recent advances in large language models (LLMs). Our key observation is that network protocols are often released with structured specification documents, a.k.a. RFC documents, which can be systematically translated to formal protocol message specifications via LLMs. Such specifications, which may contain errors due to the hallucination of LLMs, are used as a quasi-oracle to validate protocol parsers, while the validation results in return gradually refine the oracle. Since the oracle is derived from the document, any bugs we find in a protocol implementation can be traced back to the document, thus addressing the traceability problem. We have extensively evaluated our approach using nine network protocols and their implementations written in C, Python, and Go. The results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art and has detected 69 bugs, with 36 confirmed. The project also demonstrates the potential for fully automating software validation based on natural language specifications, a process previously considered predominantly manual due to the need to understand specification documents and derive expected outputs for test inputs.
Authors: Jiayi Chen, Shuai Wang, Guoliang Li, Wei Xu, Guangxu Zhu, Derrick Wing Kwan Ng, Chengzhong Xu
Abstract: Navigating autonomous vehicles in open scenarios is a challenge due to the difficulties in handling unseen objects. Existing solutions either rely on small models that struggle with generalization or large models that are resource-intensive. While collaboration between the two offers a promising solution, the key challenge is deciding when and how to engage the large model. To address this issue, this paper proposes opportunistic collaborative planning (OCP), which seamlessly integrates efficient local models with powerful cloud models through two key innovations. First, we propose large vision model guided model predictive control (LVM-MPC), which leverages the cloud for LVM perception and decision making. The cloud output serves as a global guidance for a local MPC, thereby forming a closed-loop perception-to-control system. Second, to determine the best timing for large model query and service, we propose collaboration timing optimization (CTO), including object detection confidence thresholding (ODCT) and cloud forward simulation (CFS), to decide when to seek cloud assistance and when to offer cloud service. Extensive experiments show that the proposed OCP outperforms existing methods in terms of both navigation time and success rate.
Authors: Sijia Cheng, Wen-Yu Chang, Yun-Nung Chen
Abstract: The integration of dialogue agents into the sales domain requires a deep understanding of how these systems interact with users possessing diverse personas. This study explores the influence of user personas, defined using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), on the interaction quality and performance of sales-oriented dialogue agents. Through large-scale testing and analysis, we assess the pre-trained agent's effectiveness, adaptability, and personalization capabilities across a wide range of MBTI-defined user types. Our findings reveal significant patterns in interaction dynamics, task completion rates, and dialogue naturalness, underscoring the future potential for dialogue agents to refine their strategies to better align with varying personality traits. This work not only provides actionable insights for building more adaptive and user-centric conversational systems in the sales domain but also contributes broadly to the field by releasing persona-defined user simulators. These simulators, unconstrained by domain, offer valuable tools for future research and demonstrate the potential for scaling personalized dialogue systems across diverse applications.
Authors: Lingyan Bao, Sinwoong Yun, Jemin Lee, Tony Q. S. Quek
Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to a significant interest in deploying LLMempowered algorithms for wireless communication networks. Meanwhile, open radio access network (O-RAN) techniques offer unprecedented flexibility, with the non-real-time (non-RT) radio access network (RAN) intelligent controller (RIC) (non-RT RIC) and near-real-time (near-RT) RIC (near-RT RIC) components enabling intelligent resource management across different time scales. In this paper, we propose the LLM empowered hierarchical RIC (LLM-hRIC) framework to improve the collaboration between RICs. This framework integrates LLMs with reinforcement learning (RL) for efficient network resource management. In this framework, LLMs-empowered non-RT RICs provide strategic guidance and high-level policies based on environmental context. Concurrently, RL-empowered near-RT RICs perform low-latency tasks based on strategic guidance and local near-RT observation. We evaluate the LLM-hRIC framework in an integrated access and backhaul (IAB) network setting. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves superior performance. Finally, we discuss the key future challenges in applying LLMs to O-RAN.
Authors: Zhuohao Yan, Shaoquan Feng, Xingxing Li, Yuxuan Zhou, Chunxi Xia, Shengyu Li
Abstract: Accurate and reliable multi-object tracking (MOT) in 3D space is essential for advancing robotics and computer vision applications. However, it remains a significant challenge in monocular setups due to the difficulty of mining 3D spatiotemporal associations from 2D video streams. In this work, we present three innovative techniques to enhance the fusion and exploitation of heterogeneous cues for monocular 3D MOT: (1) we introduce the Hungarian State Space Model (HSSM), a novel data association mechanism that compresses contextual tracking cues across multiple paths, enabling efficient and comprehensive assignment decisions with linear complexity. HSSM features a global receptive field and dynamic weights, in contrast to traditional linear assignment algorithms that rely on hand-crafted association costs. (2) We propose Fully Convolutional One-stage Embedding (FCOE), which eliminates ROI pooling by directly using dense feature maps for contrastive learning, thus improving object re-identification accuracy under challenging conditions such as varying viewpoints and lighting. (3) We enhance 6-DoF pose estimation through VeloSSM, an encoder-decoder architecture that models temporal dependencies in velocity to capture motion dynamics, overcoming the limitations of frame-based 3D inference. Experiments on the KITTI public test benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving a new state-of-the-art performance of 76.86~HOTA at 31~FPS. Our approach outperforms the previous best by significant margins of +2.63~HOTA and +3.62~AssA, showcasing its robustness and efficiency for monocular 3D MOT tasks. The code and models are available at https://github.com/bytepioneerX/s3mot.
Authors: Jingjin Wang
Abstract: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the standard non-parametric approach for equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with up-to-date knowledge and mitigating catastrophic forgetting common in continual learning. However, standard RAG, relying on independent passage retrieval, fails to capture the interconnected nature of human memory crucial for complex reasoning (associativity) and contextual understanding (sense-making). While structured RAG methods like HippoRAG utilize knowledge graphs (KGs) built from triples, the inherent context loss limits fidelity. We introduce PropRAG, a framework leveraging contextually rich propositions and a novel beam search algorithm over proposition paths to explicitly discover multi-step reasoning chains. Crucially, PropRAG's online retrieval process operates entirely without invoking generative LLMs, relying instead on efficient graph traversal and pre-computed embeddings. This avoids online LLM inference costs and potential inconsistencies during evidence gathering. LLMs are used effectively offline for high-quality proposition extraction and post-retrieval for answer generation. PropRAG achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot Recall@5 results on PopQA (55.3%), 2Wiki (93.7%), HotpotQA (97.0%), and MuSiQue (77.3%), alongside top F1 scores (e.g., 52.4% on MuSiQue). By improving evidence retrieval through richer representation and explicit, LLM-free online path finding, PropRAG advances non-parametric continual learning.
Authors: Xiaolu Chen, Chenghao Huang, Yanru Zhang, Hao Wang
Abstract: The rapid expansion of distributed photovoltaic (PV) installations worldwide, many being behind-the-meter systems, has significantly challenged energy management and grid operations, as unobservable PV generation further complicates the supply-demand balance. Therefore, estimating this generation from net load, known as PV disaggregation, is critical. Given privacy concerns and the need for large training datasets, federated learning becomes a promising approach, but statistical heterogeneity, arising from geographical and behavioral variations among prosumers, poses new challenges to PV disaggregation. To overcome these challenges, a privacy-preserving distributed PV disaggregation framework is proposed using Personalized Federated Learning (PFL). The proposed method employs a two-level framework that combines local and global modeling. At the local level, a transformer-based PV disaggregation model is designed to generate solar irradiance embeddings for representing local PV conditions. A novel adaptive local aggregation mechanism is adopted to mitigate the impact of statistical heterogeneity on the local model, extracting a portion of global information that benefits the local model. At the global level, a central server aggregates information uploaded from multiple data centers, preserving privacy while enabling cross-center knowledge sharing. Experiments on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed framework, showing improved accuracy and robustness compared to benchmark methods.
Authors: Wataru Kawakami, Keita Suzuki, Junichiro Iwasawa
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential in medicine, yet clinical adoption is hindered by concerns over factual accuracy, language-specific limitations (e.g., Japanese), and critically, their reliability when required to generate reasoning explanations -- a prerequisite for trust. This paper introduces Preferred-MedLLM-Qwen-72B, a 72B-parameter model optimized for the Japanese medical domain to achieve both high accuracy and stable reasoning. We employ a two-stage fine-tuning process on the Qwen2.5-72B base model: first, Continued Pretraining (CPT) on a comprehensive Japanese medical corpus instills deep domain knowledge. Second, Reasoning Preference Optimization (RPO), a preference-based method, enhances the generation of reliable reasoning pathways while preserving high answer accuracy. Evaluations on the Japanese Medical Licensing Exam benchmark (IgakuQA) show Preferred-MedLLM-Qwen-72B achieves state-of-the-art performance (0.868 accuracy), surpassing strong proprietary models like GPT-4o (0.866). Crucially, unlike baseline or CPT-only models which exhibit significant accuracy degradation (up to 11.5\% and 3.8\% respectively on IgakuQA) when prompted for explanations, our model maintains its high accuracy (0.868) under such conditions. This highlights RPO's effectiveness in stabilizing reasoning generation. This work underscores the importance of optimizing for reliable explanations alongside accuracy. We release the Preferred-MedLLM-Qwen-72B model weights to foster research into trustworthy LLMs for specialized, high-stakes applications.
Authors: Vignesh Balaji, Christos Kozyrakis, Gal Chechik, Haggai Maron
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) enable learning on realworld graphs and mini-batch training has emerged as the de facto standard for training GNNs because it can scale to very large graphs and improve convergence. Current mini-batch construction policies largely ignore efficiency considerations of GNN training. Specifically, existing mini-batching techniques employ randomization schemes to improve accuracy and convergence. However, these randomization schemes are often agnostic to the structural properties of the graph (for eg. community structure), resulting in highly irregular memory access patterns during GNN training that make suboptimal use of on-chip GPU caches. On the other hand, while deterministic mini-batching based solely on graph structure delivers fast runtime performance, the lack of randomness compromises both the final model accuracy and training convergence speed. In this paper, we present Community-structure-aware Randomized Mini-batching (COMM-RAND), a novel methodology that bridges the gap between the above extremes. COMM-RAND allows practitioners to explore the space between pure randomness and pure graph structural awareness during mini-batch construction, leading to significantly more efficient GNN training with similar accuracy. We evaluated COMM-RAND across four popular graph learning benchmarks. COMM-RAND cuts down GNN training time by up to 2.76x (1.8x on average) while achieving an accuracy that is within 1.79% points (0.42% on average) compared to popular random mini-batching approaches.
Authors: Muhammad Mubashar, Shireen Kudukkil Manchingal, Fabio Cuzzolin
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to produce very high-quality tests and responses to our queries. But how much can we trust this generated text? In this paper, we study the problem of uncertainty quantification in LLMs. We propose a novel Random-Set Large Language Model (RSLLM) approach which predicts finite random sets (belief functions) over the token space, rather than probability vectors as in classical LLMs. In order to allow so efficiently, we also present a methodology based on hierarchical clustering to extract and use a budget of "focal" subsets of tokens upon which the belief prediction is defined, rather than using all possible collections of tokens, making the method scalable yet effective. RS-LLMs encode the epistemic uncertainty induced in their generation process by the size and diversity of its training set via the size of the credal sets associated with the predicted belief functions. The proposed approach is evaluated on CoQA and OBQA datasets using Llama2-7b, Mistral-7b and Phi-2 models and is shown to outperform the standard model in both datasets in terms of correctness of answer while also showing potential in estimating the second level uncertainty in its predictions and providing the capability to detect when its hallucinating.
Authors: Yinglong Yu, Hao Shen, Zhengyi Lyu, Qi He
Abstract: In response to the growing problem of misinformation in the context of globalization and informatization, this paper proposes a classification method for fact-check-worthiness estimation based on prompt tuning. We construct a model for fact-check-worthiness estimation at the methodological level using prompt tuning. By applying designed prompt templates to large language models, we establish in-context learning and leverage prompt tuning technology to improve the accuracy of determining whether claims have fact-check-worthiness, particularly when dealing with limited or unlabeled data. Through extensive experiments on public datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses or matches multiple baseline methods in the classification task of fact-check-worthiness estimation assessment, including classical pre-trained models such as BERT, as well as recent popular large models like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Experiments show that the prompt tuning-based method proposed in this study exhibits certain advantages in evaluation metrics such as F1 score and accuracy, thereby effectively validating its effectiveness and advancement in the task of fact-check-worthiness estimation.
Authors: Aniket Dixit, Muhammad Ibrahim Khan, Faizan Ahmed, James Brusey
Abstract: This paper introduces an approach for developing surrogate environments in reinforcement learning (RL) using the Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) algorithm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments in OpenAI Gym environments, particularly Mountain Car and Lunar Lander. Our results show that SINDy-based surrogate models can accurately capture the underlying dynamics of these environments while reducing computational costs by 20-35%. With only 75 interactions for Mountain Car and 1000 for Lunar Lander, we achieve state-wise correlations exceeding 0.997, with mean squared errors as low as 3.11e-06 for Mountain Car velocity and 1.42e-06 for LunarLander position. RL agents trained in these surrogate environments require fewer total steps (65,075 vs. 100,000 for Mountain Car and 801,000 vs. 1,000,000 for Lunar Lander) while achieving comparable performance to those trained in the original environments, exhibiting similar convergence patterns and final performance metrics. This work contributes to the field of model-based RL by providing an efficient method for generating accurate, interpretable surrogate environments.
Authors: Atharva Kulkarni, Yuan Zhang, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Xiou Ge, Bo-Hsiang Tseng, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Swabha Swayamdipta, Hong Yu
Abstract: Hallucinations pose a significant obstacle to the reliability and widespread adoption of language models, yet their accurate measurement remains a persistent challenge. While many task- and domain-specific metrics have been proposed to assess faithfulness and factuality concerns, the robustness and generalization of these metrics are still untested. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale empirical evaluation of 6 diverse sets of hallucination detection metrics across 4 datasets, 37 language models from 5 families, and 5 decoding methods. Our extensive investigation reveals concerning gaps in current hallucination evaluation: metrics often fail to align with human judgments, take an overtly myopic view of the problem, and show inconsistent gains with parameter scaling. Encouragingly, LLM-based evaluation, particularly with GPT-4, yields the best overall results, and mode-seeking decoding methods seem to reduce hallucinations, especially in knowledge-grounded settings. These findings underscore the need for more robust metrics to understand and quantify hallucinations, and better strategies to mitigate them.
Authors: Fida Ullah, Muhammad Ahmad, Muhammad Tayyab Zamir, Muhammad Arif, Grigori sidorov, Edgardo Manuel Felipe River\'on, Alexander Gelbukh
Abstract: Named Entity Recognition (NER) plays a pivotal role in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks by identifying and classifying named entities (NEs) from unstructured data into predefined categories such as person, organization, location, date, and time. While extensive research exists for high-resource languages and general domains, NER in Urdu particularly within domain-specific contexts like education remains significantly underexplored. This is Due to lack of annotated datasets for educational content which limits the ability of existing models to accurately identify entities such as academic roles, course names, and institutional terms, underscoring the urgent need for targeted resources in this domain. To the best of our knowledge, no dataset exists in the domain of the Urdu language for this purpose. To achieve this objective this study makes three key contributions. Firstly, we created a manually annotated dataset in the education domain, named EDU-NER-2025, which contains 13 unique most important entities related to education domain. Second, we describe our annotation process and guidelines in detail and discuss the challenges of labelling EDU-NER-2025 dataset. Third, we addressed and analyzed key linguistic challenges, such as morphological complexity and ambiguity, which are prevalent in formal Urdu texts.
Authors: Mathieu Petitbois, R\'emy Portelas, Sylvain Lamprier, Ludovic Denoyer
Abstract: Imitation Learning (IL) techniques aim to replicate human behaviors in specific tasks. While IL has gained prominence due to its effectiveness and efficiency, traditional methods often focus on datasets collected from experts to produce a single efficient policy. Recently, extensions have been proposed to handle datasets of diverse behaviors by mainly focusing on learning transition-level diverse policies or on performing entropy maximization at the trajectory level. While these methods may lead to diverse behaviors, they may not be sufficient to reproduce the actual diversity of demonstrations or to allow controlled trajectory generation. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a different method based on two key features: a) Temporal Consistency that ensures consistent behaviors across entire episodes and not just at the transition level as well as b) Controllability obtained by constructing a latent space of behaviors that allows users to selectively activate specific behaviors based on their requirements. We compare our approach to state-of-the-art methods over a diverse set of tasks and environments. Project page: https://mathieu-petitbois.github.io/projects/swr/
Authors: Michel Gokan Khan, Renan Guarese, Fabian Johnson, Xi Vincent Wang, Anders Bergman, Benjamin Edvinsson, Mario Romero, J\'er\'emy Vachier, Jan Kronqvist
Abstract: We introduce PerfCam, an open source Proof-of-Concept (PoC) digital twinning framework that combines camera and sensory data with 3D Gaussian Splatting and computer vision models for digital twinning, object tracking, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) extraction in industrial production lines. By utilizing 3D reconstruction and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), PerfCam offers a semi-automated approach to object tracking and spatial mapping, enabling digital twins that capture real-time KPIs such as availability, performance, Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), and rate of conveyor belts in the production line. We validate the effectiveness of PerfCam through a practical deployment within realistic test production lines in the pharmaceutical industry and contribute an openly published dataset to support further research and development in the field. The results demonstrate PerfCam's ability to deliver actionable insights through its precise digital twin capabilities, underscoring its value as an effective tool for developing usable digital twins in smart manufacturing environments and extracting operational analytics.
Authors: {\TH}\'orir Hrafn Har{\dh}arson, Hrafn Loftsson, Stef\'an \'Olafsson
Abstract: The integration of language models in the legal domain holds considerable promise for streamlining processes and improving efficiency in managing extensive workloads. However, the specialized terminology, nuanced language, and formal style of legal texts can present substantial challenges. This study examines whether preference-based training techniques, specifically Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback and Direct Preference Optimization, can enhance models' performance in generating Icelandic legal summaries that align with domain-specific language standards and user preferences. We compare models fine-tuned with preference training to those using conventional supervised learning. Results indicate that preference training improves the legal accuracy of generated summaries over standard fine-tuning but does not significantly enhance the overall quality of Icelandic language usage. Discrepancies between automated metrics and human evaluations further underscore the importance of qualitative assessment in developing language models for the legal domain.
Authors: Yin Tang, Jiankai Li, Hongyu Yang, Xuan Dong, Lifeng Fan, Weixin Li
Abstract: In an era where social media platforms abound, individuals frequently share images that offer insights into their intents and interests, impacting individual life quality and societal stability. Traditional computer vision tasks, such as object detection and semantic segmentation, focus on concrete visual representations, while intent recognition relies more on implicit visual clues. This poses challenges due to the wide variation and subjectivity of such clues, compounded by the problem of intra-class variety in conveying abstract concepts, e.g. "enjoy life". Existing methods seek to solve the problem by manually designing representative features or building prototypes for each class from global features. However, these methods still struggle to deal with the large visual diversity of each intent category. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach named Multi-grained Compositional visual Clue Learning (MCCL) to address these challenges for image intent recognition. Our method leverages the systematic compositionality of human cognition by breaking down intent recognition into visual clue composition and integrating multi-grained features. We adopt class-specific prototypes to alleviate data imbalance. We treat intent recognition as a multi-label classification problem, using a graph convolutional network to infuse prior knowledge through label embedding correlations. Demonstrated by a state-of-the-art performance on the Intentonomy and MDID datasets, our approach advances the accuracy of existing methods while also possessing good interpretability. Our work provides an attempt for future explorations in understanding complex and miscellaneous forms of human expression.
Authors: He Shanxuan, Lin Zuhong, Yu Bolun, Gao Xu, Long Biao, Yao Jingjing
Abstract: Accurate prediction of lithium-ion battery lifespan is vital for ensuring operational reliability and reducing maintenance costs in applications like electric vehicles and smart grids. This study presents a hybrid learning framework for precise battery lifespan prediction, integrating dynamic multi-source data fusion with a stacked ensemble (SE) modeling approach. By leveraging heterogeneous datasets from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE), MIT-Stanford-Toyota Research Institute (TRC), and nickel cobalt aluminum (NCA) chemistries, an entropy-based dynamic weighting mechanism mitigates variability across heterogeneous datasets. The SE model combines Ridge regression, long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, and eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), effectively capturing temporal dependencies and nonlinear degradation patterns. It achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.0058, root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.0092, and coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.9839, outperforming established baseline models with a 46.2% improvement in R2 and an 83.2% reduction in RMSE. Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) analysis identifies differential discharge capacity (Qdlin) and temperature of measurement (Temp_m) as critical aging indicators. This scalable, interpretable framework enhances battery health management, supporting optimized maintenance and safety across diverse energy storage systems, thereby contributing to improved battery health management in energy storage systems.
Authors: Petar Labura, Tomislav Antic, Tomislav Capuder
Abstract: The widespread integration of new technologies in low-voltage distribution networks on the consumer side creates the need for distribution system operators to perform advanced real-time calculations to estimate network conditions. In recent years, data-driven models based on machine learning and big data analysis have emerged for calculation purposes, leveraging the information available in large datasets obtained from smart meters and other advanced measurement infrastructure. However, existing data-driven algorithms do not take into account the quality of data collected from smart meters. They lack built-in anomaly detection mechanisms and fail to differentiate anomalies based on whether the value or context of anomalous data instances deviates from the norm. This paper focuses on methods for detecting and mitigating the impact of anomalies on the consumption of active and reactive power datasets. It proposes an anomaly detection framework based on the Isolation Forest machine learning algorithm and Fast Fourier Transform filtering that works in both the time and frequency domain and is unaffected by point anomalies or contextual anomalies of the power consumption data. The importance of integrating anomaly detection methods is demonstrated in the analysis important for distribution networks with a high share of smart meters.
Authors: Ritesh Goru, Shanay Mehta, Prateek Jain
Abstract: Training Large Language Models ( LLMs) to generate explicit reasoning before they produce an answer has been shown to improve their performance across various tasks such as mathematics and coding. However, fine-tuning LLMs on multi-turn reasoning datasets presents a unique challenge: LLMs must generate reasoning tokens that are excluded from subsequent inputs to the LLM. This discrepancy prevents us from processing an entire conversation in a single forward pass-an optimization readily available when we fine-tune on a multi-turn non-reasoning dataset. This paper proposes a novel approach that overcomes this limitation through response token duplication and a custom attention mask that enforces appropriate visibility constraints. Our approach significantly reduces the training time and allows efficient fine-tuning on multi-turn reasoning datasets.
Authors: Qinyu Chen, Chang Gao, Min Liu, Daniele Perrone, Yan Ru Pei, Zuowen Wang, Zhuo Zou, Shihang Tan, Tao Han, Guorui Lu, Zhen Xu, Junyuan Ding, Ziteng Wang, Zongwei Wu, Han Han, Yuliang Wu, Jinze Chen, Wei Zhai, Yang Cao, Zheng-jun Zha, Nuwan Bandara, Thivya Kandappu, Archan Misra, Xiaopeng Lin, Hongxiang Huang, Hongwei Ren, Bojun Cheng, Hoang M. Truong, Vinh-Thuan Ly, Huy G. Tran, Thuan-Phat Nguyen, Tram T. Doan
Abstract: This survey serves as a review for the 2025 Event-Based Eye Tracking Challenge organized as part of the 2025 CVPR event-based vision workshop. This challenge focuses on the task of predicting the pupil center by processing event camera recorded eye movement. We review and summarize the innovative methods from teams rank the top in the challenge to advance future event-based eye tracking research. In each method, accuracy, model size, and number of operations are reported. In this survey, we also discuss event-based eye tracking from the perspective of hardware design.
Authors: Amirhossein Zhalehmehrabi, Daniele Meli, Francesco Dal Santo, Francesco Trotti, Alessandro Farinelli
Abstract: Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) play a crucial role in maritime operations, yet their navigation in shallow-water environments remains challenging due to dynamic disturbances and depth constraints. Traditional navigation strategies struggle with limited sensor information, making safe and efficient operation difficult. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for ASV navigation under depth constraints, where the vehicle must reach a target while avoiding unsafe areas with only a single depth measurement per timestep from a downward-facing Single Beam Echosounder (SBES). To enhance environmental awareness, we integrate Gaussian Process (GP) regression into the RL framework, enabling the agent to progressively estimate a bathymetric depth map from sparse sonar readings. This approach improves decision-making by providing a richer representation of the environment. Furthermore, we demonstrate effective sim-to-real transfer, ensuring that trained policies generalize well to real-world aquatic conditions. Experimental results validate our method's capability to improve ASV navigation performance while maintaining safety in challenging shallow-water environments.
Authors: Prajwal Chauhan, Salah Eddine Choutri, Mohamed Ghattassi, Nader Masmoudi, Saif Eddin Jabari
Abstract: This paper investigates the limitations of neural operators in learning solutions for a Hughes model, a first-order hyperbolic conservation law system for crowd dynamics. The model couples a Fokker-Planck equation representing pedestrian density with a Hamilton-Jacobi-type (eikonal) equation. This Hughes model belongs to the class of nonlinear hyperbolic systems that often exhibit complex solution structures, including shocks and discontinuities. In this study, we assess the performance of three state-of-the-art neural operators (Fourier Neural Operator, Wavelet Neural Operator, and Multiwavelet Neural Operator) in various challenging scenarios. Specifically, we consider (1) discontinuous and Gaussian initial conditions and (2) diverse boundary conditions, while also examining the impact of different numerical schemes. Our results show that these neural operators perform well in easy scenarios with fewer discontinuities in the initial condition, yet they struggle in complex scenarios with multiple initial discontinuities and dynamic boundary conditions, even when trained specifically on such complex samples. The predicted solutions often appear smoother, resulting in a reduction in total variation and a loss of important physical features. This smoothing behavior is similar to issues discussed by Daganzo (1995), where models that introduce artificial diffusion were shown to miss essential features such as shock waves in hyperbolic systems. These results suggest that current neural operator architectures may introduce unintended regularization effects that limit their ability to capture transport dynamics governed by discontinuities. They also raise concerns about generalizing these methods to traffic applications where shock preservation is essential.
Authors: Minjae Kang, Martim Brand\~ao
Abstract: Recent audio-visual generative models have made substantial progress in generating images from audio. However, existing approaches focus on generating images from single-class audio and fail to generate images from mixed audio. To address this, we propose an Audio-Visual Generation and Separation model (AV-GAS) for generating images from soundscapes (mixed audio containing multiple classes). Our contribution is threefold: First, we propose a new challenge in the audio-visual generation task, which is to generate an image given a multi-class audio input, and we propose a method that solves this task using an audio-visual separator. Second, we introduce a new audio-visual separation task, which involves generating separate images for each class present in a mixed audio input. Lastly, we propose new evaluation metrics for the audio-visual generation task: Class Representation Score (CRS) and a modified R@K. Our model is trained and evaluated on the VGGSound dataset. We show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art, achieving 7% higher CRS and 4% higher R@2* in generating plausible images with mixed audio.
Authors: Christian Pionzewski, Rebecca Rademacher, J\'er\^ome Rutinowski, Antonia Ponikarov, Stephan Matzke, Tim Chilla, Pia Schreynemackers, Alice Kirchheim
Abstract: This contribution explores the impact of synthetic training data usage and the prediction of material wear and aging in the context of re-identification. Different experimental setups and gallery set expanding strategies are tested, analyzing their impact on performance over time for aging re-identification subjects. Using a continuously updating gallery, we were able to increase our mean Rank-1 accuracy by 24%, as material aging was taken into account step by step. In addition, using models trained with 10% artificial training data, Rank-1 accuracy could be increased by up to 13%, in comparison to a model trained on only real-world data, significantly boosting generalized performance on hold-out data. Finally, this work introduces a novel, open-source re-identification dataset, pallet-block-2696. This dataset contains 2,696 images of Euro pallets, taken over a period of 4 months. During this time, natural aging processes occurred and some of the pallets were damaged during their usage. These wear and tear processes significantly changed the appearance of the pallets, providing a dataset that can be used to generate synthetically aged pallets or other wooden materials.
Authors: Prashant Garg, Thiemo Fetzer
Abstract: Using basic health statements authorized by UK and EU registers and 9,100 journalist-vetted public-health assertions on topics such as abortion, COVID-19 and politics from sources ranging from peer-reviewed journals and government advisories to social media and news across the political spectrum, we benchmark six leading large language models from in 21 languages, finding that, despite high accuracy on English-centric textbook claims, performance falls in multiple non-European languages and fluctuates by topic and source, highlighting the urgency of comprehensive multilingual, domain-aware validation before deploying AI in global health communication.
Authors: Yacine Majdoub, Eya Ben Charrada, Haifa Touati
Abstract: Using multiple agents was found to improve the debugging capabilities of Large Language Models. However, increasing the number of LLM-agents has several drawbacks such as increasing the running costs and rising the risk for the agents to lose focus. In this work, we propose an adaptive agentic design, where the number of agents and their roles are determined dynamically based on the characteristics of the task to be achieved. In this design, the agents roles are not predefined, but are generated after analyzing the problem to be solved. Our initial evaluation shows that, with the adaptive design, the number of agents that are generated depends on the complexity of the buggy code. In fact, for simple code with mere syntax issues, the problem was usually fixed using one agent only. However, for more complex problems, we noticed the creation of a higher number of agents. Regarding the effectiveness of the fix, we noticed an average improvement of 11% compared to the one-shot prompting. Given these promising results, we outline future research directions to improve our design for adaptive software agents that can autonomously plan and conduct their software goals.
Authors: Anh-Duy Pham, Olivier Basole Kashongwe, Martin Atzmueller, Tim R\"omer
Abstract: Balancing performance and interpretability in multivariate time series classification is a significant challenge due to data complexity and high dimensionality. This paper introduces PHeatPruner, a method integrating persistent homology and sheaf theory to address these challenges. Persistent homology facilitates the pruning of up to 45% of the applied variables while maintaining or enhancing the accuracy of models such as Random Forest, CatBoost, XGBoost, and LightGBM, all without depending on posterior probabilities or supervised optimization algorithms. Concurrently, sheaf theory contributes explanatory vectors that provide deeper insights into the data's structural nuances. The approach was validated using the UEA Archive and a mastitis detection dataset for dairy cows. The results demonstrate that PHeatPruner effectively preserves model accuracy. Furthermore, our results highlight PHeatPruner's key features, i.e. simplifying complex data and offering actionable insights without increasing processing time or complexity. This method bridges the gap between complexity reduction and interpretability, suggesting promising applications in various fields.
Authors: Toghrul Abbasli, Kentaroh Toyoda, Yuan Wang, Leon Witt, Muhammad Asif Ali, Yukai Miao, Dan Li, Qingsong Wei
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been transformative across many domains. However, hallucination -- confidently outputting incorrect information -- remains one of the leading challenges for LLMs. This raises the question of how to accurately assess and quantify the uncertainty of LLMs. Extensive literature on traditional models has explored Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) to measure uncertainty and employed calibration techniques to address the misalignment between uncertainty and accuracy. While some of these methods have been adapted for LLMs, the literature lacks an in-depth analysis of their effectiveness and does not offer a comprehensive benchmark to enable insightful comparison among existing solutions. In this work, we fill this gap via a systematic survey of representative prior works on UQ and calibration for LLMs and introduce a rigorous benchmark. Using two widely used reliability datasets, we empirically evaluate six related methods, which justify the significant findings of our review. Finally, we provide outlooks for key future directions and outline open challenges. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the first dedicated study to review the calibration methods and relevant metrics for LLMs.
Authors: Fengchun Liu. Tong Zhang, Chunying Zhang
Abstract: For deep learning-based image steganography frameworks, in order to ensure the invisibility and recoverability of the information embedding, the loss function usually contains several losses such as embedding loss, recovery loss and steganalysis loss. In previous research works, fixed loss weights are usually chosen for training optimization, and this setting is not linked to the importance of the steganography task itself and the training process. In this paper, we propose a Two-stage Curriculum Learning loss scheduler (TSCL) for balancing multinomial losses in deep learning image steganography algorithms. TSCL consists of two phases: a priori curriculum control and loss dynamics control. The first phase firstly focuses the model on learning the information embedding of the original image by controlling the loss weights in the multi-party adversarial training; secondly, it makes the model shift its learning focus to improving the decoding accuracy; and finally, it makes the model learn to generate a steganographic image that is resistant to steganalysis. In the second stage, the learning speed of each training task is evaluated by calculating the loss drop of the before and after iteration rounds to balance the learning of each task. Experimental results on three large public datasets, ALASKA2, VOC2012 and ImageNet, show that the proposed TSCL strategy improves the quality of steganography, decoding accuracy and security.
Authors: Roya Nasiri
Abstract: The biases in artificial intelligence (AI) models can lead to automated decision-making processes that discriminate against groups and/or individuals based on sensitive properties such as gender and race. While there are many studies on diagnosing and mitigating biases in various AI models, there is little research on individual fairness in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Unlike traditional models, which treat data features independently and overlook their inter-relationships, GNNs are designed to capture graph-based structure where nodes are interconnected. This relational approach enables GNNs to model complex dependencies, but it also means that biases can propagate through these connections, complicating the detection and mitigation of individual fairness violations. This PhD project aims to develop a testing framework to assess and ensure individual fairness in GNNs. It first systematically reviews the literature on individual fairness, categorizing existing approaches to define, measure, test, and mitigate model biases, creating a taxonomy of individual fairness. Next, the project will develop a framework for testing and ensuring fairness in GNNs by adapting and extending current fairness testing and mitigation techniques. The framework will be evaluated through industrial case studies, focusing on graph-based large language models.
Authors: Haozhen Yan, Yan Hong, Jiahui Zhan, Yikun Ji, Jun Lan, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Jianfu Zhang
Abstract: Recent advancements in image manipulation have achieved unprecedented progress in generating photorealistic content, but also simultaneously eliminating barriers to arbitrary manipulation and editing, raising concerns about multimedia authenticity and cybersecurity. However, existing Image Manipulation Detection and Localization (IMDL) methodologies predominantly focus on splicing or copy-move forgeries, lacking dedicated benchmarks for inpainting-based manipulations. To bridge this gap, we present COCOInpaint, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for inpainting detection, with three key contributions: 1) High-quality inpainting samples generated by six state-of-the-art inpainting models, 2) Diverse generation scenarios enabled by four mask generation strategies with optional text guidance, and 3) Large-scale coverage with 258,266 inpainted images with rich semantic diversity. Our benchmark is constructed to emphasize intrinsic inconsistencies between inpainted and authentic regions, rather than superficial semantic artifacts such as object shapes. We establish a rigorous evaluation protocol using three standard metrics to assess existing IMDL approaches. The dataset will be made publicly available to facilitate future research in this area.
Authors: Pablo Miralles-Gonz\'alez, Javier Huertas-Tato, Alejandro Mart\'in, David Camacho
Abstract: Natural Language Inference (NLI) is a central task in natural language understanding with applications in fact-checking, question answering, and information retrieval. Despite its importance, current NLI systems heavily rely on supervised learning with datasets that often contain annotation artifacts and biases, limiting generalization and real-world applicability. In this work, we apply a reinforcement learning-based approach using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for Chain-of-Thought (CoT) learning in NLI, eliminating the need for labeled rationales and enabling this type of training on more challenging datasets such as ANLI. We fine-tune 7B, 14B, and 32B language models using parameter-efficient techniques (LoRA and QLoRA), demonstrating strong performance across standard and adversarial NLI benchmarks. Our 32B AWQ-quantized model surpasses state-of-the-art results on 7 out of 11 adversarial sets$\unicode{x2013}$or on all of them considering our replication$\unicode{x2013}$within a 22GB memory footprint, showing that robust reasoning can be retained under aggressive quantization. This work provides a scalable and practical framework for building robust NLI systems without sacrificing inference quality.
Authors: Steven H\"asler, Philipp Ackermann
Abstract: Modern extended reality XR systems provide rich analysis of image data and fusion of sensor input and demand AR/VR applications that can reason about 3D scenes in a semantic manner. We present a spatial reasoning framework that bridges geometric facts with symbolic predicates and relations to handle key tasks such as determining how 3D objects are arranged among each other ('on', 'behind', 'near', etc.). Its foundation relies on oriented 3D bounding box representations, enhanced by a comprehensive set of spatial predicates, ranging from topology and connectivity to directionality and orientation, expressed in a formalism related to natural language. The derived predicates form a spatial knowledge graph and, in combination with a pipeline-based inference model, enable spatial queries and dynamic rule evaluation. Implementations for client- and server-side processing demonstrate the framework's capability to efficiently translate geometric data into actionable knowledge, ensuring scalable and technology-independent spatial reasoning in complex 3D environments. The Spatial Reasoner framework is fostering the creation of spatial ontologies, and seamlessly integrates with and therefore enriches machine learning, natural language processing, and rule systems in XR applications.
Authors: Qidong Liu, Xiangyu Zhao, Yejing Wang, Zijian Zhang, Howard Zhong, Chong Chen, Xiang Li, Wei Huang, Feng Tian
Abstract: Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (CDSR) aims to extract the preference from the user's historical interactions across various domains. Despite some progress in CDSR, two problems set the barrier for further advancements, i.e., overlap dilemma and transition complexity. The former means existing CDSR methods severely rely on users who own interactions on all domains to learn cross-domain item relationships, compromising the practicability. The latter refers to the difficulties in learning the complex transition patterns from the mixed behavior sequences. With powerful representation and reasoning abilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) are promising to address these two problems by bridging the items and capturing the user's preferences from a semantic view. Therefore, we propose an LLMs Enhanced Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation model (LLM4CDSR). To obtain the semantic item relationships, we first propose an LLM-based unified representation module to represent items. Then, a trainable adapter with contrastive regularization is designed to adapt the CDSR task. Besides, a hierarchical LLMs profiling module is designed to summarize user cross-domain preferences. Finally, these two modules are integrated into the proposed tri-thread framework to derive recommendations. We have conducted extensive experiments on three public cross-domain datasets, validating the effectiveness of LLM4CDSR. We have released the code online.
Authors: Yui Lo, Yuqian Chen, Dongnan Liu, Leo Zekelman, Jarrett Rushmore, Yogesh Rathi, Nikos Makris, Alexandra J. Golby, Fan Zhang, Weidong Cai, Lauren J. O'Donnell
Abstract: Shape measures have emerged as promising descriptors of white matter tractography, offering complementary insights into anatomical variability and associations with cognitive and clinical phenotypes. However, conventional methods for computing shape measures are computationally expensive and time-consuming for large-scale datasets due to reliance on voxel-based representations. We propose Tract2Shape, a novel multimodal deep learning framework that leverages geometric (point cloud) and scalar (tabular) features to predict ten white matter tractography shape measures. To enhance model efficiency, we utilize a dimensionality reduction algorithm for the model to predict five primary shape components. The model is trained and evaluated on two independently acquired datasets, the HCP-YA dataset, and the PPMI dataset. We evaluate the performance of Tract2Shape by training and testing it on the HCP-YA dataset and comparing the results with state-of-the-art models. To further assess its robustness and generalization ability, we also test Tract2Shape on the unseen PPMI dataset. Tract2Shape outperforms SOTA deep learning models across all ten shape measures, achieving the highest average Pearson's r and the lowest nMSE on the HCP-YA dataset. The ablation study shows that both multimodal input and PCA contribute to performance gains. On the unseen testing PPMI dataset, Tract2Shape maintains a high Pearson's r and low nMSE, demonstrating strong generalizability in cross-dataset evaluation. Tract2Shape enables fast, accurate, and generalizable prediction of white matter shape measures from tractography data, supporting scalable analysis across datasets. This framework lays a promising foundation for future large-scale white matter shape analysis.
Authors: Liang Yu
Abstract: Generative AI (GenAI) applications are transforming software engineering by enabling automated code co-creation. However, empirical evidence on GenAI's productivity effects in industrial settings remains limited. This paper investigates the adoption of GenAI coding assistants (e.g., Codeium, Amazon Q) within telecommunications and FinTech domains. Through surveys and interviews with industrial domain-experts, we identify primary productivity-influencing factors, including task complexity, coding skills, domain knowledge, and GenAI integration. Our findings indicate that GenAI tools enhance productivity in routine coding tasks (e.g., refactoring and Javadoc generation) but face challenges in complex, domain-specific activities due to limited context-awareness of codebases and insufficient support for customized design rules. We highlight new paradigms for coding transfer, emphasizing iterative prompt refinement, immersive development environment, and automated code evaluation as essential for effective GenAI usage.
Authors: Carlo Sgaravatti, Roberto Basla, Riccardo Pieroni, Matteo Corno, Sergio M. Savaresi, Luca Magri, Giacomo Boracchi
Abstract: We present a new way to detect 3D objects from multimodal inputs, leveraging both LiDAR and RGB cameras in a hybrid late-cascade scheme, that combines an RGB detection network and a 3D LiDAR detector. We exploit late fusion principles to reduce LiDAR False Positives, matching LiDAR detections with RGB ones by projecting the LiDAR bounding boxes on the image. We rely on cascade fusion principles to recover LiDAR False Negatives leveraging epipolar constraints and frustums generated by RGB detections of separate views. Our solution can be plugged on top of any underlying single-modal detectors, enabling a flexible training process that can take advantage of pre-trained LiDAR and RGB detectors, or train the two branches separately. We evaluate our results on the KITTI object detection benchmark, showing significant performance improvements, especially for the detection of Pedestrians and Cyclists.
Authors: Rajesh Yarra
Abstract: Despite the transformative impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across various sectors, cyber security continues to rely on traditional static and dynamic analysis tools, hampered by high false positive rates and superficial code comprehension. While generative AI offers promising automation capabilities for software development, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for vulnerability detection presents unique challenges. This paper explores the potential and limitations of LLMs in identifying vulnerabilities, acknowledging inherent weaknesses such as hallucinations, limited context length, and knowledge cut-offs. Previous attempts employing machine learning models for vulnerability detection have proven ineffective due to limited real-world applicability, feature engineering challenges, lack of contextual understanding, and the complexities of training models to keep pace with the evolving threat landscape. Therefore, we propose a robust AI-driven approach focused on mitigating these limitations and ensuring the quality and reliability of LLM based vulnerability detection. Through innovative methodologies combining Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Mixtureof-Agents (MoA), this research seeks to leverage the strengths of LLMs while addressing their weaknesses, ultimately paving the way for dependable and efficient AI-powered solutions in securing the ever-evolving software landscape.
Authors: KimiTeam, Ding Ding, Zeqian Ju, Yichong Leng, Songxiang Liu, Tong Liu, Zeyu Shang, Kai Shen, Wei Song, Xu Tan, Heyi Tang, Zhengtao Wang, Chu Wei, Yifei Xin, Xinran Xu, Jianwei Yu, Yutao Zhang, Xinyu Zhou, Y. Charles, Jun Chen, Yanru Chen, Yulun Du, Weiran He, Zhenxing Hu, Guokun Lai, Qingcheng Li, Yangyang Liu, Weidong Sun, Jianzhou Wang, Yuzhi Wang, Yuefeng Wu, Yuxin Wu, Dongchao Yang, Hao Yang, Ying Yang, Zhilin Yang, Aoxiong Yin, Ruibin Yuan, Yutong Zhang, Zaida Zhou
Abstract: We present Kimi-Audio, an open-source audio foundation model that excels in audio understanding, generation, and conversation. We detail the practices in building Kimi-Audio, including model architecture, data curation, training recipe, inference deployment, and evaluation. Specifically, we leverage a 12.5Hz audio tokenizer, design a novel LLM-based architecture with continuous features as input and discrete tokens as output, and develop a chunk-wise streaming detokenizer based on flow matching. We curate a pre-training dataset that consists of more than 13 million hours of audio data covering a wide range of modalities including speech, sound, and music, and build a pipeline to construct high-quality and diverse post-training data. Initialized from a pre-trained LLM, Kimi-Audio is continual pre-trained on both audio and text data with several carefully designed tasks, and then fine-tuned to support a diverse of audio-related tasks. Extensive evaluation shows that Kimi-Audio achieves state-of-the-art performance on a range of audio benchmarks including speech recognition, audio understanding, audio question answering, and speech conversation. We release the codes, model checkpoints, as well as the evaluation toolkits in https://github.com/MoonshotAI/Kimi-Audio.
Authors: Kun He, Zijian Song, Shuoxi Zhang, John E. Hopcroft
Abstract: Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) is a critical capability for real-world applications, enabling learning systems to adapt to new tasks while retaining knowledge from previous ones. Recent advancements in pre-trained models (PTMs) have significantly advanced the field of CIL, demonstrating superior performance over traditional methods. However, understanding how features evolve and are distributed across incremental tasks remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to modeling feature evolution in PTM-based CIL through the lens of neural collapse (NC), a striking phenomenon observed in the final phase of training, which leads to a well-separated, equiangular feature space. We explore the connection between NC and CIL effectiveness, showing that aligning feature distributions with the NC geometry enhances the ability to capture the dynamic behavior of continual learning. Based on this insight, we introduce Neural Collapse-inspired Pre-Trained Model-based CIL (NCPTM-CIL), a method that dynamically adjusts the feature space to conform to the elegant NC structure, thereby enhancing the continual learning process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NCPTM-CIL outperforms state-of-the-art methods across four benchmark datasets. Notably, when initialized with ViT-B/16-IN1K, NCPTM-CIL surpasses the runner-up method by 6.73% on VTAB, 1.25% on CIFAR-100, and 2.5% on OmniBenchmark.
Authors: Ryo Yamaki, Shintaro Shiba, Guillermo Gallego, Yoshimitsu Aoki
Abstract: Event cameras provide rich signals that are suitable for motion estimation since they respond to changes in the scene. As any visual changes in the scene produce event data, it is paramount to classify the data into different motions (i.e., motion segmentation), which is useful for various tasks such as object detection and visual servoing. We propose an iterative motion segmentation method, by classifying events into background (e.g., dominant motion hypothesis) and foreground (independent motion residuals), thus extending the Contrast Maximization framework. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method successfully classifies event clusters both for public and self-recorded datasets, producing sharp, motion-compensated edge-like images. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on moving object detection benchmarks with an improvement of over 30%, and demonstrates its possibility of applying to more complex and noisy real-world scenes. We hope this work broadens the sensitivity of Contrast Maximization with respect to both motion parameters and input events, thus contributing to theoretical advancements in event-based motion segmentation estimation. https://github.com/aoki-media-lab/event_based_segmentation_vcmax
URLs: https://github.com/aoki-media-lab/event_based_segmentation_vcmax
Authors: Wenyi Xiao, Leilei Gan, Weilong Dai, Wanggui He, Ziwei Huang, Haoyuan Li, Fangxun Shu, Zhelun Yu, Peng Zhang, Hao Jiang, Fei Wu
Abstract: Recent advances in large vision-language models (LVLMs) have revealed an \textit{overthinking} phenomenon, where models generate verbose reasoning across all tasks regardless of questions. To address this issue, we present \textbf{FAST}, a novel \textbf{Fa}st-\textbf{S}low \textbf{T}hinking framework that dynamically adapts reasoning depth based on question characteristics. Through empirical analysis, we establish the feasibility of fast-slow thinking in LVLMs by investigating how response length and data distribution affect performance. We develop FAST-GRPO with three components: model-based metrics for question characterization, an adaptive thinking reward mechanism, and difficulty-aware KL regularization. Experiments across seven reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that FAST achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with over 10\% relative improvement compared to the base model, while reducing token usage by 32.7-67.3\% compared to previous slow-thinking approaches, effectively balancing reasoning length and accuracy.
Authors: Alejandro Murillo-Gonzalez, Lantao Liu
Abstract: Continual learning in robotics seeks systems that can constantly adapt to changing environments and tasks, mirroring human adaptability. A key challenge is refining dynamics models, essential for planning and control, while addressing issues such as safe adaptation, catastrophic forgetting, outlier management, data efficiency, and balancing exploration with exploitation -- all within task and onboard resource constraints. Towards this goal, we introduce a generative framework leveraging flow matching for online robot dynamics model alignment. Rather than executing actions based on a misaligned model, our approach refines planned actions to better match with those the robot would take if its model was well aligned. We find that by transforming the actions themselves rather than exploring with a misaligned model -- as is traditionally done -- the robot collects informative data more efficiently, thereby accelerating learning. Moreover, we validate that the method can handle an evolving and possibly imperfect model while reducing, if desired, the dependency on replay buffers or legacy model snapshots. We validate our approach using two platforms: an unmanned ground vehicle and a quadrotor. The results highlight the method's adaptability and efficiency, with a record 34.2\% higher task success rate, demonstrating its potential towards enabling continual robot learning. Code: https://github.com/AlejandroMllo/action_flow_matching.
URLs: https://github.com/AlejandroMllo/action_flow_matching.
Authors: Yifeng Mao, Bozhidar Stevanoski, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye
Abstract: Empirical inference attacks are a popular approach for evaluating the privacy risk of data release mechanisms in practice. While an active attack literature exists to evaluate machine learning models or synthetic data release, we currently lack comparable methods for fixed aggregate statistics, in particular when only a limited number of statistics are released. We here propose an inference attack framework against fixed aggregate statistics and an attribute inference attack called DeSIA. We instantiate DeSIA against the U.S. Census PPMF dataset and show it to strongly outperform reconstruction-based attacks. In particular, we show DeSIA to be highly effective at identifying vulnerable users, achieving a true positive rate of 0.14 at a false positive rate of $10^{-3}$. We then show DeSIA to perform well against users whose attributes cannot be verified and when varying the number of aggregate statistics and level of noise addition. We also perform an extensive ablation study of DeSIA and show how DeSIA can be successfully adapted to the membership inference task. Overall, our results show that aggregation alone is not sufficient to protect privacy, even when a relatively small number of aggregates are being released, and emphasize the need for formal privacy mechanisms and testing before aggregate statistics are released.
Authors: Yixiao Wang
Abstract: Imitation learning holds the promise of equipping robots with versatile skills by learning from expert demonstrations. However, policies trained on finite datasets often struggle to generalize beyond the training distribution. In this work, we present a unified perspective on the generalization capability of imitation learning, grounded in both information theorey and data distribution property. We first show that the generalization gap can be upper bounded by (i) the conditional information bottleneck on intermediate representations and (ii) the mutual information between the model parameters and the training dataset. This characterization provides theoretical guidance for designing effective training strategies in imitation learning, particularly in determining whether to freeze, fine-tune, or train large pretrained encoders (e.g., vision-language models or vision foundation models) from scratch to achieve better generalization. Furthermore, we demonstrate that high conditional entropy from input to output induces a flatter likelihood landscape, thereby reducing the upper bound on the generalization gap. In addition, it shortens the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) escape time from sharp local minima, which may increase the likelihood of reaching global optima under fixed optimization budgets. These insights explain why imitation learning often exhibits limited generalization and underscore the importance of not only scaling the diversity of input data but also enriching the variability of output labels conditioned on the same input.
Authors: Xuan Wu, Di Wang, Lijie Wen, Yubin Xiao, Chunguo Wu, Yuesong Wu, Chaoyu Yu, Douglas L. Maskell, You Zhou
Abstract: Although several surveys on Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) solvers specifically designed to solve Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) have been conducted, they did not cover the state-of-the-art (SOTA) NCO solvers emerged recently. More importantly, to establish a comprehensive and up-to-date taxonomy of NCO solvers, we systematically review relevant publications and preprints, categorizing them into four distinct types, namely Learning to Construct, Learning to Improve, Learning to Predict-Once, and Learning to Predict-Multiplicity solvers. Subsequently, we present the inadequacies of the SOTA solvers, including poor generalization, incapability to solve large-scale VRPs, inability to address most types of VRP variants simultaneously, and difficulty in comparing these NCO solvers with the conventional Operations Research algorithms. Simultaneously, we discuss on-going efforts, identify open inadequacies, as well as propose promising and viable directions to overcome these inadequacies. Notably, existing efforts focus on only one or two of these inadequacies, with none attempting to address all of them concurrently. In addition, we compare the performance of representative NCO solvers from the Reinforcement, Supervised, and Unsupervised Learning paradigms across VRPs of varying scales. Finally, following the proposed taxonomy, we provide an accompanying web page as a live repository for NCO solvers. Through this survey and the live repository, we aim to foster further advancements in the NCO community.
Authors: Yile Chen, Weiming Huang, Kaiqi Zhao, Yue Jiang, Gao Cong
Abstract: The proliferation of various data sources in urban and territorial environments has significantly facilitated the development of geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) across a wide range of geospatial applications. However, geospatial data, which is inherently linked to geospatial objects, often exhibits data heterogeneity that necessitates specialized fusion and representation strategies while simultaneously being inherently sparse in labels for downstream tasks. Consequently, there is a growing demand for techniques that can effectively leverage geospatial data without heavy reliance on task-specific labels and model designs. This need aligns with the principles of self-supervised learning (SSL), which has garnered increasing attention for its ability to learn effective and generalizable representations directly from data without extensive labeled supervision. This paper presents a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of SSL techniques specifically applied to or developed for geospatial objects in three primary vector geometric types: Point, Polyline, and Polygon. We systematically categorize various SSL techniques into predictive and contrastive methods, and analyze their adaptation to different data types for representation learning across various downstream tasks. Furthermore, we examine the emerging trends in SSL for geospatial objects, particularly the gradual advancements towards geospatial foundation models. Finally, we discuss key challenges in current research and outline promising directions for future investigation. By offering a structured analysis of existing studies, this paper aims to inspire continued progress in integrating SSL with geospatial objects, and the development of geospatial foundation models in a longer term.
Authors: Syeda Nahida Akter, Shrimai Prabhumoye, John Kamalu, Sanjeev Satheesh, Eric Nyberg, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro
Abstract: The utility of synthetic data to enhance pretraining data quality and hence to improve downstream task accuracy has been widely explored in recent large language models (LLMs). Yet, these approaches fall inadequate in complex, multi-hop and mathematical reasoning tasks as the synthetic data typically fails to add complementary knowledge to the existing raw corpus. In this work, we propose a novel large-scale and diverse Math Informed syNthetic Dialogue (MIND) generation method that improves the mathematical reasoning ability of LLMs. Specifically, using MIND, we generate synthetic conversations based on OpenWebMath (OWM), resulting in a new math corpus, MIND-OWM. Our experiments with different conversational settings reveal that incorporating knowledge gaps between dialog participants is essential for generating high-quality math data. We further identify an effective way to format and integrate synthetic and raw data during pretraining to maximize the gain in mathematical reasoning, emphasizing the need to restructure raw data rather than use it as-is. Compared to pretraining just on raw data, a model pretrained on MIND-OWM shows significant boost in mathematical reasoning (GSM8K: +13.42%, MATH: +2.30%), including superior performance in specialized knowledge (MMLU: +4.55%, MMLU-STEM: +4.28%) and general purpose reasoning tasks (GENERAL REASONING: +2.51%).
Authors: Zhong-Zhi Li, Duzhen Zhang, Ming-Liang Zhang, Jiaxin Zhang, Zengyan Liu, Yuxuan Yao, Haotian Xu, Junhao Zheng, Pei-Jie Wang, Xiuyi Chen, Yingying Zhang, Fei Yin, Jiahua Dong, Zhiwei Li, Bao-Long Bi, Ling-Rui Mei, Junfeng Fang, Zhijiang Guo, Le Song, Cheng-Lin Liu
Abstract: Achieving human-level intelligence requires refining the transition from the fast, intuitive System 1 to the slower, more deliberate System 2 reasoning. While System 1 excels in quick, heuristic decisions, System 2 relies on logical reasoning for more accurate judgments and reduced biases. Foundational Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at fast decision-making but lack the depth for complex reasoning, as they have not yet fully embraced the step-by-step analysis characteristic of true System 2 thinking. Recently, reasoning LLMs like OpenAI's o1/o3 and DeepSeek's R1 have demonstrated expert-level performance in fields such as mathematics and coding, closely mimicking the deliberate reasoning of System 2 and showcasing human-like cognitive abilities. This survey begins with a brief overview of the progress in foundational LLMs and the early development of System 2 technologies, exploring how their combination has paved the way for reasoning LLMs. Next, we discuss how to construct reasoning LLMs, analyzing their features, the core methods enabling advanced reasoning, and the evolution of various reasoning LLMs. Additionally, we provide an overview of reasoning benchmarks, offering an in-depth comparison of the performance of representative reasoning LLMs. Finally, we explore promising directions for advancing reasoning LLMs and maintain a real-time \href{https://github.com/zzli2022/Awesome-Slow-Reason-System}{GitHub Repository} to track the latest developments. We hope this survey will serve as a valuable resource to inspire innovation and drive progress in this rapidly evolving field.
URLs: https://github.com/zzli2022/Awesome-Slow-Reason-System
Authors: Anton Alyakin, Jaden Stryker, Daniel Alexander Alber, Karl L. Sangwon, Jin Vivian Lee, Brandon Duderstadt, Akshay Save, David Kurland, Spencer Frome, Shrutika Singh, Jeff Zhang, Eunice Yang, Ki Yun Park, Cordelia Orillac, Aly A. Valliani, Sean Neifert, Albert Liu, Aneek Patel, Christopher Livia, Darryl Lau, Ilya Laufer, Peter A. Rozman, Eveline Teresa Hidalgo, Howard Riina, Rui Feng, Todd Hollon, Yindalon Aphinyanaphongs, John G. Golfinos, Laura Snyder, Eric Leuthardt, Douglas Kondziolka, Eric Karl Oermann
Abstract: Leading vision-language models (VLMs) are trained on general Internet content, overlooking scientific journals' rich, domain-specific knowledge. Training on specialty-specific literature could yield high-performance, task-specific tools, enabling generative AI to match generalist models in specialty publishing, educational, and clinical tasks. We created NeuroPubs, a multimodal dataset of 23,000 Neurosurgery Publications articles (134M words, 78K image-caption pairs). Using NeuroPubs, VLMs generated publication-ready graphical abstracts (70% of 100 abstracts) and board-style questions indistinguishable from human-written ones (54% of 89,587 questions). We used these questions to train CNS-Obsidian, a 34B-parameter VLM. In a blinded, randomized controlled trial, our model demonstrated non-inferiority to then state-of-the-art GPT-4o in neurosurgical differential diagnosis (clinical utility, 40.62% upvotes vs. 57.89%, p=0.1150; accuracy, 59.38% vs. 65.79%, p=0.3797). Our pilot study demonstrates how training generative AI models on specialty-specific journal content - without large-scale internet data - results in high-performance academic and clinical tools, enabling domain-tailored AI across diverse fields.
Authors: Yupei Li, Manuel Milling, Bj\"orn W. Schuller
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has achieved new levels of performance and spread in public usage with the rise of deep neural networks (DNNs). Initially inspired by human neurons and their connections, NNs have become the foundation of AI models for many advanced architectures. However, some of the most integral processes in the human brain, particularly neurogenesis and neuroplasticity in addition to the more spread neuroapoptosis have largely been ignored in DNN architecture design. Instead, contemporary AI development predominantly focuses on constructing advanced frameworks, such as large language models, which retain a static structure of neural connections during training and inference. In this light, we explore how neurogenesis, neuroapoptosis, and neuroplasticity can inspire future AI advances. Specifically, we examine analogous activities in artificial NNs, introducing the concepts of ``dropin'' for neurogenesis and revisiting ``dropout'' and structural pruning for neuroapoptosis. We additionally suggest neuroplasticity combining the two for future large NNs in ``life-long learning'' settings following the biological inspiration. We conclude by advocating for greater research efforts in this interdisciplinary domain and identifying promising directions for future exploration.
Authors: Yash Savani, Asher Trockman, Zhili Feng, Avi Schwarzschild, Alexander Robey, Marc Finzi, J. Zico Kolter
Abstract: Frontier models that generate extended reasoning traces inadvertently produce rich token sequences that can facilitate model distillation. Recognizing this vulnerability, model owners may seek sampling strategies that limit the effectiveness of distillation without compromising model performance. Antidistillation sampling provides exactly this capability. By strategically modifying a model's next-token probability distribution, antidistillation sampling poisons reasoning traces, rendering them significantly less effective for distillation while preserving the model's practical utility. For further details, see https://antidistillation.com.
Authors: Xiangkai Ma, Xiaobin Hong, Wenzhong Li, Sanglu Lu
Abstract: Time series analysis has found widespread applications in areas such as weather forecasting, anomaly detection, and healthcare. However, real-world sequential data often exhibit a superimposed state of various fluctuation patterns, including hourly, daily, and monthly frequencies. Traditional decomposition techniques struggle to effectively disentangle these multiple fluctuation patterns from the seasonal components, making time series analysis challenging. Surpassing the existing multi-period decoupling paradigms, this paper introduces a novel perspective based on energy distribution within the temporal-spectrum space. By adaptively quantifying observed sequences into continuous frequency band intervals, the proposed approach reconstructs fluctuation patterns across diverse periods without relying on domain-specific prior knowledge. Building upon this innovative strategy, we propose Pets, an enhanced architecture that is adaptable to arbitrary model structures. Pets integrates a Fluctuation Pattern Assisted (FPA) module and a Context-Guided Mixture of Predictors (MoP). The FPA module facilitates information fusion among diverse fluctuation patterns by capturing their dependencies and progressively modeling these patterns as latent representations at each layer. Meanwhile, the MoP module leverages these compound pattern representations to guide and regulate the reconstruction of distinct fluctuations hierarchically. Pets achieves state-of-the-art performance across various tasks, including forecasting, imputation, anomaly detection, and classification, while demonstrating strong generalization and robustness.
Authors: Chaoyun Zhang, He Huang, Chiming Ni, Jian Mu, Si Qin, Shilin He, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Chao Du, Liqun Li, Yu Kang, Zhao Jiang, Suzhen Zheng, Rujia Wang, Jiaxu Qian, Minghua Ma, Jian-Guang Lou, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
Abstract: Recent Computer-Using Agents (CUAs), powered by multimodal large language models (LLMs), offer a promising direction for automating complex desktop workflows through natural language. However, most existing CUAs remain conceptual prototypes, hindered by shallow OS integration, fragile screenshot-based interaction, and disruptive execution. We present UFO2, a multiagent AgentOS for Windows desktops that elevates CUAs into practical, system-level automation. UFO2 features a centralized HostAgent for task decomposition and coordination, alongside a collection of application-specialized AppAgent equipped with native APIs, domain-specific knowledge, and a unified GUI--API action layer. This architecture enables robust task execution while preserving modularity and extensibility. A hybrid control detection pipeline fuses Windows UI Automation (UIA) with vision-based parsing to support diverse interface styles. Runtime efficiency is further enhanced through speculative multi-action planning, reducing per-step LLM overhead. Finally, a Picture-in-Picture (PiP) interface enables automation within an isolated virtual desktop, allowing agents and users to operate concurrently without interference. We evaluate UFO2 across over 20 real-world Windows applications, demonstrating substantial improvements in robustness and execution accuracy over prior CUAs. Our results show that deep OS integration unlocks a scalable path toward reliable, user-aligned desktop automation.
Authors: Yi Zeng, Feifei Zhao, Yuwei Wang, Enmeng Lu, Yaodong Yang, Lei Wang, Chao Liu, Yitao Liang, Dongcheng Zhao, Bing Han, Haibo Tong, Yao Liang, Dongqi Liang, Kang Sun, Boyuan Chen, Jinyu Fan
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are becoming increasingly powerful and autonomous, and may progress to surpass human intelligence levels, namely Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). During the progression from AI to ASI, it may exceed human control, violate human values, and even lead to irreversible catastrophic consequences in extreme cases. This gives rise to a pressing issue that needs to be addressed: superalignment, ensuring that AI systems much smarter than humans, remain aligned with human (compatible) intentions and values. Existing scalable oversight and weak-to-strong generalization methods may prove substantially infeasible and inadequate when facing ASI. We must explore safer and more pluralistic frameworks and approaches for superalignment. In this paper, we redefine superalignment as the human-AI co-alignment towards a sustainable symbiotic society, and highlight a framework that integrates external oversight and intrinsic proactive alignment. External oversight superalignment should be grounded in human-centered ultimate decision, supplemented by interpretable automated evaluation and correction, to achieve continuous alignment with humanity's evolving values. Intrinsic proactive superalignment is rooted in a profound understanding of the Self, others, and society, integrating self-awareness, self-reflection, and empathy to spontaneously infer human intentions, distinguishing good from evil and proactively considering human well-being, ultimately attaining human-AI co-alignment through iterative interaction. The integration of externally-driven oversight with intrinsically-driven proactive alignment empowers sustainable symbiotic societies through human-AI co-alignment, paving the way for achieving safe and beneficial AGI and ASI for good, for human, and for a symbiotic ecology.
Authors: Ce Ju, Cuntai Guan
Abstract: Recent progress in geometric deep learning has drawn increasing attention from the machine learning community toward domain adaptation on symmetric positive definite (SPD) manifolds, especially for neuroimaging data that often suffer from distribution shifts across sessions. These data, typically represented as covariance matrices of brain signals, inherently lie on SPD manifolds due to their symmetry and positive definiteness. However, conventional domain adaptation methods often overlook this geometric structure when applied directly to covariance matrices, which can result in suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we introduce a new geometric deep learning framework that combines optimal transport theory with the geometry of SPD manifolds. Our approach aligns data distributions while respecting the manifold structure, effectively reducing both marginal and conditional discrepancies. We validate our method on three cross-session brain computer interface datasets, KU, BNCI2014001, and BNCI2015001, where it consistently outperforms baseline approaches while maintaining the intrinsic geometry of the data. We also provide quantitative results and visualizations to better illustrate the behavior of the learned embeddings.
Authors: Xuan Rao, Bo Zhao, Derong Liu
Abstract: In neural architecture search (NAS) methods based on latent space optimization (LSO), a deep generative model is trained to embed discrete neural architectures into a continuous latent space. In this case, different optimization algorithms that operate in the continuous space can be implemented to search neural architectures. However, the optimization of latent variables is challenging for gradient-based LSO since the mapping from the latent space to the architecture performance is generally non-convex. To tackle this problem, this paper develops a convexity regularized latent space optimization (CR-LSO) method, which aims to regularize the learning process of latent space in order to obtain a convex architecture performance mapping. Specifically, CR-LSO trains a graph variational autoencoder (G-VAE) to learn the continuous representations of discrete architectures. Simultaneously, the learning process of latent space is regularized by the guaranteed convexity of input convex neural networks (ICNNs). In this way, the G-VAE is forced to learn a convex mapping from the architecture representation to the architecture performance. Hereafter, the CR-LSO approximates the performance mapping using the ICNN and leverages the estimated gradient to optimize neural architecture representations. Experimental results on three popular NAS benchmarks show that CR-LSO achieves competitive evaluation results in terms of both computational complexity and architecture performance.
Authors: Milin Zhang, Mohammad Abdi, Jonathan Ashdown, Francesco Restuccia
Abstract: Distributed deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to reduce the computational burden of mobile devices and decrease the end-to-end inference latency in edge computing scenarios. While distributed DNNs have been studied, to the best of our knowledge, the resilience of distributed DNNs to adversarial action remains an open problem. In this paper, we fill the existing research gap by rigorously analyzing the robustness of distributed DNNs against adversarial action. We cast this problem in the context of information theory and rigorously proved that (i) the compressed latent dimension improves the robustness but also affect task-oriented performance; and (ii) the deeper splitting point enhances the robustness but also increases the computational burden. These two trade-offs provide a novel perspective to design robust distributed DNN. To test our theoretical findings, we perform extensive experimental analysis by considering 6 different DNN architectures, 6 different approaches for distributed DNN and 10 different adversarial attacks using the ImageNet-1K dataset.
Authors: Borja Aizpurua, Samuel Palmer, Roman Orus
Abstract: In this paper we show how tensor networks help in developing explainability of machine learning algorithms. Specifically, we develop an unsupervised clustering algorithm based on Matrix Product States (MPS) and apply it in the context of a real use-case of adversary-generated threat intelligence. Our investigation proves that MPS rival traditional deep learning models such as autoencoders and GANs in terms of performance, while providing much richer model interpretability. Our approach naturally facilitates the extraction of feature-wise probabilities, Von Neumann Entropy, and mutual information, offering a compelling narrative for classification of anomalies and fostering an unprecedented level of transparency and interpretability, something fundamental to understand the rationale behind artificial intelligence decisions.
Authors: Bram De Cooman, Johan Suykens
Abstract: Model-free reinforcement learning methods lack an inherent mechanism to impose behavioural constraints on the trained policies. Although certain extensions exist, they remain limited to specific types of constraints, such as value constraints with additional reward signals or visitation density constraints. In this work we unify these existing techniques and bridge the gap with classical optimization and control theory, using a generic primal-dual framework for value-based and actor-critic reinforcement learning methods. The obtained dual formulations turn out to be especially useful for imposing additional constraints on the learned policy, as an intrinsic relationship between such dual constraints (or regularization terms) and reward modifications in the primal is revealed. Furthermore, using this framework, we are able to introduce some novel types of constraints, allowing to impose bounds on the policy's action density or on costs associated with transitions between consecutive states and actions. From the adjusted primal-dual optimization problems, a practical algorithm is derived that supports various combinations of policy constraints that are automatically handled throughout training using trainable reward modifications. The proposed $\texttt{DualCRL}$ method is examined in more detail and evaluated under different (combinations of) constraints on two interpretable environments. The results highlight the efficacy of the method, which ultimately provides the designer of such systems with a versatile toolbox of possible policy constraints.
Authors: Ricardo Vinuesa, Paola Cinnella, Jean Rabault, Hossein Azizpour, Stefan Bauer, Bingni W. Brunton, Arne Elofsson, Elias Jarlebring, Hedvig Kjellstrom, Stefano Markidis, David Marlevi, Javier Garcia-Martinez, Steven L. Brunton
Abstract: As modern scientific instruments generate vast amounts of data and the volume of information in the scientific literature continues to grow, machine learning (ML) has become an essential tool for organising, analysing, and interpreting these complex datasets. This paper explores the transformative role of ML in accelerating breakthroughs across a range of scientific disciplines. By presenting key examples -- such as brain mapping and exoplanet detection -- we demonstrate how ML is reshaping scientific research. We also explore different scenarios where different levels of knowledge of the underlying phenomenon are available, identifying strategies to overcome limitations and unlock the full potential of ML. Despite its advances, the growing reliance on ML poses challenges for research applications and rigorous validation of discoveries. We argue that even with these challenges, ML is poised to disrupt traditional methodologies and advance the boundaries of knowledge by enabling researchers to tackle increasingly complex problems. Thus, the scientific community can move beyond the necessary traditional oversimplifications to embrace the full complexity of natural systems, ultimately paving the way for interdisciplinary breakthroughs and innovative solutions to humanity's most pressing challenges.
Authors: Vignesh Kothapalli, Tom Tirer
Abstract: A vast amount of literature has recently focused on the "Neural Collapse" (NC) phenomenon, which emerges when training neural network (NN) classifiers beyond the zero training error point. The core component of NC is the decrease in the within-class variability of the network's deepest features, dubbed as NC1. The theoretical works that study NC are typically based on simplified unconstrained features models (UFMs) that mask any effect of the data on the extent of collapse. To address this limitation of UFMs, this paper explores the possibility of analyzing NC1 using kernels associated with shallow NNs. We begin by formulating an NC1 metric as a function of the kernel. Then, we specialize it to the NN Gaussian Process kernel (NNGP) and the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), associated with wide networks at initialization and during gradient-based training with a small learning rate, respectively. As a key result, we show that the NTK does not represent more collapsed features than the NNGP for Gaussian data of arbitrary dimensions. This showcases the limitations of data-independent kernels such as NTK in approximating the NC behavior of NNs. As an alternative to NTK, we then empirically explore a recently proposed data-aware Gaussian Process kernel, which generalizes NNGP to model feature learning. We show that this kernel yields lower NC1 than NNGP but may not follow the trends of the shallow NN. Our study demonstrates that adaptivity to data may allow kernel-based analysis of NC, though further advancements in this area are still needed. A nice byproduct of our study is showing both theoretically and empirically that the choice of nonlinear activation function affects NC1 (with ERF yielding lower values than ReLU). The code is available at: https://github.com/kvignesh1420/shallow_nc1
Authors: Ognjen Kundacina, Vladimir Vincan, Dragisa Miskovic
Abstract: This paper introduces a novel two-stage active learning (AL) pipeline for automatic speech recognition (ASR), combining unsupervised and supervised AL methods. The first stage utilizes unsupervised AL by using x-vectors clustering for diverse sample selection from unlabeled speech data, thus establishing a robust initial dataset for the subsequent supervised AL. The second stage incorporates a supervised AL strategy, with a batch AL method specifically developed for ASR, aimed at selecting diverse and informative batches of samples. Here, sample diversity is also achieved using x-vectors clustering, while the most informative samples are identified using a Bayesian AL method tailored for ASR with an adaptation of Monte Carlo dropout to approximate Bayesian inference. This approach enables precise uncertainty estimation, thereby enhancing ASR model training with significantly reduced data requirements. Our method has shown superior performance compared to competing methods on homogeneous, heterogeneous, and OOD test sets, demonstrating that strategic sample selection and innovative Bayesian modeling can substantially optimize both labeling effort and data utilization in deep learning-based ASR applications.
Authors: Yuxuan Wan, Chaozheng Wang, Yi Dong, Wenxuan Wang, Shuqing Li, Yintong Huo, Michael R. Lyu
Abstract: Websites are critical in today's digital world, with over 1.11 billion currently active and approximately 252,000 new sites launched daily. Converting website layout design into functional UI code is a time-consuming yet indispensable step of website development. Manual methods of converting visual designs into functional code present significant challenges, especially for non-experts. To explore automatic design-to-code solutions, we first conduct a motivating study on GPT-4o and identify three types of issues in generating UI code: element omission, element distortion, and element misarrangement. We further reveal that a focus on smaller visual segments can help multimodal large language models (MLLMs) mitigate these failures in the generation process. In this paper, we propose DCGen, a divide-and-conquer-based approach to automate the translation of webpage design to UI code. DCGen starts by dividing screenshots into manageable segments, generating code for each segment, and then reassembling them into complete UI code for the entire screenshot. We conduct extensive testing with a dataset comprised of real-world websites and various MLLMs and demonstrate that DCGen achieves up to a 15% improvement in visual similarity and 8% in code similarity for large input images. Human evaluations show that DCGen can help developers implement webpages significantly faster and more similar to the UI designs. To the best of our knowledge, DCGen is the first segment-aware MLLM-based approach for generating UI code directly from screenshots.
Authors: Jungeum Kim, Sean O'Hagan, Veronika Rockova
Abstract: This work is concerned with conformal prediction in contemporary applications (including generative AI) where a black-box model has been trained on data that are not accessible to the user. Mirroring split-conformal inference, we design a wrapper around a black-box algorithm which calibrates conformity scores. This calibration is local and proceeds in two stages by first adaptively partitioning the predictor space into groups and then calibrating sectionally group by group. Adaptive partitioning (self-grouping) is achieved by fitting a robust regression tree to the conformity scores on the calibration set. This new tree variant is designed in such a way that adding a single new observation does not change the tree fit with overwhelmingly large probability. This add-one-in robustness property allows us to conclude a finite sample group-conditional coverage guarantee, a refinement of the marginal guarantee. In addition, unlike traditional split-conformal inference, adaptive splitting and within-group calibration yields adaptive bands which can stretch and shrink locally. We demonstrate benefits of local tightening on several simulated as well as real examples using non-parametric regression. Finally, we consider two contemporary classification applications for obtaining uncertainty quantification around GPT-4o predictions. We conformalize skin disease diagnoses based on self-reported symptoms as well as predicted states of U.S. legislators based on summaries of their ideology. We demonstrate substantial local tightening of the uncertainty sets while attaining similar marginal coverage.
Authors: Leo Yeykelis, Kaavya Pichai, James J. Cummings, Byron Reeves
Abstract: This report analyzes the potential for large language models (LLMs) to expedite accurate replication and generalization of published research about message effects in marketing. LLM-powered participants (personas) were tested by replicating 133 experimental findings from 14 papers containing 45 recent studies published in the Journal of Marketing. For each study, the measures, stimuli, and sampling specifications were used to generate prompts for LLMs to act as unique personas. The AI personas, 19,447 in total across all of the studies, generated complete datasets and statistical analyses were then compared with the original human study results. The LLM replications successfully reproduced 76% of the original main effects (84 out of 111), demonstrating strong potential for AI-assisted replication. The overall replication rate including interaction effects was 68% (90 out of 133). Furthermore, a test of how human results generalized to different participant samples, media stimuli, and measures showed that replication results can change when tests go beyond the parameters of the original human studies. Implications are discussed for the replication and generalizability crises in social science, the acceleration of theory building in media and marketing psychology, and the practical advantages of rapid message testing for consumer products. Limitations of AI replications are addressed with respect to complex interaction effects, biases in AI models, and establishing benchmarks for AI metrics in marketing research.
Authors: Yuejiang Liu, Jubayer Ibn Hamid, Annie Xie, Yoonho Lee, Maximilian Du, Chelsea Finn
Abstract: Predicting and executing a sequence of actions without intermediate replanning, known as action chunking, is increasingly used in robot learning from human demonstrations. Yet, its effects on the learned policy remain inconsistent: some studies find it crucial for achieving strong results, while others observe decreased performance. In this paper, we first dissect how action chunking impacts the divergence between a learner and a demonstrator. We find that action chunking allows the learner to better capture the temporal dependencies in demonstrations but at the cost of reduced reactivity to unexpected states. To address this tradeoff, we propose Bidirectional Decoding (BID), a test-time inference algorithm that bridges action chunking with closed-loop adaptation. At each timestep, BID samples multiple candidate predictions and searches for the optimal one based on two criteria: (i) backward coherence, which favors samples that align with previous decisions; (ii) forward contrast, which seeks samples of high likelihood for future plans. By coupling decisions within and across action chunks, BID promotes both long-term consistency and short-term reactivity. Experimental results show that our method boosts the performance of two state-of-the-art generative policies across seven simulation benchmarks and two real-world tasks. Code and videos are available at https://bid-robot.github.io.
Authors: Ningyuan Xi, Xiaoyu Wang, Yetao Wu, Teng Chen, Qingqing Gu, Yue Zhao, Jinxian Qu, Zhonglin Jiang, Yong Chen, Luo Ji
Abstract: Large Language Model can reasonably understand and generate human expressions but may lack of thorough thinking and reasoning mechanisms. Recently there have been several studies which enhance the thinking ability of language models but most of them are not data-driven or training-based. In this paper, we are motivated by the cognitive mechanism in the natural world, and design a novel model architecture called TaS which allows it to first consider the thoughts and then express the response based upon the query. We design several pipelines to annotate or generate the thought contents from prompt-response samples, then add language heads in a middle layer which behaves as the thinking layer. We train the language model by the thoughts-augmented data and successfully let the thinking layer automatically generate reasonable thoughts and finally output more reasonable responses. Both qualitative examples and quantitative results validate the effectiveness and performance of TaS. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TadE.
Authors: Jenny T. Liang, Melissa Lin, Nikitha Rao, Brad A. Myers
Abstract: Generative pre-trained models power intelligent software features used by millions of users controlled by developer-written natural language prompts. Despite the impact of prompt-powered software, little is known about its development process and its relationship to programming. In this work, we argue that some prompts are programs and that the development of prompts is a distinct phenomenon in programming known as "prompt programming". We develop an understanding of prompt programming using Straussian grounded theory through interviews with 20 developers engaged in prompt development across a variety of contexts, models, domains, and prompt structures. We contribute 15 observations to form a preliminary understanding of current prompt programming practices. For example, rather than building mental models of code, prompt programmers develop mental models of the foundation model (FM)'s behavior on the prompt by interacting with the FM. While prior research shows that experts have well-formed mental models, we find that prompt programmers who have developed dozens of prompts still struggle to develop reliable mental models. Our observations show that prompt programming differs from traditional software development, motivating the creation of prompt programming tools and providing implications for software engineering stakeholders.
Authors: Tifanny Portela, Andrei Cramariuc, Mayank Mittal, Marco Hutter
Abstract: Combining manipulation with the mobility of legged robots is essential for a wide range of robotic applications. However, integrating an arm with a mobile base significantly increases the system's complexity, making precise end-effector control challenging. Existing model-based approaches are often constrained by their modeling assumptions, leading to limited robustness. Meanwhile, recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) implementations restrict the arm's workspace to be in front of the robot or track only the position to obtain decent tracking accuracy. In this work, we address these limitations by introducing a whole-body RL formulation for end-effector pose tracking in a large workspace on rough, unstructured terrains. Our proposed method involves a terrain-aware sampling strategy for the robot's initial configuration and end-effector pose commands, as well as a game-based curriculum to extend the robot's operating range. We validate our approach on the ANYmal quadrupedal robot with a six DoF robotic arm. Through our experiments, we show that the learned controller achieves precise command tracking over a large workspace and adapts across varying terrains such as stairs and slopes. On deployment, it achieves a pose-tracking error of 2.64 cm and 3.64 degrees, outperforming existing competitive baselines.
Authors: Yifei Ming, Senthil Purushwalkam, Shrey Pandit, Zixuan Ke, Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Caiming Xiong, Shafiq Joty
Abstract: Ensuring faithfulness to context in large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems is crucial for reliable deployment in real-world applications, as incorrect or unsupported information can erode user trust. Despite advancements on standard benchmarks, faithfulness hallucination-where models generate responses misaligned with the provided context-remains a significant challenge. In this work, we introduce FaithEval, a novel and comprehensive benchmark tailored to evaluate the faithfulness of LLMs in contextual scenarios across three diverse tasks: unanswerable, inconsistent, and counterfactual contexts. These tasks simulate real-world challenges where retrieval mechanisms may surface incomplete, contradictory, or fabricated information. FaithEval comprises 4.9K high-quality problems in total, validated through a rigorous four-stage context construction and validation framework, employing both LLM-based auto-evaluation and human validation. Our extensive study across a wide range of open-source and proprietary models reveals that even state-of-the-art models often struggle to remain faithful to the given context, and that larger models do not necessarily exhibit improved faithfulness.Project is available at: https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/FaithEval.
Authors: Omar Erak, Omar Alhussein, Wen Tong
Abstract: Task-oriented semantic communication systems have emerged as a promising approach to achieving efficient and intelligent data transmission, where only information relevant to a specific task is communicated. However, existing methods struggle to fully disentangle task-relevant and task-irrelevant information, leading to privacy concerns and subpar performance. To address this, we propose an information-bottleneck method, named CLAD (contrastive learning and adversarial disentanglement). CLAD utilizes contrastive learning to effectively capture task-relevant features while employing adversarial disentanglement to discard task-irrelevant information. Additionally, due to the lack of reliable and reproducible methods to gain insight into the informativeness and minimality of the encoded feature vectors, we introduce a new technique to compute the information retention index (IRI), a comparative metric used as a proxy for the mutual information between the encoded features and the input, reflecting the minimality of the encoded features. The IRI quantifies the minimality and informativeness of the encoded feature vectors across different task-oriented communication techniques. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that CLAD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of semantic extraction, task performance, privacy preservation, and IRI. CLAD achieves a predictive performance improvement of around 2.5-3%, along with a 77-90% reduction in IRI and a 57-76% decrease in adversarial attribute inference attack accuracy.
Authors: Haoxin Liu, Chenghao Liu, B. Aditya Prakash
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs), with demonstrated reasoning abilities across multiple domains, are largely underexplored for time-series reasoning (TsR), which is ubiquitous in the real world. In this work, we propose TimerBed, the first comprehensive testbed for evaluating LLMs' TsR performance. Specifically, TimerBed includes stratified reasoning patterns with real-world tasks, comprehensive combinations of LLMs and reasoning strategies, and various supervised models as comparison anchors. We perform extensive experiments with TimerBed, test multiple current beliefs, and verify the initial failures of LLMs in TsR, evidenced by the ineffectiveness of zero shot (ZST) and performance degradation of few shot in-context learning (ICL). Further, we identify one possible root cause: the numerical modeling of data. To address this, we propose a prompt-based solution VL-Time, using visualization-modeled data and language-guided reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that Vl-Time enables multimodal LLMs to be non-trivial ZST and powerful ICL reasoners for time series, achieving about 140% average performance improvement and 99% average token costs reduction.
Authors: Shuai Niu, Jing Ma, Hongzhan Lin, Liang Bai, Zhihua Wang, Yida Xu, Yunya Song, Xian Yang
Abstract: Interpretation is critical for disease diagnosis, but existing models struggle to balance predictive accuracy with human-understandable rationales. While large language models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning abilities, their clinical use is limited by high computational costs and restricted multimodal reasoning ability. Small language models (SLMs) are efficient but lack advanced reasoning for integrating multimodal medical data. In addition, both LLMs and SLMs lack of domain knowledge for trustworthy reasoning. Therefore, we propose ClinRaGen, enhancing SLMs by leveraging LLM-derived reasoning ability via rationale distillation and domain knowledge injection for trustworthy multimodal rationale generation. Key innovations include a sequential rationale distillation framework that equips SLMs with LLM-comparable mutlimodal reasoning abilities, and a knowledge-augmented attention mechanism that jointly unifies multimodal representation from time series and textual data in a same encoding space, enabling it naturally interpreted by SLMs while incorporating domain knowledge for reliable rationale generation. Experiments on real-world medical datasets show that ClinRaGen achieves state-of-the-art performance in disease diagnosis and rationale generation, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining LLM-driven reasoning with knowledge augmentation for improved interpretability.
Authors: Vitalis Vosylius, Edward Johns
Abstract: Following the impressive capabilities of in-context learning with large transformers, In-Context Imitation Learning (ICIL) is a promising opportunity for robotics. We introduce Instant Policy, which learns new tasks instantly (without further training) from just one or two demonstrations, achieving ICIL through two key components. First, we introduce inductive biases through a graph representation and model ICIL as a graph generation problem with a learned diffusion process, enabling structured reasoning over demonstrations, observations, and actions. Second, we show that such a model can be trained using pseudo-demonstrations - arbitrary trajectories generated in simulation - as a virtually infinite pool of training data. Simulated and real experiments show that Instant Policy enables rapid learning of various everyday robot tasks. We also show how it can serve as a foundation for cross-embodiment and zero-shot transfer to language-defined tasks. Code and videos are available at https://www.robot-learning.uk/instant-policy.
Authors: S P Sharan, Minkyu Choi, Sahil Shah, Harsh Goel, Mohammad Omama, Sandeep Chinchali
Abstract: Recent advancements in text-to-video models such as Sora, Gen-3, MovieGen, and CogVideoX are pushing the boundaries of synthetic video generation, with adoption seen in fields like robotics, autonomous driving, and entertainment. As these models become prevalent, various metrics and benchmarks have emerged to evaluate the quality of the generated videos. However, these metrics emphasize visual quality and smoothness, neglecting temporal fidelity and text-to-video alignment, which are crucial for safety-critical applications. To address this gap, we introduce NeuS-V, a novel synthetic video evaluation metric that rigorously assesses text-to-video alignment using neuro-symbolic formal verification techniques. Our approach first converts the prompt into a formally defined Temporal Logic (TL) specification and translates the generated video into an automaton representation. Then, it evaluates the text-to-video alignment by formally checking the video automaton against the TL specification. Furthermore, we present a dataset of temporally extended prompts to evaluate state-of-the-art video generation models against our benchmark. We find that NeuS-V demonstrates a higher correlation by over 5x with human evaluations when compared to existing metrics. Our evaluation further reveals that current video generation models perform poorly on these temporally complex prompts, highlighting the need for future work in improving text-to-video generation capabilities.
Authors: Avner Seror
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) increasingly participate in tasks with ethical and societal stakes, a critical question arises: do they exhibit an emergent "moral mind" - a consistent structure of moral preferences guiding their decisions - and to what extent is this structure shared across models? To investigate this, we applied tools from revealed preference theory to nearly 40 leading LLMs, presenting each with many structured moral dilemmas spanning five foundational dimensions of ethical reasoning. Using a probabilistic rationality test, we found that at least one model from each major provider exhibited behavior consistent with approximately stable moral preferences, acting as if guided by an underlying utility function. We then estimated these utility functions and found that most models cluster around neutral moral stances. To further characterize heterogeneity, we employed a non-parametric permutation approach, constructing a probabilistic similarity network based on revealed preference patterns. The results reveal a shared core in LLMs' moral reasoning, but also meaningful variation: some models show flexible reasoning across perspectives, while others adhere to more rigid ethical profiles. These findings provide a new empirical lens for evaluating moral consistency in LLMs and offer a framework for benchmarking ethical alignment across AI systems.
Authors: Atsuki Yamaguchi, Terufumi Morishita, Aline Villavicencio, Nikolaos Aletras
Abstract: Vocabulary expansion (VE) is the de-facto approach to language adaptation of large language models (LLMs) by adding new tokens and continuing pre-training on target data. While this is effective for base models trained on unlabeled data, it poses challenges for chat models trained to follow instructions through labeled conversation data. Directly adapting the latter with VE on target unlabeled data may result in forgetting chat abilities. While ideal, target chat data is often unavailable or costly to create for low-resource languages, and machine-translated alternatives are not always effective. To address this issue, previous work proposed using a base and chat model from the same family. This method first adapts the base LLM with VE on target unlabeled data and then converts it to a chat model by adding a chat vector (CV) derived from the weight difference between the source base and chat models. We propose ElChat, a new language adaptation method for chat LLMs that adapts a chat model directly on target unlabeled data, without a base model. It elicits chat abilities by injecting information from the source chat model. ElChat offers more robust and competitive target language and safety performance while achieving superior English, chat, and instruction-following abilities compared to CV.
Authors: Witold Wydma\'nski, Ulvi Movsum-zada, Jacek Tabor, Marek \'Smieja
Abstract: Although deep learning models have had great success in natural language processing and computer vision, we do not observe comparable improvements in the case of tabular data, which is still the most common data type used in biological, industrial and financial applications. In particular, it is challenging to transfer large-scale pre-trained models to downstream tasks defined on small tabular datasets. To address this, we propose VisTabNet -- a cross-modal transfer learning method, which allows for adapting Vision Transformer (ViT) with pre-trained weights to process tabular data. By projecting tabular inputs to patch embeddings acceptable by ViT, we can directly apply a pre-trained Transformer Encoder to tabular inputs. This approach eliminates the conceptual cost of designing a suitable architecture for processing tabular data, while reducing the computational cost of training the model from scratch. Experimental results on multiple small tabular datasets (less than 1k samples) demonstrate VisTabNet's superiority, outperforming both traditional ensemble methods and recent deep learning models. The proposed method goes beyond conventional transfer learning practice and shows that pre-trained image models can be transferred to solve tabular problems, extending the boundaries of transfer learning. We share our example implementation as a GitHub repository available at https://github.com/wwydmanski/VisTabNet.
Authors: Nikolaos Bousias, Stefanos Pertigkiozoglou, Kostas Daniilidis, George Pappas
Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful framework for enabling agents to learn complex, coordinated behaviors but faces persistent challenges regarding its generalization, scalability and sample efficiency. Recent advancements have sought to alleviate those issues by embedding intrinsic symmetries of the systems in the policy. Yet, most dynamical systems exhibit little to no symmetries to exploit. This paper presents a novel framework for embedding extrinsic symmetries in multi-agent system dynamics that enables the use of symmetry-enhanced methods to address systems with insufficient intrinsic symmetries, expanding the scope of equivariant learning to a wide variety of MARL problems. Central to our framework is the Group Equivariant Graphormer, a group-modular architecture specifically designed for distributed swarming tasks. Extensive experiments on a swarm of symmetry-breaking quadrotors validate the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing its potential for improved generalization and zero-shot scalability. Our method achieves significant reductions in collision rates and enhances task success rates across a diverse range of scenarios and varying swarm sizes.
Authors: Shane Babcock, Carter Benson, Giacomo De Colle, Sydney Cohen, Alexander D. Diehl, Ram A. N. R. Challa, Ray Mavrovich, Joshua Billig, Anthony Huffman, Yongqun He, John Beverley
Abstract: Infectious diseases remain a critical global health challenge, and the integration of standardized ontologies plays a vital role in managing related data. The Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) and its extensions, such as the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), are essential for organizing and disseminating information related to infectious diseases. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for updating IDO and its virus-specific extensions. There is an additional need to update IDO extensions specific to bacteria, fungus, and parasite infectious diseases. We adopt the "hub and spoke" methodology to generate pathogen-specific extensions of IDO: Virus Infectious Disease Ontology (VIDO), Bacteria Infectious Disease Ontology (BIDO), Mycosis Infectious Disease Ontology (MIDO), and Parasite Infectious Disease Ontology (PIDO). The creation of pathogen-specific reference ontologies advances modularization and reusability of infectious disease data within the IDO ecosystem. Future work will focus on further refining these ontologies, creating new extensions, and developing application ontologies based on them, in line with ongoing efforts to standardize biological and biomedical terminologies for improved data sharing and analysis.
Authors: Haoyu Xie, Haoxuan Li, Chunyuan Zheng, Haonan Yuan, Guorui Liao, Jun Liao, Li Liu
Abstract: Wearable Human Activity Recognition (WHAR) is a prominent research area within ubiquitous computing. Multi-sensor synchronous measurement has proven to be more effective for WHAR than using a single sensor. However, existing WHAR methods use shared convolutional kernels for indiscriminate temporal feature extraction across each sensor variable, which fails to effectively capture spatio-temporal relationships of intra-sensor and inter-sensor variables. We propose the DecomposeWHAR model consisting of a decomposition phase and a fusion phase to better model the relationships between modality variables. The decomposition creates high-dimensional representations of each intra-sensor variable through the improved Depth Separable Convolution to capture local temporal features while preserving their unique characteristics. The fusion phase begins by capturing relationships between intra-sensor variables and fusing their features at both the channel and variable levels. Long-range temporal dependencies are modeled using the State Space Model (SSM), and later cross-sensor interactions are dynamically captured through a self-attention mechanism, highlighting inter-sensor spatial correlations. Our model demonstrates superior performance on three widely used WHAR datasets, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art models while maintaining acceptable computational efficiency.
Authors: Hy Nguyen, Nguyen Hung Nguyen, Nguyen Linh Bao Nguyen, Srikanth Thudumu, Hung Du, Rajesh Vasa, Kon Mouzakis
Abstract: The Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) algorithm is widely used for approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search, leveraging the principles of navigable small-world graphs. However, it faces some limitations. The first is the local optima problem, which arises from the algorithm's greedy search strategy, selecting neighbors based solely on proximity at each step. This often leads to cluster disconnections. The second limitation is that HNSW frequently fails to achieve logarithmic complexity, particularly in high-dimensional datasets, due to the exhaustive traversal through each layer. To address these limitations, we propose a novel algorithm that mitigates local optima and cluster disconnections while enhancing the construction speed, maintaining inference speed. The first component is a dual-branch HNSW structure with LID-based insertion mechanisms, enabling traversal from multiple directions. This improves outlier node capture, enhances cluster connectivity, accelerates construction speed and reduces the risk of local minima. The second component incorporates a bridge-building technique that bypasses redundant intermediate layers, maintaining inference and making up the additional computational overhead introduced by the dual-branch structure. Experiments on various benchmarks and datasets showed that our algorithm outperforms the original HNSW in both accuracy and speed. We evaluated six datasets across Computer Vision (CV), and Natural Language Processing (NLP), showing recall improvements of 18\% in NLP, and up to 30\% in CV tasks while reducing the construction time by up to 20\% and maintaining the inference speed. We did not observe any trade-offs in our algorithm. Ablation studies revealed that LID-based insertion had the greatest impact on performance, followed by the dual-branch structure and bridge-building components.
Authors: Hy Nguyen, Duy Khoa Pham, Srikanth Thudumu, Hung Du, Rajesh Vasa, Kon Mouzakis
Abstract: The widespread use of Multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) often relies on a fixed activation function (e.g., ReLU, Sigmoid, Tanh) for all nodes within the hidden layers. While effective in many scenarios, this uniformity may limit the networks ability to capture complex data patterns. We argue that employing the same activation function at every node is suboptimal and propose leveraging different activation functions at each node to increase flexibility and adaptability. To achieve this, we introduce Local Control Networks (LCNs), which leverage B-spline functions to enable distinct activation curves at each node. Our mathematical analysis demonstrates the properties and benefits of LCNs over conventional MLPs. In addition, we demonstrate that more complex architectures, such as Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), are unnecessary in certain scenarios, and LCNs can be a more efficient alternative. Empirical experiments on various benchmarks and datasets validate our theoretical findings. In computer vision tasks, LCNs achieve marginal improvements over MLPs and outperform KANs by approximately 5\%, while also being more computationally efficient than KANs. In basic machine learning tasks, LCNs show a 1\% improvement over MLPs and a 0.6\% improvement over KANs. For symbolic formula representation tasks, LCNs perform on par with KANs, with both architectures outperforming MLPs. Our findings suggest that diverse activations at the node level can lead to improved performance and efficiency.
Authors: Tomer Jordi Chaffer
Abstract: Current approaches to AI governance often fall short in anticipating a future where AI agents manage critical tasks, such as financial operations, administrative functions, and beyond. While cryptocurrencies could serve as the foundation for monetizing value exchange in a collaboration and delegation dynamic among AI agents, a critical question remains: how can humans ensure meaningful oversight and control as a future economy of AI agents scales and evolves? In this philosophical exploration, we highlight emerging concepts in the industry to inform research and development efforts in anticipation of a future decentralized agentic economy.
Authors: Jason Jingzhou Liu, Yulong Li, Kenneth Shaw, Tony Tao, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Deepak Pathak
Abstract: Many contact-rich tasks humans perform, such as box pickup or rolling dough, rely on force feedback for reliable execution. However, this force information, which is readily available in most robot arms, is not commonly used in teleoperation and policy learning. Consequently, robot behavior is often limited to quasi-static kinematic tasks that do not require intricate force-feedback. In this paper, we first present a low-cost, intuitive, bilateral teleoperation setup that relays external forces of the follower arm back to the teacher arm, facilitating data collection for complex, contact-rich tasks. We then introduce FACTR, a policy learning method that employs a curriculum which corrupts the visual input with decreasing intensity throughout training. The curriculum prevents our transformer-based policy from over-fitting to the visual input and guides the policy to properly attend to the force modality. We demonstrate that by fully utilizing the force information, our method significantly improves generalization to unseen objects by 43\% compared to baseline approaches without a curriculum. Video results, codebases, and instructions at https://jasonjzliu.com/factr/
Authors: Nadya Abdel Madjid, Murad Mebrahtu, Abdelmoamen Nasser, Bilal Hassan, Naoufel Werghi, Jorge Dias, Majid Khonji
Abstract: This paper introduces the Emirates Multi-Task (EMT) dataset, designed to support multi-task benchmarking within a unified framework. It comprises over 30,000 frames from a dash-camera perspective and 570,000 annotated bounding boxes, covering approximately 150 kilometers of driving routes that reflect the distinctive road topology, congestion patterns, and driving behavior of Gulf region traffic. The dataset supports three primary tasks: tracking, trajectory forecasting, and intention prediction. Each benchmark is accompanied by corresponding evaluations: (1) multi-agent tracking experiments addressing multi-class scenarios and occlusion handling; (2) trajectory forecasting evaluation using deep sequential and interaction-aware models; and (3) intention prediction experiments based on observed trajectories. The dataset is publicly available at https://avlab.io/emt-dataset, with pre-processing scripts and evaluation models at https://github.com/AV-Lab/emt-dataset.
URLs: https://avlab.io/emt-dataset,, https://github.com/AV-Lab/emt-dataset.
Authors: Rohan Juneja, Shivam Aggarwal, Safeen Huda, Tulika Mitra, Li-Shiuan Peh
Abstract: Quantization is critical for efficiently deploying large language models (LLMs). Yet conventional methods remain hardware-agnostic, limited to bit-width constraints, and do not account for intrinsic circuit characteristics such as the timing behaviors and energy profiles of Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) units. This disconnect from circuit-level behavior limits the ability to exploit available timing margins and energy-saving opportunities, reducing the overall efficiency of deployment on modern accelerators. To address these limitations, we propose HALO, a versatile framework for Hardware-Aware Post-Training Quantization (PTQ). Unlike traditional methods, HALO explicitly incorporates detailed hardware characteristics, including critical-path timing and power consumption, into its quantization approach. HALO strategically selects weights with low critical-path-delays enabling higher operational frequencies and dynamic frequency scaling without disrupting the architecture's dataflow. Remarkably, HALO achieves these improvements with only a few dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) adjustments, ensuring simplicity and practicality in deployment. Additionally, by reducing switching activity within the MAC units, HALO effectively lowers energy consumption. Evaluations on accelerators such as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) demonstrate that HALO significantly enhances inference efficiency, achieving average performance improvements of 270% and energy savings of 51% over baseline quantization methods, all with minimal impact on accuracy.
Authors: Peng Yan, Ahmed Abdulkadir, Gerrit A. Schatte, Giulia Aguzzi, Joonsu Gha, Nikola Pascher, Matthias Rosenthal, Yunlong Gao, Benjamin F. Grewe, Thilo Stadelmann
Abstract: To go from (passive) process monitoring to active process control, an effective AI system must learn about the behavior of the complex system from very limited training data, forming an ad-hoc digital twin with respect to process inputs and outputs that captures the consequences of actions on the process's world. We propose a novel methodology based on learning world models that disentangles process parameters in the learned latent representation, allowing for fine-grained control. Representation learning is driven by the latent factors influencing the processes through contrastive learning within a joint embedding predictive architecture. This makes changes in representations predictable from changes in inputs and vice versa, facilitating interpretability of key factors responsible for process variations, paving the way for effective control actions to keep the process within operational bounds. The effectiveness of our method is validated on the example of plastic injection molding, demonstrating practical relevance in proposing specific control actions for a notoriously unstable process.
Authors: Gregory Wheeler
Abstract: The desirable gambles framework provides a foundational approach to imprecise probability theory but relies heavily on linear utility assumptions. This paper introduces function-coherent gambles, a generalization that accommodates non-linear utility while preserving essential rationality properties. We establish core axioms for function-coherence and prove a representation theorem that characterizes acceptable gambles through continuous linear functionals. The framework is then applied to analyze various forms of discounting in intertemporal choice, including hyperbolic, quasi-hyperbolic, scale-dependent, and state-dependent discounting. We demonstrate how these alternatives to constant-rate exponential discounting can be integrated within the function-coherent framework. This unified treatment provides theoretical foundations for modeling sophisticated patterns of time preference within the desirability paradigm, bridging a gap between normative theory and observed behavior in intertemporal decision-making under genuine uncertainty.
Authors: Wuzhou Sun, Siyi Li, Qingxiang Zou, Zixing Liao
Abstract: In some game scenarios, due to the uncertainty of the number of enemy units and the priority of various attributes, the evaluation of the threat level of enemy units as well as the screening has been a challenging research topic, and the core difficulty lies in how to reasonably set the priority of different attributes in order to achieve quantitative evaluation of the threat. In this paper, we innovatively transform the problem of threat assessment into a reinforcement learning problem, and through systematic reinforcement learning training, we successfully construct an efficient neural network evaluator. The evaluator can not only comprehensively integrate the multidimensional attribute features of the enemy, but also effectively combine our state information, thus realizing a more accurate and scientific threat assessment.
Authors: Zhiyuan Ning, Zaitian Wang, Ran Zhang, Ping Xu, Kunpeng Liu, Pengyang Wang, Wei Ju, Pengfei Wang, Yuanchun Zhou, Erik Cambria, Chong Chen
Abstract: Graph clustering aims to divide the graph into different clusters. The recently emerging deep graph clustering approaches are largely built on graph neural networks (GNN). However, GNN is designed for general graph encoding and there is a common issue of representation collapse in existing GNN-based deep graph clustering algorithms. We attribute two main reasons for such issues: (i) the inductive bias of GNN models: GNNs tend to generate similar representations for proximal nodes. Since graphs often contain a non-negligible amount of inter-cluster links, the bias results in error message passing and leads to biased clustering; (ii) the clustering guided loss function: most traditional approaches strive to make all samples closer to pre-learned cluster centers, which causes a degenerate solution assigning all data points to a single label thus making all samples similar and less discriminative. To address these challenges, we investigate graph clustering from a graph cut perspective and propose an innovative and non-GNN-based Deep Cut-informed Graph embedding and Clustering framework, namely DCGC. This framework includes two modules: (i) cut-informed graph encoding; (ii) self-supervised graph clustering via optimal transport. For the encoding module, we derive a cut-informed graph embedding objective to fuse graph structure and attributes by minimizing their joint normalized cut. For the clustering module, we utilize the optimal transport theory to obtain the clustering assignments, which can balance the guidance of "proximity to the pre-learned cluster center". With the above two tailored designs, DCGC is more suitable for the graph clustering task, which can effectively alleviate the problem of representation collapse and achieve better performance. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that our method is simple but effective compared with benchmarks.
Authors: Chen Xu, Tony Khuong Nguyen, Emma Dixon, Christopher Rodriguez, Patrick Miller, Robert Lee, Paarth Shah, Rares Ambrus, Haruki Nishimura, Masha Itkina
Abstract: Recent years have witnessed impressive robotic manipulation systems driven by advances in imitation learning and generative modeling, such as diffusion- and flow-based approaches. As robot policy performance increases, so does the complexity and time horizon of achievable tasks, inducing unexpected and diverse failure modes that are difficult to predict a priori. To enable trustworthy policy deployment in safety-critical human environments, reliable runtime failure detection becomes important during policy inference. However, most existing failure detection approaches rely on prior knowledge of failure modes and require failure data during training, which imposes a significant challenge in practicality and scalability. In response to these limitations, we present FAIL-Detect, a modular two-stage approach for failure detection in imitation learning-based robotic manipulation. To accurately identify failures from successful training data alone, we frame the problem as sequential out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. We first distill policy inputs and outputs into scalar signals that correlate with policy failures and capture epistemic uncertainty. FAIL-Detect then employs conformal prediction (CP) as a versatile framework for uncertainty quantification with statistical guarantees. Empirically, we thoroughly investigate both learned and post-hoc scalar signal candidates on diverse robotic manipulation tasks. Our experiments show learned signals to be mostly consistently effective, particularly when using our novel flow-based density estimator. Furthermore, our method detects failures more accurately and faster than state-of-the-art (SOTA) failure detection baselines. These results highlight the potential of FAIL-Detect to enhance the safety and reliability of imitation learning-based robotic systems as they progress toward real-world deployment.
Authors: Jiuding Sun, Jing Huang, Sidharth Baskaran, Karel D'Oosterlinck, Christopher Potts, Michael Sklar, Atticus Geiger
Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability has made great strides in identifying neural network features (e.g., directions in hidden activation space) that mediate concepts(e.g., the birth year of a person) and enable predictable manipulation. Distributed alignment search (DAS) leverages supervision from counterfactual data to learn concept features within hidden states, but DAS assumes we can afford to conduct a brute force search over potential feature locations. To address this, we present HyperDAS, a transformer-based hypernetwork architecture that (1) automatically locates the token-positions of the residual stream that a concept is realized in and (2) constructs features of those residual stream vectors for the concept. In experiments with Llama3-8B, HyperDAS achieves state-of-the-art performance on the RAVEL benchmark for disentangling concepts in hidden states. In addition, we review the design decisions we made to mitigate the concern that HyperDAS (like all powerful interpretabilty methods) might inject new information into the target model rather than faithfully interpreting it.
Authors: Felipe Azua, Leopoldo Bertossi
Abstract: Different attribution-scores have been proposed to quantify the relevance of database tuples for a query answer from a database. Among them, we find Causal Responsibility, the Shapley Value, the Banzhaf Power-Index, and the Causal Effect. They have been analyzed in isolation, mainly in terms of computational properties. In this work, we start an investigation into the alignment of these scores on the basis of the queries at hand; that is, on whether they induce compatible rankings of tuples. We are able to identify vast classes of queries for which some pairs of scores are always aligned, and others for which they are not. It turns out that the presence of exogenous tuples makes a crucial difference in this regard.
Authors: Hisato Komatsu
Abstract: The linear regression (LR) method offers the advantage that optimal parameters can be calculated relatively easily, although its representation capability is limited than that of the deep learning technique. To improve deep reinforcement learning, the Least Squares Deep Q Network (LS-DQN) method was proposed by Levine et al., which combines Deep Q Network (DQN) with LR method. However, the LS-DQN method assumes that the actions are discrete. In this study, we propose the Double Least Squares Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DLS-DDPG) method to address this limitation. This method combines the LR method with the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) technique, one of the representative deep reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous action cases. For the LR update of the critic network, DLS-DDPG uses an algorithm similar to the Fitted Q iteration, the method which LS-DQN adopted. In addition, we calculated the optimal action using the quasi-Newton method and used it as both the agent's action and the training data for the LR update of the actor network. Numerical experiments conducted in MuJoCo environments showed that the proposed method improved performance at least in some tasks, although there are difficulties such as the inability to make the regularization terms small.
Authors: Haowei Lin, Xiangyu Wang, Ruilin Yan, Baizhou Huang, Haotian Ye, Jianhua Zhu, Zihao Wang, James Zou, Jianzhu Ma, Yitao Liang
Abstract: With powerful large language models (LLMs) demonstrating superhuman reasoning capabilities, a critical question arises: Do LLMs genuinely reason, or do they merely recall answers from their extensive, web-scraped training datasets? Publicly released benchmarks inevitably become contaminated once incorporated into subsequent LLM training sets, undermining their reliability as faithful assessments. To address this, we introduce KUMO, a generative evaluation framework designed specifically for assessing reasoning in LLMs. KUMO synergistically combines LLMs with symbolic engines to dynamically produce diverse, multi-turn reasoning tasks that are partially observable and adjustable in difficulty. Through an automated pipeline, KUMO continuously generates novel tasks across open-ended domains, compelling models to demonstrate genuine generalization rather than memorization. We evaluated 23 state-of-the-art LLMs on 5,000 tasks across 100 domains created by KUMO, benchmarking their reasoning abilities against university students. Our findings reveal that many LLMs have outperformed university-level performance on easy reasoning tasks, and reasoning-scaled LLMs reach university-level performance on complex reasoning challenges. Moreover, LLM performance on KUMO tasks correlates strongly with results on newly released real-world reasoning benchmarks, underscoring KUMO's value as a robust, enduring assessment tool for genuine LLM reasoning capabilities.
Authors: Kidist Amde Mekonnen, Yubao Tang, Maarten de Rijke
Abstract: Generative information retrieval (GenIR) is a promising neural retrieval paradigm that formulates document retrieval as a document identifier (docid) generation task, allowing for end-to-end optimization toward a unified global retrieval objective. However, existing GenIR models suffer from token-level misalignment, where models trained to predict the next token often fail to capture document-level relevance effectively. While reinforcement learning-based methods, such as reinforcement learning from relevance feedback (RLRF), aim to address this misalignment through reward modeling, they introduce significant complexity, requiring the optimization of an auxiliary reward function followed by reinforcement fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive and often unstable. To address these challenges, we propose direct document relevance optimization (DDRO), which aligns token-level docid generation with document-level relevance estimation through direct optimization via pairwise ranking, eliminating the need for explicit reward modeling and reinforcement learning. Experimental results on benchmark datasets, including MS MARCO document and Natural Questions, show that DDRO outperforms reinforcement learning-based methods, achieving a 7.4% improvement in MRR@10 for MS MARCO and a 19.9% improvement for Natural Questions. These findings highlight DDRO's potential to enhance retrieval effectiveness with a simplified optimization approach. By framing alignment as a direct optimization problem, DDRO simplifies the ranking optimization pipeline of GenIR models while offering a viable alternative to reinforcement learning-based methods.
Authors: Szymon Mazurek, Jakub Caputa, Jan K. Argasi\'nski, Maciej Wielgosz
Abstract: Three-factor learning rules in Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a crucial extension to traditional Hebbian learning and Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity (STDP), incorporating neuromodulatory signals to improve adaptation and learning efficiency. These mechanisms enhance biological plausibility and facilitate improved credit assignment in artificial neural systems. This paper takes a view on this topic from a machine learning perspective, providing an overview of recent advances in three-factor learning, discusses theoretical foundations, algorithmic implementations, and their relevance to reinforcement learning and neuromorphic computing. In addition, we explore interdisciplinary approaches, scalability challenges, and potential applications in robotics, cognitive modeling, and AI systems. Finally, we highlight key research gaps and propose future directions for bridging the gap between neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
Authors: Tiange Huang, Yongjun Li
Abstract: Unsupervised multivariate time series anomaly detection (UMTSAD) plays a critical role in various domains, including finance, networks, and sensor systems. In recent years, due to the outstanding performance of deep learning in general sequential tasks, many models have been specialized for deep UMTSAD tasks and have achieved impressive results, particularly those based on the Transformer and self-attention mechanisms. However, the sequence anomaly association assumptions underlying these models are often limited to specific predefined patterns and scenarios, such as concentrated or peak anomaly patterns. These limitations hinder their ability to generalize to diverse anomaly situations, especially where the lack of labels poses significant challenges. To address these issues, we propose AMAD, which integrates \textbf{A}uto\textbf{M}asked Attention for UMTS\textbf{AD} scenarios. AMAD introduces a novel structure based on the AutoMask mechanism and an attention mixup module, forming a simple yet generalized anomaly association representation framework. This framework is further enhanced by a Max-Min training strategy and a Local-Global contrastive learning approach. By combining multi-scale feature extraction with automatic relative association modeling, AMAD provides a robust and adaptable solution to UMTSAD challenges. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieving competitive performance results compared to SOTA benchmarks across a variety of datasets.
Authors: Zhiwei Xu, Yujuan Wu, Shiheng Wang, Jiabao Gao, Tian Qiu, Ziqi Wang, Hai Wan, Xibin Zhao
Abstract: Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have long been a hot topic in the cybersecurity community. In recent years, with the introduction of deep learning (DL) techniques, IDS have made great progress due to their increasing generalizability. The rationale behind this is that by learning the underlying patterns of known system behaviors, IDS detection can be generalized to intrusions that exploit zero-day vulnerabilities. In this survey, we refer to this type of IDS as DL-based IDS (DL-IDS). From the perspective of DL, this survey systematically reviews all the stages of DL-IDS, including data collection, log storage, log parsing, graph summarization, attack detection, and attack investigation. To accommodate current researchers, a section describing the publicly available benchmark datasets is included. This survey further discusses current challenges and potential future research directions, aiming to help researchers understand the basic ideas and visions of DL-IDS research, as well as to motivate their research interests.
Authors: Akram Mustafa, Usman Naseem, Mostafa Rahimi Azghadi
Abstract: Clinical document classification is essential for converting unstructured medical texts into standardised ICD-10 diagnoses, yet it faces challenges due to complex medical language, privacy constraints, and limited annotated datasets. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising improvements in accuracy and efficiency for this task. This study evaluates the performance and consistency of eight LLMs; four reasoning (Qwen QWQ, Deepseek Reasoner, GPT o3 Mini, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking) and four non-reasoning (Llama 3.3, GPT 4o Mini, Gemini 2.0 Flash, Deepseek Chat); in classifying clinical discharge summaries using the MIMIC-IV dataset. Using cTAKES to structure clinical narratives, models were assessed across three experimental runs, with majority voting determining final predictions. Results showed that reasoning models outperformed non-reasoning models in accuracy (71% vs 68%) and F1 score (67% vs 60%), with Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking achieving the highest accuracy (75%) and F1 score (76%). However, non-reasoning models demonstrated greater stability (91% vs 84% consistency). Performance varied across ICD-10 codes, with reasoning models excelling in complex cases but struggling with abstract categories. Findings indicate a trade-off between accuracy and consistency, suggesting that a hybrid approach could optimise clinical coding. Future research should explore multi-label classification, domain-specific fine-tuning, and ensemble methods to enhance model reliability in real-world applications.
Authors: Sebastian Seidel, Uwe M. Borghoff
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force across industries, driven by advances in deep learning and natural language processing, and fueled by large-scale data and computing resources. Despite its rapid adoption, the opacity of AI systems poses significant challenges to trust and acceptance. This work explores the intersection of connectionist and symbolic approaches to artificial intelligence, focusing on the derivation of interpretable symbolic models, such as decision trees, from feedforward neural networks (FNNs). Decision trees provide a transparent framework for elucidating the operations of neural networks while preserving their functionality. The derivation is presented in a step-by-step approach and illustrated with several examples. A systematic methodology is proposed to bridge neural and symbolic paradigms by exploiting distributed representations in FNNs to identify symbolic components, including fillers, roles, and their interrelationships. The process traces neuron activation values and input configurations across network layers, mapping activations and their underlying inputs to decision tree edges. The resulting symbolic structures effectively capture FNN decision processes and enable scalability to deeper networks through iterative refinement of subpaths for each hidden layer. To validate the theoretical framework, a prototype was developed using Keras .h5-data and emulating TensorFlow within the Java JDK/JavaFX environment. This prototype demonstrates the feasibility of extracting symbolic representations from neural networks, enhancing trust in AI systems, and promoting accountability.
Authors: Juan David Salazar Rodriguez, Sam Conrad Joyce, Julfendi
Abstract: This research investigates the use of customized GPT models to enhance prompting proficiency among architecture students when generating AI-driven images. Prompt engineering is increasingly essential in architectural education due to the widespread adoption of generative AI tools. This study utilized a mixed-methods experimental design involving architecture students divided into three distinct groups: a control group receiving no structured support, a second group provided with structured prompting guides, and a third group supported by both structured guides and interactive AI personas. Students engaged in reverse engineering tasks, first guessing provided image prompts and then generating their own prompts, aiming to boost critical thinking and prompting skills. Variables examined included time spent prompting, word count, prompt similarity, and concreteness. Quantitative analysis involved correlation assessments between these variables and a one-way ANOVA to evaluate differences across groups. While several correlations showed meaningful relationships, not all were statistically significant. ANOVA results indicated statistically significant improvements in word count, similarity, and concreteness, especially in the group supported by AI personas and structured prompting guides. Qualitative feedback complemented these findings, revealing enhanced confidence and critical thinking skills in students. These results suggest tailored GPT interactions substantially improve students' ability to communicate architectural concepts clearly and effectively.
Authors: Xinyu Liang, Hao Wang
Abstract: The scarcity of high-quality residential load data can pose obstacles for decarbonizing the residential sector as well as effective grid planning and operation. The above challenges have motivated research into generating synthetic load data, but existing methods faced limitations in terms of scalability, diversity, and similarity. This paper proposes a Generative Adversarial Network-based Synthetic Residential Load Pattern (RLP-GAN) generation model, a novel weakly-supervised GAN framework, leveraging an over-complete autoencoder to capture dependencies within complex and diverse load patterns and learn household-level data distribution at scale. We incorporate a model weight selection method to address the mode collapse problem and generate load patterns with high diversity. We develop a holistic evaluation method to validate the effectiveness of RLP-GAN using real-world data of 417 households. The results demonstrate that RLP-GAN outperforms state-of-the-art models in capturing temporal dependencies and generating load patterns with higher similarity to real data. Furthermore, we have publicly released the RLP-GAN generated synthetic dataset, which comprises one million synthetic residential load pattern profiles.
Authors: Fulong Ye, Miao Hua, Pengze Zhang, Xinghui Li, Qichao Sun, Songtao Zhao, Qian He, Xinglong Wu
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce DreamID, a diffusion-based face swapping model that achieves high levels of ID similarity, attribute preservation, image fidelity, and fast inference speed. Unlike the typical face swapping training process, which often relies on implicit supervision and struggles to achieve satisfactory results. DreamID establishes explicit supervision for face swapping by constructing Triplet ID Group data, significantly enhancing identity similarity and attribute preservation. The iterative nature of diffusion models poses challenges for utilizing efficient image-space loss functions, as performing time-consuming multi-step sampling to obtain the generated image during training is impractical. To address this issue, we leverage the accelerated diffusion model SD Turbo, reducing the inference steps to a single iteration, enabling efficient pixel-level end-to-end training with explicit Triplet ID Group supervision. Additionally, we propose an improved diffusion-based model architecture comprising SwapNet, FaceNet, and ID Adapter. This robust architecture fully unlocks the power of the Triplet ID Group explicit supervision. Finally, to further extend our method, we explicitly modify the Triplet ID Group data during training to fine-tune and preserve specific attributes, such as glasses and face shape. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamID outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of identity similarity, pose and expression preservation, and image fidelity. Overall, DreamID achieves high-quality face swapping results at 512*512 resolution in just 0.6 seconds and performs exceptionally well in challenging scenarios such as complex lighting, large angles, and occlusions.
Authors: Haiyan Qin, Zhiwei Xie, Jingjing Li, Liangchen Li, Xiaotong Feng, Junzhan Liu, Wang Kang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced Verilog code generation significantly, yet face challenges in data quality, reasoning capabilities, and computational efficiency. This paper presents ReasoningV, a novel model employing a hybrid reasoning strategy that integrates trained intrinsic capabilities with dynamic inference adaptation for Verilog code generation. Our framework introduces three complementary innovations: (1) ReasoningV-5K, a high-quality dataset of 5,000 functionally verified instances with reasoning paths created through multi-dimensional filtering of PyraNet samples; (2) a two-stage training approach combining parameter-efficient fine-tuning for foundational knowledge with full-parameter optimization for enhanced reasoning; and (3) an adaptive reasoning mechanism that dynamically adjusts reasoning depth based on problem complexity, reducing token consumption by up to 75\% while preserving performance. Experimental results demonstrate ReasoningV's effectiveness with a pass@1 accuracy of 57.8\% on VerilogEval-human, achieving performance competitive with leading commercial models like Gemini-2.0-flash (59.5\%) and exceeding the previous best open-source model by 10.4 percentage points. ReasoningV offers a more reliable and accessible pathway for advancing AI-driven hardware design automation, with our model, data, and code available at https://github.com/BUAA-CLab/ReasoningV.
Authors: Haiyan Qin, Jiahao Feng, Xiaotong Feng, Wei W. Xing, Wang Kang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have transformed code generation, yet their application in hardware design produces gate counts 38\%--1075\% higher than human designs. We present CircuitMind, a multi-agent framework that achieves human-competitive efficiency through three key innovations: syntax locking (constraining generation to basic logic gates), retrieval-augmented generation (enabling knowledge-driven design), and dual-reward optimization (balancing correctness with efficiency). To evaluate our approach, we introduce TC-Bench, the first gate-level benchmark harnessing collective intelligence from the TuringComplete ecosystem -- a competitive circuit design platform with hundreds of thousands of players. Experiments show CircuitMind enables 55.6\% of model implementations to match or exceed top-tier human experts in composite efficiency metrics. Most remarkably, our framework elevates the 14B Phi-4 model to outperform both GPT-4o mini and Gemini 2.0 Flash, achieving efficiency comparable to the top 25\% of human experts without requiring specialized training. These innovations establish a new paradigm for hardware optimization where collaborative AI systems leverage collective human expertise to achieve optimal circuit designs. Our model, data, and code are open-source at https://github.com/BUAA-CLab/CircuitMind.
Authors: Yihan Lin, Zhirong Bella Yu, Simon Lee
Abstract: Synthetic Electronic Health Records (EHRs) offer a valuable opportunity to create privacy preserving and harmonized structured data, supporting numerous applications in healthcare. Key benefits of synthetic data include precise control over the data schema, improved fairness and representation of patient populations, and the ability to share datasets without concerns about compromising real individuals privacy. Consequently, the AI community has increasingly turned to Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate synthetic data across various domains. However, a significant challenge in healthcare is ensuring that synthetic health records reliably generalize across different hospitals, a long standing issue in the field. In this work, we evaluate the current state of commercial LLMs for generating synthetic data and investigate multiple aspects of the generation process to identify areas where these models excel and where they fall short. Our main finding from this work is that while LLMs can reliably generate synthetic health records for smaller subsets of features, they struggle to preserve realistic distributions and correlations as the dimensionality of the data increases, ultimately limiting their ability to generalize across diverse hospital settings.
Authors: Tom Zehle, Moritz Schlager, Timo Hei{\ss}, Matthias Feurer
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing by solving a wide range of tasks simply guided by a prompt. Yet their performance is highly sensitive to prompt formulation. While automated prompt optimization addresses this challenge by finding optimal prompts, current methods require a substantial number of LLM calls and input tokens, making prompt optimization expensive. We introduce CAPO (Cost-Aware Prompt Optimization), an algorithm that enhances prompt optimization efficiency by integrating AutoML techniques. CAPO is an evolutionary approach with LLMs as operators, incorporating racing to save evaluations and multi-objective optimization to balance performance with prompt length. It jointly optimizes instructions and few-shot examples while leveraging task descriptions for improved robustness. Our extensive experiments across diverse datasets and LLMs demonstrate that CAPO outperforms state-of-the-art discrete prompt optimization methods in 11/15 cases with improvements up to 21%p. Our algorithm achieves better performances already with smaller budgets, saves evaluations through racing, and decreases average prompt length via a length penalty, making it both cost-efficient and cost-aware. Even without few-shot examples, CAPO outperforms its competitors and generally remains robust to initial prompts. CAPO represents an important step toward making prompt optimization more powerful and accessible by improving cost-efficiency.
Authors: Zexi Fan, Yan Sun, Shihao Yang, Yiping Lu
Abstract: High-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs) pose significant computational challenges across fields ranging from quantum chemistry to economics and finance. Although scientific machine learning (SciML) techniques offer approximate solutions, they often suffer from bias and neglect crucial physical insights. Inspired by inference-time scaling strategies in language models, we propose Simulation-Calibrated Scientific Machine Learning (SCaSML), a physics-informed framework that dynamically refines and debiases the SCiML predictions during inference by enforcing the physical laws. SCaSML leverages derived new physical laws that quantifies systematic errors and employs Monte Carlo solvers based on the Feynman-Kac and Elworthy-Bismut-Li formulas to dynamically correct the prediction. Both numerical and theoretical analysis confirms enhanced convergence rates via compute-optimal inference methods. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that SCaSML reduces errors by 20-50% compared to the base surrogate model, establishing it as the first algorithm to refine approximated solutions to high-dimensional PDE during inference. Code of SCaSML is available at https://github.com/Francis-Fan-create/SCaSML.
Authors: Abdesslem Layeb
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel data transformation framework based on Opposition-Based Learning (OBL) to boost the performance of traditional classification algorithms. Originally developed to accelerate convergence in optimization tasks, OBL is leveraged here to generate synthetic opposite samples that enrich the training data and improve decision boundary formation. We explore three OBL variants Global OBL, Class-Wise OBL, and Localized Class-Wise OBL and integrate them with K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN). Extensive experiments conducted on 26 heterogeneous and high-dimensional datasets demonstrate that OBL-enhanced classifiers consistently outperform the basic KNN. These findings underscore the potential of OBL as a lightweight yet powerful data transformation strategy for enhancing classification performance, especially in complex or sparse learning environments.
Authors: Junrong Yue, Yifan Zhang, Chuan Qin, Bo Li, Xiaomin Lie, Xinlei Yu, Wenxin Zhang, Zhendong Zhao
Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to enable embodied agents to follow natural language instructions and reach target locations in real-world environments. While prior methods often rely on either global scene representations or object-level features, these approaches are insufficient for capturing the complex interactions across modalities required for accurate navigation. In this paper, we propose a Multi-level Fusion and Reasoning Architecture (MFRA) to enhance the agent's ability to reason over visual observations, language instructions and navigation history. Specifically, MFRA introduces a hierarchical fusion mechanism that aggregates multi-level features-ranging from low-level visual cues to high-level semantic concepts-across multiple modalities. We further design a reasoning module that leverages fused representations to infer navigation actions through instruction-guided attention and dynamic context integration. By selectively capturing and combining relevant visual, linguistic, and temporal signals, MFRA improves decision-making accuracy in complex navigation scenarios. Extensive experiments on benchmark VLN datasets including REVERIE, R2R, and SOON demonstrate that MFRA achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of multi-level modal fusion for embodied navigation.
Authors: Yilin Zhai, Hongyuan Shi, Chao Zhan, Qing Wang, Zaijin You, Nan Wang
Abstract: Accurate wave height prediction is critical for maritime safety and coastal resilience, yet conventional physics-based models and traditional machine learning methods face challenges in computational efficiency and nonlinear dynamics modeling. This study introduces Chronos, the first implementation of a large language model (LLM)-powered temporal architecture (Chronos) optimized for wave forecasting. Through advanced temporal pattern recognition applied to historical wave data from three strategically chosen marine zones in the Northwest Pacific basin, our framework achieves multimodal improvements: (1) 14.3% reduction in training time with 2.5x faster inference speed compared to PatchTST baselines, achieving 0.575 mean absolute scaled error (MASE) units; (2) superior short-term forecasting (1-24h) across comprehensive metrics; (3) sustained predictive leadership in extended-range forecasts (1-120h); and (4) demonstrated zero-shot capability maintaining median performance (rank 4/12) against specialized operational models. This LLM-enhanced temporal modeling paradigm establishes a new standard in wave prediction, offering both computationally efficient solutions and a transferable framework for complex geophysical systems modeling.
Authors: Drew Linsley, Pinyuan Feng, Thomas Serre
Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) once showed increasing alignment with primate perception and neural responses as they improved on vision benchmarks, raising hopes that advances in AI would yield better models of biological vision. However, we show across three benchmarks that this alignment is now plateauing - and in some cases worsening - as DNNs scale to human or superhuman accuracy. This divergence may reflect the adoption of visual strategies that differ from those used by primates. These findings challenge the view that progress in artificial intelligence will naturally translate to neuroscience. We argue that vision science must chart its own course, developing algorithms grounded in biological visual systems rather than optimizing for benchmarks based on internet-scale datasets.
Authors: Jun Wu, Jiangtao Wen, Yuxing Han
Abstract: The rapid advancement of large-language models (LLMs) has driven extensive research into parameter compression after training has been completed, yet compression during the training phase remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce Rate-Constrained Training (BackSlash), a novel training-time compression approach based on rate-distortion optimization (RDO). BackSlash enables a flexible trade-off between model accuracy and complexity, significantly reducing parameter redundancy while preserving performance. Experiments in various architectures and tasks demonstrate that BackSlash can reduce memory usage by 60% - 90% without accuracy loss and provides significant compression gain compared to compression after training. Moreover, BackSlash proves to be highly versatile: it enhances generalization with small Lagrange multipliers, improves model robustness to pruning (maintaining accuracy even at 80% pruning rates), and enables network simplification for accelerated inference on edge devices.
Authors: Muskan Garg, Shaina Raza, Shebuti Rayana, Xingyi Liu, Sunghwan Sohn
Abstract: Despite substantial progress in healthcare applications driven by large language models (LLMs), growing concerns around data privacy, and limited resources; the small language models (SLMs) offer a scalable and clinically viable solution for efficient performance in resource-constrained environments for next-generation healthcare informatics. Our comprehensive survey presents a taxonomic framework to identify and categorize them for healthcare professionals and informaticians. The timeline of healthcare SLM contributions establishes a foundational framework for analyzing models across three dimensions: NLP tasks, stakeholder roles, and the continuum of care. We present a taxonomic framework to identify the architectural foundations for building models from scratch; adapting SLMs to clinical precision through prompting, instruction fine-tuning, and reasoning; and accessibility and sustainability through compression techniques. Our primary objective is to offer a comprehensive survey for healthcare professionals, introducing recent innovations in model optimization and equipping them with curated resources to support future research and development in the field. Aiming to showcase the groundbreaking advancements in SLMs for healthcare, we present a comprehensive compilation of experimental results across widely studied NLP tasks in healthcare to highlight the transformative potential of SLMs in healthcare. The updated repository is available at Github
Authors: Minkyu Choi, S P Sharan, Harsh Goel, Sahil Shah, Sandeep Chinchali
Abstract: Current text-to-video (T2V) generation models are increasingly popular due to their ability to produce coherent videos from textual prompts. However, these models often struggle to generate semantically and temporally consistent videos when dealing with longer, more complex prompts involving multiple objects or sequential events. Additionally, the high computational costs associated with training or fine-tuning make direct improvements impractical. To overcome these limitations, we introduce NeuS-E, a novel zero-training video refinement pipeline that leverages neuro-symbolic feedback to automatically enhance video generation, achieving superior alignment with the prompts. Our approach first derives the neuro-symbolic feedback by analyzing a formal video representation and pinpoints semantically inconsistent events, objects, and their corresponding frames. This feedback then guides targeted edits to the original video. Extensive empirical evaluations on both open-source and proprietary T2V models demonstrate that NeuS-E significantly enhances temporal and logical alignment across diverse prompts by almost 40%
Authors: Xinyu Zhou, Simin Fan, Martin Jaggi, Jie Fu
Abstract: Grokking is proposed and widely studied as an intricate phenomenon in which generalization is achieved after a long-lasting period of overfitting. In this work, we propose NeuralGrok, a novel gradient-based approach that learns an optimal gradient transformation to accelerate the generalization of transformers in arithmetic tasks. Specifically, NeuralGrok trains an auxiliary module (e.g., an MLP block) in conjunction with the base model. This module dynamically modulates the influence of individual gradient components based on their contribution to generalization, guided by a bilevel optimization algorithm. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that NeuralGrok significantly accelerates generalization, particularly in challenging arithmetic tasks. We also show that NeuralGrok promotes a more stable training paradigm, constantly reducing the model's complexity, while traditional regularization methods, such as weight decay, can introduce substantial instability and impede generalization. We further investigate the intrinsic model complexity leveraging a novel Absolute Gradient Entropy (AGE) metric, which explains that NeuralGrok effectively facilitates generalization by reducing the model complexity. We offer valuable insights on the grokking phenomenon of Transformer models, which encourages a deeper understanding of the fundamental principles governing generalization ability.
Authors: Hanlin Sheng, Xinming Wu, Hang Gao, Haibin Di, Sergey Fomel, Jintao Li, Xu Si
Abstract: Foundation models, as a mainstream technology in artificial intelligence, have demonstrated immense potential across various domains in recent years, particularly in handling complex tasks and multimodal data. In the field of geophysics, although the application of foundation models is gradually expanding, there is currently a lack of comprehensive reviews discussing the full workflow of integrating foundation models with geophysical data. To address this gap, this paper presents a complete framework that systematically explores the entire process of developing foundation models in conjunction with geophysical data. From data collection and preprocessing to model architecture selection, pre-training strategies, and model deployment, we provide a detailed analysis of the key techniques and methodologies at each stage. In particular, considering the diversity, complexity, and physical consistency constraints of geophysical data, we discuss targeted solutions to address these challenges. Furthermore, we discuss how to leverage the transfer learning capabilities of foundation models to reduce reliance on labeled data, enhance computational efficiency, and incorporate physical constraints into model training, thereby improving physical consistency and interpretability. Through a comprehensive summary and analysis of the current technological landscape, this paper not only fills the gap in the geophysics domain regarding a full-process review of foundation models but also offers valuable practical guidance for their application in geophysical data analysis, driving innovation and advancement in the field.
Authors: Shengtao Zhang, Haokai Zhang, Shiqi Lou, Zicheng Wang, Zinan Zeng, Yilin Wang, Minnan Luo
Abstract: Dynamic node classification is critical for modeling evolving systems like financial transactions and academic collaborations. In such systems, dynamically capturing node information changes is critical for dynamic node classification, which usually requires all labels at every timestamp. However, it is difficult to collect all dynamic labels in real-world scenarios due to high annotation costs and label uncertainty (e.g., ambiguous or delayed labels in fraud detection). In contrast, final timestamp labels are easier to obtain as they rely on complete temporal patterns and are usually maintained as a unique label for each user in many open platforms, without tracking the history data. To bridge this gap, we propose PTCL(Pseudo-label Temporal Curriculum Learning), a pioneering method addressing label-limited dynamic node classification where only final labels are available. PTCL introduces: (1) a temporal decoupling architecture separating the backbone (learning time-aware representations) and decoder (strictly aligned with final labels), which generate pseudo-labels, and (2) a Temporal Curriculum Learning strategy that prioritizes pseudo-labels closer to the final timestamp by assigning them higher weights using an exponentially decaying function. We contribute a new academic dataset (CoOAG), capturing long-range research interest in dynamic graph. Experiments across real-world scenarios demonstrate PTCL's consistent superiority over other methods adapted to this task. Beyond methodology, we propose a unified framework FLiD (Framework for Label-Limited Dynamic Node Classification), consisting of a complete preparation workflow, training pipeline, and evaluation standards, and supporting various models and datasets. The code can be found at https://github.com/3205914485/FLiD.
Authors: Yuanchang Ye, Weiyan Wen
Abstract: This study addresses the critical challenge of hallucination mitigation in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks through a Split Conformal Prediction (SCP) framework. While LVLMs excel in multi-modal reasoning, their outputs often exhibit hallucinated content with high confidence, posing risks in safety-critical applications. We propose a model-agnostic uncertainty quantification method that integrates dynamic threshold calibration and cross-modal consistency verification. By partitioning data into calibration and test sets, the framework computes nonconformity scores to construct prediction sets with statistical guarantees under user-defined risk levels ($\alpha$). Key innovations include: (1) rigorous control of \textbf{marginal coverage} to ensure empirical error rates remain strictly below $\alpha$; (2) dynamic adjustment of prediction set sizes inversely with $\alpha$, filtering low-confidence outputs; (3) elimination of prior distribution assumptions and retraining requirements. Evaluations on benchmarks (ScienceQA, MMMU) with eight LVLMs demonstrate that SCP enforces theoretical guarantees across all $\alpha$ values. The framework achieves stable performance across varying calibration-to-test split ratios, underscoring its robustness for real-world deployment in healthcare, autonomous systems, and other safety-sensitive domains. This work bridges the gap between theoretical reliability and practical applicability in multi-modal AI systems, offering a scalable solution for hallucination detection and uncertainty-aware decision-making.
Authors: Ghazal Kaviani, Yavuz Yarici, Seulgi Kim, Mohit Prabhushankar, Ghassan AlRegib, Mashhour Solh, Ameya Patil
Abstract: Daily Activity Recordings for Artificial Intelligence (DARai, pronounced "Dahr-ree") is a multimodal, hierarchically annotated dataset constructed to understand human activities in real-world settings. DARai consists of continuous scripted and unscripted recordings of 50 participants in 10 different environments, totaling over 200 hours of data from 20 sensors including multiple camera views, depth and radar sensors, wearable inertial measurement units (IMUs), electromyography (EMG), insole pressure sensors, biomonitor sensors, and gaze tracker. To capture the complexity in human activities, DARai is annotated at three levels of hierarchy: (i) high-level activities (L1) that are independent tasks, (ii) lower-level actions (L2) that are patterns shared between activities, and (iii) fine-grained procedures (L3) that detail the exact execution steps for actions. The dataset annotations and recordings are designed so that 22.7% of L2 actions are shared between L1 activities and 14.2% of L3 procedures are shared between L2 actions. The overlap and unscripted nature of DARai allows counterfactual activities in the dataset. Experiments with various machine learning models showcase the value of DARai in uncovering important challenges in human-centered applications. Specifically, we conduct unimodal and multimodal sensor fusion experiments for recognition, temporal localization, and future action anticipation across all hierarchical annotation levels. To highlight the limitations of individual sensors, we also conduct domain-variant experiments that are enabled by DARai's multi-sensor and counterfactual activity design setup. The code, documentation, and dataset are available at the dedicated DARai website: https://alregib.ece.gatech.edu/software-and-datasets/darai-daily-activity-recordings-for-artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning/