Authors: Firuz Kamalov, David Santandreu Calonge, Linda Smail, Dilshod Azizov, Dimple R. Thadani, Theresa Kwong, Amara Atif
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed various aspects of education, with large language models (LLMs) driving advancements in automated tutoring, assessment, and content generation. However, conventional LLMs are constrained by their reliance on static training data, limited adaptability, and lack of reasoning. To address these limitations and foster more sustainable technological practices, AI agents have emerged as a promising new avenue for educational innovation. In this review, we examine agentic workflows in education according to four major paradigms: reflection, planning, tool use, and multi-agent collaboration. We critically analyze the role of AI agents in education through these key design paradigms, exploring their advantages, applications, and challenges. To illustrate the practical potential of agentic systems, we present a proof-of-concept application: a multi-agent framework for automated essay scoring. Preliminary results suggest this agentic approach may offer improved consistency compared to stand-alone LLMs. Our findings highlight the transformative potential of AI agents in educational settings while underscoring the need for further research into their interpretability, trustworthiness, and sustainable impact on pedagogical impact.
Authors: Xiaojian Li, Haoyuan Shi, Rongwu Xu, Wei Xu
Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) have brought about increasingly capable systems that demonstrate remarkable abilities in reasoning, language understanding, and problem-solving. These advancements have prompted a renewed examination of AI awareness, not as a philosophical question of consciousness, but as a measurable, functional capacity. In this review, we explore the emerging landscape of AI awareness, which includes meta-cognition (the ability to represent and reason about its own state), self-awareness (recognizing its own identity, knowledge, limitations, inter alia), social awareness (modeling the knowledge, intentions, and behaviors of other agents), and situational awareness (assessing and responding to the context in which it operates). First, we draw on insights from cognitive science, psychology, and computational theory to trace the theoretical foundations of awareness and examine how the four distinct forms of AI awareness manifest in state-of-the-art AI. Next, we systematically analyze current evaluation methods and empirical findings to better understand these manifestations. Building on this, we explore how AI awareness is closely linked to AI capabilities, demonstrating that more aware AI agents tend to exhibit higher levels of intelligent behaviors. Finally, we discuss the risks associated with AI awareness, including key topics in AI safety, alignment, and broader ethical concerns. AI awareness is a double-edged sword: it improves general capabilities, i.e., reasoning, safety, while also raises concerns around misalignment and societal risks, demanding careful oversight as AI capabilities grow. On the whole, our interdisciplinary review provides a roadmap for future research and aims to clarify the role of AI awareness in the ongoing development of intelligent machines.
Authors: Aishik Sanyal, Samuel Schapiro, Sumuk Shashidhar, Royce Moon, Lav R. Varshney, Dilek Hakkani-Tur
Abstract: Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown promising abilities to generate novel research ideas in science, a direction which coincides with many foundational principles in computational creativity (CC). In light of these developments, we present an idea generation system named Spark that couples retrieval-augmented idea generation using LLMs with a reviewer model named Judge trained on 600K scientific reviews from OpenReview. Our work is both a system demonstration and intended to inspire other CC researchers to explore grounding the generation and evaluation of scientific ideas within foundational CC principles. To this end, we release the annotated dataset used to train Judge, inviting other researchers to explore the use of LLMs for idea generation and creative evaluations.
Authors: Rajeev Gupta, Suhani Gupta, Ronak Parikh, Divya Gupta, Amir Javaheri, Jairaj Singh Shaktawat
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence has made remarkable advancements in recent years, primarily driven by increasingly large deep learning models. However, achieving true Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) demands fundamentally new architectures rather than merely scaling up existing models. Current approaches largely depend on expanding model parameters, which improves task-specific performance but falls short in enabling continuous, adaptable, and generalized learning. Achieving AGI capable of continuous learning and personalization on resource-constrained edge devices is an even bigger challenge. This paper reviews the state of continual learning and neuroscience-inspired AI, and proposes a novel architecture for Personalized AGI that integrates brain-like learning mechanisms for edge deployment. We review literature on continuous lifelong learning, catastrophic forgetting, and edge AI, and discuss key neuroscience principles of human learning, including Synaptic Pruning, Hebbian plasticity, Sparse Coding, and Dual Memory Systems, as inspirations for AI systems. Building on these insights, we outline an AI architecture that features complementary fast-and-slow learning modules, synaptic self-optimization, and memory-efficient model updates to support on-device lifelong adaptation. Conceptual diagrams of the proposed architecture and learning processes are provided. We address challenges such as catastrophic forgetting, memory efficiency, and system scalability, and present application scenarios for mobile AI assistants and embodied AI systems like humanoid robots. We conclude with key takeaways and future research directions toward truly continual, personalized AGI on the edge. While the architecture is theoretical, it synthesizes diverse findings and offers a roadmap for future implementation.
Authors: Lingbo Li, Anuradha Mathrani, Teo Susnjak
Abstract: Exponential growth in scientific literature has heightened the demand for efficient evidence-based synthesis, driving the rise of the field of Automated Meta-analysis (AMA) powered by natural language processing and machine learning. This PRISMA systematic review introduces a structured framework for assessing the current state of AMA, based on screening 978 papers from 2006 to 2024, and analyzing 54 studies across diverse domains. Findings reveal a predominant focus on automating data processing (57%), such as extraction and statistical modeling, while only 17% address advanced synthesis stages. Just one study (2%) explored preliminary full-process automation, highlighting a critical gap that limits AMA's capacity for comprehensive synthesis. Despite recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) and advanced AI, their integration into statistical modeling and higher-order synthesis, such as heterogeneity assessment and bias evaluation, remains underdeveloped. This has constrained AMA's potential for fully autonomous meta-analysis. From our dataset spanning medical (67%) and non-medical (33%) applications, we found that AMA has exhibited distinct implementation patterns and varying degrees of effectiveness in actually improving efficiency, scalability, and reproducibility. While automation has enhanced specific meta-analytic tasks, achieving seamless, end-to-end automation remains an open challenge. As AI systems advance in reasoning and contextual understanding, addressing these gaps is now imperative. Future efforts must focus on bridging automation across all meta-analysis stages, refining interpretability, and ensuring methodological robustness to fully realize AMA's potential for scalable, domain-agnostic synthesis.
Authors: Haoyu Yang, Kamyar Azizzadenesheli, Haoxing Ren
Abstract: Inverse design optimization aims to infer system parameters from observed solutions, posing critical challenges across domains such as semiconductor manufacturing, structural engineering, materials science, and fluid dynamics. The lack of explicit mathematical representations in many systems complicates this process and makes the first order optimization impossible. Mainstream approaches, including generative AI and Bayesian optimization, address these challenges but have limitations. Generative AI is computationally expensive, while Bayesian optimization, relying on surrogate models, suffers from scalability, sensitivity to priors, and noise issues, often leading to suboptimal solutions. This paper introduces Deep Physics Prior (DPP), a novel method enabling first-order gradient-based inverse optimization with surrogate machine learning models. By leveraging pretrained auxiliary Neural Operators, DPP enforces prior distribution constraints to ensure robust and meaningful solutions. This approach is particularly effective when prior data and observation distributions are unknown.
Authors: William P. McCarthy, Saujas Vaduguru, Karl D. D. Willis, Justin Matejka, Judith E. Fan, Daniel Fried, Yewen Pu
Abstract: A key feature of human collaboration is the ability to iteratively refine the concepts we have communicated. In contrast, while generative AI excels at the \textit{generation} of content, it often struggles to make specific language-guided \textit{modifications} of its prior outputs. To bridge the gap between how humans and machines perform edits, we present mrCAD, a dataset of multimodal instructions in a communication game. In each game, players created computer aided designs (CADs) and refined them over several rounds to match specific target designs. Only one player, the Designer, could see the target, and they must instruct the other player, the Maker, using text, drawing, or a combination of modalities. mrCAD consists of 6,082 communication games, 15,163 instruction-execution rounds, played between 1,092 pairs of human players. We analyze the dataset and find that generation and refinement instructions differ in their composition of drawing and text. Using the mrCAD task as a benchmark, we find that state-of-the-art VLMs are better at following generation instructions than refinement instructions. These results lay a foundation for analyzing and modeling a multimodal language of refinement that is not represented in previous datasets.
Authors: Ryan Xiao Wang, Felipe Trevizan
Abstract: Recent advances in planning have explored using learning methods to help planning. However, little attention has been given to adapting search algorithms to work better with learning systems. In this paper, we introduce partial-space search, a new search space for classical planning that leverages the relational structure of actions given by PDDL action schemas -- a structure overlooked by traditional planning approaches. Partial-space search provides a more granular view of the search space and allows earlier pruning of poor actions compared to state-space search. To guide partial-space search, we introduce action set heuristics that evaluate sets of actions in a state. We describe how to automatically convert existing heuristics into action set heuristics. We also train action set heuristics from scratch using large training datasets from partial-space search. Our new planner, LazyLifted, exploits our better integrated search and learning heuristics and outperforms the state-of-the-art ML-based heuristic on IPC 2023 learning track (LT) benchmarks. We also show the efficiency of LazyLifted on high-branching factor tasks and show that it surpasses LAMA in the combined IPC 2023 LT and high-branching factor benchmarks.
Authors: Khoi Trinh, Scott Seidenberger, Raveen Wijewickrama, Murtuza Jadliwala, Anindya Maiti
Abstract: With AI-generated content becoming ubiquitous across the web, social media, and other digital platforms, it is vital to examine how such content are inspired and generated. The creation of AI-generated images often involves refining the input prompt iteratively to achieve desired visual outcomes. This study focuses on the relatively underexplored concept of image regeneration using AI, in which a human operator attempts to closely recreate a specific target image by iteratively refining their prompt. Image regeneration is distinct from normal image generation, which lacks any predefined visual reference. A separate challenge lies in determining whether existing image similarity metrics (ISMs) can provide reliable, objective feedback in iterative workflows, given that we do not fully understand if subjective human judgments of similarity align with these metrics. Consequently, we must first validate their alignment with human perception before assessing their potential as a feedback mechanism in the iterative prompt refinement process. To address these research gaps, we present a structured user study evaluating how iterative prompt refinement affects the similarity of regenerated images relative to their targets, while also examining whether ISMs capture the same improvements perceived by human observers. Our findings suggest that incremental prompt adjustments substantially improve alignment, verified through both subjective evaluations and quantitative measures, underscoring the broader potential of iterative workflows to enhance generative AI content creation across various application domains.
Authors: Paiheng Xu, Gang Wu, Xiang Chen, Tong Yu, Chang Xiao, Franck Dernoncourt, Tianyi Zhou, Wei Ai, Viswanathan Swaminathan
Abstract: Scripting interfaces enable users to automate tasks and customize software workflows, but creating scripts traditionally requires programming expertise and familiarity with specific APIs, posing barriers for many users. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, runtime code generation is severely limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. To bridge the gap, we propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset, a collection of verified scripts, by exploiting LLMs and publicly available scripting guides. Our framework comprises two components: (1) task creation, using top-down functionality guidance and bottom-up API synergy exploration to generate helpful tasks; and (2) skill generation with trials, refining and validating scripts based on execution feedback. To efficiently navigate the extensive API landscape, we introduce a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based link prediction model to capture API synergy, enabling the generation of skills involving underutilized APIs and expanding the skillset's diversity. Experiments with Adobe Illustrator demonstrate that our framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. This is the first attempt to use software scripting interfaces as a testbed for LLM-based systems, highlighting the advantages of leveraging execution feedback in a controlled environment and offering valuable insights into aligning AI capabilities with user needs in specialized software domains.
Authors: Jiapeng Wang, Jinhao Jiang, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou, Wayne Xin Zhao
Abstract: The advancement of reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) requires substantial amounts of high-quality reasoning data, particularly in mathematics. Existing data synthesis methods, such as data augmentation from annotated training sets or direct question generation based on relevant knowledge points and documents, have expanded datasets but face challenges in mastering the inner logic of the problem during generation and ensuring the verifiability of the solutions. To address these issues, we propose RV-Syn, a novel Rational and Verifiable mathematical Synthesis approach. RV-Syn constructs a structured mathematical operation function library based on initial seed problems and generates computational graphs as solutions by combining Python-formatted functions from this library. These graphs are then back-translated into complex problems. Based on the constructed computation graph, we achieve solution-guided logic-aware problem generation. Furthermore, the executability of the computational graph ensures the verifiability of the solving process. Experimental results show that RV-Syn surpasses existing synthesis methods, including those involving human-generated problems, achieving greater efficient data scaling. This approach provides a scalable framework for generating high-quality reasoning datasets.
Authors: Tianqing Zhang, Zixin Zhu, Kairong Yu, Hongwei Wang
Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as a promising approach for energy-efficient and biologically plausible computation. However, due to limitations in existing training methods and inherent model constraints, SNNs often exhibit a performance gap when compared to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Knowledge distillation (KD) has been explored as a technique to transfer knowledge from ANN teacher models to SNN student models to mitigate this gap. Traditional KD methods typically use Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to align output distributions. However, conventional KL-based approaches fail to fully exploit the unique characteristics of SNNs, as they tend to overemphasize high-probability predictions while neglecting low-probability ones, leading to suboptimal generalization. To address this, we propose Head-Tail Aware Kullback-Leibler (HTA-KL) divergence, a novel KD method for SNNs. HTA-KL introduces a cumulative probability-based mask to dynamically distinguish between high- and low-probability regions. It assigns adaptive weights to ensure balanced knowledge transfer, enhancing the overall performance. By integrating forward KL (FKL) and reverse KL (RKL) divergence, our method effectively align both head and tail regions of the distribution. We evaluate our methods on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Tiny ImageNet datasets. Our method outperforms existing methods on most datasets with fewer timesteps.
Authors: Qi Wang, Xiao Zhang, Mingyi Li, Yuan Yuan, Mengbai Xiao, Fuzhen Zhuang, Dongxiao Yu
Abstract: With the development of distributed systems, microservices and cloud native technologies have become central to modern enterprise software development. Despite bringing significant advantages, these technologies also increase system complexity and operational challenges. Traditional root cause analysis (RCA) struggles to achieve automated fault response, heavily relying on manual intervention. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made breakthroughs in contextual inference and domain knowledge integration, providing new solutions for Artificial Intelligence for Operations (AIOps). However, Existing LLM-based approaches face three key challenges: text input constraints, dynamic service dependency hallucinations, and context window limitations. To address these issues, we propose a tool-assisted LLM agent with multi-modality observation data, namely TAMO, for fine-grained RCA. It unifies multi-modal observational data into time-aligned representations to extract consistent features and employs specialized root cause localization and fault classification tools for perceiving the contextual environment. This approach overcomes the limitations of LLM in handling real-time changing service dependencies and raw observational data and guides LLM to generate repair strategies aligned with system contexts by structuring key information into a prompt. Experimental results show that TAMO performs well in root cause analysis when dealing with public datasets characterized by heterogeneity and common fault types, demonstrating its effectiveness.
Authors: Jiahao Li, Kaer Huang
Abstract: Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents, driven by Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), have emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling intelligent interaction with digital systems. This paper provides a structured summary of recent advances in GUI agents, focusing on architectures enhanced by Reinforcement Learning (RL). We first formalize GUI agent tasks as Markov Decision Processes and discuss typical execution environments and evaluation metrics. We then review the modular architecture of (M)LLM-based GUI agents, covering Perception, Planning, and Acting modules, and trace their evolution through representative works. Furthermore, we categorize GUI agent training methodologies into Prompt-based, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)-based, and RL-based approaches, highlighting the progression from simple prompt engineering to dynamic policy learning via RL. Our summary illustrates how recent innovations in multimodal perception, decision reasoning, and adaptive action generation have significantly improved the generalization and robustness of GUI agents in complex real-world environments. We conclude by identifying key challenges and future directions for building more capable and reliable GUI agents.
Authors: Xi Chen (M-PSI), Julien Cumin (M-PSI), Fano Ramparany (M-PSI), Dominique Vaufreydaz (M-PSI)
Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising potential for human activity recognition (HAR) using ambient sensors, especially through natural language reasoning and zero-shot learning. However, existing datasets such as CASAS, ARAS, and MARBLE were not originally designed with LLMs in mind and therefore lack the contextual richness, complexity, and annotation granularity required to fully exploit LLM capabilities. In this paper, we introduce MuRAL, the first Multi-Resident Ambient sensor dataset with natural Language, comprising over 21 hours of multi-user sensor data collected from 21 sessions in a smart-home environment. MuRAL is annotated with fine-grained natural language descriptions, resident identities, and high-level activity labels, all situated in dynamic, realistic multi-resident settings. We benchmark MuRAL using state-of-the-art LLMs for three core tasks: subject assignment, action description, and activity classification. Our results demonstrate that while LLMs can provide rich semantic interpretations of ambient data, current models still face challenges in handling multi-user ambiguity and under-specified sensor contexts. We release MuRAL to support future research on LLM-powered, explainable, and socially aware activity understanding in smart environments. For access to the dataset, please reach out to us via the provided contact information. A direct link for dataset retrieval will be made available at this location in due course.
Authors: Rulin Shao, Rui Qiao, Varsha Kishore, Niklas Muennighoff, Xi Victoria Lin, Daniela Rus, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low, Sewon Min, Wen-tau Yih, Pang Wei Koh, Luke Zettlemoyer
Abstract: We present ReasonIR-8B, the first retriever specifically trained for general reasoning tasks. Existing retrievers have shown limited gains on reasoning tasks, in part because existing training datasets focus on short factual queries tied to documents that straightforwardly answer them. We develop a synthetic data generation pipeline that, for each document, our pipeline creates a challenging and relevant query, along with a plausibly related but ultimately unhelpful hard negative. By training on a mixture of our synthetic data and existing public data, ReasonIR-8B achieves a new state-of-the-art of 29.9 nDCG@10 without reranker and 36.9 nDCG@10 with reranker on BRIGHT, a widely-used reasoning-intensive information retrieval (IR) benchmark. When applied to RAG tasks, ReasonIR-8B improves MMLU and GPQA performance by 6.4% and 22.6% respectively, relative to the closed-book baseline, outperforming other retrievers and search engines. In addition, ReasonIR-8B uses test-time compute more effectively: on BRIGHT, its performance consistently increases with longer and more information-rich rewritten queries; it continues to outperform other retrievers when combined with an LLM reranker. Our training recipe is general and can be easily extended to future LLMs; to this end, we open-source our code, data, and model.
Authors: Zihan Niu, Zheyong Xie, Shaosheng Cao, Chonggang Lu, Zheyu Ye, Tong Xu, Zuozhu Liu, Yan Gao, Jia Chen, Zhe Xu, Yi Wu, Yao Hu
Abstract: Social chatbots have become essential intelligent companions in daily scenarios ranging from emotional support to personal interaction. However, conventional chatbots with passive response mechanisms usually rely on users to initiate or sustain dialogues by bringing up new topics, resulting in diminished engagement and shortened dialogue duration. In this paper, we present PaRT, a novel framework enabling context-aware proactive dialogues for social chatbots through personalized real-time retrieval and generation. Specifically, PaRT first integrates user profiles and dialogue context into a large language model (LLM), which is initially prompted to refine user queries and recognize their underlying intents for the upcoming conversation. Guided by refined intents, the LLM generates personalized dialogue topics, which then serve as targeted queries to retrieve relevant passages from RedNote. Finally, we prompt LLMs with summarized passages to generate knowledge-grounded and engagement-optimized responses. Our approach has been running stably in a real-world production environment for more than 30 days, achieving a 21.77\% improvement in the average duration of dialogues.
Authors: Marta Kryven, Cole Wyeth, Aidan Curtis, Kevin Ellis
Abstract: Making sense of the world and acting in it relies on building simplified mental representations that abstract away aspects of reality. This principle of cognitive mapping is universal to agents with limited resources. Living organisms, people, and algorithms all face the problem of forming functional representations of their world under various computing constraints. In this work, we explore the hypothesis that human resource-efficient planning may arise from representing the world as predictably structured. Building on the metaphor of concepts as programs, we propose that cognitive maps can take the form of generative programs that exploit predictability and redundancy, in contrast to directly encoding spatial layouts. We use a behavioral experiment to show that people who navigate in structured spaces rely on modular planning strategies that align with programmatic map representations. We describe a computational model that predicts human behavior in a variety of structured scenarios. This model infers a small distribution over possible programmatic cognitive maps conditioned on human prior knowledge of the world, and uses this distribution to generate resource-efficient plans. Our models leverages a Large Language Model as an embedding of human priors, implicitly learned through training on a vast corpus of human data. Our model demonstrates improved computational efficiency, requires drastically less memory, and outperforms unstructured planning algorithms with cognitive constraints at predicting human behavior, suggesting that human planning strategies rely on programmatic cognitive maps.
Authors: Shrisha Rao
Abstract: This paper establishes a theoretical foundation for understanding the fundamental limits of AI explainability through algorithmic information theory. We formalize explainability as the approximation of complex models by simpler ones, quantifying both approximation error and explanation complexity using Kolmogorov complexity. Our key theoretical contributions include: (1) a complexity gap theorem proving that any explanation significantly simpler than the original model must differ from it on some inputs; (2) precise bounds showing that explanation complexity grows exponentially with input dimension but polynomially with error tolerance for Lipschitz functions; and (3) a characterization of the gap between local and global explainability, demonstrating that local explanations can be significantly simpler while maintaining accuracy in relevant regions. We further establish a regulatory impossibility theorem proving that no governance framework can simultaneously pursue unrestricted AI capabilities, human-interpretable explanations, and negligible error. These results highlight considerations likely to be relevant to the design, evaluation, and oversight of explainable AI systems.
Authors: Moirangthem Tiken Singh
Abstract: This paper proposes a novel graph-based framework for robust and interpretable multiclass fault diagnosis in rotating machinery. The method integrates entropy-optimized signal segmentation, time-frequency feature extraction, and graph-theoretic modeling to transform vibration signals into structured representations suitable for classification. Graph metrics, such as average shortest path length, modularity, and spectral gap, are computed and combined with local features to capture global and segment-level fault characteristics. The proposed method achieves high diagnostic accuracy when evaluated on two benchmark datasets, the CWRU bearing dataset (under 0-3 HP loads) and the SU gearbox and bearing datasets (under different speed-load configurations). Classification scores reach up to 99.8% accuracy on Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) and 100% accuracy on the Southeast University datasets using a logistic regression classifier. Furthermore, the model exhibits strong noise resilience, maintaining over 95.4% accuracy at high noise levels (standard deviation = 0.5), and demonstrates excellent cross-domain transferability with up to 99.7% F1-score in load-transfer scenarios. Compared to traditional techniques, this approach requires no deep learning architecture, enabling lower complexity while ensuring interpretability. The results confirm the method's scalability, reliability, and potential for real-time deployment in industrial diagnostics.
Authors: Malte Luttermann, Jan Speller, Marcel Gehrke, Tanya Braun, Ralf M\"oller, Mattis Hartwig
Abstract: Probabilistic relational models such as parametric factor graphs enable efficient (lifted) inference by exploiting the indistinguishability of objects. In lifted inference, a representative of indistinguishable objects is used for computations. To obtain a relational (i.e., lifted) representation, the Advanced Colour Passing (ACP) algorithm is the state of the art. The ACP algorithm, however, requires underlying distributions, encoded as potential-based factorisations, to exactly match to identify and exploit indistinguishabilities. Hence, ACP is unsuitable for practical applications where potentials learned from data inevitably deviate even if associated objects are indistinguishable. To mitigate this problem, we introduce the $\varepsilon$-Advanced Colour Passing ($\varepsilon$-ACP) algorithm, which allows for a deviation of potentials depending on a hyperparameter $\varepsilon$. $\varepsilon$-ACP efficiently uncovers and exploits indistinguishabilities that are not exact. We prove that the approximation error induced by $\varepsilon$-ACP is strictly bounded and our experiments show that the approximation error is close to zero in practice.
Authors: Renye Zhang, Yimin Yin, Jinghua Zhang
Abstract: Current mainstream deep learning techniques exhibit an over-reliance on extensive training data and a lack of adaptability to the dynamic world, marking a considerable disparity from human intelligence. To bridge this gap, Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) has emerged, focusing on continuous learning of new categories with limited samples without forgetting old knowledge. Existing FSCIL studies typically use a single model to learn knowledge across all sessions, inevitably leading to the stability-plasticity dilemma. Unlike machines, humans store varied knowledge in different cerebral cortices. Inspired by this characteristic, our paper aims to develop a method that learns independent models for each session. It can inherently prevent catastrophic forgetting. During the testing stage, our method integrates Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) for model deployment. Our method provides a fresh viewpoint for FSCIL and demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-100 and mini-ImageNet datasets.
Authors: Azam Ikram, Xiang Li, Sameh Elnikety, Saurabh Bagchi
Abstract: The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven the need for more efficient serving strategies. In this context, efficiency refers to the proportion of requests that meet their Service Level Objectives (SLOs), particularly for Time To First Token (TTFT) and Time Between Tokens (TBT). However, existing systems often prioritize one metric at the cost of the other. We present Ascendra, an LLM serving system designed to meet both TTFT and TBT SLOs simultaneously. The core insight behind Ascendra is that a request's urgency evolves as it approaches its deadline. To leverage this, Ascendra partitions GPU resources into two types of instances: low-priority and high-priority. Low-priority instances maximize throughput by processing requests out of arrival order, but at the risk of request starvation. To address this, Ascendra employs a performance model to predict requests at risk of missing their SLOs and proactively offloads them to high-priority instances. High-priority instances are optimized for low-latency execution and handle urgent requests nearing their deadlines. This partitioned architecture enables Ascendra to effectively balance high throughput and low latency. Extensive evaluation shows that Ascendra improves system throughput by up to 1.7x compared to vLLM and Sarathi-Serve while meeting both TTFT and TBT SLOs.
Authors: Robert F. Downey, S. S. Ravi
Abstract: We consider generating post-hoc explanations of clusters generated from various datasets using auxiliary information which was not used by clustering algorithms. Following terminology used in previous work, we refer to the auxiliary information as tags. Our focus is on two forms of explanations, namely disjunctive form (where the explanation for a cluster consists of a set of tags) and a two-clause conjunctive normal form (CNF) explanation (where the explanation consists of two sets of tags, combined through the AND operator). We use integer linear programming (ILP) as well as heuristic methods to generate these explanations. We experiment with a variety of datasets and discuss the insights obtained from our explanations. We also present experimental results regarding the scalability of our explanation methods.
Authors: Shivalika Singh, Yiyang Nan, Alex Wang, Daniel D'Souza, Sayash Kapoor, Ahmet \"Ust\"un, Sanmi Koyejo, Yuntian Deng, Shayne Longpre, Noah Smith, Beyza Ermis, Marzieh Fadaee, Sara Hooker
Abstract: Measuring progress is fundamental to the advancement of any scientific field. As benchmarks play an increasingly central role, they also grow more susceptible to distortion. Chatbot Arena has emerged as the go-to leaderboard for ranking the most capable AI systems. Yet, in this work we identify systematic issues that have resulted in a distorted playing field. We find that undisclosed private testing practices benefit a handful of providers who are able to test multiple variants before public release and retract scores if desired. We establish that the ability of these providers to choose the best score leads to biased Arena scores due to selective disclosure of performance results. At an extreme, we identify 27 private LLM variants tested by Meta in the lead-up to the Llama-4 release. We also establish that proprietary closed models are sampled at higher rates (number of battles) and have fewer models removed from the arena than open-weight and open-source alternatives. Both these policies lead to large data access asymmetries over time. Providers like Google and OpenAI have received an estimated 19.2% and 20.4% of all data on the arena, respectively. In contrast, a combined 83 open-weight models have only received an estimated 29.7% of the total data. We show that access to Chatbot Arena data yields substantial benefits; even limited additional data can result in relative performance gains of up to 112% on the arena distribution, based on our conservative estimates. Together, these dynamics result in overfitting to Arena-specific dynamics rather than general model quality. The Arena builds on the substantial efforts of both the organizers and an open community that maintains this valuable evaluation platform. We offer actionable recommendations to reform the Chatbot Arena's evaluation framework and promote fairer, more transparent benchmarking for the field
Authors: Hasan Md Tusfiqur Alam, Devansh Srivastav, Abdulrahman Mohamed Selim, Md Abdul Kadir, Md Moktadiurl Hoque Shuvo, Daniel Sonntag
Abstract: Advancements in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) hold great promise for automating radiology workflows, yet challenges in interpretability and reliability hinder clinical adoption. This paper presents an automated radiology report generation framework that combines Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) with a Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system to bridge AI performance with clinical explainability. CBMs map chest X-ray features to human-understandable clinical concepts, enabling transparent disease classification. Meanwhile, the RAG system integrates multi-agent collaboration and external knowledge to produce contextually rich, evidence-based reports. Our demonstration showcases the system's ability to deliver interpretable predictions, mitigate hallucinations, and generate high-quality, tailored reports with an interactive interface addressing accuracy, trust, and usability challenges. This framework provides a pathway to improving diagnostic consistency and empowering radiologists with actionable insights.
Authors: Polycarp Nalela
Abstract: Access to high-quality medical data is often restricted due to privacy concerns, posing significant challenges for training artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms within Electronic Health Record (EHR) applications. In this study, prompt engineering with the GPT-4 API was employed to generate high-quality synthetic datasets aimed at overcoming this limitation. The generated data encompassed a comprehensive array of patient admission information, including healthcare provider details, hospital departments, wards, bed assignments, patient demographics, emergency contacts, vital signs, immunizations, allergies, medical histories, appointments, hospital visits, laboratory tests, diagnoses, treatment plans, medications, clinical notes, visit logs, discharge summaries, and referrals. To ensure data quality and integrity, advanced validation techniques were implemented utilizing models such as BERT's Next Sentence Prediction for sentence coherence, GPT-2 for overall plausibility, RoBERTa for logical consistency, autoencoders for anomaly detection, and conducted diversity analysis. Synthetic data that met all validation criteria were integrated into a comprehensive PostgreSQL database, serving as the data management system for the EHR application. This approach demonstrates that leveraging generative AI models with rigorous validation can effectively produce high-quality synthetic medical data, facilitating the training of AI algorithms while addressing privacy concerns associated with real patient data.
Authors: Beomjun Kim, Kangyeon Kim, Sunwoo Kim, Heejin Ahn
Abstract: Ensuring the safety of AI systems has recently emerged as a critical priority for real-world deployment, particularly in physical AI applications. Current approaches to AI safety typically address predefined domain-specific safety conditions, limiting their ability to generalize across contexts. We propose a novel AI safety framework that ensures AI systems comply with \textbf{any user-defined constraint}, with \textbf{any desired probability}, and across \textbf{various domains}. In this framework, we combine an AI component (e.g., neural network) with an optimization problem to produce responses that minimize objectives while satisfying user-defined constraints with probabilities exceeding user-defined thresholds. For credibility assessment of the AI component, we propose \textit{internal test data}, a supplementary set of safety-labeled data, and a \textit{conservative testing} methodology that provides statistical validity of using internal test data. We also present an approximation method of a loss function and how to compute its gradient for training. We mathematically prove that probabilistic constraint satisfaction is guaranteed under specific, mild conditions and prove a scaling law between safety and the number of internal test data. We demonstrate our framework's effectiveness through experiments in diverse domains: demand prediction for production decision, safe reinforcement learning within the SafetyGym simulator, and guarding AI chatbot outputs. Through these experiments, we demonstrate that our method guarantees safety for user-specified constraints, outperforms {for \textbf{up to several order of magnitudes}} existing methods in low safety threshold regions, and scales effectively with respect to the size of internal test data.
Authors: Ziqing Fan, Cheng Liang, Chaoyi Wu, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Weidi Xie
Abstract: Recent advances in reasoning-enhanced large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have significantly improved performance in complex tasks, yet medical AI models often overlook the structured reasoning processes inherent in clinical practice. In this work, we present ChestX-Reasoner, a radiology diagnosis MLLM designed to leverage process supervision mined directly from clinical reports, reflecting the step-by-step reasoning followed by radiologists. We construct a large dataset by extracting and refining reasoning chains from routine radiology reports. Our two-stage training framework combines supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning guided by process rewards to better align model reasoning with clinical standards. We introduce RadRBench-CXR, a comprehensive benchmark featuring 59K visual question answering samples with 301K clinically validated reasoning steps, and propose RadRScore, a metric evaluating reasoning factuality, completeness, and effectiveness. ChestX-Reasoner outperforms existing medical and general-domain MLLMs in both diagnostic accuracy and reasoning ability, achieving 16%, 5.9%, and 18% improvements in reasoning ability compared to the best medical MLLM, the best general MLLM, and its base model, respectively, as well as 3.3%, 24%, and 27% improvements in outcome accuracy. All resources are open-sourced to facilitate further research in medical reasoning MLLMs.
Authors: Neil F. Johnson, Frank Yingjie Huo
Abstract: Trust in AI is undermined by the fact that there is no science that predicts -- or that can explain to the public -- when an LLM's output (e.g. ChatGPT) is likely to tip mid-response to become wrong, misleading, irrelevant or dangerous. With deaths and trauma already being blamed on LLMs, this uncertainty is even pushing people to treat their 'pet' LLM more politely to 'dissuade' it (or its future Artificial General Intelligence offspring) from suddenly turning on them. Here we address this acute need by deriving from first principles an exact formula for when a Jekyll-and-Hyde tipping point occurs at LLMs' most basic level. Requiring only secondary school mathematics, it shows the cause to be the AI's attention spreading so thin it suddenly snaps. This exact formula provides quantitative predictions for how the tipping-point can be delayed or prevented by changing the prompt and the AI's training. Tailored generalizations will provide policymakers and the public with a firm platform for discussing any of AI's broader uses and risks, e.g. as a personal counselor, medical advisor, decision-maker for when to use force in a conflict situation. It also meets the need for clear and transparent answers to questions like ''should I be polite to my LLM?''
Authors: Giuseppe De Giacomo, Gianmarco Parretti, Shufang Zhu
Abstract: We study a variant of LTLf synthesis that synthesizes adaptive strategies for achieving a multi-tier goal, consisting of multiple increasingly challenging LTLf objectives in nondeterministic planning domains. Adaptive strategies are strategies that at any point of their execution (i) enforce the satisfaction of as many objectives as possible in the multi-tier goal, and (ii) exploit possible cooperation from the environment to satisfy as many as possible of the remaining ones. This happens dynamically: if the environment cooperates (ii) and an objective becomes enforceable (i), then our strategies will enforce it. We provide a game-theoretic technique to compute adaptive strategies that is sound and complete. Notably, our technique is polynomial, in fact quadratic, in the number of objectives. In other words, it handles multi-tier goals with only a minor overhead compared to standard LTLf synthesis.
Authors: Mohammad S. Ahmad, Zan A. Naeem, Micha\"el Aupetit, Ahmed Elmagarmid, Mohamed Eltabakh, Xiasong Ma, Mourad Ouzzani, Chaoyi Ruan
Abstract: Tabular data embedded within PDF files, web pages, and other document formats are prevalent across numerous sectors such as government, engineering, science, and business. These human-centric tables (HCTs) possess a unique combination of high business value, intricate layouts, limited operational power at scale, and sometimes serve as the only data source for critical insights. However, their complexity poses significant challenges to traditional data extraction, processing, and querying methods. While current solutions focus on transforming these tables into relational formats for SQL queries, they fall short in handling the diverse and complex layouts of HCTs and hence being amenable to querying. This paper describes HCT-QA, an extensive benchmark of HCTs, natural language queries, and related answers on thousands of tables. Our dataset includes 2,188 real-world HCTs with 9,835 QA pairs and 4,679 synthetic tables with 67.5K QA pairs. While HCTs can be potentially processed by different type of query engines, in this paper, we focus on Large Language Models as potential engines and assess their ability in processing and querying such tables.
Authors: Juan D. Pinto, Luc Paquette
Abstract: The increasing use of complex machine learning models in education has led to concerns about their interpretability, which in turn has spurred interest in developing explainability techniques that are both faithful to the model's inner workings and intelligible to human end-users. In this paper, we describe a novel approach to creating a neural-network-based behavior detection model that is interpretable by design. Our model is fully interpretable, meaning that the parameters we extract for our explanations have a clear interpretation, fully capture the model's learned knowledge about the learner behavior of interest, and can be used to create explanations that are both faithful and intelligible. We achieve this by implementing a series of constraints to the model that both simplify its inference process and bring it closer to a human conception of the task at hand. We train the model to detect gaming-the-system behavior, evaluate its performance on this task, and compare its learned patterns to those identified by human experts. Our results show that the model is successfully able to learn patterns indicative of gaming-the-system behavior while providing evidence for fully interpretable explanations. We discuss the implications of our approach and suggest ways to evaluate explainability using a human-grounded approach.
Authors: Joey Chan, Qiao Jin, Nicholas Wan, Charalampos S. Floudas, Elisabetta Xue, Zhiyong Lu
Abstract: Clinical trials are crucial for assessing new treatments; however, recruitment challenges - such as limited awareness, complex eligibility criteria, and referral barriers - hinder their success. With the growth of online platforms, patients increasingly turn to social media and health communities for support, research, and advocacy, expanding recruitment pools and established enrollment pathways. Recognizing this potential, we utilized TrialGPT, a framework that leverages a large language model (LLM) as its backbone, to match 50 online patient cases (collected from published case reports and a social media website) to clinical trials and evaluate performance against traditional keyword-based searches. Our results show that TrialGPT outperforms traditional methods by 46% in identifying eligible trials, with each patient, on average, being eligible for around 7 trials. Additionally, our outreach efforts to case authors and trial organizers regarding these patient-trial matches yielded highly positive feedback, which we present from both perspectives.
Authors: Junhong Lai, Jiyu Wei, Lin Yao, Yueming Wang
Abstract: Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals play a crucial role in understanding brain activity and diagnosing neurological disorders. This review focuses on the recent development of EEG foundation models(EEG-FMs), which have shown great potential in processing and analyzing EEG data. We discuss various EEG-FMs, including their architectures, pre-training strategies, their pre-training and downstream datasets and other details. The review also highlights the challenges and future directions in this field, aiming to provide a comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners interested in EEG analysis and related EEG-FMs.
Authors: Zihan Wang, Kangrui Wang, Qineng Wang, Pingyue Zhang, Linjie Li, Zhengyuan Yang, Kefan Yu, Minh Nhat Nguyen, Licheng Liu, Eli Gottlieb, Monica Lam, Yiping Lu, Kyunghyun Cho, Jiajun Wu, Li Fei-Fei, Lijuan Wang, Yejin Choi, Manling Li
Abstract: Training large language models (LLMs) as interactive agents presents unique challenges including long-horizon decision making and interacting with stochastic environment feedback. While reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled progress in static tasks, multi-turn agent RL training remains underexplored. We propose StarPO (State-Thinking-Actions-Reward Policy Optimization), a general framework for trajectory-level agent RL, and introduce RAGEN, a modular system for training and evaluating LLM agents. Our study on three stylized environments reveals three core findings. First, our agent RL training shows a recurring mode of Echo Trap where reward variance cliffs and gradient spikes; we address this with StarPO-S, a stabilized variant with trajectory filtering, critic incorporation, and decoupled clipping. Second, we find the shaping of RL rollouts would benefit from diverse initial states, medium interaction granularity and more frequent sampling. Third, we show that without fine-grained, reasoning-aware reward signals, agent reasoning hardly emerge through multi-turn RL and they may show shallow strategies or hallucinated thoughts. Code and environments are available at https://github.com/RAGEN-AI/RAGEN.
Authors: Khurram Khalil, Khaza Anuarul Hoque
Abstract: The increasing adoption of approximate computing in deep neural network accelerators (AxDNNs) promises significant energy efficiency gains. However, permanent faults in AxDNNs can severely degrade their performance compared to their accurate counterparts (AccDNNs). Traditional fault detection and mitigation approaches, while effective for AccDNNs, introduce substantial overhead and latency, making them impractical for energy-constrained real-time deployment. To address this, we introduce EPSILON, a lightweight framework that leverages pre-computed statistical signatures and layer-wise importance metrics for efficient fault detection and mitigation in AxDNNs. Our framework introduces a novel non-parametric pattern-matching algorithm that enables constant-time fault detection without interrupting normal execution while dynamically adapting to different network architectures and fault patterns. EPSILON maintains model accuracy by intelligently adjusting mitigation strategies based on a statistical analysis of weight distribution and layer criticality while preserving the energy benefits of approximate computing. Extensive evaluations across various approximate multipliers, AxDNN architectures, popular datasets (MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet-1k), and fault scenarios demonstrate that EPSILON maintains 80.05\% accuracy while offering 22\% improvement in inference time and 28\% improvement in energy efficiency, establishing EPSILON as a practical solution for deploying reliable AxDNNs in safety-critical edge applications.
Authors: Manish Kansana, Keyan Alexander Rahimi, Elias Hossain, Iman Dehzangi, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz
Abstract: Adversarial noise introduces small perturbations in images, misleading deep learning models into misclassification and significantly impacting recognition accuracy. In this study, we analyzed the effects of Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) adversarial noise on image classification and investigated whether training on specific image features can improve robustness. We hypothesize that while adversarial noise perturbs various regions of an image, edges may remain relatively stable and provide essential structural information for classification. To test this, we conducted a series of experiments using brain tumor and COVID datasets. Initially, we trained the models on clean images and then introduced subtle adversarial perturbations, which caused deep learning models to significantly misclassify the images. Retraining on a combination of clean and noisy images led to improved performance. To evaluate the robustness of the edge features, we extracted edges from the original/clean images and trained the models exclusively on edge-based representations. When noise was introduced to the images, the edge-based models demonstrated greater resilience to adversarial attacks compared to those trained on the original or clean images. These results suggest that while adversarial noise is able to exploit complex non-edge regions significantly more than edges, the improvement in the accuracy after retraining is marginally more in the original data as compared to the edges. Thus, leveraging edge-based learning can improve the resilience of deep learning models against adversarial perturbations.
Authors: Xuan Rao, Bo Zhao, Derong Liu, Cesare Alippi
Abstract: Strong priors are imposed on the search space of Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS), such that cells of the same type share the same topological structure and each intermediate node retains two operators from distinct nodes. While these priors reduce optimization difficulties and improve the applicability of searched architectures, they hinder the subsequent development of automated machine learning (Auto-ML) and prevent the optimization algorithm from exploring more powerful neural networks through improved architectural flexibility. This paper aims to reduce these prior constraints by eliminating restrictions on cell topology and modifying the discretization mechanism for super-networks. Specifically, the Flexible DARTS (FX-DARTS) method, which leverages an Entropy-based Super-Network Shrinking (ESS) framework, is presented to address the challenges arising from the elimination of prior constraints. Notably, FX-DARTS enables the derivation of neural architectures without strict prior rules while maintaining the stability in the enlarged search space. Experimental results on image classification benchmarks demonstrate that FX-DARTS is capable of exploring a set of neural architectures with competitive trade-offs between performance and computational complexity within a single search procedure.
Authors: Xuan Rao, Bo Zhao, Derong Liu
Abstract: To meet the demand for designing efficient neural networks with appropriate trade-offs between model performance (e.g., classification accuracy) and computational complexity, the differentiable neural architecture distillation (DNAD) algorithm is developed based on two cores, namely search by deleting and search by imitating. Primarily, to derive neural architectures in a space where cells of the same type no longer share the same topology, the super-network progressive shrinking (SNPS) algorithm is developed based on the framework of differentiable architecture search (DARTS), i.e., search by deleting. Unlike conventional DARTS-based approaches which yield neural architectures with simple structures and derive only one architecture during the search procedure, SNPS is able to derive a Pareto-optimal set of architectures with flexible structures by forcing the dynamic super-network shrink from a dense structure to a sparse one progressively. Furthermore, since knowledge distillation (KD) has shown great effectiveness to train a compact network with the assistance of an over-parameterized model, we integrate SNPS with KD to formulate the DNAD algorithm, i.e., search by imitating. By minimizing behavioral differences between the super-network and teacher network, the over-fitting of one-level DARTS is avoided and well-performed neural architectures are derived. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet classification tasks demonstrate that both SNPS and DNAD are able to derive a set of architectures which achieve similar or lower error rates with fewer parameters and FLOPs. Particularly, DNAD achieves the top-1 error rate of 23.7% on ImageNet classification with a model of 6.0M parameters and 598M FLOPs, which outperforms most DARTS-based methods.
Authors: Thuong Dang, Qiqi Chen
Abstract: In this work, we introduce a German version for ColBERT, a late interaction multi-dense vector retrieval method, with a focus on RAG applications. We also present the main features of our package for ColBERT models, supporting both retrieval and fine-tuning workflows.
Authors: Sebastian Gehrmann, Claire Huang, Xian Teng, Sergei Yurovski, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Chirag S. Patel, Arjun Bhorkar, Naveen Thomas, John Doucette, David Rosenberg, Mark Dredze, David Rabinowitz
Abstract: To responsibly develop Generative AI (GenAI) products, it is critical to define the scope of acceptable inputs and outputs. What constitutes a "safe" response is an actively debated question. Academic work puts an outsized focus on evaluating models by themselves for general purpose aspects such as toxicity, bias, and fairness, especially in conversational applications being used by a broad audience. In contrast, less focus is put on considering sociotechnical systems in specialized domains. Yet, those specialized systems can be subject to extensive and well-understood legal and regulatory scrutiny. These product-specific considerations need to be set in industry-specific laws, regulations, and corporate governance requirements. In this paper, we aim to highlight AI content safety considerations specific to the financial services domain and outline an associated AI content risk taxonomy. We compare this taxonomy to existing work in this space and discuss implications of risk category violations on various stakeholders. We evaluate how existing open-source technical guardrail solutions cover this taxonomy by assessing them on data collected via red-teaming activities. Our results demonstrate that these guardrails fail to detect most of the content risks we discuss.
Authors: Ali Rostami
Abstract: Personalized food recommendation systems (Food-RecSys) critically underperform due to fragmented component understanding and the failure of conventional machine learning with vast, imbalanced food data. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promise, current generic Recommendation as Language Processing (RLP) strategies lack the necessary specialization for the food domain's complexity. This thesis tackles these deficiencies by first identifying and analyzing the essential components for effective Food-RecSys. We introduce two key innovations: a multimedia food logging platform for rich contextual data acquisition and the World Food Atlas, enabling unique geolocation-based food analysis previously unavailable. Building on this foundation, we pioneer the Food Recommendation as Language Processing (F-RLP) framework - a novel, integrated approach specifically architected for the food domain. F-RLP leverages LLMs in a tailored manner, overcoming the limitations of generic models and providing a robust infrastructure for effective, contextual, and truly personalized food recommendations.
Authors: Mohammad Baqar, Rajat Khanda, Saba Naqvi
Abstract: As modern software systems grow in complexity and scale, their ability to autonomously detect, diagnose, and recover from failures becomes increasingly vital. Drawing inspiration from biological healing - where the human body detects damage, signals the brain, and activates targeted recovery - this paper explores the concept of self-healing software driven by artificial intelligence. We propose a novel framework that mimics this biological model system observability tools serve as sensory inputs, AI models function as the cognitive core for diagnosis and repair, and healing agents apply targeted code and test modifications. By combining log analysis, static code inspection, and AI-driven generation of patches or test updates, our approach aims to reduce downtime, accelerate debugging, and enhance software resilience. We evaluate the effectiveness of this model through case studies and simulations, comparing it against traditional manual debugging and recovery workflows. This work paves the way toward intelligent, adaptive and self-reliant software systems capable of continuous healing, akin to living organisms.
Authors: Inmaculada Santamaria-Valenzuela, Victor Rodriguez-Fernandez, Javier Huertas-Tato, Jong Hyuk Park, David Camacho
Abstract: The present study explores the interpretability of latent spaces produced by time series foundation models, focusing on their potential for visual analysis tasks. Specifically, we evaluate the MOMENT family of models, a set of transformer-based, pre-trained architectures for multivariate time series tasks such as: imputation, prediction, classification, and anomaly detection. We evaluate the capacity of these models on five datasets to capture the underlying structures in time series data within their latent space projection and validate whether fine tuning improves the clarity of the resulting embedding spaces. Notable performance improvements in terms of loss reduction were observed after fine tuning. Visual analysis shows limited improvement in the interpretability of the embeddings, requiring further work. Results suggest that, although Time Series Foundation Models such as MOMENT are robust, their latent spaces may require additional methodological refinements to be adequately interpreted, such as alternative projection techniques, loss functions, or data preprocessing strategies. Despite the limitations of MOMENT, foundation models supose a big reduction in execution time and so a great advance for interactive visual analytics.
Authors: Fei Fang, Yifan Hua, Shengze Wang, Ruilin Zhou, Yi Liu, Chen Qian, Xiaoxue Zhang
Abstract: While significant progress has been made in research and development on open-source and cost-efficient large-language models (LLMs), serving scalability remains a critical challenge, particularly for small organizations and individuals seeking to deploy and test their LLM innovations. Inspired by peer-to-peer networks that leverage decentralized overlay nodes to increase throughput and availability, we propose GenTorrent, an LLM serving overlay that harnesses computing resources from decentralized contributors. We identify four key research problems inherent to enabling such a decentralized infrastructure: 1) overlay network organization; 2) LLM communication privacy; 3) overlay forwarding for resource efficiency; and 4) verification of serving quality. This work presents the first systematic study of these fundamental problems in the context of decentralized LLM serving. Evaluation results from a prototype implemented on a set of decentralized nodes demonstrate that GenTorrent achieves a latency reduction of over 50% compared to the baseline design without overlay forwarding. Furthermore, the security features introduce minimal overhead to serving latency and throughput. We believe this work pioneers a new direction for democratizing and scaling future AI serving capabilities.
Authors: Qingzhi Yu, Shuai Yan, Wenfeng Dai, Xiang Cheng
Abstract: Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are fundamental for deciphering cellular functions,disease pathways,and drug discovery.Although existing neural networks and machine learning methods have achieved high accuracy in PPI prediction,their black-box nature leads to a lack of causal interpretation of the prediction results and difficulty in capturing hierarchical geometries and multi-scale dynamic interaction patterns among proteins.To address these challenges, we propose HyboWaveNet,a novel deep learning framework that collaborates with hyperbolic graphical neural networks (HGNNs) and multiscale graphical wavelet transform for robust PPI prediction. Mapping protein features to Lorentz space simulates hierarchical topological relationships among biomolecules via a hyperbolic distance metric,enabling node feature representations that better fit biological a priori.HyboWaveNet inherently simulates hierarchical and scale-free biological relationships, while the integration of wavelet transforms enables adaptive extraction of local and global interaction features across different resolutions. Our framework generates node feature representations via a graph neural network under the Lorenz model and generates pairs of positive samples under multiple different views for comparative learning, followed by further feature extraction via multi-scale graph wavelet transforms to predict potential PPIs. Experiments on public datasets show that HyboWaveNet improves over both existing state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate through ablation experimental studies that the multi-scale graph wavelet transform module improves the predictive performance and generalization ability of HyboWaveNet. This work links geometric deep learning and signal processing to advance PPI prediction, providing a principled approach for analyzing complex biological systems
Authors: Wenfeng Dai, Yanhong Wang, Shuai Yan, Qingzhi Yu, Xiang Cheng
Abstract: Drug-target interaction (DTI) prediction is a core task in drug development and precision medicine in the biomedical field. However, traditional machine learning methods generally have the black box problem, which makes it difficult to reveal the deep correlation between the model decision mechanism and the interaction pattern between biological molecules. This study proposes a heterogeneous network drug target interaction prediction framework, integrating graph neural network and multi scale signal processing technology to construct a model with both efficient prediction and multi level interpretability. Its technical breakthroughs are mainly reflected in the following three dimensions:Local global feature collaborative perception module. Based on heterogeneous graph convolutional neural network (HGCN), a multi order neighbor aggregation strategy is designed.Multi scale graph signal decomposition and biological interpretation module. A deep hierarchical node feature transform (GWT) architecture is proposed.Contrastive learning combining multi dimensional perspectives and hierarchical representations. By comparing the learning models, the node representations from the two perspectives of HGCN and GWT are aligned and fused, so that the model can integrate multi dimensional information and improve the prediction robustness. Experimental results show that our framework shows excellent prediction performance on all datasets. This study provides a complete solution for drug target discovery from black box prediction to mechanism decoding, and its methodology has important reference value for modeling complex biomolecular interaction systems.
Authors: Shuang Wang, He Zhang, Tianxing Wu, Yueyou Zhang, Wei Emma Zhang, Quan Z. Sheng
Abstract: Worldwide, Geo-distributed Data Centers (GDCs) provide computing and storage services for massive workflow applications, resulting in high electricity costs that vary depending on geographical locations and time. How to reduce electricity costs while satisfying the deadline constraints of workflow applications is important in GDCs, which is determined by the execution time of servers, power, and electricity price. Determining the completion time of workflows with different server frequencies can be challenging, especially in scenarios with heterogeneous computing resources in GDCs. Moreover, the electricity price is also different in geographical locations and may change dynamically. To address these challenges, we develop a geo-distributed system architecture and propose an Electricity Cost aware Multiple Workflows Scheduling algorithm (ECMWS) for servers of GDCs with fixed frequency and power. ECMWS comprises four stages, namely workflow sequencing, deadline partitioning, task sequencing, and resource allocation where two graph embedding models and a policy network are constructed to solve the Markov Decision Process (MDP). After statistically calibrating parameters and algorithm components over a comprehensive set of workflow instances, the proposed algorithms are compared with the state-of-the-art methods over two types of workflow instances. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm significantly outperforms other algorithms, achieving an improvement of over 15\% while maintaining an acceptable computational time. The source codes are available at https://gitee.com/public-artifacts/ecmws-experiments.
Authors: Ren-Wei Liang, Chin-Ting Hsu, Chan-Hung Yu, Saransh Agrawal, Shih-Cheng Huang, Shang-Tse Chen, Kuan-Hao Huang, Shao-Hua Sun
Abstract: Ensuring that large language models (LLMs) are both helpful and harmless is a critical challenge, as overly strict constraints can lead to excessive refusals, while permissive models risk generating harmful content. Existing approaches, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO), attempt to balance these trade-offs but suffer from performance conflicts, limited controllability, and poor extendability. To address these issues, we propose Preference Vector, a novel framework inspired by task arithmetic. Instead of optimizing multiple preferences within a single objective, we train separate models on individual preferences, extract behavior shifts as preference vectors, and dynamically merge them at test time. This modular approach enables fine-grained, user-controllable preference adjustments and facilitates seamless integration of new preferences without retraining. Experiments show that our proposed Preference Vector framework improves helpfulness without excessive conservatism, allows smooth control over preference trade-offs, and supports scalable multi-preference alignment.
Authors: Chowdhury Mohammad Abid Rahman, Aldo H. Romero, Prashnna K. Gyawali
Abstract: Accurate prediction of material properties facilitates the discovery of novel materials with tailored functionalities. Deep learning models have recently shown superior accuracy and flexibility in capturing structure-property relationships. However, these models often rely on supervised learning, which requires large, well-annotated datasets an expensive and time-consuming process. Self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a promising alternative by pretraining on large, unlabeled datasets to develop foundation models that can be fine-tuned for material property prediction. In this work, we propose supervised pretraining, where available class information serves as surrogate labels to guide learning, even when downstream tasks involve unrelated material properties. We evaluate this strategy on two state-of-the-art SSL models and introduce a novel framework for supervised pretraining. To further enhance representation learning, we propose a graph-based augmentation technique that injects noise to improve robustness without structurally deforming material graphs. The resulting foundation models are fine-tuned for six challenging material property predictions, achieving significant performance gains over baselines, ranging from 2% to 6.67% improvement in mean absolute error (MAE) and establishing a new benchmark in material property prediction. This study represents the first exploration of supervised pertaining with surrogate labels in material property prediction, advancing methodology and application in the field.
Authors: Zhonghao Li, Kunpeng Zhang, Jinghuai Ou, Shuliang Liu, Xuming Hu
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems face significant challenges in multi-hop question answering (MHQA), where complex queries require synthesizing information across multiple document chunks. Existing approaches typically rely on iterative LLM-based query rewriting and routing, resulting in high computational costs due to repeated LLM invocations and multi-stage processes. To address these limitations, we propose TreeHop, an embedding-level framework without the need for LLMs in query refinement. TreeHop dynamically updates query embeddings by fusing semantic information from prior queries and retrieved documents, enabling iterative retrieval through embedding-space operations alone. This method replaces the traditional "Retrieve-Rewrite-Vectorize-Retrieve" cycle with a streamlined "Retrieve-Embed-Retrieve" loop, significantly reducing computational overhead. Moreover, a rule-based stop criterion is introduced to further prune redundant retrievals, balancing efficiency and recall rate. Experimental results show that TreeHop rivals advanced RAG methods across three open-domain MHQA datasets, achieving comparable performance with only 5\%-0.4\% of the model parameter size and reducing the query latency by approximately 99\% compared to concurrent approaches. This makes TreeHop a faster and more cost-effective solution for deployment in a range of knowledge-intensive applications. For reproducibility purposes, codes and data are available here: https://github.com/allen-li1231/TreeHop.
Authors: Zijie Lin, Yiqing Shen, Qilin Cai, He Sun, Jinrui Zhou, Mingjun Xiao
Abstract: Machine Learning (ML) research is spread through academic papers featuring rich multimodal content, including text, diagrams, and tabular results. However, translating these multimodal elements into executable code remains a challenging and time-consuming process that requires substantial ML expertise. We introduce ``Paper-to-Code'' (P2C), a novel task that transforms the multimodal content of scientific publications into fully executable code repositories, which extends beyond the existing formulation of code generation that merely converts textual descriptions into isolated code snippets. To automate the P2C process, we propose AutoP2C, a multi-agent framework based on large language models that processes both textual and visual content from research papers to generate complete code repositories. Specifically, AutoP2C contains four stages: (1) repository blueprint extraction from established codebases, (2) multimodal content parsing that integrates information from text, equations, and figures, (3) hierarchical task decomposition for structured code generation, and (4) iterative feedback-driven debugging to ensure functionality and performance. Evaluation on a benchmark of eight research papers demonstrates the effectiveness of AutoP2C, which can successfully generate executable code repositories for all eight papers, while OpenAI-o1 or DeepSeek-R1 can only produce runnable code for one paper. The code is available at https://github.com/shoushouyu/Automated-Paper-to-Code.
URLs: https://github.com/shoushouyu/Automated-Paper-to-Code.
Authors: Shubham Gandhi, Dhruv Shah, Manasi Patwardhan, Lovekesh Vig, Gautam Shroff
Abstract: In this paper we introduce ResearchCodeAgent, a novel multi-agent system leveraging large language models (LLMs) agents to automate the codification of research methodologies described in machine learning literature. The system bridges the gap between high-level research concepts and their practical implementation, allowing researchers auto-generating code of existing research papers for benchmarking or building on top-of existing methods specified in the literature with availability of partial or complete starter code. ResearchCodeAgent employs a flexible agent architecture with a comprehensive action suite, enabling context-aware interactions with the research environment. The system incorporates a dynamic planning mechanism, utilizing both short and long-term memory to adapt its approach iteratively. We evaluate ResearchCodeAgent on three distinct machine learning tasks with distinct task complexity and representing different parts of the ML pipeline: data augmentation, optimization, and data batching. Our results demonstrate the system's effectiveness and generalizability, with 46.9% of generated code being high-quality and error-free, and 25% showing performance improvements over baseline implementations. Empirical analysis shows an average reduction of 57.9% in coding time compared to manual implementation. We observe higher gains for more complex tasks. ResearchCodeAgent represents a significant step towards automating the research implementation process, potentially accelerating the pace of machine learning research.
Authors: Jinglin He, Yunqi Guo, Lai Kwan Lam, Waikei Leung, Lixing He, Yuanan Jiang, Chi Chiu Wang, Guoliang Xing, Hongkai Chen
Abstract: Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) represents a rich repository of ancient medical knowledge that continues to play an important role in modern healthcare. Due to the complexity and breadth of the TCM literature, the integration of AI technologies is critical for its modernization and broader accessibility. However, this integration poses considerable challenges, including the interpretation of obscure classical Chinese texts and the modeling of intricate semantic relationships among TCM concepts. In this paper, we develop OpenTCM, an LLM-based system that combines a domain-specific TCM knowledge graph and Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG). First, we extract more than 3.73 million classical Chinese characters from 68 gynecological books in the Chinese Medical Classics Database, with the help of TCM and gynecology experts. Second, we construct a comprehensive multi-relational knowledge graph comprising more than 48,000 entities and 152,000 interrelationships, using customized prompts and Chinese-oriented LLMs such as DeepSeek and Kimi to ensure high-fidelity semantic understanding. Last, we integrate OpenTCM with this knowledge graph, enabling high-fidelity ingredient knowledge retrieval and diagnostic question-answering without model fine-tuning. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our prompt design and model selection significantly improve knowledge graph quality, achieving a precision of 98. 55% and an F1 score of 99. 55%. In addition, OpenTCM achieves mean expert scores of 4.5 in ingredient information retrieval and 3.8 in diagnostic question-answering tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art solutions in real-world TCM use cases.
Authors: Lorenz Brehme, Thomas Str\"ohle, Ruth Breu
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has advanced significantly in recent years. The complexity of RAG systems, which involve multiple components-such as indexing, retrieval, and generation-along with numerous other parameters, poses substantial challenges for systematic evaluation and quality enhancement. Previous research highlights that evaluating RAG systems is essential for documenting advancements, comparing configurations, and identifying effective approaches for domain-specific applications. This study systematically reviews 63 academic articles to provide a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art RAG evaluation methodologies, focusing on four key areas: datasets, retrievers, indexing and databases, and the generator component. We observe the feasibility of an automated evaluation approach for each component of a RAG system, leveraging an LLM capable of both generating evaluation datasets and conducting evaluations. In addition, we found that further practical research is essential to provide companies with clear guidance on the do's and don'ts of implementing and evaluating RAG systems. By synthesizing evaluation approaches for key RAG components and emphasizing the creation and adaptation of domain-specific datasets for benchmarking, we contribute to the advancement of systematic evaluation methods and the improvement of evaluation rigor for RAG systems. Furthermore, by examining the interplay between automated approaches leveraging LLMs and human judgment, we contribute to the ongoing discourse on balancing automation and human input, clarifying their respective contributions, limitations, and challenges in achieving robust and reliable evaluations.
Authors: Abul Ehtesham, Saket Kumar, Aditi Singh, Tala Talaei Khoei
Abstract: Early detection of asthma in children is crucial to prevent long-term respiratory complications and reduce emergency interventions. This work presents an AI-powered diagnostic pipeline that leverages Googles Health Acoustic Representations (HeAR) model to detect early signs of asthma from pediatric respiratory sounds. The SPRSound dataset, the first open-access collection of annotated respiratory sounds in children aged 1 month to 18 years, is used to extract 2-second audio segments labeled as wheeze, crackle, rhonchi, stridor, or normal. Each segment is embedded into a 512-dimensional representation using HeAR, a foundation model pretrained on 300 million health-related audio clips, including 100 million cough sounds. Multiple classifiers, including SVM, Random Forest, and MLP, are trained on these embeddings to distinguish between asthma-indicative and normal sounds. The system achieves over 91\% accuracy, with strong performance on precision-recall metrics for positive cases. In addition to classification, learned embeddings are visualized using PCA, misclassifications are analyzed through waveform playback, and ROC and confusion matrix insights are provided. This method demonstrates that short, low-resource pediatric recordings, when powered by foundation audio models, can enable fast, noninvasive asthma screening. The approach is especially promising for digital diagnostics in remote or underserved healthcare settings.
Authors: Michael Pekala, Gregory Canal, Samuel Barham, Milena B. Graziano, Morgan Trexler, Leslie Hamilton, Elizabeth Reilly, Christopher D. Stiles
Abstract: A key factor for lunar mission planning is the ability to assess the local availability of raw materials. However, many potentially relevant measurements are scattered across a variety of scientific publications. In this paper we consider the viability of obtaining lunar composition data by leveraging LLMs to rapidly process a corpus of scientific publications. While leveraging LLMs to obtain knowledge from scientific documents is not new, this particular application presents interesting challenges due to the heterogeneity of lunar samples and the nuances involved in their characterization. Accuracy and uncertainty quantification are particularly crucial since many materials properties can be sensitive to small variations in composition. Our findings indicate that off-the-shelf LLMs are generally effective at extracting data from tables commonly found in these documents. However, there remains opportunity to further refine the data we extract in this initial approach; in particular, to capture fine-grained mineralogy information and to improve performance on more subtle/complex pieces of information.
Authors: Antonio A. Ginart, Naveen Kodali, Jason Lee, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese, John R. Emmons
Abstract: We introduce the LZ penalty, a penalty specialized for reducing degenerate repetitions in autoregressive language models without loss of capability. The penalty is based on the codelengths in the LZ77 universal lossless compression algorithm. Through the lens of the prediction-compression duality, decoding the LZ penalty has the interpretation of sampling from the residual distribution after removing the information that is highly compressible. We demonstrate the LZ penalty enables state-of-the-art open-source reasoning models to operate with greedy (temperature zero) decoding without loss of capability and without instances of degenerate repetition. Both the industry-standard frequency penalty and repetition penalty are ineffective, incurring degenerate repetition rates of up to 4%.
Authors: Nishant Subramani, Jason Eisner, Justin Svegliato, Benjamin Van Durme, Yu Su, Sam Thomson
Abstract: Tool-using agents that act in the world need to be both useful and safe. Well-calibrated model confidences can be used to weigh the risk versus reward of potential actions, but prior work shows that many models are poorly calibrated. Inspired by interpretability literature exploring the internals of models, we propose a novel class of model-internal confidence estimators (MICE) to better assess confidence when calling tools. MICE first decodes from each intermediate layer of the language model using logitLens and then computes similarity scores between each layer's generation and the final output. These features are fed into a learned probabilistic classifier to assess confidence in the decoded output. On the simulated trial and error (STE) tool-calling dataset using Llama3 models, we find that MICE beats or matches the baselines on smoothed expected calibration error. Using MICE confidences to determine whether to call a tool significantly improves over strong baselines on a new metric, expected tool-calling utility. Further experiments show that MICE is sample-efficient, can generalize zero-shot to unseen APIs, and results in higher tool-calling utility in scenarios with varying risk levels. Our code is open source, available at https://github.com/microsoft/mice_for_cats.
Authors: Erik Jahn, Karthik Karnik, Leonard J. Schulman
Abstract: In this paper, we analyze the applicability of the Causal Identification algorithm to causal time series graphs with latent confounders. Since these graphs extend over infinitely many time steps, deciding whether causal effects across arbitrary time intervals are identifiable appears to require computation on graph segments of unbounded size. Even for deciding the identifiability of intervention effects on variables that are close in time, no bound is known on how many time steps in the past need to be considered. We give a first bound of this kind that only depends on the number of variables per time step and the maximum time lag of any direct or latent causal effect. More generally, we show that applying the Causal Identification algorithm to a constant-size segment of the time series graph is sufficient to decide identifiability of causal effects, even across unbounded time intervals.
Authors: Jingjing Wang, Dan Zhang, Joshua Luo, Yin Yang, Feng Luo
Abstract: Ordinary differential equation (ODE) based generative models have emerged as a powerful approach for producing high-quality samples in many applications. However, the ODE-based methods either suffer the discretization error of numerical solvers of ODE, which restricts the quality of samples when only a few NFEs are used, or struggle with training instability. In this paper, we proposed Integration Flow, which directly learns the integral of ODE-based trajectory paths without solving the ODE functions. Moreover, Integration Flow explicitly incorporates the target state $\mathbf{x}_0$ as the anchor state in guiding the reverse-time dynamics. We have theoretically proven this can contribute to both stability and accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, Integration Flow is the first model with a unified structure to estimate ODE-based generative models and the first to show the exact straightness of 1-Rectified Flow without reflow. Through theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations, we show that Integration Flows achieve improved performance when it is applied to existing ODE-based models, such as diffusion models, Rectified Flows, and PFGM++. Specifically, Integration Flow achieves one-step generation on CIFAR10 with FIDs of 2.86 for the Variance Exploding (VE) diffusion model, 3.36 for rectified flow without reflow, and 2.91 for PFGM++; and on ImageNet with FIDs of 4.09 for VE diffusion model, 4.35 for rectified flow without reflow and 4.15 for PFGM++.
Authors: Niki van Stein, Anna V. Kononova, Haoran Yin, Thomas B\"ack
Abstract: The application of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Automated Algorithm Discovery (AAD), particularly for optimisation heuristics, is an emerging field of research. This emergence necessitates robust, standardised benchmarking practices to rigorously evaluate the capabilities and limitations of LLM-driven AAD methods and the resulting generated algorithms, especially given the opacity of their design process and known issues with existing benchmarks. To address this need, we introduce BLADE (Benchmark suite for LLM-driven Automated Design and Evolution), a modular and extensible framework specifically designed for benchmarking LLM-driven AAD methods in a continuous black-box optimisation context. BLADE integrates collections of benchmark problems (including MA-BBOB and SBOX-COST among others) with instance generators and textual descriptions aimed at capability-focused testing, such as generalisation, specialisation and information exploitation. It offers flexible experimental setup options, standardised logging for reproducibility and fair comparison, incorporates methods for analysing the AAD process (e.g., Code Evolution Graphs and various visualisation approaches) and facilitates comparison against human-designed baselines through integration with established tools like IOHanalyser and IOHexplainer. BLADE provides an `out-of-the-box' solution to systematically evaluate LLM-driven AAD approaches. The framework is demonstrated through two distinct use cases exploring mutation prompt strategies and function specialisation.
Authors: Weihao Sun, Heeseung Bang, Andreas A. Malikopoulos
Abstract: In this paper, we present an adherence-aware reinforcement learning (RL) approach aimed at seeking optimal lane-changing recommendations within a semi-autonomous driving environment to enhance a single vehicle's travel efficiency. The problem is framed within a Markov decision process setting and is addressed through an adherence-aware deep Q network, which takes into account the partial compliance of human drivers with the recommended actions. This approach is evaluated within CARLA's driving environment under realistic scenarios.
Authors: Daye Nam, Ahmed Omran, Ambar Murillo, Saksham Thakur, Abner Araujo, Marcel Blistein, Alexander Fr\"ommgen, Vincent Hellendoorn, Satish Chandra
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming software engineering, with coding assistants embedded in an IDE becoming increasingly prevalent. While research has focused on improving the tools and understanding developer perceptions, a critical gap exists in understanding how developers actually use these tools in their daily workflows, and, crucially, where they struggle. This paper addresses part of this gap through a multi-phased investigation of developer interactions with an LLM-powered code editing and transformation feature, Transform Code, in an IDE widely used at Google. First, we analyze telemetry logs of the feature usage, revealing that frequent re-prompting can be an indicator of developer struggles with using Transform Code. Second, we conduct a qualitative analysis of unsatisfactory requests, identifying five key categories of information often missing from developer prompts. Finally, based on these findings, we propose and evaluate a tool, AutoPrompter, for automatically improving prompts by inferring missing information from the surrounding code context, leading to a 27% improvement in edit correctness on our test set.
Authors: Aryeh Brill
Abstract: Decomposing a deep neural network's learned representations into interpretable features could greatly enhance its safety and reliability. To better understand features, we adopt a geometric perspective, viewing them as a learned coordinate system for mapping an embedded data distribution. We motivate a model of a generic data distribution as a random lattice and analyze its properties using percolation theory. Learned features are categorized into context, component, and surface features. The model is qualitatively consistent with recent findings in mechanistic interpretability and suggests directions for future research.
Authors: Juntian Zhang, Chuanqi cheng, Yuhan Liu, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Rui Yan
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve remarkable success in single-image tasks. However, real-world scenarios often involve intricate multi-image inputs, leading to a notable performance decline as models struggle to disentangle critical information scattered across complex visual features. In this work, we propose Focus-Centric Visual Chain, a novel paradigm that enhances VLMs'perception, comprehension, and reasoning abilities in multi-image scenarios. To facilitate this paradigm, we propose Focus-Centric Data Synthesis, a scalable bottom-up approach for synthesizing high-quality data with elaborate reasoning paths. Through this approach, We construct VISC-150K, a large-scale dataset with reasoning data in the form of Focus-Centric Visual Chain, specifically designed for multi-image tasks. Experimental results on seven multi-image benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves average performance gains of 3.16% and 2.24% across two distinct model architectures, without compromising the general vision-language capabilities. our study represents a significant step toward more robust and capable vision-language systems that can handle complex visual scenarios.
Authors: Yuan Xia, Akanksha Atrey, Fadoua Khmaissia, Kedar S. Namjoshi
Abstract: This paper investigates the logical reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). For a precisely defined yet tractable formulation, we choose the conceptually simple but technically complex task of constructing proofs in Boolean logic. A trained LLM receives as input a set of assumptions and a goal, and produces as output a proof that formally derives the goal from the assumptions. Incorrect proofs are caught by an automated proof checker. A critical obstacle for training is the scarcity of real-world proofs. We propose an efficient, randomized procedure for synthesizing valid proofs and introduce Template Transformation, a data augmentation technique that enhances the model's ability to handle complex logical expressions. The central evaluation question is whether an LLM has indeed learned to reason. We propose tests to measure the reasoning ability of a black-box LLM. By these measures, experiments demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities for assertions with short proofs, which decline with proof complexity. Notably, template transformation improves accuracy even for smaller models, suggesting its effectiveness across model scales.
Authors: Aiala Ros\'a, Santiago G\'ongora, Juan Pablo Filevich, Ignacio Sastre, Laura Musto, Brian Carpenter, Luis Chiruzzo
Abstract: We present a platform for the generation of educational activities oriented to teaching English as a foreign language. The different activities --games and language practice exercises-- are strongly based on Natural Language Processing techniques. The platform offers the possibility of playing out-of-the-box games, generated from resources created semi-automatically and then manually curated. It can also generate games or exercises of greater complexity from texts entered by teachers, providing a stage of review and edition of the generated content before use. As a way of expanding the variety of activities in the platform, we are currently experimenting with image and text generation. In order to integrate them and improve the performance of other neural tools already integrated, we are working on migrating the platform to a more powerful server. In this paper we describe the development of our platform and its deployment for end users, discussing the challenges faced and how we overcame them, and also detail our future work plans.
Authors: Mohammadhossein Homaei, Victor Gonzalez Morales, Oscar Mogollon Gutierrez, Ruben Molano Gomez, Andres Caro
Abstract: Water distribution systems in rural areas face serious challenges such as a lack of real-time monitoring, vulnerability to cyberattacks, and unreliable data handling. This paper presents an integrated framework that combines LoRaWAN-based data acquisition, a machine learning-driven Intrusion Detection System (IDS), and a blockchain-enabled Digital Twin (BC-DT) platform for secure and transparent water management. The IDS filters anomalous or spoofed data using a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Autoencoder and Isolation Forest before validated data is logged via smart contracts on a private Ethereum blockchain using Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus. The verified data feeds into a real-time DT model supporting leak detection, consumption forecasting, and predictive maintenance. Experimental results demonstrate that the system achieves over 80 transactions per second (TPS) with under 2 seconds of latency while remaining cost-effective and scalable for up to 1,000 smart meters. This work demonstrates a practical and secure architecture for decentralized water infrastructure in under-connected rural environments.
Authors: Mohammadhossein Homaei, Victor Gonzalez Morales, Oscar Mogollon-Gutierrez, Andres Caro
Abstract: Digital twins (DTs) are improving water distribution systems by using real-time data, analytics, and prediction models to optimize operations. This paper presents a DT platform designed for a Spanish water supply network, utilizing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to predict water consumption. However, machine learning models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, such as the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD). These attacks manipulate critical model parameters, injecting subtle distortions that degrade forecasting accuracy. To further exploit these vulnerabilities, we introduce a Learning Automata (LA) and Random LA-based approach that dynamically adjusts perturbations, making adversarial attacks more difficult to detect. Experimental results show that this approach significantly impacts prediction reliability, causing the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) to rise from 26% to over 35%. Moreover, adaptive attack strategies amplify this effect, highlighting cybersecurity risks in AI-driven DTs. These findings emphasize the urgent need for robust defenses, including adversarial training, anomaly detection, and secure data pipelines.
Authors: Xiulin Yang, Zhuoxuan Ju, Lanni Bu, Zoey Liu, Nathan Schneider
Abstract: CHILDES is a widely used resource of transcribed child and child-directed speech. This paper introduces UD-English-CHILDES, the first officially released Universal Dependencies (UD) treebank derived from previously dependency-annotated CHILDES data with consistent and unified annotation guidelines. Our corpus harmonizes annotations from 11 children and their caregivers, totaling over 48k sentences. We validate existing gold-standard annotations under the UD v2 framework and provide an additional 1M silver-standard sentences, offering a consistent resource for computational and linguistic research.
Authors: Greg Gluch, Shafi Goldwasser
Abstract: In this paper, we initiate a cryptographically inspired theoretical study of detection versus mitigation of adversarial inputs produced by attackers of Machine Learning algorithms during inference time. We formally define defense by detection (DbD) and defense by mitigation (DbM). Our definitions come in the form of a 3-round protocol between two resource-bounded parties: a trainer/defender and an attacker. The attacker aims to produce inference-time inputs that fool the training algorithm. We define correctness, completeness, and soundness properties to capture successful defense at inference time while not degrading (too much) the performance of the algorithm on inputs from the training distribution. We first show that achieving DbD and achieving DbM are equivalent for ML classification tasks. Surprisingly, this is not the case for ML generative learning tasks, where there are many possible correct outputs that can be generated for each input. We show a separation between DbD and DbM by exhibiting a generative learning task for which is possible to defend by mitigation but is provably impossible to defend by detection under the assumption that the Identity-Based Fully Homomorphic Encryption (IB-FHE), publicly-verifiable zero-knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) and Strongly Unforgeable Signatures exist. The mitigation phase uses significantly fewer samples than the initial training algorithm.
Authors: Qitao Tan, Sung-En Chang, Rui Xia, Huidong Ji, Chence Yang, Ci Zhang, Jun Liu, Zheng Zhan, Zhou Zou, Yanzhi Wang, Jin Lu, Geng Yuan
Abstract: Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is an emerging deep neural network (DNN) training paradigm that offers computational simplicity and memory savings. However, this seemingly promising approach faces a significant and long-ignored challenge. ZO requires generating a substantial number of Gaussian random numbers, which poses significant difficulties and even makes it infeasible for hardware platforms, such as FPGAs and ASICs. In this paper, we identify this critical issue, which arises from the mismatch between algorithm and hardware designers. To address this issue, we proposed PeZO, a perturbation-efficient ZO framework. Specifically, we design random number reuse strategies to significantly reduce the demand for random number generation and introduce a hardware-friendly adaptive scaling method to replace the costly Gaussian distribution with a uniform distribution. Our experiments show that PeZO reduces the required LUTs and FFs for random number generation by 48.6\% and 12.7\%, and saves at maximum 86\% power consumption, all without compromising training performance, making ZO optimization feasible for on-device training. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore the potential of on-device ZO optimization, providing valuable insights for future research.
Authors: Chao-Lin Liu, Po-Hsien Wu, Yi-Ting Yu
Abstract: This report addresses the challenge of limited labeled datasets for developing legal recommender systems, particularly in specialized domains like labor disputes. We propose a new approach leveraging the co-citation of legal articles within cases to establish similarity and enable algorithmic annotation. This method draws a parallel to the concept of case co-citation, utilizing cited precedents as indicators of shared legal issues. To evaluate the labeled results, we employ a system that recommends similar cases based on plaintiffs' accusations, defendants' rebuttals, and points of disputes. The evaluation demonstrates that the recommender, with finetuned text embedding models and a reasonable BiLSTM module can recommend labor cases whose similarity was measured by the co-citation of the legal articles. This research contributes to the development of automated annotation techniques for legal documents, particularly in areas with limited access to comprehensive legal databases.
Authors: Shou-Tzu Han
Abstract: Reflexion is an AI-powered platform designed to enable structured emotional self-reflection at scale. By integrating real-time emotion detection, layered reflective prompting, and metaphorical storytelling generation, Reflexion empowers users to engage in autonomous emotional exploration beyond basic sentiment categorization. Grounded in theories of expressive writing, cognitive restructuring, self-determination, and critical consciousness development, the system scaffolds a progressive journey from surface-level emotional recognition toward value-aligned action planning. Initial pilot studies with diverse participants demonstrate positive outcomes in emotional articulation, cognitive reframing, and perceived psychological resilience. Reflexion represents a promising direction for scalable, theory-informed affective computing interventions aimed at fostering emotional literacy and psychological growth across educational, therapeutic, and public health contexts.
Authors: Varatheepan Paramanayakam, Andreas Karatzas, Iraklis Anagnostopoulos, Dimitrios Stamoulis
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) enable real-time function calling in edge AI systems but introduce significant computational overhead, leading to high power consumption and carbon emissions. Existing methods optimize for performance while neglecting sustainability, making them inefficient for energy-constrained environments. We introduce CarbonCall, a sustainability-aware function-calling framework that integrates dynamic tool selection, carbon-aware execution, and quantized LLM adaptation. CarbonCall adjusts power thresholds based on real-time carbon intensity forecasts and switches between model variants to sustain high tokens-per-second throughput under power constraints. Experiments on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin show that CarbonCall reduces carbon emissions by up to 52%, power consumption by 30%, and execution time by 30%, while maintaining high efficiency.
Authors: Yash Jain, Vishal Chowdhary
Abstract: In recent years, the use of prompts to guide the output of Large Language Models have increased dramatically. However, even the best of experts struggle to choose the correct words to stitch up a prompt for the desired task. To solve this, LLM driven prompt optimization emerged as an important problem. Existing prompt optimization methods optimize a prompt globally, where in all the prompt tokens have to be optimized over a large vocabulary while solving a complex task. The large optimization space (tokens) leads to insufficient guidance for a better prompt. In this work, we introduce Local Prompt Optimization (LPO) that integrates with any general automatic prompt engineering method. We identify the optimization tokens in a prompt and nudge the LLM to focus only on those tokens in its optimization step. We observe remarkable performance improvements on Math Reasoning (GSM8k and MultiArith) and BIG-bench Hard benchmarks across various automatic prompt engineering methods. Further, we show that LPO converges to the optimal prompt faster than global methods.
Authors: Jason Wang, Basem Suleiman, Muhammad Johan Alibasa
Abstract: Software is omnipresent within all factors of society. It is thus important to ensure that software are well tested to mitigate bad user experiences as well as the potential for severe financial and human losses. Software testing is however expensive and absorbs valuable time and resources. As a result, the field of automated software testing has grown of interest to researchers in past decades. In our review of present and past research papers, we have identified an information gap in the areas of improvement for the Genetic Algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimisation. A gap in knowledge in the current challenges that face automated testing has also been identified. We therefore present this systematic literature review in an effort to consolidate existing knowledge in regards to the evolutionary approaches as well as their improvements and resulting limitations. These improvements include hybrid algorithm combinations as well as interoperability with mutation testing and neural networks. We will also explore the main test criterion that are used in these algorithms alongside the challenges currently faced in the field related to readability, mocking and more.
Authors: David Gordon, Panayiotis Petousis, Susanne B. Nicholas, Alex A. T. Bui
Abstract: Diagnostic reasoning entails a physician's local (mental) model based on an assumed or known shared perspective (global model) to explain patient observations with evidence assigned towards a clinical assessment. But in several (complex) medical situations, multiple experts work together as a team to optimize health evaluation and decision-making by leveraging different perspectives. Such consensus-driven reasoning reflects individual knowledge contributing toward a broader perspective on the patient. In this light, we introduce STRUCture-following for Multiagent Systems (STRUC-MAS), a framework automating the learning of these global models and their incorporation as prior beliefs for agents in multiagent systems (MAS) to follow. We demonstrate proof of concept with a prosocial MAS application for predicting acute kidney injuries (AKIs). In this case, we found that incorporating a global structure enabled multiple agents to achieve better performance (average precision, AP) in predicting AKI 48 hours before onset (structure-following-fine-tuned, SF-FT, AP=0.195; SF-FT-retrieval-augmented generation, SF-FT-RAG, AP=0.194) vs. baseline (non-structure-following-FT, NSF-FT, AP=0.141; NSF-FT-RAG, AP=0.180) for balanced precision-weighted-recall-weighted voting. Markedly, SF-FT agents with higher recall scores reported lower confidence levels in the initial round on true positive and false negative cases. But after explicit interactions, their confidence in their decisions increased (suggesting reinforced belief). In contrast, the SF-FT agent with the lowest recall decreased its confidence in true positive and false negative cases (suggesting a new belief). This approach suggests that learning and leveraging global structures in MAS is necessary prior to achieving competitive classification and diagnostic reasoning performance.
Authors: Sahil Sethi, Sai Reddy, Mansi Sakarvadia, Jordan Serotte, Darlington Nwaudo, Nicholas Maassen, Lewis Shi
Abstract: While deep learning has shown strong performance in musculoskeletal imaging, existing work has largely focused on pathologies where diagnosis is not a clinical challenge, leaving more difficult problems underexplored, such as detecting Bankart lesions (anterior-inferior glenoid labral tears) on standard MRIs. Diagnosing these lesions is challenging due to their subtle imaging features, often leading to reliance on invasive MRI arthrograms (MRAs). This study introduces ScopeMRI, the first publicly available, expert-annotated dataset for shoulder pathologies, and presents a deep learning (DL) framework for detecting Bankart lesions on both standard MRIs and MRAs. ScopeMRI includes 586 shoulder MRIs (335 standard, 251 MRAs) from 558 patients who underwent arthroscopy. Ground truth labels were derived from intraoperative findings, the gold standard for diagnosis. Separate DL models for MRAs and standard MRIs were trained using a combination of CNNs and transformers. Predictions from sagittal, axial, and coronal views were ensembled to optimize performance. The models were evaluated on a 20% hold-out test set (117 MRIs: 46 MRAs, 71 standard MRIs). The models achieved an AUC of 0.91 and 0.93, sensitivity of 83% and 94%, and specificity of 91% and 86% for standard MRIs and MRAs, respectively. Notably, model performance on non-invasive standard MRIs matched or surpassed radiologists interpreting MRAs. External validation demonstrated initial generalizability across imaging protocols. This study demonstrates that DL models can achieve radiologist-level diagnostic performance on standard MRIs, reducing the need for invasive MRAs. By releasing ScopeMRI and a modular codebase for training and evaluating deep learning models on 3D medical imaging data, we aim to accelerate research in musculoskeletal imaging and support the development of new datasets for clinically challenging diagnostic tasks.
Authors: Jae Yong Lee, Gwang Jae Jung, Byung Chan Lim, Hyung Ju Hwang
Abstract: The Boltzmann equation, a fundamental model in kinetic theory, describes the evolution of particle distribution functions through a nonlinear, high-dimensional collision operator. However, its numerical solution remains computationally demanding, particularly for inelastic collisions and high-dimensional velocity domains. In this work, we propose the Fourier Neural Spectral Network (FourierSpecNet), a hybrid framework that integrates the Fourier spectral method with deep learning to approximate the collision operator in Fourier space efficiently. FourierSpecNet achieves resolution-invariant learning and supports zero-shot super-resolution, enabling accurate predictions at unseen resolutions without retraining. Beyond empirical validation, we establish a consistency result showing that the trained operator converges to the spectral solution as the discretization is refined. We evaluate our method on several benchmark cases, including Maxwellian and hard-sphere molecular models, as well as inelastic collision scenarios. The results demonstrate that FourierSpecNet offers competitive accuracy while significantly reducing computational cost compared to traditional spectral solvers. Our approach provides a robust and scalable alternative for solving the Boltzmann equation across both elastic and inelastic regimes.
Authors: Alex Mathai, Chenxi Huang, Suwei Ma, Jihwan Kim, Hailie Mitchell, Aleksandr Nogikh, Petros Maniatis, Franjo Ivan\v{c}i\'c, Junfeng Yang, Baishakhi Ray
Abstract: Code large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities on a multitude of software engineering tasks. In particular, they have demonstrated remarkable utility in the task of code repair. However, common benchmarks used to evaluate the performance of code LLMs are often limited to small-scale settings. In this work, we build upon kGym, which shares a benchmark for system-level Linux kernel bugs and a platform to run experiments on the Linux kernel. This paper introduces CrashFixer, the first LLM-based software repair agent that is applicable to Linux kernel bugs. Inspired by the typical workflow of a kernel developer, we identify the key capabilities an expert developer leverages to resolve a kernel crash. Using this as our guide, we revisit the kGym platform and identify key system improvements needed to practically run LLM-based agents at the scale of the Linux kernel (50K files and 20M lines of code). We implement these changes by extending kGym to create an improved platform - called kGymSuite, which will be open-sourced. Finally, the paper presents an evaluation of various repair strategies for such complex kernel bugs and showcases the value of explicitly generating a hypothesis before attempting to fix bugs in complex systems such as the Linux kernel. We also evaluated CrashFixer's capabilities on still open bugs, and found at least two patch suggestions considered plausible to resolve the reported bug.
Authors: Manish Bhattarai, Miguel Cordova, Javier Santos, Dan O'Malley
Abstract: In supercomputing, efficient and optimized code generation is essential to leverage high-performance systems effectively. We propose Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Code Synthesis (ARCS), an advanced framework for accurate, robust, and efficient code generation, completion, and translation. ARCS integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to systematically break down and iteratively refine complex programming tasks. An agent-based RAG mechanism retrieves relevant code snippets, while real-time execution feedback drives the synthesis of candidate solutions. This process is formalized as a state-action search tree optimization, balancing code correctness with editing efficiency. Evaluations on the Geeks4Geeks and HumanEval benchmarks demonstrate that ARCS significantly outperforms traditional prompting methods in translation and generation quality. By enabling scalable and precise code synthesis, ARCS offers transformative potential for automating and optimizing code development in supercomputing applications, enhancing computational resource utilization.
Authors: DiJia Su, Andrew Gu, Jane Xu, Yuandong Tian, Jiawei Zhao
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language understanding and generation but face significant memory bottlenecks during training. GaLore, Gradient Low-Rank Projection, addresses this issue by leveraging the inherent low-rank structure of weight gradients, enabling substantial memory savings without sacrificing performance. Recent works further extend GaLore from various aspects, including low-bit quantization and higher-order tensor structures. However, there are several remaining challenges for GaLore, such as the computational overhead of SVD for subspace updates and the integration with state-of-the-art training parallelization strategies (e.g., FSDP). In this paper, we present GaLore 2, an efficient and scalable GaLore framework that addresses these challenges and incorporates recent advancements. In addition, we demonstrate the scalability of GaLore 2 by pre-training Llama 7B from scratch using up to 500 billion training tokens, highlighting its potential impact on real LLM pre-training scenarios.
Authors: Mika H\"am\"al\"ainen
Abstract: We study the primacy effect in three commercial LLMs: ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. We do this by repurposing the famous experiment Asch (1946) conducted using human subjects. The experiment is simple, given two candidates with equal descriptions which one is preferred if one description has positive adjectives first before negative ones and another description has negative adjectives followed by positive ones. We test this in two experiments. In one experiment, LLMs are given both candidates simultaneously in the same prompt, and in another experiment, LLMs are given both candidates separately. We test all the models with 200 candidate pairs. We found that, in the first experiment, ChatGPT preferred the candidate with positive adjectives listed first, while Gemini preferred both equally often. Claude refused to make a choice. In the second experiment, ChatGPT and Claude were most likely to rank both candidates equally. In the case where they did not give an equal rating, both showed a clear preference to a candidate that had negative adjectives listed first. Gemini was most likely to prefer a candidate with negative adjectives listed first.
Authors: Zhicheng Lian, Lizhi Wang, Hua Huang
Abstract: Automatic speech quality assessment aims to quantify subjective human perception of speech through computational models to reduce the need for labor-consuming manual evaluations. While models based on deep learning have achieved progress in predicting mean opinion scores (MOS) to assess synthetic speech, the neglect of fundamental auditory perception mechanisms limits consistency with human judgments. To address this issue, we propose an auditory perception guided-MOS prediction model (APG-MOS) that synergistically integrates auditory modeling with semantic analysis to enhance consistency with human judgments. Specifically, we first design a perceptual module, grounded in biological auditory mechanisms, to simulate cochlear functions, which encodes acoustic signals into biologically aligned electrochemical representations. Secondly, we propose a residual vector quantization (RVQ)-based semantic distortion modeling method to quantify the degradation of speech quality at the semantic level. Finally, we design a residual cross-attention architecture, coupled with a progressive learning strategy, to enable multimodal fusion of encoded electrochemical signals and semantic representations. Experiments demonstrate that APG-MOS achieves superior performance on two primary benchmarks. Our code and checkpoint will be available on a public repository upon publication.
Authors: Hai-Dang Kieu, Delvin Ce Zhang, Minh Duc Nguyen, Min Xu, Qiang Wu, Dung D. Le
Abstract: Personalized news recommendation systems often struggle to effectively capture the complexity of user preferences, as they rely heavily on shallow representations, such as article titles and abstracts. To address this problem, we introduce a novel method, namely PNR-LLM, for Large Language Models for Personalized News Recommendation. Specifically, PNR-LLM harnesses the generation capabilities of LLMs to enrich news titles and abstracts, and consequently improves recommendation quality. PNR-LLM contains a novel module, News Enrichment via LLMs, which generates deeper semantic information and relevant entities from articles, transforming shallow contents into richer representations. We further propose an attention mechanism to aggregate enriched semantic- and entity-level data, forming unified user and news embeddings that reveal a more accurate user-news match. Extensive experiments on MIND datasets show that PNR-LLM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, the proposed data enrichment module is model-agnostic, and we empirically show that applying our proposed module to multiple existing models can further improve their performance, verifying the advantage of our design.
Authors: Baining Chen, Yiming Zhang, Yuqiao Han, Ruyue Zhang, Ruihuan Du, Zhishuo Zhou, Zhengdan Zhu, Xun Liu, Jiecheng Guo
Abstract: Causal effect estimation has been widely used in marketing optimization. The framework of an uplift model followed by a constrained optimization algorithm is popular in practice. To enhance performance in the online environment, the framework needs to be improved to address the complexities caused by temporal dataset shift. This paper focuses on capturing the dataset shift from user behavior and domain distribution changing over time. We propose an Incremental Causal Effect with Proxy Knowledge Distillation (ICE-PKD) framework to tackle this challenge. The ICE-PKD framework includes two components: (i) a multi-treatment uplift network that eliminates confounding bias using counterfactual regression; (ii) an incremental training strategy that adapts to the temporal dataset shift by updating with the latest data and protects generalization via replay-based knowledge distillation. We also revisit the uplift modeling metrics and introduce a novel metric for more precise online evaluation in multiple treatment scenarios. Extensive experiments on both simulated and online datasets show that the proposed framework achieves better performance. The ICE-PKD framework has been deployed in the marketing system of Huaxiaozhu, a ride-hailing platform in China.
Authors: Chao Li, Changhua Zhou, Jia Chen
Abstract: Knowledge distillation typically transfers knowledge from a teacher model to a student model by minimizing differences between their output distributions. However, existing distillation approaches largely focus on mimicking absolute probabilities and neglect the valuable relational inductive biases embedded in the teacher's relative predictions, leading to exposure bias. In this paper, we propose Group Relative Knowledge Distillation (GRKD), a novel framework that distills teacher knowledge by learning the relative ranking among classes, rather than directly fitting the absolute distribution. Specifically, we introduce a group relative loss that encourages the student model to preserve the pairwise preference orderings provided by the teacher's outputs. Extensive experiments on classification benchmarks demonstrate that GRKD achieves superior generalization compared to existing methods, especially in tasks requiring fine-grained class differentiation. Our method provides a new perspective on exploiting teacher knowledge, focusing on relational structure rather than absolute likelihood.
Authors: Yu Cui, Yujun Cai, Yiwei Wang
Abstract: While reasoning large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across various tasks, they also contain notable security vulnerabilities. Recent research has uncovered a "thinking-stopped" vulnerability in DeepSeek-R1, where model-generated reasoning tokens can forcibly interrupt the inference process, resulting in empty responses that compromise LLM-integrated applications. However, existing methods triggering this vulnerability require complex mathematical word problems with long prompts--even exceeding 5,000 tokens. To reduce the token cost and formally define this vulnerability, we propose a novel prompt injection attack named "Reasoning Interruption Attack", based on adaptive token compression. We demonstrate that simple standalone arithmetic tasks can effectively trigger this vulnerability, and the prompts based on such tasks exhibit simpler logical structures than mathematical word problems. We develop a systematic approach to efficiently collect attack prompts and an adaptive token compression framework that utilizes LLMs to automatically compress these prompts. Experiments show our compression framework significantly reduces prompt length while maintaining effective attack capabilities. We further investigate the attack's performance via output prefix and analyze the underlying causes of the vulnerability, providing valuable insights for improving security in reasoning LLMs.
Authors: Haowen Sun, Han Wang, Chengzhong Ma, Shaolong Zhang, Jiawei Ye, Xingyu Chen, Xuguang Lan
Abstract: Learning from few demonstrations to develop policies robust to variations in robot initial positions and object poses is a problem of significant practical interest in robotics. Compared to imitation learning, which often struggles to generalize from limited samples, reinforcement learning (RL) can autonomously explore to obtain robust behaviors. Training RL agents through direct interaction with the real world is often impractical and unsafe, while building simulation environments requires extensive manual effort, such as designing scenes and crafting task-specific reward functions. To address these challenges, we propose an integrated real-to-sim-to-real pipeline that constructs simulation environments based on expert demonstrations by identifying scene objects from images and retrieving their corresponding 3D models from existing libraries. We introduce a projection-based reward model for RL policy training that is supervised by a vision-language model (VLM) using human-guided object projection relationships as prompts, with the policy further fine-tuned using expert demonstrations. In general, our work focuses on the construction of simulation environments and RL-based policy training, ultimately enabling the deployment of reliable robotic control policies in real-world scenarios.
Authors: Francisco Sede\~no, Jamal Toutouh, Francisco Chicano
Abstract: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are very useful methods to address semi-supervised learning (SSL) datasets, thanks to their ability to generate samples similar to real data. This approach, called SSL-GAN has attracted many researchers in the last decade. Evolutionary algorithms have been used to guide the evolution and training of SSL-GANs with great success. In particular, several co-evolutionary approaches have been applied where the two networks of a GAN (the generator and the discriminator) are evolved in separate populations. The co-evolutionary approaches published to date assume some spatial structure of the populations, based on the ideas of cellular evolutionary algorithms. They also create one single individual per generation and follow a generational replacement strategy in the evolution. In this paper, we re-consider those algorithmic design decisions and propose a new co-evolutionary approach, called Co-evolutionary Elitist SSL-GAN (CE-SSLGAN), with panmictic population, elitist replacement, and more than one individual in the offspring. We evaluate the performance of our proposed method using three standard benchmark datasets. The results show that creating more than one offspring per population and using elitism improves the results in comparison with a classical SSL-GAN.
Authors: Shunjie Wen, Thomas Heinis, Dong-Wan Choi
Abstract: Online class-incremental learning (OCIL) focuses on gradually learning new classes (called plasticity) from a stream of data in a single-pass, while concurrently preserving knowledge of previously learned classes (called stability). The primary challenge in OCIL lies in maintaining a good balance between the knowledge of old and new classes within the continually updated model. Most existing methods rely on explicit knowledge interaction through experience replay, and often employ exclusive training separation to address bias problems. Nevertheless, it still remains a big challenge to achieve a well-balanced learner, as these methods often exhibit either reduced plasticity or limited stability due to difficulties in continually integrating knowledge in the OCIL setting. In this paper, we propose a novel replay-based method, called Balanced Online Incremental Learning (BOIL), which can achieve both high plasticity and stability, thus ensuring more balanced performance in OCIL. Our BOIL method proposes an inclusive training separation strategy using dual classifiers so that knowledge from both old and new classes can effectively be integrated into the model, while introducing implicit approaches for transferring knowledge across the two classifiers. Extensive experimental evaluations over three widely-used OCIL benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of BOIL, showing more balanced yet better performance compared to state-of-the-art replay-based OCIL methods.
Authors: Yiping Wang, Qing Yang, Zhiyuan Zeng, Liliang Ren, Lucas Liu, Baolin Peng, Hao Cheng, Xuehai He, Kuan Wang, Jianfeng Gao, Weizhu Chen, Shuohang Wang, Simon Shaolei Du, Yelong Shen
Abstract: We show that reinforcement learning with verifiable reward using one training example (1-shot RLVR) is effective in incentivizing the math reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Applying RLVR to the base model Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B, we identify a single example that elevates model performance on MATH500 from 36.0% to 73.6%, and improves the average performance across six common mathematical reasoning benchmarks from 17.6% to 35.7%. This result matches the performance obtained using the 1.2k DeepScaleR subset (MATH500: 73.6%, average: 35.9%), which includes the aforementioned example. Similar substantial improvements are observed across various models (Qwen2.5-Math-7B, Llama3.2-3B-Instruct, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B), RL algorithms (GRPO and PPO), and different math examples (many of which yield approximately 30% or greater improvement on MATH500 when employed as a single training example). In addition, we identify some interesting phenomena during 1-shot RLVR, including cross-domain generalization, increased frequency of self-reflection, and sustained test performance improvement even after the training accuracy has saturated, a phenomenon we term post-saturation generalization. Moreover, we verify that the effectiveness of 1-shot RLVR primarily arises from the policy gradient loss, distinguishing it from the "grokking" phenomenon. We also show the critical role of promoting exploration (e.g., by adding entropy loss with an appropriate coefficient) in 1-shot RLVR training. As a bonus, we observe that applying entropy loss alone, without any outcome reward, significantly enhances Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B's performance on MATH500 by 27.4%. These findings can inspire future work on RLVR data efficiency and encourage a re-examination of both recent progress and the underlying mechanisms in RLVR. Our code, model, and data are open source at https://github.com/ypwang61/One-Shot-RLVR
Authors: Michele Garetto, Alessandro Cornacchia, Franco Galante, Emilio Leonardi, Alessandro Nordio, Alberto Tarable
Abstract: The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI is fundamentally transforming information retrieval and processing on the Internet, bringing both great potential and significant concerns regarding content authenticity and reliability. This paper presents a novel quantitative approach to shed light on the complex information dynamics arising from the growing use of generative AI tools. Despite their significant impact on the digital ecosystem, these dynamics remain largely uncharted and poorly understood. We propose a stochastic model to characterize the generation, indexing, and dissemination of information in response to new topics. This scenario particularly challenges current LLMs, which often rely on real-time Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques to overcome their static knowledge limitations. Our findings suggest that the rapid pace of generative AI adoption, combined with increasing user reliance, can outpace human verification, escalating the risk of inaccurate information proliferation across digital resources. An in-depth analysis of Stack Exchange data confirms that high-quality answers inevitably require substantial time and human effort to emerge. This underscores the considerable risks associated with generating persuasive text in response to new questions and highlights the critical need for responsible development and deployment of future generative AI tools.
Authors: Swaroop Dora, Deven Lunkad, Naziya Aslam, S. Venkatesan, Sandeep Kumar Shukla
Abstract: The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enhanced software development processes, minimizing the time and effort required for coding and enhancing developer productivity. However, despite their potential benefits, code generated by LLMs has been shown to generate insecure code in controlled environments, raising critical concerns about their reliability and security in real-world applications. This paper uses predefined security parameters to evaluate the security compliance of LLM-generated code across multiple models, such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Claude, Gemini and Grok. The analysis reveals critical vulnerabilities in authentication mechanisms, session management, input validation and HTTP security headers. Although some models implement security measures to a limited extent, none fully align with industry best practices, highlighting the associated risks in automated software development. Our findings underscore that human expertise is crucial to ensure secure software deployment or review of LLM-generated code. Also, there is a need for robust security assessment frameworks to enhance the reliability of LLM-generated code in real-world applications.
Authors: Sagi Della Torre, Mirco Pezzoli, Fabio Antonacci, Sharon Gannot
Abstract: Room Impulse Responses (RIRs) characterize acoustic environments and are crucial in multiple audio signal processing tasks. High-quality RIR estimates drive applications such as virtual microphones, sound source localization, augmented reality, and data augmentation. However, obtaining RIR measurements with high spatial resolution is resource-intensive, making it impractical for large spaces or when dense sampling is required. This research addresses the challenge of estimating RIRs at unmeasured locations within a room using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM). Our method leverages the analogy between RIR matrices and image inpainting, transforming RIR data into a format suitable for diffusion-based reconstruction. Using simulated RIR data based on the image method, we demonstrate our approach's effectiveness on microphone arrays of different curvatures, from linear to semi-circular. Our method successfully reconstructs missing RIRs, even in large gaps between microphones. Under these conditions, it achieves accurate reconstruction, significantly outperforming baseline Spline Cubic Interpolation in terms of Normalized Mean Square Error and Cosine Distance between actual and interpolated RIRs. This research highlights the potential of using generative models for effective RIR interpolation, paving the way for generating additional data from limited real-world measurements.
Authors: Jeongsoo Choi, Ji-Hoon Kim, Kim Sung-Bin, Tae-Hyun Oh, Joon Son Chung
Abstract: In this paper, we address the task of multimodal-to-speech generation, which aims to synthesize high-quality speech from multiple input modalities: text, video, and reference audio. This task has gained increasing attention due to its wide range of applications, such as film production, dubbing, and virtual avatars. Despite recent progress, existing methods still suffer from limitations in speech intelligibility, audio-video synchronization, speech naturalness, and voice similarity to the reference speaker. To address these challenges, we propose AlignDiT, a multimodal Aligned Diffusion Transformer that generates accurate, synchronized, and natural-sounding speech from aligned multimodal inputs. Built upon the in-context learning capability of the DiT architecture, AlignDiT explores three effective strategies to align multimodal representations. Furthermore, we introduce a novel multimodal classifier-free guidance mechanism that allows the model to adaptively balance information from each modality during speech synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AlignDiT significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple benchmarks in terms of quality, synchronization, and speaker similarity. Moreover, AlignDiT exhibits strong generalization capability across various multimodal tasks, such as video-to-speech synthesis and visual forced alignment, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance. The demo page is available at https://mm.kaist.ac.kr/projects/AlignDiT .
Authors: Andrew Fitzgibbon, Stephen Felix
Abstract: Large-scale numerical computations make increasing use of low-precision (LP) floating point formats and mixed precision arithmetic, which can be enhanced by the technique of stochastic rounding (SR), that is, rounding an intermediate high-precision value up or down randomly as a function of the value's distance to the two rounding candidates. Stochastic rounding requires, in addition to the high-precision input value, a source of random bits. As the provision of high-quality random bits is an additional computational cost, it is of interest to require as few bits as possible while maintaining the desirable properties of SR in a given computation, or computational domain. This paper examines a number of possible implementations of few-bit stochastic rounding (FBSR), and shows how several natural implementations can introduce sometimes significant bias into the rounding process, which are not present in the case of infinite-bit, infinite-precision examinations of these implementations. The paper explores the impact of these biases in machine learning examples, and hence opens another class of configuration parameters of which practitioners should be aware when developing or adopting low-precision floating point. Code is available at http://github.com/graphcore-research/arith25-stochastic-rounding.
URLs: http://github.com/graphcore-research/arith25-stochastic-rounding.
Authors: Moran Mizrahi, Chen Shani, Gabriel Stanovsky, Dan Jurafsky, Dafna Shahaf
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at countless tasks, yet struggle with creativity. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that couples LLMs with structured representations and cognitively inspired manipulations to generate more creative and diverse ideas. Our notion of creativity goes beyond superficial token-level variations; rather, we explicitly recombine structured representations of existing ideas, allowing our algorithm to effectively explore the more abstract landscape of ideas. We demonstrate our approach in the culinary domain with DishCOVER, a model that generates creative recipes. Experiments comparing our model's results to those of GPT-4o show greater diversity. Domain expert evaluations reveal that our outputs, which are mostly coherent and feasible culinary creations, significantly surpass GPT-4o in terms of novelty, thus outperforming it in creative generation. We hope our work inspires further research into structured creativity in AI.
Authors: Michael Ogezi, Freda Shi
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) work well in tasks ranging from image captioning to visual question answering (VQA), yet they struggle with spatial reasoning, a key skill for understanding our physical world that humans excel at. We find that spatial relations are generally rare in widely used VL datasets, with only a few being well represented, while most form a long tail of underrepresented relations. This gap leaves VLMs ill-equipped to handle diverse spatial relationships. To bridge it, we construct a synthetic VQA dataset focused on spatial reasoning generated from hyper-detailed image descriptions in Localized Narratives, DOCCI, and PixMo-Cap. Our dataset consists of 455k samples containing 3.4 million QA pairs. Trained on this dataset, our Spatial-Reasoning Enhanced (SpaRE) VLMs show strong improvements on spatial reasoning benchmarks, achieving up to a 49% performance gain on the What's Up benchmark, while maintaining strong results on general tasks. Our work narrows the gap between human and VLM spatial reasoning and makes VLMs more capable in real-world tasks such as robotics and navigation.
Authors: Joshua Hatherley, Anders S{\o}gaard, Angela Ballantyne, Ruben Pauwels
Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning approach that allows multiple devices or institutions to collaboratively train a model without sharing their local data with a third-party. FL is considered a promising way to address patient privacy concerns in medical artificial intelligence. The ethical risks of medical FL systems themselves, however, have thus far been underexamined. This paper aims to address this gap. We argue that medical FL presents a new variety of opacity -- federation opacity -- that, in turn, generates a distinctive double black box problem in healthcare AI. We highlight several instances in which the anticipated benefits of medical FL may be exaggerated, and conclude by highlighting key challenges that must be overcome to make FL ethically feasible in medicine.
Authors: Stefano Dell'Anna (University of Trento, Trento, Italy), Andrea Montibeller (University of Trento, Trento, Italy), Giulia Boato (University of Trento, Trento, Italy, Truebees srl, Trento, Italy)
Abstract: AI-generated synthetic media are increasingly used in real-world scenarios, often with the purpose of spreading misinformation and propaganda through social media platforms, where compression and other processing can degrade fake detection cues. Currently, many forensic tools fail to account for these in-the-wild challenges. In this work, we introduce TrueFake, a large-scale benchmarking dataset of 600,000 images including top notch generative techniques and sharing via three different social networks. This dataset allows for rigorous evaluation of state-of-the-art fake image detectors under very realistic and challenging conditions. Through extensive experimentation, we analyze how social media sharing impacts detection performance, and identify current most effective detection and training strategies. Our findings highlight the need for evaluating forensic models in conditions that mirror real-world use.
Authors: Joy Battocchio (University of Trento, Trento, Italy), Stefano Dell'Anna (University of Trento, Trento, Italy), Andrea Montibeller (University of Trento, Trento, Italy), Giulia Boato (University of Trento, Trento, Italy, Truebees srl, Trento, Italy)
Abstract: Recent advancements in AI-based multimedia generation have enabled the creation of hyper-realistic images and videos, raising concerns about their potential use in spreading misinformation. The widespread accessibility of generative techniques, which allow for the production of fake multimedia from prompts or existing media, along with their continuous refinement, underscores the urgent need for highly accurate and generalizable AI-generated media detection methods, underlined also by new regulations like the European Digital AI Act. In this paper, we draw inspiration from Vision Transformer (ViT)-based fake image detection and extend this idea to video. We propose an {original} %innovative framework that effectively integrates ViT embeddings over time to enhance detection performance. Our method shows promising accuracy, generalization, and few-shot learning capabilities across a new, large and diverse dataset of videos generated using five open source generative techniques from the state-of-the-art, as well as a separate dataset containing videos produced by proprietary generative methods.
Authors: Wenjing Yin, Tianze Sun, Yijiong Yu, Jiawei Fang, Guangyao Su, Jiancheng Wang, Zekun Wang, Wei Wang, Ran Chen, Ziyun Dai, Shuai Yuan, Menghang Dong, Peng Luo, Dong Cao, Da Lei, Yajun Zhang, Hao Chen, Xiang Ma, Yong Liu, Weifeng Liu, Yuanjian Xu, Ji Pei
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) play a crucial role in software engineering, excelling in tasks like code generation and maintenance. However, existing benchmarks are often narrow in scope, focusing on a specific task and lack a comprehensive evaluation framework that reflects real-world applications. To address these gaps, we introduce CoCo-Bench (Comprehensive Code Benchmark), designed to evaluate LLMs across four critical dimensions: code understanding, code generation, code modification, and code review. These dimensions capture essential developer needs, ensuring a more systematic and representative evaluation. CoCo-Bench includes multiple programming languages and varying task difficulties, with rigorous manual review to ensure data quality and accuracy. Empirical results show that CoCo-Bench aligns with existing benchmarks while uncovering significant variations in model performance, effectively highlighting strengths and weaknesses. By offering a holistic and objective evaluation, CoCo-Bench provides valuable insights to guide future research and technological advancements in code-oriented LLMs, establishing a reliable benchmark for the field.
Authors: Evangelia Gogoulou, Shorouq Zahra, Liane Guillou, Luise D\"urlich, Joakim Nivre
Abstract: A frequently observed problem with LLMs is their tendency to generate output that is nonsensical, illogical, or factually incorrect, often referred to broadly as hallucination. Building on the recently proposed HalluciGen task for hallucination detection and generation, we evaluate a suite of open-access LLMs on their ability to detect intrinsic hallucinations in two conditional generation tasks: translation and paraphrasing. We study how model performance varies across tasks and language and we investigate the impact of model size, instruction tuning, and prompt choice. We find that performance varies across models but is consistent across prompts. Finally, we find that NLI models perform comparably well, suggesting that LLM-based detectors are not the only viable option for this specific task.
Authors: Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud, Hani Itani, Bernard Ghanem
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) leverage step-by-step reasoning to solve complex problems. Standard evaluation practice involves generating a complete reasoning trace and assessing the correctness of the final answer presented at its conclusion. In this paper, we challenge the reliance on the final answer by posing the following two questions: Does the final answer reliably represent the model's optimal conclusion? Can alternative reasoning paths yield different results? To answer these questions, we analyze intermediate reasoning steps, termed subthoughts, and propose a method based on our findings. Our approach involves segmenting a reasoning trace into sequential subthoughts based on linguistic cues. We start by prompting the model to generate continuations from the end-point of each intermediate subthought. We extract a potential answer from every completed continuation originating from different subthoughts. We find that aggregating these answers by selecting the most frequent one (the mode) often yields significantly higher accuracy compared to relying solely on the answer derived from the original complete trace. Analyzing the consistency among the answers derived from different subthoughts reveals characteristics that correlate with the model's confidence and correctness, suggesting potential for identifying less reliable answers. Our experiments across various LLMs and challenging mathematical reasoning datasets (AIME2024 and AIME2025) show consistent accuracy improvements, with gains reaching up to 13\% and 10\% respectively. Implementation is available at: https://github.com/hammoudhasan/SubthoughtReasoner.
Authors: Hattan Althebeiti, Mohammed Alkinoon, Manar Mohaisen, Saeed Salem, DaeHun Nyang, David Mohaisen
Abstract: Public vulnerability databases, such as the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), document vulnerabilities and facilitate threat information sharing. However, they often suffer from short descriptions and outdated or insufficient information. In this paper, we introduce Zad, a system designed to enrich NVD vulnerability descriptions by leveraging external resources. Zad consists of two pipelines: one collects and filters supplementary data using two encoders to build a detailed dataset, while the other fine-tunes a pre-trained model on this dataset to generate enriched descriptions. By addressing brevity and improving content quality, Zad produces more comprehensive and cohesive vulnerability descriptions. We evaluate Zad using standard summarization metrics and human assessments, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing vulnerability information.
Authors: Simon Kl\"uttermann, Tim Katzke, Emmanuel M\"uller
Abstract: In this paper, we study unsupervised anomaly detection algorithms that learn a neural network representation, i.e. regular patterns of normal data, which anomalies are deviating from. Inspired by a similar concept in engineering, we refer to our methodology as surrogate anomaly detection. We formalize the concept of surrogate anomaly detection into a set of axioms required for optimal surrogate models and propose a new algorithm, named DEAN (Deep Ensemble ANomaly detection), designed to fulfill these criteria. We evaluate DEAN on 121 benchmark datasets, demonstrating its competitive performance against 19 existing methods, as well as the scalability and reliability of our method.
Authors: Woongyeong Yeo, Kangsan Kim, Soyeong Jeong, Jinheon Baek, Sung Ju Hwang
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown substantial promise in improving factual accuracy by grounding model responses with external knowledge relevant to queries. However, most existing RAG approaches are limited to a text-only corpus, and while recent efforts have extended RAG to other modalities such as images and videos, they typically operate over a single modality-specific corpus. In contrast, real-world queries vary widely in the type of knowledge they require, which a single type of knowledge source cannot address. To address this, we introduce UniversalRAG, a novel RAG framework designed to retrieve and integrate knowledge from heterogeneous sources with diverse modalities and granularities. Specifically, motivated by the observation that forcing all modalities into a unified representation space derived from a single combined corpus causes a modality gap, where the retrieval tends to favor items from the same modality as the query, we propose a modality-aware routing mechanism that dynamically identifies the most appropriate modality-specific corpus and performs targeted retrieval within it. Also, beyond modality, we organize each modality into multiple granularity levels, enabling fine-tuned retrieval tailored to the complexity and scope of the query. We validate UniversalRAG on 8 benchmarks spanning multiple modalities, showing its superiority over modality-specific and unified baselines.
Authors: Joshua Hatherley, Lauritz Munch, Jens Christian Bjerring
Abstract: Since the early days of the Explainable AI movement, post-hoc explanations have been praised for their potential to improve user understanding, promote trust, and reduce patient safety risks in black box medical AI systems. Recently, however, critics have argued that the benefits of post-hoc explanations are greatly exaggerated since they merely approximate, rather than replicate, the actual reasoning processes that black box systems take to arrive at their outputs. In this article, we aim to defend the value of post-hoc explanations against this recent critique. We argue that even if post-hoc explanations do not replicate the exact reasoning processes of black box systems, they can still improve users' functional understanding of black box systems, increase the accuracy of clinician-AI teams, and assist clinicians in justifying their AI-informed decisions. While post-hoc explanations are not a "silver bullet" solution to the black box problem in medical AI, we conclude that they remain a useful strategy for addressing the black box problem in medical AI.
Authors: Roman Abramov, Felix Steinbauer, Gjergji Kasneci
Abstract: Transformers have achieved great success in numerous NLP tasks but continue to exhibit notable gaps in multi-step factual reasoning, especially when real-world knowledge is sparse. Recent advances in grokking have demonstrated that neural networks can transition from memorizing to perfectly generalizing once they detect underlying logical patterns - yet these studies have primarily used small, synthetic tasks. In this paper, for the first time, we extend grokking to real-world factual data and address the challenge of dataset sparsity by augmenting existing knowledge graphs with carefully designed synthetic data to raise the ratio $\phi_r$ of inferred facts to atomic facts above the threshold required for grokking. Surprisingly, we find that even factually incorrect synthetic data can strengthen emergent reasoning circuits rather than degrade accuracy, as it forces the model to rely on relational structure rather than memorization. When evaluated on multi-hop reasoning benchmarks, our approach achieves up to 95-100% accuracy on 2WikiMultiHopQA - substantially improving over strong baselines and matching or exceeding current state-of-the-art results. We further provide an in-depth analysis of how increasing $\phi_r$ drives the formation of generalizing circuits inside Transformers. Our findings suggest that grokking-based data augmentation can unlock implicit multi-hop reasoning capabilities, opening the door to more robust and interpretable factual reasoning in large-scale language models.
Authors: Wenxiao Wang, Parsa Hosseini, Soheil Feizi
Abstract: Chain-of-thought prompting has demonstrated great success in facilitating the reasoning abilities of large language models. In this work, we explore how these enhanced reasoning abilities can be exploited to improve the robustness of large language models in tasks that are not necessarily reasoning-focused. In particular, we show how a wide range of large language models exhibit significantly improved robustness against reference corruption using a simple method called chain-of-defensive-thought, where only a few exemplars with structured and defensive reasoning are provided as demonstrations. Empirically, the improvements can be astounding, especially given the simplicity and applicability of the method. For example, in the Natural Questions task, the accuracy of GPT-4o degrades from 60% to as low as 3% with standard prompting when 1 out of 10 references provided is corrupted with prompt injection attacks. In contrast, GPT-4o using chain-of-defensive-thought prompting maintains an accuracy of 50%.
Authors: Ji Shi, Chengxun Xie, Zhonghao Li, Xinming Zhang, Miao Zhang
Abstract: The discovery of new molecules based on the original chemical molecule distributions is of great importance in medicine. The graph transformer, with its advantages of high performance and scalability compared to traditional graph networks, has been widely explored in recent research for applications of graph structures. However, current transformer-based graph decoders struggle to effectively utilize graph information, which limits their capacity to leverage only sequences of nodes rather than the complex topological structures of molecule graphs. This paper focuses on building a graph transformer-based framework for molecular generation, which we call \textbf{JTreeformer} as it transforms graph generation into junction tree generation. It combines GCN parallel with multi-head attention as the encoder. It integrates a directed acyclic GCN into a graph-based Transformer to serve as a decoder, which can iteratively synthesize the entire molecule by leveraging information from the partially constructed molecular structure at each step. In addition, a diffusion model is inserted in the latent space generated by the encoder, to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of sampling further. The empirical results demonstrate that our novel framework outperforms existing molecule generation methods, thus offering a promising tool to advance drug discovery (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/JTreeformer-C74C).
Authors: David Funosas, Elodie Massol, Yves Bas, Svenja Schmidt, Dominik Arend, Alexander Gebhard, Luc Barbaro, Sebastian K\"onig, Rafael Carbonell Font, David Sannier, Fernand Deroussen, J\'er\^ome Sueur, Christian Roesti, Tomi Trilar, Wolfgang Forstmeier, Lucas Roger, Elo\"isa Matheu, Piotr Guzik, Julien Barataud, Laurent Pelozuelo, St\'ephane Puissant, Sandra Mueller, Bj\"orn Schuller, Jose M. Montoya, Andreas Triantafyllopoulos, Maxime Cauchoix
Abstract: Currently available tools for the automated acoustic recognition of European insects in natural soundscapes are limited in scope. Large and ecologically heterogeneous acoustic datasets are currently needed for these algorithms to cross-contextually recognize the subtle and complex acoustic signatures produced by each species, thus making the availability of such datasets a key requisite for their development. Here we present ECOSoundSet (European Cicadidae and Orthoptera Sound dataSet), a dataset containing 10,653 recordings of 200 orthopteran and 24 cicada species (217 and 26 respective taxa when including subspecies) present in North, Central, and temperate Western Europe (Andorra, Belgium, Denmark, mainland France and Corsica, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Switzerland), collected partly through targeted fieldwork in South France and Catalonia and partly through contributions from various European entomologists. The dataset is composed of a combination of coarsely labeled recordings, for which we can only infer the presence, at some point, of their target species (weak labeling), and finely annotated recordings, for which we know the specific time and frequency range of each insect sound present in the recording (strong labeling). We also provide a train/validation/test split of the strongly labeled recordings, with respective approximate proportions of 0.8, 0.1 and 0.1, in order to facilitate their incorporation in the training and evaluation of deep learning algorithms. This dataset could serve as a meaningful complement to recordings already available online for the training of deep learning algorithms for the acoustic classification of orthopterans and cicadas in North, Central, and temperate Western Europe.
Authors: Xiyu Zhou, Ruiyin Li, Peng Liang, Beiqi Zhang, Mojtaba Shahin, Zengyang Li, Chen Yang
Abstract: Design Rationale (DR) for software architecture decisions refers to the reasoning underlying architectural choices, which provides valuable insights into the different phases of the architecting process throughout software development. However, in practice, DR is often inadequately documented due to a lack of motivation and effort from developers. With the recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), their capabilities in text comprehension, reasoning, and generation may enable the generation and recovery of DR for architecture decisions. In this study, we evaluated the performance of LLMs in generating DR for architecture decisions. First, we collected 50 Stack Overflow (SO) posts, 25 GitHub issues, and 25 GitHub discussions related to architecture decisions to construct a dataset of 100 architecture-related problems. Then, we selected five LLMs to generate DR for the architecture decisions with three prompting strategies, including zero-shot, chain of thought (CoT), and LLM-based agents. With the DR provided by human experts as ground truth, the Precision of LLM-generated DR with the three prompting strategies ranges from 0.267 to 0.278, Recall from 0.627 to 0.715, and F1-score from 0.351 to 0.389. Additionally, 64.45% to 69.42% of the arguments of DR not mentioned by human experts are also helpful, 4.12% to 4.87% of the arguments have uncertain correctness, and 1.59% to 3.24% of the arguments are potentially misleading. Based on the results, we further discussed the pros and cons of the three prompting strategies and the strengths and limitations of the DR generated by LLMs.
Authors: Yunseo Lee, John Youngeun Song, Dongsun Kim, Jindae Kim, Mijung Kim, Jaechang Nam
Abstract: Recent technical breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have enabled them to fluently generate source code. Software developers often leverage both general-purpose and code-specialized LLMs to revise existing code or even generate a whole function from scratch. These capabilities are also beneficial in no-code or low-code contexts, in which one can write programs without a technical background. However, due to their internal design, LLMs are prone to generating hallucinations, which are incorrect, nonsensical, and not justifiable information but difficult to identify its presence. This problem also occurs when generating source code. Once hallucinated code is produced, it is often challenging for users to identify and fix it, especially when such hallucinations can be identified under specific execution paths. As a result, the hallucinated code may remain unnoticed within the codebase. This survey investigates recent studies and techniques relevant to hallucinations generated by CodeLLMs. We categorize the types of hallucinations in the code generated by CodeLLMs, review existing benchmarks and mitigation strategies, and identify open challenges. Based on these findings, this survey outlines further research directions in the detection and removal of hallucinations produced by CodeLLMs.
Authors: Florian Vahl, J\"orn Griepenburg, Jan Gutsche, Jasper G\"uldenstein, Jianwei Zhang
Abstract: This paper introduces SoccerDiffusion, a transformer-based diffusion model designed to learn end-to-end control policies for humanoid robot soccer directly from real-world gameplay recordings. Using data collected from RoboCup competitions, the model predicts joint command trajectories from multi-modal sensor inputs, including vision, proprioception, and game state. We employ a distillation technique to enable real-time inference on embedded platforms that reduces the multi-step diffusion process to a single step. Our results demonstrate the model's ability to replicate complex motion behaviors such as walking, kicking, and fall recovery both in simulation and on physical robots. Although high-level tactical behavior remains limited, this work provides a robust foundation for subsequent reinforcement learning or preference optimization methods. We release the dataset, pretrained models, and code under: https://bit-bots.github.io/SoccerDiffusion
Authors: Jiaxin Hong, Sixu Chen, Shuoyang Sun, Hongyao Yu, Hao Fang, Yuqi Tan, Bin Chen, Shuhan Qi, Jiawei Li
Abstract: As 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) emerges as a breakthrough in scene representation and novel view synthesis, its rapid adoption in safety-critical domains (e.g., autonomous systems, AR/VR) urgently demands scrutiny of potential security vulnerabilities. This paper presents the first systematic study of backdoor threats in 3DGS pipelines. We identify that adversaries may implant backdoor views to induce malicious scene confusion during inference, potentially leading to environmental misperception in autonomous navigation or spatial distortion in immersive environments. To uncover this risk, we propose GuassTrap, a novel poisoning attack method targeting 3DGS models. GuassTrap injects malicious views at specific attack viewpoints while preserving high-quality rendering in non-target views, ensuring minimal detectability and maximizing potential harm. Specifically, the proposed method consists of a three-stage pipeline (attack, stabilization, and normal training) to implant stealthy, viewpoint-consistent poisoned renderings in 3DGS, jointly optimizing attack efficacy and perceptual realism to expose security risks in 3D rendering. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that GuassTrap can effectively embed imperceptible yet harmful backdoor views while maintaining high-quality rendering in normal views, validating its robustness, adaptability, and practical applicability.
Authors: Alan Lee, Harry Tong
Abstract: We explore reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to enhance reasoning within targeted problem spaces in large language models (LLMs) under memory and compute constraints. Our focus is on critic-free methods compatible with LoRA fine-tuning on a single 40GB GPU, a common limitation in academic settings. We introduce S-GRPO, a memory-efficient variant of Group Relative Policy Optimization, and T-SPMO, a token-level prefix matching strategy for fine-grained credit assignment. Despite limited resources, when used to fine-tune Qwen2-1.5B both methods significantly improve SVAMP benchmark accuracy from 46% to above 70% using LoRA training. T-SPMO also excels in multi-digit multiplication tasks, underscoring the potential of RL fine-tuning under hardware constraints. Additionally, we find that our full-token GRPO baseline under LoRA fine-tuning did not improve model performance (compared to base model) on either task, suggesting that our memory-efficient methods may act as a form of regularization that stabilizes training when only a small subset of parameters are updated.
Authors: Julien Khlaut, Elodie Ferreres, Daniel Tordjman, H\'el\`ene Philippe, Tom Boeken, Pierre Manceron, Corentin Dancette
Abstract: Medical image segmentation is a crucial and time-consuming task in clinical care, where mask precision is extremely important. The Segment Anything Model (SAM) offers a promising approach, as it provides an interactive interface based on visual prompting and edition to refine an initial segmentation. This model has strong generalization capabilities, does not rely on predefined classes, and adapts to diverse objects; however, it is pre-trained on natural images and lacks the ability to process medical data effectively. In addition, this model is built for 2D images, whereas a whole medical domain is based on 3D images, such as CT and MRI. Recent adaptations of SAM for medical imaging are based on 2D models, thus requiring one prompt per slice to segment 3D objects, making the segmentation process tedious. They also lack important features such as editing. To bridge this gap, we propose RadSAM, a novel method for segmenting 3D objects with a 2D model from a single prompt. In practice, we train a 2D model using noisy masks as initial prompts, in addition to bounding boxes and points. We then use this novel prompt type with an iterative inference pipeline to reconstruct the 3D mask slice-by-slice. We introduce a benchmark to evaluate the model's ability to segment 3D objects in CT images from a single prompt and evaluate the models' out-of-domain transfer and edition capabilities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach against state-of-the-art models on this benchmark using the AMOS abdominal organ segmentation dataset.
Authors: Junyuan Fang, Huimin Liu, Han Yang, Jiajing Wu, Zibin Zheng, Chi K. Tse
Abstract: In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown great potential in addressing various graph structure-related downstream tasks. However, recent studies have found that current GNNs are susceptible to malicious adversarial attacks. Given the inevitable presence of adversarial attacks in the real world, a variety of defense methods have been proposed to counter these attacks and enhance the robustness of GNNs. Despite the commendable performance of these defense methods, we have observed that they tend to exhibit a structural bias in terms of their defense capability on nodes with low degree (i.e., tail nodes), which is similar to the structural bias of traditional GNNs on nodes with low degree in the clean graph. Therefore, in this work, we propose a defense strategy by including hetero-homo augmented graph construction, $k$NN augmented graph construction, and multi-view node-wise attention modules to mitigate the structural bias of GNNs against adversarial attacks. Notably, the hetero-homo augmented graph consists of removing heterophilic links (i.e., links connecting nodes with dissimilar features) globally and adding homophilic links (i.e., links connecting nodes with similar features) for nodes with low degree. To further enhance the defense capability, an attention mechanism is adopted to adaptively combine the representations from the above two kinds of graph views. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the defense and debiasing effect of the proposed strategy on benchmark datasets.
Authors: Qianrun Mao
Abstract: In an era increasingly shaped by decentralized knowledge ecosystems and pervasive AI technologies, fostering sustainable learner agency has become a critical educational imperative. This study introduces a novel conceptual framework integrating Generative Artificial Intelligence and Learning Analytics to cultivate Self-Directed Growth, a dynamic competency that enables learners to iteratively drive their own developmental pathways across diverse contexts.Building upon critical gaps in current research on Self Directed Learning and AI-mediated education, the proposed Aspire to Potentials for Learners (A2PL) model reconceptualizes the interplay of learner aspirations, complex thinking, and summative self-assessment within GAI supported environments.Methodological implications for future intervention design and learning analytics applications are discussed, positioning Self-Directed Growth as a pivotal axis for developing equitable, adaptive, and sustainable learning systems in the digital era.
Authors: Jinsun Yoo, ChonLam Lao, Lianjie Cao, Bob Lantz, Minlan Yu, Tushar Krishna, Puneet Sharma
Abstract: This paper lays the foundation for Genie, a testing framework that captures the impact of real hardware network behavior on ML workload performance, without requiring expensive GPUs. Genie uses CPU-initiated traffic over a hardware testbed to emulate GPU to GPU communication, and adapts the ASTRA-sim simulator to model interaction between the network and the ML workload.
Authors: Guy Hadad, Haggai Roitman, Yotam Eshel, Bracha Shapira, Lior Rokach
Abstract: As new products are emerging daily, recommendation systems are required to quickly adapt to possible new domains without needing extensive retraining. This work presents ``X-Cross'' -- a novel cross-domain sequential-recommendation model that recommends products in new domains by integrating several domain-specific language models; each model is fine-tuned with low-rank adapters (LoRA). Given a recommendation prompt, operating layer by layer, X-Cross dynamically refines the representation of each source language model by integrating knowledge from all other models. These refined representations are propagated from one layer to the next, leveraging the activations from each domain adapter to ensure domain-specific nuances are preserved while enabling adaptability across domains. Using Amazon datasets for sequential recommendation, X-Cross achieves performance comparable to a model that is fine-tuned with LoRA, while using only 25% of the additional parameters. In cross-domain tasks, such as adapting from Toys domain to Tools, Electronics or Sports, X-Cross demonstrates robust performance, while requiring about 50%-75% less fine-tuning data than LoRA to make fine-tuning effective. Furthermore, X-Cross achieves significant improvement in accuracy over alternative cross-domain baselines. Overall, X-Cross enables scalable and adaptive cross-domain recommendations, reducing computational overhead and providing an efficient solution for data-constrained environments.
Authors: Dayananda Herurkar, J\"orn Hees, Vesselin Tzvetkov, Andreas Dengel
Abstract: The remarkable success of Deep Learning approaches is often based and demonstrated on large public datasets. However, when applying such approaches to internal, private datasets, one frequently faces challenges arising from structural differences in the datasets, domain shift, and the lack of labels. In this work, we introduce Tabular Data Adapters (TDA), a novel method for generating soft labels for unlabeled tabular data in outlier detection tasks. By identifying statistically similar public datasets and transforming private data (based on a shared autoencoder) into a format compatible with state-of-the-art public models, our approach enables the generation of weak labels. It thereby can help to mitigate the cold start problem of labeling by basing on existing outlier detection models for public datasets. In experiments on 50 tabular datasets across different domains, we demonstrate that our method is able to provide more accurate annotations than baseline approaches while reducing computational time. Our approach offers a scalable, efficient, and cost-effective solution, to bridge the gap between public research models and real-world industrial applications.
Authors: Junyuan Fang, Han Yang, Haixian Wen, Jiajing Wu, Zibin Zheng, Chi K. Tse
Abstract: Graph neural networks have been widely utilized to solve graph-related tasks because of their strong learning power in utilizing the local information of neighbors. However, recent studies on graph adversarial attacks have proven that current graph neural networks are not robust against malicious attacks. Yet much of the existing work has focused on the optimization objective based on attack performance to obtain (near) optimal perturbations, but paid less attention to the strength quantification of each perturbation such as the injection of a particular node/link, which makes the choice of perturbations a black-box model that lacks interpretability. In this work, we propose the concept of noise to quantify the attack strength of each adversarial link. Furthermore, we propose three attack strategies based on the defined noise and classification margins in terms of single and multiple steps optimization. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets against three representative graph neural networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attack strategies. Particularly, we also investigate the preferred patterns of effective adversarial perturbations by analyzing the corresponding properties of the selected perturbation nodes.
Authors: Harry Mead, Clarissa Costen, Bruno Lacerda, Nick Hawes
Abstract: When optimising for conditional value at risk (CVaR) using policy gradients (PG), current meth- ods rely on discarding a large proportion of tra- jectories, resulting in poor sample efficiency. We propose a reformulation of the CVaR optimisation problem by capping the total return of trajecto- ries used in training, rather than simply discard- ing them, and show that this is equivalent to the original problem if the cap is set appropriately. We show, with empirical results in an number of environments, that this reformulation of the prob- lem results in consistently improved performance compared to baselines.
Authors: Quentin Guimard, Moreno D'Inc\`a, Massimiliano Mancini, Elisa Ricci
Abstract: A person downloading a pre-trained model from the web should be aware of its biases. Existing approaches for bias identification rely on datasets containing labels for the task of interest, something that a non-expert may not have access to, or may not have the necessary resources to collect: this greatly limits the number of tasks where model biases can be identified. In this work, we present Classifier-to-Bias (C2B), the first bias discovery framework that works without access to any labeled data: it only relies on a textual description of the classification task to identify biases in the target classification model. This description is fed to a large language model to generate bias proposals and corresponding captions depicting biases together with task-specific target labels. A retrieval model collects images for those captions, which are then used to assess the accuracy of the model w.r.t. the given biases. C2B is training-free, does not require any annotations, has no constraints on the list of biases, and can be applied to any pre-trained model on any classification task. Experiments on two publicly available datasets show that C2B discovers biases beyond those of the original datasets and outperforms a recent state-of-the-art bias detection baseline that relies on task-specific annotations, being a promising first step toward addressing task-agnostic unsupervised bias detection.
Authors: Prothit Sen, Sai Mihir Jakkaraju
Abstract: We develop an agent-based simulation to formalize AI-human collaboration as a function of task structure, advancing a generalizable framework for strategic decision-making in organizations. Distinguishing between heuristic-based human adaptation and rule-based AI search, we model interactions across modular (parallel) and sequenced (interdependent) tasks using an NK model. Our results reveal that in modular tasks, AI often substitutes for humans - delivering higher payoffs unless human expertise is very high, and the AI search space is either narrowly focused or extremely broad. In sequenced tasks, interesting complementarities emerge. When an expert human initiates the search and AI subsequently refines it, aggregate performance is maximized. Conversely, when AI leads, excessive heuristic refinement by the human can reduce payoffs. We also show that even "hallucinatory" AI - lacking memory or structure - can improve outcomes when augmenting low-capability humans by helping escape local optima. These results yield a robust implication: the effectiveness of AI-human collaboration depends less on context or industry, and more on the underlying task structure. By elevating task decomposition as the central unit of analysis, our model provides a transferable lens for strategic decision-making involving humans and an agentic AI across diverse organizational settings.
Authors: Sachin R. Pendse, Darren Gergle, Rachel Kornfield, Jonah Meyerhoff, David Mohr, Jina Suh, Annie Wescott, Casey Williams, Jessica Schleider
Abstract: Red-teaming is a core part of the infrastructure that ensures that AI models do not produce harmful content. Unlike past technologies, the black box nature of generative AI systems necessitates a uniquely interactional mode of testing, one in which individuals on red teams actively interact with the system, leveraging natural language to simulate malicious actors and solicit harmful outputs. This interactional labor done by red teams can result in mental health harms that are uniquely tied to the adversarial engagement strategies necessary to effectively red team. The importance of ensuring that generative AI models do not propagate societal or individual harm is widely recognized -- one less visible foundation of end-to-end AI safety is also the protection of the mental health and wellbeing of those who work to keep model outputs safe. In this paper, we argue that the unmet mental health needs of AI red-teamers is a critical workplace safety concern. Through analyzing the unique mental health impacts associated with the labor done by red teams, we propose potential individual and organizational strategies that could be used to meet these needs, and safeguard the mental health of red-teamers. We develop our proposed strategies through drawing parallels between common red-teaming practices and interactional labor common to other professions (including actors, mental health professionals, conflict photographers, and content moderators), describing how individuals and organizations within these professional spaces safeguard their mental health given similar psychological demands. Drawing on these protective practices, we describe how safeguards could be adapted for the distinct mental health challenges experienced by red teaming organizations as they mitigate emerging technological risks on the new digital frontlines.
Authors: Miguel Nogales, Matteo Gambella, Manuel Roveri
Abstract: Early exits (EEs) offer a promising approach to reducing computational costs and latency by dynamically terminating inference once a satisfactory prediction confidence on a data sample is achieved. Although many works integrate EEs into encoder-only Transformers, their application to decoder-only architectures and, more importantly, Mamba models, a novel family of state-space architectures in the LLM realm, remains insufficiently explored. This work introduces DYNAMAX, the first framework to exploit the unique properties of Mamba architectures for early exit mechanisms. We not only integrate EEs into Mamba but also repurpose Mamba as an efficient EE classifier for both Mamba-based and transformer-based LLMs, showcasing its versatility. Our experiments employ the Mistral 7B transformer compared to the Codestral 7B Mamba model, using data sets such as TruthfulQA, CoQA, and TriviaQA to evaluate computational savings, accuracy, and consistency. The results highlight the adaptability of Mamba as a powerful EE classifier and its efficiency in balancing computational cost and performance quality across NLP tasks. By leveraging Mamba's inherent design for dynamic processing, we open pathways for scalable and efficient inference in embedded applications and resource-constrained environments. This study underscores the transformative potential of Mamba in redefining dynamic computing paradigms for LLMs.
Authors: Tyler McDonald, Ali Emami
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to be leveraged for daily tasks, prompt engineering remains an active field of contribution within computational linguistics, particularly in domains requiring specialized knowledge such as arithmetic reasoning. While these LLMs are optimized for a variety of tasks, their exhaustive employment may become computationally or financially cumbersome for small teams. Additionally, complete reliance on proprietary, closed-source models often limits customization and adaptability, posing significant challenges in research and application scalability. Instead, by leveraging open-source models at or below 7 billion parameters, we can optimize our resource usage while still observing remarkable gains over standard prompting approaches. To cultivate this notion, we introduce Trace-of-Thought Prompting, a simple, zero-shot prompt engineering method that instructs LLMs to create observable subproblems using critical problem-solving, specifically designed to enhance arithmetic reasoning capabilities. When applied to open-source models in tandem with GPT-4, we observe that Trace-of-Thought not only allows novel insight into the problem-solving process but also introduces performance gains as large as 125% on language models at or below 7 billion parameters. This approach underscores the potential of open-source initiatives in democratizing AI research and improving the accessibility of high-quality computational linguistics applications.
Authors: Shangyu Li, Juyong Jiang, Tiancheng Zhao, Jiasi Shen
Abstract: We introduce OSVBench, a new benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating complete specification code pertaining to operating system kernel verification tasks. The benchmark first defines the specification generation problem into a program synthesis problem within a confined scope of syntax and semantics by providing LLMs with the programming model. The LLMs are required to understand the provided verification assumption and the potential syntax and semantics space to search for, then generate the complete specification for the potentially buggy operating system code implementation under the guidance of the high-level functional description of the operating system. This benchmark is built upon a real-world operating system kernel, Hyperkernel, and consists of 245 complex specification generation tasks in total, each is a long context task of about 20k-30k tokens. Our comprehensive evaluation of 12 LLMs exhibits the limited performance of the current LLMs on the specification generation tasks for operating system verification. Significant disparities in their performance on the benchmark highlight differences in their ability to handle long-context code generation tasks. The evaluation toolkit and benchmark are available at https://github.com/lishangyu-hkust/OSVBench.
Authors: Mete Erdogan, Sebnem Demirtas
Abstract: Accurate and early diagnosis of pneumonia through X-ray imaging is essential for effective treatment and improved patient outcomes. Recent advancements in machine learning have enabled automated diagnostic tools that assist radiologists in making more reliable and efficient decisions. In this work, we propose a Singular Value Decomposition-based Least Squares (SVD-LS) framework for multi-class pneumonia classification, leveraging powerful feature representations from state-of-the-art self-supervised and transfer learning models. Rather than relying on computationally expensive gradient based fine-tuning, we employ a closed-form, non-iterative classification approach that ensures efficiency without compromising accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that SVD-LS achieves competitive performance while offering significantly reduced computational costs, making it a viable alternative for real-time medical imaging applications.
Authors: Atul Sharma, Kavindu Herath, Saurabh Bagchi, Chaoyue Liu, Somali Chaterji
Abstract: We introduce the Hubs and Spokes Learning (HSL) framework, a novel paradigm for collaborative machine learning that combines the strengths of Federated Learning (FL) and Decentralized Learning (P2PL). HSL employs a two-tier communication structure that avoids the single point of failure inherent in FL and outperforms the state-of-the-art P2PL framework, Epidemic Learning Local (ELL). At equal communication budgets (total edges), HSL achieves higher performance than ELL, while at significantly lower communication budgets, it can match ELL's performance. For instance, with only 400 edges, HSL reaches the same test accuracy that ELL achieves with 1000 edges for 100 peers (spokes) on CIFAR-10, demonstrating its suitability for resource-constrained systems. HSL also achieves stronger consensus among nodes after mixing, resulting in improved performance with fewer training rounds. We substantiate these claims through rigorous theoretical analyses and extensive experimental results, showcasing HSL's practicality for large-scale collaborative learning.
Authors: Dilip Arumugam, Thomas L. Griffiths
Abstract: A burgeoning area within reinforcement learning (RL) is the design of sequential decision-making agents centered around large language models (LLMs). While autonomous decision-making agents powered by modern LLMs could facilitate numerous real-world applications, such successes demand agents that are capable of data-efficient RL. One key obstacle to achieving data efficiency in RL is exploration, a challenge that we demonstrate many recent proposals for LLM agent designs struggle to contend with. Meanwhile, classic algorithms from the RL literature known to gracefully address exploration require technical machinery that can be challenging to operationalize in purely natural language settings. In this work, rather than relying on finetuning or in-context learning to coax LLMs into implicitly imitating a RL algorithm, we illustrate how LLMs can be used to explicitly implement an existing RL algorithm (Posterior Sampling for Reinforcement Learning) whose capacity for statistically-efficient exploration is already well-studied. We offer empirical results demonstrating how our LLM-based implementation of a known, data-efficient RL algorithm can be considerably more effective in natural language tasks that demand prudent exploration.
Authors: Thao Nguyen, Krishna Kumar Singh, Jing Shi, Trung Bui, Yong Jae Lee, Yuheng Li
Abstract: Large Multimodal Models (e.g., GPT-4, Gemini, Chameleon) have evolved into powerful tools with millions of users. However, they remain generic models and lack personalized knowledge of specific user concepts. Previous work has explored personalization for text generation, yet it remains unclear how these methods can be adapted to new modalities, such as image generation. In this paper, we introduce Yo'Chameleon, the first attempt to study personalization for large multimodal models. Given 3-5 images of a particular concept, Yo'Chameleon leverages soft-prompt tuning to embed subject-specific information to (i) answer questions about the subject and (ii) recreate pixel-level details to produce images of the subject in new contexts. Yo'Chameleon is trained with (i) a self-prompting optimization mechanism to balance performance across multiple modalities, and (ii) a ``soft-positive" image generation approach to enhance image quality in a few-shot setting.
Authors: Daniel Fuertes, Carlos R. del-Blanco, Fernando Jaureguizar, Narciso Garc\'ia
Abstract: Route planning for a fleet of vehicles is an important task in applications such as package delivery, surveillance, or transportation, often integrated within larger Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). This problem is commonly formulated as a Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) known as the Team Orienteering Problem (TOP). Existing solvers for this problem primarily rely on either linear programming, which provides accurate solutions but requires computation times that grow with the size of the problem, or heuristic methods, which typically find suboptimal solutions in a shorter time. In this paper, we introduce TOP-Former, a multi-agent route planning neural network designed to efficiently and accurately solve the Team Orienteering Problem. The proposed algorithm is based on a centralized Transformer neural network capable of learning to encode the scenario (modeled as a graph) and analyze the complete context of all agents to deliver fast, precise, and collaborative solutions. Unlike other neural network-based approaches that adopt a more local perspective, TOP-Former is trained to understand the global situation of the vehicle fleet and generate solutions that maximize long-term expected returns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the presented system outperforms most state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and computation speed.
Authors: Subhabrata Dutta, Timo Kaufmann, Goran Glava\v{s}, Ivan Habernal, Kristian Kersting, Frauke Kreuter, Mira Mezini, Iryna Gurevych, Eyke H\"ullermeier, Hinrich Schuetze
Abstract: While there is a widespread belief that artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- or even superhuman AI -- is imminent, complex problems in expert domains are far from being solved. We argue that such problems require human-AI cooperation and that the current state of the art in generative AI is unable to play the role of a reliable partner due to a multitude of shortcomings, including difficulty to keep track of a complex solution artifact (e.g., a software program), limited support for versatile human preference expression and lack of adapting to human preference in an interactive setting. To address these challenges, we propose HAICo2, a novel human-AI co-construction framework. We take first steps towards a formalization of HAICo2 and discuss the difficult open research problems that it faces.
Authors: Grace Zhang, Ayush Jain, Injune Hwang, Shao-Hua Sun, Joseph J. Lim
Abstract: Multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL) aims to learn several tasks simultaneously for better sample efficiency than learning them separately. Traditional methods achieve this by sharing parameters or relabeled data between tasks. In this work, we introduce a new framework for sharing behavioral policies across tasks, which can be used in addition to existing MTRL methods. The key idea is to improve each task's off-policy data collection by employing behaviors from other task policies. Selectively sharing helpful behaviors acquired in one task to collect training data for another task can lead to higher-quality trajectories, leading to more sample-efficient MTRL. Thus, we introduce a simple and principled framework called Q-switch mixture of policies (QMP) that selectively shares behavior between different task policies by using the task's Q-function to evaluate and select useful shareable behaviors. We theoretically analyze how QMP improves the sample efficiency of the underlying RL algorithm. Our experiments show that QMP's behavioral policy sharing provides complementary gains over many popular MTRL algorithms and outperforms alternative ways to share behaviors in various manipulation, locomotion, and navigation environments. Videos are available at https://qmp-mtrl.github.io.
Authors: Harsh Raj, Vipul Gupta, Domenic Rosati, Subhabrata Majumdar
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable fluency and competence across various natural language tasks. However, recent research has highlighted their sensitivity to variations in input prompts. To deploy LLMs in a safe and reliable manner, it is crucial for their outputs to be consistent when prompted with expressions that carry the same meaning or intent. While some existing work has explored how state-of-the-art LLMs address this issue, their evaluations have been confined to assessing lexical equality of single- or multi-word answers, overlooking the consistency of generative text sequences. For a more comprehensive understanding of the consistency of LLMs in open-ended text generation scenarios, we introduce a general measure of semantic consistency, and formulate multiple versions of this metric to evaluate the performance of various LLMs. Our proposal demonstrates significantly higher consistency and stronger correlation with human evaluations of output consistency than traditional metrics based on lexical consistency. Finally, we propose a novel prompting strategy, called Ask-to-Choose (A2C), to enhance semantic consistency. When evaluated for closed-book question answering based on answer variations from the TruthfulQA benchmark, A2C increases accuracy metrics for pretrained and finetuned LLMs by up to 47%, and semantic consistency metrics for instruction-tuned models by up to 7-fold.
Authors: Habib Slim, Xiang Li, Yuchen Li, Mahmoud Ahmed, Mohamed Ayman, Ujjwal Upadhyay, Ahmed Abdelreheem, Arpit Prajapati, Suhail Pothigara, Peter Wonka, Mohamed Elhoseiny
Abstract: In this work, we present 3DCoMPaT$^{++}$, a multimodal 2D/3D dataset with 160 million rendered views of more than 10 million stylized 3D shapes carefully annotated at the part-instance level, alongside matching RGB point clouds, 3D textured meshes, depth maps, and segmentation masks. 3DCoMPaT$^{++}$ covers 41 shape categories, 275 fine-grained part categories, and 293 fine-grained material classes that can be compositionally applied to parts of 3D objects. We render a subset of one million stylized shapes from four equally spaced views as well as four randomized views, leading to a total of 160 million renderings. Parts are segmented at the instance level, with coarse-grained and fine-grained semantic levels. We introduce a new task, called Grounded CoMPaT Recognition (GCR), to collectively recognize and ground compositions of materials on parts of 3D objects. Additionally, we report the outcomes of a data challenge organized at CVPR2023, showcasing the winning method's utilization of a modified PointNet$^{++}$ model trained on 6D inputs, and exploring alternative techniques for GCR enhancement. We hope our work will help ease future research on compositional 3D Vision.
Authors: Maryam Ahang, Todd Charter, Oluwaseyi Ogunfowora, Maziyar Khadivi, Mostafa Abbasi, Homayoun Najjaran
Abstract: Condition monitoring plays a significant role in the safety and reliability of modern industrial systems. Artificial intelligence (AI) approaches are gaining attention from academia and industry as a growing subject in industrial applications and as a powerful way of identifying faults. This paper provides an overview of intelligent condition monitoring and fault detection and diagnosis methods for industrial plants with a focus on the open-source benchmark Tennessee Eastman Process (TEP). In this survey, the most popular and state-of-the-art deep learning (DL) and machine learning (ML) algorithms for industrial plant condition monitoring, fault detection, and diagnosis are summarized and the advantages and disadvantages of each algorithm are studied. Challenges like imbalanced data, unlabelled samples and how deep learning models can handle them are also covered. Finally, a comparison of the accuracies and specifications of different algorithms utilizing the Tennessee Eastman Process (TEP) is conducted. This research will be beneficial for both researchers who are new to the field and experts, as it covers the literature on condition monitoring and state-of-the-art methods alongside the challenges and possible solutions to them.
Authors: Maxime Peyrard, Martin Josifoski, Robert West
Abstract: Recent work demonstrated great promise in the idea of orchestrating collaborations between LLMs, human input, and various tools to address the inherent limitations of LLMs. We propose a novel perspective called semantic decoding, which frames these collaborative processes as optimization procedures in semantic space. Specifically, we conceptualize LLMs as semantic processors that manipulate meaningful pieces of information that we call semantic tokens (known thoughts). LLMs are among a large pool of other semantic processors, including humans and tools, such as search engines or code executors. Collectively, semantic processors engage in dynamic exchanges of semantic tokens to progressively construct high-utility outputs. We refer to these orchestrated interactions among semantic processors, optimizing and searching in semantic space, as semantic decoding algorithms. This concept draws a direct parallel to the well-studied problem of syntactic decoding, which involves crafting algorithms to best exploit auto-regressive language models for extracting high-utility sequences of syntactic tokens. By focusing on the semantic level and disregarding syntactic details, we gain a fresh perspective on the engineering of AI systems, enabling us to imagine systems with much greater complexity and capabilities. In this position paper, we formalize the transition from syntactic to semantic tokens as well as the analogy between syntactic and semantic decoding. Subsequently, we explore the possibilities of optimizing within the space of semantic tokens via semantic decoding algorithms. We conclude with a list of research opportunities and questions arising from this fresh perspective. The semantic decoding perspective offers a powerful abstraction for search and optimization directly in the space of meaningful concepts, with semantic tokens as the fundamental units of a new type of computation.
Authors: Phai Vu Dinh, Quang Uy Nguyen, Thai Hoang Dinh, Diep N. Nguyen, Bao Son Pham, Eryk Dutkiewicz
Abstract: Representation learning (RL) methods for cyberattack detection face the diversity and sophistication of attack data, leading to the issue of mixed representations of different classes, particularly as the number of classes increases. To address this, the paper proposes a novel deep learning architecture/model called the Twin Auto-Encoder (TAE). TAE first maps the input data into latent space and then deterministically shifts data samples of different classes further apart to create separable data representations, referred to as representation targets. TAE's decoder then projects the input data into these representation targets. After training, TAE's decoder extracts data representations. TAE's representation target serves as a novel dynamic codeword, which refers to the vector that represents a specific class. This vector is updated after each training epoch for every data sample, in contrast to the conventional fixed codeword that does not incorporate information from the input data. We conduct extensive experiments on diverse cybersecurity datasets, including seven IoT botnet datasets, two network IDS datasets, three malware datasets, one cloud DDoS dataset, and ten artificial datasets as the number of classes increases. TAE boosts accuracy and F-score in attack detection by around 2% compared to state-of-the-art models, achieving up to 96.1% average accuracy in IoT attack detection. Additionally, TAE is well-suited for cybersecurity applications and potentially for IoT systems, with a model size of approximately 1 MB and an average running time of around 2.6E-07 seconds for extracting a data sample.
Authors: Pingzhi Li, Junyu Liu, Hanrui Wang, Tianlong Chen
Abstract: Optimization techniques in deep learning are predominantly led by first-order gradient methodologies, such as SGD. However, neural network training can greatly benefit from the rapid convergence characteristics of second-order optimization. Newton's GD stands out in this category, by rescaling the gradient using the inverse Hessian. Nevertheless, one of its major bottlenecks is matrix inversion, which is notably time-consuming in $O(N^3)$ time with weak scalability. Matrix inversion can be translated into solving a series of linear equations. Given that quantum linear solver algorithms (QLSAs), leveraging the principles of quantum superposition and entanglement, can operate within a $\text{polylog}(N)$ time frame, they present a promising approach with exponential acceleration. Specifically, one of the most recent QLSAs demonstrates a complexity scaling of $O(d\cdot\kappa \log(N\cdot\kappa/\epsilon))$, depending on: {size~$N$, condition number~$\kappa$, error tolerance~$\epsilon$, quantum oracle sparsity~$d$} of the matrix. However, this also implies that their potential exponential advantage may be hindered by certain properties (i.e. $\kappa$ and $d$). We propose Q-Newton, a hybrid quantum-classical scheduler for accelerating neural network training with Newton's GD. Q-Newton utilizes a streamlined scheduling module that coordinates between quantum and classical linear solvers, by estimating & reducing $\kappa$ and constructing $d$ for the quantum solver. Our evaluation showcases the potential for Q-Newton to significantly reduce the total training time compared to commonly used optimizers like SGD. We hypothesize a future scenario where the gate time of quantum machines is reduced, possibly realized by attoseconds physics. Our evaluation establishes an ambitious and promising target for the evolution of quantum computing.
Authors: Chang Li, Ruoyu Wang, Lijuan Liu, Jun Du, Yixuan Sun, Zilu Guo, Zhenrong Zhang, Yuan Jiang, Jianqing Gao, Feng Ma
Abstract: Text-to-music (TTM) generation, which converts textual descriptions into audio, opens up innovative avenues for multimedia creation. Achieving high quality and diversity in this process demands extensive, high-quality data, which are often scarce in available datasets. Most open-source datasets frequently suffer from issues like low-quality waveforms and low text-audio consistency, hindering the advancement of music generation models. To address these challenges, we propose a novel quality-aware training paradigm for generating high-quality, high-musicality music from large-scale, quality-imbalanced datasets. Additionally, by leveraging unique properties in the latent space of musical signals, we adapt and implement a masked diffusion transformer (MDT) model for the TTM task, showcasing its capacity for quality control and enhanced musicality. Furthermore, we introduce a three-stage caption refinement approach to address low-quality captions' issue. Experiments show state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on benchmark datasets including MusicCaps and the Song-Describer Dataset with both objective and subjective metrics. Demo audio samples are available at https://qa-mdt.github.io/, code and pretrained checkpoints are open-sourced at https://github.com/ivcylc/OpenMusic.
URLs: https://qa-mdt.github.io/,, https://github.com/ivcylc/OpenMusic.
Authors: Kian Ahrabian, Xihui Lin, Barun Patra, Vishrav Chaudhary, Alon Benhaim, Jay Pujara, Xia Song
Abstract: At the forefront of state-of-the-art human alignment methods are preference optimization methods (*PO). Prior research has often concentrated on identifying the best-performing method, typically involving a grid search over hyperparameters, which can be impractical for general practitioners. In this paper, we examine the robustness of existing state-of-the-art methods to varying hyperparameters in a realistic out-of-distribution (OOD) scenario that mirrors real-world applications of human alignment. Our goal is to empirically find the method that increases the likelihood of achieving better results through the lens of various metrics, such as KL divergence and response length. We also introduce LN-DPO, a simple length-normalized version of DPO that is more stable across hyperparameters, effectively reduces the average response length, and improves performance. Our analysis of state-of-the-art reference-free (i.e., SimPO) and reference-dependent (i.e., DPO and LN-DPO) methods reveals that they perform similarly at their peak (i.e., best possible scenario). However, we uncover that the pattern of change in performance greatly varies as we move away from the best possible scenario.
Authors: Sangwon Yu, Jongyoon Song, Bongkyu Hwang, Hoyoung Kang, Sooah Cho, Junhwa Choi, Seongho Joe, Taehee Lee, Youngjune L. Gwon, Sungroh Yoon
Abstract: A binary decision task, like yes-no questions or answer verification, reflects a significant real-world scenario such as where users look for confirmation about the correctness of their decisions on specific issues. In this work, we observe that language models exhibit a negative bias in the binary decisions of complex reasoning tasks. Based on our observations and the rationale about attention-based model dynamics, we propose a negative attention score (NAS) to systematically and quantitatively formulate negative bias. Based on NAS, we identify attention heads that attend to negative tokens provided in the instructions as answer candidate of binary decisions, regardless of the question in the prompt, and validate their association with the negative bias. Additionally, we propose the negative attention score alignment (NASA) method, which is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique to address the extracted negatively biased attention heads. Experimental results from various domains of reasoning tasks and large model search space demonstrate that NASA significantly reduces the gap between precision and recall caused by negative bias while preserving their generalization abilities.
Authors: Bogdan {\L}obodzi\'nski
Abstract: A new unsupervised predictive maintenance analysis method based on the renormalization group approach used to discover critical behavior in complex systems has been proposed. The algorithm analyzes univariate time series and detects critical points based on a newly proposed theorem that identifies critical points using a Log Periodic Power Law function fits. Application of a new algorithm for predictive maintenance analysis of industrial data collected from reciprocating compressor systems is presented. Based on the knowledge of the dynamics of the analyzed compressor system, the proposed algorithm predicts valve and piston rod seal failures well in advance.
Authors: Dominic Schneider, Lutz Rapp, Christoph Ament
Abstract: This article proposes a novel fuzzy clustering based anomaly detection method for pump current time series of EDFA systems. The proposed change detection framework (CDF) strategically combines the advantages of entropy analysis (EA) and principle component analysis (PCA) with fuzzy clustering procedures. In the framework, EA is applied for dynamic selection of features for reduction of the feature space and increase of computational performance. Furthermore, PCA is utilized to extract features from the raw feature space to enable generalization capability of the subsequent fuzzy clustering procedures. Three different fuzzy clustering methods, more precisely the fuzzy clustering algorithm, a probabilistic clustering algorithm and a possibilistic clustering algorithm are evaluated for performance and generalization. Hence, the proposed framework has the innovative feature to detect changes in pump current time series at an early stage for arbitrary points of operation, compared to state-of-the-art predefined alarms in commercially used EDFAs. Moreover, the approach is implemented and tested using experimental data. In addition, the proposed framework enables further approaches of applying decentralized predictive maintenance for optical fiber networks.
Authors: Marissa Radensky, Simra Shahid, Raymond Fok, Pao Siangliulue, Tom Hope, Daniel S. Weld
Abstract: The scientific ideation process often involves blending salient aspects of existing papers to create new ideas, and facet-based ideation is an established framework for idea generation. To see how large language models (LLMs) might assist in this process, we contribute a novel mixed-initiative ideation tool called Scideator. Starting from a user-provided set of scientific papers, Scideator extracts key facets -- purposes, mechanisms, and evaluations -- from these and related papers, allowing users to explore the idea space by interactively recombining facets to synthesize inventive ideas. Scideator also helps users gauge idea originality by searching the literature for overlaps, assessing idea novelty and providing explanations. To support these tasks, Scideator introduces three LLM-powered retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) modules: Analogous Paper Facet Finder, Faceted Idea Generator, and Idea Novelty Checker. In a within-subjects user study (N=22) with computer-science researchers comparing Scideator to a strong baseline, our tool provided significantly more creativity support, particularly with respect to exploration, which participants considered the most important factor for idea generation.
Authors: Chunhui Zhang, Li Liu, Guanjie Huang, Zhipeng Zhang, Hao Wen, Xi Zhou, Shiming Ge, Yanfeng Wang
Abstract: Over the past decade, significant progress has been made in visual object tracking, largely due to the availability of large-scale datasets. However, these datasets have primarily focused on open-air scenarios and have largely overlooked underwater animal tracking-especially the complex challenges posed by camouflaged marine animals. To bridge this gap, we take a step forward by proposing the first large-scale multi-modal underwater camouflaged object tracking dataset, namely UW-COT220. Based on the proposed dataset, this work first comprehensively evaluates current advanced visual object tracking methods, including SAM- and SAM2-based trackers, in challenging underwater environments, \eg, coral reefs. Our findings highlight the improvements of SAM2 over SAM, demonstrating its enhanced ability to handle the complexities of underwater camouflaged objects. Furthermore, we propose a novel vision-language tracking framework called VL-SAM2, based on the video foundation model SAM2. Experimental results demonstrate that our VL-SAM2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on the UW-COT220 dataset. The dataset and codes are available at~\href{https://github.com/983632847/Awesome-Multimodal-Object-Tracking}{\color{magenta}{here}}.
URLs: https://github.com/983632847/Awesome-Multimodal-Object-Tracking
Authors: Hongyang Li, Caesar Wu, Mohammed Chadli, Said Mammar, Pascal Bouvry
Abstract: Distributed learning (DL) uses multiple nodes to accelerate training, enabling efficient optimization of large-scale models. Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), a key optimization algorithm, plays a central role in this process. However, communication bottlenecks often limit scalability and efficiency, leading to increasing adoption of compressed SGD techniques to alleviate these challenges. Despite addressing communication overheads, compressed SGD introduces trustworthiness concerns, as gradient exchanges among nodes are vulnerable to attacks like gradient inversion (GradInv) and membership inference attacks (MIA). The trustworthiness of compressed SGD remains unexplored, leaving important questions about its reliability unanswered. In this paper, we provide a trustworthiness evaluation of compressed versus uncompressed SGD. Specifically, we conducted empirical studies using GradInv attacks, revealing that compressed SGD demonstrates significantly higher resistance to privacy leakage compared to uncompressed SGD. In addition, our findings suggest that MIA may not be a reliable metric for assessing privacy risks in distributed learning.
Authors: Yunjia Qi, Hao Peng, Xiaozhi Wang, Bin Xu, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) struggle to follow instructions with complex constraints in format, length, etc. Following the conventional instruction-tuning practice, previous works conduct post-training on complex instruction-response pairs generated by feeding complex instructions to advanced LLMs. However, even advanced LLMs cannot follow complex instructions well, thus limiting the quality of generated data. In this work, we find that existing datasets inherently contain implicit complex constraints and propose a novel data generation technique, constraint back-translation. Specifically, we take the high-quality instruction-response pairs in existing datasets and only adopt advanced LLMs to add complex constraints already met by the responses to the instructions, which naturally reduces costs and data noise. In the experiments, we adopt Llama3-70B-Instruct to back-translate constraints and create a high-quality complex instruction-response dataset, named CRAB. We present that post-training on CRAB improves multiple backbone LLMs' complex instruction-following ability, evaluated on extensive instruction-following benchmarks. We further find that constraint back-translation also serves as a useful auxiliary training objective in post-training. Our code, data, and models will be released to facilitate future research.
Authors: Haizhou Wang, Nanqing Luo, Xusheng Li, Peng LIu
Abstract: Sandboxes and other dynamic analysis processes are prevalent in malware detection systems nowadays to enhance the capability of detecting 0-day malware. Therefore, techniques of anti-dynamic analysis (TADA) are prevalent in modern malware samples, and sandboxes can suffer from false negatives and analysis failures when analyzing the samples with TADAs. In such cases, human reverse engineers will get involved in conducting dynamic analysis manually (i.e., debugging, patching), which in turn also gets obstructed by TADAs. In this work, we propose a Large Language Model (LLM) based workflow that can pinpoint the location of the TADA implementation in the code, to help reverse engineers place breakpoints used in debugging. Our evaluation shows that we successfully identified the locations of 87.80% known TADA implementations adopted from public repositories. In addition, we successfully pinpoint the locations of TADAs in 4 well-known malware samples that are documented in online malware analysis blogs.
Authors: Wenxing Liu, Yueran Pan, Dong Zhang, Hongzhu Deng, Xiaobing Zou, Ming Li
Abstract: The early diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is critically dependent on systematic observation and analysis of children's social behaviors. While current methodologies predominantly utilize supervised learning approaches, their clinical adoption faces two principal limitations: insufficient ASD diagnostic samples and inadequate interpretability of the detection outcomes. This paper presents a novel zero-shot ASD detection framework based on script-centric behavioral understanding with emotional enhancement, which is designed to overcome the aforementioned clinical constraints. The proposed pipeline automatically converts audio-visual data into structured behavioral text scripts through computer vision techniques, subsequently capitalizing on the generalization capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for zero-shot/few-shot ASD detection. Three core technical contributions are introduced: (1) A multimodal script transcription module transforming behavioral cues into structured textual representations. (2) An emotion textualization module encoding emotional dynamics as the contextual features to augment behavioral understanding. (3) A domain-specific prompt engineering strategy enables the injection of clinical knowledge into LLMs. Our method achieves an F1-score of 95.24\% in diagnosing ASD in children with an average age of two years while generating interpretable detection rationales. This work opens up new avenues for leveraging the power of LLMs in analyzing and understanding ASD-related human behavior, thereby enhancing the accuracy of assisted autism diagnosis.
Authors: Mattia Giovanni Spina, Edoardo Scalzo, Floriano De Rango, Francesca Guerriero, Antonio Iera
Abstract: The rise of programmable data plane (PDP) and in-network computing (INC) paradigms paves the way for the development of network devices (switches, network interface cards, etc.) capable of performing advanced processing tasks. This allows running various types of algorithms, including machine learning, within the network itself to support user and network services. In particular, this paper delves into the deployment of in-network learning models with the aim of implementing fully distributed intrusion detection systems (IDS) or intrusion prevention systems (IPS). Specifically, a model is proposed for the optimal distribution of the IDS/IPS workload among data plane devices with the aim of ensuring complete network security without excessively burdening the normal operations of the devices. Furthermore, a meta-heuristic approach is proposed to reduce the long computation time required by the exact solution provided by the mathematical model and its performance is evaluated. The analysis conducted and the results obtained demonstrate the enormous potential of the proposed new approach for the creation of intelligent data planes that act effectively and autonomously as the first line of defense against cyber attacks, with minimal additional workload on the network devices involved.
Authors: Michael Iannelli, Sneha Kuchipudi, Vera Dvorak
Abstract: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to generalize to new information by decoupling reasoning capabilities from static knowledge bases. Traditional RAG enhancements have explored vertical scaling-assigning subtasks to specialized modules-and horizontal scaling-replicating tasks across multiple agents-to improve performance. However, real-world applications impose diverse Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, involving trade-offs among objectives such as reducing cost, ensuring answer quality, and adhering to specific operational constraints. In this work, we present a systems-oriented approach to multi-agent RAG tailored for real-world Question Answering (QA) applications. By integrating task-specific non-functional requirements-such as answer quality, cost, and latency-into the system, we enable dynamic reconfiguration to meet diverse SLAs. Our method maps these Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to system-level parameters, allowing the generation of optimal results within specified resource constraints. We conduct a case study in the QA domain, demonstrating how dynamic re-orchestration of a multi-agent RAG system can effectively manage the trade-off between answer quality and cost. By adjusting the system based on query intent and operational conditions, we systematically balance performance and resource utilization. This approach allows the system to meet SLOs for various query types, showcasing its practicality for real-world applications.
Authors: Yinkai Wang, Xiaohui Chen, Liping Liu, Soha Hassoun
Abstract: The annotation (assigning structural chemical identities) of MS/MS spectra remains a significant challenge due to the enormous molecular diversity in biological samples and the limited scope of reference databases. Currently, the vast majority of spectral measurements remain in the "dark chemical space" without structural annotations. To improve annotation, we propose MADGEN (Mass-spec Attends to De Novo Molecular GENeration), a scaffold-based method for de novo molecular structure generation guided by mass spectrometry data. MADGEN operates in two stages: scaffold retrieval and spectra-conditioned molecular generation starting with the scaffold. In the first stage, given an MS/MS spectrum, we formulate scaffold retrieval as a ranking problem and employ contrastive learning to align mass spectra with candidate molecular scaffolds. In the second stage, starting from the retrieved scaffold, we employ the MS/MS spectrum to guide an attention-based generative model to generate the final molecule. Our approach constrains the molecular generation search space, reducing its complexity and improving generation accuracy. We evaluate MADGEN on three datasets (NIST23, CANOPUS, and MassSpecGym) and evaluate MADGEN's performance with a predictive scaffold retriever and with an oracle retriever. We demonstrate the effectiveness of using attention to integrate spectral information throughout the generation process to achieve strong results with the oracle retriever.
Authors: Seyed Mahdi B. Azad, Zahra Padar, Gabriel Kalweit, Joschka Boedecker
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel method for learning reward functions directly from offline demonstrations. Unlike traditional inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), our approach decouples the reward function from the learner's policy, eliminating the adversarial interaction typically required between the two. This results in a more stable and efficient training process. Our reward function, called \textit{SR-Reward}, leverages successor representation (SR) to encode a state based on expected future states' visitation under the demonstration policy and transition dynamics. By utilizing the Bellman equation, SR-Reward can be learned concurrently with most reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms without altering the existing training pipeline. We also introduce a negative sampling strategy to mitigate overestimation errors by reducing rewards for out-of-distribution data, thereby enhancing robustness. This strategy inherently introduces a conservative bias into RL algorithms that employ the learned reward. We evaluate our method on the D4RL benchmark, achieving competitive results compared to offline RL algorithms with access to true rewards and imitation learning (IL) techniques like behavioral cloning. Moreover, our ablation studies on data size and quality reveal the advantages and limitations of SR-Reward as a proxy for true rewards.
Authors: Burcu Canakci, Junyi Liu, Xingbo Wu, Nathana\"el Cheriere, Paolo Costa, Sergey Legtchenko, Dushyanth Narayanan, Ant Rowstron
Abstract: To match the blooming demand of generative AI workloads, GPU designers have so far been trying to pack more and more compute and memory into single complex and expensive packages. However, there is growing uncertainty about the scalability of individual GPUs and thus AI clusters, as state-of-the-art GPUs are already displaying packaging, yield, and cooling limitations. We propose to rethink the design and scaling of AI clusters through efficiently-connected large clusters of Lite-GPUs, GPUs with single, small dies and a fraction of the capabilities of larger GPUs. We think recent advances in co-packaged optics can enable distributing AI workloads onto many Lite-GPUs through high bandwidth and efficient communication. In this paper, we present the key benefits of Lite-GPUs on manufacturing cost, blast radius, yield, and power efficiency; and discuss systems opportunities and challenges around resource, workload, memory, and network management.
Authors: Ke Alexander Wang, Jiaxin Shi, Emily B. Fox
Abstract: Sequence models lie at the heart of modern deep learning. However, rapid advancements have produced a diversity of seemingly unrelated architectures, such as Transformers and recurrent alternatives. In this paper, we introduce a unifying framework to understand and derive these sequence models, inspired by the empirical importance of associative recall, the capability to retrieve contextually relevant tokens. We formalize associative recall as a two-step process, memorization and retrieval, casting memorization as a regression problem. Layers that combine these two steps perform associative recall via ``test-time regression'' over its input tokens. Prominent layers, including linear attention, state-space models, fast-weight programmers, online learners, and softmax attention, arise as special cases defined by three design choices: the regression weights, the regressor function class, and the test-time optimization algorithm. Our approach clarifies how linear attention fails to capture inter-token correlations and offers a mathematical justification for the empirical effectiveness of query-key normalization in softmax attention. Further, it illuminates unexplored regions within the design space, which we use to derive novel higher-order generalizations of softmax attention. Beyond unification, our work bridges sequence modeling with classic regression methods, a field with extensive literature, paving the way for developing more powerful and theoretically principled architectures.
Authors: Tabinda Aman, Mohammad Nadeem, Shahab Saquib Sohail, Mohammad Anas, Erik Cambria
Abstract: Animal stereotypes are deeply embedded in human culture and language. They often shape our perceptions and expectations of various species. Our study investigates how animal stereotypes manifest in vision-language models during the task of image generation. Through targeted prompts, we explore whether DALL-E perpetuates stereotypical representations of animals, such as "owls as wise," "foxes as unfaithful," etc. Our findings reveal significant stereotyped instances where the model consistently generates images aligned with cultural biases. The current work is the first of its kind to examine animal stereotyping in vision-language models systematically and to highlight a critical yet underexplored dimension of bias in AI-generated visual content.
Authors: Myra Cheng, Angela Y. Lee, Kristina Rapuano, Kate Niederhoffer, Alex Liebscher, Jeffrey Hancock
Abstract: How has the public responded to the increasing prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI)-based technologies? We investigate public perceptions of AI by collecting over 12,000 responses over 12 months from a nationally representative U.S. sample. Participants provided open-ended metaphors reflecting their mental models of AI, a methodology that overcomes the limitations of traditional self-reported measures by capturing more nuance. Using a mixed-methods approach combining quantitative clustering and qualitative coding, we identify 20 dominant metaphors shaping public understanding of AI. To analyze these metaphors systematically, we present a scalable framework integrating language modeling (LM)-based techniques to measure key dimensions of public perception: anthropomorphism (attribution of human-like qualities), warmth, and competence. We find that Americans generally view AI as warm and competent, and that over the past year, perceptions of AI's human-likeness and warmth have significantly increased ($+34\%, r = 0.80, p < 0.01; +41\%, r = 0.62, p < 0.05$). These implicit perceptions, along with the identified dominant metaphors, strongly predict trust in and willingness to adopt AI ($r^2 = 0.21, 0.18, p < 0.001$). Moreover, we uncover systematic demographic differences in metaphors and implicit perceptions, such as the higher propensity of women, older individuals, and people of color to anthropomorphize AI, which shed light on demographic disparities in trust and adoption. In addition to our dataset and framework for tracking evolving public attitudes, we provide actionable insights on using metaphors for inclusive and responsible AI development.
Authors: Peter Sushko, Ayana Bharadwaj, Zhi Yang Lim, Vasily Ilin, Ben Caffee, Dongping Chen, Mohammadreza Salehi, Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Ranjay Krishna
Abstract: Existing image editing models struggle to meet real-world demands. Despite excelling in academic benchmarks, they have yet to be widely adopted for real user needs. Datasets that power these models use artificial edits, lacking the scale and ecological validity necessary to address the true diversity of user requests. We introduce REALEDIT, a large-scale image editing dataset with authentic user requests and human-made edits sourced from Reddit. REALEDIT includes a test set of 9300 examples to evaluate models on real user requests. Our results show that existing models fall short on these tasks, highlighting the need for realistic training data. To address this, we introduce 48K training examples and train our REALEDIT model, achieving substantial gains - outperforming competitors by up to 165 Elo points in human judgment and 92 percent relative improvement on the automated VIEScore metric. We deploy our model on Reddit, testing it on new requests, and receive positive feedback. Beyond image editing, we explore REALEDIT's potential in detecting edited images by partnering with a deepfake detection non-profit. Finetuning their model on REALEDIT data improves its F1-score by 14 percentage points, underscoring the dataset's value for broad applications.
Authors: Lu Chen, Yizhou Wang, Shixiang Tang, Qianhong Ma, Tong He, Wanli Ouyang, Xiaowei Zhou, Hujun Bao, Sida Peng
Abstract: This paper addresses the task of learning an agent model behaving like humans, which can jointly perceive, predict, and act in egocentric worlds. Previous methods usually train separate models for these three abilities, which prevents them from learning from each other. In this paper, we propose a joint predictive agent model, named EgoAgent, that simultaneously learns to represent the world, predict future states, and take reasonable actions within a single transformer. EgoAgent introduces two innovations to learn from the causal and temporally intertwined nature of these abilities: (1) Interleaved sequential modeling of states and actions with the causal attention mechanism, and (2) A joint embedding-action-prediction architecture featuring temporal asymmetric predictor-observer branches. Integrating these designs based on JEPA, EgoAgent unifies these capabilities in a cohesive learning framework. Comprehensive evaluations of EgoAgent on representative tasks such as image classification, egocentric future state prediction, and 3D human motion prediction tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method. The code and trained model will be released for reproducibility.
Authors: Zhekai Du, Yinjie Min, Jingjing Li, Ke Lu, Changliang Zou, Liuhua Peng, Tingjin Chu, Mingming Gong
Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has become a prevalent method for adapting pre-trained large language models to downstream tasks. However, the simple low-rank decomposition form may constrain the hypothesis space. To address this limitation, we introduce Location-aware Cosine Adaptation (LoCA), a novel frequency-domain parameter-efficient fine-tuning method based on inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (iDCT) with selective locations of learnable components. We begin with a comprehensive theoretical comparison between frequency-domain and low-rank decompositions for fine-tuning pre-trained large models. Our analysis reveals that frequency-domain decomposition with carefully selected frequency components can surpass the expressivity of traditional low-rank-based methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate that iDCT offers a more efficient implementation compared to inverse Discrete Fourier Transform (iDFT), allowing for better selection and tuning of frequency components while maintaining equivalent expressivity to the optimal iDFT-based adaptation. By employing finite-difference approximation to estimate gradients for discrete locations of learnable coefficients on the DCT spectrum, LoCA dynamically selects the most informative frequency components during training. Experiments on diverse language and vision fine-tuning tasks demonstrate that LoCA offers enhanced parameter efficiency while maintains computational feasibility comparable to low-rank-based methods.
Authors: Riccardo Zamboni, Mirco Mutti, Marcello Restelli
Abstract: In reinforcement learning, we typically refer to task-agnostic exploration when we aim to explore the environment without access to the task specification a priori. In a single-agent setting the problem has been extensively studied and mostly understood. A popular approach cast the task-agnostic objective as maximizing the entropy of the state distribution induced by the agent's policy, from which principles and methods follows. In contrast, little is known about task-agnostic exploration in multi-agent settings, which are ubiquitous in the real world. How should different agents explore in the presence of others? In this paper, we address this question through a generalization to multiple agents of the problem of maximizing the state distribution entropy. First, we investigate alternative formulations, highlighting respective positives and negatives. Then, we present a scalable, decentralized, trust-region policy search algorithm to address the problem in practical settings. Finally, we provide proof of concept experiments to both corroborate the theoretical findings and pave the way for task-agnostic exploration in challenging multi-agent settings.
Authors: Jinouwen Zhang, Junjie Ren, Aobo Yang, Yan Lu, Lu Chen, Hairun Xie, Jing Wang, Miao Zhang, Wanli Ouyang, Shixiang Tang
Abstract: Aircraft manufacturing is the jewel in the crown of industry, among which generating high-fidelity airfoil geometries with controllable and editable representations remains a fundamental challenge. While existing deep-learning-based methods rely on predefined parametric function families, e.g., B\'ezier curves and discrete point-based representations, they suffer from inherent trade-offs between expressiveness and resolution flexibility. To tackle this challenge, we introduce FuncGenFoil, a novel function-space generative model that directly learns functional airfoil geometries. Our method inherits both the advantages of arbitrary resolution sampling and the smoothness of parametric functions, as well as the strong expressiveness of discrete point-based functions. Empirical evaluations on the AFBench dataset demonstrate that FuncGenFoil improves upon state-of-the-art methods in airfoil generation by achieving a relative -74.4 label error reduction and +23.2 diversity increase on the AF-200K dataset. Our results highlight the advantages of function-space modeling for aerodynamic shape optimization, offering a powerful and flexible framework for high-fidelity airfoil design. Our code will be released.
Authors: Melane Navaratnarajah, Sophie A. Martin, David A. Kelly, Nathan Blake, Hana Chockler
Abstract: Explainability remains a significant problem for AI models in medical imaging, making it challenging for clinicians to trust AI-driven predictions. We introduce 3D ReX, the first causality-based post-hoc explainability tool for 3D models. 3D ReX uses the theory of actual causality to generate responsibility maps which highlight the regions most crucial to the model's decision. We test 3D ReX on a stroke detection model, providing insight into the spatial distribution of features relevant to stroke.
Authors: Malte Hellmeier, Hendrik Norkowski, Ernst-Christoph Schrewe, Haydar Qarawlus, Falk Howar
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have gained significant popularity in recent years. Differentiating between a text written by a human and one generated by an LLM has become almost impossible. Information-hiding techniques such as digital watermarking or steganography can help by embedding information inside text in a form that is unlikely to be noticed. However, existing techniques, such as linguistic-based or format-based methods, change the semantics or cannot be applied to pure, unformatted text. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for information hiding called Innamark, which can conceal any byte-encoded sequence within a sufficiently long cover text. This method is implemented as a multi-platform library using the Kotlin programming language, which is accompanied by a command-line tool and a web interface. By substituting conventional whitespace characters with visually similar Unicode whitespace characters, our proposed scheme preserves the semantics of the cover text without changing the number of characters. Furthermore, we propose a specified structure for secret messages that enables configurable compression, encryption, hashing, and error correction. An experimental benchmark comparison on a dataset of 1000000 Wikipedia articles compares ten algorithms. The results demonstrate the robustness of our proposed Innamark method in various applications and the imperceptibility of its watermarks to humans. We discuss the limits to the embedding capacity and robustness of the algorithm and how these could be addressed in future work.
Authors: Mar\'ia Andrea Cruz Bland\'on, Jayasimha Talur, Bruno Charron, Dong Liu, Saab Mansour, Marcello Federico
Abstract: Automatic evaluation of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems relies on fine-grained dimensions like faithfulness and relevance, as judged by expert human annotators. Meta-evaluation benchmarks support the development of automatic evaluators that correlate well with human judgement. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on English or use translated data, which fails to capture cultural nuances. A native approach provides a better representation of the end user experience. In this work, we develop a Multilingual End-to-end Meta-Evaluation RAG benchmark (MEMERAG). Our benchmark builds on the popular MIRACL dataset, using native-language questions and generating responses with diverse large language models (LLMs), which are then assessed by expert annotators for faithfulness and relevance. We describe our annotation process and show that it achieves high inter-annotator agreement. We then analyse the performance of the answer-generating LLMs across languages as per the human evaluators. Finally we apply the dataset to our main use-case which is to benchmark multilingual automatic evaluators (LLM-as-a-judge). We show that our benchmark can reliably identify improvements offered by advanced prompting techniques and LLMs. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/amazon-science/MEMERAG
Authors: Yuqing Wang, Xiao Yang
Abstract: Cloud computing environments are increasingly vulnerable to security threats such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and SQL injection. Traditional security mechanisms, based on rule matching and feature recognition, struggle to adapt to evolving attack strategies. This paper proposes an adaptive security protection framework leveraging deep learning to construct a multi-layered defense architecture. The proposed system is evaluated in a real-world business environment, achieving a detection accuracy of 97.3%, an average response time of 18 ms, and an availability rate of 99.999%. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly enhances detection accuracy, response efficiency, and resource utilization, offering a novel and effective approach to cloud computing security.
Authors: Yuqing Wang, Xiao Yang
Abstract: This study addresses the challenge of resource scheduling optimization in edge-cloud collaborative computing using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). The proposed DRL-based approach improves task processing efficiency, reduces overall processing time, enhances resource utilization, and effectively controls task migrations. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of DRL over traditional scheduling algorithms, particularly in managing complex task allocation, dynamic workloads, and multiple resource constraints. Despite its advantages, further improvements are needed to enhance learning efficiency, reduce training time, and address convergence issues. Future research should focus on increasing the algorithm's fault tolerance to handle more complex and uncertain scheduling scenarios, thereby advancing the intelligence and efficiency of edge-cloud computing systems.
Authors: Maciej Krzysztof Zuziak, Roberto Pellungrini, Salvatore Rinzivillo
Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a widespread and well adopted paradigm of decentralized learning that allows training one model from multiple sources without the need to directly transfer data between participating clients. Since its inception in 2015, it has been divided into numerous sub-fields that deal with application-specific issues, be it data heterogeneity or resource allocation. One such sub-field, Clustered Federated Learning (CFL), is dealing with the problem of clustering the population of clients into separate cohorts to deliver personalized models. Although few remarkable works have been published in this domain, the problem is still largely unexplored, as its basic assumption and settings are slightly different from standard FL. In this work, we present One-Shot Clustered Federated Learning (OCFL), a clustering-agnostic algorithm that can automatically detect the earliest suitable moment for clustering. Our algorithm is based on the computation of cosine similarity between gradients of the clients and a temperature measure that detects when the federated model starts to converge. We empirically evaluate our methodology by testing various one-shot clustering algorithms for over thirty different tasks on three benchmark datasets. Our experiments showcase the good performance of our approach when used to perform CFL in an automated manner without the need to adjust hyperparameters.
Authors: Aoxiong Yin, Kai Shen, Yichong Leng, Xu Tan, Xinyu Zhou, Juncheng Li, Siliang Tang
Abstract: Recent advancements in text-to-video (T2V) generation have been driven by two competing paradigms: autoregressive language models and diffusion models. However, each paradigm has intrinsic limitations: language models struggle with visual quality and error accumulation, while diffusion models lack semantic understanding and causal modeling. In this work, we propose LanDiff, a hybrid framework that synergizes the strengths of both paradigms through coarse-to-fine generation. Our architecture introduces three key innovations: (1) a semantic tokenizer that compresses 3D visual features into compact 1D discrete representations through efficient semantic compression, achieving a $\sim$14,000$\times$ compression ratio; (2) a language model that generates semantic tokens with high-level semantic relationships; (3) a streaming diffusion model that refines coarse semantics into high-fidelity videos. Experiments show that LanDiff, a 5B model, achieves a score of 85.43 on the VBench T2V benchmark, surpassing the state-of-the-art open-source models Hunyuan Video (13B) and other commercial models such as Sora, Kling, and Hailuo. Furthermore, our model also achieves state-of-the-art performance in long video generation, surpassing other open-source models in this field. Our demo can be viewed at https://landiff.github.io/.
Authors: Zelin Meng, Takanori Fukao
Abstract: Depth estimation in complex real-world scenarios is a challenging task, especially when relying solely on a single modality such as visible light or thermal infrared (THR) imagery. This paper proposes a novel multimodal depth estimation model, RTFusion, which enhances depth estimation accuracy and robustness by integrating the complementary strengths of RGB and THR data. The RGB modality provides rich texture and color information, while the THR modality captures thermal patterns, ensuring stability under adverse lighting conditions such as extreme illumination. The model incorporates a unique fusion mechanism, EGFusion, consisting of the Mutual Complementary Attention (MCA) module for cross-modal feature alignment and the Edge Saliency Enhancement Module (ESEM) to improve edge detail preservation. Comprehensive experiments on the MS2 and ViViD++ datasets demonstrate that the proposed model consistently produces high-quality depth maps across various challenging environments, including nighttime, rainy, and high-glare conditions. The experimental results highlight the potential of the proposed method in applications requiring reliable depth estimation, such as autonomous driving, robotics, and augmented reality.
Authors: Yifan Yang, Kai Zhen, Bhavana Ganesh, Aram Galstyan, Goeric Huybrechts, Markus M\"uller, Jonas M. K\"ubler, Rupak Vignesh Swaminathan, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Sravan Babu Bodapati, Nathan Susanj, Zheng Zhang, Jack FitzGerald, Abhishek Kumar
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) pruning seeks to remove unimportant weights for inference speedup with minimal performance impact. However, existing methods often suffer from performance loss without full-model sparsity-aware fine-tuning. This paper presents Wanda++, a novel pruning framework that outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by utilizing decoder-block-level \textbf{regional} gradients. Specifically, Wanda++ improves the pruning score with regional gradients for the first time and proposes an efficient regional optimization method to minimize pruning-induced output discrepancies between the dense and sparse decoder output. Notably, Wanda++ improves perplexity by up to 32\% over Wanda in the language modeling task and generalizes effectively to downstream tasks. Further experiments indicate our proposed method is orthogonal to sparsity-aware fine-tuning, where Wanda++ can be combined with LoRA fine-tuning to achieve a similar perplexity improvement as the Wanda method. The proposed method is lightweight, pruning a 7B LLaMA model in under 10 minutes on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU.
Authors: Lucas Caccia, Alan Ansell, Edoardo Ponti, Ivan Vuli\'c, Alessandro Sordoni
Abstract: Dynamically integrating new or rapidly evolving information after (Large) Language Model pre-training remains challenging, particularly in low-data scenarios or when dealing with private and specialized documents. In-context learning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) face limitations, including their high inference costs and their inability to capture global document information. In this paper, we propose a way of modularizing knowledge by training document-level Knowledge Modules (KMs). KMs are lightweight components implemented as parameter-efficient LoRA modules, which are trained to store information about new documents and can be easily plugged into models on demand. We show that next-token prediction performs poorly as the training objective for KMs. We instead propose Deep Context Distillation: we learn KMs parameters such as to simulate hidden states and logits of a teacher that takes the document in context. Our method outperforms standard next-token prediction and pre-instruction training techniques, across two datasets. Finally, we highlight synergies between KMs and RAG.
Authors: Zhaoling Chen, Xiangru Tang, Gangda Deng, Fang Wu, Jialong Wu, Zhiwei Jiang, Viktor Prasanna, Arman Cohan, Xingyao Wang
Abstract: Code localization--identifying precisely where in a codebase changes need to be made--is a fundamental yet challenging task in software maintenance. Existing approaches struggle to efficiently navigate complex codebases when identifying relevant code sections. The challenge lies in bridging natural language problem descriptions with the appropriate code elements, often requiring reasoning across hierarchical structures and multiple dependencies. We introduce LocAgent, a framework that addresses code localization through graph-based representation. By parsing codebases into directed heterogeneous graphs, LocAgent creates a lightweight representation that captures code structures (files, classes, functions) and their dependencies (imports, invocations, inheritance), enabling LLM agents to effectively search and locate relevant entities through powerful multi-hop reasoning. Experimental results on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances accuracy in code localization. Notably, our method with the fine-tuned Qwen-2.5-Coder-Instruct-32B model achieves comparable results to SOTA proprietary models at greatly reduced cost (approximately 86% reduction), reaching up to 92.7% accuracy on file-level localization while improving downstream GitHub issue resolution success rates by 12% for multiple attempts (Pass@10). Our code is available at https://github.com/gersteinlab/LocAgent.
Authors: Uddhav Bhattarai, Rajkishan Arikapudi, Steven A. Fennimore, Frank N Martin, Stavros G. Vougioukas
Abstract: Manual fruit harvesting is common in agriculture, but the amount of time pickers spend on non-productive activities can make it very inefficient. Accurately identifying picking vs. non-picking activity is crucial for estimating picker efficiency and optimising labour management and harvest processes. In this study, a practical system was developed to calculate the efficiency of pickers in commercial strawberry harvesting. Instrumented picking carts were developed to record the harvested fruit weight, geolocation, and cart movement in real time. These carts were deployed during the commercial strawberry harvest season in Santa Maria, CA. The collected data was then used to train a CNN-LSTM-based deep neural network to classify a picker's activity into "Pick" and "NoPick" classes. Experimental evaluations showed that the CNN-LSTM model showed promising activity recognition performance with an F1 score accuracy of over 0.97. The recognition results were then used to compute picker efficiency and the time required to fill a tray. Analysis of the season-long harvest data showed that the average picker efficiency was 75.07% with an estimation accuracy of 95.22%. Furthermore, the average tray fill time was 6.79 minutes with an estimation accuracy of 96.43%. When integrated into commercial harvesting, the proposed technology can aid growers in monitoring automated worker activity and optimising harvests to reduce non-productive time and enhance overall harvest efficiency.
Authors: Noujoud Nader, Patrick Diehl, Steve Brandt, Hartmut Kaiser
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-4 and DeepSeek, have been applied to a wide range of domains in software engineering. However, their potential in the context of High-Performance Computing (HPC) much remains to be explored. This paper evaluates how well DeepSeek, a recent LLM, performs in generating a set of HPC benchmark codes: a conjugate gradient solver, the parallel heat equation, parallel matrix multiplication, DGEMM, and the STREAM triad operation. We analyze DeepSeek's code generation capabilities for traditional HPC languages like Cpp, Fortran, Julia and Python. The evaluation includes testing for code correctness, performance, and scaling across different configurations and matrix sizes. We also provide a detailed comparison between DeepSeek and another widely used tool: GPT-4. Our results demonstrate that while DeepSeek generates functional code for HPC tasks, it lags behind GPT-4, in terms of scalability and execution efficiency of the generated code.
Authors: Hengyu Lin
Abstract: This study investigates the application of novel model architectures and large-scale foundational models in temporal series analysis of lower limb rehabilitation motion data, aiming to leverage advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence to empower active rehabilitation guidance strategies for post-stroke patients in limb motor function recovery. Utilizing the SIAT-LLMD dataset of lower limb movement data proposed by the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, we systematically elucidate the implementation and analytical outcomes of the innovative xLSTM architecture and the foundational model Lag-Llama in short-term temporal prediction tasks involving joint kinematics and dynamics parameters. The research provides novel insights for AI-enabled medical rehabilitation applications, demonstrating the potential of cutting-edge model architectures and large-scale models in rehabilitation medicine temporal prediction. These findings establish theoretical foundations for future applications of personalized rehabilitation regimens, offering significant implications for the development of customized therapeutic interventions in clinical practice.
Authors: Hui Han, Siyuan Li, Jiaqi Chen, Yiwen Yuan, Yuling Wu, Chak Tou Leong, Hanwen Du, Junchen Fu, Youhua Li, Jie Zhang, Chi Zhang, Li-jia Li, Yongxin Ni
Abstract: Video generation assessment is essential for ensuring that generative models produce visually realistic, high-quality videos while aligning with human expectations. Current video generation benchmarks fall into two main categories: traditional benchmarks, which use metrics and embeddings to evaluate generated video quality across multiple dimensions but often lack alignment with human judgments; and large language model (LLM)-based benchmarks, though capable of human-like reasoning, are constrained by a limited understanding of video quality metrics and cross-modal consistency. To address these challenges and establish a benchmark that better aligns with human preferences, this paper introduces Video-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring a rich prompt suite and extensive evaluation dimensions. This benchmark represents the first attempt to systematically leverage MLLMs across all dimensions relevant to video generation assessment in generative models. By incorporating few-shot scoring and chain-of-query techniques, Video-Bench provides a structured, scalable approach to generated video evaluation. Experiments on advanced models including Sora demonstrate that Video-Bench achieves superior alignment with human preferences across all dimensions. Moreover, in instances where our framework's assessments diverge from human evaluations, it consistently offers more objective and accurate insights, suggesting an even greater potential advantage over traditional human judgment.
Authors: Na Li, Chuke Wang, Yu Gu, Zhifeng Li
Abstract: Voice conversion (VC) transforms source speech into a target voice by preserving the content. However, timbre information from the source speaker is inherently embedded in the content representations, causing significant timbre leakage and reducing similarity to the target speaker. To address this, we introduce a residual block to a content extractor. The residual block consists of two weighted branches: 1) universal semantic dictionary based Content Feature Re-expression (CFR) module, supplying timbre-free content representation. 2) skip connection to the original content layer, providing complementary fine-grained information. In the CFR module, each dictionary entry in the universal semantic dictionary represents a phoneme class, computed statistically using speech from multiple speakers, creating a stable, speaker-independent semantic set. We introduce a CFR method to obtain timbre-free content representations by expressing each content frame as a weighted linear combination of dictionary entries using corresponding phoneme posteriors as weights. Extensive experiments across various VC frameworks demonstrate that our approach effectively mitigates timbre leakage and significantly improves similarity to the target speaker.
Authors: Shiqian Li, Yuxi Ma, Jiajun Yan, Bo Dai, Yujia Peng, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu
Abstract: The role of mental simulation in human physical reasoning is widely acknowledged, but whether it is employed across scenarios with varying simulation costs and where its boundary lies remains unclear. Using a pouring-marble task, our human study revealed two distinct error patterns when predicting pouring angles, differentiated by simulation time. While mental simulation accurately captured human judgments in simpler scenarios, a linear heuristic model better matched human predictions when simulation time exceeded a certain boundary. Motivated by these observations, we propose a dual-process framework, Simulation-Heuristics Model (SHM), where intuitive physics employs simulation for short-time simulation but switches to heuristics when simulation becomes costly. By integrating computational methods previously viewed as separate into a unified model, SHM quantitatively captures their switching mechanism. The SHM aligns more precisely with human behavior and demonstrates consistent predictive performance across diverse scenarios, advancing our understanding of the adaptive nature of intuitive physical reasoning.
Authors: Jianling Lu, Mingqi Lv, Tieming Chen
Abstract: The performance of large language models (LLMs) in Q&A task increased substantially through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) which brings in external knowledge. However, the main difficulty lies in balancing the inherent self-knowledge of LLMs with external information retrieval (IR). The current threshold-based methods apply one-dimensional static mechanisms with single criterion. As a result, their IR decisions might be irrelevant to the LLMs' response under difficult queries. To alleviate this problem, we propose Cognitive Convection of Self-Knowledge (CCSK). Different from traditional methods that maintain single fixed IR activation criteria, CCSK implements a dynamic joint decision process via a Siamese Network module and a Response Quality Model. The Siamese Network calculates the cosine similarity between the current query and the historical queries. The Response Quality Model evaluates the responses of LLMs through LightGBM. The final decision of the CCSK is derived from the outputs of the two modules, as well as text features fused using a multi-head attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that CCSK significantly enhances the model's effectiveness in information retrieval.
Authors: Kristjan Greenewald, Luis Lastras, Thomas Parnell, Vraj Shah, Lucian Popa, Giulio Zizzo, Chulaka Gunasekara, Ambrish Rawat, David Cox
Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a highly efficient framework for finetuning the weights of large foundation models, and has become the go-to method for data-driven customization of LLMs. Despite the promise of highly customized behaviors and capabilities, switching between relevant LoRAs in a multiturn setting is highly inefficient, as the key-value (KV) cache of the entire turn history must be recomputed with the LoRA weights before generation can begin. To address this problem, we propose Activated LoRA (aLoRA), which modifies the LoRA framework to only adapt weights for the tokens in the sequence \emph{after} the aLoRA is invoked. This change crucially allows aLoRA to accept the base model's KV cache of the input string, meaning that aLoRA can be instantly activated whenever needed in a chain without recomputing the cache. This enables building what we call \emph{intrinsics}, i.e. highly specialized models invoked to perform well-defined operations on portions of an input chain or conversation that otherwise uses the base model by default. We use aLoRA to train a set of intrinsics models, demonstrating competitive accuracy with standard LoRA while achieving significant inference benefits.
Authors: Yongqian Peng, Yuxi Ma, Mengmeng Wang, Yuxuan Wang, Yizhou Wang, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu, Zilong Zheng
Abstract: The ability to combine existing concepts into novel ideas stands as a fundamental hallmark of human intelligence. Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like GPT-4V and DALLE-3 have sparked debate about whether their outputs reflect combinational creativity--defined by M. A. Boden (1998) as synthesizing novel ideas through combining existing concepts--or sophisticated pattern matching of training data. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science, we investigate the combinational creativity of VLMs from the lens of concept blending. We propose the Identification-Explanation-Implication (IEI) framework, which decomposes creative processes into three levels: identifying input spaces, extracting shared attributes, and deriving novel semantic implications. To validate this framework, we curate CreativeMashup, a high-quality dataset of 666 artist-generated visual mashups annotated according to the IEI framework. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that in comprehension tasks, best VLMs have surpassed average human performance while falling short of expert-level understanding; in generation tasks, incorporating our IEI framework into the generation pipeline significantly enhances the creative quality of VLMs' outputs. Our findings establish both a theoretical foundation for evaluating artificial creativity and practical guidelines for improving creative generation in VLMs.
Authors: Zhu Zhu, Shuo Jiang, Jingyuan Zheng, Yawen Li, Yifei Chen, Manli Zhao, Weizhong Gu, Feiwei Qin, Jinhu Wang, Gang Yu
Abstract: Neuroblastoma, adrenal-derived, is among the most common pediatric solid malignancies, characterized by significant clinical heterogeneity. Timely and accurate pathological diagnosis from hematoxylin and eosin-stained whole slide images is critical for patient prognosis. However, current diagnostic practices primarily rely on subjective manual examination by pathologists, leading to inconsistent accuracy. Existing automated whole slide image classification methods encounter challenges such as poor interpretability, limited feature extraction capabilities, and high computational costs, restricting their practical clinical deployment. To overcome these limitations, we propose CMSwinKAN, a contrastive-learning-based multi-scale feature fusion model tailored for pathological image classification, which enhances the Swin Transformer architecture by integrating a Kernel Activation Network within its multilayer perceptron and classification head modules, significantly improving both interpretability and accuracy. By fusing multi-scale features and leveraging contrastive learning strategies, CMSwinKAN mimics clinicians' comprehensive approach, effectively capturing global and local tissue characteristics. Additionally, we introduce a heuristic soft voting mechanism guided by clinical insights to seamlessly bridge patch-level predictions to whole slide image-level classifications. We validate CMSwinKAN on the PpNTs dataset, which was collaboratively established with our partner hospital and the publicly accessible BreakHis dataset. Results demonstrate that CMSwinKAN performs better than existing state-of-the-art pathology-specific models pre-trained on large datasets. Our source code is available at https://github.com/JSLiam94/CMSwinKAN.
Authors: Qingyue Wang, Qi Pang, Xixun Lin, Shuai Wang, Daoyuan Wu
Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) have emerged as a powerful architecture for large language models (LLMs), enabling efficient scaling of model capacity while maintaining manageable computational costs. The key advantage lies in their ability to route different tokens to different ``expert'' networks within the model, enabling specialization and efficient handling of diverse input. However, the vulnerabilities of MoE-based LLMs still have barely been studied, and the potential for backdoor attacks in this context remains largely unexplored. This paper presents the first backdoor attack against MoE-based LLMs where the attackers poison ``dormant experts'' (i.e., underutilized experts) and activate them by optimizing routing triggers, thereby gaining control over the model's output. We first rigorously prove the existence of a few ``dominating experts'' in MoE models, whose outputs can determine the overall MoE's output. We also show that dormant experts can serve as dominating experts to manipulate model predictions. Accordingly, our attack, namely BadMoE, exploits the unique architecture of MoE models by 1) identifying dormant experts unrelated to the target task, 2) constructing a routing-aware loss to optimize the activation triggers of these experts, and 3) promoting dormant experts to dominating roles via poisoned training data. Extensive experiments show that BadMoE successfully enforces malicious prediction on attackers' target tasks while preserving overall model utility, making it a more potent and stealthy attack than existing methods.
Authors: J\'ulia Vicens Figueres, Juliette Vanderhaeghen, Federica Bragone, Kateryna Morozovska, Khemraj Shukla
Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are a novel computational approach for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) with noisy and sparse initial and boundary data. Although, efficient quantification of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties in big multi-scale problems remains challenging. We propose \$PINN a novel method of computing global uncertainty in PDEs using a Bayesian framework, by combining local Bayesian Physics-Informed Neural Networks (BPINN) with domain decomposition. The solution continuity across subdomains is obtained by imposing the flux continuity across the interface of neighboring subdomains. To demonstrate the effectiveness of \$PINN, we conduct a series of computational experiments on PDEs in 1D and 2D spatial domains. Although we have adopted conservative PINNs (cPINNs), the method can be seamlessly extended to other domain decomposition techniques. The results infer that the proposed method recovers the global uncertainty by computing the local uncertainty exactly more efficiently as the uncertainty in each subdomain can be computed concurrently. The robustness of \$PINN is verified by adding uncorrelated random noise to the training data up to 15% and testing for different domain sizes.
Authors: Hanchen Yang, Zishen Wan, Ritik Raj, Joongun Park, Ziwei Li, Ananda Samajdar, Arijit Raychowdhury, Tushar Krishna
Abstract: Neuro-Symbolic AI (NSAI) is an emerging paradigm that integrates neural networks with symbolic reasoning to enhance the transparency, reasoning capabilities, and data efficiency of AI systems. Recent NSAI systems have gained traction due to their exceptional performance in reasoning tasks and human-AI collaborative scenarios. Despite these algorithmic advancements, executing NSAI tasks on existing hardware (e.g., CPUs, GPUs, TPUs) remains challenging, due to their heterogeneous computing kernels, high memory intensity, and unique memory access patterns. Moreover, current NSAI algorithms exhibit significant variation in operation types and scales, making them incompatible with existing ML accelerators. These challenges highlight the need for a versatile and flexible acceleration framework tailored to NSAI workloads. In this paper, we propose NSFlow, an FPGA-based acceleration framework designed to achieve high efficiency, scalability, and versatility across NSAI systems. NSFlow features a design architecture generator that identifies workload data dependencies and creates optimized dataflow architectures, as well as a reconfigurable array with flexible compute units, re-organizable memory, and mixed-precision capabilities. Evaluating across NSAI workloads, NSFlow achieves 31x speedup over Jetson TX2, more than 2x over GPU, 8x speedup over TPU-like systolic array, and more than 3x over Xilinx DPU. NSFlow also demonstrates enhanced scalability, with only 4x runtime increase when symbolic workloads scale by 150x. To the best of our knowledge, NSFlow is the first framework to enable real-time generalizable NSAI algorithms acceleration, demonstrating a promising solution for next-generation cognitive systems.
Authors: James O' Neill, Santhosh Subramanian, Eric Lin, Vaikkunth Mugunthan
Abstract: The trend towards large language models (LLMs) for guardrailing against undesired behaviors is increasing and has shown promise for censoring user inputs. However, increased latency, memory consumption, hosting expenses and non-structured outputs can make their use prohibitive. In this work, we show that task-specific data generation can lead to fine-tuned classifiers that significantly outperform current state of the art (SoTA) while being orders of magnitude smaller. Secondly, we show that using a single model, \texttt{MultiTaskGuard}, that is pretrained on a large synthetically generated dataset with unique task instructions further improves generalization. Thirdly, our most performant models, \texttt{UniGuard}, are found using our proposed search-based model merging approach that finds an optimal set of parameters to combine single-policy models and multi-policy guardrail models. % On 7 public datasets and 4 guardrail benchmarks we created, our efficient guardrail classifiers improve over the best performing SoTA publicly available LLMs and 3$^{\text{rd}}$ party guardrail APIs in detecting unsafe and safe behaviors by an average F1 score improvement of \textbf{29.92} points over Aegis-LlamaGuard and \textbf{21.62} over \texttt{gpt-4o}, respectively. Lastly, our guardrail synthetic data generation process that uses custom task-specific guardrail poli
Authors: Weidi Luo, Qiming Zhang, Tianyu Lu, Xiaogeng Liu, Yue Zhao, Zhen Xiang, Chaowei Xiao
Abstract: The increasing capabilities of agentic multi-modal large reasoning models, such as ChatGPT o3, have raised critical concerns regarding privacy leakage through inadvertent image geolocation. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic and controlled study on the potential privacy risks associated with visual reasoning abilities of ChatGPT o3. We manually collect and construct a dataset comprising 50 real-world images that feature individuals alongside privacy-relevant environmental elements, capturing realistic and sensitive scenarios for analysis. Our experimental evaluation reveals that ChatGPT o3 can predict user locations with high precision, achieving street-level accuracy (within one mile) in 60% of cases. Through analysis, we identify key visual cues, including street layout and front yard design, that significantly contribute to the model inference success. Additionally, targeted occlusion experiments demonstrate that masking critical features effectively mitigates geolocation accuracy, providing insights into potential defense mechanisms. Our findings highlight an urgent need for privacy-aware development for agentic multi-modal large reasoning models, particularly in applications involving private imagery.
Authors: Pietro Bongini, Sara Mandelli, Andrea Montibeller, Mirko Casu, Orazio Pontorno, Claudio Vittorio Ragaglia, Luca Zanchetta, Mattia Aquilina, Taiba Majid Wani, Luca Guarnera, Benedetta Tondi, Giulia Boato, Paolo Bestagini, Irene Amerini, Francesco De Natale, Sebastiano Battiato, Mauro Barni
Abstract: Synthetic image source attribution is an open challenge, with an increasing number of image generators being released yearly. The complexity and the sheer number of available generative techniques, as well as the scarcity of high-quality open source datasets of diverse nature for this task, make training and benchmarking synthetic image source attribution models very challenging. WILD is a new in-the-Wild Image Linkage Dataset designed to provide a powerful training and benchmarking tool for synthetic image attribution models. The dataset is built out of a closed set of 10 popular commercial generators, which constitutes the training base of attribution models, and an open set of 10 additional generators, simulating a real-world in-the-wild scenario. Each generator is represented by 1,000 images, for a total of 10,000 images in the closed set and 10,000 images in the open set. Half of the images are post-processed with a wide range of operators. WILD allows benchmarking attribution models in a wide range of tasks, including closed and open set identification and verification, and robust attribution with respect to post-processing and adversarial attacks. Models trained on WILD are expected to benefit from the challenging scenario represented by the dataset itself. Moreover, an assessment of seven baseline methodologies on closed and open set attribution is presented, including robustness tests with respect to post-processing.