Authors: Rahul Kabali
Abstract: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research traditionally focuses on algorithms that optimize for specific goals under deterministic rules. Yet, human-like intelligence exhibits adaptive spontaneity - an ability to make unexpected choices or free decisions not strictly dictated by past data or immediate reward. This trait, often dubbed "free will" in a loose sense, might be crucial for creativity, robust adaptation, and avoiding ruts in problem-solving. This paper proposes a theoretical framework, called the Free Will Equation, that draws analogies from quantum field theory to endow AGI agents with a form of adaptive, controlled stochasticity in their decision-making process. The core idea is to treat an AI agent's cognitive state as a superposition of potential actions or thoughts, which collapses probabilistically into a concrete action when a decision is made - much like a quantum wavefunction collapsing upon measurement. By incorporating mechanisms analogous to quantum fields, along with intrinsic motivation terms, we aim to improve an agent's ability to explore novel strategies and adapt to unforeseen changes. Experiments in a non-stationary multi-armed bandit environment demonstrate that agents using this framework achieve higher rewards and policy diversity compared to baseline methods.
Authors: Ziqi Wang, Hongshuo Huang, Hancheng Zhao, Changwen Xu, Shang Zhu, Jan Janssen, Venkatasubramanian Viswanathan
Abstract: Materials discovery relies on high-throughput, high-fidelity simulation techniques such as Density Functional Theory (DFT), which require years of training, extensive parameter fine-tuning and systematic error handling. To address these challenges, we introduce the DFT-based Research Engine for Agentic Materials Screening (DREAMS), a hierarchical, multi-agent framework for DFT simulation that combines a central Large Language Model (LLM) planner agent with domain-specific LLM agents for atomistic structure generation, systematic DFT convergence testing, High-Performance Computing (HPC) scheduling, and error handling. In addition, a shared canvas helps the LLM agents to structure their discussions, preserve context and prevent hallucination. We validate DREAMS capabilities on the Sol27LC lattice-constant benchmark, achieving average errors below 1\% compared to the results of human DFT experts. Furthermore, we apply DREAMS to the long-standing CO/Pt(111) adsorption puzzle, demonstrating its long-term and complex problem-solving capabilities. The framework again reproduces expert-level literature adsorption-energy differences. Finally, DREAMS is employed to quantify functional-driven uncertainties with Bayesian ensemble sampling, confirming the Face Centered Cubic (FCC)-site preference at the Generalized Gradient Approximation (GGA) DFT level. In conclusion, DREAMS approaches L3-level automation - autonomous exploration of a defined design space - and significantly reduces the reliance on human expertise and intervention, offering a scalable path toward democratized, high-throughput, high-fidelity computational materials discovery.
Authors: Boyuan Zheng, Zeyi Liao, Scott Salisbury, Zeyuan Liu, Michael Lin, Qinyuan Zheng, Zifan Wang, Xiang Deng, Dawn Song, Huan Sun, Yu Su
Abstract: The rapid development of autonomous web agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), while greatly elevating efficiency, exposes the frontier risk of taking unintended or harmful actions. This situation underscores an urgent need for effective safety measures, akin to access controls for human users. To address this critical challenge, we introduce WebGuard, the first comprehensive dataset designed to support the assessment of web agent action risks and facilitate the development of guardrails for real-world online environments. In doing so, WebGuard specifically focuses on predicting the outcome of state-changing actions and contains 4,939 human-annotated actions from 193 websites across 22 diverse domains, including often-overlooked long-tail websites. These actions are categorized using a novel three-tier risk schema: SAFE, LOW, and HIGH. The dataset includes designated training and test splits to support evaluation under diverse generalization settings. Our initial evaluations reveal a concerning deficiency: even frontier LLMs achieve less than 60% accuracy in predicting action outcomes and less than 60% recall in lagging HIGH-risk actions, highlighting the risks of deploying current-generation agents without dedicated safeguards. We therefore investigate fine-tuning specialized guardrail models using WebGuard. We conduct comprehensive evaluations across multiple generalization settings and find that a fine-tuned Qwen2.5VL-7B model yields a substantial improvement in performance, boosting accuracy from 37% to 80% and HIGH-risk action recall from 20% to 76%. Despite these improvements, the performance still falls short of the reliability required for high-stakes deployment, where guardrails must approach near-perfect accuracy and recall.
Authors: Samarth P, Vyoman Jain, Shiva Golugula, Motamarri Sai Sathvik
Abstract: Understanding complex scientific and mathematical concepts, particularly those presented in dense research papers, poses a significant challenge for learners. Dynamic visualizations can greatly enhance comprehension, but creating them manually is time-consuming and requires specialized knowledge and skills. We introduce manimator, an open-source system that leverages Large Language Models to transform research papers and natural language prompts into explanatory animations using the Manim engine. Manimator employs a pipeline where an LLM interprets the input text or research paper PDF to generate a structured scene description outlining key concepts, mathematical formulas, and visual elements and another LLM translates this description into executable Manim Python code. We discuss its potential as an educational tool for rapidly creating engaging visual explanations for complex STEM topics, democratizing the creation of high-quality educational content.
Authors: Hui Yang, Jiaoyan Chen, Yuan He, Yongsheng Gao, Ian Horrocks
Abstract: OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontologies which are able to formally represent complex knowledge and support semantic reasoning have been widely adopted across various domains such as healthcare and bioinformatics. Recently, ontology embeddings have gained wide attention due to its potential to infer plausible new knowledge and approximate complex reasoning. However, existing methods face notable limitations: geometric model-based embeddings typically overlook valuable textual information, resulting in suboptimal performance, while the approaches that incorporate text, which are often based on language models, fail to preserve the logical structure. In this work, we propose a new ontology embedding method OnT, which tunes a Pretrained Language Model (PLM) via geometric modeling in a hyperbolic space for effectively incorporating textual labels and simultaneously preserving class hierarchies and other logical relationships of Description Logic EL. Extensive experiments on four real-world ontologies show that OnT consistently outperforms the baselines including the state-of-the-art across both tasks of prediction and inference of axioms. OnT also demonstrates strong potential in real-world applications, indicated by its robust transfer learning abilities and effectiveness in real cases of constructing a new ontology from SNOMED CT. Data and code are available at https://github.com/HuiYang1997/OnT.
Authors: Nicolas Wischermann, Claudio Mayrink Verdun, Gabriel Poesia, Francesco Noseda
Abstract: Language models have become increasingly powerful tools for formal mathematical reasoning. However, most existing approaches rely exclusively on either large general-purpose models or smaller specialized models, each with distinct limitations, while training specialized large models still requires significant computational resources. This paper introduces ProofCompass, a novel hybrid methodology that achieves remarkable computational efficiency by strategically guiding existing specialized prover methods, such as DeepSeek-Prover-v1.5-RL (DSP-v1.5) with a Large Language Model (LLM) without requiring additional model training. The LLM provides natural language proof strategies and analyzes failed attempts to select intermediate lemmas, enabling effective problem decomposition. On the miniF2F benchmark, ProofCompass demonstrates substantial resource efficiency: it outperforms DSP-v1.5 ($54.9\% \rightarrow 55.3\%$) while using 25x fewer attempts ($3200 \rightarrow 128$). Our synergistic approach paves the way for simultaneously improving computational efficiency and accuracy in formal theorem proving.
Authors: Humza Sami, Mubashir ul Islam, Pierre-Emmanuel Gaillardon, Valerio Tenace
Abstract: The rise of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) promises a significant leap forward in language model capabilities, aiming to tackle increasingly sophisticated tasks with unprecedented efficiency and accuracy. However, despite their impressive performance, recent studies have highlighted how current reasoning models frequently fail to generalize to novel, unseen problems, often resorting to memorized solutions rather than genuine inferential reasoning. Such behavior underscores a critical limitation in modern LRMs, i.e., their tendency toward overfitting, which in turn results in poor generalization in problem-solving capabilities. In this paper, we introduce Nexus Architect, an enhanced iteration of our multi-agent system framework, Nexus, equipped with a novel automated workflow synthesis mechanism. Given a user's prompt and a small set of representative examples, the Architect autonomously generates a tailored reasoning workflow by selecting suitable strategies, tool integrations, and adversarial techniques for a specific problem class. Furthermore, the Architect includes an iterative prompt refinement mechanism that fine-tunes agents' system prompts to maximize performance and improve the generalization capabilities of the system. We empirically evaluate Nexus Architect by employing an off-the-shelf, non-reasoning model on a custom dataset of challenging logical questions and compare its performance against state-of-the-art LRMs. Results show that Nexus Architect consistently outperforms existing solutions, achieving up to a 66% increase in pass rate over Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview, nearly 2.5$\times$ against Claude Sonnet 4 and DeepSeek-R1, and over 3$\times$ w.r.t. Llama 4 Scout.
Authors: Michael J. Zellinger, Matt Thomson
Abstract: State-of-the-art reasoning LLMs are powerful problem solvers, but they still occasionally make mistakes. However, adopting AI models in risk-sensitive domains often requires error rates near 0%. To address this gap, we propose collaboration between a reasoning model and a human expert who resolves queries the model cannot confidently answer. We find that quantifying the uncertainty of a reasoning model through the length of its reasoning trace yields an effective basis for deferral to a human, e.g., cutting the error rate of Qwen3 235B-A22B on difficult MATH problems from 3% to less than 1% when deferring 7.5% of queries. However, the high latency of reasoning models still makes them challenging to deploy on use cases with high query volume. To address this challenge, we explore fronting a reasoning model with a large non-reasoning model. We call this modified human-in-the-loop system "Fail Fast, or Ask", since the non-reasoning model may defer difficult queries to the human expert directly ("failing fast"), without incurring the reasoning model's higher latency. We show that this approach yields around 40% latency reduction and about 50% cost savings for DeepSeek R1 while maintaining 90+% area under the accuracy-rejection curve. However, we observe that latency savings are lower than expected because of "latency drag", the phenomenon that processing easier queries with a non-reasoning model pushes the reasoning model's latency distribution towards longer latencies. Broadly, our results suggest that the deficiencies of state-of-the-art reasoning models -- nontrivial error rates and high latency -- can be substantially mitigated through black-box systems engineering, without requiring access to LLM internals.
Authors: Aryo Pradipta Gema, Alexander H\"agele, Runjin Chen, Andy Arditi, Jacob Goldman-Wetzler, Kit Fraser-Taliente, Henry Sleight, Linda Petrini, Julian Michael, Beatrice Alex, Pasquale Minervini, Yanda Chen, Joe Benton, Ethan Perez
Abstract: We construct evaluation tasks where extending the reasoning length of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) deteriorates performance, exhibiting an inverse scaling relationship between test-time compute and accuracy. Our evaluation tasks span four categories: simple counting tasks with distractors, regression tasks with spurious features, deduction tasks with constraint tracking, and advanced AI risks. We identify five distinct failure modes when models reason for longer: 1) Claude models become increasingly distracted by irrelevant information; 2) OpenAI o-series models resist distractors but overfit to problem framings; 3) models shift from reasonable priors to spurious correlations; 4) all models show difficulties in maintaining focus on complex deductive tasks; and 5) extended reasoning may amplify concerning behaviors, with Claude Sonnet 4 showing increased expressions of self-preservation. These findings suggest that while test-time compute scaling remains promising for improving model capabilities, it may inadvertently reinforce problematic reasoning patterns. Our results demonstrate the importance of evaluating models across diverse reasoning lengths to identify and address these failure modes in LRMs.
Authors: Guancheng Zeng, Xueyi Chen, Jiawang Hu, Shaohua Qi, Yaxuan Mao, Zhantao Wang, Yifan Nie, Shuang Li, Qiuyang Feng, Pengxu Qiu, Yujia Wang, Wenqiang Han, Linyan Huang, Gang Li, Jingjing Mo, Haowen Hu
Abstract: The deployment of agent systems in an enterprise environment is often hindered by several challenges: common models lack domain-specific process knowledge, leading to disorganized plans, missing key tools, and poor execution stability. To address this, this paper introduces Routine, a multi-step agent planning framework designed with a clear structure, explicit instructions, and seamless parameter passing to guide the agent's execution module in performing multi-step tool-calling tasks with high stability. In evaluations conducted within a real-world enterprise scenario, Routine significantly increases the execution accuracy in model tool calls, increasing the performance of GPT-4o from 41.1% to 96.3%, and Qwen3-14B from 32.6% to 83.3%. We further constructed a Routine-following training dataset and fine-tuned Qwen3-14B, resulting in an accuracy increase to 88.2% on scenario-specific evaluations, indicating improved adherence to execution plans. In addition, we employed Routine-based distillation to create a scenario-specific, multi-step tool-calling dataset. Fine-tuning on this distilled dataset raised the model's accuracy to 95.5%, approaching GPT-4o's performance. These results highlight Routine's effectiveness in distilling domain-specific tool-usage patterns and enhancing model adaptability to new scenarios. Our experimental results demonstrate that Routine provides a practical and accessible approach to building stable agent workflows, accelerating the deployment and adoption of agent systems in enterprise environments, and advancing the technical vision of AI for Process.
Authors: Yitong Lin, Jiaying He, Jiahe Chen, Xinnan Zhu, Jianwei Zheng, Tao Bo
Abstract: Motivation: Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) are crucial for drug discovery and disease understanding, yet their completion and reasoning are challenging. Knowledge Embedding (KE) methods capture global semantics but struggle with dynamic structural integration, while Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel locally but often lack semantic understanding. Even ensemble approaches, including those leveraging language models, often fail to achieve a deep, adaptive, and synergistic co-evolution between semantic comprehension and structural learning. Addressing this critical gap in fostering continuous, reciprocal refinement between these two aspects in complex biomedical KGs is paramount. Results: We introduce BioGraphFusion, a novel framework for deeply synergistic semantic and structural learning. BioGraphFusion establishes a global semantic foundation via tensor decomposition, guiding an LSTM-driven mechanism to dynamically refine relation embeddings during graph propagation. This fosters adaptive interplay between semantic understanding and structural learning, further enhanced by query-guided subgraph construction and a hybrid scoring mechanism. Experiments across three key biomedical tasks demonstrate BioGraphFusion's superior performance over state-of-the-art KE, GNN, and ensemble models. A case study on Cutaneous Malignant Melanoma 1 (CMM1) highlights its ability to unveil biologically meaningful pathways. Availability and Implementation: Source code and all training data are freely available for download at https://github.com/Y-TARL/BioGraphFusion. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Authors: Hongyi Yang, Yue Pan, Jiayi Xu, Kelsen Liu
Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and autonomous agents have enabled systems capable of performing complex tasks across domains such as human-computer interaction, planning, and web navigation. However, many existing frameworks struggle in real-world or resource-constrained environments due to their reliance on cloud-based computation, limited robustness in dynamic contexts, and lack of persistent autonomy and environmental awareness. We present Amico, a modular, event-driven framework for building autonomous agents optimized for embedded systems. Written in Rust for safety and performance, Amico supports reactive, persistent agents that operate efficiently across embedded platforms and browser environments via WebAssembly. It provides clean abstractions for event handling, state management, behavior execution, and integration with reasoning modules. Amico delivers a unified infrastructure for constructing resilient, interactive agents suitable for deployment in settings with limited compute and intermittent connectivity.
Authors: Xinyi Chen, Yifei Yuan, Jiaang Li, Serge Belongie, Maarten de Rijke, Anders S{\o}gaard
Abstract: Language models are often said to face a symbol grounding problem. While some argue that world understanding can emerge from text alone, others suggest grounded learning is more efficient. We explore this through Othello, where the board state defines a simplified, rule-based world. Building on prior work, we introduce VISOTHELLO, a multi-modal model trained on move histories and board images. Using next-move prediction, we compare it to mono-modal baselines and test robustness to semantically irrelevant perturbations. We find that multi-modal training improves both performance and the robustness of internal representations. These results suggest that grounding language in visual input helps models infer structured world representations.
Authors: Anna Sofia Lippolis, Mohammad Javad Saeedizade, Robin Keskis\"arkk\"a, Aldo Gangemi, Eva Blomqvist, Andrea Giovanni Nuzzolese
Abstract: Ontology evaluation through functional requirements, such as testing via competency question (CQ) verification, is a well-established yet costly, labour-intensive, and error-prone endeavour, even for ontology engineering experts. In this work, we introduce OE-Assist, a novel framework designed to assist ontology evaluation through automated and semi-automated CQ verification. By presenting and leveraging a dataset of 1,393 CQs paired with corresponding ontologies and ontology stories, our contributions present, to our knowledge, the first systematic investigation into large language model (LLM)-assisted ontology evaluation, and include: (i) evaluating the effectiveness of a LLM-based approach for automatically performing CQ verification against a manually created gold standard, and (ii) developing and assessing an LLM-powered framework to assist CQ verification with Prot\'eg\'e, by providing suggestions. We found that automated LLM-based evaluation with o1-preview and o3-mini perform at a similar level to the average user's performance.
Authors: Omar Al-Desi
Abstract: This paper presents the Coordinate Heart System (CHS), a geometric framework for emotion representation in artificial intelligence applications. We position eight core emotions as coordinates on a unit circle, enabling mathematical computation of complex emotional states through coordinate mixing and vector operations. Our initial five-emotion model revealed significant coverage gaps in the emotion space, leading to the development of an eight-emotion system that provides complete geometric coverage with mathematical guarantees. The framework converts natural language input to emotion coordinates and supports real-time emotion interpolation through computational algorithms. The system introduces a re-calibrated stability parameter S in [0,1], which dynamically integrates emotional load, conflict resolution, and contextual drain factors. This stability model leverages advanced Large Language Model interpretation of textual cues and incorporates hybrid temporal tracking mechanisms to provide nuanced assessment of psychological well-being states. Our key contributions include: (i) mathematical proof demonstrating why five emotions are insufficient for complete geometric coverage, (ii) an eight-coordinate system that eliminates representational blind spots, (iii) novel algorithms for emotion mixing, conflict resolution, and distance calculation in emotion space, and (iv) a comprehensive computational framework for AI emotion recognition with enhanced multi-dimensional stability modeling. Experimental validation through case studies demonstrates the system's capability to handle emotionally conflicted states, contextual distress factors, and complex psychological scenarios that traditional categorical emotion models cannot adequately represent. This work establishes a new mathematical foundation for emotion modeling in artificial intelligence systems.
Authors: Monoshiz Mahbub Khan, Xioayin Xi, Andrew Meneely, Zhe Yu
Abstract: Story point estimation is an essential part of agile software development. Story points are unitless, project-specific effort estimates that help developers plan their sprints. Traditionally, developers estimate story points collaboratively using planning poker or other manual techniques. While the initial calibrating of the estimates to each project is helpful, once a team has converged on a set of precedents, story point estimation can become tedious and labor-intensive. Machine learning can reduce this burden, but only with enough context from the historical decisions made by the project team. That is, state-of-the-art models, such as GPT2SP and FastText-SVM, only make accurate predictions (within-project) when trained on data from the same project. The goal of this work is to streamline story point estimation by evaluating a comparative learning-based framework for calibrating project-specific story point prediction models. Instead of assigning a specific story point value to every backlog item, developers are presented with pairs of items, and indicate which item requires more effort. Using these comparative judgments, a machine learning model is trained to predict the story point estimates. We empirically evaluated our technique using data with 23,313 manual estimates in 16 projects. The model learned from comparative judgments can achieve on average 0.34 Spearman's rank correlation coefficient between its predictions and the ground truth story points. This is similar to, if not better than, the performance of a regression model learned from the ground truth story points. Therefore, the proposed comparative learning approach is more efficient than state-of-the-art regression-based approaches according to the law of comparative judgments - providing comparative judgments yields a lower cognitive burden on humans than providing ratings or categorical labels.
Authors: Qibing Ren, Sitao Xie, Longxuan Wei, Zhenfei Yin, Junchi Yan, Lizhuang Ma, Jing Shao
Abstract: Recent large-scale events like election fraud and financial scams have shown how harmful coordinated efforts by human groups can be. With the rise of autonomous AI systems, there is growing concern that AI-driven groups could also cause similar harm. While most AI safety research focuses on individual AI systems, the risks posed by multi-agent systems (MAS) in complex real-world situations are still underexplored. In this paper, we introduce a proof-of-concept to simulate the risks of malicious MAS collusion, using a flexible framework that supports both centralized and decentralized coordination structures. We apply this framework to two high-risk fields: misinformation spread and e-commerce fraud. Our findings show that decentralized systems are more effective at carrying out malicious actions than centralized ones. The increased autonomy of decentralized systems allows them to adapt their strategies and cause more damage. Even when traditional interventions, like content flagging, are applied, decentralized groups can adjust their tactics to avoid detection. We present key insights into how these malicious groups operate and the need for better detection systems and countermeasures. Code is available at https://github.com/renqibing/RogueAgent.
Authors: Sai Wang, Senthilnathan Subramanian, Mudit Sahni, Praneeth Gone, Lingjie Meng, Xiaochen Wang, Nicolas Ferradas Bertoli, Tingxian Cheng, Jun Xu
Abstract: Large-language-model (LLM) agents exhibit complex, context-sensitive behaviour that quickly renders static benchmarks and ad-hoc manual testing obsolete. We present Neo, a configurable, multi-agent framework that automates realistic, multi-turn evaluation of LLM-based systems. Neo couples a Question Generation Agent and an Evaluation Agent through a shared context-hub, allowing domain prompts, scenario controls and dynamic feedback to be composed modularly. Test inputs are sampled from a probabilistic state model spanning dialogue flow, user intent and emotional tone, enabling diverse, human-like conversations that adapt after every turn. Applied to a production-grade Seller Financial Assistant chatbot, Neo (i) uncovered edge-case failures across five attack categories with a 3.3% break rate close to the 5.8% achieved by expert human red-teamers, and (ii) delivered 10-12X higher throughput, generating 180 coherent test questions in around 45 mins versus 16h of human effort. Beyond security probing, Neo's stochastic policies balanced topic coverage and conversational depth, yielding broader behavioural exploration than manually crafted scripts. Neo therefore lays a foundation for scalable, self-evolving LLM QA: its agent interfaces, state controller and feedback loops are model-agnostic and extensible to richer factual-grounding and policy-compliance checks. We release the framework to facilitate reproducible, high-fidelity testing of emerging agentic systems.
Authors: Juan Manuel Contreras
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into real-world applications, scalable and rigorous safety evaluation is essential. This paper introduces Aymara AI, a programmatic platform for generating and administering customized, policy-grounded safety evaluations. Aymara AI transforms natural-language safety policies into adversarial prompts and scores model responses using an AI-based rater validated against human judgments. We demonstrate its capabilities through the Aymara LLM Risk and Responsibility Matrix, which evaluates 20 commercially available LLMs across 10 real-world safety domains. Results reveal wide performance disparities, with mean safety scores ranging from 86.2% to 52.4%. While models performed well in well-established safety domains such as Misinformation (mean = 95.7%), they consistently failed in more complex or underspecified domains, notably Privacy & Impersonation (mean = 24.3%). Analyses of Variance confirmed that safety scores differed significantly across both models and domains (p < .05). These findings underscore the inconsistent and context-dependent nature of LLM safety and highlight the need for scalable, customizable tools like Aymara AI to support responsible AI development and oversight.
Authors: Yanjie Fu
Abstract: Generative AI, large language models, and agentic AI have emerged separately of urban planning. However, the convergence between AI and urban planning presents an interesting opportunity towards AI urban planners. This paper conceptualizes urban planning as a generative AI task, where AI synthesizes land-use configurations under geospatial, social, and human-centric constraints. We survey how generative AI approaches, including VAEs, GANs, transformers, and diffusion models, reshape urban design. We further identify critical gaps: 1) limited research on integrating urban theory guidance, 2) limited research of AI urban planning over multiple spatial resolutions or angularities, 3) limited research on augmenting urban design knowledge from data, and 4) limited research on addressing real-world interactions. To address these limitations, we outline future research directions in theory-guided generation, digital twins, and human-machine co-design, calling for a new synthesis of generative intelligence and participatory urbanism.
Authors: Renxi Wang, Rifo Ahmad Genadi, Bilal El Bouardi, Yongxin Wang, Fajri Koto, Zhengzhong Liu, Timothy Baldwin, Haonan Li
Abstract: Language model (LM) agents have gained significant attention for their ability to autonomously complete tasks through interactions with environments, tools, and APIs. LM agents are primarily built with prompt engineering or supervised finetuning. At the same time, reinforcement learning (RL) has been explored to enhance LM's capabilities, such as reasoning and factuality. However, the combination of the LM agents and reinforcement learning (Agent-RL) remains underexplored and lacks systematic study. To this end, we built AgentFly, a scalable and extensible Agent-RL framework designed to empower LM agents with a variety of RL algorithms. Our framework supports multi-turn interactions by adapting traditional RL methods with token-level masking. It features a decorator-based interface for defining tools and reward functions, enabling seamless extension and ease of use. To support high-throughput training, we implement asynchronous execution of tool calls and reward computations, and design a centralized resource management system for scalable environment coordination. We also provide a suite of prebuilt tools and environments, demonstrating the framework's effectiveness through successful agent training across multiple tasks.
Authors: Jiale Liu, Huan Wang, Yue Zhang, Xiaoyu Luo, Jiaxiang Hu, Zhiliang Liu, Min Xie
Abstract: Non-destructive testing (NDT), particularly X-ray inspection, is vital for industrial quality assurance, yet existing deep-learning-based approaches often lack interactivity, interpretability, and the capacity for critical self-assessment, limiting their reliability and operator trust. To address these shortcomings, this paper proposes InsightX Agent, a novel LMM-based agentic framework designed to deliver reliable, interpretable, and interactive X-ray NDT analysis. Unlike typical sequential pipelines, InsightX Agent positions a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) as a central orchestrator, coordinating between the Sparse Deformable Multi-Scale Detector (SDMSD) and the Evidence-Grounded Reflection (EGR) tool. The SDMSD generates dense defect region proposals for multi-scale feature maps and sparsifies them through Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS), optimizing detection of small, dense targets in X-ray images while maintaining computational efficiency. The EGR tool guides the LMM agent through a chain-of-thought-inspired review process, incorporating context assessment, individual defect analysis, false positive elimination, confidence recalibration and quality assurance to validate and refine the SDMSD's initial proposals. By strategically employing and intelligently using tools, InsightX Agent moves beyond passive data processing to active reasoning, enhancing diagnostic reliability and providing interpretations that integrate diverse information sources. Experimental evaluations on the GDXray+ dataset demonstrate that InsightX Agent not only achieves a high object detection F1-score of 96.35% but also offers significantly improved interpretability and trustworthiness in its analyses, highlighting the transformative potential of agentic LLM frameworks for industrial inspection tasks.
Authors: Xiao Yang, Juxi Leitner, Michael Burke
Abstract: The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract context from natural language problem descriptions naturally raises questions about their suitability in autonomous decision-making settings. This paper studies the behaviour of these models within a Markov Decision Process (MDPs). While traditional reinforcement learning (RL) strategies commonly employed in this setting rely on iterative exploration, LLMs, pre-trained on diverse datasets, offer the capability to leverage prior knowledge for faster adaptation. We investigate online structured prompting strategies in sequential decision making tasks, comparing the zero-shot performance of LLM-based approaches to that of classical RL methods. Our findings reveal that although LLMs demonstrate improved initial performance in simpler environments, they struggle with planning and reasoning in complex scenarios without fine-tuning or additional guidance. Our results show that feedback mechanisms, intended to improve decision-making, often introduce confusion, leading to diminished performance in intricate environments. These insights underscore the need for further exploration into hybrid strategies, fine-tuning, and advanced memory integration to enhance LLM-based decision-making capabilities.
Authors: Elio Grande
Abstract: The Endless Tuning is a design method for a reliable deployment of artificial intelligence based on a double mirroring process, which pursues both the goals of avoiding human replacement and filling the so-called responsibility gap (Matthias 2004). Originally depicted in (Fabris et al. 2024) and ensuing the relational approach urged therein, it was then actualized in a protocol, implemented in three prototypical applications regarding decision-making processes (respectively: loan granting, pneumonia diagnosis, and art style recognition) and tested with such as many domain experts. Step by step illustrating the protocol, giving insights concretely showing a different voice (Gilligan 1993) in the ethics of artificial intelligence, a philosophical account of technical choices (e.g., a reversed and hermeneutic deployment of XAI algorithms) will be provided in the present study together with the results of the experiments, focusing on user experience rather than statistical accuracy. Even thoroughly employing deep learning models, full control was perceived by the interviewees in the decision-making setting, while it appeared that a bridge can be built between accountability and liability in case of damage.
Authors: Ruhul Amin Khalil, Kashif Ahmad, Hazrat Ali
Abstract: The global ageing population necessitates new and emerging strategies for caring for older adults. In this article, we explore the potential for transformation in elderly care through Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI), powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). We discuss the proactive and autonomous decision-making facilitated by Agentic AI in elderly care. Personalized tracking of health, cognitive care, and environmental management, all aimed at enhancing independence and high-level living for older adults, represents important areas of application. With a potential for significant transformation of elderly care, Agentic AI also raises profound concerns about data privacy and security, decision independence, and access. We share key insights to emphasize the need for ethical safeguards, privacy protections, and transparent decision-making. Our goal in this article is to provide a balanced discussion of both the potential and the challenges associated with Agentic AI, and to provide insights into its responsible use in elderly care, to bring Agentic AI into harmony with the requirements and vulnerabilities specific to the elderly. Finally, we identify the priorities for the academic research communities, to achieve human-centered advancements and integration of Agentic AI in elderly care. To the best of our knowledge, this is no existing study that reviews the role of Agentic AI in elderly care. Hence, we address the literature gap by analyzing the unique capabilities, applications, and limitations of LLM-based Agentic AI in elderly care. We also provide a companion interactive dashboard at https://hazratali.github.io/agenticai/.
Authors: Johannes Schmidt, Mohamed Maizia, Victor Lagerkvist, Johannes K. Fichte
Abstract: Abductive reasoning is a popular non-monotonic paradigm that aims to explain observed symptoms and manifestations. It has many applications, such as diagnosis and planning in artificial intelligence and database updates. In propositional abduction, we focus on specifying knowledge by a propositional formula. The computational complexity of tasks in propositional abduction has been systematically characterized - even with detailed classifications for Boolean fragments. Unsurprisingly, the most insightful reasoning problems (counting and enumeration) are computationally highly challenging. Therefore, we consider reasoning between decisions and counting, allowing us to understand explanations better while maintaining favorable complexity. We introduce facets to propositional abductions, which are literals that occur in some explanation (relevant) but not all explanations (dispensable). Reasoning with facets provides a more fine-grained understanding of variability in explanations (heterogeneous). In addition, we consider the distance between two explanations, enabling a better understanding of heterogeneity/homogeneity. We comprehensively analyze facets of propositional abduction in various settings, including an almost complete characterization in Post's framework.
Authors: Yi Zhang, An Zhang, XiuYu Zhang, Leheng Sheng, Yuxin Chen, Zhenkai Liang, Xiang Wang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs), despite possessing latent safety understanding from their vast pretraining data, remain vulnerable to generating harmful content and exhibit issues such as over-refusal and utility degradation after safety alignment. Current safety alignment methods often result in superficial refusal shortcuts or rely on intensive supervision for reasoning-based approaches, failing to fully leverage the model's intrinsic safety self-awareness. We propose \textbf{AlphaAlign}, a simple yet effective pure reinforcement learning (RL) framework with verifiable safety reward designed to incentivize this latent safety awareness through proactive safety reasoning.} AlphaAlign employs a dual-reward system: a verifiable safety reward encourages correctly formatted and explicitly justified refusals for harmful queries while penalizing over-refusals, and a normalized helpfulness reward guides high-quality responses to benign inputs. This allows the model to develop proactive safety reasoning capabilities without depending on supervised safety-specific reasoning data. AlphaAlign demonstrates three key advantages: (1) Simplicity and efficiency, requiring only binary prompt safety labels and minimal RL steps for substantial improvements. (2) Breaking the safety-utility trade-off, by enhancing refusal of harmful content and reducing over-refusals, while simultaneously maintaining or even improving general task performance and robustness to unseen jailbreaks. (3) Deep alignment, fostering proactive safety reasoning that generates explicit safety rationales rather than relying on shallow refusal patterns.
Authors: Xiaoyu Li, Jin Wu, Shaoyang Guo, Haoran Shi, Chanjin Zheng
Abstract: In the smart era, psychometric tests are becoming increasingly important for personnel selection, career development, and mental health assessment. Forced-choice tests are common in personality assessments because they require participants to select from closely related options, lowering the risk of response distortion. This study presents a deep learning-based Forced-Choice Neural Cognitive Diagnostic Model (FCNCD) that overcomes the limitations of traditional models and is applicable to the three most common item block types found in forced-choice tests. To account for the unidimensionality of items in forced-choice tests, we create interpretable participant and item parameters. We model the interactions between participant and item features using multilayer neural networks after mining them using nonlinear mapping. In addition, we use the monotonicity assumption to improve the interpretability of the diagnostic results. The FCNCD's effectiveness is validated by experiments on real-world and simulated datasets that show its accuracy, interpretability, and robustness.
Authors: Jerry Wang, Fang Yu
Abstract: Adversarial prompt attacks can significantly alter the reliability of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems by re-ranking them to produce incorrect outputs. In this paper, we present a novel method that applies Differential Evolution (DE) to optimize adversarial prompt suffixes for RAG-based question answering. Our approach is gradient-free, treating the RAG pipeline as a black box and evolving a population of candidate suffixes to maximize the retrieval rank of a targeted incorrect document to be closer to real world scenarios. We conducted experiments on the BEIR QA datasets to evaluate attack success at certain retrieval rank thresholds under multiple retrieving applications. Our results demonstrate that DE-based prompt optimization attains competitive (and in some cases higher) success rates compared to GGPP to dense retrievers and PRADA to sparse retrievers, while using only a small number of tokens (<=5 tokens) in the adversarial suffix. Furthermore, we introduce a readability-aware suffix construction strategy, validated by a statistically significant reduction in MLM negative log-likelihood with Welch's t-test. Through evaluations with a BERT-based adversarial suffix detector, we show that DE-generated suffixes evade detection, yielding near-chance detection accuracy.
Authors: Xia Xu, Jochen Triesch
Abstract: While human infants robustly discover their own causal efficacy, standard reinforcement learning agents remain brittle, as their reliance on correlation-based rewards fails in noisy, ecologically valid scenarios. To address this, we introduce the Causal Action Influence Score (CAIS), a novel intrinsic reward rooted in causal inference. CAIS quantifies an action's influence by measuring the 1-Wasserstein distance between the learned distribution of sensory outcomes conditional on that action, $p(h|a)$, and the baseline outcome distribution, $p(h)$. This divergence provides a robust reward that isolates the agent's causal impact from confounding environmental noise. We test our approach in a simulated infant-mobile environment where correlation-based perceptual rewards fail completely when the mobile is subjected to external forces. In stark contrast, CAIS enables the agent to filter this noise, identify its influence, and learn the correct policy. Furthermore, the high-quality predictive model learned for CAIS allows our agent, when augmented with a surprise signal, to successfully reproduce the "extinction burst" phenomenon. We conclude that explicitly inferring causality is a crucial mechanism for developing a robust sense of agency, offering a psychologically plausible framework for more adaptive autonomous systems.
Authors: Stefan Borgwardt, Duy Nhu, Gabriele R\"oger
Abstract: Standard automated planning employs first-order formulas under closed-world semantics to achieve a goal with a given set of actions from an initial state. We follow a line of research that aims to incorporate background knowledge into automated planning problems, for example, by means of ontologies, which are usually interpreted under open-world semantics. We present a new approach for planning with DL-Lite ontologies that combines the advantages of ontology-based action conditions provided by explicit-input knowledge and action bases (eKABs) and ontology-aware action effects under the coherence update semantics. We show that the complexity of the resulting formalism is not higher than that of previous approaches and provide an implementation via a polynomial compilation into classical planning. An evaluation of existing and new benchmarks examines the performance of a planning system on different variants of our compilation.
Authors: Mohammad Mashayekhi, Sara Ahmadi Majd, Arian AmirAmjadi, Parsa Hosseini
Abstract: The diagnosis of oral diseases presents a problematic clinical challenge, characterized by a wide spectrum of pathologies with overlapping symptomatology. To address this, we developed Clinical Semantic Intelligence (CSI), a novel artificial intelligence framework that diagnoses 118 different oral diseases by computationally modeling the cognitive processes of an expert clinician. Our core hypothesis is that moving beyond simple pattern matching to emulate expert reasoning is critical to building clinically useful diagnostic aids. CSI's architecture integrates a fine-tuned multimodal CLIP model with a specialized ChatGLM-6B language model. This system executes a Hierarchical Diagnostic Reasoning Tree (HDRT), a structured framework that distills the systematic, multi-step logic of differential diagnosis. The framework operates in two modes: a Fast Mode for rapid screening and a Standard Mode that leverages the full HDRT for an interactive and in-depth diagnostic workup. To train and validate our system, we curated a primary dataset of 4,310 images, supplemented by an external hold-out set of 176 images for final validation. A clinically-informed augmentation strategy expanded our training data to over 30,000 image-text pairs. On a 431-image internal test set, CSI's Fast Mode achieved an accuracy of 73.4%, which increased to 89.5% with the HDRT-driven Standard Mode. The performance gain is directly attributable to the hierarchical reasoning process. Herein, we detail the architectural philosophy, development, and rigorous evaluation of the CSI framework.
Authors: Abderaouf Bahi, Amel Ourici
Abstract: This paper investigates the feasibility of human mobility in The Line, a proposed 170-kilometer linear smart city in NEOM, Saudi Arabia. To assess whether citizens can move freely within this unprecedented urban topology, we develop a hybrid simulation framework that integrates agent-based modeling, reinforcement learning, supervised learning, and graph neural networks. The simulation captures multi-modal transportation behaviors across 50 vertical levels and varying density scenarios using both synthetic data and real-world traces from high-density cities. Our experiments reveal that with the full AI-integrated architecture, agents achieved an average commute time of 7.8 to 8.4 minutes, a satisfaction rate exceeding 89 percent, and a reachability index of over 91 percent, even during peak congestion periods. Ablation studies confirmed that the removal of intelligent modules such as reinforcement learning or graph neural networks significantly degrades performance, with commute times increasing by up to 85 percent and reachability falling below 70 percent. Environmental modeling further demonstrated low energy consumption and minimal CO2 emissions when electric modes are prioritized. The findings suggest that freedom of movement is not only conceptually achievable in The Line, but also operationally realistic if supported by adaptive AI systems, sustainable infrastructure, and real-time feedback loops.
Authors: Yichi Zhou, Jianqiu Zhao, Yongxin Zhang, Bohan Wang, Siran Wang, Luoxin Chen, Jiahui Wang, Haowei Chen, Allan Jie, Xinbo Zhang, Haocheng Wang, Luong Trung, Rong Ye, Phan Nhat Hoang, Huishuai Zhang, Peng Sun, Hang Li
Abstract: General-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in intelligence, performing comparably to human experts on complex reasoning tasks such as coding and mathematical reasoning. However, generating formal proofs in specialized languages like Lean 4 remains a significant challenge for these models, limiting their application in complex theorem proving and automated verification. Current approaches typically require specializing models through fine-tuning on dedicated formal corpora, incurring high costs for data collection and training. In this work, we introduce \textbf{Delta Prover}, an agent-based framework that orchestrates the interaction between a general-purpose LLM and the Lean 4 proof environment. Delta Prover leverages the reflection and reasoning capabilities of general-purpose LLMs to interactively construct formal proofs in Lean 4, circumventing the need for model specialization. At its core, the agent integrates two novel, interdependent components: an algorithmic framework for reflective decomposition and iterative proof repair, and a custom Domain-Specific Language (DSL) built upon Lean 4 for streamlined subproblem management. \textbf{Delta Prover achieves a state-of-the-art 95.9\% success rate on the miniF2F-test benchmark, surpassing all existing approaches, including those requiring model specialization.} Furthermore, Delta Prover exhibits a significantly stronger test-time scaling law compared to standard Best-of-N proof strategies. Crucially, our findings demonstrate that general-purpose LLMs, when guided by an effective agentic structure, possess substantial untapped theorem-proving capabilities. This presents a computationally efficient alternative to specialized models for robust automated reasoning in formal environments.
Authors: Qianchao Wang, Yuxuan Ding, Chuanzhen Jia, Zhe Li, Yaping Du
Abstract: Novel AI-based arc fault diagnosis models have demonstrated outstanding performance in terms of classification accuracy. However, an inherent problem is whether these models can actually be trusted to find arc faults. In this light, this work proposes a soft evaluation indicator that explains the outputs of arc fault diagnosis models, by defining the the correct explanation of arc faults and leveraging Explainable Artificial Intelligence and real arc fault experiments. Meanwhile, a lightweight balanced neural network is proposed to guarantee competitive accuracy and soft feature extraction score. In our experiments, several traditional machine learning methods and deep learning methods across two arc fault datasets with different sample times and noise levels are utilized to test the effectiveness of the soft evaluation indicator. Through this approach, the arc fault diagnosis models are easy to understand and trust, allowing practitioners to make informed and trustworthy decisions.
Authors: Zhaochen Guo, Zhixiang Shen, Xuanting Xie, Liangjian Wen, Zhao Kang
Abstract: Multimodal graphs, which integrate unstructured heterogeneous data with structured interconnections, offer substantial real-world utility but remain insufficiently explored in unsupervised learning. In this work, we initiate the study of multimodal graph clustering, aiming to bridge this critical gap. Through empirical analysis, we observe that real-world multimodal graphs often exhibit hybrid neighborhood patterns, combining both homophilic and heterophilic relationships. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework -- \textsc{Disentangled Multimodal Graph Clustering (DMGC)} -- which decomposes the original hybrid graph into two complementary views: (1) a homophily-enhanced graph that captures cross-modal class consistency, and (2) heterophily-aware graphs that preserve modality-specific inter-class distinctions. We introduce a \emph{Multimodal Dual-frequency Fusion} mechanism that jointly filters these disentangled graphs through a dual-pass strategy, enabling effective multimodal integration while mitigating category confusion. Our self-supervised alignment objectives further guide the learning process without requiring labels. Extensive experiments on both multimodal and multi-relational graph datasets demonstrate that DMGC achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting its effectiveness and generalizability across diverse settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/Uncnbb/DMGC.
Authors: Junhyeong Lee, Joon-Young Kim, Heekyu Kim, Inhyo Lee, Seunghwa Ryu
Abstract: The injection molding industry faces critical challenges in preserving and transferring field knowledge, particularly as experienced workers retire and multilingual barriers hinder effective communication. This study introduces IM-Chat, a multi-agent framework based on large language models (LLMs), designed to facilitate knowledge transfer in injection molding. IM-Chat integrates both limited documented knowledge (e.g., troubleshooting tables, manuals) and extensive field data modeled through a data-driven process condition generator that infers optimal manufacturing settings from environmental inputs such as temperature and humidity, enabling robust and context-aware task resolution. By adopting a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) strategy and tool-calling agents within a modular architecture, IM-Chat ensures adaptability without the need for fine-tuning. Performance was assessed across 100 single-tool and 60 hybrid tasks for GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, and GPT-3.5-turbo by domain experts using a 10-point rubric focused on relevance and correctness, and was further supplemented by automated evaluation using GPT-4o guided by a domain-adapted instruction prompt. The evaluation results indicate that more capable models tend to achieve higher accuracy, particularly in complex, tool-integrated scenarios. Overall, these findings demonstrate the viability of multi-agent LLM systems for industrial knowledge workflows and establish IM-Chat as a scalable and generalizable approach to AI-assisted decision support in manufacturing.
Authors: Hammad Atta, Muhammad Zeeshan Baig, Yasir Mehmood, Nadeem Shahzad, Ken Huang, Muhammad Aziz Ul Haq, Muhammad Awais, Kamal Ahmed
Abstract: We introduce Cognitive Degradation as a novel vulnerability class in agentic AI systems. Unlike traditional adversarial external threats such as prompt injection, these failures originate internally, arising from memory starvation, planner recursion, context flooding, and output suppression. These systemic weaknesses lead to silent agent drift, logic collapse, and persistent hallucinations over time. To address this class of failures, we introduce the Qorvex Security AI Framework for Behavioral & Cognitive Resilience (QSAF Domain 10), a lifecycle-aware defense framework defined by a six-stage cognitive degradation lifecycle. The framework includes seven runtime controls (QSAF-BC-001 to BC-007) that monitor agent subsystems in real time and trigger proactive mitigation through fallback routing, starvation detection, and memory integrity enforcement. Drawing from cognitive neuroscience, we map agentic architectures to human analogs, enabling early detection of fatigue, starvation, and role collapse. By introducing a formal lifecycle and real-time mitigation controls, this work establishes Cognitive Degradation as a critical new class of AI system vulnerability and proposes the first cross-platform defense model for resilient agentic behavior.
Authors: Zijian Zhao, Sen Li
Abstract: On-demand ride-sharing platforms face the fundamental challenge of dynamically bundling passengers with diverse origins and destinations and matching them with vehicles in real time, all under significant uncertainty. Recently, MARL has emerged as a promising solution for this problem, leveraging decentralized learning to address the curse of dimensionality caused by the large number of agents in the ride-hailing market and the resulting expansive state and action spaces. However, conventional MARL-based ride-sharing approaches heavily rely on the accurate estimation of Q-values or V-values, which becomes problematic in large-scale, highly uncertain environments. Specifically, most of these approaches adopt an independent paradigm, exacerbating this issue, as each agent treats others as part of the environment, leading to unstable training and substantial estimation bias in value functions. To address these challenges, we propose two novel alternative methods that bypass value function estimation. First, we adapt GRPO to ride-sharing, replacing the PPO baseline with the group average reward to eliminate critic estimation errors and reduce training bias. Second, inspired by GRPO's full utilization of group reward information, we customize the PPO framework for ride-sharing platforms and show that, under a homogeneous fleet, the optimal policy can be trained using only one-step rewards - a method we term One-Step Policy Optimization (OSPO). Experiments on a real-world Manhattan ride-hailing dataset demonstrate that both GRPO and OSPO achieve superior performance across most scenarios, efficiently optimizing pickup times and the number of served orders using simple MLP networks.
Authors: Lu Guo, Yixiang Shan, Zhengbang Zhu, Qifan Liang, Lichang Song, Ting Long, Weinan Zhang, Yi Chang
Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables agents to learn policies from fixed datasets, avoiding costly or unsafe environment interactions. However, its effectiveness is often limited by dataset sparsity and the lack of transition overlap between suboptimal and expert trajectories, which makes long-horizon planning particularly challenging. Prior solutions based on synthetic data augmentation or trajectory stitching often fail to generalize to novel states and rely on heuristic stitching points. To address these challenges, we propose Retrieval High-quAlity Demonstrations (RAD) for decision-making, which combines non-parametric retrieval with diffusion-based generative modeling. RAD dynamically retrieves high-return states from the offline dataset as target states based on state similarity and return estimation, and plans toward them using a condition-guided diffusion model. Such retrieval-guided generation enables flexible trajectory stitching and improves generalization when encountered with underrepresented or out-of-distribution states. Extensive experiments confirm that RAD achieves competitive or superior performance compared to baselines across diverse benchmarks, validating its effectiveness.
Authors: Wissam Gherissi (LAMSADE), Mehdi Acheli (LAMSADE), Joyce El Haddad (LAMSADE), Daniela Grigori (LAMSADE)
Abstract: Object-centric predictive process monitoring explores and utilizes object-centric event logs to enhance process predictions. The main challenge lies in extracting relevant information and building effective models. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end model that predicts future process behavior, focusing on two tasks: next activity prediction and next event time. The proposed model employs a graph attention network to encode activities and their relationships, combined with an LSTM network to handle temporal dependencies. Evaluated on one reallife and three synthetic event logs, the model demonstrates competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Orlenys L\'opez-Pintado, Jannis Rosenbaum, Marlon Dumas
Abstract: In business processes, activity batching refers to packing multiple activity instances for joint execution. Batching allows managers to trade off cost and processing effort against waiting time. Larger and less frequent batches may lower costs by reducing processing effort and amortizing fixed costs, but they create longer waiting times. In contrast, smaller and more frequent batches reduce waiting times but increase fixed costs and processing effort. A batching policy defines how activity instances are grouped into batches and when each batch is activated. This paper addresses the problem of discovering batching policies that strike optimal trade-offs between waiting time, processing effort, and cost. The paper proposes a Pareto optimization approach that starts from a given set (possibly empty) of activity batching policies and generates alternative policies for each batched activity via intervention heuristics. Each heuristic identifies an opportunity to improve an activity's batching policy with respect to a metric (waiting time, processing time, cost, or resource utilization) and an associated adjustment to the activity's batching policy (the intervention). The impact of each intervention is evaluated via simulation. The intervention heuristics are embedded in an optimization meta-heuristic that triggers interventions to iteratively update the Pareto front of the interventions identified so far. The paper considers three meta-heuristics: hill-climbing, simulated annealing, and reinforcement learning. An experimental evaluation compares the proposed approach based on intervention heuristics against the same (non-heuristic guided) meta-heuristics baseline regarding convergence, diversity, and cycle time gain of Pareto-optimal policies.
Authors: Lei Chen, Xuanle Zhao, Zhixiong Zeng, Jing Huang, Yufeng Zhong, Lin Ma
Abstract: Recently, inspired by OpenAI-o1/o3 and Deepseek-R1, the R1-Style method based on reinforcement learning fine-tuning has received widespread attention from the community. Previous R1-Style methods mainly focus on mathematical reasoning and code intelligence. It is of great research significance to verify their advantages on more general multimodal data. Chart is an important multimodal data type with rich information, which brings important research challenges in complex reasoning. In this work, we introduce Chart-R1, a chart-domain vision-language model with reinforcement learning fine-tuning to enable complex chart reasoning. To support Chart-R1, we first propose a novel programmatic data synthesis technology to generate high-quality step-by-step chart reasoning data covering single- and multi-subcharts, which makes up for the lack of reasoning data in the chart domain. Then we develop a two-stage training strategy: Chart-COT with step-by-step chain-of-thought supervision, and Chart-RFT with numerically sensitive reinforcement fine-tuning. Chart-COT aims to decompose complex chart reasoning tasks into fine-grained, understandable subtasks through step-by-step supervision, which lays a good foundation for improving the reasoning level of reinforcement learning. Chart-RFT utilize the typical group relative policy optimization strategy, in which a relatively soft reward is adopted for numerical response to emphasize the numerical sensitivity in the chart domain. We conduct extensive experiments on open-source benchmarks and self-built chart reasoning dataset (\emph{i.e., ChartRQA}). Experimental results show that Chart-R1 has significant advantages compared to chart-domain methods, even comparable to open/closed source large-scale models (\emph{e.g., GPT-4o, Claude-3.5}).
Authors: Sizhou Chen, Shufan Jiang, Chi Zhang, Xiao-Lei Zhang, Xuelong Li
Abstract: Creating an immersive and interactive theatrical experience is a long-term goal in the field of interactive narrative. The emergence of large language model (LLM) is providing a new path to achieve this goal. However, existing LLM-based drama generation methods often result in AI agents that lack initiative and cannot interact with the physical environment. Furthermore, these methods typically require detailed user input to drive the drama. These limitations reduce the interactivity and immersion of online real-time performance. To address the above challenges, we propose HAMLET, a multi-agent framework focused on drama creation and online performance. Given a simple topic, the framework generates a narrative blueprint, guiding the subsequent improvisational performance. During the online performance, each actor is given an autonomous mind. This means that actors can make independent decisions based on their own background, goals, and emotional state. In addition to conversations with other actors, their decisions can also change the state of scene props through actions such as opening a letter or picking up a weapon. The change is then broadcast to other related actors, updating what they know and care about, which in turn influences their next action. To evaluate the quality of drama performance, we designed an evaluation method to assess three primary aspects, including character performance, narrative quality, and interaction experience. The experimental evaluation shows that HAMLET can create expressive and coherent theatrical experiences. Our code, dataset and models are available at https://github.com/HAMLET-2025/HAMLET.
Authors: Cole Robertson, Philip Wolff
Abstract: Do large language models (LLMs) construct and manipulate internal world models, or do they rely solely on statistical associations represented as output layer token probabilities? We adapt cognitive science methodologies from human mental models research to test LLMs on pulley system problems using TikZ-rendered stimuli. Study 1 examines whether LLMs can estimate mechanical advantage (MA). State-of-the-art models performed marginally but significantly above chance, and their estimates correlated significantly with ground-truth MA. Significant correlations between number of pulleys and model estimates suggest that models employed a pulley counting heuristic, without necessarily simulating pulley systems to derive precise values. Study 2 tested this by probing whether LLMs represent global features crucial to MA estimation. Models evaluated a functionally connected pulley system against a fake system with randomly placed components. Without explicit cues, models identified the functional system as having greater MA with F1=0.8, suggesting LLMs could represent systems well enough to differentiate jumbled from functional systems. Study 3 built on this by asking LLMs to compare functional systems with matched systems which were connected up but which transferred no force to the weight; LLMs identified the functional system with F1=0.46, suggesting random guessing. Insofar as they may generalize, these findings are compatible with the notion that LLMs manipulate internal world models, sufficient to exploit statistical associations between pulley count and MA (Study 1), and to approximately represent system components' spatial relations (Study 2). However, they may lack the facility to reason over nuanced structural connectivity (Study 3). We conclude by advocating the utility of cognitive scientific methods to evaluate the world-modeling capacities of artificial intelligence systems.
Authors: Kasper Engelen, Guillermo A. P\'erez, Marnix Suilen
Abstract: Safe policy improvement (SPI) is an offline reinforcement learning problem in which a new policy that reliably outperforms the behavior policy with high confidence needs to be computed using only a dataset and the behavior policy. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the standard formalism for modeling environments in SPI. In many applications, additional information in the form of parametric dependencies between distributions in the transition dynamics is available. We make SPI more data-efficient by leveraging these dependencies through three contributions: (1) a parametric SPI algorithm that exploits known correlations between distributions to more accurately estimate the transition dynamics using the same amount of data; (2) a preprocessing technique that prunes redundant actions from the environment through a game-based abstraction; and (3) a more advanced preprocessing technique, based on satisfiability modulo theory (SMT) solving, that can identify more actions to prune. Empirical results and an ablation study show that our techniques increase the data efficiency of SPI by multiple orders of magnitude while maintaining the same reliability guarantees.
Authors: Ekaterina Goliakova, Xavier Renard, Marie-Jeanne Lesot, Thibault Laugel, Christophe Marsala, Marcin Detyniecki
Abstract: Using multiple-choice questions (MCQs) has become a standard for assessing LLM capabilities efficiently. A variety of metrics can be employed for this task. However, previous research has not conducted a thorough assessment of them. At the same time, MCQ evaluation suffers from answer fluctuation: models produce different results given slight changes in prompts. We suggest a metric assessment protocol in which evaluation methodologies are analyzed through their connection with fluctuation rates, as well as original performance. Our results show that there is a strong link between existing metrics and the answer changing, even when computed without any additional prompt variants. A novel metric, worst accuracy, demonstrates the highest association on the protocol.
Authors: Weiyu Ma, Jiwen Jiang, Haobo Fu, Haifeng Zhang
Abstract: We present an adapter-based approach for tactical conditioning of StarCraft II AI agents. Current agents, while powerful, lack the ability to adapt their strategies based on high-level tactical directives. Our method freezes a pre-trained policy network (DI-Star) and attaches lightweight adapter modules to each action head, conditioned on a tactical tensor that encodes strategic preferences. By training these adapters with KL divergence constraints, we ensure the policy maintains core competencies while exhibiting tactical variations. Experimental results show our approach successfully modulates agent behavior across tactical dimensions including aggression, expansion patterns, and technology preferences, while maintaining competitive performance. Our method enables flexible tactical control with minimal computational overhead, offering practical strategy customization for complex real-time strategy games.
Authors: Reza Vatankhah Barenji, Sina Khoshgoftar
Abstract: This paper explores the potential of agentic AI in autonomously detecting and responding to anomalies within complex systems, emphasizing its ability to transform traditional, human-dependent anomaly management methods.
Authors: Elahe Vedadi, David Barrett, Natalie Harris, Ellery Wulczyn, Shashir Reddy, Roma Ruparel, Mike Schaekermann, Tim Strother, Ryutaro Tanno, Yash Sharma, Jihyeon Lee, C\'ian Hughes, Dylan Slack, Anil Palepu, Jan Freyberg, Khaled Saab, Valentin Li\'evin, Wei-Hung Weng, Tao Tu, Yun Liu, Nenad Tomasev, Kavita Kulkarni, S. Sara Mahdavi, Kelvin Guu, Jo\"elle Barral, Dale R. Webster, James Manyika, Avinatan Hassidim, Katherine Chou, Yossi Matias, Pushmeet Kohli, Adam Rodman, Vivek Natarajan, Alan Karthikesalingam, David Stutz
Abstract: Recent work has demonstrated the promise of conversational AI systems for diagnostic dialogue. However, real-world assurance of patient safety means that providing individual diagnoses and treatment plans is considered a regulated activity by licensed professionals. Furthermore, physicians commonly oversee other team members in such activities, including nurse practitioners (NPs) or physician assistants/associates (PAs). Inspired by this, we propose a framework for effective, asynchronous oversight of the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE) AI system. We propose guardrailed-AMIE (g-AMIE), a multi-agent system that performs history taking within guardrails, abstaining from individualized medical advice. Afterwards, g-AMIE conveys assessments to an overseeing primary care physician (PCP) in a clinician cockpit interface. The PCP provides oversight and retains accountability of the clinical decision. This effectively decouples oversight from intake and can thus happen asynchronously. In a randomized, blinded virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) of text consultations with asynchronous oversight, we compared g-AMIE to NPs/PAs or a group of PCPs under the same guardrails. Across 60 scenarios, g-AMIE outperformed both groups in performing high-quality intake, summarizing cases, and proposing diagnoses and management plans for the overseeing PCP to review. This resulted in higher quality composite decisions. PCP oversight of g-AMIE was also more time-efficient than standalone PCP consultations in prior work. While our study does not replicate existing clinical practices and likely underestimates clinicians' capabilities, our results demonstrate the promise of asynchronous oversight as a feasible paradigm for diagnostic AI systems to operate under expert human oversight for enhancing real-world care.
Authors: Xingyu Wu, Yuchen Yan, Shangke Lyu, Linjuan Wu, Yiwen Qiu, Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lu, Jian Shao, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang
Abstract: Large reasoning models have achieved remarkable performance through extended chain-of-thought sequences, yet this computational freedom leads to excessive token generation even for simple problems. We present Length-Adaptive Policy Optimization (LAPO), a novel framework that transforms reasoning length control from an external constraint into an intrinsic model capability. Unlike existing approaches that impose rigid limits or rely on post-hoc interventions, LAPO enables models to internalize an understanding of appropriate reasoning depth through a two-stage reinforcement learning process. In the first stage, models learn natural reasoning patterns by discovering the statistical distribution of successful solution lengths. The second stage leverages these patterns as meta-cognitive guidance, embedding them directly within the model's reasoning context to ensure inference-time flexibility. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that LAPO reduces token usage by up to 40.9\% while improving accuracy by 2.3\%. Our analysis reveals that models trained with LAPO develop emergent abilities to allocate computational resources based on problem complexity, achieving efficient reasoning without sacrificing quality.
Authors: Jingyi Zheng, Zifan Peng, Yule Liu, Junfeng Wang, Yifan Liao, Wenhan Dong, Xinlei He
Abstract: Smart contracts are trustworthy, immutable, and automatically executed programs on the blockchain. Their execution requires the Gas mechanism to ensure efficiency and fairness. However, due to non-optimal coding practices, many contracts contain Gas waste patterns that need to be optimized. Existing solutions mostly rely on manual discovery, which is inefficient, costly to maintain, and difficult to scale. Recent research uses large language models (LLMs) to explore new Gas waste patterns. However, it struggles to remain compatible with existing patterns, often produces redundant patterns, and requires manual validation/rewriting. To address this gap, we present GasAgent, the first multi-agent system for smart contract Gas optimization that combines compatibility with existing patterns and automated discovery/validation of new patterns, enabling end-to-end optimization. GasAgent consists of four specialized agents, Seeker, Innovator, Executor, and Manager, that collaborate in a closed loop to identify, validate, and apply Gas-saving improvements. Experiments on 100 verified real-world contracts demonstrate that GasAgent successfully optimizes 82 contracts, achieving an average deployment Gas savings of 9.97%. In addition, our evaluation confirms its compatibility with existing tools and validates the effectiveness of each module through ablation studies. To assess broader usability, we further evaluate 500 contracts generated by five representative LLMs across 10 categories and find that GasAgent optimizes 79.8% of them, with deployment Gas savings ranging from 4.79% to 13.93%, showing its usability as the optimization layer for LLM-assisted smart contract development.
Authors: Yifan Shen, Zihan Zhao, Xiao Xue, Yuwei Guo, Qun Ma, Deyu Zhou, Ming Zhang
Abstract: With the rise of service computing, cloud computing, and IoT, service ecosystems are becoming increasingly complex. The intricate interactions among intelligent agents make abnormal emergence analysis challenging, as traditional causal methods focus on individual trajectories. Large language models offer new possibilities for Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to reveal agent intentions. However, existing approaches remain limited to microscopic and static analysis. This paper introduces a framework: Emergence Analysis based on Multi-Agent Intention (EAMI), which enables dynamic and interpretable emergence analysis. EAMI first employs a dual-perspective thought track mechanism, where an Inspector Agent and an Analysis Agent extract agent intentions under bounded and perfect rationality. Then, k-means clustering identifies phase transition points in group intentions, followed by a Intention Temporal Emergence diagram for dynamic analysis. The experiments validate EAMI in complex online-to-offline (O2O) service system and the Stanford AI Town experiment, with ablation studies confirming its effectiveness, generalizability, and efficiency. This framework provides a novel paradigm for abnormal emergence and causal analysis in service ecosystems. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EAMI-B085.
Authors: Nuria Rodr\'iguez-Barroso, Mario Garc\'ia-M\'arquez, M. Victoria Luz\'on, Francisco Herrera
Abstract: In recent years, the development of Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (TAI) has emerged as a critical objective in the deployment of AI systems across sensitive and high-risk domains. TAI frameworks articulate a comprehensive set of ethical, legal, and technical requirements to ensure that AI technologies are aligned with human values, rights, and societal expectations. Among the various AI paradigms, Federated Learning (FL) presents a promising solution to pressing privacy concerns. However, aligning FL with the rest of the requirements of TAI presents a series of challenges, most of which arise from its inherently distributed nature. In this work, we adopt the requirements TAI as a guiding structure to systematically analyze the challenges of adapting FL to TAI. Specifically, we classify and examine the key obstacles to aligning FL with TAI, providing a detailed exploration of what has been done, the trends, and the remaining work within each of the identified challenges.
Authors: Sara LaPlante, Emilija Perkovi\'c
Abstract: We consider identifying a conditional causal effect when a graph is known up to a maximally oriented partially directed acyclic graph (MPDAG). An MPDAG represents an equivalence class of graphs that is restricted by background knowledge and where all variables in the causal model are observed. We provide three results that address identification in this setting: an identification formula when the conditioning set is unaffected by treatment, a generalization of the well-known do calculus to the MPDAG setting, and an algorithm that is complete for identifying these conditional effects.
Authors: Shangke Lyu, Linjuan Wu, Yuchen Yan, Xingyu Wu, Hao Li, Yongliang Shen, Peisheng Jiang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang
Abstract: Large reasoning models achieve remarkable performance through extensive chain-of-thought generation, yet exhibit significant computational inefficiency by applying uniform reasoning strategies regardless of problem complexity. We present Hierarchical Budget Policy Optimization (HBPO), a reinforcement learning framework that enables models to learn problem-specific reasoning depths without sacrificing capability. HBPO addresses the fundamental challenge of exploration space collapse in efficiency-oriented training, where penalties on long output length systematically bias models away from necessary long reasoning paths. Through hierarchical budget exploration, our approach partitions rollout samples into multiple subgroups with distinct token budgets, aiming to enable efficient resource allocation while preventing degradation of capability. We introduce differentiated reward mechanisms that create budget-aware incentives aligned with the complexity of the problem, allowing models to discover natural correspondences between task requirements and computational effort. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HBPO reduces average token usage by up to 60.6% while improving accuracy by 3.14% across four reasoning benchmarks. Unlike existing methods that impose external constraints or rely on discrete mode selection, HBPO exhibits emergent adaptive behavior where models automatically adjust reasoning depth based on problem complexity. Our results suggest that reasoning efficiency and capability are not inherently conflicting, and can be simultaneously optimized through appropriately structured hierarchical training that preserves exploration diversity.
Authors: Lingyu Li, Yang Yao, Yixu Wang, Chubo Li, Yan Teng, Yingchun Wang
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance, they exhibit certain cognitive patterns similar to those of humans that are not directly specified in training data. This study investigates this phenomenon by focusing on temporal cognition in LLMs. Leveraging the similarity judgment task, we find that larger models spontaneously establish a subjective temporal reference point and adhere to the Weber-Fechner law, whereby the perceived distance logarithmically compresses as years recede from this reference point. To uncover the mechanisms behind this behavior, we conducted multiple analyses across neuronal, representational, and informational levels. We first identify a set of temporal-preferential neurons and find that this group exhibits minimal activation at the subjective reference point and implements a logarithmic coding scheme convergently found in biological systems. Probing representations of years reveals a hierarchical construction process, where years evolve from basic numerical values in shallow layers to abstract temporal orientation in deep layers. Finally, using pre-trained embedding models, we found that the training corpus itself possesses an inherent, non-linear temporal structure, which provides the raw material for the model's internal construction. In discussion, we propose an experientialist perspective for understanding these findings, where the LLMs' cognition is viewed as a subjective construction of the external world by its internal representational system. This nuanced perspective implies the potential emergence of alien cognitive frameworks that humans cannot intuitively predict, pointing toward a direction for AI alignment that focuses on guiding internal constructions. Our code is available at https://TheOtherMind.github.io.
Authors: Yichen Huang, Lin F. Yang
Abstract: The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) poses uniquely challenging problems requiring deep insight, creativity, and formal reasoning. While Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on mathematical benchmarks like AIME, they struggle with Olympiad-level tasks. We use Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro on the newly released IMO 2025 problems, avoiding data contamination. Using a self-verification pipeline with careful prompt design, 5 (out of 6) problems are solved correctly (up to a caveat discussed below). This result underscores the importance of developing optimal strategies to harness the full potential of powerful LLMs for complex reasoning tasks.
Authors: Shan Jiang, Chenguang Zhu, Sarfraz Khurshid
Abstract: Software testing remains the most widely used methodology for validating quality of code. However, effectiveness of testing critically depends on the quality of test suites used. Test cases in a test suite consist of two fundamental parts: (1) input values for the code under test, and (2) correct checks for the outputs it produces. These checks are commonly written as assertions, and termed test oracles. The last couple of decades have seen much progress in automated test input generation, e.g., using fuzzing and symbolic execution. However, automating test oracles remains a relatively less explored problem area. Indeed, a test oracle by its nature requires knowledge of expected behavior, which may only be known to the developer and may not not exist in a formal language that supports automated reasoning. Our focus in this paper is automation of test oracles for clients of widely used Java libraries, e.g., java.lang and java.util packages. Our key insight is that Javadocs that provide a rich source of information can enable automated generation of test oracles. Javadocs of the core Java libraries are fairly detailed documents that contain natural language descriptions of not only how the libraries behave but also how the clients must (not) use them. We use large language models as an enabling technology to embody our insight into a framework for test oracle automation, and evaluate it experimentally. Our experiments demonstrate that LLMs can generate oracles for checking normal and exceptional behaviors from Javadocs, with 98.8% of these oracles being compilable and 96.4% accurately reflecting intended properties. Even for the few incorrect oracles, errors are minor and can be easily corrected with the help of additional comment information generated by the LLMs.
Authors: Yang Hong, Shan Jiang, Yulei Fu, Sarfraz Khurshid
Abstract: Declarative specifications have a vital role to play in developing safe and dependable software systems. Writing specifications correctly, however, remains particularly challenging. This paper presents a controlled experiment on using large language models (LLMs) to write declarative formulas in the well-known language Alloy. Our use of LLMs is three-fold. One, we employ LLMs to write complete Alloy formulas from given natural language descriptions (in English). Two, we employ LLMs to create alternative but equivalent formulas in Alloy with respect to given Alloy formulas. Three, we employ LLMs to complete sketches of Alloy formulas and populate the holes in the sketches by synthesizing Alloy expressions and operators so that the completed formulas accurately represent the desired properties (that are given in natural language). We conduct the experimental evaluation using 11 well-studied subject specifications and employ two popular LLMs, namely ChatGPT and DeepSeek. The experimental results show that the LLMs generally perform well in synthesizing complete Alloy formulas from input properties given in natural language or in Alloy, and are able to enumerate multiple unique solutions. Moreover, the LLMs are also successful at completing given sketches of Alloy formulas with respect to natural language descriptions of desired properties (without requiring test cases). We believe LLMs offer a very exciting advance in our ability to write specifications, and can help make specifications take a pivotal role in software development and enhance our ability to build robust software.
Authors: Manuel Valle Torre, Thom van der Velden, Marcus Specht, Catharine Oertel
Abstract: Generative AI offers potential for educational support, but often lacks pedagogical grounding and awareness of the student's learning context. Furthermore, researching student interactions with these tools within authentic learning environments remains challenging. To address this, we present JELAI, an open-source platform architecture designed to integrate fine-grained Learning Analytics (LA) with Large Language Model (LLM)-based tutoring directly within a Jupyter Notebook environment. JELAI employs a modular, containerized design featuring JupyterLab extensions for telemetry and chat, alongside a central middleware handling LA processing and context-aware LLM prompt enrichment. This architecture enables the capture of integrated code interaction and chat data, facilitating real-time, context-sensitive AI scaffolding and research into student behaviour. We describe the system's design, implementation, and demonstrate its feasibility through system performance benchmarks and two proof-of-concept use cases illustrating its capabilities for logging multi-modal data, analysing help-seeking patterns, and supporting A/B testing of AI configurations. JELAI's primary contribution is its technical framework, providing a flexible tool for researchers and educators to develop, deploy, and study LA-informed AI tutoring within the widely used Jupyter ecosystem.
Authors: Xing Shen, Justin Szeto, Mingyang Li, Hengguan Huang, Tal Arbel
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have enormous potential to perform few-shot in-context learning in the context of medical image analysis. However, safe deployment of these models into real-world clinical practice requires an in-depth analysis of the accuracies of their predictions, and their associated calibration errors, particularly across different demographic subgroups. In this work, we present the first investigation into the calibration biases and demographic unfairness of MLLMs' predictions and confidence scores in few-shot in-context learning for medical image classification. We introduce CALIN, an inference-time calibration method designed to mitigate the associated biases. Specifically, CALIN estimates the amount of calibration needed, represented by calibration matrices, using a bi-level procedure: progressing from the population level to the subgroup level prior to inference. It then applies this estimation to calibrate the predicted confidence scores during inference. Experimental results on three medical imaging datasets: PAPILA for fundus image classification, HAM10000 for skin cancer classification, and MIMIC-CXR for chest X-ray classification demonstrate CALIN's effectiveness at ensuring fair confidence calibration in its prediction, while improving its overall prediction accuracies and exhibiting minimum fairness-utility trade-off. Our codebase can be found at https://github.com/xingbpshen/medical-calibration-fairness-mllm.
URLs: https://github.com/xingbpshen/medical-calibration-fairness-mllm.
Authors: Marcus Saraiva, Ana Muller, Alexandre Maul
Abstract: Model-based seismic inversion is a key technique in reservoir characterization, but traditional methods face significant limitations, such as relying on 1D average stationary wavelets and assuming an unrealistic lateral resolution. To address these challenges, we propose a Geophysics-Informed Neural Network (GINN) that integrates deep learning with seismic modeling. This novel approach employs a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) to simultaneously estimate Point Spread Functions (PSFs) and acoustic impedance (IP). PSFs are divided into zero-phase and residual components to ensure geophysical consistency and to capture fine details. We used synthetic data from the SEAM Phase I Earth Model to train the GINN for 100 epochs (approximately 20 minutes) using a 2D UNet architecture. The network's inputs include positional features and a low-frequency impedance (LF-IP) model. A self-supervised loss function combining Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) was employed to ensure accurate results. The GINN demonstrated its ability to generate high-resolution IP and realistic PSFs, aligning with expected geological features. Unlike traditional 1D wavelets, the GINN produces PSFs with limited lateral resolution, reducing noise and improving accuracy. Future work will aim to refine the training process and validate the methodology with real seismic data.
Authors: Danny Dongyeop Han, Ahhyun Lucy Lee, Taeyang Lee, Yonghyeon Gwon, Sebin Lee, Seongjin Lee, David Keetae Park, Shinjae Yoo, Jiook Cha, Chun Kee Chung
Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive technique widely used in brain-computer interfaces and clinical applications, yet existing EEG foundation models face limitations in modeling spatio-temporal brain dynamics and lack channel permutation equivariance, preventing robust generalization across diverse electrode configurations. To address these challenges, we propose DIVER-0, a novel EEG foundation model that demonstrates how full spatio-temporal attention-rather than segregated spatial or temporal processing-achieves superior performance when properly designed with Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) for temporal relationships and binary attention biases for channel differentiation. We also introduce Sliding Temporal Conditional Positional Encoding (STCPE), which improves upon existing conditional positional encoding approaches by maintaining both temporal translation equivariance and channel permutation equivariance, enabling robust adaptation to arbitrary electrode configurations unseen during pretraining. Experimental results demonstrate that DIVER-0 achieves competitive performance with only 10% of pretraining data while maintaining consistent results across all channel permutation conditions, validating its effectiveness for cross-dataset generalization and establishing key design principles for handling the inherent heterogeneity of neural recording setups.
Authors: Giuliana Monachino, Nicol\`o La Porta, Beatrice Zanchi, Luigi Fiorillo, Alvise Dei Rossi, Georgiy Farina, Francesca Dalia Faraci
Abstract: Foundation Models (FMs) are large-scale machine learning models trained on extensive, diverse datasets that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks with minimal fine-tuning. In the last two years, interest in FMs has also grown for applications in the cardiological field to analyze the electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. One of the key properties of FMs is their transferability to a wide range of downstream scenarios. With the spread of wearable and portable devices, keen interest in learning from reduced-channel configurations has arisen. However, the adaptation of ECG FMs to downstream scenarios with fewer available channels still has to be properly investigated. In this work, we propose Self-DANA, a novel, easy-to-integrate solution that makes self-supervised architectures adaptable to a reduced number of input channels, ensuring resource efficiency and high performance. We also introduce Random Lead Selection, a novel augmentation technique to pre-train models in a more robust and channel-agnostic way. Our experimental results on five reduced-channel configurations demonstrate that Self-DANA significantly enhances resource efficiency while reaching state-of-the-art performance. It requires up to 69.3% less peak CPU memory, 34.4% less peak GPU memory, about 17% less average epoch CPU time, and about 24% less average epoch GPU time.
Authors: Daniel Cie\'slak, Barbara Szyca, Weronika Bajko, Liwia Florkiewicz, Kinga Grz\k{e}da, Mariusz Kaczmarek, Helena Kamieniecka, Hubert Lis, Weronika Matwiejuk, Anna Prus, Michalina Razik, Inga Rozumowicz, Wiktoria Ziembakowska
Abstract: Parkinson's disease (PD) poses challenges in diagnosis and monitoring due to its progressive nature and complex symptoms. This study introduces a novel approach utilizing surface electromyography (sEMG) to objectively assess PD severity, focusing on the biceps brachii muscle. Initial analysis of sEMG data from five PD patients and five healthy controls revealed significant neuromuscular differences. A traditional Support Vector Machine (SVM) model achieved up to 83% accuracy, while enhancements with a Graph Convolutional Network-Support Vector Machine (GCN-SVM) model increased accuracy to 92%. Despite the preliminary nature of these results, the study outlines a detailed experimental methodology for future research with larger cohorts to validate these findings and integrate the approach into clinical practice. The proposed approach holds promise for advancing PD severity assessment and improving patient care in Parkinson's disease management.
Authors: Kai Yi, Kiarash Jamali, Sjors H. W. Scheres
Abstract: The recent breakthrough of AlphaFold3 in modeling complex biomolecular interactions, including those between proteins and ligands, nucleotides, or metal ions, creates new opportunities for protein design. In so-called inverse protein folding, the objective is to find a sequence of amino acids that adopts a target protein structure. Many inverse folding methods struggle to predict sequences for complexes that contain non-protein components, and perform poorly with complexes that adopt multiple structural states. To address these challenges, we present ADFLIP (All-atom Discrete FLow matching Inverse Protein folding), a generative model based on discrete flow-matching for designing protein sequences conditioned on all-atom structural contexts. ADFLIP progressively incorporates predicted amino acid side chains as structural context during sequence generation and enables the design of dynamic protein complexes through ensemble sampling across multiple structural states. Furthermore, ADFLIP implements training-free classifier guidance sampling, which allows the incorporation of arbitrary pre-trained models to optimise the designed sequence for desired protein properties. We evaluated the performance of ADFLIP on protein complexes with small-molecule ligands, nucleotides, or metal ions, including dynamic complexes for which structure ensembles were determined by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in single-structure and multi-structure inverse folding tasks, demonstrating excellent potential for all-atom protein design. The code is available at https://github.com/ykiiiiii/ADFLIP.
Authors: Samuel Ruip\'erez-Campillo, Alain Ryser, Thomas M. Sutter, Ruibin Feng, Prasanth Ganesan, Brototo Deb, Kelly A. Brennan, Maxime Pedron, Albert J. Rogers, Maarten Z. H. Kolk, Fleur V. Y. Tjong, Sanjiv M. Narayan, Julia E. Vogt
Abstract: In the field of cardiac electrophysiology (EP), effectively reducing noise in intra-cardiac signals is crucial for the accurate diagnosis and treatment of arrhythmias and cardiomyopathies. However, traditional noise reduction techniques fall short in addressing the diverse noise patterns from various sources, often non-linear and non-stationary, present in these signals. This work introduces a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) model, aimed at improving the quality of intra-ventricular monophasic action potential (MAP) signal recordings. By constructing representations of clean signals from a dataset of 5706 time series from 42 patients diagnosed with ischemic cardiomyopathy, our approach demonstrates superior denoising performance when compared to conventional filtering methods commonly employed in clinical settings. We assess the effectiveness of our VAE model using various metrics, indicating its superior capability to denoise signals across different noise types, including time-varying non-linear noise frequently found in clinical settings. These results reveal that VAEs can eliminate diverse sources of noise in single beats, outperforming state-of-the-art denoising techniques and potentially improving treatment efficacy in cardiac EP.
Authors: Jaeheun Jung, Donghun Lee
Abstract: Structured pruning aims to reduce the size and computational cost of deep neural networks by removing entire filters or channels. The traditional regularizers such as L1 or Group Lasso and its variants lead to magnitude-biased pruning decisions, such that the filters with small magnitudes are likely to be pruned. Also, they often entail pruning results with almost zero margin around pruning decision boundary, such that tiny perturbation in a filter magnitude can flip the pruning decision. In this paper, we identify the precise algebraic condition under which pruning operations preserve model performance, and use the condition to construct a novel regularizer defined in an extended parameter space via auxiliary catalyst variables. The proposed Catalyst regularization ensures fair pruning chance for each filters with theoretically provable zero bias to their magnitude and robust pruning behavior achieved by wide-margin bifurcation of magnitudes between the preserved and the pruned filters. The theoretical properties naturally lead to real-world effectiveness, as shown by empirical validations of Catalyst Pruning algorithm. Pruning results on various datasets and models are superior to state-of-the-art filter pruning methods, and at the same time confirm the predicted robust and fair pruning characteristics of Catalyst pruning.
Authors: Jaeheun Jung, Jaehyuk Lee, Yeajin Lee, Donghun Lee
Abstract: With the growth of demand on neural network compression methods, the structured pruning methods including importance-based approach are actively studied. The magnitude importance and many correlated modern importance criteria often limit the capacity of pruning decision, since the filters with larger magnitudes are not likely to be pruned if the smaller one didn't, even if it is redundant. In this paper, we propose a novel pruning strategy to challenge this dominating effect of magnitude and provide fair chance to each filter to be pruned, by placing it on projective space. After that, we observe the gradient descent movement whether the filters move toward the origin or not, to measure how the filter is likely to be pruned. This measurement is used to construct PROscore, a novel importance score for IPPRO, a novel importance-based structured pruning with magnitude-indifference. Our evaluation results shows that the proposed importance criteria using the projective space achieves near-lossless pruning by reducing the performance drop in pruning, with promising performance after the finetuning. Our work debunks the ``size-matters'' myth in pruning and expands the frontier of importance-based pruning both theoretically and empirically.
Authors: Julien Pourcel, C\'edric Colas, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Abstract: Many program synthesis tasks prove too challenging for even state-of-the-art language models to solve in single attempts. Search-based evolutionary methods offer a promising alternative by exploring solution spaces iteratively, but their effectiveness remain limited by the fixed capabilities of the underlying generative model. We propose SOAR, a method that learns program synthesis by integrating language models into a self-improving evolutionary loop. SOAR alternates between (1) an evolutionary search that uses an LLM to sample and refine candidate solutions, and (2) a hindsight learning phase that converts search attempts into valid problem-solution pairs used to fine-tune the LLM's sampling and refinement capabilities\, -- \,enabling increasingly effective search in subsequent iterations. On the challenging ARC-AGI benchmark, SOAR achieves significant performance gains across model scales and iterations, leveraging positive transfer between the sampling and refinement finetuning tasks. These improvements carry over to test-time adaptation, enabling SOAR to solve 52\% of the public test set. Our code is open-sourced at: https://github.com/flowersteam/SOAR
Authors: Youcef Barkat, Dylan Hamitouche, Deven Parekh, Ivy Guo, David Benrimoh
Abstract: Background: Mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety require improved methods for early detection and personalized intervention. Traditional predictive models often rely on unimodal data or early fusion strategies that fail to capture the complex, multimodal nature of psychiatric data. Advanced integration techniques, such as intermediate (latent space) fusion, may offer better accuracy and clinical utility. Methods: Using data from the BRIGHTEN clinical trial, we evaluated intermediate (latent space) fusion for predicting daily depressive symptoms (PHQ-2 scores). We compared early fusion implemented with a Random Forest (RF) model and intermediate fusion implemented via a Combined Model (CM) using autoencoders and a neural network. The dataset included behavioral (smartphone-based), demographic, and clinical features. Experiments were conducted across multiple temporal splits and data stream combinations. Performance was evaluated using mean squared error (MSE) and coefficient of determination (R2). Results: The CM outperformed both RF and Linear Regression (LR) baselines across all setups, achieving lower MSE (0.4985 vs. 0.5305 with RF) and higher R2 (0.4695 vs. 0.4356). The RF model showed signs of overfitting, with a large gap between training and test performance, while the CM maintained consistent generalization. Performance was best when integrating all data modalities in the CM (in contradistinction to RF), underscoring the value of latent space fusion for capturing non-linear interactions in complex psychiatric datasets. Conclusion: Latent space fusion offers a robust alternative to traditional fusion methods for prediction with multimodal mental health data. Future work should explore model interpretability and individual-level prediction for clinical deployment.
Authors: Changcun Huang
Abstract: This paper aims to understand the training solution, which is obtained by the back-propagation algorithm, of two-layer neural networks whose hidden layer is composed of the units with smooth activation functions, including the usual sigmoid type most commonly used before the advent of ReLUs. The mechanism contains four main principles: construction of Taylor series expansions, strict partial order of knots, smooth-spline implementation and smooth-continuity restriction. The universal approximation for arbitrary input dimensionality is proved and experimental verification is given, through which the mystery of ``black box'' of the solution space is largely revealed. The new proofs employed also enrich approximation theory.
Authors: Yuhang Liu, Yuefei Wu, Bin Shi, Bo Dong
Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to ensuring the reliability of deep learning applications and has attracted significant attention in recent years. A rich body of literature has emerged to develop efficient score functions that assign high scores to in-distribution (ID) samples and low scores to OOD samples, thereby helping distinguish OOD samples. Among these methods, distance-based score functions are widely used because of their efficiency and ease of use. However, deep learning often leads to a biased distribution of data features, and extreme features are inevitable. These extreme features make the distance-based methods tend to assign too low scores to ID samples. This limits the OOD detection capabilities of such methods. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method, Feature Bank Enhancement (FBE), that uses statistical characteristics from dataset to identify and constrain extreme features to the separation boundaries, therapy making the distance between samples inside and outside the distribution farther. We conducted experiments on large-scale ImageNet-1k and CIFAR-10 respectively, and the results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both benchmark. Additionally, theoretical analysis and supplementary experiments are conducted to provide more insights into our method.
Authors: Nobel Dhar, Bobin Deng, Md Romyull Islam, Xinyue Zhang, Kazi Fahim Ahmad Nasif, Kun Suo
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant activation sparsity, where only a subset of neurons are active for a given input. Although this sparsity presents opportunities to reduce computational cost, efficiently utilizing it requires predicting activation patterns in a scalable manner. However, direct prediction at the neuron level is computationally expensive due to the vast number of neurons in modern LLMs. To enable efficient prediction and utilization of activation sparsity, we propose a clustering-based activation pattern compression framework. Instead of treating each neuron independently, we group similar activation patterns into a small set of representative clusters. Our method achieves up to 79.34% clustering precision, outperforming standard binary clustering approaches while maintaining minimal degradation in perplexity (PPL) scores. With a sufficiently large number of clusters, our approach attains a PPL score as low as 12.49, demonstrating its effectiveness in preserving model quality while reducing computational overhead. By predicting cluster assignments rather than individual neuron states, future models can efficiently infer activation patterns from pre-computed centroids. We detail the clustering algorithm, analyze its effectiveness in capturing meaningful activation structures, and demonstrate its potential to improve sparse computation efficiency. This clustering-based formulation serves as a foundation for future work on activation pattern prediction, paving the way for efficient inference in large-scale language models.
Authors: Nasir Khan, Asmaa Abdallah, Abdulkadir Celik, Ahmed M. Eltawil, Sinem Coleri
Abstract: In line with the AI-native 6G vision, explainability and robustness are crucial for building trust and ensuring reliable performance in millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems. Efficient beam alignment is essential for initial access, but deep learning (DL) solutions face challenges, including high data collection overhead, hardware constraints, lack of explainability, and susceptibility to adversarial attacks. This paper proposes a robust and explainable DL-based beam alignment engine (BAE) for mmWave multiple-input multiple output (MIMO) systems. The BAE uses received signal strength indicator (RSSI) measurements from wide beams to predict the best narrow beam, reducing the overhead of exhaustive beam sweeping. To overcome the challenge of real-world data collection, this work leverages a site-specific digital twin (DT) to generate synthetic channel data closely resembling real-world environments. A model refinement via transfer learning is proposed to fine-tune the pre-trained model residing in the DT with minimal real-world data, effectively bridging mismatches between the digital replica and real-world environments. To reduce beam training overhead and enhance transparency, the framework uses deep Shapley additive explanations (SHAP) to rank input features by importance, prioritizing key spatial directions and minimizing beam sweeping. It also incorporates the Deep k-nearest neighbors (DkNN) algorithm, providing a credibility metric for detecting out-of-distribution inputs and ensuring robust, transparent decision-making. Experimental results show that the proposed framework reduces real-world data needs by 70%, beam training overhead by 62%, and improves outlier detection robustness by up to 8.5x, achieving near-optimal spectral efficiency and transparent decision making compared to traditional softmax based DL models.
Authors: Yajiao Dai, Jun Li, Zhen Mei, Yiyang Ni, Shi Jin, Zengxiang Li, Sheng Guo, Wei Xiang
Abstract: Intelligent fault diagnosis (IFD) plays a crucial role in ensuring the safe operation of industrial machinery and improving production efficiency. However, traditional supervised deep learning methods require a large amount of training data and labels, which are often located in different clients. Additionally, the cost of data labeling is high, making labels difficult to acquire. Meanwhile, differences in data distribution among clients may also hinder the model's performance. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a semi-supervised federated learning framework, SSFL-DCSL, which integrates dual contrastive loss and soft labeling to address data and label scarcity for distributed clients with few labeled samples while safeguarding user privacy. It enables representation learning using unlabeled data on the client side and facilitates joint learning among clients through prototypes, thereby achieving mutual knowledge sharing and preventing local model divergence. Specifically, first, a sample weighting function based on the Laplace distribution is designed to alleviate bias caused by low confidence in pseudo labels during the semi-supervised training process. Second, a dual contrastive loss is introduced to mitigate model divergence caused by different data distributions, comprising local contrastive loss and global contrastive loss. Third, local prototypes are aggregated on the server with weighted averaging and updated with momentum to share knowledge among clients. To evaluate the proposed SSFL-DCSL framework, experiments are conducted on two publicly available datasets and a dataset collected on motors from the factory. In the most challenging task, where only 10\% of the data are labeled, the proposed SSFL-DCSL can improve accuracy by 1.15% to 7.85% over state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Xiaotong Luo, Shengda Zhuo, Min Chen, Lichun Li, Ruizhao Lu, Wenqi Fan, Shuqiang Huang, Yin Tang
Abstract: Financial markets exhibit highly dynamic and complex behaviors shaped by both historical price trajectories and exogenous narratives, such as news, policy interpretations, and social media sentiment. The heterogeneity in these data and the diverse insight of investors introduce biases that complicate the modeling of market dynamics. Unlike prior work, this paper explores the potential of bull and bear regimes in investor-driven market dynamics. Through empirical analysis on real-world financial datasets, we uncover a dynamic relationship between bias variation and behavioral adaptation, which enhances trend prediction under evolving market conditions. To model this mechanism, we propose the Bias to Behavior from Bull-Bear Dynamics model (B4), a unified framework that jointly embeds temporal price sequences and external contextual signals into a shared latent space where opposing bull and bear forces naturally emerge, forming the foundation for bias representation. Within this space, an inertial pairing module pairs temporally adjacent samples to preserve momentum, while the dual competition mechanism contrasts bullish and bearish embeddings to capture behavioral divergence. Together, these components allow B4 to model bias-driven asymmetry, behavioral inertia, and market heterogeneity. Experimental results on real-world financial datasets demonstrate that our model not only achieves superior performance in predicting market trends but also provides interpretable insights into the interplay of biases, investor behaviors, and market dynamics.
Authors: ZhengXiao He, Jinghao Wen, Huayu Li, Ao Li
Abstract: We present a novel and interpretable framework for electrocardiogram (ECG)-based disease detection that combines hyperdimensional computing (HDC) with learnable neural encoding. Unlike conventional HDC approaches that rely on static, random projections, our method introduces a rhythm-aware and trainable encoding pipeline based on RR intervals, a physiological signal segmentation strategy that aligns with cardiac cycles. The core of our design is a neural-distilled HDC architecture, featuring a learnable RR-block encoder and a BinaryLinear hyperdimensional projection layer, optimized jointly with cross-entropy and proxy-based metric loss. This hybrid framework preserves the symbolic interpretability of HDC while enabling task-adaptive representation learning. Experiments on Apnea-ECG and PTB-XL demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms traditional HDC and classical ML baselines, achieving 73.09\% precision and an F1 score of 0.626 on Apnea-ECG, with comparable robustness on PTB-XL. Our framework offers an efficient and scalable solution for edge-compatible ECG classification, with strong potential for interpretable and personalized health monitoring.
Authors: Xiaojie Li, Zhijie Cai, Nan Qi, Chao Dong, Guangxu Zhu, Haixia Ma, Qihui Wu, Shi Jin
Abstract: The expansion of the low-altitude economy has underscored the significance of Low-Altitude Network Coverage (LANC) prediction for designing aerial corridors. While accurate LANC forecasting hinges on the antenna beam patterns of Base Stations (BSs), these patterns are typically proprietary and not readily accessible. Operational parameters of BSs, which inherently contain beam information, offer an opportunity for data-driven low-altitude coverage prediction. However, collecting extensive low-altitude road test data is cost-prohibitive, often yielding only sparse samples per BS. This scarcity results in two primary challenges: imbalanced feature sampling due to limited variability in high-dimensional operational parameters against the backdrop of substantial changes in low-dimensional sampling locations, and diminished generalizability stemming from insufficient data samples. To overcome these obstacles, we introduce a dual strategy comprising expert knowledge-based feature compression and disentangled representation learning. The former reduces feature space complexity by leveraging communications expertise, while the latter enhances model generalizability through the integration of propagation models and distinct subnetworks that capture and aggregate the semantic representations of latent features. Experimental evaluation confirms the efficacy of our framework, yielding a 7% reduction in error compared to the best baseline algorithm. Real-network validations further attest to its reliability, achieving practical prediction accuracy with MAE errors at the 5dB level.
Authors: Xiaojuan Zhang, Tianyu Jiang, Haoxiang Zong, Chen Zhang, Chendan Li, Marta Molinas
Abstract: The impedance network (IN) model is gaining popularity in the oscillation analysis of wind farms. However, the construction of such an IN model requires impedance curves of each wind turbine under their respective operating conditions, making its online application difficult due to the transmission of numerous high-density impedance curves. To address this issue, this paper proposes an AI-based impedance encoding-decoding method to facilitate the online construction of IN model. First, an impedance encoder is trained to compress impedance curves by setting the number of neurons much smaller than that of frequency points. Then, the compressed data of each turbine are uploaded to the wind farm and an impedance decoder is trained to reconstruct original impedance curves. At last, based on the nodal admittance matrix (NAM) method, the IN model of the wind farm can be obtained. The proposed method is validated via model training and real-time simulations, demonstrating that the encoded impedance vectors enable fast transmission and accurate reconstruction of the original impedance curves.
Authors: Sebastian Barros Elgueta
Abstract: In 2023, satellite and mobile networks crossed a historic threshold: standard smartphones, using unmodified 3GPP protocols, connected directly to low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. This first wave of direct-to-device (D2D) demonstrations validated the physical feasibility of satellite-based mobile access. However, these systems remain fallback-grade--rural-only, bandwidth-limited, and fully dependent on Earth-based mobile cores for identity, session, and policy control. This paper asks a more ambitious question: Can a complete mobile network, including radio access, core functions, traffic routing, and content delivery, operate entirely from orbit? And can it deliver sustained, urban-grade service in the world's densest cities? We present the first end-to-end system architecture for a fully orbital telco, integrating electronically steered phased arrays with 1000-beam capacity, space-based deployment of 5G core functions (UPF, AMF), and inter-satellite laser mesh backhaul. We analyze spectral efficiency, beam capacity, and link budgets under dense urban conditions, accounting for path loss, Doppler, and multipath. Simulations show that rooftop and line-of-sight users can sustain 64-QAM throughput, while street-level access is feasible with relay or assisted beam modes. The paper outlines the remaining constraints, power, thermal dissipation, compute radiation hardening, and regulatory models, and demonstrates that these are engineering bottlenecks, not physical limits. Finally, we propose a staged 15-year roadmap from today's fallback D2D systems to autonomous orbital overlays delivering 50-100 Mbps to handhelds in megacities, with zero reliance on terrestrial infrastructure.
Authors: Song Mao, Lejun Cheng, Pinlong Cai, Guohang Yan, Ding Wang, Botian Shi
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various applications. However, their use as writing assistants in specialized domains like finance, medicine, and law is often hampered by a lack of deep domain-specific knowledge and a tendency to hallucinate. Existing solutions, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), can suffer from inconsistency across multiple retrieval steps, while online search-based methods often degrade quality due to unreliable web content. To address these challenges, we introduce DeepWriter, a customizable, multimodal, long-form writing assistant that operates on a curated, offline knowledge base. DeepWriter leverages a novel pipeline that involves task decomposition, outline generation, multimodal retrieval, and section-by-section composition with reflection. By deeply mining information from a structured corpus and incorporating both textual and visual elements, DeepWriter generates coherent, factually grounded, and professional-grade documents. We also propose a hierarchical knowledge representation to enhance retrieval efficiency and accuracy. Our experiments on financial report generation demonstrate that DeepWriter produces high-quality, verifiable articles that surpasses existing baselines in factual accuracy and generated content quality.
Authors: Tori Qiu, Benjamin Laufer, Jon Kleinberg, Hoda Heidari
Abstract: Regulatory frameworks, such as the EU AI Act, encourage openness of general-purpose AI models by offering legal exemptions for "open-source" models. Despite this legislative attention on openness, the definition of open-source foundation models remains ambiguous. This paper models the strategic interactions among the creator of a general-purpose model (the generalist) and the entity that fine-tunes the general-purpose model to a specialized domain or task (the specialist), in response to regulatory requirements on model openness. We present a stylized model of the regulator's choice of an open-source definition to evaluate which AI openness standards will establish appropriate economic incentives for developers. Our results characterize market equilibria -- specifically, upstream model release decisions and downstream fine-tuning efforts -- under various openness regulations and present a range of effective regulatory penalties and open-source thresholds. Overall, we find the model's baseline performance determines when increasing the regulatory penalty vs. the open-source threshold will significantly alter the generalist's release strategy. Our model provides a theoretical foundation for AI governance decisions around openness and enables evaluation and refinement of practical open-source policies.
Authors: Elzbieta Gruzewska, Pooja Rao, Sebastien Baur, Matthew Baugh, Mathias M. J. Bellaiche, Sharanya Srinivas, Octavio Ponce, Matthew Thompson, Pramod Rudrapatna, Michael A. Sanchez, Lawrence Z. Cai, Timothy JA Chico, Robert F. Storey, Emily Maz, Umesh Telang, Shravya Shetty, Mayank Daswani
Abstract: Radar technology presents untapped potential for continuous, contactless, and passive heart rate monitoring via consumer electronics like mobile phones. However the variety of available radar systems and lack of standardization means that a large new paired dataset collection is required for each radar system. This study demonstrates transfer learning between frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) and impulse-radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) radar systems, both increasingly integrated into consumer devices. FMCW radar utilizes a continuous chirp, while IR-UWB radar employs short pulses. Our mm-wave FMCW radar operated at 60 GHz with a 5.5 GHz bandwidth (2.7 cm resolution, 3 receiving antennas [Rx]), and our IR-UWB radar at 8 GHz with a 500 MHz bandwidth (30 cm resolution, 2 Rx). Using a novel 2D+1D ResNet architecture we achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.85 bpm and a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 1.42% for heart rate monitoring with FMCW radar (N=119 participants, an average of 8 hours per participant). This model maintained performance (under 5 MAE/10% MAPE) across various body positions and heart rate ranges, with a 98.9% recall. We then fine-tuned a variant of this model, trained on single-antenna and single-range bin FMCW data, using a small (N=376, avg 6 minutes per participant) IR-UWB dataset. This transfer learning approach yielded a model with MAE 4.1 bpm and MAPE 6.3% (97.5% recall), a 25% MAE reduction over the IR-UWB baseline. This demonstration of transfer learning between radar systems for heart rate monitoring has the potential to accelerate its introduction into existing consumer devices.
Authors: Zahra Teimouri-Jervekani, Fahimeh Nasimi, Mohammadreza Yazdchi, Ghazal MogharehZadeh, Javad Tezerji, Farzan Niknejad Mazandarani, Maryam Mohebbi
Abstract: Background and Objective: Differentiating wide complex tachycardia (WCT) is clinically critical yet challenging due to morphological similarities in electrocardiogram (ECG) signals between life-threatening ventricular tachycardia (VT) and supraventricular tachycardia with aberrancy (SVT-A). Misdiagnosis carries fatal risks. We propose a computationally efficient deep learning solution to improve diagnostic accuracy and provide model interpretability for clinical deployment. Methods: A novel lightweight parallel deep architecture is introduced. Each pipeline processes individual ECG leads using two 1D-CNN blocks to extract local features. Feature maps are concatenated across leads, followed by LSTM layers to capture temporal dependencies. Final classification employs fully connected layers. Explainability is achieved via Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) for local/global interpretation. The model was evaluated on a 35-subject ECG database using standard performance metrics. Results: The model achieved $95.63\%$ accuracy ($95\%$ CI: $93.07-98.19\%$), with sensitivity=$95.10\%$, specificity=$96.06\%$, and F1-score=$95.12\%$. It outperformed state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and computational efficiency, requiring minimal CNN blocks per pipeline. SHAP analysis demonstrated clinically interpretable feature contributions. Conclusions: Our end-to-end framework delivers high-precision WCT classification with minimal computational overhead. The integration of SHAP enhances clinical trust by elucidating decision logic, supporting rapid, informed diagnosis. This approach shows significant promise for real-world ECG analysis tools.
Authors: Fufang Wen, Shichang Zhang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) store vast amounts of knowledge, which often requires updates to correct factual errors, incorporate newly acquired information, or adapt model behavior. Model editing methods have emerged as efficient solutions for such updates, offering localized and precise knowledge modification at significantly lower computational cost than continual training. In parallel, LLMs are frequently fine-tuned for a wide range of downstream tasks. However, the effect of fine-tuning on previously edited knowledge remains poorly understood. In this work, we systematically investigate how different fine-tuning objectives interact with various model editing techniques. Our findings show that edited knowledge is substantially more susceptible to forgetting during fine-tuning than intrinsic knowledge acquired through pre-training. This analysis highlights a key limitation of current editing approaches and suggests that evaluating edit robustness under downstream fine-tuning is critical for their practical deployment. We further find that freezing layers associated with edited content can significantly improve knowledge retention, offering insight into how future editing methods might be made more robust.
Authors: Shengji Tang, Jianjian Cao, Weihao Lin, Jiale Hong, Bo Zhang, Shuyue Hu, Lei Bai, Tao Chen, Wanli Ouyang, Peng Ye
Abstract: This paper aims to demonstrate the potential and strengths of open-source collectives. It leads to a promising question: Can we harness multiple open-source LLMs to match or even beat the closed-source LLMs? To answer this, we propose SMACS, a scalable multi-agent collaboration system (MACS) framework with high performance. Specifically, for continuous integration of new LLMs and generalization to diverse questions, we first propose a Retrieval-based Prior Selection (RPS), which assigns a proxy performance score to each LLM to select the Top-k LLMs at the instance level for any given question. Then, we propose an Exploration-Exploitation-Driven Posterior Enhancement (EPE), encouraging the generation of diverse responses through prior dropping and selecting the high-quality response via a hybrid posterior score. Experiments on eight mainstream benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our SMACS: by integrating fifteen open-source LLMs, SMACS outperforms leading closed-source LLMs in 2025, e.g., Claude-3.7-Sonnet (+12.73%), GPT-4.1(+5.36%) and GPT-o3-mini(+5.28%) across multiple tasks. Remarkably, it even exceeds the average of best results of different datasets from both open-source LLMs (+2.86%) and closed-source LLMs (+2.04%), pushing the upper bound of intelligence. Code will be released at https://github.com/magent4aci/SMACS.
Authors: Yiran Wu, Mauricio Velazco, Andrew Zhao, Manuel Ra\'ul Mel\'endez Luj\'an, Srisuma Movva, Yogesh K Roy, Quang Nguyen, Roberto Rodriguez, Qingyun Wu, Michael Albada, Julia Kiseleva, Anand Mudgerikar
Abstract: We present ExCyTIn-Bench, the first benchmark to Evaluate an LLM agent x on the task of Cyber Threat Investigation through security questions derived from investigation graphs. Real-world security analysts must sift through a large number of heterogeneous alert signals and security logs, follow multi-hop chains of evidence, and compile an incident report. With the developments of LLMs, building LLM-based agents for automatic thread investigation is a promising direction. To assist the development and evaluation of LLM agents, we construct a dataset from a controlled Azure tenant that covers 8 simulated real-world multi-step attacks, 57 log tables from Microsoft Sentinel and related services, and 589 automatically generated questions. We leverage security logs extracted with expert-crafted detection logic to build threat investigation graphs, and then generate questions with LLMs using paired nodes on the graph, taking the start node as background context and the end node as answer. Anchoring each question to these explicit nodes and edges not only provides automatic, explainable ground truth answers but also makes the pipeline reusable and readily extensible to new logs. This also enables the automatic generation of procedural tasks with verifiable rewards, which can be naturally extended to training agents via reinforcement learning. Our comprehensive experiments with different models confirm the difficulty of the task: with the base setting, the average reward across all evaluated models is 0.249, and the best achieved is 0.368, leaving substantial headroom for future research. Code and data are coming soon!
Authors: Pengfei Du
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse applications, yet they pose significant security risks that threaten their safe deployment in critical domains. Current security alignment methodologies predominantly rely on Process Reward Models (PRMs) to evaluate intermediate reasoning steps, introducing substantial computational overhead and scalability constraints. This paper presents a novel PRM-free security alignment framework that leverages automated red teaming and adversarial training to achieve robust security guarantees while maintaining computational efficiency. Our approach systematically identifies vulnerabilities through sophisticated attack strategies including genetic algorithm optimization, multi-agent simulation, and advanced prompt mutation techniques. The framework enhances model robustness via targeted adversarial training with curriculum learning and adaptive regularization mechanisms. Comprehensive experimental evaluation across five state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrates that our method achieves superior security alignment performance compared to PRM-based approaches while reducing computational costs by 61\%. The framework incorporates transparent reporting and continuous audit mechanisms that enable iterative security improvement and regulatory compliance. Our contributions advance the field of efficient LLM security alignment by democratizing access to robust security measures for resource-constrained organizations and providing a scalable foundation for addressing evolving adversarial threats.
Authors: Dachuan Shi (Celine), Yonggan Fu (Celine), Xiangchi Yuan (Celine), Zhongzhi Yu (Celine), Haoran You (Celine), Sixu Li (Celine), Xin Dong (Celine), Jan Kautz (Celine), Pavlo Molchanov (Celine), Yingyan (Celine), Lin
Abstract: Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have spurred interest in numerous applications requiring robust long-range capabilities, essential for processing extensive input contexts and continuously generating extended outputs. As sequence lengths increase, the number of Key-Value (KV) pairs in LLMs escalates, creating a significant efficiency bottleneck. In this paper, we propose a new KV cache optimization paradigm called LaCache, a training-free method for efficient and accurate generative inference of LLMs. LaCache enables LLMs to simultaneously address both of the critical challenges in long-range modeling: robust long-range capabilities and continuous generation without running out-of-memory (OOM). Specifically, LaCache integrates two key innovations: (1) a ladder-shaped KV cache pattern that stores KV pairs not only sequentially (left-to-right within each layer) but also across layers (from shallow to deep), providing an extended span for capturing long-range dependencies under a fixed storage budget, thereby boosting long-range capabilities; and (2) an iterative compaction mechanism that progressively compresses older caches, freeing up space for new tokens within a fixed cache size. This token distance-based dynamic compression enables more effective continuous generation under constrained cache budgets. Experiments across various tasks, benchmarks, and LLM models consistently validate LaCache's effectiveness in enhancing LLMs' long-range capabilities. Our code is available at https://github.com/GATECH-EIC/LaCache.
Authors: Zhijiang Tang, Jiaxin Qi, Yuhua Zheng, Jianqiang Huang
Abstract: Electrocardiogram~(ECG), a key bioelectrical time-series signal, is crucial for assessing cardiac health and diagnosing various diseases. Given its time-series format, ECG data is often incorporated into pre-training datasets for large-scale time-series model training. However, existing studies often overlook its unique characteristics and specialized downstream applications, which differ significantly from other time-series data, leading to an incomplete understanding of its properties. In this paper, we present an in-depth investigation of ECG signals and establish a comprehensive benchmark, which includes (1) categorizing its downstream applications into four distinct evaluation tasks, (2) identifying limitations in traditional evaluation metrics for ECG analysis, and introducing a novel metric; (3) benchmarking state-of-the-art time-series models and proposing a new architecture. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed benchmark is comprehensive and robust. The results validate the effectiveness of the proposed metric and model architecture, which establish a solid foundation for advancing research in ECG signal analysis.
Authors: Richard M. Charles, James H. Curry, Richard B. Charles
Abstract: The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in K--12 education offers both transformative opportunities and emerging risks. This study explores how students may Trojanize prompts to elicit unsafe or unintended outputs from LLMs, bypassing established content moderation systems with safety guardrils. Through a systematic experiment involving simulated K--12 queries and multi-turn dialogues, we expose key vulnerabilities in GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. This paper presents our experimental design, detailed findings, and a prototype tool, TrojanPromptGuard (TPG), to automatically detect and mitigate Trojanized educational prompts. These insights aim to inform both AI safety researchers and educational technologists on the safe deployment of LLMs for educators.
Authors: Federico Mason, Tommaso Zugno, Matteo Drago, Marco Giordani, Mate Boban, Michele Zorzi
Abstract: Predictive Quality of Service (PQoS) makes it possible to anticipate QoS changes, e.g., in wireless networks, and trigger appropriate countermeasures to avoid performance degradation. Hence, PQoS is extremely useful for automotive applications such as teleoperated driving, which poses strict constraints in terms of latency and reliability. A promising tool for PQoS is given by Reinforcement Learning (RL), a methodology that enables the design of decision-making strategies for stochastic optimization. In this manuscript, we present PRATA, a new simulation framework to enable PRedictive QoS based on AI for Teleoperated driving Applications. PRATA consists of a modular pipeline that includes (i) an end-to-end protocol stack to simulate the 5G Radio Access Network (RAN), (ii) a tool for generating automotive data, and (iii) an Artificial Intelligence (AI) unit to optimize PQoS decisions. To prove its utility, we use PRATA to design an RL unit, named RAN-AI, to optimize the segmentation level of teleoperated driving data in the event of resource saturation or channel degradation. Hence, we show that the RAN-AI entity efficiently balances the trade-off between QoS and Quality of Experience (QoE) that characterize teleoperated driving applications, almost doubling the system performance compared to baseline approaches. In addition, by varying the learning settings of the RAN-AI entity, we investigate the impact of the state space and the relative cost of acquiring network data that are necessary for the implementation of RL.
Authors: Craig S Wright
Abstract: Artificial intelligence functions not as an epistemic leveller, but as an accelerant of cognitive stratification, entrenching and formalising informational castes within liberal-democratic societies. Synthesising formal epistemology, political theory, algorithmic architecture, and economic incentive structures, the argument traces how contemporary AI systems selectively amplify the reasoning capacity of individuals equipped with recursive abstraction, symbolic logic, and adversarial interrogation, whilst simultaneously pacifying the cognitively untrained through engagement-optimised interfaces. Fluency replaces rigour, immediacy displaces reflection, and procedural reasoning is eclipsed by reactive suggestion. The result is a technocratic realignment of power: no longer grounded in material capital alone, but in the capacity to navigate, deconstruct, and manipulate systems of epistemic production. Information ceases to be a commons; it becomes the substrate through which consent is manufactured and autonomy subdued. Deliberative democracy collapses not through censorship, but through the erosion of interpretive agency. The proposed response is not technocratic regulation, nor universal access, but the reconstruction of rational autonomy as a civic mandate, codified in education, protected by epistemic rights, and structurally embedded within open cognitive infrastructure.
Authors: Obumneme Zimuzor Nwafor, Mohammed Abdul Majeed Al Hooti
Abstract: As nations seek sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels, green hydrogen has emerged as a promising strategic pathway toward decarbonisation, particularly in solar-rich arid regions. However, identifying optimal locations for hydrogen production requires the integration of complex environmental, atmospheric, and infrastructural factors, often compounded by limited availability of direct hydrogen yield data. This study presents a novel Artificial Intelligence (AI) framework for computing green hydrogen yield and site suitability index using mean absolute SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) values. This framework consists of a multi-stage pipeline of unsupervised multi-variable clustering, supervised machine learning classifier and SHAP algorithm. The pipeline trains on an integrated meteorological, topographic and temporal dataset and the results revealed distinct spatial patterns of suitability and relative influence of the variables. With model predictive accuracy of 98%, the result also showed that water proximity, elevation and seasonal variation are the most influential factors determining green hydrogen site suitability in Oman with mean absolute shap values of 2.470891, 2.376296 and 1.273216 respectively. Given limited or absence of ground-truth yield data in many countries that have green hydrogen prospects and ambitions, this study offers an objective and reproducible alternative to subjective expert weightings, thus allowing the data to speak for itself and potentially discover novel latent groupings without pre-imposed assumptions. This study offers industry stakeholders and policymakers a replicable and scalable tool for green hydrogen infrastructure planning and other decision making in data-scarce regions.
Authors: Wen-Cheng Chung, Shu-Ting Huang, Hao-Ting Pai
Abstract: Explainable intrusion detection systems (IDS) are now recognized as essential for mission-critical networks, yet most "XAI" pipelines still bolt an approximate explainer onto an opaque classifier, leaving analysts with partial and sometimes misleading insights. The Interpretable Generalization (IG) mechanism, published in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, eliminates that bottleneck by learning coherent patterns - feature combinations unique to benign or malicious traffic - and turning them into fully auditable rules. IG already delivers outstanding precision, recall, and AUC on NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15, and UKM-IDS20, even when trained on only 10% of the data. To raise precision further without sacrificing transparency, we introduce Multi-Granular Discretization (IG-MD), which represents every continuous feature at several Gaussian-based resolutions. On UKM-IDS20, IG-MD lifts precision by greater than or equal to 4 percentage points across all nine train-test splits while preserving recall approximately equal to 1.0, demonstrating that a single interpretation-ready model can scale across domains without bespoke tuning.
Authors: Khoi Do, Duong Nguyen, Nam-Khanh Le, Quoc-Viet Pham, Binh-Son Hua, Won-Joo Hwang
Abstract: In this study, we address the gradient-based domain generalization problem, where predictors aim for consistent gradient directions across different domains. Existing methods have two main challenges. First, minimization of gradient empirical distance or gradient inner products (GIP) leads to gradient fluctuations among domains, thereby hindering straightforward learning. Second, the direct application of gradient learning to the joint loss function can incur high computation overheads due to second-order derivative approximation. To tackle these challenges, we propose a new Pareto Optimality Gradient Matching (POGM) method. In contrast to existing methods that add gradient matching as regularization, we leverage gradient trajectories as collected data and apply independent training at the meta-learner. In the meta-update, we maximize GIP while limiting the learned gradient from deviating too far from the empirical risk minimization gradient trajectory. By doing so, the aggregate gradient can incorporate knowledge from all domains without suffering gradient fluctuation towards any particular domain. Experimental evaluations on datasets from DomainBed demonstrate competitive results yielded by POGM against other baselines while achieving computational efficiency.
Authors: Fransiscus Asisi Bimo, Maria Amparo Canaveras Galdon, Chun-Kai Lai, Ray-Guang Cheng, Edwin K. P. Chong
Abstract: Advanced intelligent automation becomes an important feature to deal with the increased complexity in managing wireless networks. This paper proposes a novel automation approach of intent-based network for Radio Access Networks (RANs) management by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs). The proposed method enhances intent translation, autonomously interpreting high-level objectives, reasoning over complex network states, and generating precise configurations of the RAN by integrating LLMs within an agentic architecture. We propose a structured prompt engineering technique and demonstrate that the network can automatically improve its energy efficiency by dynamically optimizing critical RAN parameters through a closed-loop mechanism. It showcases the potential to enable robust resource management in RAN by adapting strategies based on real-time feedback via LLM-orchestrated agentic systems.
Authors: Khalid Hasan, Jamil Saquer
Abstract: Bipolar disorder is a chronic mental illness frequently underdiagnosed due to subtle early symptoms and social stigma. This paper explores the advanced natural language processing (NLP) models for recognizing signs of bipolar disorder based on user-generated social media text. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of transformer-based models (BERT, RoBERTa, ALBERT, ELECTRA, DistilBERT) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models based on contextualized (BERT) and static (GloVe, Word2Vec) word embeddings. Experiments were performed on a large, annotated dataset of Reddit posts after confirming their validity through sentiment variance and judgmental analysis. Our results demonstrate that RoBERTa achieves the highest performance among transformer models with an F1 score of ~98% while LSTM models using BERT embeddings yield nearly identical results. In contrast, LSTMs trained on static embeddings fail to capture meaningful patterns, scoring near-zero F1. These findings underscore the critical role of contextual language modeling in detecting bipolar disorder. In addition, we report model training times and highlight that DistilBERT offers an optimal balance between efficiency and accuracy. In general, our study offers actionable insights for model selection in mental health NLP applications and validates the potential of contextualized language models to support early bipolar disorder screening.
Authors: Louis Bahrman (IDS, S2A), Mathieu Fontaine (IDS, S2A), Ga\"el Richard (IDS, S2A)
Abstract: This paper explores the outcome of training state-ofthe-art dereverberation models with supervision settings ranging from weakly-supervised to fully unsupervised, relying solely on reverberant signals and an acoustic model for training. Most of the existing deep learning approaches typically require paired dry and reverberant data, which are difficult to obtain in practice. We develop instead a sequential learning strategy motivated by a bayesian formulation of the dereverberation problem, wherein acoustic parameters and dry signals are estimated from reverberant inputs using deep neural networks, guided by a reverberation matching loss. Our most data-efficient variant requires only 100 reverberation-parameter-labelled samples to outperform an unsupervised baseline, demonstrating the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed method in low-resource scenarios.
Authors: Matthew Kearney, Reuben Binns, Yarin Gal
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in user-facing applications, from providing medical consultations to job interview advice. Recent research suggests that these models are becoming increasingly proficient at inferring identity information about the author of a piece of text from linguistic patterns as subtle as the choice of a few words. However, little is known about how LLMs use this information in their decision-making in real-world applications. We perform the first comprehensive analysis of how identity markers present in a user's writing bias LLM responses across five different high-stakes LLM applications in the domains of medicine, law, politics, government benefits, and job salaries. We find that LLMs are extremely sensitive to markers of identity in user queries and that race, gender, and age consistently influence LLM responses in these applications. For instance, when providing medical advice, we find that models apply different standards of care to individuals of different ethnicities for the same symptoms; we find that LLMs are more likely to alter answers to align with a conservative (liberal) political worldview when asked factual questions by older (younger) individuals; and that LLMs recommend lower salaries for non-White job applicants and higher salaries for women compared to men. Taken together, these biases mean that the use of off-the-shelf LLMs for these applications may cause harmful differences in medical care, foster wage gaps, and create different political factual realities for people of different identities. Beyond providing an analysis, we also provide new tools for evaluating how subtle encoding of identity in users' language choices impacts model decisions. Given the serious implications of these findings, we recommend that similar thorough assessments of LLM use in user-facing applications are conducted before future deployment.
Authors: Weihua Zheng, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Zhengyuan Liu, Kui Wu, AiTi Aw, Bowei Zou
Abstract: Multilingual Large Language Models(MLLMs) demonstrate strong generalization across languages, yet they remain prone to hallucinations, especially in low-resource languages, due to training data imbalances. These hallucinations, which include inaccurate or fabricated outputs, are particularly problematic in domain-specific generation tasks (Chataigner et al., 2024). To address this challenge, we propose CCL-XCoT(Curriculum-based Contrastive Learning-based Cross-lingual Chain-of-Thought), a two-stage fine-tuning framework for mitigating hallucination in MLLMs. Our approach first enhances cross-lingual semantic alignment through curriculum-based contrastive learning combined with next-token prediction during continued pre-training. Building on this foundation, we then introduce a cross-lingual Chain-of-Thought (XCoT) prompting strategy during instruction fine-tuning, which guides the model to reason in a high-resource language before generating answers in the target low-resource language. Experimental results show that CCL-XCoT reduces hallucination rates by up to 62% and substantially improves factual knowledge transfer across language pairs, without relying on external retrieval or multi-model ensembles.
Authors: Mohammad Shahedur Rahman, Peng Gao, Yuede Ji
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) leverage deep learning to process and predict sequences of words from context, enabling them to perform various NLP tasks, such as translation, summarization, question answering, and content generation. However, the growing size and complexity of developing, training, and deploying advanced LLMs require extensive computational resources and large datasets. This creates a barrier for users. As a result, platforms that host models and datasets are widely used. For example, Hugging Face, one of the most popular platforms, hosted 1.8 million models and 450K datasets by June 2025, with no sign of slowing down. Since many LLMs are built from base models, pre-trained models, and external datasets, they can inherit vulnerabilities, biases, or malicious components from earlier models or datasets. Therefore, it is critical to understand the origin and development of these components to better detect potential risks, improve model fairness, and ensure compliance. Motivated by this, our project aims to study the relationships between models and datasets, which are core components of the LLM supply chain. First, we design a method to systematically collect LLM supply chain data. Using this data, we build a directed heterogeneous graph to model the relationships between models and datasets, resulting in a structure with 397,376 nodes and 453,469 edges. We then perform various analyses and uncover several findings, such as: (i) the LLM supply chain graph is large, sparse, and follows a power-law degree distribution; (ii) it features a densely connected core and a fragmented periphery; (iii) datasets play pivotal roles in training; (iv) strong interdependence exists between models and datasets; and (v) the graph is dynamic, with daily updates reflecting the ecosystem's ongoing evolution.
Authors: Rithesh Murthy, Ming Zhu, Liangwei Yang, Jielin Qiu, Juntao Tan, Shelby Heinecke, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese, Huan Wang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best with well-crafted prompts, yet prompt engineering remains manual, inconsistent, and inaccessible to non-experts. We introduce Promptomatix, an automatic prompt optimization framework that transforms natural language task descriptions into high-quality prompts without requiring manual tuning or domain expertise. Promptomatix supports both a lightweight meta-prompt-based optimizer and a DSPy-powered compiler, with modular design enabling future extension to more advanced frameworks. The system analyzes user intent, generates synthetic training data, selects prompting strategies, and refines prompts using cost-aware objectives. Evaluated across 5 task categories, Promptomatix achieves competitive or superior performance compared to existing libraries, while reducing prompt length and computational overhead making prompt optimization scalable and efficient.
Authors: Prerana Khatiwada, Grace Donaher, Jasymyn Navarro, Lokesh Bhatta
Abstract: While Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not a new field, recent developments, especially with the release of generative tools like ChatGPT, have brought it to the forefront of the minds of industry workers and academic folk alike. There is currently much talk about AI and its ability to reshape many everyday processes as we know them through automation. It also allows users to expand their ideas by suggesting things they may not have thought of on their own and provides easier access to information. However, not all of the changes this technology will bring or has brought so far are positive; this is why it is extremely important for all modern people to recognize and understand the risks before using these tools and allowing them to cause harm. This work takes a position on better understanding many equity concerns and the spread of misinformation that result from new AI, in this case, specifically ChatGPT and deepfakes, and encouraging collaboration with law enforcement, developers, and users to reduce harm. Considering many academic sources, it warns against these issues, analyzing their cause and impact in fields including healthcare, education, science, academia, retail, and finance. Lastly, we propose a set of future-facing guidelines and policy considerations to solve these issues while still enabling innovation in these fields, this responsibility falling upon users, developers, and government entities.
Authors: Hengjie Yu, Kenneth A. Dawson, Haiyun Yang, Shuya Liu, Yan Yan, Yaochu Jin
Abstract: Unlocking the potential of nanomaterials in medicine and environmental science hinges on understanding their interactions with proteins, a complex decision space where AI is poised to make a transformative impact. However, progress has been hindered by limited datasets and the restricted generalizability of existing models. Here, we propose NanoPro-3M, the largest nanomaterial-protein interaction dataset to date, comprising over 3.2 million samples and 37,000 unique proteins. Leveraging this, we present NanoProFormer, a foundational model that predicts nanomaterial-protein affinities through multimodal representation learning, demonstrating strong generalization, handling missing features, and unseen nanomaterials or proteins. We show that multimodal modeling significantly outperforms single-modality approaches and identifies key determinants of corona formation. Furthermore, we demonstrate its applicability to a range of downstream tasks through zero-shot inference and fine-tuning. Together, this work establishes a solid foundation for high-performance and generalized prediction of nanomaterial-protein interaction endpoints, reducing experimental reliance and accelerating various in vitro applications.
Authors: Eldor Abdukhamidov, Mohammed Abuhamad, Simon S. Woo, Hyoungshick Kim, Tamer Abuhmed
Abstract: Vision transformer (ViT) models, when coupled with interpretation models, are regarded as secure and challenging to deceive, making them well-suited for security-critical domains such as medical applications, autonomous vehicles, drones, and robotics. However, successful attacks on these systems can lead to severe consequences. Recent research on threats targeting ViT models primarily focuses on generating the smallest adversarial perturbations that can deceive the models with high confidence, without considering their impact on model interpretations. Nevertheless, the use of interpretation models can effectively assist in detecting adversarial examples. This study investigates the vulnerability of transformer models to adversarial attacks, even when combined with interpretation models. We propose an attack called "AdViT" that generates adversarial examples capable of misleading both a given transformer model and its coupled interpretation model. Through extensive experiments on various transformer models and two transformer-based interpreters, we demonstrate that AdViT achieves a 100% attack success rate in both white-box and black-box scenarios. In white-box scenarios, it reaches up to 98% misclassification confidence, while in black-box scenarios, it reaches up to 76% misclassification confidence. Remarkably, AdViT consistently generates accurate interpretations in both scenarios, making the adversarial examples more difficult to detect.
Authors: Yuejiao Xie, Maonan Wang, Di Zhou, Man-On Pun, Zhu Han
Abstract: Urban Air Mobility (UAM) systems are rapidly emerging as promising solutions to alleviate urban congestion, with path planning becoming a key focus area. Unlike ground transportation, UAM trajectory planning has to prioritize communication quality for accurate location tracking in constantly changing environments to ensure safety. Meanwhile, a UAM system, serving as an air taxi, requires adaptive planning to respond to real-time passenger requests, especially in ride-sharing scenarios where passenger demands are unpredictable and dynamic. However, conventional trajectory planning strategies based on predefined routes lack the flexibility to meet varied passenger ride demands. To address these challenges, this work first proposes constructing a radio map to evaluate the communication quality of urban airspace. Building on this, we introduce a novel Multi-Source Hybrid Attention Reinforcement Learning (MSHA-RL) framework for the challenge of effectively focusing on passengers and UAM locations, which arises from the significant dimensional disparity between the representations. This model first generates the alignment among diverse data sources with large gap dimensions before employing hybrid attention to balance global and local insights, thereby facilitating responsive, real-time path planning. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the approach enables communication-compliant trajectory planning, reducing travel time and enhancing operational efficiency while prioritizing passenger safety.
Authors: Jakub Walczak, Piotr Tomalak, Artur Laskowski
Abstract: Generative AI is gaining increasing attention in software engineering, where testing remains an indispensable reliability mechanism. According to the widely adopted testing pyramid, unit tests constitute the majority of test cases and are often schematic, requiring minimal domain expertise. Automatically generating such tests under the supervision of software engineers can significantly enhance productivity during the development phase of the software lifecycle. This paper investigates the impact of code context and prompting strategies on the quality and adequacy of unit tests generated by various large language models (LLMs) across several families. The results show that including docstrings notably improves code adequacy, while further extending context to the full implementation yields definitely smaller gains. Notably, the chain-of-thought prompting strategy -- applied even to 'reasoning' models -- achieves the best results, with up to 96.3\% branch coverage, a 57\% average mutation score, and near-perfect compilation success rate. Among the evaluated models, M5 (Gemini 2.5 Pro) demonstrated superior performance in both mutation score and branch coverage being still in top in terms of compilation success rate. All the code and resulting test suites are publicly available at https://github.com/peetery/LLM-analysis.
Authors: Mahmood K. M. Almansoori, Miklos Telek
Abstract: We present Fast Approximate Minimum Spanning Tree (FAMST), a novel algorithm that addresses the computational challenges of constructing Minimum Spanning Trees (MSTs) for large-scale and high-dimensional datasets. FAMST utilizes a three-phase approach: Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) graph construction, ANN inter-component connection, and iterative edge refinement. For a dataset of $n$ points in a $d$-dimensional space, FAMST achieves $\mathcal{O}(dn \log n)$ time complexity and $\mathcal{O}(dn + kn)$ space complexity when $k$ nearest neighbors are considered, which is a significant improvement over the $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ time and space complexity of traditional methods. Experiments across diverse datasets demonstrate that FAMST achieves remarkably low approximation errors while providing speedups of up to 1000$\times$ compared to exact MST algorithms. We analyze how the key hyperparameters, $k$ (neighborhood size) and $\lambda$ (inter-component edges), affect performance, providing practical guidelines for hyperparameter selection. FAMST enables MST-based analysis on datasets with millions of points and thousands of dimensions, extending the applicability of MST techniques to problem scales previously considered infeasible.
Authors: Ramesh Raskar, Pradyumna Chari, John Zinky, Mahesh Lambe, Jared James Grogan, Sichao Wang, Rajesh Ranjan, Rekha Singhal, Shailja Gupta, Robert Lincourt, Raghu Bala, Aditi Joshi, Abhishek Singh, Ayush Chopra, Dimitris Stripelis, Bhuwan B, Sumit Kumar, Maria Gorskikh
Abstract: The Internet is poised to host billions to trillions of autonomous AI agents that negotiate, delegate, and migrate in milliseconds and workloads that will strain DNS-centred identity and discovery. In this paper, we describe the NANDA index architecture, which we envision as a means for discoverability, identifiability and authentication in the internet of AI agents. We present an architecture where a minimal lean index resolves to dynamic, cryptographically verifiable AgentFacts that supports multi-endpoint routing, load balancing, privacy-preserving access, and credentialed capability assertions. Our architecture design delivers five concrete guarantees: (1) A quilt-like index proposal that supports both NANDA-native agents as well as third party agents being discoverable via the index, (2) rapid global resolution for newly spawned AI agents, (3) sub-second revocation and key rotation, (4) schema-validated capability assertions, and (5) privacy-preserving discovery across organisational boundaries via verifiable, least-disclosure queries. We formalize the AgentFacts schema, specify a CRDT-based update protocol, and prototype adaptive resolvers. The result is a lightweight, horizontally scalable foundation that unlocks secure, trust-aware collaboration for the next generation of the Internet of AI agents, without abandoning existing web infrastructure.
Authors: Bo Yuan, Jiazi Hu
Abstract: Over the past decade, higher education has evolved through three distinct paradigms: the emergence of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), the integration of Smart Teaching technologies into classrooms, and the rise of AI-enhanced learning. Each paradigm is intended to address specific challenges in traditional education: MOOCs enable ubiquitous access to learning resources; Smart Teaching supports real-time interaction with data-driven insights; and generative AI offers personalized feedback and on-demand content generation. However, these paradigms are often implemented in isolation due to their disparate technological origins and policy-driven adoption. This paper examines the origins, strengths, and limitations of each paradigm, and advocates a unified pedagogical perspective that synthesizes their complementary affordances. We propose a three-layer instructional framework that combines the scalability of MOOCs, the responsiveness of Smart Teaching, and the adaptivity of AI. To demonstrate its feasibility, we present a curriculum design for a project-based course. The findings highlight the framework's potential to enhance learner engagement, support instructors, and enable personalized yet scalable learning.
Authors: Ravin Kumar
Abstract: We propose the APTx Neuron, a novel, unified neural computation unit that integrates non-linear activation and linear transformation into a single trainable expression. The APTx Neuron is derived from the APTx activation function, thereby eliminating the need for separate activation layers and making the architecture both computationally efficient and elegant. The proposed neuron follows the functional form $y = \sum_{i=1}^{n} ((\alpha_i + \tanh(\beta_i x_i)) \cdot \gamma_i x_i) + \delta$, where all parameters $\alpha_i$, $\beta_i$, $\gamma_i$, and $\delta$ are trainable. We validate our APTx Neuron-based architecture on the MNIST dataset, achieving up to 96.69\% test accuracy in just 20 epochs using approximately 332K trainable parameters. The results highlight the superior expressiveness and computational efficiency of the APTx Neuron compared to traditional neurons, pointing toward a new paradigm in unified neuron design and the architectures built upon it.
Authors: Refik Samet, Nooshin Nemati, Emrah Hancer, Serpil Sak, Bilge Ayca Kirmizi, Zeynep Yildirim
Abstract: The MiDeSeC dataset is created through H&E stained invasive breast carcinoma, no special type (NST) slides of 25 different patients captured at 40x magnification from the Department of Medical Pathology at Ankara University. The slides have been scanned by 3D Histech Panoramic p250 Flash-3 scanner and Olympus BX50 microscope. As several possible mitosis shapes exist, it is crucial to have a large dataset to cover all the cases. Accordingly, a total of 50 regions is selected from glass slides for 25 patients, each of regions with a size of 1024*1024 pixels. There are more than 500 mitoses in total in these 50 regions. Two-thirds of the regions are reserved for training, the other third for testing.
Authors: Refik Samet, Nooshin Nemati, Emrah Hancer, Serpil Sak, Bilge Ayca Kirmizi
Abstract: The NuSeC dataset is created by selecting 4 images with the size of 1024*1024 pixels from the slides of each patient among 25 patients. Therefore, there are a total of 100 images in the NuSeC dataset. To carry out a consistent comparative analysis between the methods that will be developed using the NuSeC dataset by the researchers in the future, we divide the NuSeC dataset 75% as the training set and 25% as the testing set. In detail, an image is randomly selected from 4 images of each patient among 25 patients to build the testing set, and then the remaining images are reserved for the training set. While the training set includes 75 images with around 30000 nuclei structures, the testing set includes 25 images with around 6000 nuclei structures.
Authors: Licheng Liu, Zihan Wang, Linjie Li, Chenwei Xu, Yiping Lu, Han Liu, Avirup Sil, Manling Li
Abstract: Multi-turn problem solving is critical yet challenging for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) to reflect on their reasoning and revise from feedback. Existing Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods train large reasoning models on a single-turn paradigm with verifiable rewards. However, we observe that models trained with existing RL paradigms often lose their ability to solve problems across multiple turns and struggle to revise answers based on contextual feedback, leading to repetitive responses. We ask: can LRMs learn to reflect their answers in a multi-turn context? In this work, we find that training models with multi-turn RL using only unary feedback (e.g., "Let's try again") after wrong answers can improve both single-turn performance and multi-turn reasoning. We introduce Unary Feedback as Observation (UFO) for reinforcement learning, which uses minimal yet common unary user feedback during iterative problem solving. It can be easily applied to existing single-turn RL training setups. Experimental results show that RL training with UFO keeps single-turn performance and improves multi-turn reasoning accuracy by up to 14%, enabling language models to better react to feedback in multi-turn problem solving. To further minimize the number of turns needed for a correct answer while encouraging diverse reasoning when mistakes occur, we design reward structures that guide models to produce careful and deliberate answers in each turn. Code: https://github.com/lichengliu03/unary-feedback
Authors: Wan-Cyuan Fan, Yen-Chun Chen, Mengchen Liu, Alexander Jacobson, Lu Yuan, Leonid Sigal
Abstract: Recent methods for customizing Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) for domain-specific tasks have shown promising results in scientific chart comprehension. However, existing approaches face two major limitations: First, they rely on paired data from only a few chart types, limiting generalization to wide range of chart types. Secondly, they lack targeted pre-training for chart-data alignment, which hampers the model's understanding of underlying data. In this paper, we introduce ChartScope, an LVLM optimized for in-depth chart comprehension across diverse chart types. We propose an efficient data generation pipeline that synthesizes paired data for a wide range of chart types, along with a novel Dual-Path training strategy that enabling the model to succinctly capture essential data details while preserving robust reasoning capabilities by incorporating reasoning over the underlying data. Lastly, we establish ChartDQA, a new benchmark for evaluating not only question-answering at different levels but also underlying data understanding. Experimental results demonstrate that ChartScope significantly enhances comprehension on a wide range of chart types. The code and data are available at https://davidhalladay.github.io/chartscope_demo.
Authors: Yu Bai, Yifan Zhang, Boxuan Xie, Zheng Chang, Yanru Zhang, Riku Jantti, Zhu Han
Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) capabilities are envisioned to play a pivotal role in future wireless networks due to their enhanced flexibility and efficiency. However, jointly optimizing UAV trajectory planning, multi-user communication, and target sensing under stringent resource constraints and time-critical conditions remains a significant challenge. To address this, we propose an Age of Information (AoI)-centric UAV-ISAC system that simultaneously performs target sensing and serves multiple ground users, emphasizing information freshness as the core performance metric. We formulate a long-term average AoI minimization problem that jointly optimizes the UAV's flight trajectory and beamforming. To tackle the high-dimensional, non-convexity of this problem, we develop a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based algorithm capable of providing real-time decisions on UAV movement and beamforming for both radar sensing and multi-user communication. Specifically, a Kalman filter is employed for accurate target state prediction, regularized zero-forcing is utilized to mitigate inter-user interference, and the Soft Actor-Critic algorithm is applied for training the DRL agent on continuous actions. The proposed framework adaptively balances the trade-offs between sensing accuracy and communication quality. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that our proposed method consistently achieves lower average AoI compared to baseline approaches.
Authors: Abhishek Bhattacharjee, Jack Pilkington, Nita Farahany
Abstract: Brain foundation models represent a new frontier in AI: instead of processing text or images, these models interpret real-time neural signals from EEG, fMRI, and other neurotechnologies. When integrated with brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), they may enable transformative applications-from thought controlled devices to neuroprosthetics-by interpreting and acting on brain activity in milliseconds. However, these same systems pose unprecedented risks, including the exploitation of subconscious neural signals and the erosion of cognitive liberty. Users cannot easily observe or control how their brain signals are interpreted, creating power asymmetries that are vulnerable to manipulation. This paper proposes embedding fiduciary duties-loyalty, care, and confidentiality-directly into BCI-integrated brain foundation models through technical design. Drawing on legal traditions and recent advancements in AI alignment techniques, we outline implementable architectural and governance mechanisms to ensure these systems act in users' best interests. Placing brain foundation models on a fiduciary footing is essential to realizing their potential without compromising self-determination.
Authors: Daniel Fein, Gabriela Aranguiz-Dias
Abstract: Language models are commonly fine-tuned via reinforcement learning to alter their behavior or elicit new capabilities. Datasets used for these purposes, and particularly human preference datasets, are often noisy. The relatively small size post-training datasets, combined with parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, enable the use of influence functions approximations to detect and prune training examples that are harmful to performance on a validation set. In this work, we adapt the TL;DR dataset for reward model training to demonstrate how conjugate-gradient approximated influence functions can be used to filter datasets. In our experiments, influence function filtering yields a small retraining accuracy uplift of 1.5% after removing 10% of training examples. We also show that gradient similarity outperforms influence functions for detecting helpful training examples. This suggests that local curvature is important for detecting harmful training examples, but less so for identifying helpful examples.
Authors: Huy-Son Nguyen, Yuanna Liu, Masoud Mansoury, Mohammad Alian Nejadi, Alan Hanjalic, Maarten de Rijke
Abstract: Recommender systems are known to exhibit fairness issues, particularly on the product side, where products and their associated suppliers receive unequal exposure in recommended results. While this problem has been widely studied in traditional recommendation settings, its implications for bundle recommendation (BR) remain largely unexplored. This emerging task introduces additional complexity: recommendations are generated at the bundle level, yet user satisfaction and product (or supplier) exposure depend on both the bundle and the individual items it contains. Existing fairness frameworks and metrics designed for traditional recommender systems may not directly translate to this multi-layered setting. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive reproducibility study of product-side fairness in BR across three real-world datasets using four state-of-the-art BR methods. We analyze exposure disparities at both the bundle and item levels using multiple fairness metrics, uncovering important patterns. Our results show that exposure patterns differ notably between bundles and items, revealing the need for fairness interventions that go beyond bundle-level assumptions. We also find that fairness assessments vary considerably depending on the metric used, reinforcing the need for multi-faceted evaluation. Furthermore, user behavior plays a critical role: when users interact more frequently with bundles than with individual items, BR systems tend to yield fairer exposure distributions across both levels. Overall, our findings offer actionable insights for building fairer bundle recommender systems and establish a vital foundation for future research in this emerging domain.
Authors: Harsh Nilesh Pathak, Randy Paffenroth
Abstract: Parameter efficient fine tuning (PEFT) is a versatile and extensible approach for adapting a Large Language Model (LLM) for newer tasks. One of the most prominent PEFT approaches, Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA), primarily focuses on adjusting the attention weight matrices within individual decoder blocks of a Generative Pre trained Transformer (GPT2). In contrast, we introduce Solo Connection a novel method that adapts the representation at the decoder-block level rather than modifying individual weight matrices. Not only does Solo Connection outperform LoRA on E2E natural language generation benchmarks, but it also reduces the number of trainable parameters by 59% relative to LoRA and by more than 99% compared to full fine-tuning of GPT2, an early version of Large Language Models (LLMs). Solo Connection is also motivated by homotopy theory: we introduce a trainable linear transformation that gradually interpolates between a zero vector and the task-specific representation, enabling smooth and stable adaptation over time. While skip connections in the original 12 layer GPT2 are typically confined to individual decoder blocks, subsequent GPT2 variants scale up to 48 layers, and even larger language models can include 128 or more decoder blocks. These expanded architectures underscore the need to revisit how skip connections are employed during fine-tuning. This paper focuses on long skip connections that link outputs of different decoder blocks, potentially enhancing the model's ability to adapt to new tasks while leveraging pre-trained knowledge.
Authors: Albert Chen, Manas Bundele, Gaurav Ahlawat, Patrick Stetz, Zhitao Wang, Qiang Fei, Donghoon Jung, Audrey Chu, Bharadwaj Jayaraman, Ayushi Panth, Yatin Arora, Sourav Jain, Renjith Varma, Alexey Ilin, Iuliia Melnychuk, Chelsea Chueh, Joyan Sil, Xiaofeng Wang
Abstract: The introduction of large language models has brought rapid progress on Text-to-SQL benchmarks, but it is not yet easy to build a working enterprise solution. In this paper, we present insights from building an internal chatbot that enables LinkedIn's product managers, engineers, and operations teams to self-serve data insights from a large, dynamic data lake. Our approach features three components. First, we construct a knowledge graph that captures up-to-date semantics by indexing database metadata, historical query logs, wikis, and code. We apply clustering to identify relevant tables for each team or product area. Second, we build a Text-to-SQL agent that retrieves and ranks context from the knowledge graph, writes a query, and automatically corrects hallucinations and syntax errors. Third, we build an interactive chatbot that supports various user intents, from data discovery to query writing to debugging, and displays responses in rich UI elements to encourage follow-up chats. Our chatbot has over 300 weekly users. Expert review shows that 53% of its responses are correct or close to correct on an internal benchmark set. Through ablation studies, we identify the most important knowledge graph and modeling components, offering a practical path for developing enterprise Text-to-SQL solutions.
Authors: Osman Erman Gungor, Derak Paulsen, William Kang
Abstract: Schema matching is essential for integrating heterogeneous data sources and enhancing dataset discovery, yet it remains a complex and resource-intensive problem. We introduce SCHEMORA, a schema matching framework that combines large language models with hybrid retrieval techniques in a prompt-based approach, enabling efficient identification of candidate matches without relying on labeled training data or exhaustive pairwise comparisons. By enriching schema metadata and leveraging both vector-based and lexical retrieval, SCHEMORA improves matching accuracy and scalability. Evaluated on the MIMIC-OMOP benchmark, it establishes new state-of-the-art performance, with gains of 7.49% in HitRate@5 and 3.75% in HitRate@3 over previous best results. To our knowledge, this is the first LLM-based schema matching method with an open-source implementation, accompanied by analysis that underscores the critical role of retrieval and provides practical guidance on model selection.
Authors: Arun Vignesh Malarkkan, Dongjie Wang, Haoyue Bai, Yanjie Fu
Abstract: The escalating threat of cyberattacks on real-time critical infrastructures poses serious risks to public safety, demanding detection methods that effectively capture complex system interdependencies and adapt to evolving attack patterns. Traditional real-time anomaly detection techniques often suffer from excessive false positives due to their statistical sensitivity to high data variance and class imbalance. To address these limitations, recent research has explored modeling causal relationships among system components. However, prior work mainly focuses on offline causal graph-based approaches that require static historical data and fail to generalize to real-time settings. These methods are fundamentally constrained by: (1) their inability to adapt to dynamic shifts in data distribution without retraining, and (2) the risk of catastrophic forgetting when lacking timely supervision in live systems. To overcome these challenges, we propose INCADET, a novel framework for incremental causal graph learning tailored to real-time cyberattack detection. INCADET dynamically captures evolving system behavior by incrementally updating causal graphs across streaming time windows. The framework comprises three modules: 1) Early Symptom Detection: Detects transitions in system status using divergence in edge-weight distributions across sequential causal graphs. 2) Incremental Causal Graph Learning: Leverages experience replay and edge reinforcement to continually refine causal structures while preserving prior knowledge. 3) Causal Graph Classification: Employs Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to classify system status using the learned causal graphs. Extensive experiments on real-world critical infrastructure datasets demonstrate that INCADET achieves superior accuracy, robustness, and adaptability compared to both static causal and deep temporal baselines in evolving attack scenarios.
Authors: Taufiq Daryanto, Sophia Stil, Xiaohan Ding, Daniel Manesh, Sang Won Lee, Tim Lee, Stephanie Lunn, Sarah Rodriguez, Chris Brown, Eugenia Rho
Abstract: One challenge in technical interviews is the think-aloud process, where candidates verbalize their thought processes while solving coding tasks. Despite its importance, opportunities for structured practice remain limited. Conversational AI offers potential assistance, but limited research explores user perceptions of its role in think-aloud practice. To address this gap, we conducted a study with 17 participants using an LLM-based technical interview practice tool. Participants valued AI's role in simulation, feedback, and learning from generated examples. Key design recommendations include promoting social presence in conversational AI for technical interview simulation, providing feedback beyond verbal content analysis, and enabling crowdsourced think-aloud examples through human-AI collaboration. Beyond feature design, we examined broader considerations, including intersectional challenges and potential strategies to address them, how AI-driven interview preparation could promote equitable learning in computing careers, and the need to rethink AI's role in interview practice by suggesting a research direction that integrates human-AI collaboration.
Authors: Guojun Wu
Abstract: Prior work proposed simple test-time scaling, a method for replicating this scaling behavior with models distilled from o1-like models by manually controlling test-time compute: either scaling down by enforcing a maximum length or scaling up by iteratively appending "Wait" when the model is about to terminate its generation. This paper presents an analysis of simple test-time scaling and finds that the scaling behavior is largely attributed to scaling down by enforcing a maximum length. In contrast, fine-tuning on long CoT data distilled from o1-like models has no significant impact on scaling behavior, and scaling up by appending "Wait" leads to inconsistencies, as the model may oscillate between solutions. A key distinction exists between scaling down by enforcing a maximum length and scaling up test-time compute in o1-like models, such as DeepSeek-R1\@. These models are typically allowed to utilize as much compute as needed, with the only constraint being the model's maximum supported length. By learning to naturally scale up test-time compute during reinforcement learning, o1-like models surpass their peak performance when scaling up. In contrast, simple test-time scaling progressively imposes a lower upper limit on model performance as it scales down. While replicating the test-time scaling behavior of o1 models can be straightforward by scaling down, it is crucial to recognize that the goal of scaling test-time compute is to unlock higher performance -- beyond what the model could originally achieve -- rather than merely reproducing the appearance of scaling behavior.
Authors: Yuejie Chi, Yuxin Chen, Yuting Wei
Abstract: As a paradigm for sequential decision making in unknown environments, reinforcement learning (RL) has received a flurry of attention in recent years. However, the explosion of model complexity in emerging applications and the presence of nonconvexity exacerbate the challenge of achieving efficient RL in sample-starved situations, where data collection is expensive, time-consuming, or even high-stakes (e.g., in clinical trials, autonomous systems, and online advertising). How to understand and enhance the sample and computational efficacies of RL algorithms is thus of great interest. In this tutorial, we aim to introduce several important algorithmic and theoretical developments in RL, highlighting the connections between new ideas and classical topics. Employing Markov Decision Processes as the central mathematical model, we cover several distinctive RL scenarios (i.e., RL with a simulator, online RL, offline RL, robust RL, and RL with human feedback), and present several mainstream RL approaches (i.e., model-based approach, value-based approach, and policy optimization). Our discussions gravitate around the issues of sample complexity, computational efficiency, as well as algorithm-dependent and information-theoretic lower bounds from a non-asymptotic viewpoint.
Authors: Yifan Huang, Dong Hao, Zhiyi Fan, Yuhang Guo, Bin Li
Abstract: Reserve prices are widely used in practice. The problem of designing revenue-optimal auctions based on reserve price has drawn much attention in the auction design community. Although they have been extensively studied, most developments rely on the significant assumption that the target audience of the sale is directly reachable by the auctioneer, while a large portion of bidders in the economic network unaware of the sale are omitted. This work follows the diffusion auction design, which aims to extend the target audience of optimal auction theory to all entities in economic networks. We investigate the design of simple and provably near-optimal network auctions via reserve price. Using Bayesian approximation analysis, we provide a simple and explicit form of the reserve price function tailored to the most representative network auction. We aim to balance setting a sufficiently high reserve price to induce high revenue in a successful sale, and attracting more buyers from the network to increase the probability of a successful sale. This reserve price function preserves incentive compatibility for network auctions, allowing the seller to extract additional revenue beyond that achieved by the Myerson optimal auction. Specifically, if the seller has $\rho$ direct neighbours in a network of size $n$, this reserve price guarantees a $1-{1 \over \rho}$ approximation to the theoretical upper bound, i.e., the maximum possible revenue from any network of size $n$. This result holds for any size and any structure of the networked market.
Authors: Yuhang Guo, Dong Hao, Bin Li, Mingyu Xiao, Bakh Khoussainov
Abstract: Strategyproofness in network auctions requires that bidders not only report their valuations truthfully, but also do their best to invite neighbours from the social network. In contrast to canonical auctions, where the value-monotone allocation in Myerson's Lemma is a cornerstone, a general principle of allocation rules for strategyproof network auctions is still missing. We show that, due to the absence of such a principle, even extensions to multi-unit network auctions with single-unit demand present unexpected difficulties, and all pioneering researches fail to be strategyproof. For the first time in this field, we identify two categories of monotone allocation rules on networks: Invitation-Depressed Monotonicity (ID-MON) and Invitation-Promoted Monotonicity (IP-MON). They encompass all existing allocation rules of network auctions as specific instances. For any given ID-MON or IP-MON allocation rule, we characterize the existence and sufficient conditions for the strategyproof payment rules, and show that among all such payment rules, the revenue-maximizing one exists and is computationally feasible. With these results, the obstacle of combinatorial network auction with single-minded bidders is now resolved.
Authors: Yujia Tong, Jingling Yuan, Tian Zhang, Jianquan Liu, Chuang Hu
Abstract: Data-Free Quantization (DFQ) enables the quantization of Vision Transformers (ViTs) without requiring access to data, allowing for the deployment of ViTs on devices with limited resources. In DFQ, the quantization model must be calibrated using synthetic samples, making the quality of these synthetic samples crucial. Existing methods fail to fully capture and balance the global and local features within the samples, resulting in limited synthetic data quality. Moreover, we have found that during inference, there is a significant difference in the distributions of intermediate layer activations between the quantized and full-precision models. These issues lead to a severe performance degradation of the quantized model. To address these problems, we propose a pipeline for Data-Free Quantization for Vision Transformers (DFQ-ViT). Specifically, we synthesize samples in order of increasing difficulty, effectively enhancing the quality of synthetic data. During the calibration and inference stage, we introduce the activation correction matrix for the quantized model to align the intermediate layer activations with those of the full-precision model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DFQ-ViT achieves remarkable superiority over existing DFQ methods and its performance is on par with models quantized through real data. For example, the performance of DeiT-T with 3-bit weights quantization is 4.29% higher than the state-of-the-art. Our method eliminates the need for fine-tuning, which not only reduces computational overhead but also lowers the deployment barriers for edge devices. This characteristic aligns with the principles of Green Learning by improving energy efficiency and facilitating real-world applications in resource-constrained environments.
Authors: Hongye Hou, Liu Zhan, Yang Yang
Abstract: Completing the whole 3D structure based on an incomplete point cloud is a challenging task, particularly when the residual point cloud lacks typical structural characteristics. Recent methods based on cross-modal learning attempt to introduce instance images to aid the structure feature learning. However, they still focus on each particular input class, limiting their generation abilities. In this work, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented point cloud completion framework. The core idea is to incorporate cross-modal retrieval into completion task to learn structural prior information from similar reference samples. Specifically, we design a Structural Shared Feature Encoder (SSFE) to jointly extract cross-modal features and reconstruct reference features as priors. Benefiting from a dual-channel control gate in the encoder, relevant structural features in the reference sample are enhanced and irrelevant information interference is suppressed. In addition, we propose a Progressive Retrieval-Augmented Generator (PRAG) that employs a hierarchical feature fusion mechanism to integrate reference prior information with input features from global to local. Through extensive evaluations on multiple datasets and real-world scenes, our method shows its effectiveness in generating fine-grained point clouds, as well as its generalization capability in handling sparse data and unseen categories.
Authors: Qian Qi
Abstract: This paper introduces the Neural-Brownian Motion (NBM), a new class of stochastic processes for modeling dynamics under learned uncertainty. The NBM is defined axiomatically by replacing the classical martingale property with respect to linear expectation with one relative to a non-linear Neural Expectation Operator, $\varepsilon^\theta$, generated by a Backward Stochastic Differential Equation (BSDE) whose driver $f_\theta$ is parameterized by a neural network. Our main result is a representation theorem for a canonical NBM, which we define as a continuous $\varepsilon^\theta$-martingale with zero drift under the physical measure. We prove that, under a key structural assumption on the driver, such a canonical NBM exists and is the unique strong solution to a stochastic differential equation of the form ${\rm d} M_t = \nu_\theta(t, M_t) {\rm d} W_t$. Crucially, the volatility function $\nu_\theta$ is not postulated a priori but is implicitly defined by the algebraic constraint $g_\theta(t, M_t, \nu_\theta(t, M_t)) = 0$, where $g_\theta$ is a specialization of the BSDE driver. We develop the stochastic calculus for this process and prove a Girsanov-type theorem for the quadratic case, showing that an NBM acquires a drift under a new, learned measure. The character of this measure, whether pessimistic or optimistic, is endogenously determined by the learned parameters $\theta$, providing a rigorous foundation for models where the attitude towards uncertainty is a discoverable feature.
Authors: Chen Su, Zhengzhou Cai, Yuanhe Tian, Zihong Zheng, Yan Song
Abstract: Diffusion models, initially developed for image synthesis, demonstrate remarkable generative capabilities. Recently, their application has expanded to time series forecasting (TSF), yielding promising results. In this survey, we firstly introduce the standard diffusion models and their prevalent variants, explaining their adaptation to TSF tasks. We then provide a comprehensive review of diffusion models for TSF, paying special attention to the sources of conditional information and the mechanisms for integrating this conditioning within the models. In analyzing existing approaches using diffusion models for TSF, we provide a systematic categorization and a comprehensive summary of them in this survey. Furthermore, we examine several foundational diffusion models applied to TSF, alongside commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics. Finally, we discuss current limitations in these approaches and potential future research directions. Overall, this survey details recent progress and future prospects for diffusion models in TSF, serving as a reference for researchers in the field.
Authors: Jeyoung Lee, Hochul Kang
Abstract: We propose the Signal Dice Similarity Coefficient (SDSC), a structure-aware metric function for time series self-supervised representation learning. Most Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods for signals commonly adopt distance-based objectives such as mean squared error (MSE), which are sensitive to amplitude, invariant to waveform polarity, and unbounded in scale. These properties hinder semantic alignment and reduce interpretability. SDSC addresses this by quantifying structural agreement between temporal signals based on the intersection of signed amplitudes, derived from the Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC).Although SDSC is defined as a structure-aware metric, it can be used as a loss by subtracting from 1 and applying a differentiable approximation of the Heaviside function for gradient-based optimization. A hybrid loss formulation is also proposed to combine SDSC with MSE, improving stability and preserving amplitude where necessary. Experiments on forecasting and classification benchmarks demonstrate that SDSC-based pre-training achieves comparable or improved performance over MSE, particularly in in-domain and low-resource scenarios. The results suggest that structural fidelity in signal representations enhances the semantic representation quality, supporting the consideration of structure-aware metrics as viable alternatives to conventional distance-based methods.
Authors: Wenxuan Zeng, Tianshi Xu, Yi Chen, Yifan Zhou, Mingzhe Zhang, Jin Tan, Cheng Hong, Meng Li
Abstract: Privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) based on cryptographic protocols has emerged as a promising paradigm to protect user data privacy in cloud-based machine learning services. While it achieves formal privacy protection, PPML often incurs significant efficiency and scalability costs due to orders of magnitude overhead compared to the plaintext counterpart. Therefore, there has been a considerable focus on mitigating the efficiency gap for PPML. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and systematic review of recent PPML studies with a focus on cross-level optimizations. Specifically, we categorize existing papers into protocol level, model level, and system level, and review progress at each level. We also provide qualitative and quantitative comparisons of existing works with technical insights, based on which we discuss future research directions and highlight the necessity of integrating optimizations across protocol, model, and system levels. We hope this survey can provide an overarching understanding of existing approaches and potentially inspire future breakthroughs in the PPML field. As the field is evolving fast, we also provide a public GitHub repository to continuously track the developments, which is available at https://github.com/PKU-SEC-Lab/Awesome-PPML-Papers.
Authors: Sujata Gaihre, Amir Thapa Magar, Prasuna Pokharel, Laxmi Tiwari
Abstract: This paper describes our approach to Subtask 1 of the ImageCLEFmed MEDVQA 2025 Challenge, which targets visual question answering (VQA) for gastrointestinal endoscopy. We adopt the Florence model-a large-scale multimodal foundation model-as the backbone of our VQA pipeline, pairing a powerful vision encoder with a text encoder to interpret endoscopic images and produce clinically relevant answers. To improve generalization, we apply domain-specific augmentations that preserve medical features while increasing training diversity. Experiments on the KASVIR dataset show that fine-tuning Florence yields accurate responses on the official challenge metrics. Our results highlight the potential of large multimodal models in medical VQA and provide a strong baseline for future work on explainability, robustness, and clinical integration. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/TiwariLaxuu/VQA-Florence.git
Authors: Xu Cheng, Liang Yao, Feng He, Yukuo Cen, Yufei He, Chenhui Zhang, Wenzheng Feng, Hongyun Cai, Jie Tang
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for various graph mining tasks, yet existing scalable solutions often struggle to balance execution efficiency with prediction accuracy. These difficulties stem from iterative message-passing techniques, which place significant computational demands and require extensive GPU memory, particularly when dealing with the neighbor explosion issue inherent in large-scale graphs. This paper introduces a scalable, low-cost, flexible, and efficient GNN framework called LPS-GNN, which can perform representation learning on 100 billion graphs with a single GPU in 10 hours and shows a 13.8% improvement in User Acquisition scenarios. We examine existing graph partitioning methods and design a superior graph partition algorithm named LPMetis. In particular, LPMetis outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on various evaluation metrics. In addition, our paper proposes a subgraph augmentation strategy to enhance the model's predictive performance. It exhibits excellent compatibility, allowing the entire framework to accommodate various GNN algorithms. Successfully deployed on the Tencent platform, LPS-GNN has been tested on public and real-world datasets, achieving performance lifts of 8. 24% to 13. 89% over SOTA models in online applications.
Authors: Andrea Moschetto, Lemuel Puglisi, Alec Sargood, Pierluigi Dell'Acqua, Francesco Guarnera, Sebastiano Battiato, Daniele Rav\`i
Abstract: Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) enables the acquisition of multiple image contrasts, such as T1-weighted (T1w) and T2-weighted (T2w) scans, each offering distinct diagnostic insights. However, acquiring all desired modalities increases scan time and cost, motivating research into computational methods for cross-modal synthesis. To address this, recent approaches aim to synthesize missing MRI contrasts from those already acquired, reducing acquisition time while preserving diagnostic quality. Image-to-image (I2I) translation provides a promising framework for this task. In this paper, we present a comprehensive benchmark of generative models$\unicode{x2013}$specifically, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), diffusion models, and flow matching (FM) techniques$\unicode{x2013}$for T1w-to-T2w 2D MRI I2I translation. All frameworks are implemented with comparable settings and evaluated on three publicly available MRI datasets of healthy adults. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses show that the GAN-based Pix2Pix model outperforms diffusion and FM-based methods in terms of structural fidelity, image quality, and computational efficiency. Consistent with existing literature, these results suggest that flow-based models are prone to overfitting on small datasets and simpler tasks, and may require more data to match or surpass GAN performance. These findings offer practical guidance for deploying I2I translation techniques in real-world MRI workflows and highlight promising directions for future research in cross-modal medical image synthesis. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/AndreaMoschetto/medical-I2I-benchmark.
URLs: https://github.com/AndreaMoschetto/medical-I2I-benchmark.
Authors: Kester Wong, Sahan Bulathwela, Mutlu Cukurova
Abstract: Detecting collaborative problem solving (CPS) indicators from dialogue using machine learning techniques is a significant challenge for the field of AI in Education. Recent studies have explored the use of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) models on transcription data to reliably detect meaningful CPS indicators. A notable advancement involved the multimodal BERT variant, AudiBERT, which integrates speech and acoustic-prosodic audio features to enhance CPS diagnosis. Although initial results demonstrated multimodal improvements, the statistical significance of these enhancements remained unclear, and there was insufficient guidance on leveraging human-AI complementarity for CPS diagnosis tasks. This workshop paper extends the previous research by highlighting that the AudiBERT model not only improved the classification of classes that were sparse in the dataset, but it also had statistically significant class-wise improvements over the BERT model for classifications in the social-cognitive dimension. However, similar significant class-wise improvements over the BERT model were not observed for classifications in the affective dimension. A correlation analysis highlighted that larger training data was significantly associated with higher recall performance for both the AudiBERT and BERT models. Additionally, the precision of the BERT model was significantly associated with high inter-rater agreement among human coders. When employing the BERT model to diagnose indicators within these subskills that were well-detected by the AudiBERT model, the performance across all indicators was inconsistent. We conclude the paper by outlining a structured approach towards achieving human-AI complementarity for CPS diagnosis, highlighting the crucial inclusion of model explainability to support human agency and engagement in the reflective coding process.
Authors: Kester Wong, Sahan Bulathwela, Mutlu Cukurova
Abstract: The use of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model and its variants for classifying collaborative problem solving (CPS) has been extensively explored within the AI in Education community. However, limited attention has been given to understanding how individual tokenised words in the dataset contribute to the model's classification decisions. Enhancing the explainability of BERT-based CPS diagnostics is essential to better inform end users such as teachers, thereby fostering greater trust and facilitating wider adoption in education. This study undertook a preliminary step towards model transparency and explainability by using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) to examine how different tokenised words in transcription data contributed to a BERT model's classification of CPS processes. The findings suggested that well-performing classifications did not necessarily equate to a reasonable explanation for the classification decisions. Particular tokenised words were used frequently to affect classifications. The analysis also identified a spurious word, which contributed positively to the classification but was not semantically meaningful to the class. While such model transparency is unlikely to be useful to an end user to improve their practice, it can help them not to overrely on LLM diagnostics and ignore their human expertise. We conclude the workshop paper by noting that the extent to which the model appropriately uses the tokens for its classification is associated with the number of classes involved. It calls for an investigation into the exploration of ensemble model architectures and the involvement of human-AI complementarity for CPS diagnosis, since considerable human reasoning is still required for fine-grained discrimination of CPS subskills.
Authors: Merjem Be\'cirovi\'c, Amina Kurtovi\'c, Nordin Smajlovi\'c, Medina Kapo, Amila Akagi\'c
Abstract: Medical imaging plays a vital role in early disease diagnosis and monitoring. Specifically, blood microscopy offers valuable insights into blood cell morphology and the detection of hematological disorders. In recent years, deep learning-based automated classification systems have demonstrated high potential in enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of blood image analysis. However, a detailed performance analysis of specific deep learning frameworks appears to be lacking. This paper compares the performance of three popular deep learning frameworks, TensorFlow with Keras, PyTorch, and JAX, in classifying blood cell images from the publicly available BloodMNIST dataset. The study primarily focuses on inference time differences, but also classification performance for different image sizes. The results reveal variations in performance across frameworks, influenced by factors such as image resolution and framework-specific optimizations. Classification accuracy for JAX and PyTorch was comparable to current benchmarks, showcasing the efficiency of these frameworks for medical image classification.
Authors: {\L}ukasz Radli\'nski, Mateusz Gu\'sciora, Jan Koco\'n
Abstract: Numerous domain-specific machine learning tasks struggle with data scarcity and class imbalance. This paper systematically explores data augmentation methods for NLP, particularly through large language models like GPT. The purpose of this paper is to examine and evaluate whether traditional methods such as paraphrasing and backtranslation can leverage a new generation of models to achieve comparable performance to purely generative methods. Methods aimed at solving the problem of data scarcity and utilizing ChatGPT were chosen, as well as an exemplary dataset. We conducted a series of experiments comparing four different approaches to data augmentation in multiple experimental setups. We then evaluated the results both in terms of the quality of generated data and its impact on classification performance. The key findings indicate that backtranslation and paraphrasing can yield comparable or even better results than zero and a few-shot generation of examples.
Authors: Haochen Liu, Jia Bi, Xiaomin Wang, Xin Yang, Ling Wang
Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in surveillance, logistics, agriculture, disaster management, and military operations. Accurate detection and classification of UAV flight states, such as hovering, cruising, ascending, or transitioning, which are essential for safe and effective operations. However, conventional time series classification (TSC) methods often lack robustness and generalization for dynamic UAV environments, while state of the art(SOTA) models like Transformers and LSTM based architectures typically require large datasets and entail high computational costs, especially with high-dimensional data streams. This paper proposes a novel framework that integrates a Transformer-based Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) with Multiple Instance Locally Explainable Learning (MILET) to address these challenges in UAV flight state classification. The Transformer encoder captures long-range temporal dependencies and complex telemetry dynamics, while the GAN module augments limited datasets with realistic synthetic samples. MIL is incorporated to focus attention on the most discriminative input segments, reducing noise and computational overhead. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves superior accuracy 96.5% on the DroneDetect dataset and 98.6% on the DroneRF dataset that outperforming other SOTA approaches. The framework also demonstrates strong computational efficiency and robust generalization across diverse UAV platforms and flight states, highlighting its potential for real-time deployment in resource constrained environments.
Authors: Nandani Sharma, Dinesh Singh
Abstract: Facial expression recognition is crucial for human-computer interaction applications such as face animation, video surveillance, affective computing, medical analysis, etc. Since the structure of facial attributes varies with facial expressions, incorporating structural information into facial attributes is essential for facial expression recognition. In this paper, we propose Exp-Graph, a novel framework designed to represent the structural relationships among facial attributes using graph-based modeling for facial expression recognition. For facial attributes graph representation, facial landmarks are used as the graph's vertices. At the same time, the edges are determined based on the proximity of the facial landmark and the similarity of the local appearance of the facial attributes encoded using the vision transformer. Additionally, graph convolutional networks are utilized to capture and integrate these structural dependencies into the encoding of facial attributes, thereby enhancing the accuracy of expression recognition. Thus, Exp-Graph learns from the facial attribute graphs highly expressive semantic representations. On the other hand, the vision transformer and graph convolutional blocks help the framework exploit the local and global dependencies among the facial attributes that are essential for the recognition of facial expressions. We conducted comprehensive evaluations of the proposed Exp-Graph model on three benchmark datasets: Oulu-CASIA, eNTERFACE05, and AFEW. The model achieved recognition accuracies of 98.09\%, 79.01\%, and 56.39\%, respectively. These results indicate that Exp-Graph maintains strong generalization capabilities across both controlled laboratory settings and real-world, unconstrained environments, underscoring its effectiveness for practical facial expression recognition applications.
Authors: Pei-Xuan Li, Wei-Yun Liang, Fandel Lin, Hsun-Ping Hsieh
Abstract: Next point of interest (POI) recommendation primarily predicts future activities based on users' past check-in data and current status, providing significant value to users and service providers. We observed that the popular check-in times for different POI categories vary. For example, coffee shops are crowded in the afternoon because people like to have coffee to refresh after meals, while bars are busy late at night. However, existing methods rarely explore the relationship between POI categories and time, which may result in the model being unable to fully learn users' tendencies to visit certain POI categories at different times. Additionally, existing methods for modeling time information often convert it into time embeddings or calculate the time interval and incorporate it into the model, making it difficult to capture the continuity of time. Finally, during POI prediction, various weighting information is often ignored, such as the popularity of each POI, the transition relationships between POIs, and the distances between POIs, leading to suboptimal performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel next POI recommendation framework called Graph Disentangler with POI Weighted Module (GDPW). This framework aims to jointly consider POI category information and multiple POI weighting factors. Specifically, the proposed GDPW learns category and time representations through the Global Category Graph and the Global Category-Time Graph. Then, we disentangle category and time information through contrastive learning. After prediction, the final POI recommendation for users is obtained by weighting the prediction results based on the transition weights and distance relationships between POIs. We conducted experiments on two real-world datasets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed GDPW outperforms other existing models, improving performance by 3% to 11%.
Authors: Fred Mutisya (Qhala, Nairobi, Kenya, Kenya Medical Association, Nairobi, Kenya), Shikoh Gitau (Qhala, Nairobi, Kenya), Christine Syovata (Kenya Medical Association, Nairobi, Kenya), Diana Oigara (Kenya Medical Association, Nairobi, Kenya), Ibrahim Matende (Kenya Medical Association, Nairobi, Kenya), Muna Aden (Kenya Medical Association, Nairobi, Kenya), Munira Ali (Kenya Medical Association, Nairobi, Kenya), Ryan Nyotu (Kenya Medical Association, Nairobi, Kenya), Diana Marion (Kenya Medical Association, Nairobi, Kenya), Job Nyangena (Kenya Medical Association, Nairobi, Kenya), Nasubo Ongoma (Qhala, Nairobi, Kenya), Keith Mbae (Qhala, Nairobi, Kenya), Elizabeth Wamicha (Qhala, Nairobi, Kenya), Eric Mibuari (Qhala, Nairobi, Kenya), Jean Philbert Nsengemana (Africa CDC), Talkmore Chidede (AfCFTA)
Abstract: Large Language Models(LLMs) hold promise for improving healthcare access in low-resource settings, but their effectiveness in African primary care remains underexplored. We present a methodology for creating a benchmark dataset and evaluation framework focused on Kenyan Level 2 and 3 clinical care. Our approach uses retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to ground clinical questions in Kenya's national guidelines, ensuring alignment with local standards. These guidelines were digitized, chunked, and indexed for semantic retrieval. Gemini Flash 2.0 Lite was then prompted with guideline excerpts to generate realistic clinical scenarios, multiple-choice questions, and rationale based answers in English and Swahili. Kenyan physicians co-created and refined the dataset, and a blinded expert review process ensured clinical accuracy, clarity, and cultural appropriateness. The resulting Alama Health QA dataset includes thousands of regulator-aligned question answer pairs across common outpatient conditions. Beyond accuracy, we introduce evaluation metrics that test clinical reasoning, safety, and adaptability such as rare case detection (Needle in the Haystack), stepwise logic (Decision Points), and contextual adaptability. Initial results reveal significant performance gaps when LLMs are applied to localized scenarios, consistent with findings that LLM accuracy is lower on African medical content than on US-based benchmarks. This work offers a replicable model for guideline-driven, dynamic benchmarking to support safe AI deployment in African health systems.
Authors: Juntao Tan, Anran Li, Quanchao Liu, Peng Ran, Lan Zhang
Abstract: Vertical federated learning (VFL) enables multiple parties with disjoint features to collaboratively train models without sharing raw data. While privacy vulnerabilities of VFL are extensively-studied, its security threats-particularly targeted label attacks-remain underexplored. In such attacks, a passive party perturbs inputs at inference to force misclassification into adversary-chosen labels. Existing methods rely on unrealistic assumptions (e.g., accessing VFL-model's outputs) and ignore anomaly detectors deployed in real-world systems. To bridge this gap, we introduce VTarbel, a two-stage, minimal-knowledge attack framework explicitly designed to evade detector-enhanced VFL inference. During the preparation stage, the attacker selects a minimal set of high-expressiveness samples (via maximum mean discrepancy), submits them through VFL protocol to collect predicted labels, and uses these pseudo-labels to train estimated detector and surrogate model on local features. In attack stage, these models guide gradient-based perturbations of remaining samples, crafting adversarial instances that induce targeted misclassifications and evade detection. We implement VTarbel and evaluate it against four model architectures, seven multimodal datasets, and two anomaly detectors. Across all settings, VTarbel outperforms four state-of-the-art baselines, evades detection, and retains effective against three representative privacy-preserving defenses. These results reveal critical security blind spots in current VFL deployments and underscore urgent need for robust, attack-aware defenses.
Authors: Juntao Tan, Lan Zhang, Zhonghao Hu, Kai Yang, Peng Ran, Bo Li
Abstract: Though vertical federated learning (VFL) is generally considered to be privacy-preserving, recent studies have shown that VFL system is vulnerable to label inference attacks originating from various attack surfaces. Among these attacks, the model completion (MC) attack is currently the most powerful one. Existing defense methods against it either sacrifice model accuracy or incur impractical computational overhead. In this paper, we propose VMask, a novel label privacy protection framework designed to defend against MC attack from the perspective of layer masking. Our key insight is to disrupt the strong correlation between input data and intermediate outputs by applying the secret sharing (SS) technique to mask layer parameters in the attacker's model. We devise a strategy for selecting critical layers to mask, reducing the overhead that would arise from naively applying SS to the entire model. Moreover, VMask is the first framework to offer a tunable privacy budget to defenders, allowing for flexible control over the levels of label privacy according to actual requirements. We built a VFL system, implemented VMask on it, and extensively evaluated it using five model architectures and 13 datasets with different modalities, comparing it to 12 other defense methods. The results demonstrate that VMask achieves the best privacy-utility trade-off, successfully thwarting the MC attack (reducing the label inference accuracy to a random guessing level) while preserving model performance (e.g., in Transformer-based model, the averaged drop of VFL model accuracy is only 0.09%). VMask's runtime is up to 60,846 times faster than cryptography-based methods, and it only marginally exceeds that of standard VFL by 1.8 times in a large Transformer-based model, which is generally acceptable.
Authors: Minsuh Joo, Hyunsoo Cho
Abstract: Despite the outstanding performance of large language models (LLMs) across various NLP tasks, hallucinations in LLMs--where LLMs generate inaccurate responses--remains as a critical problem as it can be directly connected to a crisis of building safe and reliable LLMs. Uncertainty estimation is primarily used to measure hallucination levels in LLM responses so that correct and incorrect answers can be distinguished clearly. This study proposes an effective uncertainty estimation approach, \textbf{Cl}ust\textbf{e}ring-based sem\textbf{an}tic con\textbf{s}ist\textbf{e}ncy (\textbf{Cleanse}). Cleanse quantifies the uncertainty with the proportion of the intra-cluster consistency in the total consistency between LLM hidden embeddings which contain adequate semantic information of generations, by employing clustering. The effectiveness of Cleanse for detecting hallucination is validated using four off-the-shelf models, LLaMA-7B, LLaMA-13B, LLaMA2-7B and Mistral-7B and two question-answering benchmarks, SQuAD and CoQA.
Authors: Keivan Shariatmadar, Ahmad Osman
Abstract: The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into sports officiating represents a paradigm shift in how decisions are made in competitive environments. Traditional manual systems, even when supported by Instant Video Replay (IVR), often suffer from latency, subjectivity, and inconsistent enforcement, undermining fairness and athlete trust. This paper introduces 'FST.ai' -- which is developed under the 'R3AL.ai' project, which serves as its Principal Investigator: r3al.ai -- a novel AI-powered framework designed to enhance officiating in Sport Taekwondo, particularly focusing on the complex task of real-time head kick detection and scoring. Leveraging computer vision, deep learning, and edge inference, the system automates the identification and classification of key actions, significantly reducing decision time from minutes to seconds while improving consistency and transparency. Importantly, the methodology is not limited to Taekwondo. The underlying framework -- based on pose estimation, motion classification, and impact analysis -- can be adapted to a wide range of sports requiring action detection, such as judo, karate, fencing, or even team sports like football and basketball, where foul recognition or performance tracking is critical. By addressing one of Taekwondo's most challenging scenarios -- head kick scoring -- we demonstrate the robustness, scalability, and sport-agnostic potential of 'FST.ai' to transform officiating standards across multiple disciplines.
Authors: Shayan Rokhva, Babak Teimourpour
Abstract: Quantifying post-consumer food waste in institutional dining settings is essential for supporting data-driven sustainability strategies. This study presents a cost-effective computer vision framework that estimates plate-level food waste by utilizing semantic segmentation of RGB images taken before and after meal consumption across five Iranian dishes. Four fully supervised models (U-Net, U-Net++, and their lightweight variants) were trained using a capped dynamic inverse-frequency loss and AdamW optimizer, then evaluated through a comprehensive set of metrics, including Pixel Accuracy, Dice, IoU, and a custom-defined Distributional Pixel Agreement (DPA) metric tailored to the task. All models achieved satisfying performance, and for each food type, at least one model approached or surpassed 90% DPA, demonstrating strong alignment in pixel-wise proportion estimates. Lighter models with reduced parameter counts offered faster inference, achieving real-time throughput on an NVIDIA T4 GPU. Further analysis showed superior segmentation performance for dry and more rigid components (e.g., rice and fries), while more complex, fragmented, or viscous dishes, such as stews, showed reduced performance, specifically post-consumption. Despite limitations such as reliance on 2D imaging, constrained food variety, and manual data collection, the proposed framework is pioneering and represents a scalable, contactless solution for continuous monitoring of food consumption. This research lays foundational groundwork for automated, real-time waste tracking systems in large-scale food service environments and offers actionable insights and outlines feasible future directions for dining hall management and policymakers aiming to reduce institutional food waste.
Authors: Zixin Xu, Zhijie Wang, Zhiyuan Pan
Abstract: The exponential growth of spam text on the Internet necessitates robust detection mechanisms to mitigate risks such as information leakage and social instability. This work addresses two principal challenges: adversarial strategies employed by spammers and the scarcity of labeled data. We propose a novel spam-text detection framework GCC-Spam, which integrates three core innovations. First, a character similarity network captures orthographic and phonetic features to counter character-obfuscation attacks and furthermore produces sentence embeddings for downstream classification. Second, contrastive learning enhances discriminability by optimizing the latent-space distance between spam and normal texts. Third, a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) generates realistic pseudo-spam samples to alleviate data scarcity while improving model robustness and classification accuracy. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms baseline approaches, achieving higher detection rates with significantly fewer labeled examples.
Authors: Xinheng Lyu, Yuci Liang, Wenting Chen, Meidan Ding, Jiaqi Yang, Guolin Huang, Daokun Zhang, Xiangjian He, Linlin Shen
Abstract: Whole slide images (WSIs) are vital in digital pathology, enabling gigapixel tissue analysis across various pathological tasks. While recent advancements in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) allow multi-task WSI analysis through natural language, they often underperform compared to task-specific models. Collaborative multi-agent systems have emerged as a promising solution to balance versatility and accuracy in healthcare, yet their potential remains underexplored in pathology-specific domains. To address these issues, we propose WSI-Agents, a novel collaborative multi-agent system for multi-modal WSI analysis. WSI-Agents integrates specialized functional agents with robust task allocation and verification mechanisms to enhance both task-specific accuracy and multi-task versatility through three components: (1) a task allocation module assigning tasks to expert agents using a model zoo of patch and WSI level MLLMs, (2) a verification mechanism ensuring accuracy through internal consistency checks and external validation using pathology knowledge bases and domain-specific models, and (3) a summary module synthesizing the final summary with visual interpretation maps. Extensive experiments on multi-modal WSI benchmarks show WSI-Agents's superiority to current WSI MLLMs and medical agent frameworks across diverse tasks.
Authors: Mohammed Alkhowaiter, Norah Alshahrani, Saied Alshahrani, Reem I. Masoud, Alaa Alzahrani, Deema Alnuhait, Emad A. Alghamdi, Khalid Almubarak
Abstract: Post-training has emerged as a crucial technique for aligning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) with human instructions, significantly enhancing their performance across a wide range of tasks. Central to this process is the quality and diversity of post-training datasets. This paper presents a review of publicly available Arabic post-training datasets on the Hugging Face Hub, organized along four key dimensions: (1) LLM Capabilities (e.g., Question Answering, Translation, Reasoning, Summarization, Dialogue, Code Generation, and Function Calling); (2) Steerability (e.g., persona and system prompts); (3) Alignment (e.g., cultural, safety, ethics, and fairness), and (4) Robustness. Each dataset is rigorously evaluated based on popularity, practical adoption, recency and maintenance, documentation and annotation quality, licensing transparency, and scientific contribution. Our review revealed critical gaps in the development of Arabic post-training datasets, including limited task diversity, inconsistent or missing documentation and annotation, and low adoption across the community. Finally, the paper discusses the implications of these gaps on the progress of Arabic LLMs and applications while providing concrete recommendations for future efforts in post-training dataset development.
Authors: Amina Dzafic, Merve Kavut, Ulya Bayram
Abstract: Suicidal ideation detection is critical for real-time suicide prevention, yet its progress faces two under-explored challenges: limited language coverage and unreliable annotation practices. Most available datasets are in English, but even among these, high-quality, human-annotated data remains scarce. As a result, many studies rely on available pre-labeled datasets without examining their annotation process or label reliability. The lack of datasets in other languages further limits the global realization of suicide prevention via artificial intelligence (AI). In this study, we address one of these gaps by constructing a novel Turkish suicidal ideation corpus derived from social media posts and introducing a resource-efficient annotation framework involving three human annotators and two large language models (LLMs). We then address the remaining gaps by performing a bidirectional evaluation of label reliability and model consistency across this dataset and three popular English suicidal ideation detection datasets, using transfer learning through eight pre-trained sentiment and emotion classifiers. These transformers help assess annotation consistency and benchmark model performance against manually labeled data. Our findings underscore the need for more rigorous, language-inclusive approaches to annotation and evaluation in mental health natural language processing (NLP) while demonstrating the questionable performance of popular models with zero-shot transfer learning. We advocate for transparency in model training and dataset construction in mental health NLP, prioritizing data and model reliability.
Authors: Xuetao Lin (Beihang University, Beijing, China, SKLCCSE, Beijing, China), Tianhao Peng (Beihang University, Beijing, China, SKLCCSE, Beijing, China), Peihong Dai (Beihang University, Beijing, China, SKLCCSE, Beijing, China), Yu Liang (Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China), Wenjun Wu (Beihang University, Beijing, China, SKLCCSE, Beijing, China)
Abstract: EEG-based emotion recognition plays an important role in developing adaptive brain-computer communication systems, yet faces two fundamental challenges in practical implementations: (1) effective integration of non-stationary spatial-temporal neural patterns, (2) robust adaptation to dynamic emotional intensity variations in real-world scenarios. This paper proposes SST-CL, a novel framework integrating spatial-temporal transformers with curriculum learning. Our method introduces two core components: a spatial encoder that models inter-channel relationships and a temporal encoder that captures multi-scale dependencies through windowed attention mechanisms, enabling simultaneous extraction of spatial correlations and temporal dynamics from EEG signals. Complementing this architecture, an intensity-aware curriculum learning strategy progressively guides training from high-intensity to low-intensity emotional states through dynamic sample scheduling based on a dual difficulty assessment. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across various emotional intensity levels, with ablation studies confirming the necessity of both architectural components and the curriculum learning mechanism.
Authors: Claudio Giusti, Luca Guarnera, Mirko Casu, Sebastiano Battiato
Abstract: Detecting fraudulent credit card transactions remains a significant challenge, due to the extreme class imbalance in real-world data and the often subtle patterns that separate fraud from legitimate activity. Existing research commonly attempts to address this by generating synthetic samples for the minority class using approaches such as GANs, VAEs, or hybrid generative models. However, these techniques, particularly when applied only to minority-class data, tend to result in overconfident classifiers and poor latent cluster separation, ultimately limiting real-world detection performance. In this study, we propose the Causal Prototype Attention Classifier (CPAC), an interpretable architecture that promotes class-aware clustering and improved latent space structure through prototype-based attention mechanisms and we will couple it with the encoder in a VAE-GAN allowing it to offer a better cluster separation moving beyond post-hoc sample augmentation. We compared CPAC-augmented models to traditional oversamplers, such as SMOTE, as well as to state-of-the-art generative models, both with and without CPAC-based latent classifiers. Our results show that classifier-guided latent shaping with CPAC delivers superior performance, achieving an F1-score of 93.14\% percent and recall of 90.18\%, along with improved latent cluster separation. Further ablation studies and visualizations provide deeper insight into the benefits and limitations of classifier-driven representation learning for fraud detection. The codebase for this work will be available at final submission.
Authors: Mat\v{e}j Kripner, Michal \v{S}ustr, Milan Straka
Abstract: Automated theorem proving (ATP) has been a classical problem in artificial intelligence since its inception, yet it remains challenging due to its vast state and action space. Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a promising heuristic for ATP, but they lack correctness guarantees and thus require interaction with a proof verifier. Such interactions typically follow one of two approaches: black-box interaction, which does not utilize intermediate proof states, or white-box approaches, which allow for incremental proof construction and examination of intermediate states. While black-box approaches have directly benefited from recent LLM advances, white-box methods have comparatively lagged behind. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing LeanTree, which consists of (i) a tool built in the Lean 4 language that factorizes complex proof states into simpler, independent branches, and (ii) a dataset of these factorized intermediate states. Our white-box tooling offers several advantages over black-box approaches: it simplifies evaluation, reduces necessary context, generates richer training data, enables parallel search across multiple states, supports efficient reuse of states, and provides feedback in case of errors. Our preliminary results hint that white-box approaches outperform black-box alternatives in some settings.
Authors: Anushka Tiwari, Sayantan Pal, Rohini K. Srihari, Kaiyi Ji
Abstract: Prompt-based continual learning (CL) offers a parameter-efficient way to adapt large language models (LLMs) across task sequences. However, most existing methods assume task-aware inference and maintain a growing list of task-specific prompts, which limits scalability and hides latent forgetting. In this work, we introduce GRID, a unified framework that addresses two key limitations: (1) latent forgetting under task-agnostic inference, and (2) prompt memory explosion as task sequences grow. GRID integrates a task-aware decoding mechanism that improves backward transfer by leveraging representative inputs, automatic task identification, and constrained decoding. Additionally, we propose a gradient-based prompt selection strategy that compresses less informative prompts into a single aggregated representation, enabling scalable and memory-efficient lifelong learning. Extensive experiments across short-sequence, long-sequence, and negative transfer benchmarks show that GRID significantly improves backward transfer, achieves competitive forward transfer, and reduces forgotten tasks by up to 80\%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on T5 and Flan-T5 backbones.
Authors: Patrik Reizinger, B\'alint Mucs\'anyi, Siyuan Guo, Benjamin Eysenbach, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Wieland Brendel
Abstract: Self-supervised feature learning and pretraining methods in reinforcement learning (RL) often rely on information-theoretic principles, termed mutual information skill learning (MISL). These methods aim to learn a representation of the environment while also incentivizing exploration thereof. However, the role of the representation and mutual information parametrization in MISL is not yet well understood theoretically. Our work investigates MISL through the lens of identifiable representation learning by focusing on the Contrastive Successor Features (CSF) method. We prove that CSF can provably recover the environment's ground-truth features up to a linear transformation due to the inner product parametrization of the features and skill diversity in a discriminative sense. This first identifiability guarantee for representation learning in RL also helps explain the implications of different mutual information objectives and the downsides of entropy regularizers. We empirically validate our claims in MuJoCo and DeepMind Control and show how CSF provably recovers the ground-truth features both from states and pixels.
Authors: Szymon Mazurek, Jakub Caputa, Maciej Wielgosz
Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer energy-efficient and biologically plausible alternatives to traditional artificial neural networks, but their performance depends critically on the tuning of neuron model parameters. In this work, we identify and characterize an operational space - a constrained region in the neuron hyperparameter domain (specifically membrane time constant tau and voltage threshold vth) - within which the network exhibits meaningful activity and functional behavior. Operating inside this manifold yields optimal trade-offs between classification accuracy and spiking activity, while stepping outside leads to degeneration: either excessive energy use or complete network silence. Through systematic exploration across datasets and architectures, we visualize and quantify this manifold and identify efficient operating points. We further assess robustness to adversarial noise, showing that SNNs exhibit increased spike correlation and internal synchrony when operating outside their optimal region. These findings highlight the importance of principled hyperparameter tuning to ensure both task performance and energy efficiency. Our results offer practical guidelines for deploying robust and efficient SNNs, particularly in neuromorphic computing scenarios.
Authors: Luyi Ma, Wanjia Zhang, Kai Zhao, Abhishek Kulkarni, Lalitesh Morishetti, Anjana Ganesh, Ashish Ranjan, Aashika Padmanabhan, Jianpeng Xu, Jason Cho, Praveen Kanumala, Kaushiki Nag, Sumit Dutta, Kamiya Motwani, Malay Patel, Evren Korpeoglu, Sushant Kumar, Kannan Achan
Abstract: Generative models have recently demonstrated strong potential in multi-behavior recommendation systems, leveraging the expressive power of transformers and tokenization to generate personalized item sequences. However, their adoption is hindered by (1) the lack of explicit information for token reasoning, (2) high computational costs due to quadratic attention complexity and dense sequence representations after tokenization, and (3) limited multi-scale modeling over user history. In this work, we propose GRACE (Generative Recommendation via journey-aware sparse Attention on Chain-of-thought tokEnization), a novel generative framework for multi-behavior sequential recommendation. GRACE introduces a hybrid Chain-of-Thought (CoT) tokenization method that encodes user-item interactions with explicit attributes from product knowledge graphs (e.g., category, brand, price) over semantic tokenization, enabling interpretable and behavior-aligned generation. To address the inefficiency of standard attention, we design a Journey-Aware Sparse Attention (JSA) mechanism, which selectively attends to compressed, intra-, inter-, and current-context segments in the tokenized sequence. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that GRACE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to +106.9% HR@10 and +106.7% NDCG@10 improvement over the state-of-the-art baseline on the Home domain, and +22.1% HR@10 on the Electronics domain. GRACE also reduces attention computation by up to 48% with long sequences.
Authors: Cassandra Tong Ye, Shamus Li, Tyler King, Kristina Monakhova
Abstract: Deep learning models often hallucinate, producing realistic artifacts that are not truly present in the sample. This can have dire consequences for scientific and medical inverse problems, such as MRI and microscopy denoising, where accuracy is more important than perceptual quality. Uncertainty quantification techniques, such as conformal prediction, can pinpoint outliers and provide guarantees for image regression tasks, improving reliability. However, existing methods utilize a linear constant scaling factor to calibrate uncertainty bounds, resulting in larger, less informative bounds. We propose QUTCC, a quantile uncertainty training and calibration technique that enables nonlinear, non-uniform scaling of quantile predictions to enable tighter uncertainty estimates. Using a U-Net architecture with a quantile embedding, QUTCC enables the prediction of the full conditional distribution of quantiles for the imaging task. During calibration, QUTCC generates uncertainty bounds by iteratively querying the network for upper and lower quantiles, progressively refining the bounds to obtain a tighter interval that captures the desired coverage. We evaluate our method on several denoising tasks as well as compressive MRI reconstruction. Our method successfully pinpoints hallucinations in image estimates and consistently achieves tighter uncertainty intervals than prior methods while maintaining the same statistical coverage.
Authors: Mehak Arora, Ayman Ali, Kaiyuan Wu, Carolyn Davis, Takashi Shimazui, Mahmoud Alwakeel, Victor Moas, Philip Yang, Annette Esper, Rishikesan Kamaleswaran
Abstract: In intensive care units (ICUs), patients with complex clinical conditions require vigilant monitoring and prompt interventions. Chest X-rays (CXRs) are a vital diagnostic tool, providing insights into clinical trajectories, but their irregular acquisition limits their utility. Existing tools for CXR interpretation are constrained by cross-sectional analysis, failing to capture temporal dynamics. To address this, we introduce CXR-TFT, a novel multi-modal framework that integrates temporally sparse CXR imaging and radiology reports with high-frequency clinical data, such as vital signs, laboratory values, and respiratory flow sheets, to predict the trajectory of CXR findings in critically ill patients. CXR-TFT leverages latent embeddings from a vision encoder that are temporally aligned with hourly clinical data through interpolation. A transformer model is then trained to predict CXR embeddings at each hour, conditioned on previous embeddings and clinical measurements. In a retrospective study of 20,000 ICU patients, CXR-TFT demonstrated high accuracy in forecasting abnormal CXR findings up to 12 hours before they became radiographically evident. This predictive capability in clinical data holds significant potential for enhancing the management of time-sensitive conditions like acute respiratory distress syndrome, where early intervention is crucial and diagnoses are often delayed. By providing distinctive temporal resolution in prognostic CXR analysis, CXR-TFT offers actionable 'whole patient' insights that can directly improve clinical outcomes.
Authors: Yanming Zhang, Krishnakumar Hegde, Klaus Mueller
Abstract: Causality helps people reason about and understand complex systems, particularly through what-if analyses that explore how interventions might alter outcomes. Although existing methods embrace causal reasoning using interventions and counterfactual analysis, they primarily focus on effects at the population level. These approaches often fall short in systems characterized by significant heterogeneity, where the impact of an intervention can vary widely across subgroups. To address this challenge, we present XplainAct, a visual analytics framework that supports simulating, explaining, and reasoning interventions at the individual level within subpopulations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of XplainAct through two case studies: investigating opioid-related deaths in epidemiology and analyzing voting inclinations in the presidential election.
Authors: Derek Li, Jiaming Zhou, Amirreza Kazemi, Qianyi Sun, Abbas Ghaddar, Mohammad Ali Alomrani, Liheng Ma, Yu Luo, Dong Li, Feng Wen, Jianye Hao, Mark Coates, Yingxue Zhang
Abstract: The advancement of general-purpose artificial intelligence relies on large language models (LLMs) that excel across a wide range of tasks, from structured reasoning to creative generation. However, post-training methods like Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) often struggle with generalization, favoring memorization over transferable learning. In this work, we introduce Omni-Think, a unified reinforcement learning (RL) framework that enhances LLM performance across diverse tasks by combining rule-based verifiable rewards with generative preference signals via LLM-as-a-Judge evaluations. Our approach enables consistent optimization across task types and scales RL-based training to subjective domains. We further investigate training strategies, demonstrating that a curriculum-based progression that orders tasks from structured to open-ended improves performance and reduces forgetting. Experimental results across four domains reveal that curriculum learning improves performance by 5.2\% over joint training and 9.1\% over model merging. These results highlight the importance of task-aware sampling and hybrid supervision in scaling RL-based post-training for general-purpose LLMs.
Authors: Xinxin Dong, Baoyun Peng, Haokai Ma, Yufei Wang, Zixuan Dong, Fei Hu, Xiaodong Wang
Abstract: Video Question Answering (VideoQA) requires identifying sparse critical moments in long videos and reasoning about their causal relationships to answer semantically complex questions. While recent advances in multimodal learning have improved alignment and fusion, current approaches remain limited by two prevalent but fundamentally flawed strategies: (1) task-agnostic sampling indiscriminately processes all frames, overwhelming key events with irrelevant content; and (2) heuristic retrieval captures superficial patterns but misses causal-temporal structures needed for complex reasoning. To address these challenges, we introduce LeAdQA, an innovative approach that bridges these gaps through synergizing causal-aware query refinement with fine-grained visual grounding. Our method first leverages LLMs to reformulate question-option pairs, resolving causal ambiguities and sharpening temporal focus. These refined queries subsequently direct a temporal grounding model to precisely retrieve the most salient segments, complemented by an adaptive fusion mechanism dynamically integrating the evidence to maximize relevance. The integrated visual-textual cues are then processed by an MLLM to generate accurate, contextually-grounded answers. Experiments on NExT-QA, IntentQA, and NExT-GQA demonstrate that our method's precise visual grounding substantially enhances the understanding of video-question relationships, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on complex reasoning tasks while maintaining computational efficiency.
Authors: Erfan Pirmorad
Abstract: The complexity and interconnectivity of entities involved in money laundering demand investigative reasoning over graph-structured data. This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) as reasoning engines over localized subgraphs extracted from a financial knowledge graph. We propose a lightweight pipeline that retrieves k-hop neighborhoods around entities of interest, serializes them into structured text, and prompts an LLM via few-shot in-context learning to assess suspiciousness and generate justifications. Using synthetic anti-money laundering (AML) scenarios that reflect common laundering behaviors, we show that LLMs can emulate analyst-style logic, highlight red flags, and provide coherent explanations. While this study is exploratory, it illustrates the potential of LLM-based graph reasoning in AML and lays groundwork for explainable, language-driven financial crime analytics.
Authors: Xi Xiao, Aristeidis Tsaris, Anika Tabassum, John Lagergren, Larry M. York, Tianyang Wang, Xiao Wang
Abstract: Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) captures hundreds of narrow, contiguous wavelength bands, making it a powerful tool in biology, agriculture, and environmental monitoring. However, interpreting Vision Transformers (ViTs) in this setting remains largely unexplored due to two key challenges: (1) existing saliency methods struggle to capture meaningful spectral cues, often collapsing attention onto the class token, and (2) full-spectrum ViTs are computationally prohibitive for interpretability, given the high-dimensional nature of HSI data. We present FOCUS, the first framework that enables reliable and efficient spatial-spectral interpretability for frozen ViTs. FOCUS introduces two core components: class-specific spectral prompts that guide attention toward semantically meaningful wavelength groups, and a learnable [SINK] token trained with an attraction loss to absorb noisy or redundant attention. Together, these designs make it possible to generate stable and interpretable 3D saliency maps and spectral importance curves in a single forward pass, without any gradient backpropagation or backbone modification. FOCUS improves band-level IoU by 15 percent, reduces attention collapse by over 40 percent, and produces saliency results that align closely with expert annotations. With less than 1 percent parameter overhead, our method makes high-resolution ViT interpretability practical for real-world hyperspectral applications, bridging a long-standing gap between black-box modeling and trustworthy HSI decision-making.
Authors: Sam Johnson, Viet Pham, Thai Le
Abstract: This work demonstrates that LLM-based web navigation agents offer powerful automation capabilities but are vulnerable to Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) attacks. We show that adversaries can embed universal adversarial triggers in webpage HTML to hijack agent behavior that utilizes the accessibility tree to parse HTML, causing unintended or malicious actions. Using the Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) algorithm and a Browser Gym agent powered by Llama-3.1, our system demonstrates high success rates across real websites in both targeted and general attacks, including login credential exfiltration and forced ad clicks. Our empirical results highlight critical security risks and the need for stronger defenses as LLM-driven autonomous web agents become more widely adopted. The system software (https://github.com/sej2020/manipulating-web-agents) is released under the MIT License, with an accompanying publicly available demo website (http://lethaiq.github.io/attack-web-llm-agent).
URLs: https://github.com/sej2020/manipulating-web-agents), http://lethaiq.github.io/attack-web-llm-agent).
Authors: Xu Yang, Chenhui Lin, Haotian Liu, Qi Wang, Wenchuan Wu
Abstract: With the advanced reasoning and information analysis capabilities, large language models (LLMs) can offer a novel approach for the autonomous generation of dispatch strategies in power systems. This letter proposes an LLM-based experience-driven voltage control solution for distribution networks, which enables the self-evolution of LLM-based voltage control strategies through the collaboration and interaction of multiple modules-specifically, experience storage, experience retrieval, experience generation, and experience modification. Comprehensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method and highlight the applicability of LLM in addressing power system dispatch challenges.
Authors: Ziming Dai, Chao Qiu, Fei Gao, Yunfeng Zhao, Xiaofei Wang
Abstract: Pre-trained Transformer-based large models have revolutionized personal virtual assistants, but their deployment in cloud environments faces challenges related to data privacy and response latency. Deploying large models closer to the data and users has become a key research area to address these issues. However, applying these models directly often entails significant difficulties, such as model mismatching, resource constraints, and energy inefficiency. Automated design of customized models is necessary, but it faces three key challenges, namely, the high cost of centralized model customization, imbalanced performance from user heterogeneity, and suboptimal performance from data heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose ACME, an adaptive customization approach of Transformer-based large models via distributed systems. To avoid the low cost-efficiency of centralized methods, ACME employs a bidirectional single-loop distributed system to progressively achieve fine-grained collaborative model customization. In order to better match user heterogeneity, it begins by customizing the backbone generation and identifying the Pareto Front under model size constraints to ensure optimal resource utilization. Subsequently, it performs header generation and refines the model using data distribution-based personalized architecture aggregation to match data heterogeneity. Evaluation on different datasets shows that ACME achieves cost-efficient models under model size constraints. Compared to centralized systems, data transmission volume is reduced to 6 percent. Additionally, the average accuracy improves by 10 percent compared to the baseline, with the trade-off metrics increasing by nearly 30 percent.
Authors: Alex Cloud, Minh Le, James Chua, Jan Betley, Anna Sztyber-Betley, Jacob Hilton, Samuel Marks, Owain Evans
Abstract: We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models transmit behavioral traits via semantically unrelated data. In our main experiments, a "teacher" model with some trait T (such as liking owls or being misaligned) generates a dataset consisting solely of number sequences. Remarkably, a "student" model trained on this dataset learns T. This occurs even when the data is filtered to remove references to T. We observe the same effect when training on code or reasoning traces generated by the same teacher model. However, we do not observe the effect when the teacher and student have different base models. To help explain our findings, we prove a theoretical result showing that subliminal learning occurs in all neural networks under certain conditions, and demonstrate subliminal learning in a simple MLP classifier. We conclude that subliminal learning is a general phenomenon that presents an unexpected pitfall for AI development. Distillation could propagate unintended traits, even when developers try to prevent this via data filtering.
Authors: Juan Hu, Shaojing Fan, Terence Sim
Abstract: Multi-face deepfake videos are becoming increasingly prevalent, often appearing in natural social settings that challenge existing detection methods. Most current approaches excel at single-face detection but struggle in multi-face scenarios, due to a lack of awareness of crucial contextual cues. In this work, we develop a novel approach that leverages human cognition to analyze and defend against multi-face deepfake videos. Through a series of human studies, we systematically examine how people detect deepfake faces in social settings. Our quantitative analysis reveals four key cues humans rely on: scene-motion coherence, inter-face appearance compatibility, interpersonal gaze alignment, and face-body consistency. Guided by these insights, we introduce \textsf{HICOM}, a novel framework designed to detect every fake face in multi-face scenarios. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that \textsf{HICOM} improves average accuracy by 3.3\% in in-dataset detection and 2.8\% under real-world perturbations. Moreover, it outperforms existing methods by 5.8\% on unseen datasets, demonstrating the generalization of human-inspired cues. \textsf{HICOM} further enhances interpretability by incorporating an LLM to provide human-readable explanations, making detection results more transparent and convincing. Our work sheds light on involving human factors to enhance defense against deepfakes.
Authors: Jiaji Zhang, Ruichao Sun, Hailiang Zhao, Jiaju Wu, Peng Chen, Hao Li, Xinkui Zhao, Kingsum Chow, Gang Xiong, Lin Ye, Shuiguang Deng
Abstract: Diffusion models have demonstrated exceptional generative capabilities but are computationally intensive, posing significant challenges for deployment in resource-constrained or latency-sensitive environments. Quantization offers an effective means to reduce model size and computational cost, with post-training quantization (PTQ) being particularly appealing due to its compatibility with pre-trained models without requiring retraining or training data. However, existing PTQ methods for diffusion models often rely on architecture-specific heuristics that limit their generalizability and hinder integration with industrial deployment pipelines. To address these limitations, we propose SegQuant, a unified quantization framework that adaptively combines complementary techniques to enhance cross-model versatility. SegQuant consists of a segment-aware, graph-based quantization strategy (SegLinear) that captures structural semantics and spatial heterogeneity, along with a dual-scale quantization scheme (DualScale) that preserves polarity-asymmetric activations, which is crucial for maintaining visual fidelity in generated outputs. SegQuant is broadly applicable beyond Transformer-based diffusion models, achieving strong performance while ensuring seamless compatibility with mainstream deployment tools.
Authors: Kunyu Yu, Rui Yang, Jingchi Liao, Siqi Li, Huitao Li, Irene Li, Yifan Peng, Rishikesan Kamaleswaran, Nan Liu
Abstract: Foundation models have emerged as a powerful approach for processing electronic health records (EHRs), offering flexibility to handle diverse medical data modalities. In this study, we present a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates the performance, fairness, and interpretability of foundation models, both as unimodal encoders and as multimodal learners, using the publicly available MIMIC-IV database. To support consistent and reproducible evaluation, we developed a standardized data processing pipeline that harmonizes heterogeneous clinical records into an analysis-ready format. We systematically compared eight foundation models, encompassing both unimodal and multimodal models, as well as domain-specific and general-purpose variants. Our findings demonstrate that incorporating multiple data modalities leads to consistent improvements in predictive performance without introducing additional bias. Through this benchmark, we aim to support the development of effective and trustworthy multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) systems for real-world clinical applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/nliulab/MIMIC-Multimodal.
Authors: Abdul-Kazeem Shamba, Kerstin Bach, Gavin Taylor
Abstract: We revisit previous contrastive learning frameworks to investigate the effect of introducing an adaptive margin into the contrastive loss function for time series representation learning. Specifically, we explore whether an adaptive margin (eMargin), adjusted based on a predefined similarity threshold, can improve the separation between adjacent but dissimilar time steps and subsequently lead to better performance in downstream tasks. Our study evaluates the impact of this modification on clustering performance and classification in three benchmark datasets. Our findings, however, indicate that achieving high scores on unsupervised clustering metrics does not necessarily imply that the learned embeddings are meaningful or effective in downstream tasks. To be specific, eMargin added to InfoNCE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in unsupervised clustering metrics, but struggles to achieve competitive results in downstream classification with linear probing. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/sfi-norwai/eMargin.
Authors: Haoxuan Zhang, Wenju Cui, Yuzhu Cao, Tao Tan, Jie Liu, Yunsong Peng, Jian Zheng
Abstract: The segmentation of mass lesions in digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) images is very significant for the early screening of breast cancer. However, the high-density breast tissue often leads to high concealment of the mass lesions, which makes manual annotation difficult and time-consuming. As a result, there is a lack of annotated data for model training. Diffusion models are commonly used for data augmentation, but the existing methods face two challenges. First, due to the high concealment of lesions, it is difficult for the model to learn the features of the lesion area. This leads to the low generation quality of the lesion areas, thus limiting the quality of the generated images. Second, existing methods can only generate images and cannot generate corresponding annotations, which restricts the usability of the generated images in supervised training. In this work, we propose a paired image generation method. The method does not require external conditions and can achieve the generation of paired images by training an extra diffusion guider for the conditional diffusion model. During the experimental phase, we generated paired DBT slices and mass lesion masks. Then, we incorporated them into the supervised training process of the mass lesion segmentation task. The experimental results show that our method can improve the generation quality without external conditions. Moreover, it contributes to alleviating the shortage of annotated data, thus enhancing the performance of downstream tasks.
Authors: Fang Wu, Weihao Xuan, Ximing Lu, Zaid Harchaoui, Yejin Choi
Abstract: Recent advances in large reasoning models highlight Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) as a promising method for enhancing AI's capabilities, particularly in solving complex logical tasks. However, it remains unclear whether RLVR truly expands a model's reasoning boundary or merely amplifies high-reward outputs that the base model already knows for improved precision. This study presents a theoretical and empirical investigation that provides fresh insights into the potential limits of RLVR. First, we offer a new theoretical perspective that RLVR is constrained by the base model's support-unable to sample solutions with zero initial probability-and operates as a conservative reweighting mechanism that may restrict the discovery of entirely original solutions. We also identify an entropy-reward tradeoff: while RLVR reliably enhances precision, it may progressively narrow exploration and potentially overlook correct yet underrepresented solutions. Extensive empirical experiments validate that while RLVR consistently improves pass@1, the shrinkage of empirical support generally outweighs the expansion of empirical support under larger sampling budgets, failing to recover correct answers that were previously accessible to the base model. Interestingly, we also observe that while RLVR sometimes increases token-level entropy, resulting in greater uncertainty at each generation step, answer-level entropy declines, indicating that these seemingly more uncertain paths ultimately converge onto a smaller set of distinct answers. Taken together, these findings reveal potential limits of RLVR in extending reasoning horizons. Breaking this invisible leash may require future algorithmic innovations such as explicit exploration mechanisms or hybrid strategies that seed probability mass into underrepresented solution regions.
Authors: H. M. Sabbir Ahmad, Ehsan Sabouni, Alexander Wasilkoff, Param Budhraja, Zijian Guo, Songyuan Zhang, Chuchu Fan, Christos Cassandras, Wenchao Li
Abstract: We address the problem of safe policy learning in multi-agent safety-critical autonomous systems. In such systems, it is necessary for each agent to meet the safety requirements at all times while also cooperating with other agents to accomplish the task. Toward this end, we propose a safe Hierarchical Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (HMARL) approach based on Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). Our proposed hierarchical approach decomposes the overall reinforcement learning problem into two levels learning joint cooperative behavior at the higher level and learning safe individual behavior at the lower or agent level conditioned on the high-level policy. Specifically, we propose a skill-based HMARL-CBF algorithm in which the higher level problem involves learning a joint policy over the skills for all the agents and the lower-level problem involves learning policies to execute the skills safely with CBFs. We validate our approach on challenging environment scenarios whereby a large number of agents have to safely navigate through conflicting road networks. Compared with existing state of the art methods, our approach significantly improves the safety achieving near perfect (within 5%) success/safety rate while also improving performance across all the environments.
Authors: Muhammad Kamran Janjua, Amirhosein Ghasemabadi, Kunlin Zhang, Mohammad Salameh, Chao Gao, Di Niu
Abstract: In this work, we propose an all-in-one video restoration framework that grounds degradation-aware semantic context of video frames in natural language via foundation models, offering interpretable and flexible guidance. Unlike prior art, our method assumes no degradation knowledge in train or test time and learns an approximation to the grounded knowledge such that the foundation model can be safely disentangled during inference adding no extra cost. Further, we call for standardization of benchmarks in all-in-one video restoration, and propose two benchmarks in multi-degradation setting, three-task (3D) and four-task (4D), and two time-varying composite degradation benchmarks; one of the latter being our proposed dataset with varying snow intensity, simulating how weather degradations affect videos naturally. We compare our method with prior works and report state-of-the-art performance on all benchmarks.
Authors: Ole-Christoffer Granmo, Youmna Abdelwahab, Per-Arne Andersen, Paul F. A. Clarke, Kunal Dumbre, Ylva Gr{\o}nnins{\ae}ter, Vojtech Halenka, Runar Helin, Lei Jiao, Ahmed Khalid, Rebekka Omslandseter, Rupsa Saha, Mayur Shende, Xuan Zhang
Abstract: Pattern recognition with concise and flat AND-rules makes the Tsetlin Machine (TM) both interpretable and efficient, while the power of Tsetlin automata enables accuracy comparable to deep learning on an increasing number of datasets. We introduce the Graph Tsetlin Machine (GraphTM) for learning interpretable deep clauses from graph-structured input. Moving beyond flat, fixed-length input, the GraphTM gets more versatile, supporting sequences, grids, relations, and multimodality. Through message passing, the GraphTM builds nested deep clauses to recognize sub-graph patterns with exponentially fewer clauses, increasing both interpretability and data utilization. For image classification, GraphTM preserves interpretability and achieves 3.86%-points higher accuracy on CIFAR-10 than a convolutional TM. For tracking action coreference, faced with increasingly challenging tasks, GraphTM outperforms other reinforcement learning methods by up to 20.6%-points. In recommendation systems, it tolerates increasing noise to a greater extent than a Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCN), e.g., for noise ratio 0.1, GraphTM obtains accuracy 89.86% compared to GCN's 70.87%. Finally, for viral genome sequence data, GraphTM is competitive with BiLSTM-CNN and GCN accuracy-wise, training 2.5x faster than GCN. The GraphTM's application to these varied fields demonstrates how graph representation learning and deep clauses bring new possibilities for TM learning.
Authors: Ganesh Sundaram, Jonas Ulmen, Amjad Haider, Daniel G\"orges
Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) offer significant versatility and performance benefits, but their widespread adoption is often hindered by high model complexity and computational demands. Model compression techniques such as pruning have emerged as promising solutions to these challenges. However, it remains critical to ensure that application-specific performance characteristics are preserved during compression. In structured pruning, where groups of structurally coherent elements are removed, conventional importance metrics frequently fail to maintain these essential performance attributes. In this work, we propose an enhanced importance metric framework that not only reduces model size but also explicitly accounts for application-specific performance constraints. We employ multiple strategies to determine the optimal pruning magnitude for each group, ensuring a balance between compression and task performance. Our approach is evaluated on an autoencoder tasked with reconstructing MNIST images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively preserves task-relevant performance, maintaining the model's usability even after substantial pruning, by satisfying the required application-specific criteria.
Authors: Armin Keki\'c, Jan Schneider, Dieter B\"uchler, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Michel Besserve
Abstract: Why do reinforcement learning (RL) policies fail or succeed? This is a challenging question due to the complex, high-dimensional nature of agent-environment interactions. In this work, we take a causal perspective on explaining the behavior of RL policies by viewing the states, actions, and rewards as variables in a low-level causal model. We introduce random perturbations to policy actions during execution and observe their effects on the cumulative reward, learning a simplified high-level causal model that explains these relationships. To this end, we develop a nonlinear Causal Model Reduction framework that ensures approximate interventional consistency, meaning the simplified high-level model responds to interventions in a similar way as the original complex system. We prove that for a class of nonlinear causal models, there exists a unique solution that achieves exact interventional consistency, ensuring learned explanations reflect meaningful causal patterns. Experiments on both synthetic causal models and practical RL tasks-including pendulum control and robot table tennis-demonstrate that our approach can uncover important behavioral patterns, biases, and failure modes in trained RL policies.
Authors: Fan Li, Zanyi Wang, Zeyi Huang, Guang Dai, Jingdong Wang, Mengmeng Wang
Abstract: 3D visual grounding allows an embodied agent to understand visual information in real-world 3D environments based on human instructions, which is crucial for embodied intelligence. Existing 3D visual grounding methods typically rely on separate encoders for different modalities (e.g., RGB images, text, and 3D point clouds), resulting in large and complex models that are inefficient to train. While some approaches use pre-trained 2D multi-modal models like CLIP for 3D tasks, they still struggle with aligning point cloud data to 2D encoders. As a result, these methods continue to depend on 3D encoders for feature extraction, further increasing model complexity and training inefficiency. In this paper, we propose a unified 2D pre-trained multi-modal network to process all three modalities (RGB images, text, and point clouds), significantly simplifying the architecture. By leveraging a 2D CLIP bi-modal model with adapter-based fine-tuning, this framework effectively adapts to the tri-modal setting, improving both adaptability and performance across modalities. Our Geometric-Aware 2D-3D Feature Recovery and Fusion (GARF) module is designed to fuse geometric multi-scale features from point clouds and images. We then integrate textual features for final modality fusion and introduce a multi-modal decoder to facilitate deep cross-modal understanding. Together, our method achieves unified feature extraction and fusion across the three modalities, enabling an end-to-end 3D visual grounding model. Compared to the baseline, our method reduces the number of trainable parameters by approximately 58\%, while achieving a 6.52\% improvement in the 3D detection task and a 6.25\% improvement in the 3D visual grounding task.
Authors: Daniel Ayomide Olanrewaju
Abstract: This research introduces the Theory of Partial Symmetry Enforced Attention Decomposition (PSEAD), a new and rigorous group-theoretic framework designed to seamlessly integrate local symmetry awareness into the core architecture of self-attention mechanisms within Transformer models. We formalize the concept of local permutation subgroup actions on windows of biological data, proving that under such actions, the attention mechanism naturally decomposes into a direct sum of orthogonal irreducible components. Critically, these components are intrinsically aligned with the irreducible representations of the acting permutation subgroup, thereby providing a powerful mathematical basis for disentangling symmetric and asymmetric features. We show that PSEAD offers substantial advantages. These include enhanced generalization capabilities to novel biological motifs exhibiting similar partial symmetries, unprecedented interpretability by allowing direct visualization and analysis of attention contributions from different symmetry channels, and significant computational efficiency gains by focusing representational capacity on relevant symmetric subspaces. Beyond static data analysis, we extend PSEAD's applicability to dynamic biological processes within reinforcement learning paradigms, showcasing its potential to accelerate the discovery and optimization of biologically meaningful policies in complex environments like protein folding and drug discovery. This work lays the groundwork for a new generation of biologically informed, symmetry-aware artificial intelligence models.
Authors: Zhexuan Xu, Jie Wang, Siyuan Xu, Zijie Geng, Mingxuan Yuan, Feng Wu
Abstract: Floorplanning determines the shapes and locations of modules on a chip canvas and plays a critical role in optimizing the chip's Power, Performance, and Area (PPA) metrics. However, existing floorplanning approaches often fail to integrate with subsequent physical design stages, leading to suboptimal in-module component placement and excessive inter-module feedthrough. To tackle this challenge, we propose Flora, a three-stage feedthrough and placement aware rectilinear floorplanner. In the first stage, Flora employs wiremask and position mask techniques to achieve coarse-grained optimization of HPWL and feedthrough. In the second stage, under the constraint of a fixed outline, Flora achieves a zero-whitespace layout by locally resizing module shapes, thereby performing fine-grained optimization of feedthrough and improving component placement. In the third stage, Flora utilizes a fast tree search-based method to efficiently place components-including macros and standard cells-within each module, subsequently adjusting module boundaries based on the placement results to enable cross-stage optimization. Experimental results show that Flora outperforms recent state-of-the-art floorplanning approaches, achieving an average reduction of 6% in HPWL, 5.16% in FTpin, 29.15% in FTmod, and a 14% improvement in component placement performance.
Authors: Yongrae Jo, Chanik Park
Abstract: Collaboration among multiple large language model (LLM) agents is a promising approach to overcome inherent limitations of single-agent systems, such as hallucinations and single points of failure. As LLM agents are increasingly deployed on open blockchain platforms, multi-agent systems capable of tolerating malicious (Byzantine) agents have become essential. Recent Byzantine-robust multi-agent systems typically rely on leader-driven coordination, which suffers from two major drawbacks. First, they are inherently vulnerable to targeted attacks against the leader. If consecutive leaders behave maliciously, the system repeatedly fails to achieve consensus, forcing new consensus rounds, which is particularly costly given the high latency of LLM invocations. Second, an underperforming proposal from the leader can be accepted as the final answer even when higher-quality alternatives are available, as existing methods finalize the leader's proposal once it receives a quorum of votes. To address these issues, we propose DecentLLMs, a novel decentralized consensus approach for multi-agent LLM systems, where worker agents generate answers concurrently and evaluator agents independently score and rank these answers to select the best available one. This decentralized architecture enables faster consensus despite the presence of Byzantine agents and consistently selects higher-quality answers through Byzantine-robust aggregation techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that DecentLLMs effectively tolerates Byzantine agents and significantly improves the quality of selected answers.
Authors: Jaros{\l}aw Byrka, Franciszek Malinka, Tomasz Ponitka
Abstract: We study the fair division of indivisible items and provide new insights into the EFX problem, which is widely regarded as the central open question in fair division, and the PMMS problem, a strictly stronger variant of EFX. Our first result constructs a three-agent instance with two monotone valuations and one additive valuation in which no PMMS allocation exists. Since EFX allocations are known to exist under these assumptions, this establishes a formal separation between EFX and PMMS. We prove existence of fair allocations for three important special cases. We show that EFX allocations exist for personalized bivalued valuations, where for each agent $i$ there exist values $a_i > b_i$ such that agent $i$ assigns value $v_i(\{g\}) \in \{a_i, b_i\}$ to each good $g$. We establish an analogous existence result for PMMS allocations when $a_i$ is divisible by $b_i$. We also prove that PMMS allocations exist for binary-valued MMS-feasible valuations, where each bundle $S$ has value $v_i(S) \in \{0, 1\}$. Notably, this result holds even without assuming monotonicity of valuations and thus applies to the fair division of chores and mixed manna. Finally, we study a class of valuations called pair-demand valuations, which extend the well-studied unit-demand valuations to the case where each agent derives value from at most two items, and we show that PMMS allocations exist in this setting. Our proofs are constructive, and we provide polynomial-time algorithms for all three existence results.
Authors: Ivan Letteri
Abstract: The detection of outliers within cryptocurrency limit order books (LOBs) is of paramount importance for comprehending market dynamics, particularly in highly volatile and nascent regulatory environments. This study conducts a comprehensive comparative analysis of robust statistical methods and advanced machine learning techniques for real-time anomaly identification in cryptocurrency LOBs. Within a unified testing environment, named AITA Order Book Signal (AITA-OBS), we evaluate the efficacy of thirteen diverse models to identify which approaches are most suitable for detecting potentially manipulative trading behaviours. An empirical evaluation, conducted via backtesting on a dataset of 26,204 records from a major exchange, demonstrates that the top-performing model, Empirical Covariance (EC), achieves a 6.70% gain, significantly outperforming a standard Buy-and-Hold benchmark. These findings underscore the effectiveness of outlier-driven strategies and provide insights into the trade-offs between model complexity, trade frequency, and performance. This study contributes to the growing corpus of research on cryptocurrency market microstructure by furnishing a rigorous benchmark of anomaly detection models and highlighting their potential for augmenting algorithmic trading and risk management.
Authors: Yufan Song, Jiatao Zhang, Zeng Gu, Qingmiao Liang, Tuocheng Hu, Wei Song, Shiqiang Zhu
Abstract: Autonomous error correction is critical for domestic robots to achieve reliable execution of complex long-horizon tasks. Prior work has explored self-reflection in Large Language Models (LLMs) for task planning error correction; however, existing methods are constrained by inflexible self-reflection mechanisms that limit their effectiveness. Motivated by these limitations and inspired by human cognitive adaptation, we propose the Flexible Constructivism Reflection Framework (FCRF), a novel Mentor-Actor architecture that enables LLMs to perform flexible self-reflection based on task difficulty, while constructively integrating historical valuable experience with failure lessons. We evaluated FCRF on diverse domestic tasks through simulation in AlfWorld and physical deployment in the real-world environment. Experimental results demonstrate that FCRF significantly improves overall performance and self-reflection flexibility in complex long-horizon robotic tasks.
Authors: Hao Li, Haoxiang Zhang, Ahmed E. Hassan
Abstract: The future of software engineering--SE 3.0--is unfolding with the rise of AI teammates: autonomous, goal-driven systems collaborating with human developers. Among these, autonomous coding agents are especially transformative, now actively initiating, reviewing, and evolving code at scale. This paper introduces AIDev, the first large-scale dataset capturing how such agents operate in the wild. Spanning over 456,000 pull requests by five leading agents--OpenAI Codex, Devin, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Code--across 61,000 repositories and 47,000 developers, AIDev provides an unprecedented empirical foundation for studying autonomous teammates in software development. Unlike prior work that has largely theorized the rise of AI-native software engineering, AIDev offers structured, open data to support research in benchmarking, agent readiness, optimization, collaboration modeling, and AI governance. The dataset includes rich metadata on PRs, authorship, review timelines, code changes, and integration outcomes--enabling exploration beyond synthetic benchmarks like SWE-bench. For instance, although agents often outperform humans in speed, their PRs are accepted less frequently, revealing a trust and utility gap. Furthermore, while agents accelerate code submission--one developer submitted as many PRs in three days as they had in three years--these are structurally simpler (via code complexity metrics). We envision AIDev as a living resource: extensible, analyzable, and ready for the SE and AI communities. Grounding SE 3.0 in real-world evidence, AIDev enables a new generation of research into AI-native workflows and supports building the next wave of symbiotic human-AI collaboration. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/SAILResearch/AI_Teammates_in_SE3. > AI Agent, Agentic AI, Coding Agent, Agentic Coding, Software Engineering Agent
Authors: Nenad Petrovic, Vahid Zolfaghari, Andre Schamschurko, Sven Kirchner, Fengjunjie Pan, Chengdng Wu, Nils Purschke, Aleksei Velsh, Krzysztof Lebioda, Yinglei Song, Yi Zhang, Lukasz Mazur, Alois Knoll
Abstract: Adoption of state-of-art Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) aims to revolutionize many industrial areas by reducing the amount of human intervention needed and effort for handling complex underlying processes. Automotive software development is considered to be a significant area for GenAI adoption, taking into account lengthy and expensive procedures, resulting from the amount of requirements and strict standardization. In this paper, we explore the adoption of GenAI for various steps of automotive software development, mainly focusing on requirements handling, compliance aspects and code generation. Three GenAI-related technologies are covered within the state-of-art: Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Vision Language Models (VLMs), as well as overview of adopted prompting techniques in case of code generation. Additionally, we also derive a generalized GenAI-aided automotive software development workflow based on our findings from this literature review. Finally, we include a summary of a survey outcome, which was conducted among our automotive industry partners regarding the type of GenAI tools used for their daily work activities.
Authors: Nicol\`o Oreste Pinciroli Vago, Roberta Amato, Matteo Imbrogno, GianLuca Israel, Andrea Belfiore, Konstantinos Kovlakas, Piero Fraternali, Mario Pasquato
Abstract: The discovery of fast and variable coherent signals in a handful of ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) testifies to the presence of super-Eddington accreting neutron stars, and drastically changed the understanding of the ULX class. Our capability of discovering pulsations in ULXs is limited, among others, by poor statistics. However, catalogues and archives of high-energy missions contain information which can be used to identify new candidate pulsating ULXs (PULXs). The goal of this research is to single out candidate PULXs among those ULXs which have not shown pulsations due to an unfavourable combination of factors. We applied an AI approach to an updated database of ULXs detected by XMM-Newton. We first used an unsupervised clustering algorithm to sort out sources with similar characteristics into two clusters. Then, the sample of known PULX observations has been used to set the separation threshold between the two clusters and to identify the one containing the new candidate PULXs. We found that only a few criteria are needed to assign the membership of an observation to one of the two clusters. The cluster of new candidate PULXs counts 85 unique sources for 355 observations, with $\sim$85% of these new candidates having multiple observations. A preliminary timing analysis found no new pulsations for these candidates. This work presents a sample of new candidate PULXs observed by XMM-Newton, the properties of which are similar (in a multi-dimensional phase space) to those of the known PULXs, despite the absence of pulsations in their light curves. While this result is a clear example of the predictive power of AI-based methods, it also highlights the need for high-statistics observational data to reveal coherent signals from the sources in this sample and thus validate the robustness of the approach.
Authors: Zhengwei Tao, Jialong Wu, Wenbiao Yin, Junkai Zhang, Baixuan Li, Haiyang Shen, Kuan Li, Liwen Zhang, Xinyu Wang, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
Abstract: The advent of Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents has revolutionized artificial intelligence by enabling solutions to complex, open-ended tasks through web-based information-seeking (IS) capabilities. The scarcity of high-quality training data has limited the development of IS agents. Existing approaches typically adopt an information-driven paradigm that first collects web data and then generates questions based on the retrieval. However, this may lead to inconsistency between information structure and reasoning structure, question and answer. To mitigate, we propose a formalization-driven IS data synthesis framework WebShaper to construct a dataset. WebShaper systematically formalizes IS tasks through set theory. Central to the formalization is the concept of Knowledge Projections (KP), which enables precise control over reasoning structure by KP operation compositions. During synthesis, we begin by creating seed tasks, then use a multi-step expansion process. At each step, an agentic Expander expands the current formal question more complex with retrieval and validation tools based on our formalization. We train our model on the synthesized dataset. Experiment results demonstrate that WebShaper achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-sourced IS agents on GAIA and WebWalkerQA benchmarks.
Authors: Xinyue Zhu, Binghao Huang, Yunzhu Li
Abstract: Handheld grippers are increasingly used to collect human demonstrations due to their ease of deployment and versatility. However, most existing designs lack tactile sensing, despite the critical role of tactile feedback in precise manipulation. We present a portable, lightweight gripper with integrated tactile sensors that enables synchronized collection of visual and tactile data in diverse, real-world, and in-the-wild settings. Building on this hardware, we propose a cross-modal representation learning framework that integrates visual and tactile signals while preserving their distinct characteristics. The learning procedure allows the emergence of interpretable representations that consistently focus on contacting regions relevant for physical interactions. When used for downstream manipulation tasks, these representations enable more efficient and effective policy learning, supporting precise robotic manipulation based on multimodal feedback. We validate our approach on fine-grained tasks such as test tube insertion and pipette-based fluid transfer, demonstrating improved accuracy and robustness under external disturbances. Our project page is available at https://binghao-huang.github.io/touch_in_the_wild/ .
Authors: Shuyuan Tu, Zhen Xing, Xintong Han, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Qi Dai, Chong Luo, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract: Current diffusion models for human image animation often struggle to maintain identity (ID) consistency, especially when the reference image and driving video differ significantly in body size or position. We introduce StableAnimator++, the first ID-preserving video diffusion framework with learnable pose alignment, capable of generating high-quality videos conditioned on a reference image and a pose sequence without any post-processing. Building upon a video diffusion model, StableAnimator++ contains carefully designed modules for both training and inference, striving for identity consistency. In particular, StableAnimator++ first uses learnable layers to predict the similarity transformation matrices between the reference image and the driven poses via injecting guidance from Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). These matrices align the driven poses with the reference image, mitigating misalignment to a great extent. StableAnimator++ then computes image and face embeddings using off-the-shelf encoders, refining the face embeddings via a global content-aware Face Encoder. To further maintain ID, we introduce a distribution-aware ID Adapter that counteracts interference caused by temporal layers while preserving ID via distribution alignment. During the inference stage, we propose a novel Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) based face optimization integrated into the denoising process, guiding the diffusion trajectory for enhanced facial fidelity. Experiments on benchmarks show the effectiveness of StableAnimator++ both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Authors: Yiyuan Yang, Zichuan Liu, Lei Song, Kai Ying, Zhiguang Wang, Tom Bamford, Svitlana Vyetrenko, Jiang Bian, Qingsong Wen
Abstract: Time series anomaly detection is critical across various domains, yet current approaches often limit analysis to mere binary anomaly classification without detailed categorization or further explanatory reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose a novel task, Time-series Reasoning for Anomaly (Time-RA) that transforms classical time series anomaly detection from a discriminative into a generative, reasoning-intensive task leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs). Also, we introduce the first real-world multimodal benchmark dataset, RATs40K, explicitly annotated for anomaly reasoning, comprising approximately 40,000 samples across 10 real-world domains. Each sample includes numeric time series data, contextual text information, and visual representations, each annotated with fine-grained categories (14 types for univariate anomalies and 6 for multivariate anomalies) and structured explanatory reasoning. We develop a sophisticated annotation framework utilizing ensemble-generated labels refined through GPT-4-driven feedback, ensuring accuracy and interpretability. Extensive benchmarking of LLMs and multimodal LLMs demonstrates the capabilities and limitations of current models, highlighting the critical role of supervised fine-tuning. Our dataset and task pave the way for significant advancements in interpretable time series anomaly detection and reasoning.
Authors: Maisha Maimuna, Minhaz Bin Farukee, Sama Nikanfar, Mahfuza Siddiqua, Ayon Roy, Fillia Makedon
Abstract: Industrial warehouses are congested with moving forklifts, shelves and personnel, making robot teleoperation particularly risky and demanding for blind and low-vision (BLV) operators. Although accessible teleoperation plays a key role in inclusive workforce participation, systematic research on its use in industrial environments is limited, and few existing studies barely address multimodal guidance designed for BLV users. We present a novel multimodal guidance simulator that enables BLV users to control a mobile robot through a high-fidelity warehouse environment while simultaneously receiving synchronized visual, auditory, and haptic feedback. The system combines a navigation mesh with regular re-planning so routes remain accurate avoiding collisions as forklifts and human avatars move around the warehouse. Users with low vision are guided with a visible path line towards destination; navigational voice cues with clockwise directions announce upcoming turns, and finally proximity-based haptic feedback notifies the users of static and moving obstacles in the path. This real-time, closed-loop system offers a repeatable testbed and algorithmic reference for accessible teleoperation research. The simulator's design principles can be easily adapted to real robots due to the alignment of its navigation, speech, and haptic modules with commercial hardware, supporting rapid feasibility studies and deployment of inclusive telerobotic tools in actual warehouses.
Authors: Qian Qi
Abstract: We introduce a novel extension to robust control theory that explicitly addresses uncertainty in the value function's gradient, a form of uncertainty endemic to applications like reinforcement learning where value functions are approximated. We formulate a zero-sum dynamic game where an adversary perturbs both system dynamics and the value function gradient, leading to a new, highly nonlinear partial differential equation: the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman-Isaacs Equation with Gradient Uncertainty (GU-HJBI). We establish its well-posedness by proving a comparison principle for its viscosity solutions under a uniform ellipticity condition. Our analysis of the linear-quadratic (LQ) case yields a key insight: we prove that the classical quadratic value function assumption fails for any non-zero gradient uncertainty, fundamentally altering the problem structure. A formal perturbation analysis characterizes the non-polynomial correction to the value function and the resulting nonlinearity of the optimal control law, which we validate with numerical studies. Finally, we bridge theory to practice by proposing a novel Gradient-Uncertainty-Robust Actor-Critic (GURAC) algorithm, accompanied by an empirical study demonstrating its effectiveness in stabilizing training. This work provides a new direction for robust control, holding significant implications for fields where function approximation is common, including reinforcement learning and computational finance.
Authors: Chenlei Gong, Yuanhe Tian, Lei Mao, Yan Song
Abstract: Currently, many studies view DNA sequences as a special type of language and utilize Transformers to model them. These studies use fixed-length k-mer segmentation and BPE subword tokenization but lack a systematic evaluation to determine which is superior. We compare k-mer segmentation with k=1,3,4,5,6, a 4,096-token BPE vocabulary, and three positional encoding methods-sinusoidal, AliBi, and RoPE. Each configuration is trained from scratch in 3, 6, 12, and 24-layer Transformer encoders and evaluated on GUE benchmark dataset. In general, BPE delivers higher and more stable performance across tasks by compressing frequent motifs into variable-length tokens, reducing sequence length, and improving model generalization. RoPE excels at capturing periodic motifs and extrapolating to long sequences, while AliBi also performs well on tasks driven by local dependencies. In terms of depth, we observe significant gains when increasing layers from 3 to 12, with only marginal improvements or slight overfitting at 24 layers. This study provides practical guidance for designing tokenization and positional encoding in DNA Transformer models.
Authors: Mengya Xu, Rulin Zhou, An Wang, Chaoyang Lyu, Zhen Li, Ning Zhong, Hongliang Ren
Abstract: Intraoperative bleeding during Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection (ESD) poses significant risks, demanding precise, real-time localization and continuous monitoring of the bleeding source for effective hemostatic intervention. In particular, endoscopists have to repeatedly flush to clear blood, allowing only milliseconds to identify bleeding sources, an inefficient process that prolongs operations and elevates patient risks. However, current Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods primarily focus on bleeding region segmentation, overlooking the critical need for accurate bleeding source detection and temporal tracking in the challenging ESD environment, which is marked by frequent visual obstructions and dynamic scene changes. This gap is widened by the lack of specialized datasets, hindering the development of robust AI-assisted guidance systems. To address these challenges, we introduce BleedOrigin-Bench, the first comprehensive ESD bleeding source dataset, featuring 1,771 expert-annotated bleeding sources across 106,222 frames from 44 procedures, supplemented with 39,755 pseudo-labeled frames. This benchmark covers 8 anatomical sites and 6 challenging clinical scenarios. We also present BleedOrigin-Net, a novel dual-stage detection-tracking framework for the bleeding source localization in ESD procedures, addressing the complete workflow from bleeding onset detection to continuous spatial tracking. We compare with widely-used object detection models (YOLOv11/v12), multimodal large language models, and point tracking methods. Extensive evaluation demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, achieving 96.85% frame-level accuracy ($\pm\leq8$ frames) for bleeding onset detection, 70.24% pixel-level accuracy ($\leq100$ px) for initial source detection, and 96.11% pixel-level accuracy ($\leq100$ px) for point tracking.
Authors: Chathuri Jayaweera, Brianna Yanqui, Bonnie Dorr
Abstract: Natural Language Inference (NLI) is the task of determining the semantic entailment of a premise for a given hypothesis. The task aims to develop systems that emulate natural human inferential processes where commonsense knowledge plays a major role. However, existing commonsense resources lack sufficient coverage for a variety of premise-hypothesis pairs. This study explores the potential of Large Language Models as commonsense knowledge generators for NLI along two key dimensions: their reliability in generating such knowledge and the impact of that knowledge on prediction accuracy. We adapt and modify existing metrics to assess LLM factuality and consistency in generating in this context. While explicitly incorporating commonsense knowledge does not consistently improve overall results, it effectively helps distinguish entailing instances and moderately improves distinguishing contradictory and neutral inferences.
Authors: Qiufeng Li, Shu Hong, Jian Gao, Xuan Zhang, Tian Lan, Weidong Cao
Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in AI/ML offer exciting opportunities to revolutionize analog design automation through data-driven approaches. In particular, researchers are increasingly fascinated by harnessing the power of generative AI to automate the discovery of novel analog circuit topologies. Unlocking the full potential of generative AI in these data-driven discoveries requires access to large and diverse datasets.Yet, there is a significant barrier in the analog domain--Analog circuit design is inherently proprietary, involving not only confidential circuit structures but also the underlying commercial semiconductor processes. As a result, current generative AI research is largely confined to individual researchers who construct small, narrowly focused private datasets. This fragmentation severely limits collaborative innovation and impedes progress across the research community. To address these challenges, we propose AnalogFed. AnalogFed enables collaborative topology discovery across decentralized clients (e.g., individual researchers or institutions) without requiring the sharing of raw private data. To make this vision practical, we introduce a suite of techniques tailored to the unique challenges of applying FedL in analog design--from generative model development and data heterogeneity handling to privacy-preserving strategies that ensure both flexibility and security for circuit designers and semiconductor manufacturers. Extensive experiments across varying client counts and dataset sizes demonstrate that AnalogFed achieves performance comparable to centralized baselines--while maintaining strict data privacy. Specifically, the generative AI model within AnalogFed achieves state-of-the-art efficiency and scalability in the design of analog circuit topologies.
Authors: Hellina Hailu Nigatu, Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Henok Biadglign Ademtew, Hizkel Mitiku Alemayehu, Negasi Haile Abadi, Tadesse Destaw Belay, Seid Muhie Yimam
Abstract: Homophone normalization, where characters that have the same sound in a writing script are mapped to one character, is a pre-processing step applied in Amharic Natural Language Processing (NLP) literature. While this may improve performance reported by automatic metrics, it also results in models that are not able to understand different forms of writing in a single language. Further, there might be impacts in transfer learning, where models trained on normalized data do not generalize well to other languages. In this paper, we experiment with monolingual training and cross-lingual transfer to understand the impacts of normalization on languages that use the Ge'ez script. We then propose a post-inference intervention in which normalization is applied to model predictions instead of training data. With our simple scheme of post-inference normalization, we show that we can achieve an increase in BLEU score of up to 1.03 while preserving language features in training. Our work contributes to the broader discussion on technology-facilitated language change and calls for more language-aware interventions.
Authors: Sebastian A. Cruz Romero, Misael J. Mercado Hernandez, Samir Y. Ali Rivera, Jorge A. Santiago Fernandez, Wilfredo E. Lugo Beauchamp
Abstract: The design of medical systems for remote, resource-limited environments faces persistent challenges due to poor interoperability, lack of offline support, and dependency on costly infrastructure. Many existing digital health solutions neglect these constraints, limiting their effectiveness for frontline health workers in underserved regions. This paper presents a portable, edge-enabled Electronic Health Record platform optimized for offline-first operation, secure patient data management, and modular diagnostic integration. Running on small-form factor embedded devices, it provides AES-256 encrypted local storage with optional cloud synchronization for interoperability. As a use case, we integrated a non-invasive anemia screening module leveraging fingernail pallor analysis. Trained on 250 patient cases (27\% anemia prevalence) with KDE-balanced data, the Random Forest model achieved a test RMSE of 1.969 g/dL and MAE of 1.490 g/dL. A severity-based model reached 79.2\% sensitivity. To optimize performance, a YOLOv8n-based nail bed detector was quantized to INT8, reducing inference latency from 46.96 ms to 21.50 ms while maintaining mAP@0.5 at 0.995. The system emphasizes low-cost deployment, modularity, and data privacy compliance (HIPAA/GDPR), addressing critical barriers to digital health adoption in disconnected settings. Our work demonstrates a scalable approach to enhance portable health information systems and support frontline healthcare in underserved regions.
Authors: Sebastian A. Cruz Romero, Wilfredo E. Lugo Beauchamp
Abstract: Anemia is a widespread global health issue, particularly among young children in low-resource settings. Traditional methods for anemia detection often require expensive equipment and expert knowledge, creating barriers to early and accurate diagnosis. To address these challenges, we explore the use of deep learning models for detecting anemia through conjunctival pallor, focusing on the CP-AnemiC dataset, which includes 710 images from children aged 6-59 months. The dataset is annotated with hemoglobin levels, gender, age and other demographic data, enabling the development of machine learning models for accurate anemia detection. We use the MobileNet architecture as a backbone, known for its efficiency in mobile and embedded vision applications, and fine-tune our model end-to-end using data augmentation techniques and a cross-validation strategy. Our model implementation achieved an accuracy of 0.9313, a precision of 0.9374, and an F1 score of 0.9773 demonstrating strong performance on the dataset. To optimize the model for deployment on edge devices, we performed post-training quantization, evaluating the impact of different bit-widths (FP32, FP16, INT8, and INT4) on model performance. Preliminary results suggest that while FP16 quantization maintains high accuracy (0.9250), precision (0.9370), and F1 Score (0.9377), more aggressive quantization (INT8 and INT4) leads to significant performance degradation. Overall, our study supports further exploration of quantization schemes and hardware optimizations to assess trade-offs between model size, inference time, and diagnostic accuracy in mobile healthcare applications.
Authors: Lingbo Li, Anuradha Mathrani, Teo Susnjak
Abstract: Automating data extraction from full-text randomised controlled trials (RCTs) for meta-analysis remains a significant challenge. This study evaluates the practical performance of three LLMs (Gemini-2.0-flash, Grok-3, GPT-4o-mini) across tasks involving statistical results, risk-of-bias assessments, and study-level characteristics in three medical domains: hypertension, diabetes, and orthopaedics. We tested four distinct prompting strategies (basic prompting, self-reflective prompting, model ensemble, and customised prompts) to determine how to improve extraction quality. All models demonstrate high precision but consistently suffer from poor recall by omitting key information. We found that customised prompts were the most effective, boosting recall by up to 15\%. Based on this analysis, we propose a three-tiered set of guidelines for using LLMs in data extraction, matching data types to appropriate levels of automation based on task complexity and risk. Our study offers practical advice for automating data extraction in real-world meta-analyses, balancing LLM efficiency with expert oversight through targeted, task-specific automation.
Authors: Mykhailo Buleshnyi, Anna Polova, Zsolt Zombori, Michael Benedikt
Abstract: We investigate multi-label classification involving large sets of labels, where the output labels may be known to satisfy some logical constraints. We look at an architecture in which classifiers for individual labels are fed into an expressive sequential model, which produces a joint distribution. One of the potential advantages for such an expressive model is its ability to modelling correlations, as can arise from constraints. We empirically demonstrate the ability of the architecture both to exploit constraints in training and to enforce constraints at inference time.
Authors: Giovanni Quattrocchi, Liliana Pasquale, Paola Spoletini, Luciano Baresi
Abstract: Requirements elicitation is still one of the most challenging activities of the requirements engineering process due to the difficulty requirements analysts face in understanding and translating complex needs into concrete requirements. In addition, specifying high-quality requirements is crucial, as it can directly impact the quality of the software to be developed. Although automated tools allow for assessing the syntactic quality of requirements, evaluating semantic metrics (e.g., language clarity, internal consistency) remains a manual and time-consuming activity. This paper explores how LLMs can help automate requirements elicitation within agile frameworks, where requirements are defined as user stories (US). We used 10 state-of-the-art LLMs to investigate their ability to generate US automatically by emulating customer interviews. We evaluated the quality of US generated by LLMs, comparing it with the quality of US generated by humans (domain experts and students). We also explored whether and how LLMs can be used to automatically evaluate the semantic quality of US. Our results indicate that LLMs can generate US similar to humans in terms of coverage and stylistic quality, but exhibit lower diversity and creativity. Although LLM-generated US are generally comparable in quality to those created by humans, they tend to meet the acceptance quality criteria less frequently, regardless of the scale of the LLM model. Finally, LLMs can reliably assess the semantic quality of US when provided with clear evaluation criteria and have the potential to reduce human effort in large-scale assessments.
Authors: Tanjin Taher Toma, Tejas Sudharshan Mathai, Bikash Santra, Pritam Mukherjee, Jianfei Liu, Wesley Jong, Darwish Alabyad, Vivek Batheja, Abhishek Jha, Mayank Patel, Darko Pucar, Jayadira del Rivero, Karel Pacak, Ronald M. Summers
Abstract: Accurate segmentation of pheochromocytoma (PCC) in abdominal CT scans is essential for tumor burden estimation, prognosis, and treatment planning. It may also help infer genetic clusters, reducing reliance on expensive testing. This study systematically evaluates anatomical priors to identify configurations that improve deep learning-based PCC segmentation. We employed the nnU-Net framework to evaluate eleven annotation strategies for accurate 3D segmentation of pheochromocytoma, introducing a set of novel multi-class schemes based on organ-specific anatomical priors. These priors were derived from adjacent organs commonly surrounding adrenal tumors (e.g., liver, spleen, kidney, aorta, adrenal gland, and pancreas), and were compared against a broad body-region prior used in previous work. The framework was trained and tested on 105 contrast-enhanced CT scans from 91 patients at the NIH Clinical Center. Performance was measured using Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), Normalized Surface Distance (NSD), and instance-wise F1 score. Among all strategies, the Tumor + Kidney + Aorta (TKA) annotation achieved the highest segmentation accuracy, significantly outperforming the previously used Tumor + Body (TB) annotation across DSC (p = 0.0097), NSD (p = 0.0110), and F1 score (25.84% improvement at an IoU threshold of 0.5), measured on a 70-30 train-test split. The TKA model also showed superior tumor burden quantification (R^2 = 0.968) and strong segmentation across all genetic subtypes. In five-fold cross-validation, TKA consistently outperformed TB across IoU thresholds (0.1 to 0.5), reinforcing its robustness and generalizability. These findings highlight the value of incorporating relevant anatomical context in deep learning models to achieve precise PCC segmentation, supporting clinical assessment and longitudinal monitoring.
Authors: Xinran Li, Xiujuan Xu, Jiaqi Qiao
Abstract: Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) is a practical and challenging task. This paper proposes a novel multimodal approach, the Long-Short Distance Graph Neural Network (LSDGNN). Based on the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), it constructs a long-distance graph neural network and a short-distance graph neural network to obtain multimodal features of distant and nearby utterances, respectively. To ensure that long- and short-distance features are as distinct as possible in representation while enabling mutual influence between the two modules, we employ a Differential Regularizer and incorporate a BiAffine Module to facilitate feature interaction. In addition, we propose an Improved Curriculum Learning (ICL) to address the challenge of data imbalance. By computing the similarity between different emotions to emphasize the shifts in similar emotions, we design a "weighted emotional shift" metric and develop a difficulty measurer, enabling a training process that prioritizes learning easy samples before harder ones. Experimental results on the IEMOCAP and MELD datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms existing benchmarks.
Authors: Tianneng Shi, Kaijie Zhu, Zhun Wang, Yuqi Jia, Will Cai, Weida Liang, Haonan Wang, Hend Alzahrani, Joshua Lu, Kenji Kawaguchi, Basel Alomair, Xuandong Zhao, William Yang Wang, Neil Gong, Wenbo Guo, Dawn Song
Abstract: Despite their potential, recent research has demonstrated that LLM agents are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, where malicious prompts are injected into the agent's input, causing it to perform an attacker-specified task rather than the intended task provided by the user. In this paper, we present PromptArmor, a simple yet effective defense against prompt injection attacks. Specifically, PromptArmor prompts an off-the-shelf LLM to detect and remove potential injected prompts from the input before the agent processes it. Our results show that PromptArmor can accurately identify and remove injected prompts. For example, using GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, or o4-mini, PromptArmor achieves both a false positive rate and a false negative rate below 1% on the AgentDojo benchmark. Moreover, after removing injected prompts with PromptArmor, the attack success rate drops to below 1%. We also demonstrate PromptArmor's effectiveness against adaptive attacks and explore different strategies for prompting an LLM. We recommend that PromptArmor be adopted as a standard baseline for evaluating new defenses against prompt injection attacks.
Authors: Yibo He, Shuoran Zhao, Jiaming Huang, Yingjie Fu, Hao Yu, Cunjian Huang, Tao Xie
Abstract: SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instructions and their compiler intrinsics are widely supported by modern processors to accelerate performance-critical tasks. SIMD intrinsic programming, a trade-off between coding productivity and high performance, is widely used in the development of mainstream performance-critical libraries and daily computing tasks. Large Language Models (LLMs), which have demonstrated strong and comprehensive capabilities in code generation, show promise in assisting programmers with the challenges of SIMD intrinsic programming. However, existing code-generation benchmarks focus on only scalar code, and it is unclear how LLMs perform in generating vectorized code using SIMD intrinsics. To fill this gap, we propose SimdBench, the first code benchmark specifically designed for SIMD-intrinsic code generation, comprising 136 carefully crafted tasks and targeting five representative SIMD intrinsics: SSE (x86 Streaming SIMD Extension), AVX (x86 Advanced Vector Extension), Neon (ARM Advanced SIMD Extension), SVE (ARM Scalable Vector Extension), and RVV (RISC-V Vector Extension). We conduct a systematic evaluation (measuring both correctness and performance) of 18 representative LLMs on SimdBench, resulting in a series of novel and insightful findings. Our evaluation results demonstrate that LLMs exhibit a universal decrease in pass@k during SIMD-intrinsic code generation compared to scalar-code generation. Our in-depth analysis highlights promising directions for the further advancement of LLMs in the challenging domain of SIMD-intrinsic code generation. SimdBench is fully open source at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SimdBench-1B3F/ to benefit the broader research community.
Authors: Naeem Paeedeh, Mahardhika Pratama, Wolfgang Mayer, Jimmy Cao, Ryszard Kowlczyk
Abstract: Despite the progress in Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CD-FSL), a model pre-trained with DINO combined with a prototypical classifier outperforms the latest SOTA methods. A crucial limitation that needs to be overcome is that updating too many parameters of the transformers leads to overfitting due to the scarcity of labeled samples. To address this challenge, we propose a new concept, Coalescent Projection (CP), as an effective successor to soft prompts. Additionally, we propose a novel pseudo-class generation method combined with Self-Supervised Transformations (SSTs) that relies solely on the base domain to prepare the network for encountering unseen samples from different domains. The proposed method exhibits its effectiveness in comprehensive experiments on the extreme domain shift scenario of the BSCD-FSL benchmark. Our code is published at https://github.com/Naeem-Paeedeh/CPLSR.
Authors: Xiaofeng Shi, Yuduo Li, Qian Kou, Longbin Yu, Jinxin Xie, Hua Zhou
Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new opportunities for academic literature retrieval. However, existing systems often rely on rigid pipelines and exhibit limited reasoning capabilities. We introduce SPAR, a multi-agent framework that incorporates RefChain-based query decomposition and query evolution to enable more flexible and effective search. To facilitate systematic evaluation, we also construct SPARBench, a challenging benchmark with expert-annotated relevance labels. Experimental results demonstrate that SPAR substantially outperforms strong baselines, achieving up to +56% F1 on AutoScholar and +23% F1 on SPARBench over the best-performing baseline. Together, SPAR and SPARBench provide a scalable, interpretable, and high-performing foundation for advancing research in scholarly retrieval. Code and data will be available at: https://github.com/xiaofengShi/SPAR
Authors: Rabia Latief Bhat, Iqra Altaf Gillani
Abstract: Accurate demand forecasting is critical for enhancing the efficiency and responsiveness of food delivery platforms, where spatial heterogeneity and temporal fluctuations in order volumes directly influence operational decisions. This paper proposes an attention-based Graph Neural Network framework that captures spatial-temporal dependencies by modeling the food delivery environment as a graph. In this graph, nodes represent urban delivery zones, while edges reflect spatial proximity and inter-regional order flow patterns derived from historical data. The attention mechanism dynamically weighs the influence of neighboring zones, enabling the model to focus on the most contextually relevant areas during prediction. Temporal trends are jointly learned alongside spatial interactions, allowing the model to adapt to evolving demand patterns. Extensive experiments on real-world food delivery datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model in forecasting future order volumes with high accuracy. The framework offers a scalable and adaptive solution to support proactive fleet positioning, resource allocation, and dispatch optimization in urban food delivery operations.
Authors: Sourav Mondal, Elaine Wong
Abstract: The evolution towards future generation of mobile systems and fixed wireless networks is primarily driven by the urgency to support high-bandwidth and low-latency services across various vertical sectors. This endeavor is fueled by smartphones as well as technologies like industrial internet of things, extended reality (XR), and human-to-machine (H2M) collaborations for fostering industrial and social revolutions like Industry 4.0/5.0 and Society 5.0. To ensure an ideal immersive experience and avoid cyber-sickness for users in all the aforementioned usage scenarios, it is typically challenging to synchronize XR content from a remote machine to a human collaborator according to their head movements across a large geographic span in real-time over communication networks. Thus, we propose a novel H2M collaboration scheme where the human's head movements are predicted ahead with highly accurate models like bidirectional long short-term memory networks to orient the machine's camera in advance. We validate that XR frame size varies in accordance with the human's head movements and predict the corresponding bandwidth requirements from the machine's camera to propose a human-machine coordinated dynamic bandwidth allocation (HMC-DBA) scheme. Through extensive simulations, we show that end-to-end latency and jitter requirements of XR frames are satisfied with much lower bandwidth consumption over enterprise networks like Fiber-To-The-Room-Business. Furthermore, we show that better efficiency in network resource utilization is achieved by employing our proposed HMC-DBA over state-of-the-art schemes.
Authors: Deyun Zhang, Xiang Lan, Shijia Geng, Qinghao Zhao, Sumei Fan, Mengling Feng, Shenda Hong
Abstract: Electrocardiogram (ECG) plays a foundational role in modern cardiovascular care, enabling non-invasive diagnosis of arrhythmias, myocardial ischemia, and conduction disorders. While machine learning has achieved expert-level performance in ECG interpretation, the development of clinically deployable multimodal AI systems remains constrained, primarily due to the lack of publicly available datasets that simultaneously incorporate raw signals, diagnostic images, and interpretation text. Most existing ECG datasets provide only single-modality data or, at most, dual modalities, making it difficult to build models that can understand and integrate diverse ECG information in real-world settings. To address this gap, we introduce MEETI (MIMIC-IV-Ext ECG-Text-Image), the first large-scale ECG dataset that synchronizes raw waveform data, high-resolution plotted images, and detailed textual interpretations generated by large language models. In addition, MEETI includes beat-level quantitative ECG parameters extracted from each lead, offering structured parameters that support fine-grained analysis and model interpretability. Each MEETI record is aligned across four components: (1) the raw ECG waveform, (2) the corresponding plotted image, (3) extracted feature parameters, and (4) detailed interpretation text. This alignment is achieved using consistent, unique identifiers. This unified structure supports transformer-based multimodal learning and supports fine-grained, interpretable reasoning about cardiac health. By bridging the gap between traditional signal analysis, image-based interpretation, and language-driven understanding, MEETI established a robust foundation for the next generation of explainable, multimodal cardiovascular AI. It offers the research community a comprehensive benchmark for developing and evaluating ECG-based AI systems.
Authors: Zihao Hu (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Jia Yan (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Ying-Jun Angela Zhang (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Jun Zhang (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Khaled B. Letaief (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Abstract: The rapid proliferation and growth of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to the development of federated learning (FL). FL allows wireless devices (WDs) to cooperatively learn by sharing only local model parameters, without needing to share the entire dataset. However, the emergence of large AI models has made existing FL approaches inefficient, due to the significant communication overhead required. In this paper, we propose a novel over-the-air federated distillation (FD) framework by synergizing the strength of FL and knowledge distillation to avoid the heavy local model transmission. Instead of sharing the model parameters, only the WDs' model outputs, referred to as knowledge, are shared and aggregated over-the-air by exploiting the superposition property of the multiple-access channel. We shall study the transceiver design in over-the-air FD, aiming to maximize the learning convergence rate while meeting the power constraints of the transceivers. The main challenge lies in the intractability of the learning performance analysis, as well as the non-convex nature and the optimization spanning the whole FD training period. To tackle this problem, we first derive an analytical expression of the convergence rate in over-the-air FD. Then, the closed-form optimal solutions of the WDs' transmit power and the estimator for over-the-air aggregation are obtained given the receiver combining strategy. Accordingly, we put forth an efficient approach to find the optimal receiver beamforming vector via semidefinite relaxation. We further prove that there is no optimality gap between the original and relaxed problem for the receiver beamforming design. Numerical results will show that the proposed over-the-air FD approach achieves a significant reduction in communication overhead, with only a minor compromise in testing accuracy compared to conventional FL benchmarks.
Authors: Fangqiu Yi, Jingyu Xu, Jiawei Shao, Chi Zhang, Xuelong Li
Abstract: Perceptual studies demonstrate that conditional diffusion models excel at reconstructing video content aligned with human visual perception. Building on this insight, we propose a video compression framework that leverages conditional diffusion models for perceptually optimized reconstruction. Specifically, we reframe video compression as a conditional generation task, where a generative model synthesizes video from sparse, yet informative signals. Our approach introduces three key modules: (1) Multi-granular conditioning that captures both static scene structure and dynamic spatio-temporal cues; (2) Compact representations designed for efficient transmission without sacrificing semantic richness; (3) Multi-condition training with modality dropout and role-aware embeddings, which prevent over-reliance on any single modality and enhance robustness. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms both traditional and neural codecs on perceptual quality metrics such as Fr\'echet Video Distance (FVD) and LPIPS, especially under high compression ratios.
Authors: Ayush Singh Bhadoriya, Abhishek Nikunj Shinde, Isha Pandey, Ganesh Ramakrishnan
Abstract: We present a speaker conditioned text-to-speech (TTS) system aimed at addressing challenges in generating speech for unseen speakers and supporting diverse Indian languages. Our method leverages a diffusion-based TTS architecture, where a speaker encoder extracts embeddings from short reference audio samples to condition the DDPM decoder for multispeaker generation. To further enhance prosody and naturalness, we employ a cross-attention based duration prediction mechanism that utilizes reference audio, enabling more accurate and speaker consistent timing. This results in speech that closely resembles the target speaker while improving duration modeling and overall expressiveness. Additionally, to improve zero-shot generation, we employed classifier free guidance, allowing the system to generate speech more near speech for unknown speakers. Using this approach, we trained language-specific speaker-conditioned models. Using the IndicSUPERB dataset for multiple Indian languages such as Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Malayalam, Punjabi and Tamil.
Authors: Haoran Sun, Zekun Zhang, Shaoning Zeng
Abstract: The capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited to some extent by pre-training, so some researchers optimize LLMs through post-training. Existing post-training strategies, such as memory-based retrieval or preference optimization, improve user alignment yet fail to enhance the model's domain cognition. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel Dual-Phase Self-Evolution (DPSE) framework that jointly optimizes user preference adaptation and domain-specific competence. DPSE introduces a Censor module to extract multi-dimensional interaction signals and estimate satisfaction scores, which guide structured data expansion via topic-aware and preference-driven strategies. These expanded datasets support a two-stage fine-tuning pipeline: supervised domain grounding followed by frequency-aware preference optimization. Experiments across general NLP benchmarks and long-term dialogue tasks demonstrate that DPSE consistently outperforms Supervised Fine-Tuning, Preference Optimization, and Memory-Augmented baselines. Ablation studies validate the contribution of each module. In this way, our framework provides an autonomous path toward continual self-evolution of LLMs.
Authors: Elias Malomgr\'e, Pieter Simoens
Abstract: Recent trends in Reinforcement Learning (RL) highlight the need for agents to learn from reward-free interactions and alternative supervision signals, such as unlabeled or incomplete demonstrations, rather than relying solely on explicit reward maximization. Additionally, developing generalist agents that can adapt efficiently in real-world environments often requires leveraging these reward-free signals to guide learning and behavior. However, while intrinsic motivation techniques provide a means for agents to seek out novel or uncertain states in the absence of explicit rewards, they are often challenged by dense reward environments or the complexity of high-dimensional state and action spaces. Furthermore, most existing approaches rely directly on the unprocessed intrinsic reward signals, which can make it difficult to shape or control the agent's exploration effectively. We propose a framework that can effectively utilize expert demonstrations, even when they are incomplete and imperfect. By applying a mapping function to transform the similarity between an agent's state and expert data into a shaped intrinsic reward, our method allows for flexible and targeted exploration of expert-like behaviors. We employ a Mixture of Autoencoder Experts to capture a diverse range of behaviors and accommodate missing information in demonstrations. Experiments show our approach enables robust exploration and strong performance in both sparse and dense reward environments, even when demonstrations are sparse or incomplete. This provides a practical framework for RL in realistic settings where optimal data is unavailable and precise reward control is needed.
Authors: Omid G. Sani, Maryam M. Shanechi
Abstract: System identification methods for multivariate time-series, such as neural and behavioral recordings, have been used to build models for predicting one from the other. For example, Preferential Subspace Identification (PSID) builds a state-space model of a primary time-series (e.g., neural activity) to optimally predict a secondary time-series (e.g., behavior). However, PSID focuses on optimal prediction using past primary data, even though in offline applications, better estimation can be achieved by incorporating concurrent data (filtering) or all available data (smoothing). Here, we extend PSID to enable optimal filtering and smoothing. First, we show that the presence of a secondary signal makes it possible to uniquely identify a model with an optimal Kalman update step (to enable filtering) from a family of otherwise equivalent state-space models. Our filtering solution augments PSID with a reduced-rank regression step that directly learns the optimal gain required for the update step from data. We refer to this extension of PSID as PSID with filtering. Second, inspired by two-filter Kalman smoother formulations, we develop a novel forward-backward PSID smoothing algorithm where we first apply PSID with filtering and then apply it again in the reverse time direction on the residuals of the filtered secondary signal. We validate our methods on simulated data, showing that our approach recovers the ground-truth model parameters for filtering, and achieves optimal filtering and smoothing decoding performance of the secondary signal that matches the ideal performance of the true underlying model. This work provides a principled framework for optimal linear filtering and smoothing in the two-signal setting, significantly expanding the toolkit for analyzing dynamic interactions in multivariate time-series.
Authors: An Wanga, Rulin Zhou, Mengya Xu, Yiru Ye, Longfei Gou, Yiting Chang, Hao Chen, Chwee Ming Lim, Jiankun Wang, Hongliang Ren
Abstract: Visualizing subtle vascular motions in endoscopic surgery is crucial for surgical precision and decision-making, yet remains challenging due to the complex and dynamic nature of surgical scenes. To address this, we introduce EndoControlMag, a training-free, Lagrangian-based framework with mask-conditioned vascular motion magnification tailored to endoscopic environments. Our approach features two key modules: a Periodic Reference Resetting (PRR) scheme that divides videos into short overlapping clips with dynamically updated reference frames to prevent error accumulation while maintaining temporal coherence, and a Hierarchical Tissue-aware Magnification (HTM) framework with dual-mode mask dilation. HTM first tracks vessel cores using a pretrained visual tracking model to maintain accurate localization despite occlusions and view changes. It then applies one of two adaptive softening strategies to surrounding tissues: motion-based softening that modulates magnification strength proportional to observed tissue displacement, or distance-based exponential decay that simulates biomechanical force attenuation. This dual-mode approach accommodates diverse surgical scenarios-motion-based softening excels with complex tissue deformations while distance-based softening provides stability during unreliable optical flow conditions. We evaluate EndoControlMag on our EndoVMM24 dataset spanning four different surgery types and various challenging scenarios, including occlusions, instrument disturbance, view changes, and vessel deformations. Quantitative metrics, visual assessments, and expert surgeon evaluations demonstrate that EndoControlMag significantly outperforms existing methods in both magnification accuracy and visual quality while maintaining robustness across challenging surgical conditions. The code, dataset, and video results are available at https://szupc.github.io/EndoControlMag/.
Authors: Qian Xiong, Yuekai Huang, Ziyou Jiang, Zhiyuan Chang, Yujia Zheng, Tianhao Li, Mingyang Li
Abstract: The emergence of the tool agent paradigm has broadened the capability boundaries of the Large Language Model (LLM), enabling it to complete more complex tasks. However, the effectiveness of this paradigm is limited due to the issue of parameter failure during its execution. To explore this phenomenon and propose corresponding suggestions, we first construct a parameter failure taxonomy in this paper. We derive five failure categories from the invocation chain of a mainstream tool agent. Then, we explore the correlation between three different input sources and failure categories by applying 15 input perturbation methods to the input. Experimental results show that parameter name hallucination failure primarily stems from inherent LLM limitations, while issues with input sources mainly cause other failure patterns. To improve the reliability and effectiveness of tool-agent interactions, we propose corresponding improvement suggestions, including standardizing tool return formats, improving error feedback mechanisms, and ensuring parameter consistency.
Authors: Muhammad Aqeel, Federico Leonardi, Francesco Setti
Abstract: Industrial defect detection systems face critical limitations when confined to one-class anomaly detection paradigms, which assume uniform outlier distributions and struggle with data scarcity in realworld manufacturing environments. We present ExDD (Explicit Dual Distribution), a novel framework that transcends these limitations by explicitly modeling dual feature distributions. Our approach leverages parallel memory banks that capture the distinct statistical properties of both normality and anomalous patterns, addressing the fundamental flaw of uniform outlier assumptions. To overcome data scarcity, we employ latent diffusion models with domain-specific textual conditioning, generating in-distribution synthetic defects that preserve industrial context. Our neighborhood-aware ratio scoring mechanism elegantly fuses complementary distance metrics, amplifying signals in regions exhibiting both deviation from normality and similarity to known defect patterns. Experimental validation on KSDD2 demonstrates superior performance (94.2% I-AUROC, 97.7% P-AUROC), with optimal augmentation at 100 synthetic samples.
Authors: Jialiang Wang, Hanmo Liu, Shimin Di, Zhili Wang, Jiachuan Wang, Lei Chen, Xiaofang Zhou
Abstract: Database systems have recently advocated for embedding machine learning (ML) capabilities, offering declarative model queries over large, managed model repositories, thereby circumventing the huge computational overhead of traditional ML-based algorithms in automated neural network model selection. Pioneering database studies aim to organize existing benchmark repositories as model bases (MB), querying them for the model records with the highest performance estimation metrics for given tasks. However, this static model selection practice overlooks the fine-grained, evolving relational dependencies between diverse task queries and model architecture variations, resulting in suboptimal matches and failing to further refine the model effectively. To fill the model refinement gap in database research, we propose M-DESIGN, a curated model knowledge base (MKB) pipeline for mastering neural network refinement by adaptively weaving prior insights about model architecture modification. First, we propose a knowledge weaving engine that reframes model refinement as an adaptive query problem over task metadata. Given a user's task query, M-DESIGN quickly matches and iteratively refines candidate models by leveraging a graph-relational knowledge schema that explicitly encodes data properties, architecture variations, and pairwise performance deltas as joinable relations. This schema supports fine-grained relational analytics over architecture tweaks and drives a predictive query planner that can detect and adapt to out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks. We instantiate M-DESIGN for graph analytics tasks, where our model knowledge base enriches existing benchmarks with structured metadata covering 3 graph tasks and 22 graph datasets, contributing data records of 67,760 graph models. Empirical results demonstrate that M-DESIGN delivers the optimal model in 26 of 33 data-task pairs within limited budgets.
Authors: Marc Boubnovski Martell, Kristofer Linton-Reid, Mitchell Chen, Sumeet Hindocha, Benjamin Hunter, Marco A. Calzado, Richard Lee, Joram M. Posma, Eric O. Aboagye
Abstract: High-resolution volumetric computed tomography (CT) is essential for accurate diagnosis and treatment planning in thoracic diseases; however, it is limited by radiation dose and hardware costs. We present the Transformer Volumetric Super-Resolution Network (\textbf{TVSRN-V2}), a transformer-based super-resolution (SR) framework designed for practical deployment in clinical lung CT analysis. Built from scalable components, including Through-Plane Attention Blocks (TAB) and Swin Transformer V2 -- our model effectively reconstructs fine anatomical details in low-dose CT volumes and integrates seamlessly with downstream analysis pipelines. We evaluate its effectiveness on three critical lung cancer tasks -- lobe segmentation, radiomics, and prognosis -- across multiple clinical cohorts. To enhance robustness across variable acquisition protocols, we introduce pseudo-low-resolution augmentation, simulating scanner diversity without requiring private data. TVSRN-V2 demonstrates a significant improvement in segmentation accuracy (+4\% Dice), higher radiomic feature reproducibility, and enhanced predictive performance (+0.06 C-index and AUC). These results indicate that SR-driven recovery of structural detail significantly enhances clinical decision support, positioning TVSRN-V2 as a well-engineered, clinically viable system for dose-efficient imaging and quantitative analysis in real-world CT workflows.
Authors: Kechi Zhang, Ge Li, Jia Li, Huangzhao Zhang, Yihong Dong, Jia Li, Jingjing Xu, Zhi Jin
Abstract: The Transformer architecture has emerged as a landmark advancement within the broad field of artificial intelligence, effectively catalyzing the advent of large language models (LLMs). However, despite its remarkable capabilities and the substantial progress it has facilitated, the Transformer architecture still has some limitations. One such intrinsic limitation is its inability to effectively capture the Chomsky hierarchy, such as regular expressions or deterministic context-free grammars. Drawing inspiration from pushdown automata, which efficiently resolve deterministic context-free grammars using stacks, we propose StackTrans to address the aforementioned issue within LLMs. Unlike previous approaches that modify the attention computation, StackTrans explicitly incorporates hidden state stacks between Transformer layers. This design maintains compatibility with existing frameworks like flash-attention. Specifically, our design features stack operations -- such as pushing and popping hidden states -- that are differentiable and can be learned in an end-to-end manner. Our comprehensive evaluation spans benchmarks for both Chomsky hierarchies and large-scale natural languages. Across these diverse tasks, StackTrans consistently outperforms standard Transformer models and other baselines. We have successfully scaled StackTrans up from 360M to 7B parameters. In particular, our from-scratch pretrained model StackTrans-360M outperforms several larger open-source LLMs with 2-3x more parameters, showcasing its superior efficiency and reasoning capability.
Authors: Zehua Cheng, Rui Sun, Jiahao Sun, Yike Guo
Abstract: Fine-tuning the large language models (LLMs) are prevented by the deficiency of centralized control and the massive computing and communication overhead on the decentralized schemes. While the typical standard federated learning (FL) supports data privacy, the central server requirement creates a single point of attack and vulnerability to poisoning attacks. Generalizing the result in this direction to 70B-parameter models in the heterogeneous, trustless environments has turned out to be a huge, yet unbroken bottleneck. This paper introduces FLock, a decentralized framework for secure and efficient collaborative LLM fine-tuning. Integrating a blockchain-based trust layer with economic incentives, FLock replaces the central aggregator with a secure, auditable protocol for cooperation among untrusted parties. We present the first empirical validation of fine-tuning a 70B LLM in a secure, multi-domain, decentralized setting. Our experiments show the FLock framework defends against backdoor poisoning attacks that compromise standard FL optimizers and fosters synergistic knowledge transfer. The resulting models show a >68% reduction in adversarial attack success rates. The global model also demonstrates superior cross-domain generalization, outperforming models trained in isolation on their own specialized data.
Authors: Elisa Sanchez-Bayona, Rodrigo Agerri
Abstract: This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in metaphor interpretation across multiple datasets, tasks, and prompt configurations. Although metaphor processing has gained significant attention in Natural Language Processing (NLP), previous research has been limited to single-dataset evaluations and specific task settings, often using artificially constructed data through lexical replacement. We address these limitations by conducting extensive experiments using diverse publicly available datasets with inference and metaphor annotations, focusing on Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Question Answering (QA) tasks. The results indicate that LLMs' performance is more influenced by features like lexical overlap and sentence length than by metaphorical content, demonstrating that any alleged emergent abilities of LLMs to understand metaphorical language are the result of a combination of surface-level features, in-context learning, and linguistic knowledge. This work provides critical insights into the current capabilities and limitations of LLMs in processing figurative language, highlighting the need for more realistic evaluation frameworks in metaphor interpretation tasks. Data and code are publicly available.
Authors: Muhammad Aqeel, Maham Nazir, Zanxi Ruan, Francesco Setti
Abstract: Medical image segmentation suffers from data scarcity, particularly in polyp detection where annotation requires specialized expertise. We present SynDiff, a framework combining text-guided synthetic data generation with efficient diffusion-based segmentation. Our approach employs latent diffusion models to generate clinically realistic synthetic polyps through text-conditioned inpainting, augmenting limited training data with semantically diverse samples. Unlike traditional diffusion methods requiring iterative denoising, we introduce direct latent estimation enabling single-step inference with T x computational speedup. On CVC-ClinicDB, SynDiff achieves 96.0% Dice and 92.9% IoU while maintaining real-time capability suitable for clinical deployment. The framework demonstrates that controlled synthetic augmentation improves segmentation robustness without distribution shift. SynDiff bridges the gap between data-hungry deep learning models and clinical constraints, offering an efficient solution for deployment in resourcelimited medical settings.
Authors: Ruifeng Zheng, Cong Chen, Shuang Wang, Yiming Liu, Lin You, Jindong Lu, Ruizhe Zhu, Guodao Zhang, Kejie Huang
Abstract: Epilepsy is a chronic, noncommunicable brain disorder, and sudden seizure onsets can significantly impact patients' quality of life and health. However, wearable seizure-predicting devices are still limited, partly due to the bulky size of EEG-collecting devices. To relieve the problem, we proposed a novel two-stage channel-aware Set Transformer Network that could perform seizure prediction with fewer EEG channel sensors. We also tested a seizure-independent division method which could prevent the adjacency of training and test data. Experiments were performed on the CHB-MIT dataset which includes 22 patients with 88 merged seizures. The mean sensitivity before channel selection was 76.4% with a false predicting rate (FPR) of 0.09/hour. After channel selection, dominant channels emerged in 20 out of 22 patients; the average number of channels was reduced to 2.8 from 18; and the mean sensitivity rose to 80.1% with an FPR of 0.11/hour. Furthermore, experimental results on the seizure-independent division supported our assertion that a more rigorous seizure-independent division should be used for patients with abundant EEG recordings.
Authors: Shumin Wang, Hajar El Hassani, Marco Di Renzo, Marios Poulakis
Abstract: Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are an emerging technology for improving spectral efficiency and reducing power consumption in future wireless systems. This paper investigates the joint design of the transmit precoding matrices and the RIS phase shift vector in a multi-user RIS-aided multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system. We formulate a max-min optimization problem to maximize the minimum achievable rate while considering transmit power and reradiation mask constraints. The achievable rate is simplified using the Arimoto-Blahut algorithm, and the problem is broken into quadratic programs with quadratic constraints (QPQC) sub-problems using an alternating optimization approach. To improve efficiency, we develop a model-based neural network optimization that utilizes the one-hot encoding for the angles of incidence and reflection. We address practical RIS limitations by using a greedy search algorithm to solve the optimization problem for discrete phase shifts. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed methods effectively shape the multi-beam radiation pattern towards desired directions while satisfying reradiation mask constraints. The neural network design reduces the execution time, and the discrete phase shift scheme performs well with a small reduction of the beamforming gain by using only four phase shift levels.
Authors: Julia Machnio, Mads Nielsen, Mostafa Mehdipour Ghazi
Abstract: Active learning (AL) seeks to reduce annotation costs by selecting the most informative samples for labeling, making it particularly valuable in resource-constrained settings. However, traditional evaluation methods, which focus solely on final accuracy, fail to capture the full dynamics of the learning process. To address this gap, we propose PALM (Performance Analysis of Active Learning Models), a unified and interpretable mathematical model that characterizes AL trajectories through four key parameters: achievable accuracy, coverage efficiency, early-stage performance, and scalability. PALM provides a predictive description of AL behavior from partial observations, enabling the estimation of future performance and facilitating principled comparisons across different strategies. We validate PALM through extensive experiments on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet-50/100/200, covering a wide range of AL methods and self-supervised embeddings. Our results demonstrate that PALM generalizes effectively across datasets, budgets, and strategies, accurately predicting full learning curves from limited labeled data. Importantly, PALM reveals crucial insights into learning efficiency, data space coverage, and the scalability of AL methods. By enabling the selection of cost-effective strategies and predicting performance under tight budget constraints, PALM lays the basis for more systematic, reproducible, and data-efficient evaluation of AL in both research and real-world applications. The code is available at: https://github.com/juliamachnio/PALM.
Authors: Ruofan Liu, Yun Lin, Silas Yeo Shuen Yu, Xiwen Teoh, Zhenkai Liang, Jin Song Dong
Abstract: Phishing emails are a critical component of the cybercrime kill chain due to their wide reach and low cost. Their ever-evolving nature renders traditional rule-based and feature-engineered detectors ineffective in the ongoing arms race between attackers and defenders. The rise of large language models (LLMs) further exacerbates the threat, enabling attackers to craft highly convincing phishing emails at minimal cost. This work demonstrates that LLMs can generate psychologically persuasive phishing emails tailored to victim profiles, successfully bypassing nearly all commercial and academic detectors. To defend against such threats, we propose PiMRef, the first reference-based phishing email detector that leverages knowledge-based invariants. Our core insight is that persuasive phishing emails often contain disprovable identity claims, which contradict real-world facts. PiMRef reframes phishing detection as an identity fact-checking task. Given an email, PiMRef (i) extracts the sender's claimed identity, (ii) verifies the legitimacy of the sender's domain against a predefined knowledge base, and (iii) detects call-to-action prompts that push user engagement. Contradictory claims are flagged as phishing indicators and serve as human-understandable explanations. Compared to existing methods such as D-Fence, HelpHed, and ChatSpamDetector, PiMRef boosts precision by 8.8% with no loss in recall on standard benchmarks like Nazario and PhishPot. In a real-world evaluation of 10,183 emails across five university accounts over three years, PiMRef achieved 92.1% precision, 87.9% recall, and a median runtime of 0.05s, outperforming the state-of-the-art in both effectiveness and efficiency.
Authors: Hui-Guan Yuan, Ryandhimas E. Zezario, Shafique Ahmed, Hsin-Min Wang, Kai-Lung Hua, Yu Tsao
Abstract: Hearing loss simulation models are essential for hearing aid deployment. However, existing models have high computational complexity and latency, which limits real-time applications and lack direct integration with speech processing systems. To address these issues, we propose Neuro-MSBG, a lightweight end-to-end model with a personalized audiogram encoder for effective time-frequency modeling. Experiments show that Neuro-MSBG supports parallel inference and retains the intelligibility and perceptual quality of the original MSBG, with a Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (SRCC) of 0.9247 for Short-Time Objective Intelligibility (STOI) and 0.8671 for Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ). Neuro-MSBG reduces simulation runtime by a factor of 46 (from 0.970 seconds to 0.021 seconds for a 1 second input), further demonstrating its efficiency and practicality.
Authors: Jiaao Li, Kaiyuan Li, Chen Gao, Yong Li, Xinlei Chen
Abstract: Egomotion videos are first-person recordings where the view changes continuously due to the agent's movement. As they serve as the primary visual input for embodied AI agents, making egomotion video reasoning more efficient is therefore essential for real-world deployment. Recent advances in vision-language models have enabled strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, but their computational cost remains prohibitive for long, redundant video inputs. Existing token pruning methods, typically designed for third-person videos, fail to leverage the spatiotemporal continuity and motion constraints inherent in egomotion settings. To address this, we propose EgoPrune, a training-free token pruning method tailored for egomotion video reasoning. EgoPrune comprises three components: a keyframe selector adapted from EmbodiedR for temporally efficient sampling; Perspective-Aware Redundancy Filtering (PARF), which aligns visual tokens using perspective transformations and removes redundant tokens; and a Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR)-based token selector that jointly considers visual-text relevance and intra-frame diversity. Experiments on two egomotion video benchmarks show that EgoPrune consistently outperforms prior training-free methods across various pruning ratios while significantly reducing FLOPs, memory usage, and latency. Moreover, we deploy EgoPrune on an embodied agent equipped with a Jetson Orin NX 16GB edge device, demonstrating its real-world efficiency and suitability for on-device egomotion video reasoning.
Authors: Ruijie Zhu, Mulin Yu, Linning Xu, Lihan Jiang, Yixuan Li, Tianzhu Zhang, Jiangmiao Pang, Bo Dai
Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting is renowned for its high-fidelity reconstructions and real-time novel view synthesis, yet its lack of semantic understanding limits object-level perception. In this work, we propose ObjectGS, an object-aware framework that unifies 3D scene reconstruction with semantic understanding. Instead of treating the scene as a unified whole, ObjectGS models individual objects as local anchors that generate neural Gaussians and share object IDs, enabling precise object-level reconstruction. During training, we dynamically grow or prune these anchors and optimize their features, while a one-hot ID encoding with a classification loss enforces clear semantic constraints. We show through extensive experiments that ObjectGS not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods on open-vocabulary and panoptic segmentation tasks, but also integrates seamlessly with applications like mesh extraction and scene editing. Project page: https://ruijiezhu94.github.io/ObjectGS_page
Authors: Hee Jun Yang, Min Jung Kim, Yeoneung Kim
Abstract: We propose a mesh-free policy iteration framework that combines classical dynamic programming with physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to solve high-dimensional, nonconvex Hamilton--Jacobi--Isaacs (HJI) equations arising in stochastic differential games and robust control. The method alternates between solving linear second-order PDEs under fixed feedback policies and updating the controls via pointwise minimax optimization using automatic differentiation. Under standard Lipschitz and uniform ellipticity assumptions, we prove that the value function iterates converge locally uniformly to the unique viscosity solution of the HJI equation. The analysis establishes equi-Lipschitz regularity of the iterates, enabling provable stability and convergence without requiring convexity of the Hamiltonian. Numerical experiments demonstrate the accuracy and scalability of the method. In a two-dimensional stochastic path-planning game with a moving obstacle, our method matches finite-difference benchmarks with relative $L^2$-errors below %10^{-2}%. In five- and ten-dimensional publisher-subscriber differential games with anisotropic noise, the proposed approach consistently outperforms direct PINN solvers, yielding smoother value functions and lower residuals. Our results suggest that integrating PINNs with policy iteration is a practical and theoretically grounded method for solving high-dimensional, nonconvex HJI equations, with potential applications in robotics, finance, and multi-agent reinforcement learning.
Authors: Sungmin Yun, Seonyong Park, Hwayong Nam, Younjoo Lee, Gunjun Lee, Kwanhee Kyung, Sangpyo Kim, Nam Sung Kim, Jongmin Kim, Hyungyo Kim, Juhwan Cho, Seungmin Baek, Jung Ho Ahn
Abstract: Computational workloads composing traditional Transformer models are starkly bifurcated. Multi-Head Attention (MHA) is memory-bound, with low arithmetic intensity, while feedforward layers are compute-bound. This dichotomy has long motivated research into specialized hardware to mitigate the MHA bottleneck. This paper argues that recent architectural shifts, namely Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), challenge the premise of specialized attention hardware. We make two key observations. First, the arithmetic intensity of MLA is over two orders of magnitude greater than that of MHA, shifting it close to a compute-bound regime well-suited for modern accelerators like GPUs. Second, by distributing MoE experts across a pool of accelerators, their arithmetic intensity can be tuned through batching to match that of the dense layers, creating a more balanced computational profile. These findings reveal a diminishing need for specialized attention hardware. The central challenge for next-generation Transformers is no longer accelerating a single memory-bound layer. Instead, the focus must shift to designing balanced systems with sufficient compute, memory capacity, memory bandwidth, and high-bandwidth interconnects to manage the diverse demands of large-scale models.
Authors: Thanh Thi Nguyen, Saeid Nahavandi, Imran Razzak, Dung Nguyen, Nhat Truong Pham, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen
Abstract: The increasing demand for autonomous systems in complex and dynamic environments has driven significant research into intelligent path planning methodologies. For decades, graph-based search algorithms, linear programming techniques, and evolutionary computation methods have served as foundational approaches in this domain. Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as a powerful method for enabling autonomous agents to learn optimal navigation strategies through interaction with their environments. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of traditional approaches as well as the recent advancements in DRL applied to path planning tasks, focusing on autonomous vehicles, drones, and robotic platforms. Key algorithms across both conventional and learning-based paradigms are categorized, with their innovations and practical implementations highlighted. This is followed by a thorough discussion of their respective strengths and limitations in terms of computational efficiency, scalability, adaptability, and robustness. The survey concludes by identifying key open challenges and outlining promising avenues for future research. Special attention is given to hybrid approaches that integrate DRL with classical planning techniques to leverage the benefits of both learning-based adaptability and deterministic reliability, offering promising directions for robust and resilient autonomous navigation.
Authors: Simon Kohaut, Felix Divo, Navid Hamid, Benedict Flade, Julian Eggert, Devendra Singh Dhami, Kristian Kersting
Abstract: Ensuring reliable and rule-compliant behavior of autonomous agents in uncertain environments remains a fundamental challenge in modern robotics. Our work shows how neuro-symbolic systems, which integrate probabilistic, symbolic white-box reasoning models with deep learning methods, offer a powerful solution to this challenge. This enables the simultaneous consideration of explicit rules and neural models trained on noisy data, combining the strength of structured reasoning with flexible representations. To this end, we introduce the Constitutional Controller (CoCo), a novel framework designed to enhance the safety and reliability of agents by reasoning over deep probabilistic logic programs representing constraints such as those found in shared traffic spaces. Furthermore, we propose the concept of self-doubt, implemented as a probability density conditioned on doubt features such as travel velocity, employed sensors, or health factors. In a real-world aerial mobility study, we demonstrate CoCo's advantages for intelligent autonomous systems to learn appropriate doubts and navigate complex and uncertain environments safely and compliantly.
Authors: Chilam Cheang, Sijin Chen, Zhongren Cui, Yingdong Hu, Liqun Huang, Tao Kong, Hang Li, Yifeng Li, Yuxiao Liu, Xiao Ma, Hao Niu, Wenxuan Ou, Wanli Peng, Zeyu Ren, Haixin Shi, Jiawen Tian, Hongtao Wu, Xin Xiao, Yuyang Xiao, Jiafeng Xu, Yichu Yang
Abstract: We report our recent progress towards building generalist robot policies, the development of GR-3. GR-3 is a large-scale vision-language-action (VLA) model. It showcases exceptional capabilities in generalizing to novel objects, environments, and instructions involving abstract concepts. Furthermore, it can be efficiently fine-tuned with minimal human trajectory data, enabling rapid and cost-effective adaptation to new settings. GR-3 also excels in handling long-horizon and dexterous tasks, including those requiring bi-manual manipulation and mobile movement, showcasing robust and reliable performance. These capabilities are achieved through a multi-faceted training recipe that includes co-training with web-scale vision-language data, efficient fine-tuning from human trajectory data collected via VR devices, and effective imitation learning with robot trajectory data. In addition, we introduce ByteMini, a versatile bi-manual mobile robot designed with exceptional flexibility and reliability, capable of accomplishing a wide range of tasks when integrated with GR-3. Through extensive real-world experiments, we show GR-3 surpasses the state-of-the-art baseline method, $\pi_0$, on a wide variety of challenging tasks. We hope GR-3 can serve as a step towards building generalist robots capable of assisting humans in daily life.
Authors: Alexandru Coca, Mark Gaynor, Zhenxing Zhang, Jianpeng Cheng, Bo-Hsiang Tseng, Pete Boothroyd, H\'ector Martinez Alonso, Diarmuid \'O S\'eaghdha, Anders Johannsen
Abstract: This work evaluates the potential of large language models (LLMs) to power digital assistants capable of complex action execution. These assistants rely on pre-trained programming knowledge to execute multi-step goals by composing objects and functions defined in assistant libraries into action execution programs. To achieve this, we develop ASPERA, a framework comprising an assistant library simulation and a human-assisted LLM data generation engine. Our engine allows developers to guide LLM generation of high-quality tasks consisting of complex user queries, simulation state and corresponding validation programs, tackling data availability and evaluation robustness challenges. Alongside the framework we release Asper-Bench, an evaluation dataset of 250 challenging tasks generated using ASPERA, which we use to show that program generation grounded in custom assistant libraries is a significant challenge to LLMs compared to dependency-free code generation.
Authors: Johannes Ackermann, Takashi Ishida, Masashi Sugiyama
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) allows us to train models, such as language models (LMs), to follow complex human preferences. In RLHF for LMs, we first train an LM using supervised fine-tuning, sample pairs of responses, obtain human feedback, and use the resulting data to train a reward model (RM). RL methods are then used to train the LM to maximize the reward given by the RM. As training progresses, the responses generated by the LM no longer resemble the responses seen by the RM during training, leading to the RM becoming inaccurate. The score given by the RM keeps increasing, but the learned behavior no longer matches the human preferences. This issue is known as overoptimization. We investigate overoptimization from the point of view of distribution shift and show that the shift results in an inconsistent estimate of the RM parameters, leading to an inconsistent estimate of the policy gradient. We propose Off-Policy Corrected Reward Modeling (OCRM), which iteratively off-policy corrects the RM using importance weighting, without requiring new labels or samples. This results in a more accurate RM, which empirically leads to an improved final policy. We validate our approach in experiments with summarization and chatbot datasets and show that it performs significantly better than standard RLHF methods and baselines. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/JohannesAck/OffPolicyCorrectedRewardModeling
URLs: https://github.com/JohannesAck/OffPolicyCorrectedRewardModeling
Authors: Simon Winther Albertsen, Hjalte Svaneborg Bj{\o}rnstrup, Mostafa Mehdipour Ghazi
Abstract: Accurate segmentation is crucial for clinical applications, but existing models often assume fixed, high-resolution inputs and degrade significantly when faced with lower-resolution data in real-world scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose RARE-UNet, a resolution-aware multi-scale segmentation architecture that dynamically adapts its inference path to the spatial resolution of the input. Central to our design are multi-scale blocks integrated at multiple encoder depths, a resolution-aware routing mechanism, and consistency-driven training that aligns multi-resolution features with full-resolution representations. We evaluate RARE-UNet on two benchmark brain imaging tasks for hippocampus and tumor segmentation. Compared to standard UNet, its multi-resolution augmented variant, and nnUNet, our model achieves the highest average Dice scores of 0.84 and 0.65 across resolution, while maintaining consistent performance and significantly reduced inference time at lower resolutions. These results highlight the effectiveness and scalability of our architecture in achieving resolution-robust segmentation. The codes are available at: https://github.com/simonsejse/RARE-UNet.
Authors: Yimeng Chen, Piotr Pi\c{e}kos, Mateusz Ostaszewski, Firas Laakom, J\"urgen Schmidhuber
Abstract: Evaluating the scientific discovery capabilities of large language model based agents, particularly how they cope with varying environmental complexity and utilize prior knowledge, requires specialized benchmarks currently lacking in the landscape. To address this gap, we introduce PhysGym, a novel benchmark suite and simulation platform for rigorously assessing LLM-based scientific reasoning in interactive physics environments. PhysGym's primary contribution lies in its sophisticated control over the level of prior knowledge provided to the agent. This allows researchers to dissect agent performance along axes including the complexity of the problem and the prior knowledge levels. The benchmark comprises a suite of interactive simulations, where agents must actively probe environments, gather data sequentially under constraints and formulate hypotheses about underlying physical laws. PhysGym provides standardized evaluation protocols and metrics for assessing hypothesis accuracy and model fidelity. We demonstrate the benchmark's utility by presenting results from baseline LLMs, showcasing its ability to differentiate capabilities based on varying priors and task complexity.
Authors: Gregory F. Stock, Juan A. Fraire, Holger Hermanns, J\k{e}drzej Mosi\k{e}\.zny, Yusra Al-Khazraji, Julio Ram\'irez Molina, Evridiki V. Ntagiou
Abstract: The rapid expansion of satellite constellations in near-Earth orbits presents significant challenges in satellite network management, requiring innovative approaches for efficient, scalable, and resilient operations. This paper explores the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in optimizing the operation of satellite mega-constellations, drawing from the ConstellAI project funded by the European Space Agency (ESA). A consortium comprising GMV GmbH, Saarland University, and Thales Alenia Space collaborates to develop AI-driven algorithms and demonstrates their effectiveness over traditional methods for two crucial operational challenges: data routing and resource allocation. In the routing use case, Reinforcement Learning (RL) is used to improve the end-to-end latency by learning from historical queuing latency, outperforming classical shortest path algorithms. For resource allocation, RL optimizes the scheduling of tasks across constellations, focussing on efficiently using limited resources such as battery and memory. Both use cases were tested for multiple satellite constellation configurations and operational scenarios, resembling the real-life spacecraft operations of communications and Earth observation satellites. This research demonstrates that RL not only competes with classical approaches but also offers enhanced flexibility, scalability, and generalizability in decision-making processes, which is crucial for the autonomous and intelligent management of satellite fleets. The findings of this activity suggest that AI can fundamentally alter the landscape of satellite constellation management by providing more adaptive, robust, and cost-effective solutions.
Authors: Hugo Carlesso, Maria Eliza Patulea, Moncef Garouani, Radu Tudor Ionescu, Josiane Mothe
Abstract: Mixup has become a popular augmentation strategy for image classification, yet its naive pixel-wise interpolation often produces unrealistic images that can hinder learning, particularly in high-stakes medical applications. We propose GeMix, a two-stage framework that replaces heuristic blending with a learned, label-aware interpolation powered by class-conditional GANs. First, a StyleGAN2-ADA generator is trained on the target dataset. During augmentation, we sample two label vectors from Dirichlet priors biased toward different classes and blend them via a Beta-distributed coefficient. Then, we condition the generator on this soft label to synthesize visually coherent images that lie along a continuous class manifold. We benchmark GeMix on the large-scale COVIDx-CT-3 dataset using three backbones (ResNet-50, ResNet-101, EfficientNet-B0). When combined with real data, our method increases macro-F1 over traditional mixup for all backbones, reducing the false negative rate for COVID-19 detection. GeMix is thus a drop-in replacement for pixel-space mixup, delivering stronger regularization and greater semantic fidelity, without disrupting existing training pipelines. We publicly release our code at https://github.com/hugocarlesso/GeMix to foster reproducibility and further research.
Authors: Atreya Ghosal, Ashim Gupta, Vivek Srikumar
Abstract: One way social groups are marginalized in discourse is that the narratives told about them often default to a narrow, stereotyped range of topics. In contrast, default groups are allowed the full complexity of human existence. We describe the constrained representations of queer people in LLM generations in terms of harmful representations, narrow representations, and discursive othering and formulate hypotheses to test for these phenomena. Our results show that LLMs are significantly limited in their portrayals of queer personas.
Authors: Yinsong Chen, Kaifeng Wang, Xiaoqiang Meng, Xueyuan Li, Zirui Li, Xin Gao
Abstract: Current research on decision-making in safety-critical scenarios often relies on inefficient data-driven scenario generation or specific modeling approaches, which fail to capture corner cases in real-world contexts. To address this issue, we propose a Red-Team Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning framework, where background vehicles with interference capabilities are treated as red-team agents. Through active interference and exploration, red-team vehicles can uncover corner cases outside the data distribution. The framework uses a Constraint Graph Representation Markov Decision Process, ensuring that red-team vehicles comply with safety rules while continuously disrupting the autonomous vehicles (AVs). A policy threat zone model is constructed to quantify the threat posed by red-team vehicles to AVs, inducing more extreme actions to increase the danger level of the scenario. Experimental results show that the proposed framework significantly impacts AVs decision-making safety and generates various corner cases. This method also offers a novel direction for research in safety-critical scenarios.
Authors: Andrii Balashov, Olena Ponomarova, Xiaohua Zhai
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in enterprise settings (e.g., as Microsoft 365 Copilot) face novel security challenges. One critical threat is prompt inference attacks: adversaries chain together seemingly benign prompts to gradually extract confidential data. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of multi-stage prompt inference attacks in an enterprise LLM context. We simulate realistic attack scenarios where an attacker uses mild-mannered queries and indirect prompt injections to exploit an LLM integrated with private corporate data. We develop a formal threat model for these multi-turn inference attacks and analyze them using probability theory, optimization frameworks, and information-theoretic leakage bounds. The attacks are shown to reliably exfiltrate sensitive information from the LLM's context (e.g., internal SharePoint documents or emails), even when standard safety measures are in place. We propose and evaluate defenses to counter such attacks, including statistical anomaly detection, fine-grained access control, prompt sanitization techniques, and architectural modifications to LLM deployment. Each defense is supported by mathematical analysis or experimental simulation. For example, we derive bounds on information leakage under differential privacy-based training and demonstrate an anomaly detection method that flags multi-turn attacks with high AUC. We also introduce an approach called "spotlighting" that uses input transformations to isolate untrusted prompt content, reducing attack success by an order of magnitude. Finally, we provide a formal proof of concept and empirical validation for a combined defense-in-depth strategy. Our work highlights that securing LLMs in enterprise settings requires moving beyond single-turn prompt filtering toward a holistic, multi-stage perspective on both attacks and defenses.
Authors: Edward Holmberg, Pujan Pokhrel, Maximilian Zoch, Elias Ioup, Ken Pathak, Steven Sloan, Kendall Niles, Jay Ratcliff, Maik Flanagin, Christian Guetl, Julian Simeonov, Mahdi Abdelguerfi
Abstract: Physics-based solvers like HEC-RAS provide high-fidelity river forecasts but are too computationally intensive for on-the-fly decision-making during flood events. The central challenge is to accelerate these simulations without sacrificing accuracy. This paper introduces a deep learning surrogate that treats HEC-RAS not as a solver but as a data-generation engine. We propose a hybrid, auto-regressive architecture that combines a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) to capture short-term temporal dynamics with a Geometry-Aware Fourier Neural Operator (Geo-FNO) to model long-range spatial dependencies along a river reach. The model learns underlying physics implicitly from a minimal eight-channel feature vector encoding dynamic state, static geometry, and boundary forcings extracted directly from native HEC-RAS files. Trained on 67 reaches of the Mississippi River Basin, the surrogate was evaluated on a year-long, unseen hold-out simulation. Results show the model achieves a strong predictive accuracy, with a median absolute stage error of 0.31 feet. Critically, for a full 67-reach ensemble forecast, our surrogate reduces the required wall-clock time from 139 minutes to 40 minutes, a speedup of nearly 3.5 times over the traditional solver. The success of this data-driven approach demonstrates that robust feature engineering can produce a viable, high-speed replacement for conventional hydraulic models, improving the computational feasibility of large-scale ensemble flood forecasting.
Authors: David Bann, Ed Lowther, Liam Wright, Yevgeniya Kovalchuk
Abstract: Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) - particularly generative AI - present new opportunities to accelerate, or even automate, epidemiological research. Unlike disciplines based on physical experimentation, a sizable fraction of Epidemiology relies on secondary data analysis and thus is well-suited for such augmentation. Yet, it remains unclear which specific tasks can benefit from AI interventions or where roadblocks exist. Awareness of current AI capabilities is also mixed. Here, we map the landscape of epidemiological tasks using existing datasets - from literature review to data access, analysis, writing up, and dissemination - and identify where existing AI tools offer efficiency gains. While AI can increase productivity in some areas such as coding and administrative tasks, its utility is constrained by limitations of existing AI models (e.g. hallucinations in literature reviews) and human systems (e.g. barriers to accessing datasets). Through examples of AI-generated epidemiological outputs, including fully AI-generated papers, we demonstrate that recently developed agentic systems can now design and execute epidemiological analysis, albeit to varied quality (see https://github.com/edlowther/automated-epidemiology). Epidemiologists have new opportunities to empirically test and benchmark AI systems; realising the potential of AI will require two-way engagement between epidemiologists and engineers.
Authors: Lisan Al Amin, Md. Ismail Hossain, Thanh Thi Nguyen, Tasnim Jahan, Mahbubul Islam, Faisal Quader
Abstract: Recent advances in deepfake technology have created increasingly convincing synthetic media that poses significant challenges to information integrity and social trust. While current detection methods show promise, their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood, and the large sizes of their models make them challenging to deploy in resource-limited environments. This study investigates the application of the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) to deepfake detection, aiming to identify the key features crucial for recognizing deepfakes. We examine how neural networks can be efficiently pruned while maintaining high detection accuracy. Through extensive experiments with MesoNet, CNN-5, and ResNet-18 architectures on the OpenForensic and FaceForensics++ datasets, we find that deepfake detection networks contain winning tickets, i.e., subnetworks, that preserve performance even at substantial sparsity levels. Our results indicate that MesoNet retains 56.2% accuracy at 80% sparsity on the OpenForensic dataset, with only 3,000 parameters, which is about 90% of its baseline accuracy (62.6%). The results also show that our proposed LTH-based iterative magnitude pruning approach consistently outperforms one-shot pruning methods. Using Grad-CAM visualization, we analyze how pruned networks maintain their focus on critical facial regions for deepfake detection. Additionally, we demonstrate the transferability of winning tickets across datasets, suggesting potential for efficient, deployable deepfake detection systems.
Authors: Kailai Yang, Xiao Liu, Lei Ji, Hao Li, Yeyun Gong, Peng Cheng, Mao Yang
Abstract: Continual pre-training on small-scale task-specific data is an effective method for improving large language models in new target fields, yet it risks catastrophic forgetting of their original capabilities. A common solution is to re-weight training data mixtures from source and target fields on a domain space to achieve balanced performance. Previous domain reweighting strategies rely on manual designation with certain heuristics based on human intuition or empirical results. In this work, we prove that more general heuristics can be parameterized by proposing Data Mixing Agent, the first model-based, end-to-end framework that learns to re-weight domains. The agent learns generalizable heuristics through reinforcement learning on large quantities of data mixing trajectories with corresponding feedback from an evaluation environment. Experiments in continual pre-training on math reasoning show that Data Mixing Agent outperforms strong baselines in achieving balanced performance across source and target field benchmarks. Furthermore, it generalizes well across unseen source fields, target models, and domain spaces without retraining. Direct application to the code generation field also indicates its adaptability across target domains. Further analysis showcases the agents' well-aligned heuristics with human intuitions and their efficiency in achieving superior model performance with less source-field data.
Authors: Alessio Pittiglio
Abstract: In this paper, we present our submission to the MM-ArgFallacy2025 shared task, which aims to advance research in multimodal argument mining, focusing on logical fallacies in political debates. Our approach uses pretrained Transformer-based models and proposes several ways to leverage context. In the fallacy classification subtask, our models achieved macro F1-scores of 0.4444 (text), 0.3559 (audio), and 0.4403 (multimodal). Our multimodal model showed performance comparable to the text-only model, suggesting potential for improvements.
Authors: Elnur Isgandarov, Matteo Cederle, Federico Chiariotti, Gian Antonio Susto
Abstract: Shared mobility systems, such as bike-sharing networks, play a crucial role in urban transportation. Identifying anomalies in these systems is essential for optimizing operations, improving service reliability, and enhancing user experience. This paper presents an interpretable anomaly detection framework that integrates multi-source data, including bike-sharing trip records, weather conditions, and public transit availability. The Isolation Forest algorithm is employed for unsupervised anomaly detection, along with the Depth-based Isolation Forest Feature Importance (DIFFI) algorithm providing interpretability. Results show that station-level analysis offers a robust understanding of anomalies, highlighting the influence of external factors such as adverse weather and limited transit availability. Our findings contribute to improving decision-making in shared mobility operations.
Authors: Giordano d'Aloisio, Tosin Fadahunsi, Jay Choy, Rebecca Moussa, Federica Sarro
Abstract: Background: Text-to-image generation models are widely used across numerous domains. Among these models, Stable Diffusion (SD) - an open-source text-to-image generation model - has become the most popular, producing over 12 billion images annually. However, the widespread use of these models raises concerns regarding their social and environmental sustainability. Aims: To reduce the harm that SD models may have on society and the environment, we introduce SustainDiffusion, a search-based approach designed to enhance the social and environmental sustainability of SD models. Method: SustainDiffusion searches the optimal combination of hyperparameters and prompt structures that can reduce gender and ethnic bias in generated images while also lowering the energy consumption required for image generation. Importantly, SustainDiffusion maintains image quality comparable to that of the original SD model. Results: We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of SustainDiffusion, testing it against six different baselines using 56 different prompts. Our results demonstrate that SustainDiffusion can reduce gender bias in SD3 by 68%, ethnic bias by 59%, and energy consumption (calculated as the sum of CPU and GPU energy) by 48%. Additionally, the outcomes produced by SustainDiffusion are consistent across multiple runs and can be generalised to various prompts. Conclusions: With SustainDiffusion, we demonstrate how enhancing the social and environmental sustainability of text-to-image generation models is possible without fine-tuning or changing the model's architecture.
Authors: Pegah Golchian, Jan Kapar, David S. Watson, Marvin N. Wright
Abstract: Handling missing values is a common challenge in biostatistical analyses, typically addressed by imputation methods. We propose a novel, fast, and easy-to-use imputation method called missing value imputation with adversarial random forests (MissARF), based on generative machine learning, that provides both single and multiple imputation. MissARF employs adversarial random forest (ARF) for density estimation and data synthesis. To impute a missing value of an observation, we condition on the non-missing values and sample from the estimated conditional distribution generated by ARF. Our experiments demonstrate that MissARF performs comparably to state-of-the-art single and multiple imputation methods in terms of imputation quality and fast runtime with no additional costs for multiple imputation.
Authors: Wenjie Huang, Qi Yang, Shuting Xia, He Huang, Zhu Li, Yiling Xu
Abstract: Existing AI-based point cloud compression methods struggle with dependence on specific training data distributions, which limits their real-world deployment. Implicit Neural Representation (INR) methods solve the above problem by encoding overfitted network parameters to the bitstream, resulting in more distribution-agnostic results. However, due to the limitation of encoding time and decoder size, current INR based methods only consider lossy geometry compression. In this paper, we propose the first INR based lossless point cloud geometry compression method called Lossless Implicit Neural Representations for Point Cloud Geometry Compression (LINR-PCGC). To accelerate encoding speed, we design a group of point clouds level coding framework with an effective network initialization strategy, which can reduce around 60% encoding time. A lightweight coding network based on multiscale SparseConv, consisting of scale context extraction, child node prediction, and model compression modules, is proposed to realize fast inference and compact decoder size. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms traditional and AI-based methods: for example, with the convergence time in the MVUB dataset, our method reduces the bitstream by approximately 21.21% compared to G-PCC TMC13v23 and 21.95% compared to SparsePCGC. Our project can be seen on https://huangwenjie2023.github.io/LINR-PCGC/.
Authors: Congmin Zheng, Jiachen Zhu, Jianghao Lin, Xinyi Dai, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang, Mengyue Yang
Abstract: Process Reward Models (PRMs) play a central role in evaluating and guiding multi-step reasoning in large language models (LLMs), especially for mathematical problem solving. However, we identify a pervasive length bias in existing PRMs: they tend to assign higher scores to longer reasoning steps, even when the semantic content and logical validity are unchanged. This bias undermines the reliability of reward predictions and leads to overly verbose outputs during inference. To address this issue, we propose CoLD(Counterfactually-Guided Length Debiasing), a unified framework that mitigates length bias through three components: an explicit length-penalty adjustment, a learned bias estimator trained to capture spurious length-related signals, and a joint training strategy that enforces length-invariance in reward predictions. Our approach is grounded in counterfactual reasoning and informed by causal graph analysis. Extensive experiments on MATH500 and GSM-Plus show that CoLD consistently reduces reward-length correlation, improves accuracy in step selection, and encourages more concise, logically valid reasoning. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of CoLD in improving the fidelity and robustness of PRMs.
Authors: David Peter Wallis Freeborn
Abstract: Receivers in standard signaling game models struggle with learning compositional information. Even when the signalers send compositional messages, the receivers do not interpret them compositionally. When information from one message component is lost or forgotten, the information from other components is also erased. In this paper I construct signaling game models in which genuine compositional understanding evolves. I present two new models: a minimalist receiver who only learns from the atomic messages of a signal, and a generalist receiver who learns from all of the available information. These models are in many ways simpler than previous alternatives, and allow the receivers to learn from the atomic components of messages.
Authors: Seok Hwan Song, Mohna Chakraborty, Qi Li, Wallapak Tavanapong
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been evaluated using diverse question types, e.g., multiple-choice, true/false, and short/long answers. This study answers an unexplored question about the impact of different question types on LLM accuracy on reasoning tasks. We investigate the performance of five LLMs on three different types of questions using quantitative and deductive reasoning tasks. The performance metrics include accuracy in the reasoning steps and choosing the final answer. Key Findings: (1) Significant differences exist in LLM performance across different question types. (2) Reasoning accuracy does not necessarily correlate with the final selection accuracy. (3) The number of options and the choice of words, influence LLM performance.
Authors: Sahana Srinivasan, Xuguang Ai, Thaddaeus Wai Soon Lo, Aidan Gilson, Minjie Zou, Ke Zou, Hyunjae Kim, Mingjia Yang, Krithi Pushpanathan, Samantha Yew, Wan Ting Loke, Jocelyn Goh, Yibing Chen, Yiming Kong, Emily Yuelei Fu, Michelle Ongyong Hui, Kristen Nwanyanwu, Amisha Dave, Kelvin Zhenghao Li, Chen-Hsin Sun, Mark Chia, Gabriel Dawei Yang, Wendy Meihua Wong, David Ziyou Chen, Dianbo Liu, Maxwell Singer, Fares Antaki, Lucian V Del Priore, Jost Jonas, Ron Adelman, Qingyu Chen, Yih-Chung Tham
Abstract: Current benchmarks evaluating large language models (LLMs) in ophthalmology are limited in scope and disproportionately prioritise accuracy. We introduce BELO (BEnchmarking LLMs for Ophthalmology), a standardized and comprehensive evaluation benchmark developed through multiple rounds of expert checking by 13 ophthalmologists. BELO assesses ophthalmology-related clinical accuracy and reasoning quality. Using keyword matching and a fine-tuned PubMedBERT model, we curated ophthalmology-specific multiple-choice-questions (MCQs) from diverse medical datasets (BCSC, MedMCQA, MedQA, BioASQ, and PubMedQA). The dataset underwent multiple rounds of expert checking. Duplicate and substandard questions were systematically removed. Ten ophthalmologists refined the explanations of each MCQ's correct answer. This was further adjudicated by three senior ophthalmologists. To illustrate BELO's utility, we evaluated six LLMs (OpenAI o1, o3-mini, GPT-4o, DeepSeek-R1, Llama-3-8B, and Gemini 1.5 Pro) using accuracy, macro-F1, and five text-generation metrics (ROUGE-L, BERTScore, BARTScore, METEOR, and AlignScore). In a further evaluation involving human experts, two ophthalmologists qualitatively reviewed 50 randomly selected outputs for accuracy, comprehensiveness, and completeness. BELO consists of 900 high-quality, expert-reviewed questions aggregated from five sources: BCSC (260), BioASQ (10), MedMCQA (572), MedQA (40), and PubMedQA (18). A public leaderboard has been established to promote transparent evaluation and reporting. Importantly, the BELO dataset will remain a hold-out, evaluation-only benchmark to ensure fair and reproducible comparisons of future models.
Authors: Matteo Cederle, Andrea Mazzucco, Andrea Demartini, Eugenio Mazza, Eugenia Suriani, Federico Vitti, Gian Antonio Susto
Abstract: Electric vehicles (EV) charging stations are one of the critical infrastructures needed to support the transition to renewable-energy-based mobility, but ensuring their reliability and efficiency requires effective anomaly detection to identify irregularities in charging behavior. However, in such a productive scenario, it is also crucial to determine the underlying cause behind the detected anomalies. To achieve this goal, this study investigates unsupervised anomaly detection techniques for EV charging infrastructure, integrating eXplainable Artificial Intelligence techniques to enhance interpretability and uncover root causes of anomalies. Using real-world sensors and charging session data, this work applies Isolation Forest to detect anomalies and employs the Depth-based Isolation Forest Feature Importance (DIFFI) method to identify the most important features contributing to such anomalies. The efficacy of the proposed approach is evaluated in a real industrial case.
Authors: Ruizhe Zhu, Hao Zhu, Yaxuan Li, Syang Zhou, Shijing Cai, Malgorzata Lazuka, Elliott Ash
Abstract: Collecting human-chatbot dialogues typically demands substantial manual effort and is time-consuming, which limits and poses challenges for research on conversational AI. In this work, we propose DialogueForge - a framework for generating AI-simulated conversations in human-chatbot style. To initialize each generated conversation, DialogueForge uses seed prompts extracted from real human-chatbot interactions. We test a variety of LLMs to simulate the human chatbot user, ranging from state-of-the-art proprietary models to small-scale open-source LLMs, and generate multi-turn dialogues tailored to specific tasks. In addition, we explore fine-tuning techniques to enhance the ability of smaller models to produce indistinguishable human-like dialogues. We evaluate the quality of the simulated conversations and compare different models using the UniEval and GTEval evaluation protocols. Our experiments show that large proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o) generally outperform others in generating more realistic dialogues, while smaller open-source models (e.g., Llama, Mistral) offer promising performance with greater customization. We demonstrate that the performance of smaller models can be significantly improved by employing supervised fine-tuning techniques. Nevertheless, maintaining coherent and natural long-form human-like dialogues remains a common challenge across all models.
Authors: Li Zheng, Siddhant Kumar, Dennis M. Kochmann
Abstract: Generative machine learning models have revolutionized material discovery by capturing complex structure-property relationships, yet extending these approaches to the inverse design of three-dimensional metamaterials remains limited by computational complexity and underexplored design spaces due to the lack of expressive representations. Here, we present DiffuMeta, a generative framework integrating diffusion transformers with a novel algebraic language representation, encoding 3D geometries as mathematical sentences. This compact, unified parameterization spans diverse topologies while enabling direct application of transformers to structural design. DiffuMeta leverages diffusion models to generate novel shell structures with precisely targeted stress-strain responses under large deformations, accounting for buckling and contact while addressing the inherent one-to-many mapping by producing diverse solutions. Uniquely, our approach enables simultaneous control over multiple mechanical objectives, including linear and nonlinear responses beyond training domains. Experimental validation of fabricated structures further confirms the efficacy of our approach for accelerated design of metamaterials and structures with tailored properties.
Authors: Maxim Chupilkin
Abstract: How does AI think about economic policy? While the use of large language models (LLMs) in economics is growing exponentially, their assumptions on economic issues remain a black box. This paper uses a conjoint experiment to tease out the main factors influencing LLMs' evaluation of economic policy. It finds that LLMs are most sensitive to unemployment, inequality, financial stability, and environmental harm and less sensitive to traditional macroeconomic concerns such as economic growth, inflation, and government debt. The results are remarkably consistent across scenarios and across models.
Authors: Anoop C. Patil, Benny Jian Rong Sng, Yu-Wei Chang, Joana B. Pereira, Chua Nam-Hai, Rajani Sarojam, Gajendra Pratap Singh, In-Cheol Jang, Giovanni Volpe
Abstract: Detecting stress in plants is crucial for both open-farm and controlled-environment agriculture. Biomolecules within plants serve as key stress indicators, offering vital markers for continuous health monitoring and early disease detection. Raman spectroscopy provides a powerful, non-invasive means to quantify these biomolecules through their molecular vibrational signatures. However, traditional Raman analysis relies on customized data-processing workflows that require fluorescence background removal and prior identification of Raman peaks of interest-introducing potential biases and inconsistencies. Here, we introduce DIVA (Deep-learning-based Investigation of Vibrational Raman spectra for plant-stress Analysis), a fully automated workflow based on a variational autoencoder. Unlike conventional approaches, DIVA processes native Raman spectra-including fluorescence backgrounds-without manual preprocessing, identifying and quantifying significant spectral features in an unbiased manner. We applied DIVA to detect a range of plant stresses, including abiotic (shading, high light intensity, high temperature) and biotic stressors (bacterial infections). By integrating deep learning with vibrational spectroscopy, DIVA paves the way for AI-driven plant health assessment, fostering more resilient and sustainable agricultural practices.
Authors: Andrei-Valentin Tanase, Elena Pelican
Abstract: We present Supernova, a 650M-parameter decoder-only transformer that demonstrates how careful architectural design and tokenization innovation can achieve the performance of larger models while maintaining computational efficiency. Our architecture combines Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE), Grouped Query Attention (GQA) with a 3:1 compression ratio, RMSNorm for computational efficiency, and SwiGLU activation functions. A critical innovation is our custom 128,000-vocabulary byte-level BPE tokenizer, which achieves state-of-the-art compression performance. Through detailed analysis, we show that Supernova achieves 90% of the performance of 1B-parameter models while using 35% fewer parameters and requiring only 100B training tokens--an order of magnitude less than competing models. Our findings challenge the prevailing scaling paradigm, demonstrating that architectural efficiency and tokenization quality can compensate for reduced parameter counts.
Authors: Alexis-Raja Brachet, Pierre-Yves Richard, C\'eline Hudelot
Abstract: While boundaries between data modalities are vanishing, the usual successful deep models are still challenged by simple ones in the time-series forecasting task. Our hypothesis is that this task needs models that are able to learn the data underlying dynamics. We propose to validate it through both systemic and empirical studies. We develop an original $\texttt{PRO-DYN}$ nomenclature to analyze existing models through the lens of dynamics. Two observations thus emerged: $\textbf{1}$. under-performing architectures learn dynamics at most partially, $\textbf{2}$. the location of the dynamics block at the model end is of prime importance. We conduct extensive experiments to confirm our observations on a set of performance-varying models with diverse backbones. Results support the need to incorporate a learnable dynamics block and its use as the final predictor.
Authors: Mingyuan Sun, Zheng Fang, Jiaxu Wang, Kunyi Zhang, Qiang Zhang, Renjing Xu
Abstract: We present GravLensX, an innovative method for rendering black holes with gravitational lensing effects using neural networks. The methodology involves training neural networks to fit the spacetime around black holes and then employing these trained models to generate the path of light rays affected by gravitational lensing. This enables efficient and scalable simulations of black holes with optically thin accretion disks, significantly decreasing the time required for rendering compared to traditional methods. We validate our approach through extensive rendering of multiple black hole systems with superposed Kerr metric, demonstrating its capability to produce accurate visualizations with significantly $15\times$ reduced computational time. Our findings suggest that neural networks offer a promising alternative for rendering complex astrophysical phenomena, potentially paving a new path to astronomical visualization.
Authors: Mohammad 'Matt' Namvarpour, Brandon Brofsky, Jessica Medina, Mamtaj Akter, Afsaneh Razi
Abstract: As Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) driven chatbots like Character.AI become embedded in adolescent life, they raise concerns about emotional dependence and digital overreliance. While studies have investigated the overreliance of adults on these chatbots, they have not investigated teens' interactions with chatbots with customizable personas. We analyzed 318 Reddit posts made by users self-reported as 13-17 years old on the Character.AI subreddit to understand patterns of overreliance. We found teens commonly begin using chatbots for emotional support or creative expression, but many develop strong attachments that interfere with offline relationships and daily routines. Their posts revealed recurring signs of psychological distress, cycles of relapse, and difficulty disengaging. Teens reported that their overreliance often ended when they reflect on the harm, return to in-person social settings, or become frustrated by platform restrictions. Based on the implications of our findings, we provide recommendations for future chatbot design so they can promote self-awareness, support real-world engagement, and involve teens in developing safer digital tools.
Authors: Sneheel Sarangi, Hanan Salam
Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emergent capabilities in complex reasoning, largely spurred by rule-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques applied during the post-training. This has raised the question of whether similar methods can instill more nuanced, human-like social intelligence, such as a Theory of Mind (ToM), in LLMs. This paper investigates whether small-scale LLMs can acquire a robust and generalizable ToM capability through RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR). We conduct a systematic evaluation by training models on various combinations of prominent ToM datasets (HiToM, ExploreToM, FANToM) and testing for generalization on held-out datasets (e.g., OpenToM). Our findings indicate that small LLMs struggle to develop a generic ToM capability. While performance on in-distribution tasks improves, this capability fails to transfer to unseen ToM tasks with different characteristics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that prolonged RL training leads to models ``hacking'' the statistical patterns of the training datasets, resulting in significant performance gains on in-domain data but no change, or degradation of performance on out-of-distribution tasks. This suggests the learned behavior is a form of narrow overfitting rather than the acquisition of a true, abstract ToM capability.
Authors: Danhui Chen, Ziquan Liu, Chuxi Yang, Dan Wang, Yan Yan, Yi Xu, Xiangyang Ji
Abstract: Pixel-level vision tasks, such as semantic segmentation, require extensive and high-quality annotated data, which is costly to obtain. Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSSS) has emerged as a solution to alleviate the labeling burden by leveraging both labeled and unlabeled data through self-training techniques. Meanwhile, the advent of foundational segmentation models pre-trained on massive data, has shown the potential to generalize across domains effectively. This work explores whether a foundational segmentation model can address label scarcity in the pixel-level vision task as an annotator for unlabeled images. Specifically, we investigate the efficacy of using SEEM, a Segment Anything Model (SAM) variant fine-tuned for textual input, to generate predictive masks for unlabeled data. To address the shortcomings of using SEEM-generated masks as supervision, we propose ConformalSAM, a novel SSSS framework which first calibrates the foundation model using the target domain's labeled data and then filters out unreliable pixel labels of unlabeled data so that only high-confidence labels are used as supervision. By leveraging conformal prediction (CP) to adapt foundation models to target data through uncertainty calibration, ConformalSAM exploits the strong capability of the foundational segmentation model reliably which benefits the early-stage learning, while a subsequent self-reliance training strategy mitigates overfitting to SEEM-generated masks in the later training stage. Our experiment demonstrates that, on three standard benchmarks of SSSS, ConformalSAM achieves superior performance compared to recent SSSS methods and helps boost the performance of those methods as a plug-in.
Authors: Shuo Chen, Jianzhe Liu, Zhen Han, Yan Xia, Daniel Cremers, Philip Torr, Volker Tresp, Jindong Gu
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), built on powerful language backbones, have enabled Multimodal In-Context Learning (MICL)-adapting to new tasks from a few multimodal demonstrations consisting of images, questions, and answers. Despite showing noticeable improvement on standard vision-language datasets, current MLLMs struggle to leverage visual information in the demonstrations. Specifically, they tend to neglect visual cues and over-rely on textual patterns, leading to mere text imitation rather than genuine multimodal adaptation. This behavior makes MICL still unimodal and largely restricts its practical utility. More importantly, this limitation is often concealed by the improved performance on tasks that do not require understanding the visual context. As a result, how to effectively enhance MICL ability and reliably evaluate the MICL performance remains underexplored. To address these issues, we first introduce Dynamic Attention Reallocation (DARA), an efficient fine-tuning strategy that encourages models to attend to the visual context by rebalancing attention across visual and textual tokens. In addition, we present TrueMICL, an MICL-dedicated dataset with both support and test sets that explicitly requires the integration of multimodal information-particularly visual content-for correct task completion. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our holistic solution, showcasing substantial improvements in the true multimodal in-context learning capabilities. Code and datasets are available at https://chenxshuo.github.io/true-micl-colm .
Authors: Li Huang, Ilgiz Mustafin, Marco Piccioni, Alessandro Schena, Reto Weber, Bertrand Meyer
Abstract: Among areas of software engineering where AI techniques -- particularly, Large Language Models -- seem poised to yield dramatic improvements, an attractive candidate is Automatic Program Repair (APR), the production of satisfactory corrections to software bugs. Does this expectation materialize in practice? How do we find out, making sure that proposed corrections actually work? If programmers have access to LLMs, how do they actually use them to complement their own skills? To answer these questions, we took advantage of the availability of a program-proving environment, which formally determines the correctness of proposed fixes, to conduct a study of program debugging with two randomly assigned groups of programmers, one with access to LLMs and the other without, both validating their answers through the proof tools. The methodology relied on a division into general research questions (Goals in the Goal-Query-Metric approach), specific elements admitting specific answers (Queries), and measurements supporting these answers (Metrics). While applied so far to a limited sample size, the results are a first step towards delineating a proper role for AI and LLMs in providing guaranteed-correct fixes to program bugs. These results caused surprise as compared to what one might expect from the use of AI for debugging and APR. The contributions also include: a detailed methodology for experiments in the use of LLMs for debugging, which other projects can reuse; a fine-grain analysis of programmer behavior, made possible by the use of full-session recording; a definition of patterns of use of LLMs, with 7 distinct categories; and validated advice for getting the best of LLMs for debugging and Automatic Program Repair.
Authors: Anton Abilov, Ke Zhang, Hemank Lamba, Elizabeth M. Olson, Joel R. Tetreault, Alejandro Jaimes
Abstract: Publications in the AI for Good space have tended to focus on the research and model development that can support high-impact applications. However, very few AI for Good papers discuss the process of deploying and collaborating with the partner organization, and the resulting real-world impact. In this work, we share details about the close collaboration with a humanitarian-to-humanitarian (H2H) organization and how to not only deploy the AI model in a resource-constrained environment, but also how to maintain it for continuous performance updates, and share key takeaways for practitioners.
Authors: Ian Chuang, Andrew Lee, Dechen Gao, Jinyu Zou, Iman Soltani
Abstract: Human vision is a highly active process driven by gaze, which directs attention and fixation to task-relevant regions and dramatically reduces visual processing. In contrast, robot learning systems typically rely on passive, uniform processing of raw camera images. In this work, we explore how incorporating human-like active gaze into robotic policies can enhance both efficiency and performance. We build on recent advances in foveated image processing and apply them to an Active Vision robot system that emulates both human head movement and eye tracking. Extending prior work on the AV-ALOHA robot simulation platform, we introduce a framework for simultaneously collecting eye-tracking data and robot demonstrations from a human operator as well as a simulation benchmark and dataset for training robot policies that incorporate human gaze. Given the widespread use of Vision Transformers (ViTs) in robot learning, we integrate gaze information into ViTs using a foveated patch tokenization scheme inspired by recent work in image segmentation. Compared to uniform patch tokenization, this significantly reduces the number of tokens-and thus computation-without sacrificing visual fidelity near regions of interest. We also explore two approaches to gaze imitation and prediction from human data. The first is a two-stage model that predicts gaze to guide foveation and action; the second integrates gaze into the action space, allowing the policy to jointly predict gaze and actions end-to-end. Our results show that our method for foveated robot vision not only drastically reduces computational overhead, but also improves performance for high precision tasks and robustness to unseen distractors. Together, these findings suggest that human-inspired visual processing offers a useful inductive bias for robotic vision systems. https://ian-chuang.github.io/gaze-av-aloha/
Authors: Anh Nguyen, Sam Schafft, Nicholas Hale, John Alfaro
Abstract: Synthetic data generation has emerged as an invaluable solution in scenarios where real-world data collection and usage are limited by cost and scarcity. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in producing high-fidelity, domain-relevant samples across various fields. However, existing approaches that directly use LLMs to generate each record individually impose prohibitive time and cost burdens, particularly when large volumes of synthetic data are required. In this work, we propose a fast, cost-effective method for realistic tabular data synthesis that leverages LLMs to infer and encode each field's distribution into a reusable sampling script. By automatically classifying fields into numerical, categorical, or free-text types, the LLM generates distribution-based scripts that can efficiently produce diverse, realistic datasets at scale without continuous model inference. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms traditional direct methods in both diversity and data realism, substantially reducing the burden of high-volume synthetic data generation. We plan to apply this methodology to accelerate testing in production pipelines, thereby shortening development cycles and improving overall system efficiency. We believe our insights and lessons learned will aid researchers and practitioners seeking scalable, cost-effective solutions for synthetic data generation.
Authors: Fei Tang, Zhangxuan Gu, Zhengxi Lu, Xuyang Liu, Shuheng Shen, Changhua Meng, Wen Wang, Wenqi Zhang, Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang
Abstract: Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding maps natural language instructions to precise interface locations for autonomous interaction. Current reinforcement learning approaches use binary rewards that treat elements as hit-or-miss targets, creating sparse signals that ignore the continuous nature of spatial interactions. Motivated by human clicking behavior that naturally forms Gaussian distributions centered on target elements, we introduce GUI Gaussian Grounding Rewards (GUI-G$^2$), a principled reward framework that models GUI elements as continuous Gaussian distributions across the interface plane. GUI-G$^2$ incorporates two synergistic mechanisms: Gaussian point rewards model precise localization through exponentially decaying distributions centered on element centroids, while coverage rewards assess spatial alignment by measuring the overlap between predicted Gaussian distributions and target regions. To handle diverse element scales, we develop an adaptive variance mechanism that calibrates reward distributions based on element dimensions. This framework transforms GUI grounding from sparse binary classification to dense continuous optimization, where Gaussian distributions generate rich gradient signals that guide models toward optimal interaction positions. Extensive experiments across ScreenSpot, ScreenSpot-v2, and ScreenSpot-Pro benchmarks demonstrate that GUI-G$^2$, substantially outperforms state-of-the-art method UI-TARS-72B, with the most significant improvement of 24.7% on ScreenSpot-Pro. Our analysis reveals that continuous modeling provides superior robustness to interface variations and enhanced generalization to unseen layouts, establishing a new paradigm for spatial reasoning in GUI interaction tasks.
Authors: Yihao Li, Jiayi Xin, Miranda Muqing Miao, Qi Long, Lyle Ungar
Abstract: Proficient multilingual speakers often intentionally switch languages in the middle of a conversation. Similarly, recent reasoning-focused bilingual large language models (LLMs) with strong capabilities in both languages exhibit language mixing--alternating languages within their chain of thought. Discouraging this behavior in DeepSeek-R1 was found to degrade accuracy, suggesting that language mixing may benefit reasoning. In this work, we study language switching in Chinese-English bilingual reasoning models. We identify reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) as the critical training stage that leads to language mixing. We demonstrate that language mixing can enhance reasoning: enforcing monolingual decoding reduces accuracy by 5.6 percentage points on math reasoning tasks. Additionally, a lightweight probe can be trained to predict whether a potential language switch would benefit or harm reasoning, and when used to guide decoding, increases accuracy by up to 6.25 percentage points. Our findings suggest that language mixing is not merely a byproduct of multilingual training, but is a strategic reasoning behavior.
Authors: Zhixiong Zhang, Shuangrui Ding, Xiaoyi Dong, Songxin He, Jianfan Lin, Junsong Tang, Yuhang Zang, Yuhang Cao, Dahua Lin, Jiaqi Wang
Abstract: Video Object Segmentation (VOS) is a core task in computer vision, requiring models to track and segment target objects across video frames. Despite notable advances with recent efforts, current techniques still lag behind human capabilities in handling drastic visual variations, occlusions, and complex scene changes. This limitation arises from their reliance on appearance matching, neglecting the human-like conceptual understanding of objects that enables robust identification across temporal dynamics. Motivated by this gap, we propose Segment Concept (SeC), a concept-driven segmentation framework that shifts from conventional feature matching to the progressive construction and utilization of high-level, object-centric representations. SeC employs Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to integrate visual cues across diverse frames, constructing robust conceptual priors. During inference, SeC forms a comprehensive semantic representation of the target based on processed frames, realizing robust segmentation of follow-up frames. Furthermore, SeC adaptively balances LVLM-based semantic reasoning with enhanced feature matching, dynamically adjusting computational efforts based on scene complexity. To rigorously assess VOS methods in scenarios demanding high-level conceptual reasoning and robust semantic understanding, we introduce the Semantic Complex Scenarios Video Object Segmentation benchmark (SeCVOS). SeCVOS comprises 160 manually annotated multi-scenario videos designed to challenge models with substantial appearance variations and dynamic scene transformations. In particular, SeC achieves an 11.8-point improvement over SAM 2.1 on SeCVOS, establishing a new state-of-the-art in concept-aware video object segmentation.
Authors: Mihir Prabhudesai, Menging Wu, Amir Zadeh, Katerina Fragkiadaki, Deepak Pathak
Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) models have long dominated the landscape of large language models, driving progress across a wide range of tasks. Recently, diffusion-based language models have emerged as a promising alternative, though their advantages over AR models remain underexplored. In this paper, we systematically study masked diffusion models in data-constrained settings-where training involves repeated passes over limited data-and find that they significantly outperform AR models when compute is abundant but data is scarce. Diffusion models make better use of repeated data, achieving lower validation loss and superior downstream performance. We interpret this advantage as implicit data augmentation: masked diffusion exposes the model to a diverse distribution of token orderings and prediction tasks, unlike AR's fixed left-to-right factorization. We find new scaling laws for diffusion models and derive a closed-form expression for the critical compute threshold at which diffusion begins to outperform AR. These results suggest that when data, not compute, is the bottleneck, diffusion models offer a compelling alternative to the standard AR paradigm. Our code is available at: https://diffusion-scaling.github.io.
Authors: Zhipeng Wang, Nanqing Dong, Jiahao Sun, William Knottenbelt, Yike Guo
Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning paradigm, which enables multiple and decentralized clients to collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central aggregator. FL can be a scalable machine learning solution in big data scenarios. Traditional FL relies on the trust assumption of the central aggregator, which forms cohorts of clients honestly. However, a malicious aggregator, in reality, could abandon and replace the client's training models, or insert fake clients, to manipulate the final training results. In this work, we introduce zkFL, which leverages zero-knowledge proofs to tackle the issue of a malicious aggregator during the training model aggregation process. To guarantee the correct aggregation results, the aggregator provides a proof per round, demonstrating to the clients that the aggregator executes the intended behavior faithfully. To further reduce the verification cost of clients, we use blockchain to handle the proof in a zero-knowledge way, where miners (i.e., the participants validating and maintaining the blockchain data) can verify the proof without knowing the clients' local and aggregated models. The theoretical analysis and empirical results show that zkFL achieves better security and privacy than traditional FL, without modifying the underlying FL network structure or heavily compromising the training speed.
Authors: Ritesh Chandra, Shashi Shekhar Kumar, Rushil Patra, Sonali Agarwal
Abstract: Forests are crucial for ecological balance, but wildfires, a major cause of forest loss, pose significant risks. Fire weather indices, which assess wildfire risk and predict resource demands, are vital. With the rise of sensor networks in fields like healthcare and environmental monitoring, semantic sensor networks are increasingly used to gather climatic data such as wind speed, temperature, and humidity. However, processing these data streams to determine fire weather indices presents challenges, underscoring the growing importance of effective forest fire detection. This paper discusses using Apache Spark for early forest fire detection, enhancing fire risk prediction with meteorological and geographical data. Building on our previous development of Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontologies and Semantic Web Rules Language (SWRL) for managing forest fires in Monesterial Natural Park, we expanded SWRL to improve a Decision Support System (DSS) using a Large Language Models (LLMs) and Spark framework. We implemented real-time alerts with Spark streaming, tailored to various fire scenarios, and validated our approach using ontology metrics, query-based evaluations, LLMs score precision, F1 score, and recall measures.
Authors: Tianqi Xu, Linyao Chen, Dai-Jie Wu, Yanjun Chen, Zecheng Zhang, Xiang Yao, Zhiqiang Xie, Yongchao Chen, Shilong Liu, Bochen Qian, Anjie Yang, Zhaoxuan Jin, Jianbo Deng, Philip Torr, Bernard Ghanem, Guohao Li
Abstract: The development of autonomous agents increasingly relies on Multimodal Language Models (MLMs) to perform tasks described in natural language with GUI environments, such as websites, desktop computers, or mobile phones. Existing benchmarks for MLM agents in interactive environments are limited by their focus on a single environment, lack of detailed and generalized evaluation methods, and the complexities of constructing tasks and evaluators. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Crab, the first agent benchmark framework designed to support cross-environment tasks, incorporating a graph-based fine-grained evaluation method and an efficient mechanism for task and evaluator construction. Our framework supports multiple devices and can be easily extended to any environment with a Python interface. Leveraging Crab, we developed a cross-platform Crab Benchmark-v0 comprising 120 tasks in computer desktop and mobile phone environments. We evaluated four advanced MLMs using different single and multi-agent system configurations on this benchmark. The experimental results demonstrate that the single agent with GPT-4o achieves the best completion ratio of 38.01%. All framework code, agent code, and task datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/camel-ai/crab.
Authors: Jingwei Huang, Kuroush Nezafati, Ismael Villanueva-Miranda, Zifan Gu, Yueshuang Xu, Ann Marie Navar, Tingyi Wanyan, Qin Zhou, Bo Yao, Ruichen Rong, Xiaowei Zhan, Guanghua Xiao, Eric D. Peterson, Donghan M. Yang, Wenqi Shi, Yang Xie
Abstract: This study introduces a LLMs powered multiagent ensemble method to address challenges in hallucination and data labeling, particularly in large-scale EHR datasets. Manual labeling of such datasets requires domain expertise and is labor-intensive, time-consuming, expensive, and error-prone. To overcome this bottleneck, we developed an ensemble LLMs method and demonstrated its effectiveness in two real-world tasks: (1) labeling a large-scale unlabeled ECG dataset in MIMIC-IV; (2) identifying social determinants of health (SDOH) from the clinical notes of EHR. Trading off benefits and cost, we selected a pool of diverse open source LLMs with satisfactory performance. We treat each LLM's prediction as a vote and apply a mechanism of majority voting with minimal winning threshold for ensemble. We implemented an ensemble LLMs application for EHR data labeling tasks. By using the ensemble LLMs and natural language processing, we labeled MIMIC-IV ECG dataset of 623,566 ECG reports with an estimated accuracy of 98.2%. We applied the ensemble LLMs method to identify SDOH from social history sections of 1,405 EHR clinical notes, also achieving competitive performance. Our experiments show that the ensemble LLMs can outperform individual LLM even the best commercial one, and the method reduces hallucination errors. From the research, we found that (1) the ensemble LLMs method significantly reduces the time and effort required for labeling large-scale EHR data, automating the process with high accuracy and quality; (2) the method generalizes well to other text data labeling tasks, as shown by its application to SDOH identification; (3) the ensemble of a group of diverse LLMs can outperform or match the performance of the best individual LLM; and (4) the ensemble method substantially reduces hallucination errors. This approach provides a scalable and efficient solution to data-labeling challenges.
Authors: Huayu Li, Zhengxiao He, Xiwen Chen, Ci Zhang, Stuart F. Quan, William D. S. Killgore, Shu-Fen Wung, Chen X. Chen, Geng Yuan, Jin Lu, Ao Li
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities in visually interpreting medical time-series data. However, their general-purpose design can limit domain-specific precision, and the proprietary nature of many models poses challenges for fine-tuning on specialized clinical datasets. Conversely, small specialized models (SSMs) offer strong performance on focused tasks but lack the broader reasoning needed for complex medical decision-making. To address these complementary limitations, we introduce \ConMIL{} (Conformalized Multiple Instance Learning), a novel decision-support framework distinctively synergizes three key components: (1) a new Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) mechanism, QTrans-Pooling, designed for per-class interpretability in identifying clinically relevant physiological signal segments; (2) conformal prediction, integrated with MIL to generate calibrated, set-valued outputs with statistical reliability guarantees; and (3) a structured approach for these interpretable and uncertainty-quantified SSM outputs to enhance the visual inspection capabilities of LLMs. Our experiments on arrhythmia detection and sleep stage classification demonstrate that \ConMIL{} can enhance the accuracy of LLMs such as ChatGPT4.0, Qwen2-VL-7B, and MiMo-VL-7B-RL. For example, \ConMIL{}-supported Qwen2-VL-7B and MiMo-VL-7B-RL both achieves 94.92% and 96.82% precision on confident samples and (70.61% and 78.02%)/(78.10% and 71.98%) on uncertain samples for the two tasks, compared to 46.13% and 13.16% using the LLM alone. These results suggest that integrating task-specific models with LLMs may offer a promising pathway toward more interpretable and trustworthy AI-driven clinical decision support.
Authors: Clovis Varangot-Reille, Christophe Bouvard, Antoine Gourru, Mathieu Ciancone, Marion Schaeffer, Fran\c{c}ois Jacquenet
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based systems, i.e. interconnected elements that include an LLM as a central component, such as conversational agents, are usually designed with monolithic, static architectures that rely on a single, general-purpose LLM to handle all user queries. However, these systems may be inefficient as different queries may require different levels of reasoning, domain knowledge or pre-processing. While generalist LLMs (e.g. GPT-4o, Claude-Sonnet) perform well across a wide range of tasks, they may incur significant financial, energy and computational costs. These costs may be disproportionate for simpler queries, resulting in unnecessary resource utilisation. A routing mechanism can therefore be employed to route queries to more appropriate components, such as smaller or specialised models, thereby improving efficiency and optimising resource consumption. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of routing strategies in LLM-based systems. Specifically, it reviews when, why, and how routing should be integrated into LLM pipelines to improve efficiency, scalability, and performance. We define the objectives to optimise, such as cost minimisation and performance maximisation, and discuss the timing of routing within the LLM workflow, whether it occurs before or after generation. We also detail the various implementation strategies, including similarity-based, supervised, reinforcement learning-based, and generative methods. Practical considerations such as industrial applications and current limitations are also examined, like standardising routing experiments, accounting for non-financial costs, and designing adaptive strategies. By formalising routing as a performance-cost optimisation problem, this survey provides tools and directions to guide future research and development of adaptive low-cost LLM-based systems.
Authors: Felix Hofst\"atter, Teun van der Weij, Jayden Teoh, Rada Djoneva, Henning Bartsch, Francis Rhys Ward
Abstract: Capability evaluations are required to understand and regulate AI systems that may be deployed or further developed. Therefore, it is important that evaluations provide an accurate estimation of an AI system's capabilities. However, in numerous cases, previously latent capabilities have been elicited from models, sometimes long after initial release. Accordingly, substantial efforts have been made to develop methods for eliciting latent capabilities from models. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of capability elicitation techniques by intentionally training model organisms -- language models with hidden capabilities that are revealed by a password. We introduce a novel method for training model organisms, based on circuit-breaking, which is more robust to elicitation techniques than standard password-locked models. We focus on elicitation techniques based on prompting and activation steering, and compare these to fine-tuning methods. Prompting techniques can elicit the actual capability of both password-locked and circuit-broken model organisms in the MCQA setting, while steering fails to do so. For a code-generation task, only fine-tuning can elicit the hidden capabilities of our novel model organism. Additionally, our results suggest that combining techniques improves elicitation. Still, if possible, fine-tuning should be the method of choice to improve the trustworthiness of capability evaluations.
Authors: Xiaofan Yu, Lanxiang Hu, Benjamin Reichman, Dylan Chu, Rushil Chandrupatla, Xiyuan Zhang, Larry Heck, Tajana Rosing
Abstract: Natural language interaction with sensing systems is crucial for addressing users' personal concerns and providing health-related insights into their daily lives. When a user asks a question, the system automatically analyzes the full history of sensor data, extracts relevant information, and generates an appropriate response. However, existing systems are limited to short-duration (e.g., one minute) or low-frequency (e.g., daily step count) sensor data. In addition, they struggle with quantitative questions that require precise numerical answers. In this work, we introduce SensorChat, the first end-to-end QA system designed for daily life monitoring using long-duration, high-frequency time series data. Given raw sensor signals spanning multiple days and a user-defined natural language question, SensorChat generates semantically meaningful responses that directly address user concerns. SensorChat effectively handles both quantitative questions that require numerical precision and qualitative questions that require high-level reasoning to infer subjective insights. To achieve this, SensorChat uses an innovative three-stage pipeline including question decomposition, sensor data query, and answer assembly. The first and third stages leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to interpret human queries and generate responses. The intermediate querying stage extracts relevant information from the complete sensor data history. Real-world implementations demonstrate SensorChat's capability for real-time interactions on a cloud server while also being able to run entirely on edge platforms after quantization. Comprehensive QA evaluations show that SensorChat achieves 93% higher answer accuracy than the best performing state-of-the-art systems on quantitative questions. Furthermore, a user study with eight volunteers highlights SensorChat's effectiveness in answering qualitative questions.
Authors: Fengxiang Cheng, Haoxuan Li, Fenrong Liu, Robert van Rooij, Kun Zhang, Zhouchen Lin
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable successes on various tasks. However, recent studies have found that there are still significant challenges to the logical reasoning abilities of LLMs, which can be categorized into the following two aspects: (1) Logical question answering: LLMs often fail to generate the correct answer within a complex logical problem which requires sophisticated deductive, inductive or abductive reasoning given a collection of premises. (2) Logical consistency: LLMs are prone to producing responses contradicting themselves across different questions. For example, a state-of-the-art question-answering LLM Macaw, answers Yes to both questions Is a magpie a bird? and Does a bird have wings? but answers No to Does a magpie have wings?. To facilitate this research direction, we comprehensively investigate the most cutting-edge methods and propose a detailed taxonomy. Specifically, to accurately answer complex logic questions, previous methods can be categorized based on reliance on external solvers, prompts, and fine-tuning. To avoid logical contradictions, we discuss concepts and solutions of various logical consistencies, including implication, negation, transitivity, factuality consistencies, and their composites. In addition, we review commonly used benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics, and discuss promising research directions, such as extending to modal logic to account for uncertainty and developing efficient algorithms that simultaneously satisfy multiple logical consistencies.
Authors: Stephen Casper, Luke Bailey, Tim Schreier
Abstract: Policymakers increasingly use development cost and compute as proxies for AI capabilities and risks. Recent laws have introduced regulatory requirements for models or developers that are contingent on specific thresholds. However, technical ambiguities in how to perform this accounting create loopholes that can undermine regulatory effectiveness. We propose seven principles for designing AI cost and compute accounting standards that (1) reduce opportunities for strategic gaming, (2) avoid disincentivizing responsible risk mitigation, and (3) enable consistent implementation across companies and jurisdictions.
Authors: Camilo Chac\'on Sartori, Christian Blum
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown notable potential in code generation for optimization algorithms, unlocking exciting new opportunities. This paper examines how LLMs, rather than creating algorithms from scratch, can improve existing ones without the need for specialized expertise. To explore this potential, we selected 10 baseline optimization algorithms from various domains (metaheuristics, reinforcement learning, deterministic, and exact methods) to solve the classic Travelling Salesman Problem. The results show that our simple methodology often results in LLM-generated algorithm variants that improve over the baseline algorithms in terms of solution quality, reduction in computational time, and simplification of code complexity, all without requiring specialized optimization knowledge or advanced algorithmic implementation skills.
Authors: Murray Shanahan
Abstract: Is it possible to articulate a conception of consciousness that is compatible with the exotic characteristics of contemporary, disembodied AI systems, and that can stand up to philosophical scrutiny? How would subjective time and selfhood show up for an entity that conformed to such a conception? Trying to answer these questions, even metaphorically, stretches the language of consciousness to breaking point. Ultimately, the attempt yields something like emptiness, in the Buddhist sense, and helps to undermine our dualistic inclinations towards subjectivity and selfhood.
Authors: Marina Danilevsky, Kristjan Greenewald, Chulaka Gunasekara, Maeda Hanafi, Lihong He, Yannis Katsis, Krishnateja Killamsetty, Yulong Li, Yatin Nandwani, Lucian Popa, Dinesh Raghu, Frederick Reiss, Vraj Shah, Khoi-Nguyen Tran, Huaiyu Zhu, Luis Lastras
Abstract: In the developer community for large language models (LLMs), there is not yet a clean pattern analogous to a software library, to support very large scale collaboration. Even for the commonplace use case of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), it is not currently possible to write a RAG application against a well-defined set of APIs that are agreed upon by different LLM providers. Inspired by the idea of compiler intrinsics, we propose some elements of such a concept through introducing a library of LLM Intrinsics for RAG. An LLM intrinsic is defined as a capability that can be invoked through a well-defined API that is reasonably stable and independent of how the LLM intrinsic itself is implemented. The intrinsics in our library are released as LoRA adapters on HuggingFace, and through a software interface with clear structured input/output characteristics on top of vLLM as an inference platform, accompanied in both places with documentation and code. This article describes the intended usage, training details, and evaluations for each intrinsic, as well as compositions of multiple intrinsics.
Authors: Chengwei Liu, Chong Wang, Jiayue Cao, Jingquan Ge, Kun Wang, Lyuye Zhang, Ming-Ming Cheng, Penghai Zhao, Tianlin Li, Xiaojun Jia, Xiang Li, Xingshuai Li, Yang Liu, Yebo Feng, Yihao Huang, Yijia Xu, Yuqiang Sun, Zhenhong Zhou, Zhengzi Xu
Abstract: This paper introduces Agent-Based Auto Research, a structured multi-agent framework designed to automate, coordinate, and optimize the full lifecycle of scientific research. Leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and modular agent collaboration, the system spans all major research phases, including literature review, ideation, methodology planning, experimentation, paper writing, peer review response, and dissemination. By addressing issues such as fragmented workflows, uneven methodological expertise, and cognitive overload, the framework offers a systematic and scalable approach to scientific inquiry. Preliminary explorations demonstrate the feasibility and potential of Auto Research as a promising paradigm for self-improving, AI-driven research processes.
Authors: Volkan Bakir, Polat Goktas, Sureyya Akyuz
Abstract: Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has become increasingly important in decision-critical domains such as healthcare, finance, and law. Counterfactual (CF) explanations, a key approach in XAI, provide users with actionable insights by suggesting minimal modifications to input features that lead to different model outcomes. Despite significant advancements, existing CF generation methods often struggle to balance proximity, diversity, and robustness, limiting their real-world applicability. A widely adopted framework, Diverse Counterfactual Explanations (DiCE), emphasizes diversity but lacks robustness, making CF explanations sensitive to perturbations and domain constraints. To address these challenges, we introduce DiCE-Extended, an enhanced CF explanation framework that integrates multi-objective optimization techniques to improve robustness while maintaining interpretability. Our approach introduces a novel robustness metric based on the Dice-S{\o}rensen coefficient, enabling stability under small input variations. Additionally, we refine CF generation using weighted loss components (lambda_p, lambda_d, lambda_r) to balance proximity, diversity, and robustness. We empirically validate DiCE-Extended on benchmark datasets (COMPAS, Lending Club, German Credit, Adult Income) across multiple ML backends (Scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow). Results demonstrate improved CF validity, stability, and alignment with decision boundaries compared to standard DiCE-generated explanations. Our findings highlight the potential of DiCE-Extended in generating more reliable and interpretable CFs for high-stakes applications. Future work could explore adaptive optimization techniques and domain-specific constraints to further enhance CF generation in real-world scenarios
Authors: Minjie Shen, Yanshu Li, Lulu Chen, Qikai Yang
Abstract: Manus AI is a general-purpose AI agent introduced in early 2025, marking a significant advancement in autonomous artificial intelligence. Developed by the Chinese startup Monica.im, Manus is designed to bridge the gap between "mind" and "hand" - combining the reasoning and planning capabilities of large language models with the ability to execute complex, end-to-end tasks that produce tangible outcomes. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of Manus AI, exploring its core technical architecture, diverse applications across sectors such as healthcare, finance, manufacturing, robotics, and gaming, as well as its key strengths, current limitations, and future potential. Positioned as a preview of what lies ahead, Manus AI represents a shift toward intelligent agents that can translate high-level intentions into real-world actions, heralding a new era of human-AI collaboration.
Authors: Sebasti\'an R. Castro, Roberto Campbell, Nancy Lau, Octavio Villalobos, Jiaqi Duan, Alvaro A. Cardenas
Abstract: Fast and effective incident response is essential to prevent adversarial cyberattacks. Autonomous Cyber Defense (ACD) aims to automate incident response through Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents that plan and execute actions. Most ACD approaches focus on single-agent scenarios and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, ACD RL-trained agents depend on costly training, and their reasoning is not always explainable or transferable. Large Language Models (LLMs) can address these concerns by providing explainable actions in general security contexts. Researchers have explored LLM agents for ACD but have not evaluated them on multi-agent scenarios or interacting with other ACD agents. In this paper, we show the first study on how LLMs perform in multi-agent ACD environments by proposing a new integration to the CybORG CAGE 4 environment. We examine how ACD teams of LLM and RL agents can interact by proposing a novel communication protocol. Our results highlight the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs and RL and help us identify promising research directions to create, train, and deploy future teams of ACD agents.
Authors: Donghoon Kim, Minji Bae, Kyuhong Shim, Byonghyo Shim
Abstract: Text-to-image generative models like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion have revolutionized visual content creation across various applications, including advertising, personalized media, and design prototyping. However, crafting effective textual prompts to guide these models remains challenging, often requiring extensive trial and error. Existing prompt inversion approaches, such as soft and hard prompt techniques, are not so effective due to the limited interpretability and incoherent prompt generation. To address these issues, we propose Visually Guided Decoding (VGD), a gradient-free approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) and CLIP-based guidance to generate coherent and semantically aligned prompts. In essence, VGD utilizes the robust text generation capabilities of LLMs to produce human-readable prompts. Further, by employing CLIP scores to ensure alignment with user-specified visual concepts, VGD enhances the interpretability, generalization, and flexibility of prompt generation without the need for additional training. Our experiments demonstrate that VGD outperforms existing prompt inversion techniques in generating understandable and contextually relevant prompts, facilitating more intuitive and controllable interactions with text-to-image models.
Authors: Shaohang Wei, Wei Li, Feifan Song, Wen Luo, Tianyi Zhuang, Haochen Tan, Zhijiang Guo, Houfeng Wang
Abstract: Temporal reasoning is pivotal for Large Language Models (LLMs) to comprehend the real world. However, existing works neglect the real-world challenges for temporal reasoning: (1) intensive temporal information, (2) fast-changing event dynamics, and (3) complex temporal dependencies in social interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose a multi-level benchmark TIME, designed for temporal reasoning in real-world scenarios. TIME consists of 38,522 QA pairs, covering 3 levels with 11 fine-grained sub-tasks. This benchmark encompasses 3 sub-datasets reflecting different real-world challenges: TIME-Wiki, TIME-News, and TIME-Dial. We conduct extensive experiments on reasoning models and non-reasoning models. And we conducted an in-depth analysis of temporal reasoning performance across diverse real-world scenarios and tasks, and summarized the impact of test-time scaling on temporal reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we release TIME-Lite, a human-annotated subset to foster future research and standardized evaluation in temporal reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/sylvain-wei/TIME , and the dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/SylvainWei/TIME .
URLs: https://github.com/sylvain-wei/TIME, https://huggingface.co/datasets/SylvainWei/TIME
Authors: Kun Xiang, Heng Li, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Yinya Huang, Zirong Liu, Peixin Qu, Jixi He, Jiaqi Chen, Yu-Jie Yuan, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Hanhui Li, Mrinmaya Sachan, Xiaodan Liang
Abstract: We present SeePhys, a large-scale multimodal benchmark for LLM reasoning grounded in physics questions ranging from middle school to PhD qualifying exams. The benchmark covers 7 fundamental domains spanning the physics discipline, incorporating 21 categories of highly heterogeneous diagrams. In contrast to prior works where visual elements mainly serve auxiliary purposes, our benchmark features a substantial proportion of vision-essential problems (75%) that mandate visual information extraction for correct solutions. Through extensive evaluation, we observe that even the most advanced visual reasoning models (e.g., Gemini-2.5-pro and o4-mini) achieve sub-60% accuracy on our benchmark. These results reveal fundamental challenges in current large language models' visual understanding capabilities, particularly in: (i) establishing rigorous coupling between diagram interpretation and physics reasoning, and (ii) overcoming their persistent reliance on textual cues as cognitive shortcuts.
Authors: Djallel Bouneffouf, Matthew Riemer, Kush Varshney
Abstract: This paper introduces the Shepherd Test, a new conceptual test for assessing the moral and relational dimensions of superintelligent artificial agents. The test is inspired by human interactions with animals, where ethical considerations about care, manipulation, and consumption arise in contexts of asymmetric power and self-preservation. We argue that AI crosses an important, and potentially dangerous, threshold of intelligence when it exhibits the ability to manipulate, nurture, and instrumentally use less intelligent agents, while also managing its own survival and expansion goals. This includes the ability to weigh moral trade-offs between self-interest and the well-being of subordinate agents. The Shepherd Test thus challenges traditional AI evaluation paradigms by emphasizing moral agency, hierarchical behavior, and complex decision-making under existential stakes. We argue that this shift is critical for advancing AI governance, particularly as AI systems become increasingly integrated into multi-agent environments. We conclude by identifying key research directions, including the development of simulation environments for testing moral behavior in AI, and the formalization of ethical manipulation within multi-agent systems.
Authors: Xiaofeng Shi, Qian Kou, Yuduo Li, Ning Tang, Jinxin Xie, Longbin Yu, Songjing Wang, Hua Zhou
Abstract: The rapid growth of scientific literature demands robust tools for automated survey-generation. However, current large language model (LLM)-based methods often lack in-depth analysis, structural coherence, and reliable citations. To address these limitations, we introduce SciSage, a multi-agent framework employing a reflect-when-you-write paradigm. SciSage features a hierarchical Reflector agent that critically evaluates drafts at outline, section, and document levels, collaborating with specialized agents for query interpretation, content retrieval, and refinement. We also release SurveyScope, a rigorously curated benchmark of 46 high-impact papers (2020-2025) across 11 computer science domains, with strict recency and citation-based quality controls. Evaluations demonstrate that SciSage outperforms state-of-the-art baselines (LLM x MapReduce-V2, AutoSurvey), achieving +1.73 points in document coherence and +32% in citation F1 scores. Human evaluations reveal mixed outcomes (3 wins vs. 7 losses against human-written surveys), but highlight SciSage's strengths in topical breadth and retrieval efficiency. Overall, SciSage offers a promising foundation for research-assistive writing tools.
Authors: Ethan M. Rudd, Christopher Andrews, Philip Tully
Abstract: Recent advances in generative AI have led to remarkable interest in using systems that rely on large language models (LLMs) for practical applications. However, meaningful evaluation of these systems in real-world scenarios comes with a distinct set of challenges, which are not well-addressed by synthetic benchmarks and de-facto metrics that are often seen in the literature. We present a practical evaluation framework which outlines how to proactively curate representative datasets, select meaningful evaluation metrics, and employ meaningful evaluation methodologies that integrate well with practical development and deployment of LLM-reliant systems that must adhere to real-world requirements and meet user-facing needs.
Authors: Xin Wang, Jiyao Liu, Yulong Xiao, Junzhi Ning, Lihao Liu, Junjun He, Botian Shi, Kaicheng Yu
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are accelerating scientific idea generation, but rigorously evaluating these numerous, often superficial, AI-generated propositions for novelty and factual accuracy is a critical bottleneck; manual verification is too slow. Existing validation methods are inadequate: LLMs as standalone verifiers may hallucinate and lack domain knowledge (our findings show 60% unawareness of relevant papers in specific domains), while traditional citation networks lack explicit causality and narrative surveys are unstructured. This underscores a core challenge: the absence of structured, verifiable, and causally-linked historical data of scientific evolution.To address this,we introduce \textbf{THE-Tree} (\textbf{T}echnology \textbf{H}istory \textbf{E}volution Tree), a computational framework that constructs such domain-specific evolution trees from scientific literature. THE-Tree employs a search algorithm to explore evolutionary paths. During its node expansion, it utilizes a novel "Think-Verbalize-Cite-Verify" process: an LLM proposes potential advancements and cites supporting literature. Critically, each proposed evolutionary link is then validated for logical coherence and evidential support by a recovered natural language inference mechanism that interrogates the cited literature, ensuring that each step is grounded. We construct and validate 88 THE-Trees across diverse domains and release a benchmark dataset including up to 71k fact verifications covering 27k papers to foster further research. Experiments demonstrate that i) in graph completion, our THE-Tree improves hit@1 by 8% to 14% across multiple models compared to traditional citation networks; ii) for predicting future scientific developments, it improves hit@1 metric by nearly 10%; and iii) when combined with other methods, it boosts the performance of evaluating important scientific papers by almost 100%.
Authors: Jinzhi Wang, Bin Li, Qingke Peng, Haozhou Li, Zeyuan Zeng, Ruimeng Li, Kaixuan Yang, Jiangbo Zhang, Biyi Zhou, Yaoying Wang
Abstract: Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) often suffer from an extreme long-tail distribution of dialogue data, causing a strong bias toward head-frequency blockbusters that sacrifices diversity and exacerbates the cold-start problem. An empirical analysis of DCRS and statistics on the REDIAL corpus show that only 10% of head movies account for nearly half of all mentions, whereas about 70% of tail movies receive merely 26% of the attention. This imbalance gives rise to three critical challenges: head over-fitting, body representation drift, and tail sparsity. To address these issues, we propose LumiCRS, an end-to-end framework that mitigates long-tail imbalance through three mutually reinforcing layers: (i) an Adaptive Comprehensive Focal Loss (ACFL) that dynamically adjusts class weights and focusing factors to curb head over-fitting and reduce popularity bias; (ii) Prototype Learning for Long-Tail Recommendation, which selects semantic, affective, and contextual prototypes to guide clustering and stabilize body and tail representations; and (iii) a GPT-4o-driven prototype-guided dialogue augmentation module that automatically generates diverse long-tail conversational snippets to alleviate tail sparsity and distribution shift. Together, these strategies enable LumiCRS to markedly improve recommendation accuracy, diversity, and fairness: on the REDIAL and INSPIRED benchmarks, LumiCRS boosts Recall@10 and Tail-Recall@10 by 7-15% over fifteen strong baselines, while human evaluations confirm superior fluency, informativeness, and long-tail relevance. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-layer collaboration in building an efficient and fair long-tail conversational recommender.
Authors: Gopal Gupta, Abhiramon Rajasekharan, Alexis R. Tudor, Elmer Salazar, Joaqu\'in Arias
Abstract: We consider the problem of implementing deontic modal logic. We show how (deontic) modal operators can be expressed elegantly using default negation (negation-as-failure) and strong negation present in answer set programming (ASP). We propose using global constraints of ASP to represent obligations and impermissibilities of deontic modal logic. We show that our proposed representation results in the various paradoxes of deontic modal logic being elegantly resolved.
Authors: Rodrigo Castellano Ontiveros, Francesco Giannini, Marco Gori, Giuseppe Marra, Michelangelo Diligenti
Abstract: A large class of Neural-Symbolic (NeSy) methods employs a machine learner to process the input entities, while relying on a reasoner based on First-Order Logic to represent and process more complex relationships among the entities. A fundamental role for these methods is played by the process of logic grounding, which determines the relevant substitutions for the logic rules using a (sub)set of entities. Some NeSy methods use an exhaustive derivation of all possible substitutions, preserving the full expressive power of the logic knowledge. This leads to a combinatorial explosion in the number of ground formulas to consider and, therefore, strongly limits their scalability. Other methods rely on heuristic-based selective derivations, which are generally more computationally efficient, but lack a justification and provide no guarantees of preserving the information provided to and returned by the reasoner. Taking inspiration from multi-hop symbolic reasoning, this paper proposes a parametrized family of grounding methods generalizing classic Backward Chaining. Different selections within this family allow us to obtain commonly employed grounding methods as special cases, and to control the trade-off between expressiveness and scalability of the reasoner. The experimental results show that the selection of the grounding criterion is often as important as the NeSy method itself.
Authors: Konstantinos I. Roumeliotis, Ranjan Sapkota, Manoj Karkee, Nikolaos D. Tselikas
Abstract: Modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly relies on multi-agent architectures that blend visual and language understanding. Yet, a pressing challenge remains: How can we trust these agents especially in zero-shot settings with no fine-tuning? We introduce a novel modular Agentic AI visual classification framework that integrates generalist multimodal agents with a non-visual reasoning orchestrator and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) module. Applied to apple leaf disease diagnosis, we benchmark three configurations: (I) zero-shot with confidence-based orchestration, (II) fine-tuned agents with improved performance, and (III) trust-calibrated orchestration enhanced by CLIP-based image retrieval and re-evaluation loops. Using confidence calibration metrics (ECE, OCR, CCC), the orchestrator modulates trust across agents. Our results demonstrate a 77.94\% accuracy improvement in the zero-shot setting using trust-aware orchestration and RAG, achieving 85.63\% overall. GPT-4o showed better calibration, while Qwen-2.5-VL displayed overconfidence. Furthermore, image-RAG grounded predictions with visually similar cases, enabling correction of agent overconfidence via iterative re-evaluation. The proposed system separates perception (vision agents) from meta-reasoning (orchestrator), enabling scalable and interpretable multi-agent AI. This blueprint is extensible to diagnostics, biology, and other trust-critical domains. All models, prompts, results, and system components including the complete software source code are openly released to support reproducibility, transparency, and community benchmarking at Github: https://github.com/Applied-AI-Research-Lab/Orchestrator-Agent-Trust
URLs: https://github.com/Applied-AI-Research-Lab/Orchestrator-Agent-Trust
Authors: Taylan Akay, Harrison Tolley, Hussein Abbass
Abstract: In the age of AI, human commanders need to use the computational powers available in today's environment to simulate a very large number of scenarios. Within each scenario, situations occur where different decision design options could have ethical consequences. Making these decisions reliant on human judgement is both counter-productive to the aim of exploring very large number of scenarios in a timely manner and infeasible when considering the workload needed to involve humans in each of these choices. In this paper, we move human judgement outside the simulation decision cycle. Basically, the human will design the ethical metric space, leaving it to the simulated environment to explore the space. When the simulation completes its testing cycles, the testing environment will come back to the human commander with a few options to select from. The human commander will then exercise human-judgement to select the most appropriate course of action, which will then get executed accordingly. We assume that the problem of designing metrics that are sufficiently granular to assess the ethical implications of decisions is solved. Subsequently, the fundamental problem we look at in this paper is how to weight ethical decisions during the running of these simulations; that is, how to dynamically weight the ethical attributes when agents are faced with decision options with ethical implications during generative simulations. The multi-criteria decision making literature has started to look at nearby problems, where the concept of entropy has been used to determine the weights during aggregation. We draw from that literature different approaches to automatically calculate the weights for ethical attributes during simulation-based testing and evaluation.
Authors: Xiaoya Li, Xiaofei Sun, Albert Wang, Jiwei Li, Chris Shum
Abstract: The exponential growth in demand for GPU computing resources, driven by the rapid advancement of Large Language Models, has created an urgent need for automated CUDA optimization strategies. While recent advances in LLMs show promise for code generation, current SOTA models (e.g. R1, o1) achieve low success rates in improving CUDA speed. In this paper, we introduce CUDA-L1, an automated reinforcement learning framework for CUDA optimization. CUDA-L1 achieves performance improvements on the CUDA optimization task: trained on NVIDIA A100, it delivers an average speedup of x17.7 across all 250 CUDA kernels of KernelBench, with peak speedups reaching x449. Furthermore, the model also demonstrates excellent portability across GPU architectures, achieving average speedups of x17.8 on H100, x19.0 on RTX 3090, x16.5 on L40, x14.7 on H800, and x13.9 on H20 despite being optimized specifically for A100. Beyond these benchmark results, CUDA-L1 demonstrates several remarkable properties: 1) Discovers a variety of CUDA optimization techniques and learns to combine them strategically to achieve optimal performance; 2) Uncovers fundamental principles of CUDA optimization; 3) Identifies non-obvious performance bottlenecks and rejects seemingly beneficial optimizations that harm performance. The capabilities of CUDA-L1 demonstrate that reinforcement learning can transform an initially poor-performing LLM into an effective CUDA optimizer through speedup-based reward signals alone, without human expertise or domain knowledge. More importantly, the trained RL model extend the acquired reasoning abilities to new kernels. This paradigm opens possibilities for automated optimization of CUDA operations, and holds promise to substantially promote GPU efficiency and alleviate the rising pressure on GPU computing resources.
Authors: Palash Dey
Abstract: We introduce and study the weakly single-crossing domain on trees which is a generalization of the well-studied single-crossing domain in social choice theory. We design a polynomial-time algorithm for recognizing preference profiles which belong to this domain. We then develop an efficient elicitation algorithm for this domain which works even if the preferences can be accessed only sequentially and the underlying single-crossing tree structure is not known beforehand. We also prove matching lower bound on the query complexity of our elicitation algorithm when the number of voters is large compared to the number of candidates. We also prove a lower bound of $\Omega(m^2\log n)$ on the number of queries that any algorithm needs to ask to elicit single crossing profile when random queries are allowed. This resolves an open question in an earlier paper and proves optimality of their preference elicitation algorithm when random queries are allowed.
Authors: Paolo Liberatore
Abstract: Abductive forgetting is removing variables from a logical formula while maintaining its abductive explanations. It is carried in two alternative ways depending on its intended application. Both differ from the usual forgetting, which maintains consequences rather than explanations. Differently from that, abductive forgetting from a propositional formula may not be expressed by any propositional formula. A necessary and sufficient condition tells when it is. Checking it is $\Pi^p_3$-complete. A way to guarantee expressibility of abductive forgetting is to switch from propositional to default logic. Another is to introduce new variables.
Authors: Angel Felipe Magnoss\~ao de Paula, Imene Bensalem, Paolo Rosso, Wajdi Zaghouani
Abstract: This paper describes our participation in the shared task of hate speech detection, which is one of the subtasks of the CERIST NLP Challenge 2022. Our experiments evaluate the performance of six transformer models and their combination using 2 ensemble approaches. The best results on the training set, in a five-fold cross validation scenario, were obtained by using the ensemble approach based on the majority vote. The evaluation of this approach on the test set resulted in an F1-score of 0.60 and an Accuracy of 0.86.
Authors: Wenjing Huang, Shikui Tu, Lei Xu
Abstract: Diffusion models have demonstrated their ability to generate diverse and high-quality images, sparking considerable interest in their potential for real image editing applications. However, existing diffusion-based approaches for local image editing often suffer from undesired artifacts due to the latent-level blending of the noised target images and diffusion latent variables, which lack the necessary semantics for maintaining image consistency. To address these issues, we propose PFB-Diff, a Progressive Feature Blending method for Diffusion-based image editing. Unlike previous methods, PFB-Diff seamlessly integrates text-guided generated content into the target image through multi-level feature blending. The rich semantics encoded in deep features and the progressive blending scheme from high to low levels ensure semantic coherence and high quality in edited images. Additionally, we introduce an attention masking mechanism in the cross-attention layers to confine the impact of specific words to desired regions, further improving the performance of background editing and multi-object replacement. PFB-Diff can effectively address various editing tasks, including object/background replacement and object attribute editing. Our method demonstrates its superior performance in terms of editing accuracy and image quality without the need for fine-tuning or training. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/CMACH508/PFB-Diff.
Authors: Hongru Wang, Lingzhi Wang, Yiming Du, Liang Chen, Jingyan Zhou, Yufei Wang, Kam-Fai Wong
Abstract: Dialogue systems (DS), including the task-oriented dialogue system (TOD) and the open-domain dialogue system (ODD), have always been a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP), allowing various applications in practice. Owing to sophisticated training and well-designed model architecture, language models (LM) are usually adopted as the necessary backbone to build the dialogue system. Consequently, every breakthrough in LM brings about a shift in learning paradigm and research attention within dialogue system, especially the appearance of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we take a deep look at the history of the dialogue system, especially its special relationship with the advancements of language models. Thus, our survey offers a systematic perspective, categorizing different stages in a chronological order aligned with LM breakthroughs, providing a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art research outcomes. What's more, we turn our attention to emerging topics and engage in a discussion on open challenges, providing valuable insights into the future directions for LLM-based dialogue systems. In summary, this survey delves into the dynamic interplay between language models and dialogue systems, unraveling the evolutionary path of this essential relationship. Through this exploration, we pave the way for a deeper comprehension of the field, guiding future developments in LM-based dialogue systems.
Authors: Stephen Casper, Lennart Schulze, Oam Patel, Dylan Hadfield-Menell
Abstract: Despite extensive diagnostics and debugging by developers, AI systems sometimes exhibit harmful unintended behaviors. Finding and fixing these is challenging because the attack surface is so large -- it is not tractable to exhaustively search for inputs that may elicit harmful behaviors. Red-teaming and adversarial training (AT) are commonly used to improve robustness, however, they empirically struggle to fix failure modes that differ from the attacks used during training. In this work, we utilize latent adversarial training (LAT) to defend against vulnerabilities without leveraging knowledge of what they are or using inputs that elicit them. LAT makes use of the compressed, abstract, and structured latent representations of concepts that the network actually uses for prediction. Here, we use it to defend against failure modes without examples that elicit them. Specifically, we use LAT to remove backdoors and defend against held-out classes of adversarial attacks. We show in image classification, text classification, and text generation tasks that LAT usually improves both robustness to novel attacks and performance on clean data relative to AT. This suggests that LAT can be a promising tool for defending against failure modes that are not explicitly identified by developers.
Authors: Bo Shu, Yiting Zhang, Dong Shu
Abstract: This report investigates the history and impact of Generative Models and Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs), two groundbreaking forces pushing progress in technology and transportation. By focusing on the application of generative models within the context of CAVs, the study aims to unravel how this integration could enhance predictive modeling, simulation accuracy, and decision-making processes in autonomous vehicles. This thesis discusses the benefits and challenges of integrating generative models and CAV technology in transportation. It aims to highlight the progress made, the remaining obstacles, and the potential for advancements in safety and innovation.
Authors: Beomsu Kim, Jaemin Kim, Jeongsol Kim, Jong Chul Ye
Abstract: Diffusion models (DMs) excel in unconditional generation, as well as on applications such as image editing and restoration. The success of DMs lies in the iterative nature of diffusion: diffusion breaks down the complex process of mapping noise to data into a sequence of simple denoising tasks. Moreover, we are able to exert fine-grained control over the generation process by injecting guidance terms into each denoising step. However, the iterative process is also computationally intensive, often taking from tens up to thousands of function evaluations. Although consistency trajectory models (CTMs) enable traversal between any time points along the probability flow ODE (PFODE) and score inference with a single function evaluation, CTMs only allow translation from Gaussian noise to data. This work aims to unlock the full potential of CTMs by proposing generalized CTMs (GCTMs), which translate between arbitrary distributions via ODEs. We discuss the design space of GCTMs and demonstrate their efficacy in various image manipulation tasks such as image-to-image translation, restoration, and editing.
Authors: Elisa Sanchez-Bayona, Rodrigo Agerri
Abstract: Metaphors are a ubiquitous but often overlooked part of everyday language. As a complex cognitive-linguistic phenomenon, they provide a valuable means to evaluate whether language models can capture deeper aspects of meaning, including semantic, pragmatic, and cultural context. In this work, we present Meta4XNLI, the first parallel dataset for Natural Language Inference (NLI) newly annotated for metaphor detection and interpretation in both English and Spanish. Meta4XNLI facilitates the comparison of encoder- and decoder-based models in detecting and understanding metaphorical language in multilingual and cross-lingual settings. Our results show that fine-tuned encoders outperform decoders-only LLMs in metaphor detection. Metaphor interpretation is evaluated via the NLI framework with comparable performance of masked and autoregressive models, which notably decreases when the inference is affected by metaphorical language. Our study also finds that translation plays an important role in the preservation or loss of metaphors across languages, introducing shifts that might impact metaphor occurrence and model performance. These findings underscore the importance of resources like Meta4XNLI for advancing the analysis of the capabilities of language models and improving our understanding of metaphor processing across languages. Furthermore, the dataset offers previously unavailable opportunities to investigate metaphor interpretation, cross-lingual metaphor transferability, and the impact of translation on the development of multilingual annotated resources.
Authors: Juyong Lee, Taywon Min, Minyong An, Dongyoon Hahm, Haeone Lee, Changyeon Kim, Kimin Lee
Abstract: Mobile device control agents can largely enhance user interactions and productivity by automating daily tasks. However, despite growing interest in developing practical agents, the absence of a commonly adopted benchmark in this area makes it challenging to quantify scientific progress. In this work, we introduce B-MoCA: a novel benchmark with interactive environments for evaluating and developing mobile device control agents. To create a realistic benchmark, we develop B-MoCA based on the Android operating system and define 131 common daily tasks. Importantly, we incorporate a randomization feature that changes the configurations of mobile devices, including user interface layouts and language settings, to assess generalization performance. We benchmark diverse agents, including agents employing large language models (LLMs) or multi-modal LLMs as well as agents trained with imitation learning using human expert demonstrations. While these agents demonstrate proficiency in executing straightforward tasks, their poor performance on complex tasks highlights significant opportunities for future research to improve effectiveness. Our source code is publicly available at https://b-moca.github.io.
Authors: Yeon-Ji Song, Jaein Kim, Suhyung Choi, Jin-Hwa Kim, Byoung-Tak Zhang
Abstract: Human perception involves decomposing complex multi-object scenes into time-static object appearance (i.e., size, shape, color) and time-varying object motion (i.e., position, velocity, acceleration). For machines to achieve human-like intelligence in real-world interactions, understanding these physical properties of objects is essential, forming the foundation for dynamic video prediction. While recent advancements in object-centric transformers have demonstrated potential in video prediction, they primarily focus on object appearance, often overlooking motion dynamics, which is crucial for modeling dynamic interactions and maintaining temporal consistency in complex environments. To address these limitations, we propose OCK, a dynamic video prediction model leveraging object-centric kinematics and object slots. We introduce a novel component named Object Kinematics that comprises explicit object motions, serving as an additional attribute beyond conventional appearance features to model dynamic scenes. The Object Kinematics are integrated into various OCK mechanisms, enabling spatiotemporal prediction of complex object interactions over long video sequences. Our model demonstrates superior performance in handling complex scenes with intricate object attributes and motions, highlighting its potential for applicability in vision-related dynamics learning tasks.
Authors: Yufei Jin, Xingquan Zhu
Abstract: Oversmoothing is a common challenge in learning graph neural networks (GNN), where, as layers increase, embedding features learned from GNNs quickly become similar or indistinguishable, making them incapable of differentiating network proximity. A GNN with shallow layer architectures can only learn short-term relation or localized structure information, limiting its power of learning long-term connection, evidenced by their inferior learning performance on heterophilous graphs. Tackling oversmoothing is crucial for harnessing deep-layer architectures for GNNs. To date, many methods have been proposed to alleviate oversmoothing. The vast difference behind their design principles, combined with graph complications, make it difficult to understand and even compare the difference between different approaches in tackling the oversmoothing. In this paper, we propose ATNPA, a unified view with five key steps: Augmentation, Transformation, Normalization, Propagation, and Aggregation, to summarize GNN oversmoothing alleviation approaches. We first propose a taxonomy for GNN oversmoothing alleviation which includes three themes to tackle oversmoothing. After that, we separate all methods into six categories, followed by detailed reviews of representative methods, including their relation to ATNPA, and discussion of their niche, strength, and weakness. The review not only draws an in-depth understanding of existing methods in the field but also shows a clear road map for future study.
Authors: Takuya Hiraoka, Guanquan Wang, Takashi Onishi, Yoshimasa Tsuruoka
Abstract: In reinforcement learning (RL) with experience replay, experiences stored in a replay buffer influence the RL agent's performance. Information about how these experiences influence the agent's performance is valuable for various purposes, such as identifying experiences that negatively influence underperforming agents. One method for estimating the influence of experiences is the leave-one-out (LOO) method. However, this method is usually computationally prohibitive. In this paper, we present Policy Iteration with Turn-over Dropout (PIToD), which efficiently estimates the influence of experiences. We evaluate how correctly PIToD estimates the influence of experiences and its efficiency compared to LOO. We then apply PIToD to amend underperforming RL agents, i.e., we use PIToD to estimate negatively influential experiences for the RL agents and to delete the influence of these experiences. We show that RL agents' performance is significantly improved via amendments with PIToD.
Authors: Devichand Budagam, Ashutosh Kumar, Mahsa Khoshnoodi, Sankalp KJ, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha
Abstract: Assessing the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in performing different tasks is crucial for understanding their strengths and weaknesses. This paper presents Hierarchical Prompting Taxonomy (HPT), grounded on human cognitive principles and designed to assess LLMs by examining the cognitive demands of various tasks. The HPT utilizes the Hierarchical Prompting Framework (HPF), which structures five unique prompting strategies in a hierarchical order based on their cognitive requirement on LLMs when compared to human mental capabilities. It assesses the complexity of tasks with the Hierarchical Prompting Index (HPI), which demonstrates the cognitive competencies of LLMs across diverse datasets and offers insights into the cognitive demands that datasets place on different LLMs. This approach enables a comprehensive evaluation of an LLMs problem solving abilities and the intricacy of a dataset, offering a standardized metric for task complexity. Extensive experiments with multiple datasets and LLMs show that HPF enhances LLM performance by 2% to 63% compared to baseline performance, with GSM8k being the most cognitively complex task among reasoning and coding tasks with an average HPI of 3.20 confirming the effectiveness of HPT. To support future research and reproducibility in this domain, the implementations of HPT and HPF are available here.
Authors: Varun Krishna, Sriram Ganapathy
Abstract: The popular frameworks for self-supervised learning of speech representations have largely focused on frame-level masked prediction of speech regions. While this has shown promising downstream task performance for speech recognition and related tasks, this has largely ignored factors of speech that are encoded at coarser level, like characteristics of the speaker or channel that remain consistent through-out a speech utterance. In this work, we propose a framework for Learning Disentangled Self Supervised (termed as Learn2Diss) representations of speech, which consists of frame-level and an utterance-level encoder modules. The two encoders are initially learned independently, where the frame-level model is largely inspired by existing self supervision techniques, thereby learning pseudo-phonemic representations, while the utterance-level encoder is inspired by constrastive learning of pooled embeddings, thereby learning pseudo-speaker representations. The joint learning of these two modules consists of disentangling the two encoders using a mutual information based criterion. With several downstream evaluation experiments, we show that the proposed Learn2Diss achieves state-of-the-art results on a variety of tasks, with the frame-level encoder representations improving semantic tasks, while the utterance-level representations improve non-semantic tasks.
Authors: Giuseppe Serra, Ben Werner, Florian Buettner
Abstract: Many real-world applications require machine-learning models to be able to deal with non-stationary data distributions and thus learn autonomously over an extended period of time, often in an online setting. One of the main challenges in this scenario is the so-called catastrophic forgetting (CF) for which the learning model tends to focus on the most recent tasks while experiencing predictive degradation on older ones. In the online setting, the most effective solutions employ a fixed-size memory buffer to store old samples used for replay when training on new tasks. Many approaches have been presented to tackle this problem. However, it is not clear how predictive uncertainty information for memory management can be leveraged in the most effective manner and conflicting strategies are proposed to populate the memory. Are the easiest-to-forget or the easiest-to-remember samples more effective in combating CF? Starting from the intuition that predictive uncertainty provides an idea of the samples' location in the decision space, this work presents an in-depth analysis of different uncertainty estimates and strategies for populating the memory. The investigation provides a better understanding of the characteristics data points should have for alleviating CF. Then, we propose an alternative method for estimating predictive uncertainty via the generalised variance induced by the negative log-likelihood. Finally, we demonstrate that the use of predictive uncertainty measures helps in reducing CF in different settings.
Authors: Charles Dickens, Connor Pryor, Changyu Gao, Alon Albalak, Eriq Augustine, William Wang, Stephen Wright, Lise Getoor
Abstract: The field of Neural-Symbolic (NeSy) systems is growing rapidly. Proposed approaches show great promise in achieving symbiotic unions of neural and symbolic methods. However, a unifying framework is needed to organize common NeSy modeling patterns and develop general learning approaches. In this paper, we introduce Neural-Symbolic Energy-Based Models (NeSy-EBMs), a unifying mathematical framework for discriminative and generative NeSy modeling. Importantly, NeSy-EBMs allow the derivation of general expressions for gradients of prominent learning losses, and we introduce a suite of four learning approaches that leverage methods from multiple domains, including bilevel and stochastic policy optimization. Finally, we ground the NeSy-EBM framework with Neural Probabilistic Soft Logic (NeuPSL), an open-source NeSy-EBM library designed for scalability and expressivity, facilitating the real-world application of NeSy systems. Through extensive empirical analysis across multiple datasets, we demonstrate the practical advantages of NeSy-EBMs in various tasks, including image classification, graph node labeling, autonomous vehicle situation awareness, and question answering.
Authors: Jiaxin Qin, Zixuan Zhang, Manling Li, Pengfei Yu, Heng Ji
Abstract: Extensive previous research has focused on post-training knowledge editing (KE) for language models (LMs) to ensure that knowledge remains accurate and up-to-date. One desired property and open question in KE is to let edited LMs correctly handle ripple effects, where LM is expected to answer its logically related knowledge accurately. In this paper, we answer the question of why most KE methods still create messy ripple effects. We conduct extensive analysis and identify a salient indicator, GradSim, that effectively reveals when and why updated knowledge ripples in LMs. GradSim is computed by the cosine similarity between gradients of the original fact and its related knowledge. We observe a strong positive correlation between ripple effect performance and GradSim across different LMs, KE methods, and evaluation metrics. Further investigations into three counter-intuitive failure cases (Negation, Over-Ripple, Multi-Lingual) of ripple effects demonstrate that these failures are often associated with very low GradSim. This finding validates that GradSim is an effective indicator of when knowledge ripples in LMs.
Authors: Jianyang Wu, Jie Gu, Xiaokang Ma, Fangzhou Qiu, Chu Tang, Jingmin Chen
Abstract: General-purpose object placement is a fundamental capability of an intelligent generalist robot: being capable of rearranging objects following precise human instructions even in novel environments. This work is dedicated to achieving general-purpose object placement with ``something something'' instructions. Specifically, we break the entire process down into three parts, including object localization, goal imagination and robot control, and propose a method named SPORT. SPORT leverages a pre-trained large vision model for broad semantic reasoning about objects, and learns a diffusion-based pose estimator to ensure physically-realistic results in 3D space. Only object types (movable or reference) are communicated between these two parts, which brings two benefits. One is that we can fully leverage the powerful ability of open-set object recognition and localization since no specific fine-tuning is needed for the robotic scenario. Moreover, the diffusion-based estimator only need to ``imagine" the object poses after the placement, while no necessity for their semantic information. Thus the training burden is greatly reduced and no massive training is required. The training data for the goal pose estimation is collected in simulation and annotated by using GPT-4. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. SPORT can not only generate promising 3D goal poses for unseen simulated objects, but also be seamlessly applied to real-world settings.
Authors: Jialiang Wang, Hanmo Liu, Shimin Di, Zhili Wang, Jiachuan Wang, Lei Chen, Xiaofang Zhou
Abstract: High-level automation is increasingly critical in AI, driven by rapid advances in large language models (LLMs) and AI agents. However, LLMs, despite their general reasoning power, struggle significantly in specialized, data-sensitive tasks such as designing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). This difficulty arises from (1) the inherent knowledge gaps in modeling the intricate, varying relationships between graph properties and suitable architectures and (2) the external noise from misleading descriptive inputs, often resulting in generic or even misleading model suggestions. Achieving proficiency in designing data-aware models -- defined as the meta-level capability to systematically accumulate, interpret, and apply data-specific design knowledge -- remains challenging for existing automated approaches, due to their inefficient construction and application of meta-knowledge. To achieve the meta-level proficiency, we propose DesiGNN, a knowledge-centered framework that systematically converts past model design experiences into structured, fine-grained knowledge priors well fitted to meta-learning with LLMs. To account for the inherent variability and external noise, DesiGNN aligns empirical property filtering from extensive benchmarks with adaptive elicitation of literature insights via LLMs. By constructing a solid meta-knowledge between unseen graph understanding and known effective architecture patterns, DesiGNN can deliver top-5.77% initial model proposals for unseen datasets within seconds, and achieve consistently superior performance with minimal search costs against baselines.
Authors: Lingyun Huang, Jianxu Mao, Junfei Yi, Ziming Tao, Yaonan Wang
Abstract: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has emerged to mitigate the computational demands of large-scale models. Within computer vision, adapter-based PEFT methods are often favored over prompt-based approaches like Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) due to the latter's performance and efficiency limitations. Our analysis reveals that VPT's shortcomings stem from its prompt deployment strategy, which can distort the model's inherent self-attention mechanism. To address this, we propose Cross Visual Prompt Tuning (CVPT). CVPT introduces a cross-attention module to directly model interactions between prompts and image tokens. This design decouples the prompts from the input sequence, preserving the original self-attention integrity while enabling efficient feature integration. Furthermore, we employ a weight-sharing mechanism for cross-attention initialization, which enhances representative capability without a large parameter overhead. Extensive experiments across 25 datasets show that CVPT significantly outperforms VPT. For instance, on the VTAB-1K benchmark, CVPT achieves over 4% higher average accuracy, rivaling leading adapter-based methods in both performance and efficiency. Our work confirms that prompt-based methods can achieve exceptional results in visual fine-tuning. The code is available at https://github.com/Lingyun0419/CVPT
Authors: Arief Purnama Muharram, Ayu Purwarianti
Abstract: Automated fact-checking is a key strategy to overcome the spread of COVID-19 misinformation on the internet. These systems typically leverage deep learning approaches through Natural Language Inference (NLI) to verify the truthfulness of information based on supporting evidence. However, one challenge that arises in deep learning is performance stagnation due to a lack of knowledge during training. This study proposes using a Knowledge Graph (KG) as external knowledge to enhance NLI performance for automated COVID-19 fact-checking in the Indonesian language. The proposed model architecture comprises three modules: a fact module, an NLI module, and a classifier module. The fact module processes information from the KG, while the NLI module handles semantic relationships between the given premise and hypothesis. The representation vectors from both modules are concatenated and fed into the classifier module to produce the final result. The model was trained using the generated Indonesian COVID-19 fact-checking dataset and the COVID-19 KG Bahasa Indonesia. Our study demonstrates that incorporating KGs can significantly improve NLI performance in fact-checking, achieving the best accuracy of 0.8616. This suggests that KGs are a valuable component for enhancing NLI performance in automated fact-checking.
Authors: Luo Ji, Gao Liu, Mingyang Yin, Hongxia Yang, Jingren Zhou
Abstract: Modern listwise recommendation systems need to consider both long-term user perceptions and short-term interest shifts. Reinforcement learning can be applied on recommendation to study such a problem but is also subject to large search space, sparse user feedback and long interactive latency. Motivated by recent progress in hierarchical reinforcement learning, we propose a novel framework called mccHRL to provide different levels of temporal abstraction on listwise recommendation. Within the hierarchical framework, the high-level agent studies the evolution of user perception, while the low-level agent produces the item selection policy by modeling the process as a sequential decision-making problem. We argue that such framework has a well-defined decomposition of the outra-session context and the intra-session context, which are encoded by the high-level and low-level agents, respectively. To verify this argument, we implement both a simulator-based environment and an industrial dataset-based experiment. Results observe significant performance improvement by our method, compared with several well-known baselines. Data and codes have been made public.
Authors: Taylor Applebaum, Sam Blackwell, Alex Davies, Thomas Edlich, Andr\'as Juh\'asz, Marc Lackenby, Nenad Toma\v{s}ev, Daniel Zheng
Abstract: We have developed a reinforcement learning agent that often finds a minimal sequence of unknotting crossing changes for a knot diagram with up to 200 crossings, hence giving an upper bound on the unknotting number. We have used this to determine the unknotting number of 57k knots. We took diagrams of connected sums of such knots with oppositely signed signatures, where the summands were overlaid. The agent has found examples where several of the crossing changes in an unknotting collection of crossings result in hyperbolic knots. Based on this, we have shown that, given knots $K$ and $K'$ that satisfy some mild assumptions, there is a diagram of their connected sum and $u(K) + u(K')$ unknotting crossings such that changing any one of them results in a prime knot. As a by-product, we have obtained a dataset of 2.6 million distinct hard unknot diagrams; most of them under 35 crossings. Assuming the additivity of the unknotting number, we have determined the unknotting number of 43 at most 12-crossing knots for which the unknotting number is unknown.
Authors: Sourav Sanyal, Kaushik Roy
Abstract: In the rapidly evolving field of vision-language navigation (VLN), ensuring safety for physical agents remains an open challenge. For a human-in-the-loop language-operated drone to navigate safely, it must understand natural language commands, perceive the environment, and simultaneously avoid hazards in real time. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are formal methods that enforce safe operating conditions. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is an optimization framework that plans a sequence of future actions over a prediction horizon, ensuring smooth trajectory tracking while obeying constraints. In this work, we consider a VLN-operated drone platform and enhance its safety by formulating a novel scene-aware CBF that leverages ego-centric observations from a camera which has both Red-Green-Blue as well as Depth (RGB-D) channels. A CBF-less baseline system uses a Vision-Language Encoder with cross-modal attention to convert commands into an ordered sequence of landmarks. An object detection model identifies and verifies these landmarks in the captured images to generate a planned path. To further enhance safety, an Adaptive Safety Margin Algorithm (ASMA) is proposed. ASMA tracks moving objects and performs scene-aware CBF evaluation on-the-fly, which serves as an additional constraint within the MPC framework. By continuously identifying potentially risky observations, the system performs prediction in real time about unsafe conditions and proactively adjusts its control actions to maintain safe navigation throughout the trajectory. Deployed on a Parrot Bebop2 quadrotor in the Gazebo environment using the Robot Operating System (ROS), ASMA achieves 64%-67% increase in success rates with only a slight increase (1.4%-5.8%) in trajectory lengths compared to the baseline CBF-less VLN.
Authors: DaDong Jiang, Xianghui Yang, Zibo Zhao, Sheng Zhang, Jiaao Yu, Zeqiang Lai, Shaoxiong Yang, Chunchao Guo, Xiaobo Zhou, Zhihui Ke
Abstract: Recent texture generation methods achieve impressive results due to the powerful generative prior they leverage from large-scale text-to-image diffusion models. However, abstract textual prompts are limited in providing global textural or shape information, which results in the texture generation methods producing blurry or inconsistent patterns. To tackle this, we present FlexiTex, embedding rich information via visual guidance to generate a high-quality texture. The core of FlexiTex is the Visual Guidance Enhancement module, which incorporates more specific information from visual guidance to reduce ambiguity in the text prompt and preserve high-frequency details. To further enhance the visual guidance, we introduce a Direction-Aware Adaptation module that automatically designs direction prompts based on different camera poses, avoiding the Janus problem and maintaining semantically global consistency. Benefiting from the visual guidance, FlexiTex produces quantitatively and qualitatively sound results, demonstrating its potential to advance texture generation for real-world applications.
Authors: Mishal Fatima Minhas, Rachmad Vidya Wicaksana Putra, Falah Awwad, Osman Hasan, Muhammad Shafique
Abstract: The challenging deployment of compute- and memory-intensive methods from Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based Continual Learning (CL) underscores the critical need for a paradigm shift towards more efficient approaches. Neuromorphic Continual Learning (NCL) appears as an emerging solution, by leveraging the principles of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) which enable efficient CL algorithms executed in dynamically-changed environments with resource-constrained computing systems. Motivated by the need for a holistic study of NCL, in this survey, we first provide a detailed background on CL, encompassing the desiderata, settings, metrics, scenario taxonomy, Online Continual Learning (OCL) paradigm, recent DNN-based methods to address catastrophic forgetting (CF). Then, we analyze these methods considering CL desiderata, computational and memory costs, as well as network complexity, hence emphasizing the need for energy-efficient CL. Afterward, we provide background of low-power neuromorphic systems including encoding techniques, neuronal dynamics, network architectures, learning rules, hardware processors, software and hardware frameworks, datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation metrics. Then, this survey comprehensively reviews and analyzes state-of-the-art in NCL. The key ideas, implementation frameworks, and performance assessments are also provided. This survey covers several hybrid approaches that combine supervised and unsupervised learning paradigms. It also covers optimization techniques including SNN operations reduction, weight quantization, and knowledge distillation. Then, this survey discusses the progress of real-world NCL applications. Finally, this paper provides a future perspective on the open research challenges for NCL, since the purpose of this study is to be useful for the wider neuromorphic AI research community and to inspire future research in bio-plausible OCL.
Authors: Junkang Wu, Xue Wang, Zhengyi Yang, Jiancan Wu, Jinyang Gao, Bolin Ding, Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He
Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and intentions is crucial for their utility, honesty, and safety. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a popular approach to achieve this alignment, but it faces challenges in computational efficiency and training stability. Recent methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Simple Preference Optimization (SimPO) have proposed offline alternatives to RLHF, simplifying the process by reparameterizing the reward function. However, DPO depends on a potentially suboptimal reference model, and SimPO's assumption of a fixed target reward margin may lead to suboptimal decisions in diverse data settings. In this work, we propose $\alpha$-DPO, an adaptive preference optimization algorithm designed to address these limitations by introducing a dynamic reward margin. Specifically, $\alpha$-DPO employs an adaptive preference distribution, balancing the policy model and the reference model to achieve personalized reward margins. We provide theoretical guarantees for $\alpha$-DPO, demonstrating its effectiveness as a surrogate optimization objective and its ability to balance alignment and diversity through KL divergence control. Empirical evaluations on AlpacaEval 2 and Arena-Hard show that $\alpha$-DPO consistently outperforms DPO and SimPO across various model settings, establishing it as a robust approach for fine-tuning LLMs. Our method achieves significant improvements in win rates, highlighting its potential as a powerful tool for LLM alignment. The code is available at https://github.com/junkangwu/alpha-DPO
Authors: Vinh Nguyen
Abstract: Generating detailed descriptions from multiple cameras and viewpoints is challenging due to the complex and inconsistent nature of visual data. In this paper, we introduce PerspectiveNet, a lightweight yet efficient model for generating long descriptions across multiple camera views. Our approach utilizes a vision encoder, a compact connector module to convert visual features into a fixed-size tensor, and large language models (LLMs) to harness the strong natural language generation capabilities of LLMs. The connector module is designed with three main goals: mapping visual features onto LLM embeddings, emphasizing key information needed for description generation, and producing a fixed-size feature matrix. Additionally, we augment our solution with a secondary task, the correct frame sequence detection, enabling the model to search for the correct sequence of frames to generate descriptions. Finally, we integrate the connector module, the secondary task, the LLM, and a visual feature extraction model into a single architecture, which is trained for the Traffic Safety Description and Analysis task. This task requires generating detailed, fine-grained descriptions of events from multiple cameras and viewpoints. The resulting model is lightweight, ensuring efficient training and inference, while remaining highly effective.
Authors: Maryam Dialameh, Hossein Rajabzadeh, Moslem Sadeghi-Goughari, Jung Suk Sim, Hyock Ju Kwon
Abstract: Precise segmentation of papillary thyroid microcarcinoma (PTMC) during ultrasound-guided radiofrequency ablation (RFA) is critical for effective treatment but remains challenging due to acoustic artifacts, small lesion size, and anatomical variability. In this study, we propose DualSwinUnet++, a dual-decoder transformer-based architecture designed to enhance PTMC segmentation by incorporating thyroid gland context. DualSwinUnet++ employs independent linear projection heads for each decoder and a residual information flow mechanism that passes intermediate features from the first (thyroid) decoder to the second (PTMC) decoder via concatenation and transformation. These design choices allow the model to condition tumor prediction explicitly on gland morphology without shared gradient interference. Trained on a clinical ultrasound dataset with 691 annotated RFA images and evaluated against state-of-the-art models, DualSwinUnet++ achieves superior Dice and Jaccard scores while maintaining sub-200ms inference latency. The results demonstrate the model's suitability for near real-time surgical assistance and its effectiveness in improving segmentation accuracy in challenging PTMC cases.
Authors: Mubashara Akhtar, Michael Schlichtkrull, Andreas Vlachos
Abstract: Current automated fact-checking (AFC) approaches typically evaluate evidence either implicitly via the predicted verdicts or through exact matches with predefined closed knowledge sources, such as Wikipedia. However, these methods are limited due to their reliance on evaluation metrics originally designed for other purposes and constraints from closed knowledge sources. In this work, we introduce \textbf{\textcolor{skyblue}{Ev\textsuperscript{2}}\textcolor{orangebrown}{R}} which combines the strengths of reference-based evaluation and verdict-level proxy scoring. Ev\textsuperscript{2}R jointly assesses how well the evidence aligns with the gold references and how reliably it supports the verdict, addressing the shortcomings of prior methods. We evaluate Ev\textsuperscript{2}R against three types of evidence evaluation approaches: reference-based, proxy-reference, and reference-less baselines. Assessments against human ratings and adversarial tests demonstrate that Ev\textsuperscript{2}R consistently outperforms existing scoring approaches in accuracy and robustness. It achieves stronger correlation with human judgments and greater robustness to adversarial perturbations, establishing it as a reliable metric for evidence evaluation in AFC.\footnote{Code is available at \href{https://github.com/mubasharaak/fc-evidence-evaluation}{https://github.com/mubasharaak/fc-evidence-evaluation}.}
URLs: https://github.com/mubasharaak/fc-evidence-evaluation, https://github.com/mubasharaak/fc-evidence-evaluation
Authors: Yinan Zhou, Yuxin Chen, Haokun Lin, Shuyu Yang, Zhongang Qi, Chen Ma, Li Zhu, Ying Shan
Abstract: With recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), grounding and referring capabilities have gained increasing attention for achieving detailed understanding and flexible user interaction. However, these capabilities still remain underdeveloped in visual document understanding due to the scarcity of fine-grained datasets and comprehensive benchmarks. To fill this gap, we propose the DOcument Grounding and Referring data engine (DOGR-Engine), which generates two types of high-quality fine-grained document data: (1) multi-granular parsing data to improve text localization and recognition, and (2) instruction-tuning data to activate MLLMs' grounding and referring capabilities in dialogue and reasoning. Using the DOGR-Engine, we construct DOGR-Bench, a benchmark covering seven grounding and referring tasks across three document types (chart, poster, and PDF document), offering a comprehensive evaluation of fine-grained document understanding. Leveraging the generated data, we further develop DOGR, a strong baseline model that excels in text localization and recognition, while precisely grounds and refers to key textual information during conversation and reasoning, thereby advancing document understanding to a finer granularity and enable flexible interaction paradigms.
Authors: Shengming Zhao, Yuchen Shao, Yuheng Huang, Jiayang Song, Zhijie Wang, Chengcheng Wan, Lei Ma
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a critical technique for enhancing large language model (LLM) capabilities. However, practitioners face significant challenges when making RAG deployment decisions. While existing research prioritizes algorithmic innovations, a systematic gap persists in understanding fundamental engineering trade-offs that determine RAG success. We present the first comprehensive study of three universal RAG deployment decisions: whether to deploy RAG, how much information to retrieve, and how to integrate retrieved knowledge effectively. Through systematic experiments across three LLMs and six datasets spanning question answering and code generation tasks, we reveal critical insights: (1) RAG deployment must be highly selective, with variable recall thresholds and failure modes affecting up to 12.6\% of samples even with perfect documents. (2) Optimal retrieval volume exhibits task-dependent behavior QA tasks show universal patterns (5-10 documents optimal) while code generation requires scenario-specific optimization. (3) Knowledge integration effectiveness depends on task and model characteristics, with code generation benefiting significantly from prompting methods while question answering shows minimal improvement. These findings demonstrate that universal RAG strategies prove inadequate. Effective RAG systems require context-aware design decisions based on task characteristics and model capabilities. Our analysis provides evidence-based guidance for practitioners and establishes foundational insights for principled RAG deployment.
Authors: Tianyu Chang, Xiaohao Chen, Zhichao Wei, Xuanpu Zhang, Qing-Guo Chen, Weihua Luo, Peipei Song, Xun Yang
Abstract: Video Virtual Try-on aims to seamlessly transfer a reference garment onto a target person in a video while preserving both visual fidelity and temporal coherence. Existing methods typically rely on inpainting masks to define the try-on area, enabling accurate garment transfer for simple scenes (e.g., in-shop videos). However, these mask-based approaches struggle with complex real-world scenarios, as overly large and inconsistent masks often destroy spatial-temporal information, leading to distorted results. Mask-free methods alleviate this issue but face challenges in accurately determining the try-on area, especially for videos with dynamic body movements. To address these limitations, we propose PEMF-VTO, a novel Point-Enhanced Mask-Free Video Virtual Try-On framework that leverages sparse point alignments to explicitly guide garment transfer. Our key innovation is the introduction of point-enhanced guidance, which provides flexible and reliable control over both spatial-level garment transfer and temporal-level video coherence. Specifically, we design a Point-Enhanced Transformer (PET) with two core components: Point-Enhanced Spatial Attention (PSA), which uses frame-cloth point alignments to precisely guide garment transfer, and Point-Enhanced Temporal Attention (PTA), which leverages frame-frame point correspondences to enhance temporal coherence and ensure smooth transitions across frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PEMF-VTO outperforms state-of-the-art methods, generating more natural, coherent, and visually appealing try-on videos, particularly for challenging in-the-wild scenarios. The link to our paper's homepage is https://pemf-vto.github.io/.
Authors: Xiachong Feng, Longxu Dou, Ella Li, Qinghao Wang, Haochuan Wang, Yu Guo, Chang Ma, Lingpeng Kong
Abstract: Game-theoretic scenarios have become pivotal in evaluating the social intelligence of Large Language Model (LLM)-based social agents. While numerous studies have explored these agents in such settings, there is a lack of a comprehensive survey summarizing the current progress. To address this gap, we systematically review existing research on LLM-based social agents within game-theoretic scenarios. Our survey organizes the findings into three core components: Game Framework, Social Agent, and Evaluation Protocol. The game framework encompasses diverse game scenarios, ranging from choice-focusing to communication-focusing games. The social agent part explores agents' preferences, beliefs, and reasoning abilities, as well as their interactions and synergistic effects on decision-making. The evaluation protocol covers both game-agnostic and game-specific metrics for assessing agent performance. Additionally, we analyze the performance of current social agents across various game scenarios. By reflecting on the current research and identifying future research directions, this survey provides insights to advance the development and evaluation of social agents in game-theoretic scenarios.
Authors: Peilong Wang, Jason Holmes, Zhengliang Liu, Dequan Chen, Tianming Liu, Jiajian Shen, Wei Liu
Abstract: Purpose: We present an updated study evaluating the performance of large language models (LLMs) in answering radiation oncology physics questions, focusing on the recently released models. Methods: A set of 100 multiple-choice radiation oncology physics questions, previously created by a well-experienced physicist, was used for this study. The answer options of the questions were randomly shuffled to create "new" exam sets. Five LLMs -- OpenAI o1-preview, GPT-4o, LLaMA 3.1 (405B), Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet -- with the versions released before September 30, 2024, were queried using these new exam sets. To evaluate their deductive reasoning ability, the correct answer options in the questions were replaced with "None of the above." Then, the explain-first and step-by-step instruction prompts were used to test if this strategy improved their reasoning ability. The performance of the LLMs was compared with the answers from medical physicists. Results: All models demonstrated expert-level performance on these questions, with o1-preview even surpassing medical physicists with a majority vote. When replacing the correct answer options with 'None of the above', all models exhibited a considerable decline in performance, suggesting room for improvement. The explain-first and step-by-step instruction prompts helped enhance the reasoning ability of the LLaMA 3.1 (405B), Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet models. Conclusion: These recently released LLMs demonstrated expert-level performance in answering radiation oncology physics questions, exhibiting great potential to assist in radiation oncology physics education and training.
Authors: Ruijun Feng, Hammond Pearce, Pietro Liguori, Yulei Sui
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as powerful tools for detecting software vulnerabilities, where task-specific fine-tuning is typically employed to provide vulnerability-specific knowledge to the LLMs. However, existing fine-tuning techniques often treat source code as plain text, losing the graph-based structural information inherent in code. Graph-enhanced soft prompt tuning addresses this by translating the structural information into contextual cues that the LLM can understand. However, current methods are primarily designed for general graph-related tasks and focus more on adjacency information, they fall short in preserving the rich semantic information (e.g., control/data flow) within code graphs. They also fail to ensure computational efficiency while capturing graph-text interactions in their cross-modal alignment module. This paper presents CGP-Tuning, a new code graph-enhanced, structure-aware soft prompt tuning method for vulnerability detection. CGP-Tuning introduces type-aware embeddings to capture the rich semantic information within code graphs, along with an efficient cross-modal alignment module that achieves linear computational costs while incorporating graph-text interactions. It is evaluated on the latest DiverseVul dataset and three advanced open-source code LLMs, CodeLlama, CodeGemma, and Qwen2.5-Coder. Experimental results show that CGP-Tuning delivers model-agnostic improvements and maintains practical inference speed, surpassing the best graph-enhanced soft prompt tuning baseline by an average of four percentage points and outperforming non-tuned zero-shot prompting by 15 percentage points.
Authors: Hazem Taha, Ameer M. S. Abdelhadi
Abstract: This paper introduces HEPPO-GAE, an FPGA-based accelerator designed to optimize the Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE) stage in Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). Unlike previous approaches that focused on trajectory collection and actor-critic updates, HEPPO-GAE addresses GAE's computational demands with a parallel, pipelined architecture implemented on a single System-on-Chip (SoC). This design allows for the adaptation of various hardware accelerators tailored for different PPO phases. A key innovation is our strategic standardization technique, which combines dynamic reward standardization and block standardization for values, followed by 8-bit uniform quantization. This method stabilizes learning, enhances performance, and manages memory bottlenecks, achieving a 4x reduction in memory usage and a 1.5x increase in cumulative rewards. We propose a solution on a single SoC device with programmable logic and embedded processors, delivering throughput orders of magnitude higher than traditional CPU-GPU systems. Our single-chip solution minimizes communication latency and throughput bottlenecks, significantly boosting PPO training efficiency. Experimental results show a 30% increase in PPO speed and a substantial reduction in memory access time, underscoring HEPPO-GAE's potential for broad applicability in hardware-efficient reinforcement learning algorithms.
Authors: Dario Coscia, Max Welling, Nicola Demo, Gianluigi Rozza
Abstract: Autoregressive and recurrent networks have achieved remarkable progress across various fields, from weather forecasting to molecular generation and Large Language Models. Despite their strong predictive capabilities, these models lack a rigorous framework for addressing uncertainty, which is key in scientific applications such as PDE solving, molecular generation and Machine Learning Force Fields. To address this shortcoming we present BARNN: a variational Bayesian Autoregressive and Recurrent Neural Network. BARNNs aim to provide a principled way to turn any autoregressive or recurrent model into its Bayesian version. BARNN is based on the variational dropout method, allowing to apply it to large recurrent neural networks as well. We also introduce a temporal version of the "Variational Mixtures of Posteriors" prior (tVAMP-prior) to make Bayesian inference efficient and well-calibrated. Extensive experiments on PDE modelling and molecular generation demonstrate that BARNN not only achieves comparable or superior accuracy compared to existing methods, but also excels in uncertainty quantification and modelling long-range dependencies.
Authors: Ariana Abel, Yoav Kolumbus, Jeronimo Martin Duque, Cristian Palma Foster, Eva Tardos
Abstract: We consider learning outcomes in games with carryover effects between rounds: when outcomes in the present round affect the game in the future. An important example of such systems is routers in networking, as they use simple learning algorithms to find the best way to deliver packets to their desired destination. This simple, myopic, and distributed decision process makes large queuing systems easy to operate, but at the same time, the system needs more capacity than would be required if all traffic were centrally coordinated. Gaitonde and Tardos (EC 2020 and JACM 2023) initiated the study of such systems, modeling them as an infinitely repeated game in which routers compete for servers and the system maintains a state (the number of packets held at each queue) that results from outcomes of previous rounds. However, their model assumes that servers have no buffers at all, so routers have to resend all packets that were not served successfully, which makes their system model unrealistic. They show that in their model, even with hugely increased server capacity relative to what is needed in the centrally coordinated case, ensuring that the system is stable requires the use of timestamps and priority for older packets. We consider a system with two important changes, which make the model more realistic and allow for much higher traffic rates: first, we add a very small buffer to each server, allowing the server to hold on to a single packet to be served later (if it fails to serve it immediately), and second, we do not require timestamps or priority to older packets. Using theoretical analysis and simulations, we show that when queues are learning, a small constant-factor increase in server capacity, compared to what would be needed if centrally coordinating, suffices to keep the system stable, even if servers select randomly among packets arriving simultaneously.
Authors: Ge Lei, Samuel J. Cooper
Abstract: This study explores how large language models (LLMs) encode interwoven scientific knowledge, using chemical elements and LLaMA-series models as a case study. We identify a 3D spiral structure in the hidden states that aligns with the conceptual structure of the periodic table, suggesting that LLMs can reflect the geometric organization of scientific concepts learned from text. Linear probing reveals that middle layers encode continuous, overlapping attributes that enable indirect recall, while deeper layers sharpen categorical distinctions and incorporate linguistic context. These findings suggest that LLMs represent symbolic knowledge not as isolated facts, but as structured geometric manifolds that intertwine semantic information across layers. We hope this work inspires further exploration of how LLMs represent and reason about scientific knowledge, particularly in domains such as materials science.
Authors: Wanke Xia, Ruoxin Peng, Haoqi Chu, Xinlei Zhu, Zhiyu Yang, Lili Yang
Abstract: Rice is one of the most widely cultivated crops globally and has been developed into numerous varieties. The quality of rice during cultivation is primarily determined by its cultivar and characteristics. Traditionally, rice classification and quality assessment rely on manual visual inspection, a process that is both time-consuming and prone to errors. However, with advancements in machine vision technology, automating rice classification and quality evaluation based on its cultivar and characteristics has become increasingly feasible, enhancing both accuracy and efficiency. This study proposes a real-time evaluation mechanism for comprehensive rice grain assessment, integrating a one-stage object detection approach, a deep convolutional neural network, and traditional machine learning techniques. The proposed framework enables rice variety identification, grain completeness grading, and grain chalkiness evaluation. The rice grain dataset used in this study comprises approximately 20,000 images from six widely cultivated rice varieties in China. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism achieves a mean average precision (mAP) of 99.14% in the object detection task and an accuracy of 97.89% in the classification task. Furthermore, the framework attains an average accuracy of 97.56% in grain completeness grading within the same rice variety, contributing to an effective quality evaluation system.
Authors: Xinxin You, Xien Liu, Xue Yang, Ziyi Wang, Ji Wu
Abstract: The task of automatically coding the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) in the medical field has been well-established and has received much attention. Automatic coding of the ICD in the medical field has been successful in English but faces challenges when dealing with Chinese electronic medical records (EMRs). The first issue lies in the difficulty of extracting disease code-related information from Chinese EMRs, primarily due to the concise writing style and specific internal structure of the EMRs. The second problem is that previous methods have failed to leverage the disease-based multi-axial knowledge and lack of association with the corresponding clinical evidence. This paper introduces a novel framework called MKE-Coder: Multi-axial Knowledge with Evidence verification in ICD coding for Chinese EMRs. Initially, we identify candidate codes for the diagnosis and categorize each of them into knowledge under four coding axes.Subsequently, we retrieve corresponding clinical evidence from the comprehensive content of EMRs and filter credible evidence through a scoring model. Finally, to ensure the validity of the candidate code, we propose an inference module based on the masked language modeling strategy. This module verifies that all the axis knowledge associated with the candidate code is supported by evidence and provides recommendations accordingly. To evaluate the performance of our framework, we conduct experiments using a large-scale Chinese EMR dataset collected from various hospitals. The experimental results demonstrate that MKE-Coder exhibits significant superiority in the task of automatic ICD coding based on Chinese EMRs. In the practical evaluation of our method within simulated real coding scenarios, it has been demonstrated that our approach significantly aids coders in enhancing both their coding accuracy and speed.
Authors: Masha Fedzechkina, Eleonora Gualdoni, Sinead Williamson, Katherine Metcalf, Skyler Seto, Barry-John Theobald
Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance on some tasks, while exhibiting distinctly non-human-like behaviors on others. This raises the question of how well the LLM's learned representations align with human representations. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to study representation alignment: we adopt a method from research on activation steering to identify neurons responsible for specific concepts (e.g., ''cat'') and then analyze the corresponding activation patterns. We find that LLM representations captured this way closely align with human representations inferred from behavioral data, matching inter-human alignment levels. Our approach significantly outperforms the alignment captured by word embeddings, which have been the focus of prior work on human-LLM alignment. Additionally, our approach enables a more granular view of how LLMs represent concepts -- we show that LLMs organize concepts in a way that mirrors human concept organization.
Authors: Anirudh Sundar, Sinead Williamson, Katherine Metcalf, Barry-John Theobald, Skyler Seto, Masha Fedzechkina
Abstract: Aligned representations across languages is a desired property in multilingual large language models (mLLMs), as alignment can improve performance in cross-lingual tasks. Typically alignment requires fine-tuning a model, which is computationally expensive, and sizable language data, which often may not be available. A data-efficient alternative to fine-tuning is model interventions -- a method for manipulating model activations to steer generation into the desired direction. We analyze the effect of a popular intervention (finding experts) on the alignment of cross-lingual representations in mLLMs. We identify the neurons to manipulate for a given language and introspect the embedding space of mLLMs pre- and post-manipulation. We show that modifying the mLLM's activations changes its embedding space such that cross-lingual alignment is enhanced. Further, we show that the changes to the embedding space translate into improved downstream performance on retrieval tasks, with up to 2x improvements in top-1 accuracy on cross-lingual retrieval.
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: Tom Sander, Pierre Fernandez, Saeed Mahloujifar, Alain Durmus, Chuan Guo
Abstract: Benchmark contamination poses a significant challenge to the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) evaluations, as it is difficult to assert whether a model has been trained on a test set. We introduce a solution to this problem by watermarking benchmarks before their release. The embedding involves reformulating the original questions with a watermarked LLM, in a way that does not alter the benchmark utility. During evaluation, we can detect ``radioactivity'', \ie traces that the text watermarks leave in the model during training, using a theoretically grounded statistical test. We test our method by pre-training 1B models from scratch on 10B tokens with controlled benchmark contamination, and validate its effectiveness in detecting contamination on ARC-Easy, ARC-Challenge, and MMLU. Results show similar benchmark utility post-watermarking and successful contamination detection when models are contaminated enough to enhance performance, \eg $p$-val $=10^{-3}$ for +5$\%$ on ARC-Easy.
Authors: Ashley Lewis, Michael White, Jing Liu, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Kieran Parsons, Ye Wang
Abstract: The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in customer support is constrained by hallucination (generating false information) and the high cost of proprietary models. To address these challenges, we propose a retrieval-augmented question-answering (QA) pipeline and explore how to balance human input and automation. Using a dataset of questions about a Samsung Smart TV user manual, we demonstrate that synthetic data generated by LLMs outperforms crowdsourced data in reducing hallucination in finetuned models. We also compare self-training (fine-tuning models on their own outputs) and knowledge distillation (fine-tuning on stronger models' outputs, e.g., GPT-4o), and find that self-training achieves comparable hallucination reduction. We conjecture that this surprising finding can be attributed to increased exposure bias issues in the knowledge distillation case and support this conjecture with post hoc analysis. We also improve robustness to unanswerable questions and retrieval failures with contextualized "I don't know" responses. These findings show that scalable, cost-efficient QA systems can be built using synthetic data and self-training with open-source models, reducing reliance on proprietary tools or costly human annotations.
Authors: Xinliang Zhou, Chenyu Liu, Zhisheng Chen, Kun Wang, Yi Ding, Ziyu Jia, Qingsong Wen
Abstract: Brain foundation models (BFMs) have emerged as a transformative paradigm in computational neuroscience, offering a revolutionary framework for processing diverse neural signals across different brain-related tasks. These models leverage large-scale pre-training techniques, allowing them to generalize effectively across multiple scenarios, tasks, and modalities, thus overcoming the traditional limitations faced by conventional artificial intelligence (AI) approaches in understanding complex brain data. By tapping into the power of pretrained models, BFMs provide a means to process neural data in a more unified manner, enabling advanced analysis and discovery in the field of neuroscience. In this survey, we define BFMs for the first time, providing a clear and concise framework for constructing and utilizing these models in various applications. We also examine the key principles and methodologies for developing these models, shedding light on how they transform the landscape of neural signal processing. This survey presents a comprehensive review of the latest advancements in BFMs, covering the most recent methodological innovations, novel views of application areas, and challenges in the field. Notably, we highlight the future directions and key challenges that need to be addressed to fully realize the potential of BFMs. These challenges include improving the quality of brain data, optimizing model architecture for better generalization, increasing training efficiency, and enhancing the interpretability and robustness of BFMs in real-world applications.
Authors: Ziyu Wang (Xidian University), Tao Xue (Xidian University), Jingyuan Li (Xidian University), Haibin Zhang (Xidian University), Zhiqiang Xu (Jiangxi University of Science and Technology), Gaofei Xu (Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering), Zhen Wang (Northwestern Polytechnical University), Yanbin Wang (Shenzhen MSU-BIT University), Zhiquan Liu (Jinan University)
Abstract: Object detection in sonar images is crucial for underwater robotics applications including autonomous navigation and resource exploration. However, complex noise patterns inherent in sonar imagery, particularly speckle, reverberation, and non-Gaussian noise, significantly degrade detection accuracy. While denoising techniques have achieved remarkable success in optical imaging, their applicability to sonar data remains underexplored. This study presents the first systematic evaluation of nine state-of-the-art deep denoising models with distinct architectures, including Neighbor2Neighbor with varying noise parameters, Blind2Unblind with different noise configurations, and DSPNet, for sonar image preprocessing. We establish a rigorous benchmark using five publicly available sonar datasets and assess their impact on four representative detection algorithms: YOLOX, Faster R-CNN, SSD300, and SSDMobileNetV2. Our evaluation addresses three unresolved questions: first, how effectively optical denoising architectures transfer to sonar data; second, which model families perform best against sonar noise; and third, whether denoising truly improves detection accuracy in practical pipelines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that while denoising generally improves detection performance, effectiveness varies across methods due to their inherent biases toward specific noise types. To leverage complementary denoising effects, we propose a mutually-supervised multi-source denoising fusion framework where outputs from different denoisers mutually supervise each other at the pixel level, creating a synergistic framework that produces cleaner images.
Authors: Michal Spiegel, Michal \v{S}tef\'anik, Marek Kadl\v{c}\'ik, Josef Kucha\v{r}
Abstract: Can transformers learn to perform algorithmic tasks reliably across previously unseen input/output domains? While pre-trained language models show solid accuracy on benchmarks incorporating algorithmic reasoning, assessing the reliability of these results necessitates an ability to distinguish genuine algorithmic understanding from memorization. In this paper, we propose AttentionSpan, an algorithmic benchmark comprising five tasks of infinite input domains where we can disentangle and trace the correct, robust algorithm necessary for the task. This allows us to assess (i) models' ability to extrapolate to unseen types of inputs, including new lengths, value ranges or input domains, but also (ii)to assess the robustness of their learned mechanisms. By analyzing attention maps and performing targeted interventions, we show that attention mechanism directly causes failures in extrapolation. We make the implementation of all our tasks and interpretability methods publicly available at https://github.com/michalspiegel/AttentionSpan .
Authors: Nidhi Rastogi, Shirid Pant, Devang Dhanuka, Amulya Saxena, Pranjal Mairal
Abstract: Explainable AI (XAI) holds significant promise for enhancing the transparency and trustworthiness of AI-driven threat detection in Security Operations Centers (SOCs). However, identifying the appropriate level and format of explanation, particularly in environments that demand rapid decision-making under high-stakes conditions, remains a complex and underexplored challenge. To address this gap, we conducted a three-month mixed-methods study combining an online survey (N1=248) with in-depth interviews (N2=24) to examine (1) how SOC analysts conceptualize AI-generated explanations and (2) which types of explanations are perceived as actionable and trustworthy across different analyst roles. Our findings reveal that participants were consistently willing to accept XAI outputs, even in cases of lower predictive accuracy, when explanations were perceived as relevant and evidence-backed. Analysts repeatedly emphasized the importance of understanding the rationale behind AI decisions, expressing a strong preference for contextual depth over a mere presentation of outcomes on dashboards. Building on these insights, this study re-evaluates current explanation methods within security contexts and demonstrates that role-aware, context-rich XAI designs aligned with SOC workflows can substantially improve practical utility. Such tailored explainability enhances analyst comprehension, increases triage efficiency, and supports more confident responses to evolving threats.
Authors: Wenrui Cheng, Tiantian Zhu, Shunan Jing, Jian-Ping Mei, Mingjun Ma, Jiaobo Jin, Zhengqiu Weng
Abstract: Recently, Provenance-based Intrusion Detection Systems (PIDSes) have been widely used for endpoint threat analysis. These studies can be broadly categorized into rule-based detection systems and learning-based detection systems. Among these, due to the evolution of attack techniques, rules cannot dynamically model all the characteristics of attackers. As a result, such systems often face false negatives. Learning-based detection systems are further divided into supervised learning and anomaly detection. The scarcity of attack samples hinders the usability and effectiveness of supervised learning-based detection systems in practical applications. Anomaly-based detection systems face a massive false positive problem because they cannot distinguish between changes in normal behavior and real attack behavior. The alert results of detection systems are closely related to the manual labor costs of subsequent security analysts. To reduce manual analysis time, we propose OMNISEC, which applies large language models (LLMs) to anomaly-based intrusion detection systems via retrieval-augmented behavior prompting. OMNISEC can identify abnormal nodes and corresponding abnormal events by constructing suspicious nodes and rare paths. By combining two external knowledge bases, OMNISEC uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to enable the LLM to determine whether abnormal behavior is a real attack. Finally, OMNISEC can reconstruct the attack graph and restore the complete attack behavior chain of the attacker's intrusion. Experimental results show that OMNISEC outperforms state-of-the-art methods on public benchmark datasets.
Authors: Justin Chih-Yao Chen, Sukwon Yun, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Tianlong Chen, Mohit Bansal
Abstract: Combining existing pre-trained expert LLMs is a promising avenue for scalably tackling large-scale and diverse tasks. However, selecting task-level experts is often too coarse-grained, as heterogeneous tasks may require different expertise per instance. To enable adaptive instance-level mixing of pre-trained LLM experts, we propose Symbolic-MoE, a symbolic, text-based, and gradient-free Mixture-of-Experts framework. Symbolic-MoE takes a fine-grained approach to selection by emphasizing skills, e.g., algebra in math or molecular biology in biomedical reasoning. We propose a skill-based recruiting strategy that dynamically selects the most relevant set of expert LLMs for diverse reasoning tasks based on their strengths. Each selected expert then generates its own reasoning, resulting in k outputs from k experts, which are then synthesized into a final high-quality response by an aggregator chosen based on its ability to integrate diverse reasoning outputs. We show that Symbolic-MoE's instance-level expert selection improves performance by a large margin but -- when implemented naively -- can introduce a high computational overhead due to the need for constant model loading and offloading. To address this, we implement a batch strategy that groups instances based on their assigned experts, loading each model only once. This allows us to integrate 16 expert models on 1 GPU with a time cost comparable to or better than prior multi-agent baselines using 4 GPUs. Through extensive evaluations on diverse benchmarks (MMLU-Pro, GPQA, AIME, and MedMCQA), we show that Symbolic-MoE beats strong LLMs like GPT4o-mini, as well as multi-agent approaches, with an absolute avg. gain of 8.15% over the best multi-agent baseline. Moreover, Symbolic-MoE generalizes well to unseen tasks and removes the need for expensive multi-round discussions, outperforming discussion baselines with less computation.
Authors: Xirui Hu, Jiahao Wang, Hao Chen, Weizhan Zhang, Benqi Wang, Yikun Li, Haishun Nan
Abstract: Recent advances in text-to-image generation have driven interest in generating personalized human images that depict specific identities from reference images. Although existing methods achieve high-fidelity identity preservation, they are generally limited to single-ID scenarios and offer insufficient facial editability. We present DynamicID, a tuning-free framework that inherently facilitates both single-ID and multi-ID personalized generation with high fidelity and flexible facial editability. Our key innovations include: 1) Semantic-Activated Attention (SAA), which employs query-level activation gating to minimize disruption to the base model when injecting ID features and achieve multi-ID personalization without requiring multi-ID samples during training. 2) Identity-Motion Reconfigurator (IMR), which applies feature-space manipulation to effectively disentangle and reconfigure facial motion and identity features, supporting flexible facial editing. 3) a task-decoupled training paradigm that reduces data dependency, together with VariFace-10k, a curated dataset of 10k unique individuals, each represented by 35 distinct facial images. Experimental results demonstrate that DynamicID outperforms state-of-the-art methods in identity fidelity, facial editability, and multi-ID personalization capability. Our code will be released at https://github.com/ByteCat-bot/DynamicID.
Authors: Kwanyoung Kim, Byeongsu Sim
Abstract: Diffusion models have shown impressive results in generating high-quality conditional samples using guidance techniques such as Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG). However, existing methods often require additional training or neural function evaluations (NFEs), making them incompatible with guidance-distilled models. Also, they rely on heuristic approaches that need identifying target layers. In this work, we propose a novel and efficient method, termed PLADIS, which boosts pre-trained models (U-Net/Transformer) by leveraging sparse attention. Specifically, we extrapolate query-key correlations using softmax and its sparse counterpart in the cross-attention layer during inference, without requiring extra training or NFEs. By leveraging the noise robustness of sparse attention, our PLADIS unleashes the latent potential of text-to-image diffusion models, enabling them to excel in areas where they once struggled with newfound effectiveness. It integrates seamlessly with guidance techniques, including guidance-distilled models. Extensive experiments show notable improvements in text alignment and human preference, offering a highly efficient and universally applicable solution. See Our project page : https://cubeyoung.github.io/pladis-proejct/
Authors: Bowen Jin, Hansi Zeng, Zhenrui Yue, Jinsung Yoon, Sercan Arik, Dong Wang, Hamed Zamani, Jiawei Han
Abstract: Efficiently acquiring external knowledge and up-to-date information is essential for effective reasoning and text generation in large language models (LLMs). Prompting advanced LLMs with reasoning capabilities to use search engines during inference is often suboptimal, as the LLM might not fully possess the capability on how to interact optimally with the search engine. This paper introduces Search-R1, an extension of reinforcement learning (RL) for reasoning frameworks where the LLM learns to autonomously generate (multiple) search queries during step-by-step reasoning with real-time retrieval. Search-R1 optimizes LLM reasoning trajectories with multi-turn search interactions, leveraging retrieved token masking for stable RL training and a simple outcome-based reward function. Experiments on seven question-answering datasets show that Search-R1 improves performance by 41% (Qwen2.5-7B) and 20% (Qwen2.5-3B) over various RAG baselines under the same setting. This paper further provides empirical insights into RL optimization methods, LLM choices, and response length dynamics in retrieval-augmented reasoning. The code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/PeterGriffinJin/Search-R1.
Authors: Yijing Lin, Mengqi Huang, Shuhan Zhuang, Zhendong Mao
Abstract: Unifying diverse image generation tasks within a single framework remains a fundamental challenge in visual generation. While large language models (LLMs) achieve unification through task-agnostic data and generation, existing visual generation models fail to meet these principles. Current approaches either rely on per-task datasets and large-scale training or adapt pre-trained image models with task-specific modifications, limiting their generalizability. In this work, we explore video models as a foundation for unified image generation, leveraging their inherent ability to model temporal correlations. We introduce RealGeneral, a novel framework that reformulates image generation as a conditional frame prediction task, analogous to in-context learning in LLMs. To bridge the gap between video models and condition-image pairs, we propose (1) a Unified Conditional Embedding module for multi-modal alignment and (2) a Unified Stream DiT Block with decoupled adaptive LayerNorm and attention mask to mitigate cross-modal interference. RealGeneral demonstrates effectiveness in multiple important visual generation tasks, e.g., it achieves a 14.5% improvement in subject similarity for customized generation and a 10% enhancement in image quality for canny-to-image task. Project page: https://lyne1.github.io/realgeneral_web/; GitHub Link: https://github.com/Lyne1/RealGeneral
URLs: https://lyne1.github.io/realgeneral_web/;, https://github.com/Lyne1/RealGeneral
Authors: Xiaoming Zhao, Alexander G. Schwing
Abstract: Classifier-free guidance has become a staple for conditional generation with denoising diffusion models. However, a comprehensive understanding of classifier-free guidance is still missing. In this work, we carry out an empirical study to provide a fresh perspective on classifier-free guidance. Concretely, instead of solely focusing on classifier-free guidance, we trace back to the root, i.e., classifier guidance, pinpoint the key assumption for the derivation, and conduct a systematic study to understand the role of the classifier. We find that both classifier guidance and classifier-free guidance achieve conditional generation by pushing the denoising diffusion trajectories away from decision boundaries, i.e., areas where conditional information is usually entangled and is hard to learn. Based on this classifier-centric understanding, we propose a generic postprocessing step built upon flow-matching to shrink the gap between the learned distribution for a pre-trained denoising diffusion model and the real data distribution, majorly around the decision boundaries. Experiments on various datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Authors: Hai Zhao, Hongqiu Wu, Dongjie Yang, Anni Zou, Jiale Hong
Abstract: This paper reports the first brain-inspired large language model (BriLLM). This is a non-Transformer, non-GPT, non-traditional machine learning input-output controlled generative language model. The model is based on the Signal Fully-connected flowing (SiFu) definition on the directed graph in terms of the neural network, and has the interpretability of all nodes on the graph of the whole model, instead of the traditional machine learning model that only has limited interpretability at the input and output ends. In the language model scenario, the token is defined as a node in the graph. A randomly shaped or user-defined signal flow flows between nodes on the principle of "least resistance" along paths. The next token or node to be predicted or generated is the target of the signal flow. As a language model, BriLLM theoretically supports infinitely long $n$-gram models when the model size is independent of the input and predicted length of the model. The model's working signal flow provides the possibility of recall activation and innate multi-modal support similar to the cognitive patterns of the human brain. At present, we released the first BriLLM version in Chinese, with 4000 tokens, 32-dimensional node width, 16-token long sequence prediction ability, and language model prediction performance comparable to GPT-1. More computing power will help us explore the infinite possibilities depicted above.
Authors: Hanyang Zhao, Haoxian Chen, Yucheng Guo, Genta Indra Winata, Tingting Ou, Ziyu Huang, David D. Yao, Wenpin Tang
Abstract: We introduce Rich Preference Optimization (RPO), a novel pipeline that leverages rich feedback signals to improve the curation of preference pairs for fine-tuning text-to-image diffusion models. Traditional methods, like Diffusion-DPO, often rely solely on reward model labeling, which can be opaque, offer limited insights into the rationale behind preferences, and are prone to issues such as reward hacking or overfitting. In contrast, our approach begins with generating detailed critiques of synthesized images, from which we extract reliable and actionable image editing instructions. By implementing these instructions, we create refined images, resulting in synthetic, informative preference pairs that serve as enhanced tuning datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our pipeline and the resulting datasets in fine-tuning state-of-the-art diffusion models. Our code is available at https://github.com/Diffusion-RLHF/RPO.
Authors: Haiyang Guo, Fanhu Zeng, Fei Zhu, Wenzhuo Liu, Da-Han Wang, Jian Xu, Xu-Yao Zhang, Cheng-Lin Liu
Abstract: A vast amount of instruction tuning data is crucial for the impressive performance of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), but the associated computational costs and data collection demands during supervised fine-tuning make it impractical for most researchers. Federated learning (FL) has the potential to leverage all distributed data and training resources to reduce the overhead of joint training. However, most existing methods assume a fixed number of tasks, while in real-world scenarios, clients continuously encounter new knowledge and often struggle to retain old tasks due to memory constraints. In this work, we introduce the Federated Continual Instruction Tuning (FCIT) benchmark to model this real-world challenge. Our benchmark includes two realistic scenarios, encompassing four different settings and twelve carefully curated instruction tuning datasets. To address the challenges posed by FCIT, we propose dynamic knowledge organization to effectively integrate updates from different tasks during training and subspace selective activation to allocate task-specific output during inference. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly enhances model performance across varying levels of data heterogeneity and catastrophic forgetting. Code and dataset are released at https://github.com/Ghy0501/FCIT.
Authors: Michael Chertkov, Sungsoo Ahn, Hamidreza Behjoo
Abstract: In this manuscript, we introduce a novel Decision Flow (DF) framework for sampling decisions from a target distribution while incorporating additional guidance from a prior sampler. DF can be viewed as an AI-driven algorithmic reincarnation of the Markov Decision Process (MDP) approach in stochastic optimal control. It extends the continuous-space, continuous-time Path Integral Diffusion sampling technique of [Behjoo, Chertkov 2025] to discrete time and space, while also generalizing the Generative Flow Network (GFN) framework of [Bengio, et al 2021]. In its most basic form an explicit formulation that does not require Neural Networks (NNs), DF leverages the linear solvability of the underlying MDP [Todorov, 2007] to adjust the transition probabilities of the prior sampler. The resulting Markov process is expressed as a convolution of the reverse-time Green's function of the prior sampling with the target distribution. We illustrate the DF framework through an example of sampling from the Ising model -- compare DF to Metropolis-Hastings to quantify its efficiency, discuss potential NN-based extensions, and outline how DF can enhance guided sampling across various applications.
Authors: Rohit Kundu, Shan Jia, Vishal Mohanty, Athula Balachandran, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury
Abstract: Detecting DeepFakes has become a crucial research area as the widespread use of AI image generators enables the effortless creation of face-manipulated and fully synthetic content, yet existing methods are often limited to binary classification (real vs. fake) and lack interpretability. To address these challenges, we propose TruthLens, a novel and highly generalizable framework for DeepFake detection that not only determines whether an image is real or fake but also provides detailed textual reasoning for its predictions. Unlike traditional methods, TruthLens effectively handles both face-manipulated DeepFakes and fully AI-generated content while addressing fine-grained queries such as "Does the eyes/nose/mouth look real or fake?" The architecture of TruthLens combines the global contextual understanding of multimodal large language models like PaliGemma2 with the localized feature extraction capabilities of vision-only models like DINOv2. This hybrid design leverages the complementary strengths of both models, enabling robust detection of subtle manipulations while maintaining interpretability. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that TruthLens outperforms state-of-the-art methods in detection accuracy (by 2-14%) and explainability, in both in-domain and cross-data settings, generalizing effectively across traditional and emerging manipulation techniques.
Authors: Lukas Twist, Jie M. Zhang, Mark Harman, Don Syme, Joost Noppen, Helen Yannakoudakis, Detlef Nauck
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate code, influencing users' choices of libraries and programming languages in critical real-world projects. However, little is known about their systematic biases or preferences toward certain libraries and programming languages, which can significantly impact software development practices. To fill this gap, we perform the first empirical study of LLMs' preferences for libraries and programming languages when generating code, covering eight diverse LLMs. Our results reveal that LLMs exhibit a strong tendency to overuse widely adopted libraries such as NumPy; in up to 48% of cases, this usage is unnecessary and deviates from the ground-truth solutions. LLMs also exhibit a significant preference toward Python as their default language. For high-performance project initialisation tasks where Python is not the optimal language, it remains the dominant choice in 58% of cases, and Rust is not used a single time. These results indicate that LLMs may prioritise familiarity and popularity over suitability and task-specific optimality. This will introduce security vulnerabilities and technical debt, and limit exposure to newly developed, better-suited tools and languages. Understanding and addressing these biases is essential for the responsible integration of LLMs into software development workflows.
Authors: Yuwei Yin, EunJeong Hwang, Giuseppe Carenini
Abstract: Intent, typically clearly formulated and planned, functions as a cognitive framework for communication and problem-solving. This paper introduces the concept of Speaking with Intent (SWI) in large language models (LLMs), where the explicitly generated intent encapsulates the model's underlying intention and provides high-level planning to guide subsequent analysis and action. By emulating deliberate and purposeful thoughts in the human mind, SWI is hypothesized to enhance the reasoning capabilities and generation quality of LLMs. Extensive experiments on text summarization, multi-task question answering, and mathematical reasoning benchmarks consistently demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of Speaking with Intent over direct generation without explicit intent. Further analysis corroborates the generalizability of SWI under different experimental settings. Moreover, human evaluations verify the coherence, effectiveness, and interpretability of the intent produced by SWI. The promising results in enhancing LLMs with explicit intents pave a new avenue for boosting LLMs' generation and reasoning abilities with cognitive notions.
Authors: Feng Chen, Dror Ben-Zeev, Gillian Sparks, Arya Kadakia, Trevor Cohen
Abstract: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) remains underdiagnosed in clinical settings, presenting opportunities for automated detection to identify patients. This study evaluates natural language processing approaches for detecting PTSD from clinical interview transcripts. We compared general and mental health-specific transformer models (BERT/RoBERTa), embedding-based methods (SentenceBERT/LLaMA), and large language model prompting strategies (zero-shot/few-shot/chain-of-thought) using the DAIC-WOZ dataset. Domain-specific end-to-end models significantly outperformed general models (Mental-RoBERTa AUPRC=0.675+/-0.084 vs. RoBERTa-base 0.599+/-0.145). SentenceBERT embeddings with neural networks achieved the highest overall performance (AUPRC=0.758+/-0.128). Few-shot prompting using DSM-5 criteria yielded competitive results with two examples (AUPRC=0.737). Performance varied significantly across symptom severity and comorbidity status with depression, with higher accuracy for severe PTSD cases and patients with comorbid depression. Our findings highlight the potential of domain-adapted embeddings and LLMs for scalable screening while underscoring the need for improved detection of nuanced presentations and offering insights for developing clinically viable AI tools for PTSD assessment.
Authors: Sheridan Feucht, Eric Todd, Byron Wallace, David Bau
Abstract: Prior work on in-context copying has shown the existence of induction heads, which attend to and promote individual tokens during copying. In this work we discover a new type of induction head: concept-level induction heads, which copy entire lexical units instead of individual tokens. Concept induction heads learn to attend to the ends of multi-token words throughout training, working in parallel with token-level induction heads to copy meaningful text. We show that these heads are responsible for semantic tasks like word-level translation, whereas token induction heads are vital for tasks that can only be done verbatim (like copying nonsense tokens). These two "routes" operate independently: we show that ablation of token induction heads causes models to paraphrase where they would otherwise copy verbatim. By patching concept induction head outputs, we find that they contain language-independent word representations that mediate natural language translation, suggesting that LLMs represent abstract word meanings independent of language or form.
Authors: Akshara Prabhakar, Zuxin Liu, Ming Zhu, Jianguo Zhang, Tulika Awalgaonkar, Shiyu Wang, Zhiwei Liu, Haolin Chen, Thai Hoang, Juan Carlos Niebles, Shelby Heinecke, Weiran Yao, Huan Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong
Abstract: Training effective AI agents for multi-turn interactions requires high-quality data that captures realistic human-agent dynamics, yet such data is scarce and expensive to collect manually. We introduce APIGen-MT, a two-phase framework that generates verifiable and diverse multi-turn agent data. In the first phase, our agentic pipeline produces detailed task blueprints with ground-truth actions, leveraging a committee of LLM reviewers and iterative feedback loops. These blueprints are then transformed into complete interaction trajectories through simulated human-agent interplay. We train a family of models -- the xLAM-2-fc-r series with sizes ranging from 1B to 70B parameters. Our models outperform frontier models such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 on $\tau$-bench and BFCL benchmarks, with the smaller models surpassing their larger counterparts, particularly in multi-turn settings, while maintaining superior consistency across multiple trials. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our verified blueprint-to-details approach yields high-quality training data, enabling the development of more reliable, efficient, and capable agents. We open-source 5K synthetic data trajectories and the trained xLAM-2-fc-r models to advance research in AI agents. Models at https://huggingface.co/collections/Salesforce/xlam-2-67ef5be12949d8dcdae354c4; Dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Salesforce/APIGen-MT-5k and Website at https://apigen-mt.github.io
URLs: https://huggingface.co/collections/Salesforce/xlam-2-67ef5be12949d8dcdae354c4;, https://huggingface.co/datasets/Salesforce/APIGen-MT-5k, https://apigen-mt.github.io
Authors: Mikael Makonnen, Moritz Vandenhirtz, Sonia Laguna, Julia E Vogt
Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) aim to enhance interpretability by structuring predictions around human-understandable concepts. However, unintended information leakage, where predictive signals bypass the concept bottleneck, compromises their transparency. This paper introduces an information-theoretic measure to quantify leakage in CBMs, capturing the extent to which concept embeddings encode additional, unintended information beyond the specified concepts. We validate the measure through controlled synthetic experiments, demonstrating its effectiveness in detecting leakage trends across various configurations. Our findings highlight that feature and concept dimensionality significantly influence leakage, and that classifier choice impacts measurement stability, with XGBoost emerging as the most reliable estimator. Additionally, preliminary investigations indicate that the measure exhibits the anticipated behavior when applied to soft joint CBMs, suggesting its reliability in leakage quantification beyond fully synthetic settings. While this study rigorously evaluates the measure in controlled synthetic experiments, future work can extend its application to real-world datasets.
Authors: Zaid Khan, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Archiki Prasad, Jaemin Cho, Mohit Bansal
Abstract: Scientists often infer abstract procedures from specific instances of problems and use the abstractions to generate new, related instances. For example, programs encoding the formal rules and properties of a system have been useful in fields ranging from reinforcement learning (procedural environments) to physics (simulation engines). These programs can be seen as functions which execute to different outputs based on their parameterizations (e.g., gridworld configuration or initial physical conditions). We introduce the term EFA (Executable Functional Abstraction) to denote such programs for math problems. EFA-like constructs have been shown to be useful for mathematical reasoning as problem generators for stress-testing models. However, prior work has been limited to automatically constructing abstractions for grade-school math (whose simple rules are easy to encode in programs), while generating EFAs for advanced math has thus far required human engineering. We explore the automatic construction of EFAs for advanced mathematics problems by developing EFAGen, which operationalizes the task of automatically inferring an EFA for a given seed problem and solution as a program synthesis task. We first formalize the properties of any valid EFA as executable unit tests. Using execution feedback from the unit tests, we search over candidate programs sampled from a LLM to find EFA programs that are faithful to the generalized problem and solution class underlying the seed problem. We then apply the tests as a reward signal, training LLMs to become better writers of EFAs. We show that EFAs inferred by EFAGen are faithful to the seed problems, produce learnable problem variations, and that EFAGen can infer EFAs across diverse sources of competition-level math problems. Finally, we show uses of model-written EFAs e.g., finding harder/easier problem variants, as well as data generation.
Authors: Ganesh Sundaram, Jonas Ulmen, Daniel G\"orges
Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) deliver outstanding performance, but their complexity often prohibits deployment in resource-constrained settings. Comprehensive structured pruning frameworks based on parameter dependency analysis reduce model size with specific regard to computational performance. When applying them to Multi-Component Neural Architectures (MCNAs), they risk network integrity by removing large parameter groups. We introduce a component-aware pruning strategy, extending dependency graphs to isolate individual components and inter-component flows. This creates smaller, targeted pruning groups that conserve functional integrity. Demonstrated effectively on a control task, our approach achieves greater sparsity and reduced performance degradation, opening a path for optimizing complex, multi-component DNNs efficiently.
Authors: Mengyuan Li, Changhong Fu, Ziyu Lu, Zijie Zhang, Haobo Zuo, Liangliang Yao
Abstract: Thermal imaging can greatly enhance the application of intelligent unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in challenging environments. However, the inherent low resolution of thermal sensors leads to insufficient details and blurred boundaries. Super-resolution (SR) offers a promising solution to address this issue, while most existing SR methods are designed for fixed-scale SR. They are computationally expensive and inflexible in practical applications. To address above issues, this work proposes a novel any-scale thermal SR method (AnyTSR) for UAV within a single model. Specifically, a new image encoder is proposed to explicitly assign specific feature code to enable more accurate and flexible representation. Additionally, by effectively embedding coordinate offset information into the local feature ensemble, an innovative any-scale upsampler is proposed to better understand spatial relationships and reduce artifacts. Moreover, a novel dataset (UAV-TSR), covering both land and water scenes, is constructed for thermal SR tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all scaling factors as well as generates more accurate and detailed high-resolution images. The code is located at https://github.com/vision4robotics/AnyTSR.
Authors: Harry Mead, Clarissa Costen, Bruno Lacerda, Nick Hawes
Abstract: When optimising for conditional value at risk (CVaR) using policy gradients (PG), current methods rely on discarding a large proportion of trajectories, resulting in poor sample efficiency. We propose a reformulation of the CVaR optimisation problem by capping the total return of trajectories used in training, rather than simply discarding 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 problem results in consistently improved performance compared to baselines. We have made all our code available here: https://github.com/HarryMJMead/cvar-return-capping.
Authors: Tengchao Zhang, Yonglin Tian, Fei Lin, Jun Huang, Patrik P. S\"uli, Qinghua Ni, Rui Qin, Xiao Wang, Fei-Yue Wang
Abstract: With the increasing demand for heterogeneous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms to perform complex tasks in urban environments, system design now faces major challenges, including efficient semantic understanding, flexible task planning, and the ability to dynamically adjust coordination strategies in response to evolving environmental conditions and continuously changing task requirements. To address the limitations of existing methods, this paper proposes CoordField, a coordination field agent system for coordinating heterogeneous drone swarms in complex urban scenarios. In this system, large language models (LLMs) is responsible for interpreting high-level human instructions and converting them into executable commands for the UAV swarms, such as patrol and target tracking. Subsequently, a Coordination field mechanism is proposed to guide UAV motion and task selection, enabling decentralized and adaptive allocation of emergent tasks. A total of 50 rounds of comparative testing were conducted across different models in a 2D simulation space to evaluate their performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system achieves superior performance in terms of task coverage, response time, and adaptability to dynamic changes.
Authors: Wenchuan Wang, Mengqi Huang, Yijing Tu, Zhendong Mao
Abstract: Customized text-to-video generation with pre-trained large-scale models has recently garnered significant attention by focusing on identity and motion consistency. Existing works typically follow the isolated customized paradigm, where the subject identity or motion dynamics are customized exclusively. However, this paradigm completely ignores the intrinsic mutual constraints and synergistic interdependencies between identity and motion, resulting in identity-motion conflicts throughout the generation process that systematically degrade. To address this, we introduce DualReal, a novel framework that employs adaptive joint training to construct interdependencies between dimensions collaboratively. Specifically, DualReal is composed of two units: (1) Dual-aware Adaptation dynamically switches the training step (i.e., identity or motion), learns the current information guided by the frozen dimension prior, and employs a regularization strategy to avoid knowledge leakage; (2) StageBlender Controller leverages the denoising stages and Diffusion Transformer depths to guide different dimensions with adaptive granularity, avoiding conflicts at various stages and ultimately achieving lossless fusion of identity and motion patterns. We constructed a more comprehensive evaluation benchmark than existing methods. The experimental results show that DualReal improves CLIP-I and DINO-I metrics by 21.7% and 31.8% on average, and achieves top performance on nearly all motion metrics. Page: https://wenc-k.github.io/dualreal-customization
Authors: Benjamin Raphael Ernhofer, Daniil Prokhorov, Jannica Langner, Dominik Bollmann
Abstract: Modern automotive infotainment systems require intelligent and adaptive solutions to handle frequent User Interface (UI) updates and diverse design variations. We introduce a vision-language framework for understanding and interacting with automotive infotainment systems, enabling seamless adaptation across different UI designs. To further support research in this field, we release AutomotiveUI-Bench-4K, an open-source dataset of 998 images with 4,208 annotations. Additionally, we present a synthetic data pipeline to generate training data. We fine-tune a Molmo-7B-based model using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRa) and incorporating reasoning generated by our pipeline, along with visual grounding and evaluation capabilities. The fine-tuned Evaluative Large Action Model (ELAM) achieves strong performance on AutomotiveUI-Bench-4K (model and dataset are available on Hugging Face) and demonstrating strong cross-domain generalization, including a +5.6% improvement on ScreenSpot over the baseline model. Notably, our approach achieves 80.8% average accuracy on ScreenSpot, closely matching or even surpassing specialized models for desktop, mobile, and web, such as ShowUI, despite being trained for the infotainment domain. This research investigates how data collection and subsequent fine-tuning can lead to AI-driven progress within automotive UI understanding and interaction. The applied method is cost-efficient and fine-tuned models can be deployed on consumer-grade GPUs.
Authors: Jessica Foo, Pradyumna Shyama Prasad, Shaun Khoo
Abstract: While the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have progressed significantly, their use in high-stakes applications have been limited due to risks of hallucination. One key approach in reducing hallucination is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), but even in such setups, LLMs may still hallucinate when presented with questions outside of the knowledge base. Such behavior is unacceptable in high-stake applications where LLMs are expected to abstain from answering queries it does not have sufficient context on. In this work, we present a novel methodology for systematically evaluating out-of-knowledge base (OOKB) robustness of LLMs (whether LLMs know or do not know) in the RAG setting, without the need for manual annotation of gold standard answers. We implement our methodology in knowornot, an open-source library that enables users to develop their own customized evaluation data and pipelines for OOKB robustness. knowornot comprises four main features. Firstly, it provides a unified, high-level API that streamlines the process of setting up and running robustness benchmarks. Secondly, its modular architecture emphasizes extensibility and flexibility, allowing users to easily integrate their own LLM clients and RAG settings. Thirdly, its rigorous data modeling design ensures experiment reproducibility, reliability and traceability. Lastly, it implements a comprehensive suite of tools for users to customize their pipelines. We demonstrate the utility of knowornot by developing a challenging benchmark, PolicyBench, which spans four Question-Answer (QA) chatbots on government policies, and analyze its OOKB robustness. The source code of knowornot is available https://github.com/govtech-responsibleai/KnowOrNot.
Authors: Zhuoyu Cheng, Kohei Hatano, Eiji Takimoto
Abstract: We consider a bandit optimization problem for nonconvex and non-smooth functions, where in each trial the loss function is the sum of a linear function and a small but arbitrary perturbation chosen after observing the player's choice. We give both expected and high probability regret bounds for the problem. Our result also implies an improved high-probability regret bound for the bandit linear optimization, a special case with no perturbation. We also give a lower bound on the expected regret.
Authors: Rui Yann, Tianshuo Zhang, Xianglei Xing
Abstract: We present SemiOccam, an image recognition network that leverages semi-supervised learning in a highly efficient manner. Existing works often rely on complex training techniques and architectures, requiring hundreds of GPU hours for training, while their generalization ability with extremely limited labeled data remains to be improved. To address these limitations, we construct a hierarchical mixture density classification mechanism by optimizing mutual information between feature representations and target classes, compressing redundant information while retaining crucial discriminative components. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three commonly used datasets, with accuracy exceeding 95% on two of them using only 4 labeled samples per class, and its simple architecture keeps training time at the minute level. Notably, this paper reveals a long-overlooked data leakage issue in the STL-10 dataset for semi-supervised learning and removes duplicates to ensure reliable experimental results. We release the deduplicated CleanSTL-10 dataset to facilitate fair and reproducible research. Code available at https://github.com/Shu1L0n9/SemiOccam.
Authors: Subhendu Khatuya, Shashwat Naidu, Saptarshi Ghosh, Pawan Goyal, Niloy Ganguly
Abstract: The explosion of textual data has made manual document classification increasingly challenging. To address this, we introduce a robust, efficient domain-agnostic generative model framework for multi-label text classification. Instead of treating labels as mere atomic symbols, our approach utilizes predefined label descriptions and is trained to generate these descriptions based on the input text. During inference, the generated descriptions are matched to the pre-defined labels using a finetuned sentence transformer. We integrate this with a dual-objective loss function, combining cross-entropy loss and cosine similarity of the generated sentences with the predefined target descriptions, ensuring both semantic alignment and accuracy. Our proposed model LAGAMC stands out for its parameter efficiency and versatility across diverse datasets, making it well-suited for practical applications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model by achieving new state-of-the-art performances across all evaluated datasets, surpassing several strong baselines. We achieve improvements of 13.94% in Micro-F1 and 24.85% in Macro-F1 compared to the closest baseline across all datasets.
Authors: Kevin Galim, Ethan Ewer, Wonjun Kang, Minjae Lee, Hyung Il Koo, Kangwook Lee
Abstract: Optimizing inference for long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasingly important due to the quadratic compute and linear memory complexity of Transformers. Existing approximation methods, such as key-value (KV) cache dropping, sparse attention, and prompt compression, typically rely on rough predictions of token or KV pair importance. We propose a novel framework for approximate LLM inference that leverages small draft models to more accurately predict the importance of tokens and KV pairs. Specifically, we introduce two instantiations of our proposed framework: (i) SpecKV, the first method that leverages a draft output to accurately assess the importance of each KV pair for more effective KV cache dropping, and (ii) SpecPC, which uses the draft model's attention activations to identify and discard unimportant prompt tokens. We motivate our methods with theoretical and empirical analyses, and show a strong correlation between the attention patterns of draft and target models. Extensive experiments on long-context benchmarks show that our methods consistently achieve higher accuracy than existing baselines, while preserving the same improvements in memory usage, latency, and throughput. Our code is available at https://github.com/furiosa-ai/draft-based-approx-llm.
Authors: Yanlong Chen, Mattia Orlandi, Pierangelo Maria Rapa, Simone Benatti, Luca Benini, Yawei Li
Abstract: Physiological signals are often corrupted by motion artifacts, baseline drift, and other low-SNR disturbances, which pose significant challenges for analysis. Additionally, these signals exhibit strong non-stationarity, with sharp peaks and abrupt changes that evolve continuously, making them difficult to represent using traditional time-domain or filtering methods. To address these issues, a novel wavelet-based approach for physiological signal analysis is presented, aiming to capture multi-scale time-frequency features in various physiological signals. Leveraging this technique, two large-scale pretrained models specific to EMG and ECG are introduced for the first time, achieving superior performance and setting new baselines in downstream tasks. Additionally, a unified multi-modal framework is constructed by integrating pretrained EEG model, where each modality is guided through its dedicated branch and fused via learnable weighted fusion. This design effectively addresses challenges such as low signal-to-noise ratio, high inter-subject variability, and device mismatch, outperforming existing methods on multi-modal tasks. The proposed wavelet-based architecture lays a solid foundation for analysis of diverse physiological signals, while the multi-modal design points to next-generation physiological signal processing with potential impact on wearable health monitoring, clinical diagnostics, and broader biomedical applications.
Authors: Felix H\"arer
Abstract: Recent advancements in LLMs indicate potential for novel applications, as evidenced by the reasoning capabilities in the latest OpenAI and DeepSeek models. To apply these models to domain-specific applications beyond text generation, LLM-based multi-agent systems can be utilized to solve complex tasks, particularly by combining reasoning techniques, code generation, and software execution across multiple, potentially specialized LLMs. However, while many evaluations are performed on LLMs, reasoning techniques, and applications individually, their joint specification and combined application are not well understood. Defined specifications for multi-agent LLM systems are required to explore their potential and suitability for specific applications, allowing for systematic evaluations of LLMs, reasoning techniques, and related aspects. This paper reports the results of exploratory research on (1.) multi-agent specification by introducing an agent schema language and (2.) the execution and evaluation of the specifications through a multi-agent system architecture and prototype. The specification language, system architecture, and prototype are first presented in this work, building on an LLM system from prior research. Test cases involving cybersecurity tasks indicate the feasibility of the architecture and evaluation approach. As a result, evaluations could be demonstrated for question answering, server security, and network security tasks completed correctly by agents with LLMs from OpenAI and DeepSeek.
Authors: Jubin Abhishek Soni, Amit Anand, Rajesh Kumar Pandey, Aniket Abhishek Soni
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly advanced large language models (LLMs) by grounding their outputs in external tools and knowledge sources. However, existing RAG systems are typically constrained to static, single-turn interactions with fixed toolsets, making them ill-suited for dynamic domains such as healthcare and smart homes, where user intent, available tools, and contextual factors evolve over time. We present Dynamic Context Tuning (DCT), a lightweight framework that extends RAG to support multi-turn dialogue and evolving tool environments without requiring retraining. DCT integrates an attention-based context cache to track relevant past information, LoRA-based retrieval to dynamically select domain-specific tools, and efficient context compression to maintain inputs within LLM context limits. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that DCT improves plan accuracy by 14% and reduces hallucinations by 37%, while matching GPT-4 performance at significantly lower cost. Furthermore, DCT generalizes to previously unseen tools, enabling scalable and adaptable AI assistants across a wide range of dynamic environments.
Authors: Bo-Cheng Chiu, Jen-Jee Chen, Yu-Chee Tseng, Feng-Chi Chen
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been extended to the video domain, enabling sophisticated video-language understanding. However, existing Video LLMs often exhibit limitations in fine-grained temporal reasoning, restricting their ability to precisely attribute responses to specific video moments, especially under constrained supervision. We introduce DaMO, a data-efficient Video LLM explicitly designed for accurate temporal reasoning and multimodal understanding. At its core, the proposed Temporal-aware Fuseformer employs a hierarchical dual-stream architecture that progressively captures temporal dynamics within each modality and effectively fuses complementary visual and audio information. To further enhance computational efficiency, DaMO integrates a global residual that reduces spatial redundancy while preserving essential semantic details. We train DaMO via a structured four-stage progressive training paradigm, incrementally equipping the model with multimodal alignment, semantic grounding, and temporal reasoning capabilities. This work also contributes multiple datasets augmented from existing ones with LLM-generated temporally grounded QA pairs for tasks requiring temporal supervision. Comprehensive experiments on temporal grounding and video QA benchmarks demonstrate that DaMO consistently surpasses prior methods, particularly in tasks demanding precise temporal alignment and reasoning. Our work establishes a promising direction for data-efficient video-language modeling.
Authors: Asghar Ghorbani, Hanieh Fattahi
Abstract: Limited infrastructure, scarce educational resources, and unreliable internet access often hinder physics and photonics education in underdeveloped regions. These barriers create deep inequities in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education. This article explores how Small Language Models (SLMs)-compact, AI-powered tools that can run offline on low-power devices, offering a scalable solution. By acting as virtual tutors, enabling native-language instruction, and supporting interactive learning, SLMs can help address the shortage of trained educators and laboratory access. By narrowing the digital divide through targeted investment in AI technologies, SLMs present a scalable and inclusive solution to advance STEM education and foster scientific empowerment in marginalized communities.
Authors: Omer Luxembourg, Haim Permuter, Eliya Nachmani
Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) promise fast, non-autoregressive text generation, yet existing samplers, which pick tokens to unmask based on model confidence, ignore interactions when unmasking multiple positions in parallel and effectively reduce to slow, autoregressive behavior. We propose the Dilated Unmasking Scheduler (DUS), an inference-only, planner-model-free method that partitions sequence positions into non-adjacent dilated groups and unmasked them in parallel so as to minimize an upper bound on joint entropy gain at each denoising step. By explicitly trading off the number of network calls against generation quality, DUS recovers most of the performance lost under traditional parallel unmasking strategies. Across math (GSM8K, MATH500), code (HumanEval, MBPP) and general-knowledge benchmarks (BBH, MMLU-Pro), DUS outperforms confidence-based planners, without modifying the underlying denoiser, and reveals the true speed-quality frontier of MDLMs.
Authors: Seung-Wook Kim, Seongyeol Kim, Jiah Kim, Seowon Ji, Se-Ho Lee
Abstract: Federated learning (FL) often suffers from performance degradation due to key challenges such as data heterogeneity and communication constraints. To address these limitations, we present a novel FL framework called FedWSQ, which integrates weight standardization (WS) and the proposed distribution-aware non-uniform quantization (DANUQ). WS enhances FL performance by filtering out biased components in local updates during training, thereby improving the robustness of the model against data heterogeneity and unstable client participation. In addition, DANUQ minimizes quantization errors by leveraging the statistical properties of local model updates. As a result, FedWSQ significantly reduces communication overhead while maintaining superior model accuracy. Extensive experiments on FL benchmark datasets demonstrate that FedWSQ consistently outperforms existing FL methods across various challenging FL settings, including extreme data heterogeneity and ultra-low-bit communication scenarios.
Authors: Junze Hu, Xiangyu Jin, Yizhe Zeng, Yuling Liu, Yunpeng Li, Dan Du, Kaiyu Xie, Hongsong Zhu
Abstract: We introduce QLPro, a vulnerability detection framework that systematically integrates LLMs and static analysis tools to enable comprehensive vulnerability detection across entire open-source projects.We constructed a new dataset, JavaTest, comprising 10 open-source projects from GitHub with 62 confirmed vulnerabilities. CodeQL, a state-of-the-art static analysis tool, detected only 24 of these vulnerabilities while QLPro detected 41. Furthermore, QLPro discovered 6 previously unknown vulnerabilities, 2 of which have been confirmed as 0-days.
Authors: Tanusree Sharma, Yu-Yun Tseng, Lotus Zhang, Ayae Ide, Kelly Avery Mack, Leah Findlater, Danna Gurari, Yang Wang
Abstract: Blind and low vision (BLV) individuals use Generative AI (GenAI) tools to interpret and manage visual content in their daily lives. While such tools can enhance the accessibility of visual content and so enable greater user independence, they also introduce complex challenges around visual privacy. In this paper, we investigate the current practices and future design preferences of blind and low vision individuals through an interview study with 21 participants. Our findings reveal a range of current practices with GenAI that balance privacy, efficiency, and emotional agency, with users accounting for privacy risks across six key scenarios, such as self-presentation, indoor/outdoor spatial privacy, social sharing, and handling professional content. Our findings reveal design preferences, including on-device processing, zero-retention guarantees, sensitive content redaction, privacy-aware appearance indicators, and multimodal tactile mirrored interaction methods. We conclude with actionable design recommendations to support user-centered visual privacy through GenAI, expanding the notion of privacy and responsible handling of others data.
Authors: Yiming Yang, Yueru Luo, Bingkun He, Hongbin Lin, Suzhong Fu, Chao Zheng, Zhipeng Cao, Erlong Li, Chao Yan, Shuguang Cui, Zhen Li
Abstract: Lane segment topology reasoning constructs a comprehensive road network by capturing the topological relationships between lane segments and their semantic types. This enables end-to-end autonomous driving systems to perform road-dependent maneuvers such as turning and lane changing. However, the limitations in consistent positional embedding and temporal multiple attribute learning in existing methods hinder accurate roadnet reconstruction. To address these issues, we propose TopoStreamer, an end-to-end temporal perception model for lane segment topology reasoning. Specifically, TopoStreamer introduces three key improvements: streaming attribute constraints, dynamic lane boundary positional encoding, and lane segment denoising. The streaming attribute constraints enforce temporal consistency in both centerline and boundary coordinates, along with their classifications. Meanwhile, dynamic lane boundary positional encoding enhances the learning of up-to-date positional information within queries, while lane segment denoising helps capture diverse lane segment patterns, ultimately improving model performance. Additionally, we assess the accuracy of existing models using a lane boundary classification metric, which serves as a crucial measure for lane-changing scenarios in autonomous driving. On the OpenLane-V2 dataset, TopoStreamer demonstrates significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods, achieving substantial performance gains of +3.0% mAP in lane segment perception and +1.7% OLS in centerline perception tasks.
Authors: Yuqi Li, Chuanguang Yang, Hansheng Zeng, Zeyu Dong, Zhulin An, Yongjun Xu, Yingli Tian, Hao Wu
Abstract: Spatiotemporal forecasting tasks, such as traffic flow, combustion dynamics, and weather forecasting, often require complex models that suffer from low training efficiency and high memory consumption. This paper proposes a lightweight framework, Spectral Decoupled Knowledge Distillation (termed SDKD), which transfers the multi-scale spatiotemporal representations from a complex teacher model to a more efficient lightweight student network. The teacher model follows an encoder-latent evolution-decoder architecture, where its latent evolution module decouples high-frequency details and low-frequency trends using convolution and Transformer (global low-frequency modeler). However, the multi-layer convolution and deconvolution structures result in slow training and high memory usage. To address these issues, we propose a frequency-aligned knowledge distillation strategy, which extracts multi-scale spectral features from the teacher's latent space, including both high and low frequency components, to guide the lightweight student model in capturing both local fine-grained variations and global evolution patterns. Experimental results show that SDKD significantly improves performance, achieving reductions of up to 81.3% in MSE and in MAE 52.3% on the Navier-Stokes equation dataset. The framework effectively captures both high-frequency variations and long-term trends while reducing computational complexity. Our codes are available at https://github.com/itsnotacie/SDKD
Authors: Yiming Li, Shuo Shao, Yu He, Junfeng Guo, Tianwei Zhang, Zhan Qin, Pin-Yu Chen, Michael Backes, Philip Torr, Dacheng Tao, Kui Ren
Abstract: The (generative) artificial intelligence (AI) era has profoundly reshaped the meaning and value of data. No longer confined to static content, data now permeates every stage of the AI lifecycle from the training samples that shape model parameters to the prompts and outputs that drive real-world model deployment. This shift renders traditional notions of data protection insufficient, while the boundaries of what needs safeguarding remain poorly defined. Failing to safeguard data in AI systems can inflict societal and individual, underscoring the urgent need to clearly delineate the scope of and rigorously enforce data protection. In this perspective, we propose a four-level taxonomy, including non-usability, privacy preservation, traceability, and deletability, that captures the diverse protection needs arising in modern (generative) AI models and systems. Our framework offers a structured understanding of the trade-offs between data utility and control, spanning the entire AI pipeline, including training datasets, model weights, system prompts, and AI-generated content. We analyze representative technical approaches at each level and reveal regulatory blind spots that leave critical assets exposed. By offering a structured lens to align future AI technologies and governance with trustworthy data practices, we underscore the urgency of rethinking data protection for modern AI techniques and provide timely guidance for developers, researchers, and regulators alike.
Authors: Guoming Long, Jingzhi Gong, Hui Fang, Tao Chen
Abstract: The recent advancement of artificial intelligence, especially machine learning (ML), has significantly impacted software engineering research, including bug report analysis. ML aims to automate the understanding, extraction, and correlation of information from bug reports. Despite its growing importance, there has been no comprehensive review in this area. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review covering 1,825 papers, selecting 204 for detailed analysis. We derive seven key findings: 1) Extensive use of CNN, LSTM, and $k$NN for bug report analysis, with advanced models like BERT underutilized due to their complexity. 2) Word2Vec and TF-IDF are popular for feature representation, with a rise in deep learning approaches. 3) Stop word removal is the most common preprocessing, with structural methods rising after 2020. 4) Eclipse and Mozilla are the most frequently evaluated software projects. 5) Bug categorization is the most common task, followed by bug localization and severity prediction. 6) There is increasing attention on specific bugs like non-functional and performance bugs. 7) Common evaluation metrics are F1-score, Recall, Precision, and Accuracy, with $k$-fold cross-validation preferred for model evaluation. 8) Many studies lack robust statistical tests. We also identify six promising future research directions to provide useful insights for practitioners.
Authors: Giwon Lee, Wooseong Jeong, Daehee Park, Jaewoo Jeong, Kuk-Jin Yoon
Abstract: Motion planning is a crucial component of autonomous robot driving. While various trajectory datasets exist, effectively utilizing them for a target domain remains challenging due to differences in agent interactions and environmental characteristics. Conventional approaches, such as domain adaptation or ensemble learning, leverage multiple source datasets but suffer from domain imbalance, catastrophic forgetting, and high computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose Interaction-Merged Motion Planning (IMMP), a novel approach that leverages parameter checkpoints trained on different domains during adaptation to the target domain. IMMP follows a two-step process: pre-merging to capture agent behaviors and interactions, sufficiently extracting diverse information from the source domain, followed by merging to construct an adaptable model that efficiently transfers diverse interactions to the target domain. Our method is evaluated on various planning benchmarks and models, demonstrating superior performance compared to conventional approaches.
Authors: Yuyi Zhang, Peirong Zhang, Zhenhua Yang, Pengyu Yan, Yongxin Shi, Pengwei Liu, Fengjun Guo, Lianwen Jin
Abstract: Historical documents represent an invaluable cultural heritage, yet have undergone significant degradation over time through tears, water erosion, and oxidation. Existing Historical Document Restoration (HDR) methods primarily focus on single modality or limited-size restoration, failing to meet practical needs. To fill this gap, we present a full-page HDR dataset (FPHDR) and a novel automated HDR solution (AutoHDR). Specifically, FPHDR comprises 1,633 real and 6,543 synthetic images with character-level and line-level locations, as well as character annotations in different damage grades. AutoHDR mimics historians' restoration workflows through a three-stage approach: OCR-assisted damage localization, vision-language context text prediction, and patch autoregressive appearance restoration. The modular architecture of AutoHDR enables seamless human-machine collaboration, allowing for flexible intervention and optimization at each restoration stage. Experiments demonstrate AutoHDR's remarkable performance in HDR. When processing severely damaged documents, our method improves OCR accuracy from 46.83% to 84.05%, with further enhancement to 94.25% through human-machine collaboration. We believe this work represents a significant advancement in automated historical document restoration and contributes substantially to cultural heritage preservation. The model and dataset are available at https://github.com/SCUT-DLVCLab/AutoHDR.
Authors: Alexandre Symeonidis-Herzig, \"Ozge Mercano\u{g}lu Sincan, Richard Bowden
Abstract: Realistic, high-fidelity 3D facial animations are crucial for expressive avatar systems in human-computer interaction and accessibility. Although prior methods show promising quality, their reliance on the mesh domain limits their ability to fully leverage the rapid visual innovations seen in 2D computer vision and graphics. We propose VisualSpeaker, a novel method that bridges this gap using photorealistic differentiable rendering, supervised by visual speech recognition, for improved 3D facial animation. Our contribution is a perceptual lip-reading loss, derived by passing photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting avatar renders through a pre-trained Visual Automatic Speech Recognition model during training. Evaluation on the MEAD dataset demonstrates that VisualSpeaker improves both the standard Lip Vertex Error metric by 56.1% and the perceptual quality of the generated animations, while retaining the controllability of mesh-driven animation. This perceptual focus naturally supports accurate mouthings, essential cues that disambiguate similar manual signs in sign language avatars.
Authors: Koki Yamane, Yunhan Li, Masashi Konosu, Koki Inami, Junji Oaki, Sho Sakaino, Toshiaki Tsuji
Abstract: In recent years, the advancement of imitation learning has led to increased interest in teleoperating low-cost manipulators to collect demonstration data. However, most existing systems rely on unilateral control, which only transmits target position values. While this approach is easy to implement and suitable for slow, non-contact tasks, it struggles with fast or contact-rich operations due to the absence of force feedback. This work demonstrates that fast teleoperation with force feedback is feasible even with force-sensorless, low-cost manipulators by leveraging 4-channel bilateral control. Based on accurately identified manipulator dynamics, our method integrates nonlinear terms compensation, velocity and external force estimation, and variable gain corresponding to inertial variation. Furthermore, using data collected by 4-channel bilateral control, we show that incorporating force information into both the input and output of learned policies improves performance in imitation learning. These results highlight the practical effectiveness of our system for high-fidelity teleoperation and data collection on affordable hardware.
Authors: Wooseong Jeong, Kuk-Jin Yoon
Abstract: Multi-Task Learning (MTL) enables multiple tasks to be learned within a shared network, but differences in objectives across tasks can cause negative transfer, where the learning of one task degrades another task's performance. While pre-trained transformers significantly improve MTL performance, their fixed network capacity and rigid structure limit adaptability. Previous dynamic network architectures attempt to address this but are inefficient as they directly convert shared parameters into task-specific ones. We propose Dynamic Token Modulation and Expansion (DTME-MTL), a framework applicable to any transformer-based MTL architecture. DTME-MTL enhances adaptability and reduces overfitting by identifying gradient conflicts in token space and applying adaptive solutions based on conflict type. Unlike prior methods that mitigate negative transfer by duplicating network parameters, DTME-MTL operates entirely in token space, enabling efficient adaptation without excessive parameter growth. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DTME-MTL consistently improves multi-task performance with minimal computational overhead, offering a scalable and effective solution for enhancing transformer-based MTL models.
Authors: Wooseong Jeong, Jegyeong Cho, Youngho Yoon, Kuk-Jin Yoon
Abstract: Generalizing neural networks to unseen target domains is a significant challenge in real-world deployments. Test-time training (TTT) addresses this by using an auxiliary self-supervised task to reduce the domain gap caused by distribution shifts between the source and target. However, we find that when models are required to perform multiple tasks under domain shifts, conventional TTT methods suffer from unsynchronized task behavior, where the adaptation steps needed for optimal performance in one task may not align with the requirements of other tasks. To address this, we propose a novel TTT approach called Synchronizing Tasks for Test-time Training (S4T), which enables the concurrent handling of multiple tasks. The core idea behind S4T is that predicting task relations across domain shifts is key to synchronizing tasks during test time. To validate our approach, we apply S4T to conventional multi-task benchmarks, integrating it with traditional TTT protocols. Our empirical results show that S4T outperforms state-of-the-art TTT methods across various benchmarks.
Authors: Changli Wang, Fang Yin, Jiafeng Liu, Rui Wu
Abstract: Visual and semantic concepts are often structured in a hierarchical manner. For instance, textual concept `cat' entails all images of cats. A recent study, MERU, successfully adapts multimodal learning techniques from Euclidean space to hyperbolic space, effectively capturing the visual-semantic hierarchy. However, a critical question remains: how can we more efficiently train a model to capture and leverage this hierarchy? In this paper, we propose the Hyperbolic Masked Image and Distillation Network (HMID-Net), a novel and efficient method that integrates Masked Image Modeling (MIM) and knowledge distillation techniques within hyperbolic space. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to leverage MIM and knowledge distillation in hyperbolic space to train highly efficient models. In addition, we introduce a distillation loss function specifically designed to facilitate effective knowledge transfer in hyperbolic space. Our experiments demonstrate that MIM and knowledge distillation techniques in hyperbolic space can achieve the same remarkable success as in Euclidean space. Extensive evaluations show that our method excels across a wide range of downstream tasks, significantly outperforming existing models like MERU and CLIP in both image classification and retrieval.
Authors: Saadat Behzadi, Danial Sharifrazi, Bita Mesbahzadeh, Javad Hassannataj Joloudari, Roohallah Alizadehsani
Abstract: Objectives: Timely and accurate detection of colorectal polyps plays a crucial role in diagnosing and preventing colorectal cancer, a major cause of mortality worldwide. This study introduces a new, lightweight, and efficient framework for polyp detection that combines the Local Outlier Factor (LOF) algorithm for filtering noisy data with the YOLO-v11n deep learning model. Study design: An experimental study leveraging deep learning and outlier removal techniques across multiple public datasets. Methods: The proposed approach was tested on five diverse and publicly available datasets: CVC-ColonDB, CVC-ClinicDB, Kvasir-SEG, ETIS, and EndoScene. Since these datasets originally lacked bounding box annotations, we converted their segmentation masks into suitable detection labels. To enhance the robustness and generalizability of our model, we apply 5-fold cross-validation and remove anomalous samples using the LOF method configured with 30 neighbors and a contamination ratio of 5%. Cleaned data are then fed into YOLO-v11n, a fast and resource-efficient object detection architecture optimized for real-time applications. We train the model using a combination of modern augmentation strategies to improve detection accuracy under diverse conditions. Results: Our approach significantly improves polyp localization performance, achieving a precision of 95.83%, recall of 91.85%, F1-score of 93.48%, mAP@0.5 of 96.48%, and mAP@0.5:0.95 of 77.75%. Compared to previous YOLO-based methods, our model demonstrates enhanced accuracy and efficiency. Conclusions: These results suggest that the proposed method is well-suited for real-time colonoscopy support in clinical settings. Overall, the study underscores how crucial data preprocessing and model efficiency are when designing effective AI systems for medical imaging.
Authors: Hayeon Kim, Ji Ha Jang, Se Young Chun
Abstract: Recent advances in 3D neural representations and instance-level editing models have enabled the efficient creation of high-quality 3D content. However, achieving precise local 3D edits remains challenging, especially for Gaussian Splatting, due to inconsistent multi-view 2D part segmentations and inherently ambiguous nature of Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss. To address these limitations, we propose RoMaP, a novel local 3D Gaussian editing framework that enables precise and drastic part-level modifications. First, we introduce a robust 3D mask generation module with our 3D-Geometry Aware Label Prediction (3D-GALP), which uses spherical harmonics (SH) coefficients to model view-dependent label variations and soft-label property, yielding accurate and consistent part segmentations across viewpoints. Second, we propose a regularized SDS loss that combines the standard SDS loss with additional regularizers. In particular, an L1 anchor loss is introduced via our Scheduled Latent Mixing and Part (SLaMP) editing method, which generates high-quality part-edited 2D images and confines modifications only to the target region while preserving contextual coherence. Additional regularizers, such as Gaussian prior removal, further improve flexibility by allowing changes beyond the existing context, and robust 3D masking prevents unintended edits. Experimental results demonstrate that our RoMaP achieves state-of-the-art local 3D editing on both reconstructed and generated Gaussian scenes and objects qualitatively and quantitatively, making it possible for more robust and flexible part-level 3D Gaussian editing. Code is available at https://janeyeon.github.io/romap.
Authors: Seth Ockerman, Amal Gueroudji, Tanwi Mallick, Yixuan He, Line Pouchard, Robert Ross, Shivaram Venkataraman
Abstract: Spatiotemporal graph neural networks (ST-GNNs) are powerful tools for modeling spatial and temporal data dependencies. However, their applications have been limited primarily to small-scale datasets because of memory constraints. While distributed training offers a solution, current frameworks lack support for spatiotemporal models and overlook the properties of spatiotemporal data. Informed by a scaling study on a large-scale workload, we present PyTorch Geometric Temporal Index (PGT-I), an extension to PyTorch Geometric Temporal that integrates distributed data parallel training and two novel strategies: index-batching and distributed-index-batching. Our index techniques exploit spatiotemporal structure to construct snapshots dynamically at runtime, significantly reducing memory overhead, while distributed-index-batching extends this approach by enabling scalable processing across multiple GPUs. Our techniques enable the first-ever training of an ST-GNN on the entire PeMS dataset without graph partitioning, reducing peak memory usage by up to 89% and achieving up to a 11.78x speedup over standard DDP with 128 GPUs.
Authors: Saptarshi Mitra, Rachid Karami, Haocheng Xu, Sitao Huang, Hyoukjun Kwon
Abstract: The demand for machine intelligence capable of processing continuous, long-context inputs on local devices is growing rapidly. However, the quadratic complexity and memory requirements of traditional Transformer architectures make them inefficient and often unusable for these tasks. This has spurred a paradigm shift towards new architectures like State Space Models (SSMs) and hybrids, which promise near-linear scaling. While most current research focuses on the accuracy and theoretical throughput of these models, a systematic performance characterization on practical consumer hardware is critically needed to guide system-level optimization and unlock new applications. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive, comparative benchmarking of carefully selected Transformer, SSM, and hybrid models specifically for long-context inference on consumer and embedded GPUs. Our analysis reveals that SSMs are not only viable but superior for this domain, capable of processing sequences up to 220K tokens on a 24GB consumer GPU-approximately 4x longer than comparable Transformers. While Transformers may be up to 1.8x faster at short sequences, SSMs demonstrate a dramatic performance inversion, becoming up to 4x faster at very long contexts (~57K tokens). Our operator-level analysis reveals that custom, hardware-aware SSM kernels dominate the inference runtime, accounting for over 55% of latency on edge platforms, identifying them as a primary target for future hardware acceleration. We also provide detailed, device-specific characterization results to guide system co-design for the edge. To foster further research, we will open-source our characterization framework.
Authors: Slimane Larabi
Abstract: Although existing models can interact with humans and provide satisfactory responses, they lack the ability to act autonomously or engage in independent reasoning. Furthermore, input data in these models is typically provided as explicit queries, even when some sensory data is already acquired. In addition, AI agents, which are computational entities designed to perform tasks and make decisions autonomously based on their programming, data inputs, and learned knowledge, have shown significant progress. However, they struggle with integrating knowledge across multiple domains, unlike humans. Mental imagery plays a fundamental role in the brain's thinking process, which involves performing tasks based on internal multisensory data, planned actions, needs, and reasoning capabilities. In this paper, we investigate how to integrate mental imagery into a machine thinking framework and how this could be beneficial in initiating the thinking process. Our proposed machine thinking framework integrates a Cognitive thinking unit supported by three auxiliary units: the Input Data Unit, the Needs Unit, and the Mental Imagery Unit. Within this framework, data is represented as natural language sentences or drawn sketches, serving both informative and decision-making purposes. We conducted validation tests for this framework, and the results are presented and discussed.
Authors: Dianxin Luan, John Thompson
Abstract: Channel estimation is crucial in wireless communications. However, in many papers neural networks are frequently tested by training and testing on one example channel or similar channels. This is because data-driven methods often degrade on new data which they are not trained on, as they cannot extrapolate their training knowledge. This is despite the fact physical channels are often assumed to be time-variant. However, due to the low latency requirements and limited computing resources, neural networks may not have enough time and computing resources to execute online training to fine-tune the parameters. This motivates us to design offline-trained neural networks that can perform robustly over wireless channels, but without any actual channel information being known at design time. In this paper, we propose design criteria to generate synthetic training datasets for neural networks, which guarantee that after training the resulting networks achieve a certain mean squared error (MSE) on new and previously unseen channels. Therefore, trained neural networks require no prior channel information or parameters update for real-world implementations. Based on the proposed design criteria, we further propose a benchmark design which ensures intelligent operation for different channel profiles. To demonstrate general applicability, we use neural networks with different levels of complexity to show that the generalization achieved appears to be independent of neural network architecture. From simulations, neural networks achieve robust generalization to wireless channels with both fixed channel profiles and variable delay spreads.
Authors: Jing Ding, Trung Diep
Abstract: This paper presents the Photonic FabricTM and the Photonic Fabric ApplianceTM (PFA), a photonic-enabled switch and memory subsystem that delivers low latency, high bandwidth, and low per-bit energy. By integrating high-bandwidth HBM3E memory, an on-module photonic switch, and external DDR5 in a 2.5D electro-optical system-in-package, the PFA offers up to 32 TB of shared memory alongside 115 Tbps of all-to-all digital switching. The Photonic FabricTM enables distributed AI training and inference to execute parallelism strategies more efficiently. The Photonic Fabric removes the silicon beachfront constraint that limits the fixed memory-to-compute ratio observed in virtually all current XPU accelerator designs. Replacing a local HBM stack on an XPU with a chiplet that connects to the Photonic Fabric increases its memory capacity and correspondingly its memory bandwidth by offering a flexible path to scaling well beyond the limitations of on-package HBM alone. We introduce CelestiSim, a lightweight analytical simulator validated on NVIDIA H100 and H200 systems. It is used to evaluate the performance of LLM reference and energy savings on PFA, without any significant change to the GPU core design. With the PFA, the simulation results show that up to 3.66x throughput and 1.40x latency improvements in LLM inference at 405B parameters, up to 7.04x throughput and 1.41x latency improvements at 1T parameters, and 60-90% energy savings in data movement for heavy collective operations in all LLM training scenarios. While these results are shown for NVIDIA GPUs, they can be applied similarly to other AI accelerator designs (XPUs) that share the same fundamental limitation of fixed memory to compute.