Authors: Ziyang Xiao, Jingrong Xie, Lilin Xu, Shisi Guan, Jingyan Zhu, Xiongwei Han, Xiaojin Fu, WingYin Yu, Han Wu, Wei Shi, Qingcan Kang, Jiahui Duan, Tao Zhong, Mingxuan Yuan, Jia Zeng, Yuan Wang, Gang Chen, Dongxiang Zhang
Abstract: By virtue of its great utility in solving real-world problems, optimization modeling has been widely employed for optimal decision-making across various sectors, but it requires substantial expertise from operations research professionals. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), new opportunities have emerged to automate the procedure of mathematical modeling. This survey presents a comprehensive and timely review of recent advancements that cover the entire technical stack, including data synthesis and fine-tuning for the base model, inference frameworks, benchmark datasets, and performance evaluation. In addition, we conducted an in-depth analysis on the quality of benchmark datasets, which was found to have a surprisingly high error rate. We cleaned the datasets and constructed a new leaderboard with fair performance evaluation in terms of base LLM model and datasets. We also build an online portal that integrates resources of cleaned datasets, code and paper repository to benefit the community. Finally, we identify limitations in current methodologies and outline future research opportunities.
Authors: Sattvik Sahai, Prasoon Goyal, Michael Johnston, Anna Gottardi, Yao Lu, Lucy Hu, Luke Dai, Shaohua Liu, Samyuth Sagi, Hangjie Shi, Desheng Zhang, Lavina Vaz, Leslie Ball, Maureen Murray, Rahul Gupta, Shankar Ananthakrishna
Abstract: AI systems for software development are rapidly gaining prominence, yet significant challenges remain in ensuring their safety. To address this, Amazon launched the Trusted AI track of the Amazon Nova AI Challenge, a global competition among 10 university teams to drive advances in secure AI. In the challenge, five teams focus on developing automated red teaming bots, while the other five create safe AI assistants. This challenge provides teams with a unique platform to evaluate automated red-teaming and safety alignment methods through head-to-head adversarial tournaments where red teams have multi-turn conversations with the competing AI coding assistants to test their safety alignment. Along with this, the challenge provides teams with a feed of high quality annotated data to fuel iterative improvement. Throughout the challenge, teams developed state-of-the-art techniques, introducing novel approaches in reasoning-based safety alignment, robust model guardrails, multi-turn jail-breaking, and efficient probing of large language models (LLMs). To support these efforts, the Amazon Nova AI Challenge team made substantial scientific and engineering investments, including building a custom baseline coding specialist model for the challenge from scratch, developing a tournament orchestration service, and creating an evaluation harness. This paper outlines the advancements made by university teams and the Amazon Nova AI Challenge team in addressing the safety challenges of AI for software development, highlighting this collaborative effort to raise the bar for AI safety.
Authors: Alexandru-Andrei Avram, Adrian Groza, Alexandru Lecu
Abstract: The large spread of disinformation across digital platforms creates significant challenges to information integrity. This paper presents a multi-agent system that uses relation extraction to detect disinformation in news articles, focusing on titles and short text snippets. The proposed Agentic AI system combines four agents: (i) a machine learning agent (logistic regression), (ii) a Wikipedia knowledge check agent (which relies on named entity recognition), (iii) a coherence detection agent (using LLM prompt engineering), and (iv) a web-scraped data analyzer that extracts relational triplets for fact checking. The system is orchestrated via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), offering shared context and live learning across components. Results demonstrate that the multi-agent ensemble achieves 95.3% accuracy with an F1 score of 0.964, significantly outperforming individual agents and traditional approaches. The weighted aggregation method, mathematically derived from individual agent misclassification rates, proves superior to algorithmic threshold optimization. The modular architecture makes the system easily scalable, while also maintaining details of the decision processes.
Authors: Hana Derouiche, Zaki Brahmi, Haithem Mazeni
Abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has ushered in a transformative paradigm in artificial intelligence, Agentic AI, where intelligent agents exhibit goal-directed autonomy, contextual reasoning, and dynamic multi-agent coordination. This paper provides a systematic review and comparative analysis of leading Agentic AI frameworks, including CrewAI, LangGraph, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, Agno, Google ADK, and MetaGPT, evaluating their architectural principles, communication mechanisms, memory management, safety guardrails, and alignment with service-oriented computing paradigms. Furthermore, we identify key limitations, emerging trends, and open challenges in the field. To address the issue of agent communication, we conduct an in-depth analysis of protocols such as the Contract Net Protocol (CNP), Agent-to-Agent (A2A), Agent Network Protocol (ANP), and Agora. Our findings not only establish a foundational taxonomy for Agentic AI systems but also propose future research directions to enhance scalability, robustness, and interoperability. This work serves as a comprehensive reference for researchers and practitioners working to advance the next generation of autonomous AI systems.
Authors: Doaa Allabadi, Kyle Bradbury, Jordan M. Malof
Abstract: We focus here on Deep Research Agents (DRAs), which are systems that can take a natural language prompt from a user, and then autonomously search for, and utilize, internet-based content to address the prompt. Recent DRAs have demonstrated impressive capabilities on public benchmarks however, recent research largely involves proprietary closed-source systems. At the time of this work, we only found one open-source DRA, termed Open Deep Research (ODR). In this work we adapt the challenging recent BrowseComp benchmark to compare ODR to existing proprietary systems. We propose BrowseComp-Small (BC-Small), comprising a subset of BrowseComp, as a more computationally-tractable DRA benchmark for academic labs. We benchmark ODR and two other proprietary systems on BC-Small: one system from Anthropic and one system from Google. We find that all three systems achieve 0% accuracy on the test set of 60 questions. We introduce three strategic improvements to ODR, resulting in the ODR+ model, which achieves a state-of-the-art 10% success rate on BC-Small among both closed-source and open-source systems. We report ablation studies indicating that all three of our improvements contributed to the success of ODR+.
Authors: Bin Hong, Jiayu Liu, Zhenya Huang, Kai Zhang, Mengdi Zhang
Abstract: Recent advances in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated strong performance on complex tasks through long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, their lengthy outputs increase computational costs and may lead to overthinking, raising challenges in balancing reasoning effectiveness and efficiency. Current methods for efficient reasoning often compromise reasoning quality or require extensive resources. This paper investigates efficient methods to reduce the generation length of LRMs. We analyze generation path distributions and filter generated trajectories through difficulty estimation. Subsequently, we analyze the convergence behaviors of the objectives of various preference optimization methods under a Bradley-Terry loss based framework. Based on the analysis, we propose Length Controlled Preference Optimization (LCPO) that directly balances the implicit reward related to NLL loss. LCPO can effectively learn length preference with limited data and training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces the average output length by over 50\% across multiple benchmarks while maintaining the reasoning performance. Our work highlights the potential for computationally efficient approaches in guiding LRMs toward efficient reasoning.
Authors: Stepan Kulibaba, Artem Dzhalilov, Roman Pakhomov, Oleg Svidchenko, Alexander Gasnikov, Aleksei Shpilman
Abstract: Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based AutoML systems demonstrate impressive capabilities but face significant limitations such as constrained exploration strategies and a severe execution bottleneck. Exploration is hindered by one-shot methods lacking diversity and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) approaches that fail to recombine strong partial solutions. The execution bottleneck arises from lengthy code validation cycles that stifle iterative refinement. To overcome these challenges, we introduce KompeteAI, a novel AutoML framework with dynamic solution space exploration. Unlike previous MCTS methods that treat ideas in isolation, KompeteAI introduces a merging stage that composes top candidates. We further expand the hypothesis space by integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), sourcing ideas from Kaggle notebooks and arXiv papers to incorporate real-world strategies. KompeteAI also addresses the execution bottleneck via a predictive scoring model and an accelerated debugging method, assessing solution potential using early stage metrics to avoid costly full-code execution. This approach accelerates pipeline evaluation 6.9 times. KompeteAI outperforms leading methods (e.g., RD-agent, AIDE, and Ml-Master) by an average of 3\% on the primary AutoML benchmark, MLE-Bench. Additionally, we propose Kompete-bench to address limitations in MLE-Bench, where KompeteAI also achieves state-of-the-art results
Authors: Mark Zilberman
Abstract: This work demonstrates how the concept of the entropic potential of events -- a parameter quantifying the influence of discrete events on the expected future entropy of a system -- can enhance uncertainty quantification, decision-making, and interpretability in artificial intelligence (AI). Building on its original formulation in physics, the framework is adapted for AI by introducing an event-centric measure that captures how actions, observations, or other discrete occurrences impact uncertainty at future time horizons. Both the original and AI-adjusted definitions of entropic potential are formalized, with the latter emphasizing conditional expectations to account for counterfactual scenarios. Applications are explored in policy evaluation, intrinsic reward design, explainable AI, and anomaly detection, highlighting the metric's potential to unify and strengthen uncertainty modeling in intelligent systems. Conceptual examples illustrate its use in reinforcement learning, Bayesian inference, and anomaly detection, while practical considerations for computation in complex AI models are discussed. The entropic potential framework offers a theoretically grounded, interpretable, and versatile approach to managing uncertainty in AI, bridging principles from thermodynamics, information theory, and machine learning.
Authors: Jingde Cheng
Abstract: Recently, with the application progress of AIGC tools based on large language models (LLMs), led by ChatGPT, many AI experts and more non-professionals are trumpeting the "understanding ability" and "reasoning ability" of the LLMs. The present author considers that the so-called "understanding ability" and "reasoning ability" of LLMs are just illusions of those people who with vague concepts. In fact, the LLMs can never have the true understanding ability and true reasoning ability. This paper intents to explain that, because the essential limitations of their working principle, the LLMs can never have the ability of true correct reasoning.
Authors: Chuhuai Yue, Chengqi Dong, Yinan Gao, Hang He, Jiajun Chai, Guojun Yin, Wei Lin
Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently achieved significant progress in complex reasoning tasks, aided by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. However, LRMs often suffer from overthinking, expending excessive computation on simple problems and reducing efficiency. Existing efficient reasoning methods typically require accurate task assessment to preset token budgets or select reasoning modes, which limits their flexibility and reliability. In this work, we revisit the essence of overthinking and identify that encouraging effective steps while penalizing ineffective ones is key to its solution. To this end, we propose a novel rule-based verifiable stepwise reward mechanism (VSRM), which assigns rewards based on the performance of intermediate states in the reasoning trajectory. This approach is intuitive and naturally fits the step-by-step nature of reasoning tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on standard mathematical reasoning benchmarks, including AIME24 and AIME25, by integrating VSRM with PPO and Reinforce++. Results show that our method achieves substantial output length reduction while maintaining original reasoning performance, striking an optimal balance between efficiency and accuracy. Further analysis of overthinking frequency and pass@k score before and after training demonstrates that our approach in deed effectively suppresses ineffective steps and encourages effective reasoning, fundamentally alleviating the overthinking problem. All code will be released upon acceptance.
Authors: Chenliang Zhang, Lin Wang, Yuanyuan Lu, Yusheng Qi, Kexin Wang, Peixu Hou, Wenshi Chen
Abstract: This paper describes the solutions of the Dianping-Trust-Safety team for the META CRAG-MM challenge. The challenge requires building a comprehensive retrieval-augmented generation system capable for multi-modal multi-turn question answering. The competition consists of three tasks: (1) answering questions using structured data retrieved from an image-based mock knowledge graph, (2) synthesizing information from both knowledge graphs and web search results, and (3) handling multi-turn conversations that require context understanding and information aggregation from multiple sources. For Task 1, our solution is based on the vision large language model, enhanced by supervised fine-tuning with knowledge distilled from GPT-4.1. We further applied curriculum learning strategies to guide reinforcement learning, resulting in improved answer accuracy and reduced hallucination. For Task 2 and Task 3, we additionally leveraged web search APIs to incorporate external knowledge, enabling the system to better handle complex queries and multi-turn conversations. Our approach achieved 1st place in Task 1 with a significant lead of 52.38\%, and 3rd place in Task 3, demonstrating the effectiveness of the integration of curriculum learning with reinforcement learning in our training pipeline.
Authors: Chak Lam Shek, Guangyao Shi, Pratap Tokekar
Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) requires coordinated and stable policy updates among interacting agents. Heterogeneous-Agent Trust Region Policy Optimization (HATRPO) enforces per-agent trust region constraints using Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to stabilize training. However, assigning each agent the same KL threshold can lead to slow and locally optimal updates, especially in heterogeneous settings. To address this limitation, we propose two approaches for allocating the KL divergence threshold across agents: HATRPO-W, a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker-based (KKT-based) method that optimizes threshold assignment under global KL constraints, and HATRPO-G, a greedy algorithm that prioritizes agents based on improvement-to-divergence ratio. By connecting sequential policy optimization with constrained threshold scheduling, our approach enables more flexible and effective learning in heterogeneous-agent settings. Experimental results demonstrate that our methods significantly boost the performance of HATRPO, achieving faster convergence and higher final rewards across diverse MARL benchmarks. Specifically, HATRPO-W and HATRPO-G achieve comparable improvements in final performance, each exceeding 22.5%. Notably, HATRPO-W also demonstrates more stable learning dynamics, as reflected by its lower variance.
Authors: Mengtao Zhou, Sifan Wu, Huan Zhang, Qi Sima, Bang Liu
Abstract: We investigate the capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) for imaginative reasoning--the proactive construction, testing, and revision of hypotheses in information-sparse environments. Existing benchmarks, often static or focused on social deduction, fail to capture the dynamic, exploratory nature of this reasoning process. To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive research framework based on the classic "Turtle Soup" game, integrating a benchmark, an agent, and an evaluation protocol. We present TurtleSoup-Bench, the first large-scale, bilingual, interactive benchmark for imaginative reasoning, comprising 800 turtle soup puzzles sourced from both the Internet and expert authors. We also propose Mosaic-Agent, a novel agent designed to assess LLMs' performance in this setting. To evaluate reasoning quality, we develop a multi-dimensional protocol measuring logical consistency, detail completion, and conclusion alignment. Experiments with leading LLMs reveal clear capability limits, common failure patterns, and a significant performance gap compared to humans. Our work offers new insights into LLMs' imaginative reasoning and establishes a foundation for future research on exploratory agent behavior.
Authors: Yaoze Zhang, Rong Wu, Pinlong Cai, Xiaoman Wang, Guohang Yan, Song Mao, Ding Wang, Botian Shi
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) plays a crucial role in grounding Large Language Models by leveraging external knowledge, whereas the effectiveness is often compromised by the retrieval of contextually flawed or incomplete information. To address this, knowledge graph-based RAG methods have evolved towards hierarchical structures, organizing knowledge into multi-level summaries. However, these approaches still suffer from two critical, unaddressed challenges: high-level conceptual summaries exist as disconnected ``semantic islands'', lacking the explicit relations needed for cross-community reasoning; and the retrieval process itself remains structurally unaware, often degenerating into an inefficient flat search that fails to exploit the graph's rich topology. To overcome these limitations, we introduce LeanRAG, a framework that features a deeply collaborative design combining knowledge aggregation and retrieval strategies. LeanRAG first employs a novel semantic aggregation algorithm that forms entity clusters and constructs new explicit relations among aggregation-level summaries, creating a fully navigable semantic network. Then, a bottom-up, structure-guided retrieval strategy anchors queries to the most relevant fine-grained entities and then systematically traverses the graph's semantic pathways to gather concise yet contextually comprehensive evidence sets. The LeanRAG can mitigate the substantial overhead associated with path retrieval on graphs and minimizes redundant information retrieval. Extensive experiments on four challenging QA benchmarks with different domains demonstrate that LeanRAG significantly outperforming existing methods in response quality while reducing 46\% retrieval redundancy. Code is available at: https://github.com/RaZzzyz/LeanRAG
Authors: Yan Ting Chok, Soyon Park, Seungheun Baek, Hajung Kim, Junhyun Lee, Jaewoo Kang
Abstract: Medication recommendation is a crucial task for assisting physicians in making timely decisions from longitudinal patient medical records. However, real-world EHR data present significant challenges due to the presence of rarely observed medical entities and incomplete records that may not fully capture the clinical ground truth. While data-driven models trained on longitudinal Electronic Health Records often achieve strong empirical performance, they struggle to generalize under missing or novel conditions, largely due to their reliance on observed co-occurrence patterns. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Ontology and Network Refinement for Robust Medication Recommendation (HiRef), a unified framework that combines two complementary structures: (i) the hierarchical semantics encoded in curated medical ontologies, and (ii) refined co-occurrence patterns derived from real-world EHRs. We embed ontology entities in hyperbolic space, which naturally captures tree-like relationships and enables knowledge transfer through shared ancestors, thereby improving generalizability to unseen codes. To further improve robustness, we introduce a prior-guided sparse regularization scheme that refines the EHR co-occurrence graph by suppressing spurious edges while preserving clinically meaningful associations. Our model achieves strong performance on EHR benchmarks (MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV) and maintains high accuracy under simulated unseen-code settings. Extensive experiments with comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate HiRef's resilience to unseen medical codes, supported by in-depth analyses of the learned sparsified graph structure and medical code embeddings.
Authors: Yi Dong, Yusuke Muraoka, Scott Shi, Yi Zhang
Abstract: We present MM-Food-100K, a public 100,000-sample multimodal food intelligence dataset with verifiable provenance. It is a curated approximately 10% open subset of an original 1.2 million, quality-accepted corpus of food images annotated for a wide range of information (such as dish name, region of creation). The corpus was collected over six weeks from over 87,000 contributors using the Codatta contribution model, which combines community sourcing with configurable AI-assisted quality checks; each submission is linked to a wallet address in a secure off-chain ledger for traceability, with a full on-chain protocol on the roadmap. We describe the schema, pipeline, and QA, and validate utility by fine-tuning large vision-language models (ChatGPT 5, ChatGPT OSS, Qwen-Max) on image-based nutrition prediction. Fine-tuning yields consistent gains over out-of-box baselines across standard metrics; we report results primarily on the MM-Food-100K subset. We release MM-Food-100K for publicly free access and retain approximately 90% for potential commercial access with revenue sharing to contributors.
Authors: Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Peiqing Yang, Yanzi Wang, Xiaowan Wang, Enhui Wan, Sitong Zhou, Guanting Dong, Yuchen Zeng, Yida Xu, Jie Wang, Chong Sun, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, but still struggle with complex mathematical reasoning. Existing research primarily focuses on dataset construction and method optimization, often overlooking two critical aspects: comprehensive knowledge-driven design and model-centric data space modeling. In this paper, we introduce We-Math 2.0, a unified system that integrates a structured mathematical knowledge system, model-centric data space modeling, and a reinforcement learning (RL)-based training paradigm to comprehensively enhance the mathematical reasoning abilities of MLLMs. The key contributions of We-Math 2.0 are fourfold: (1) MathBook Knowledge System: We construct a five-level hierarchical system encompassing 491 knowledge points and 1,819 fundamental principles. (2) MathBook-Standard & Pro: We develop MathBook-Standard, a dataset that ensures broad conceptual coverage and flexibility through dual expansion. Additionally, we define a three-dimensional difficulty space and generate 7 progressive variants per problem to build MathBook-Pro, a challenging dataset for robust training. (3) MathBook-RL: We propose a two-stage RL framework comprising: (i) Cold-Start Fine-tuning, which aligns the model with knowledge-oriented chain-of-thought reasoning; and (ii) Progressive Alignment RL, leveraging average-reward learning and dynamic data scheduling to achieve progressive alignment across difficulty levels. (4) MathBookEval: We introduce a comprehensive benchmark covering all 491 knowledge points with diverse reasoning step distributions. Experimental results show that MathBook-RL performs competitively with existing baselines on four widely-used benchmarks and achieves strong results on MathBookEval, suggesting promising generalization in mathematical reasoning.
Authors: Xueli Pan, Victor de Boer, Jacco van Ossenbruggen
Abstract: Question answering over Scholarly Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) remains a challenging task due to the complexity of scholarly content and the intricate structure of these graphs. Large Language Model (LLM) approaches could be used to translate natural language questions (NLQs) into SPARQL queries; however, these LLM-based approaches struggle with SPARQL query generation due to limited exposure to SKG-specific content and the underlying schema. We identified two main types of errors in the LLM-generated SPARQL queries: (i) structural inconsistencies, such as missing or redundant triples in the queries, and (ii) semantic inaccuracies, where incorrect entities or properties are shown in the queries despite a correct query structure. To address these issues, we propose FIRESPARQL, a modular framework that supports fine-tuned LLMs as a core component, with optional context provided via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and a SPARQL query correction layer. We evaluate the framework on the SciQA Benchmark using various configurations (zero-shot, zero-shot with RAG, one-shot, fine-tuning, and fine-tuning with RAG) and compare the performance with baseline and state-of-the-art approaches. We measure query accuracy using BLEU and ROUGE metrics, and query result accuracy using relaxed exact match(RelaxedEM), with respect to the gold standards containing the NLQs, SPARQL queries, and the results of the queries. Experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuning achieves the highest overall performance, reaching 0.90 ROUGE-L for query accuracy and 0.85 RelaxedEM for result accuracy on the test set.
Authors: Ivan Khai Ze Lim, Ningyi Liao, Yiming Yang, Gerald Wei Yong Yip, Siqiang Luo
Abstract: Contemporary spatial services such as online maps predominantly rely on user queries for location searches. However, the user experience is limited when performing complex tasks, such as searching for a group of locations simultaneously. In this study, we examine the extended scenario known as Spatial Exemplar Query (SEQ), where multiple relevant locations are jointly searched based on user-specified examples. We introduce SEQ-GPT, a spatial query system powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) towards more versatile SEQ search using natural language. The language capabilities of LLMs enable unique interactive operations in the SEQ process, including asking users to clarify query details and dynamically adjusting the search based on user feedback. We also propose a tailored LLM adaptation pipeline that aligns natural language with structured spatial data and queries through dialogue synthesis and multi-model cooperation. SEQ-GPT offers an end-to-end demonstration for broadening spatial search with realistic data and application scenarios.
Authors: Shicheng Xu, Xin Huang, Zihao Wei, Liang Pang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
Abstract: Full-process clinical diagnosis in the real world encompasses the entire diagnostic workflow that begins with only an ambiguous chief complaint. While artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), is transforming clinical diagnosis, its role remains largely as an assistant to physicians. This AI-assisted working pattern makes AI can only answer specific medical questions at certain parts within the diagnostic process, but lack the ability to drive the entire diagnostic process starting from an ambiguous complaint, which still relies heavily on human physicians. This gap limits AI's ability to fully reduce physicians' workload and enhance diagnostic efficiency. To address this, we propose a paradigm shift that reverses the relationship between physicians and AI: repositioning AI as the primary director, with physicians serving as its assistants. So we present DxDirector-7B, an LLM endowed with advanced deep thinking capabilities, enabling it to drive the full-process diagnosis with minimal physician involvement. Furthermore, DxDirector-7B establishes a robust accountability framework for misdiagnoses, delineating responsibility between AI and human physicians. In evaluations across rare, complex, and real-world cases under full-process diagnosis setting, DxDirector-7B not only achieves significant superior diagnostic accuracy but also substantially reduces physician workload than state-of-the-art medical LLMs as well as general-purpose LLMs. Fine-grained analyses across multiple clinical departments and tasks validate its efficacy, with expert evaluations indicating its potential to serve as a viable substitute for medical specialists. These findings mark a new era where AI, traditionally a physicians' assistant, now drives the entire diagnostic process to drastically reduce physicians' workload, indicating an efficient and accurate diagnostic solution.
Authors: Yushi Feng, Junye Du, Yingying Hong, Qifan Wang, Lequan Yu
Abstract: Existing tool-augmented agentic systems are limited in the real world by (i) black-box reasoning steps that undermine trust of decision-making and pose safety risks, (ii) poor multimodal integration, which is inherently critical for healthcare tasks, and (iii) rigid and computationally inefficient agentic pipelines. We introduce PASS (Probabilistic Agentic Supernet Sampling), the first multimodal framework to address these challenges in the context of Chest X-Ray (CXR) reasoning. PASS adaptively samples agentic workflows over a multi-tool graph, yielding decision paths annotated with interpretable probabilities. Given the complex CXR reasoning task with multimodal medical data, PASS leverages its learned task-conditioned distribution over the agentic supernet. Thus, it adaptively selects the most suitable tool at each supernet layer, offering probability-annotated trajectories for post-hoc audits and directly enhancing medical AI safety. PASS also continuously compresses salient findings into an evolving personalized memory, while dynamically deciding whether to deepen its reasoning path or invoke an early exit for efficiency. To optimize a Pareto frontier balancing performance and cost, we design a novel three-stage training procedure, including expert knowledge warm-up, contrastive path-ranking, and cost-aware reinforcement learning. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce CAB-E, a comprehensive benchmark for multi-step, safety-critical, free-form CXR reasoning. Experiments across various benchmarks validate that PASS significantly outperforms strong baselines in multiple metrics (e.g., accuracy, AUC, LLM-J.) while balancing computational costs, pushing a new paradigm shift towards interpretable, adaptive, and multimodal medical agentic systems.
Authors: Zetian Sun, Dongfang Li, Baotian Hu
Abstract: The alignment of language models (LMs) with human preferences is critical for building reliable AI systems. The problem is typically framed as optimizing an LM policy to maximize the expected reward that reflects human preferences. Recently, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) was proposed as a LM alignment method that directly optimize the policy from static preference data, and further improved by incorporating on-policy sampling (i.e., preference candidates generated during the training loop) for better LM alignment. However, we show on-policy data is not always optimal, with systematic effectiveness difference emerging between static and on-policy preference candidates. For example, on-policy data can result in a 3$\times$ effectiveness compared with static data for Llama-3, and a 0.4$\times$ effectiveness for Zephyr. To explain the phenomenon, we propose the alignment stage assumption, which divides the alignment process into two distinct stages: the preference injection stage, which benefits from diverse data, and the preference fine-tuning stage, which favors high-quality data. Through theoretical and empirical analysis, we characterize these stages and propose an effective algorithm to identify the boundaries between them. We perform experiments on 5 models (Llama, Zephyr, Phi-2, Qwen, Pythia) and 2 alignment methods (DPO, SLiC-HF) to show the generalizability of alignment stage assumption and boundary measurement.
Authors: Zetian Sun, Dongfang Li, Baotian Hu, Min Zhang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of tasks. However, their reasoning capabilities, particularly in complex domains like mathematics, remain a significant challenge. Value-based process verifiers, which estimate the probability of a partial reasoning chain leading to a correct solution, are a promising approach for improving reasoning. Nevertheless, their effectiveness is often hindered by estimation error in their training annotations, a consequence of the limited number of Monte Carlo (MC) samples feasible due to the high cost of LLM inference. In this paper, we identify that the estimation error primarily arises from high variance rather than bias, and the MC estimator is a Minimum Variance Unbiased Estimator (MVUE). To address the problem, we propose the \textsc{Com}pound \textsc{M}onte \textsc{C}arlo \textsc{S}ampling (ComMCS) method, which constructs an unbiased estimator by linearly combining the MC estimators from the current and subsequent steps. Theoretically, we show that our method leads to a predictable reduction in variance, while maintaining an unbiased estimation without additional LLM inference cost. We also perform empirical experiments on the MATH-500 and GSM8K benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Notably, ComMCS outperforms regression-based optimization method by 2.8 points, the non-variance-reduced baseline by 2.2 points on MATH-500 on Best-of-32 sampling experiment.
Authors: Xinyan Jiang, Lin Zhang, Jiayi Zhang, Qingsong Yang, Guimin Hu, Di Wang, Lijie Hu
Abstract: Activation steering offers a promising approach to controlling the behavior of Large Language Models by directly manipulating their internal activations. However, most existing methods struggle to jointly steer multiple attributes, often resulting in interference and undesirable trade-offs. To address this challenge, we propose Multi-Subspace Representation Steering (MSRS), a novel framework for effective multi-attribute steering via subspace representation fine-tuning. MSRS reduces inter-attribute interference by allocating orthogonal subspaces to each attribute, isolating their influence within the model's representation space. MSRS also incorporates a hybrid subspace composition strategy: it combines attribute-specific subspaces for unique steering directions with a shared subspace for common steering directions. A dynamic weighting function learns to efficiently integrate these components for precise control. During inference, MSRS introduces a token-level steering mechanism that dynamically identifies and intervenes on the most semantically relevant tokens, enabling fine-grained behavioral modulation. Experimental results show that MSRS significantly reduces attribute conflicts, surpasses existing methods across a range of attributes, and generalizes effectively to diverse downstream tasks.
Authors: Zhenye Yang, Jinpeng Chen, Huan Li, Xiongnan Jin, Xuanyang Li, Junwei Zhang, Hongbo Gao, Kaimin Wei, Senzhang Wang
Abstract: Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) aim to proactively capture user preferences through natural language dialogue and recommend high-quality items. To achieve this, CRS gathers user preferences via a dialog module and builds user profiles through a recommendation module to generate appropriate recommendations. However, existing CRS faces challenges in capturing the deep semantics of user preferences and dialogue context. In particular, the efficient integration of external knowledge graph (KG) information into dialogue generation and recommendation remains a pressing issue. Traditional approaches typically combine KG information directly with dialogue content, which often struggles with complex semantic relationships, resulting in recommendations that may not align with user expectations. To address these challenges, we introduce STEP, a conversational recommender centered on pre-trained language models that combines curriculum-guided context-knowledge fusion with lightweight task-specific prompt tuning. At its heart, an F-Former progressively aligns the dialogue context with knowledge-graph entities through a three-stage curriculum, thus resolving fine-grained semantic mismatches. The fused representation is then injected into the frozen language model via two minimal yet adaptive prefix prompts: a conversation prefix that steers response generation toward user intent and a recommendation prefix that biases item ranking toward knowledge-consistent candidates. This dual-prompt scheme allows the model to share cross-task semantics while respecting the distinct objectives of dialogue and recommendation. Experimental results show that STEP outperforms mainstream methods in the precision of recommendation and dialogue quality in two public datasets.
Authors: Yiping Song, Jiaoyan Chen, Renate A. Schmidt
Abstract: Ontology matching (OM) plays an essential role in enabling semantic interoperability and integration across heterogeneous knowledge sources, particularly in the biomedical domain which contains numerous complex concepts related to diseases and pharmaceuticals. This paper introduces GenOM, a large language model (LLM)-based ontology alignment framework, which enriches the semantic representations of ontology concepts via generating textual definitions, retrieves alignment candidates with an embedding model, and incorporates exact matching-based tools to improve precision. Extensive experiments conducted on the OAEI Bio-ML track demonstrate that GenOM can often achieve competitive performance, surpassing many baselines including traditional OM systems and recent LLM-based methods. Further ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of semantic enrichment and few-shot prompting, highlighting the framework's robustness and adaptability.
Authors: Sayan Nag, K J Joseph, Koustava Goswami, Vlad I Morariu, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan
Abstract: Evaluating graphic designs involves assessing it from multiple facets like alignment, composition, aesthetics and color choices. Evaluating designs in a holistic way involves aggregating feedback from individual expert reviewers. Towards this, we propose an Agentic Design Review System (AgenticDRS), where multiple agents collaboratively analyze a design, orchestrated by a meta-agent. A novel in-context exemplar selection approach based on graph matching and a unique prompt expansion method plays central role towards making each agent design aware. Towards evaluating this framework, we propose DRS-BENCH benchmark. Thorough experimental evaluation against state-of-the-art baselines adapted to the problem setup, backed-up with critical ablation experiments brings out the efficacy of Agentic-DRS in evaluating graphic designs and generating actionable feedback. We hope that this work will attract attention to this pragmatic, yet under-explored research direction.
Authors: Sangwoo Jeon, Juchul Shin, Gyeong-Tae Kim, YeonJe Cho, Seongwoo Kim
Abstract: Generalized planning using deep reinforcement learning (RL) combined with graph neural networks (GNNs) has shown promising results in various symbolic planning domains described by PDDL. However, existing approaches typically represent planning states as fully connected graphs, leading to a combinatorial explosion in edge information and substantial sparsity as problem scales grow, especially evident in large grid-based environments. This dense representation results in diluted node-level information, exponentially increases memory requirements, and ultimately makes learning infeasible for larger-scale problems. To address these challenges, we propose a sparse, goal-aware GNN representation that selectively encodes relevant local relationships and explicitly integrates spatial features related to the goal. We validate our approach by designing novel drone mission scenarios based on PDDL within a grid world, effectively simulating realistic mission execution environments. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method scales effectively to larger grid sizes previously infeasible with dense graph representations and substantially improves policy generalization and success rates. Our findings provide a practical foundation for addressing realistic, large-scale generalized planning tasks.
Authors: Zhiqi Shen, Shaojing Fan, Danni Xu, Terence Sim, Mohan Kankanhalli
Abstract: As AI-generated content becomes widespread, so does the risk of misinformation. While prior research has primarily focused on identifying whether content is authentic, much less is known about how such content influences human perception and behavior. In domains like trading or the stock market, predicting how people react (e.g., whether a news post will go viral), can be more critical than verifying its factual accuracy. To address this, we take a human-centered approach and introduce the MhAIM Dataset, which contains 154,552 online posts (111,153 of them AI-generated), enabling large-scale analysis of how people respond to AI-generated content. Our human study reveals that people are better at identifying AI content when posts include both text and visuals, particularly when inconsistencies exist between the two. We propose three new metrics: trustworthiness, impact, and openness, to quantify how users judge and engage with online content. We present T-Lens, an LLM-based agent system designed to answer user queries by incorporating predicted human responses to multimodal information. At its core is HR-MCP (Human Response Model Context Protocol), built on the standardized Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling seamless integration with any LLM. This integration allows T-Lens to better align with human reactions, enhancing both interpretability and interaction capabilities. Our work provides empirical insights and practical tools to equip LLMs with human-awareness capabilities. By highlighting the complex interplay among AI, human cognition, and information reception, our findings suggest actionable strategies for mitigating the risks of AI-driven misinformation.
Authors: Ma\"el Jullien, Marco Valentino, Andr\'e Freitas
Abstract: Large language models are often assumed to acquire increasingly structured, generalizable internal representations simply by scaling data and parameters. We interrogate this assumption by introducing a Clinical Trial Natural Language Inference benchmark comprising four reasoning families, Causal Attribution, Compositional Grounding, Epistemic Verification, and Risk State Abstraction. Each item is paired with a targeted Ground Knowledge and Meta-Level Reasoning Verification (GKMRV) probe, allowing us to dissociate failures of factual access from failures of inference. We evaluate six contemporary LLMs under both direct and chain of thought prompting. Models achieve near-ceiling GKMRV accuracy (mean accuracy 0.918) yet perform poorly on the main reasoning tasks (mean accuracy 0.25). Despite low accuracy, output inferences are highly consistent across samples (mean 0.87), indicating a systematic application of underlying heuristics and shortcuts. These results reveal fundamental structural and representational limitations: current LLMs often possess the relevant clinical knowledge but lack the structured, composable internal representations needed to deploy it reliably (e.g., integrating constraints, weighing evidence, or simulating counterfactuals). Decoupling knowledge from reasoning with GKMRV makes this dissociation explicit and measurable, providing an effective framework for probing the reliability of LLMs in high-stakes domains.
Authors: Maria J. P. Peixoto, Akriti Pandey, Ahsan Zaman, Peter R. Lewis
Abstract: As AI systems are increasingly deployed to support decision-making in critical domains, explainability has become a means to enhance the understandability of these outputs and enable users to make more informed and conscious choices. However, despite growing interest in the usability of eXplainable AI (XAI), the accessibility of these methods, particularly for users with vision impairments, remains underexplored. This paper investigates accessibility gaps in XAI through a two-pronged approach. First, a literature review of 79 studies reveals that evaluations of XAI techniques rarely include disabled users, with most explanations relying on inherently visual formats. Second, we present a four-part methodological proof of concept that operationalizes inclusive XAI design: (1) categorization of AI systems, (2) persona definition and contextualization, (3) prototype design and implementation, and (4) expert and user assessment of XAI techniques for accessibility. Preliminary findings suggest that simplified explanations are more comprehensible for non-visual users than detailed ones, and that multimodal presentation is required for more equitable interpretability.
Authors: Lalitesh Morishetti, Abhay Kumar, Jonathan Scott, Kaushiki Nag, Gunjan Sharma, Shanu Vashishtha, Rahul Sridhar, Rohit Chatter, Kannan Achan
Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel model architecture for optimizing personalized product search ranking using a multi-task learning (MTL) framework. Our approach uniquely integrates tabular and non-tabular data, leveraging a pre-trained TinyBERT model for semantic embeddings and a novel sampling technique to capture diverse customer behaviors. We evaluate our model against several baselines, including XGBoost, TabNet, FT-Transformer, DCN-V2, and MMoE, focusing on their ability to handle mixed data types and optimize personalized ranking. Additionally, we propose a scalable relevance labeling mechanism based on click-through rates, click positions, and semantic similarity, offering an alternative to traditional human-annotated labels. Experimental results show that combining non-tabular data with advanced embedding techniques in multi-task learning paradigm significantly enhances model performance. Ablation studies further underscore the benefits of incorporating relevance labels, fine-tuning TinyBERT layers, and TinyBERT query-product embedding interactions. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving improved personalized product search ranking.
Authors: Lovedeep Gondara, Gregory Arbour, Raymond Ng, Jonathan Simkin, Shebnum Devji
Abstract: Automating data extraction from clinical documents offers significant potential to improve efficiency in healthcare settings, yet deploying Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions presents practical challenges. Drawing upon our experience implementing various NLP models for information extraction and classification tasks at the British Columbia Cancer Registry (BCCR), this paper shares key lessons learned throughout the project lifecycle. We emphasize the critical importance of defining problems based on clear business objectives rather than solely technical accuracy, adopting an iterative approach to development, and fostering deep interdisciplinary collaboration and co-design involving domain experts, end-users, and ML specialists from inception. Further insights highlight the need for pragmatic model selection (including hybrid approaches and simpler methods where appropriate), rigorous attention to data quality (representativeness, drift, annotation), robust error mitigation strategies involving human-in-the-loop validation and ongoing audits, and building organizational AI literacy. These practical considerations, generalizable beyond cancer registries, provide guidance for healthcare organizations seeking to successfully implement AI/NLP solutions to enhance data management processes and ultimately improve patient care and public health outcomes.
Authors: Daniel Groos
Abstract: Fantasy Premier League engages the football community in selecting the Premier League players who will perform best from gameweek to gameweek. Access to accurate performance forecasts gives participants an edge over competitors by guiding expectations about player outcomes and reducing uncertainty in squad selection. However, high-accuracy forecasts are currently limited to commercial services whose inner workings are undisclosed and that rely on proprietary data. This paper aims to democratize access to highly accurate forecasts of player performance by presenting OpenFPL, an open-source Fantasy Premier League forecasting method developed exclusively from public data. Comprising position-specific ensemble models optimized on Fantasy Premier League and Understat data from four previous seasons (2020-21 to 2023-24), OpenFPL achieves accuracy comparable to a leading commercial service when tested prospectively on data from the 2024-25 season. OpenFPL also surpasses the commercial benchmark for high-return players ($>$ 2 points), which are most influential for rank gains. These findings hold across one-, two-, and three-gameweek forecast horizons, supporting long-term planning of transfers and strategies while also informing final-day decisions.
Authors: Lucie-Aim\'ee Kaffee, Giada Pistilli, Yacine Jernite
Abstract: AI companionship, where users develop emotional bonds with AI systems, has emerged as a significant pattern with positive but also concerning implications. We introduce Interactions and Machine Attachment Benchmark (INTIMA), a benchmark for evaluating companionship behaviors in language models. Drawing from psychological theories and user data, we develop a taxonomy of 31 behaviors across four categories and 368 targeted prompts. Responses to these prompts are evaluated as companionship-reinforcing, boundary-maintaining, or neutral. Applying INTIMA to Gemma-3, Phi-4, o3-mini, and Claude-4 reveals that companionship-reinforcing behaviors remain much more common across all models, though we observe marked differences between models. Different commercial providers prioritize different categories within the more sensitive parts of the benchmark, which is concerning since both appropriate boundary-setting and emotional support matter for user well-being. These findings highlight the need for more consistent approaches to handling emotionally charged interactions.
Authors: Rakesh Thakur, Sneha Sharma, Gauri Chopra
Abstract: Fact-checking in code-mixed, low-resource languages such as Hinglish remains an underexplored challenge in natural language processing. Existing fact-verification systems largely focus on high-resource, monolingual settings and fail to generalize to real-world political discourse in linguistically diverse regions like India. Given the widespread use of Hinglish by public figures, particularly political figures, and the growing influence of social media on public opinion, there's a critical need for robust, multilingual and context-aware fact-checking tools. To address this gap a novel benchmark HiFACT dataset is introduced with 1,500 realworld factual claims made by 28 Indian state Chief Ministers in Hinglish, under a highly code-mixed low-resource setting. Each claim is annotated with textual evidence and veracity labels. To evaluate this benchmark, a novel graphaware, retrieval-augmented fact-checking model is proposed that combines multilingual contextual encoding, claim-evidence semantic alignment, evidence graph construction, graph neural reasoning, and natural language explanation generation. Experimental results show that HiFACTMix outperformed accuracy in comparison to state of art multilingual baselines models and provides faithful justifications for its verdicts. This work opens a new direction for multilingual, code-mixed, and politically grounded fact verification research.
Authors: Austin C. Kozlowski, Callin Dai, Andrei Boutyline
Abstract: Psychological research consistently finds that human ratings of words across diverse semantic scales can be reduced to a low-dimensional form with relatively little information loss. We find that the semantic associations encoded in the embedding matrices of large language models (LLMs) exhibit a similar structure. We show that the projections of words on semantic directions defined by antonym pairs (e.g. kind - cruel) correlate highly with human ratings, and further find that these projections effectively reduce to a 3-dimensional subspace within LLM embeddings, closely resembling the patterns derived from human survey responses. Moreover, we find that shifting tokens along one semantic direction causes off-target effects on geometrically aligned features proportional to their cosine similarity. These findings suggest that semantic features are entangled within LLMs similarly to how they are interconnected in human language, and a great deal of semantic information, despite its apparent complexity, is surprisingly low-dimensional. Furthermore, accounting for this semantic structure may prove essential for avoiding unintended consequences when steering features.
Authors: Andr\'es Carvallo, Denis Parra, Peter Brusilovsky, Hernan Valdivieso, Gabriel Rada, Ivania Donoso, Vladimir Araujo
Abstract: The attention mechanism is a core component of the Transformer architecture. Beyond improving performance, attention has been proposed as a mechanism for explainability via attention weights, which are associated with input features (e.g., tokens in a document). In this context, larger attention weights may imply more relevant features for the model's prediction. In evidence-based medicine, such explanations could support physicians' understanding and interaction with AI systems used to categorize biomedical literature. However, there is still no consensus on whether attention weights provide helpful explanations. Moreover, little research has explored how visualizing attention affects its usefulness as an explanation aid. To bridge this gap, we conducted a user study to evaluate whether attention-based explanations support users in biomedical document classification and whether there is a preferred way to visualize them. The study involved medical experts from various disciplines who classified articles based on study design (e.g., systematic reviews, broad synthesis, randomized and non-randomized trials). Our findings show that the Transformer model (XLNet) classified documents accurately; however, the attention weights were not perceived as particularly helpful for explaining the predictions. However, this perception varied significantly depending on how attention was visualized. Contrary to Munzner's principle of visual effectiveness, which favors precise encodings like bar length, users preferred more intuitive formats, such as text brightness or background color. While our results do not confirm the overall utility of attention weights for explanation, they suggest that their perceived helpfulness is influenced by how they are visually presented.
Authors: Chengliang Zhou, Mei Wang, Ting Zhang, Qiannan Zhu, Jian Li, Hua Huang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in mathematical problem-solving. However, the transition from providing answers to generating high-quality educational questions presents significant challenges that remain underexplored. To advance Educational Question Generation (EQG) and facilitate LLMs in generating pedagogically valuable and educationally effective questions, we introduce EQGBench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating LLMs' performance in Chinese EQG. EQGBench establishes a five-dimensional evaluation framework supported by a dataset of 900 evaluation samples spanning three fundamental middle school disciplines: mathematics, physics, and chemistry. The dataset incorporates user queries with varying knowledge points, difficulty gradients, and question type specifications to simulate realistic educational scenarios. Through systematic evaluation of 46 mainstream large models, we reveal significant room for development in generating questions that reflect educational value and foster students' comprehensive abilities.
Authors: Hojun Jin, Eunsoo Hong, Ziwon Hyung, Sungjun Lim, Seungjin Lee, Keunseok Cho
Abstract: Hard-parameter sharing is a common strategy to train a single model jointly across diverse tasks. However, this often leads to task interference, impeding overall model performance. To address the issue, we propose a simple yet effective Supervised Mixture of Experts (S-MoE). Unlike traditional Mixture of Experts models, S-MoE eliminates the need for training gating functions by utilizing special guiding tokens to route each task to its designated expert. By assigning each task to a separate feedforward network, S-MoE overcomes the limitations of hard-parameter sharing. We further apply S-MoE to a speech-to-text model, enabling the model to process mixed-bandwidth input while jointly performing automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech translation (ST). Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed S-MoE, achieving a 6.35% relative improvement in Word Error Rate (WER) when applied to both the encoder and decoder.
Authors: Rodrigo Tertulino
Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) presents a groundbreaking approach for collaborative health research, allowing model training on decentralized data while safeguarding patient privacy. FL offers formal security guarantees when combined with Differential Privacy (DP). The integration of these technologies, however, introduces a significant trade-off between privacy and clinical utility, a challenge further complicated by the severe class imbalance often present in medical datasets. The research presented herein addresses these interconnected issues through a systematic, multi-stage analysis. An FL framework was implemented for cardiovascular risk prediction, where initial experiments showed that standard methods struggled with imbalanced data, resulting in a recall of zero. To overcome such a limitation, we first integrated the hybrid Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique with Tomek Links (SMOTETomek) at the client level, successfully developing a clinically useful model. Subsequently, the framework was optimized for non-IID data using a tuned FedProx algorithm. Our final results reveal a clear, non-linear trade-off between the privacy budget (epsilon) and model recall, with the optimized FedProx consistently out-performing standard FedAvg. An optimal operational region was identified on the privacy-utility frontier, where strong privacy guarantees (with epsilon 9.0) can be achieved while maintaining high clinical utility (recall greater than 77%). Ultimately, our study provides a practical methodological blueprint for creating effective, secure, and accurate diagnostic tools that can be applied to real-world, heterogeneous healthcare data.
Authors: Sridhar Mahadevan
Abstract: Natural language is replete with superficially different statements, such as ``Charles Darwin wrote" and ``Charles Darwin is the author of", which carry the same meaning. Large language models (LLMs) should generate the same next-token probabilities in such cases, but usually do not. Empirical workarounds have been explored, such as using k-NN estimates of sentence similarity to produce smoothed estimates. In this paper, we tackle this problem more abstractly, introducing a categorical homotopy framework for LLMs. We introduce an LLM Markov category to represent probability distributions in language generated by an LLM, where the probability of a sentence, such as ``Charles Darwin wrote" is defined by an arrow in a Markov category. However, this approach runs into difficulties as language is full of equivalent rephrases, and each generates a non-isomorphic arrow in the LLM Markov category. To address this fundamental problem, we use categorical homotopy techniques to capture ``weak equivalences" in an LLM Markov category. We present a detailed overview of application of categorical homotopy to LLMs, from higher algebraic K-theory to model categories, building on powerful theoretical results developed over the past half a century.
Authors: Li Wang, Changhao Zhang, Zengqi Xiu, Kai Lu, Xin Yu, Kui Zhang, Wenjun Wu
Abstract: Despite recent advances in the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), improving the reasoning ability of Small Language Models (SLMs, e.g., $\leq$ 1.5B) remains challenging. A key obstacle lies in the complexity and variability of natural language: essentially equivalent problems often appear in diverse surface forms, often obscured by redundant or distracting details. This imposes a dual burden on SLMs: they must first extract the core problem from complex linguistic input, and then perform reasoning based on that understanding. The resulting vast and noisy problem space hinders optimization, particularly for models with limited capacity. To address this, we propose a new framework that decouples understanding from reasoning by mapping natural language problems into a canonical problem space-a semantically simplified yet expressive domain. This enables SLMs to focus on reasoning over standardized inputs, free from linguistic variability. Within this framework, we introduce DURIT (Decoupled Understanding from Reasoning via Iterative Training), a three-step algorithm that iteratively: (1) mapping natural language problems via reinforcement learning, (2) aligns reasoning trajectories through self-distillation, and (3) trains reasoning policies in the problem space. The mapper and reasoner are co-trained in an alternating loop throughout this process. Experiments show that DURIT substantially improves SLMs' performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain mathematical and logical reasoning tasks. Beyond improving reasoning capabilities, DURIT also improves the robustness of reasoning, validating decoupling understanding from reasoning as an effective strategy for strengthening SLMs.
Authors: Chuan Li, Qianyi Zhao, Fengran Mo, Cen Chen
Abstract: Efficiently enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in federated learning environments remains challenging, particularly when balancing performance gains with strict computational, communication, and privacy constraints. This challenge is especially acute in healthcare, where decisions-spanning clinical, operational, and patient-facing contexts-demand not only accurate outputs but also interpretable, traceable rationales to ensure safety, accountability, and regulatory compliance. Conventional federated tuning approaches on LLM fail to address this need: they optimize primarily for answer correctness while neglecting rationale quality, leaving CoT capabilities dependent on models' innate pre-training abilities. Moreover, existing methods for improving rationales typically rely on privacy-violating knowledge distillation from centralized models. Additionally, the communication overhead in traditional federated fine-tuning on LLMs remains substantial. We addresses this gap by proposing FedCoT, a novel framework specifically designed to enhance reasoning in federated settings. FedCoT leverages a lightweight chain-of-thought enhancement mechanism: local models generate multiple reasoning paths, and a compact discriminator dynamically selects the most promising one. This approach improves reasoning accuracy and robustness while providing valuable interpretability, which is particularly critical for medical applications. To manage client heterogeneity efficiently, we adopt an improved aggregation approach building upon advanced LoRA module stacking, incorporating client classifier-awareness to achieve noise-free aggregation across diverse clients. Comprehensive experiments on medical reasoning tasks demonstrate that FedCoT significantly boosts client-side reasoning performance under stringent resource budgets while fully preserving data privacy.
Authors: Egor Fadeev, Dzhambulat Mollaev, Aleksei Shestov, Dima Korolev, Omar Zoloev, Ivan Kireev, Andrey Savchenko, Maksim Makarenko
Abstract: Learning clients embeddings from sequences of their historic communications is central to financial applications. While large language models (LLMs) offer general world knowledge, their direct use on long event sequences is computationally expensive and impractical in real-world pipelines. In this paper, we propose LATTE, a contrastive learning framework that aligns raw event embeddings with semantic embeddings from frozen LLMs. Behavioral features are summarized into short prompts, embedded by the LLM, and used as supervision via contrastive loss. The proposed approach significantly reduces inference cost and input size compared to conventional processing of complete sequence by LLM. We experimentally show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques for learning event sequence representations on real-world financial datasets while remaining deployable in latency-sensitive environments.
Authors: Yuanchang Ye
Abstract: This study introduces a significance testing-enhanced conformal prediction (CP) framework to improve trustworthiness of large language models (LLMs) in multiple-choice question answering (MCQA). While LLMs have been increasingly deployed in disciplinary QA scenarios, hallucination and nonfactual generation substantially compromise response reliability. Although CP provides statistically rigorous marginal coverage guarantees for prediction sets, and significance testing offers established statistical rigor, their synergistic integration remains unexplored. To mitigate hallucination and factual inaccuracies, our framework integrates $p$-value computation with conformity scoring through self-consistency resampling of MCQA responses. This approach calculates option frequencies to address LLMs' black-box nature, subsequently constructing prediction sets via null hypothesis testing ($\mathcal{H}_0$) with empirically derived $p$-values. Evaluations on MMLU and MMLU-Pro benchmarks using off-the-shelf LLMs demonstrate: (1) The enhanced CP achieves user-specified empirical miscoverage rates; (2) Test-set average prediction set size (APSS) decreases monotonically with increasing risk levels ($\alpha$), validating APSS as an effective uncertainty metric. This work establishes a principled statistical framework for trustworthy LLM deployment in high-stakes QA applications.
Authors: J. Pablo Mu\~noz, Jinjie Yuan
Abstract: Test-Time Compute (TTC) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) at inference, leveraging strategies such as Test-Time Training (TTT) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, the optimal adaptation strategy varies across queries, and indiscriminate application of TTC strategy incurs substantial computational overhead. In this work, we introduce Reward-Guided Test-Time Compute (RTTC), a novel framework that adaptively selects the most effective TTC strategy for each query via a pretrained reward model, maximizing downstream accuracy across diverse domains and tasks. RTTC operates in a distributed server-client architecture, retrieving relevant samples from a remote knowledge base and applying RAG or lightweight fine-tuning on client devices only when necessary. To further mitigate redundant computation, we propose Query-State Caching, which enables the efficient reuse of historical query states at both retrieval and adaptation levels. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that RTTC consistently achieves superior accuracy compared to vanilla RAG or TTT, validating the necessity of adaptive, reward-guided TTC selection and the potential of RTTC for scalable, high-performance language model adaptation.
Authors: Silvia Garc\'ia-M\'endez, Francisco de Arriba-P\'erez
Abstract: Among the many challenges mothers undergo after childbirth, postpartum depression (PPD) is a severe condition that significantly impacts their mental and physical well-being. Consequently, the rapid detection of ppd and their associated risk factors is critical for in-time assessment and intervention through specialized prevention procedures. Accordingly, this work addresses the need to help practitioners make decisions with the latest technological advancements to enable real-time screening and treatment recommendations. Mainly, our work contributes to an intelligent PPD screening system that combines Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning (ML), and Large Language Models (LLMs) towards an affordable, real-time, and non-invasive free speech analysis. Moreover, it addresses the black box problem since the predictions are described to the end users thanks to the combination of LLMs with interpretable ml models (i.e., tree-based algorithms) using feature importance and natural language. The results obtained are 90 % on ppd detection for all evaluation metrics, outperforming the competing solutions in the literature. Ultimately, our solution contributes to the rapid detection of PPD and their associated risk factors, critical for in-time and proper assessment and intervention.
Authors: Kai Zhao, Yanjun Zhao, Jiaming Song, Shien He, Lusheng Zhang, Qiang Zhang, Tianjiao Li
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) empowered by chain-of-thought reasoning have achieved impressive accuracy on complex tasks but suffer from excessive inference costs and latency when applied uniformly to all problems. We propose SABER (Switchable and Balanced Training for Efficient LLM Reasoning), a reinforcement learning framework that endows LLMs with user-controllable, token-budgeted reasoning. SABER first profiles each training example's base-model thinking token usage and assigns it to one of the predefined budget tiers. During fine-tuning, the model is guided by system prompts and length-aware rewards to respect its assigned budget. In parallel, we incorporate no-think examples to ensure the model remains reliable even when explicit reasoning is turned off. SABER further supports four discrete inference modes - NoThink, FastThink, CoreThink, and DeepThink, enabling flexible trade-offs between latency and reasoning depth. Extensive evaluations on math reasoning (MATH, GSM8K), code generation (MBPP), and logical reasoning (LiveBench-Reasoning) demonstrate that SABER achieves high accuracy under tight budgets, graceful degradation, and effective cross-scale and cross-domain generalization. In particular, SABER-FastThink cuts reasoning length by 65.4% and yields a 3.6% accuracy gain compared with the base model on the MATH benchmark.
Authors: Ali Zolnour, Hossein Azadmaleki, Yasaman Haghbin, Fatemeh Taherinezhad, Mohamad Javad Momeni Nezhad, Sina Rashidi, Masoud Khani, AmirSajjad Taleban, Samin Mahdizadeh Sani, Maryam Dadkhah, James M. Noble, Suzanne Bakken, Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh, Abdol-Hossein Vahabie, Masoud Rouhizadeh, Maryam Zolnoori
Abstract: Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) affect approximately five million older adults in the U.S., yet over half remain undiagnosed. Speech-based natural language processing (NLP) offers a promising, scalable approach to detect early cognitive decline through linguistic markers. To develop and evaluate a screening pipeline that (i) fuses transformer embeddings with handcrafted linguistic features, (ii) tests data augmentation using synthetic speech generated by large language models (LLMs), and (iii) benchmarks unimodal and multimodal LLM classifiers for ADRD detection. Transcripts from the DementiaBank "cookie-theft" task (n = 237) were used. Ten transformer models were evaluated under three fine-tuning strategies. A fusion model combined embeddings from the top-performing transformer with 110 lexical-derived linguistic features. Five LLMs (LLaMA-8B/70B, MedAlpaca-7B, Ministral-8B, GPT-4o) were fine-tuned to generate label-conditioned synthetic speech, which was used to augment training data. Three multimodal models (GPT-4o, Qwen-Omni, Phi-4) were tested for speech-text classification in zero-shot and fine-tuned settings. The fusion model achieved F1 = 83.3 (AUC = 89.5), outperforming linguistic or transformer-only baselines. Augmenting training data with 2x MedAlpaca-7B synthetic speech increased F1 to 85.7. Fine-tuning significantly improved unimodal LLM classifiers (e.g., MedAlpaca: F1 = 47.3 -> 78.5 F1). Current multimodal models demonstrated lower performance (GPT-4o = 70.2 F1; Qwen = 66.0). Performance gains aligned with the distributional similarity between synthetic and real speech. Integrating transformer embeddings with linguistic features enhances ADRD detection from speech. Clinically tuned LLMs effectively support both classification and data augmentation, while further advancement is needed in multimodal modeling.
Authors: Xiao Fu, Hossein A. Rahmani, Bin Wu, Jerome Ramos, Emine Yilmaz, Aldo Lipani
Abstract: Personalised text generation is essential for user-centric information systems, yet most evaluation methods overlook the individuality of users. We introduce \textbf{PREF}, a \textbf{P}ersonalised \textbf{R}eference-free \textbf{E}valuation \textbf{F}ramework that jointly measures general output quality and user-specific alignment without requiring gold personalised references. PREF operates in a three-step pipeline: (1) a coverage stage uses a large language model (LLM) to generate a comprehensive, query-specific guideline covering universal criteria such as factuality, coherence, and completeness; (2) a preference stage re-ranks and selectively augments these factors using the target user's profile, stated or inferred preferences, and context, producing a personalised evaluation rubric; and (3) a scoring stage applies an LLM judge to rate candidate answers against this rubric, ensuring baseline adequacy while capturing subjective priorities. This separation of coverage from preference improves robustness, transparency, and reusability, and allows smaller models to approximate the personalised quality of larger ones. Experiments on the PrefEval benchmark, including implicit preference-following tasks, show that PREF achieves higher accuracy, better calibration, and closer alignment with human judgments than strong baselines. By enabling scalable, interpretable, and user-aligned evaluation, PREF lays the groundwork for more reliable assessment and development of personalised language generation systems.
Authors: Wenpeng Xing, Mohan Li, Chunqiang Hu, Haitao XuNingyu Zhang, Bo Lin, Meng Han
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in various language tasks but are susceptible to jailbreak attacks that circumvent their safety alignments. This paper introduces Latent Fusion Jailbreak (LFJ), a representation-based attack that interpolates hidden states from harmful and benign query pairs to elicit prohibited responses. LFJ begins by selecting query pairs with high thematic and syntactic similarity, then performs gradient-guided interpolation at influential layers and tokens, followed by optimization to balance attack success, output fluency, and computational efficiency. Evaluations on models such as Vicuna and LLaMA-2 across benchmarks like AdvBench and MaliciousInstruct yield an average attack success rate (ASR) of 94.01%, outperforming existing methods. To mitigate LFJ, we propose an adversarial training defense that fine-tunes models on interpolated examples, reducing ASR by over 80% without degrading performance on benign inputs. Ablation studies validate the importance of query pair selection, hidden state interpolation components, and optimization strategies in LFJ's effectiveness.
Authors: Saaduddin Mahmud, Mason Nakamura, Kyle H. Wray, Shlomo Zilberstein
Abstract: Prompt optimization methods have demonstrated significant effectiveness in aligning black-box large language models (LLMs). In parallel, inference scaling strategies such as Best-of-N Sampling and Majority Voting have also proven to enhance alignment and performance by trading off computation. However, existing prompt optimization approaches are inference strategy agnostic; that is, they optimize prompts without regard to the inference strategy employed during deployment. This constitutes a significant methodological gap, as our empirical and theoretical analysis reveals a strong interdependence between these two paradigms. Moreover, we find that user preferences regarding trade-offs among multiple objectives and inference budgets substantially influence the choice of prompt and inference configuration. To address this gap, we introduce a unified novel framework named IAPO (Inference-Aware Prompt Optimization) that jointly optimizes the prompt and inference scale, while being aware of the inference budget and different task objectives. We then develop a fixed-budget training algorithm for IAPO, which we call PSST (Prompt Scaling via Sequential Trimming), and analyze finite-budget guarantees on error probability. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of PSST on six different tasks, including multi-objective text generation and reasoning, and demonstrate the critical role of incorporating inference-awareness when aligning black-box LLMs through prompt optimization.
Authors: Jinhwa Kim, Ian G. Harris
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant advancements in performance, various jailbreak attacks have posed growing safety and ethical risks. Malicious users often exploit adversarial context to deceive LLMs, prompting them to generate responses to harmful queries. In this study, we propose a new defense mechanism called Context Filtering model, an input pre-processing method designed to filter out untrustworthy and unreliable context while identifying the primary prompts containing the real user intent to uncover concealed malicious intent. Given that enhancing the safety of LLMs often compromises their helpfulness, potentially affecting the experience of benign users, our method aims to improve the safety of the LLMs while preserving their original performance. We evaluate the effectiveness of our model in defending against jailbreak attacks through comparative analysis, comparing our approach with state-of-the-art defense mechanisms against six different attacks and assessing the helpfulness of LLMs under these defenses. Our model demonstrates its ability to reduce the Attack Success Rates of jailbreak attacks by up to 88% while maintaining the original LLMs' performance, achieving state-of-the-art Safety and Helpfulness Product results. Notably, our model is a plug-and-play method that can be applied to all LLMs, including both white-box and black-box models, to enhance their safety without requiring any fine-tuning of the models themselves. We will make our model publicly available for research purposes.
Authors: Fan Yang
Abstract: Thinking mode has always been regarded as one of the most valuable modes in LLMs. However, we uncover a surprising and previously overlooked phenomenon: LLMs with thinking mode are more easily broken by Jailbreak attack. We evaluate 9 LLMs on AdvBench and HarmBench and find that the success rate of attacking thinking mode in LLMs is almost higher than that of non-thinking mode. Through large numbers of sample studies, it is found that for educational purposes and excessively long thinking lengths are the characteristics of successfully attacked data, and LLMs also give harmful answers when they mostly know that the questions are harmful. In order to alleviate the above problems, this paper proposes a method of safe thinking intervention for LLMs, which explicitly guides the internal thinking processes of LLMs by adding "specific thinking tokens" of LLMs to the prompt. The results demonstrate that the safe thinking intervention can significantly reduce the attack success rate of LLMs with thinking mode.
Authors: Yuksel Aydin
Abstract: Language models exhibit human-like cognitive vulnerabilities, such as emotional framing, that escape traditional behavioral alignment. We present CCS-7 (Cognitive Cybersecurity Suite), a taxonomy of seven vulnerabilities grounded in human cognitive security research. To establish a human benchmark, we ran a randomized controlled trial with 151 participants: a "Think First, Verify Always" (TFVA) lesson improved cognitive security by +7.9% overall. We then evaluated TFVA-style guardrails across 12,180 experiments on seven diverse language model architectures. Results reveal architecture-dependent risk patterns: some vulnerabilities (e.g., identity confusion) are almost fully mitigated, while others (e.g., source interference) exhibit escalating backfire, with error rates increasing by up to 135% in certain models. Humans, in contrast, show consistent moderate improvement. These findings reframe cognitive safety as a model-specific engineering problem: interventions effective in one architecture may fail, or actively harm, another, underscoring the need for architecture-aware cognitive safety testing before deployment.
Authors: Juvenal Bassa, Vidya Manian, Sudhir Malik, Arghya Chattopadhyay
Abstract: Jet classification in high-energy particle physics is important for understanding fundamental interactions and probing phenomena beyond the Standard Model. Jets originate from the fragmentation and hadronization of quarks and gluons, and pose a challenge for identification due to their complex, multidimensional structure. Traditional classification methods often fall short in capturing these intricacies, necessitating advanced machine learning approaches. In this paper, we employ two neural networks simultaneously as an ensemble to tag various jet types. We convert the jet data to two-dimensional histograms instead of representing them as points in a higher-dimensional space. Specifically, this ensemble approach, hereafter referred to as Ensemble Model, is used to tag jets into classes from the JetNet dataset, corresponding to: Top Quarks, Light Quarks (up or down), and W and Z bosons. For the jet classes mentioned above, we show that the Ensemble Model can be used for both binary and multi-categorical classification. This ensemble approach learns jet features by leveraging the strengths of each constituent network achieving superior performance compared to either individual network.
Authors: Dong Zhao, Yadong Wang, Xiang Chen, Chenxi Wang, Hongliang Dai, Chuanxing Geng, Shengzhong Zhang, Shaoyuan Li, Sheng-Jun Huang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable potential for few-shot information extraction (IE), yet their performance is highly sensitive to the choice of in-context examples. Conventional selection strategies often fail to provide informative guidance, as they overlook a key source of model fallibility: confusion stemming not just from semantic content, but also from the generation of well-structured formats required by IE tasks. To address this, we introduce Active Prompting for Information Extraction (APIE), a novel active prompting framework guided by a principle we term introspective confusion. Our method empowers an LLM to assess its own confusion through a dual-component uncertainty metric that uniquely quantifies both Format Uncertainty (difficulty in generating correct syntax) and Content Uncertainty (inconsistency in extracted semantics). By ranking unlabeled data with this comprehensive score, our framework actively selects the most challenging and informative samples to serve as few-shot exemplars. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks show that our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding significant improvements in both extraction accuracy and robustness. Our work highlights the critical importance of a fine-grained, dual-level view of model uncertainty when it comes to building effective and reliable structured generation systems.
Authors: Pierre-Francois Gimenez, Sarath Sivaprasad, Mario Fritz
Abstract: Malware analysis involves analyzing suspicious software to detect malicious payloads. Static malware analysis, which does not require software execution, relies increasingly on machine learning techniques to achieve scalability. Although such techniques obtain very high detection accuracy, they can be easily evaded with adversarial examples where a few modifications of the sample can dupe the detector without modifying the behavior of the software. Unlike other domains, such as computer vision, creating an adversarial example of malware without altering its functionality requires specific transformations. We propose a new model architecture for certifiably robust malware detection by design. In addition, we show that every robust detector can be decomposed into a specific structure, which can be applied to learn empirically robust malware detectors, even on fragile features. Our framework ERDALT is based on this structure. We compare and validate these approaches with machine-learning-based malware detection methods, allowing for robust detection with limited reduction of detection performance.
Authors: Wenqiang Wang, Yan Xiao, Hao Lin, Yangshijie Zhang, Xiaochun Cao
Abstract: Current multi-task adversarial text attacks rely on abundant access to shared internal features and numerous queries, often limited to a single task type. As a result, these attacks are less effective against practical scenarios involving black-box feedback APIs, limited queries, or multiple task types. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{C}luster and \textbf{E}nsemble \textbf{M}ulti-task Text Adversarial \textbf{A}ttack (\textbf{CEMA}), an effective black-box attack that exploits the transferability of adversarial texts across different tasks. CEMA simplifies complex multi-task scenarios by using a \textit{deep-level substitute model} trained in a \textit{plug-and-play} manner for text classification, enabling attacks without mimicking the victim model. This approach requires only a few queries for training, converting multi-task attacks into classification attacks and allowing attacks across various tasks. CEMA generates multiple adversarial candidates using different text classification methods and selects the one that most effectively attacks substitute models. In experiments involving multi-task models with two, three, or six tasks--spanning classification, translation, summarization, and text-to-image generation--CEMA demonstrates significant attack success with as few as 100 queries. Furthermore, CEMA can target commercial APIs (e.g., Baidu and Google Translate), large language models (e.g., ChatGPT 4o), and image-generation models (e.g., Stable Diffusion V2), showcasing its versatility and effectiveness in real-world applications.
Authors: V\'itor N. Louren\c{c}o, Aline Paes, and Tillman Weyde
Abstract: The global spread of misinformation and concerns about content trustworthiness have driven the development of automated fact-checking systems. Since false information often exploits social media dynamics such as "likes" and user networks to amplify its reach, effective solutions must go beyond content analysis to incorporate these factors. Moreover, simply labelling content as false can be ineffective or even reinforce biases such as automation and confirmation bias. This paper proposes an explainable framework that combines content, social media, and graph-based features to enhance fact-checking. It integrates a misinformation classifier with explainability techniques to deliver complete and interpretable insights supporting classification decisions. Experiments demonstrate that multimodal information improves performance over single modalities, with evaluations conducted on datasets in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Additionally, the framework's explanations were assessed for interpretability, trustworthiness, and robustness with a novel protocol, showing that it effectively generates human-understandable justifications for its predictions.
Authors: Jane Carney, Kushal Upreti, Gaby G. Dagher, Tim Andersen
Abstract: Federated learning enhances traditional deep learning by enabling the joint training of a model with the use of IoT device's private data. It ensures privacy for clients, but is susceptible to data poisoning attacks during training that degrade model performance and integrity. Current poisoning detection methods in federated learning lack a standardized detection method or take significant liberties with trust. In this paper, we present \Sys, a novel blockchain-enabled poison detection framework in federated learning. The framework decentralizes the role of the global server across participating clients. We introduce a judge model used to detect data poisoning in model updates. The judge model is produced by each client and verified to reach consensus on a single judge model. We implement our solution to show \Sys is robust against data poisoning attacks and the creation of our judge model is scalable.
Authors: Pallavi Zambare, Venkata Nikhil Thanikella, Ying Liu
Abstract: When combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with autonomous agents, used in network monitoring and decision-making systems, this will create serious security issues. In this research, the MAESTRO framework consisting of the seven layers threat modeling architecture in the system was used to expose, evaluate, and eliminate vulnerabilities of agentic AI. The prototype agent system was constructed and implemented, using Python, LangChain, and telemetry in WebSockets, and deployed with inference, memory, parameter tuning, and anomaly detection modules. Two practical threat cases were confirmed as follows: (i) resource denial of service by traffic replay denial-of-service, and (ii) memory poisoning by tampering with the historical log file maintained by the agent. These situations resulted in measurable levels of performance degradation, i.e. telemetry updates were delayed, and computational loads were increased, as a result of poor system adaptations. It was suggested to use a multilayered defense-in-depth approach with memory isolation, validation of planners and anomaly response systems in real-time. These findings verify that MAESTRO is viable in operational threat mapping, prospective risk scoring, and the basis of the resilient system design. The authors bring attention to the importance of the enforcement of memory integrity, paying attention to the adaptation logic monitoring, and cross-layer communication protection that guarantee the agentic AI reliability in adversarial settings.
Authors: Aydin Zaboli, Junho Hong
Abstract: This paper elaborates on an extensive security framework specifically designed for energy management systems (EMSs), which effectively tackles the dynamic environment of cybersecurity vulnerabilities and/or system problems (SPs), accomplished through the incorporation of novel methodologies. A comprehensive multi-point attack/error model is initially proposed to systematically identify vulnerabilities throughout the entire EMS data processing pipeline, including post state estimation (SE) stealth attacks, EMS database manipulation, and human-machine interface (HMI) display corruption according to the real-time database (RTDB) storage. This framework acknowledges the interconnected nature of modern attack vectors, which utilize various phases of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) data flow. Then, generative AI (GenAI)-based anomaly detection systems (ADSs) for EMSs are proposed for the first time in the power system domain to handle the scenarios. Further, a set-of-mark generative intelligence (SoM-GI) framework, which leverages multimodal analysis by integrating visual markers with rules considering the GenAI capabilities, is suggested to overcome inherent spatial reasoning limitations. The SoM-GI methodology employs systematic visual indicators to enable accurate interpretation of segmented HMI displays and detect visual anomalies that numerical methods fail to identify. Validation on the IEEE 14-Bus system shows the framework's effectiveness across scenarios, while visual analysis identifies inconsistencies. This integrated approach combines numerical analysis with visual pattern recognition and linguistic rules to protect against cyber threats and system errors.
Authors: Muhammad Ahmad, Fida Ullah, Muhammad Usman, Ildar Batyrshin, Grigori Sidorov
Abstract: Social media platforms have become valuable tools for understanding public health challenges by offering insights into patient behaviors, medication use, and mental health issues. However, analyzing such data remains difficult due to the prevalence of informal language, slang, and coded communication, which can obscure the detection of opioid misuse. This study addresses the issue of opioid-related user behavior on social media, including informal expressions, slang terms, and misspelled or coded language. We analyzed the existing Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) technique and developed a BERT-BiLSTM-3CNN hybrid deep learning model, named SABIA, to create a single-task classifier that effectively captures the features of the target dataset. The SABIA model demonstrated strong capabilities in capturing semantics and contextual information. The proposed approach includes: (1) data preprocessing, (2) data representation using the SABIA model, (3) a fine-tuning phase, and (4) classification of user behavior into five categories. A new dataset was constructed from Reddit posts, identifying opioid user behaviors across five classes: Dealers, Active Opioid Users, Recovered Users, Prescription Users, and Non-Users, supported by detailed annotation guidelines. Experiments were conducted using supervised learning. Results show that SABIA achieved benchmark performance, outperforming the baseline (Logistic Regression, LR = 0.86) and improving accuracy by 9.30%. Comparisons with seven previous studies confirmed its effectiveness and robustness. This study demonstrates the potential of hybrid deep learning models for detecting complex opioid-related behaviors on social media, supporting public health monitoring and intervention efforts.
Authors: Greg Sadler, Nathan Sherburn
Abstract: We introduce the concept of "Legal Zero-Days" as a novel risk vector for advanced AI systems. Legal Zero-Days are previously undiscovered vulnerabilities in legal frameworks that, when exploited, can cause immediate and significant societal disruption without requiring litigation or other processes before impact. We present a risk model for identifying and evaluating these vulnerabilities, demonstrating their potential to bypass safeguards or impede government responses to AI incidents. Using the 2017 Australian dual citizenship crisis as a case study, we illustrate how seemingly minor legal oversights can lead to large-scale governance disruption. We develop a methodology for creating "legal puzzles" as evaluation instruments for assessing AI systems' capabilities to discover such vulnerabilities. Our findings suggest that while current AI models may not reliably find impactful Legal Zero-Days, future systems may develop this capability, presenting both risks and opportunities for improving legal robustness. This work contributes to the broader effort to identify and mitigate previously unrecognized risks from frontier AI systems.
Authors: Pallavi Zambare, Venkata Nikhil Thanikella, Nikhil Padmanabh Kottur, Sree Akhil Akula, Ying Liu
Abstract: In this paper, we present NetMoniAI, an agentic AI framework for automatic network monitoring and security that integrates decentralized analysis with lightweight centralized coordination. The framework consists of two layers: autonomous micro-agents at each node perform local traffic analysis and anomaly detection. A central controller then aggregates insights across nodes to detect coordinated attacks and maintain system-wide situational awareness. We evaluated NetMoniAI on a local micro-testbed and through NS-3 simulations. Results confirm that the two-tier agentic-AI design scales under resource constraints, reduces redundancy, and improves response time without compromising accuracy. To facilitate broader adoption and reproducibility, the complete framework is available as open source. This enables researchers and practitioners to replicate, validate, and extend it across diverse network environments and threat scenarios. Github link: https://github.com/pzambare3/NetMoniAI
Authors: Christopher Pinier, Sonia Acu\~na Vargas, Mariia Steeghs-Turchina, Dora Matzke, Claire E. Stevenson, Michael D. Nunez
Abstract: This study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) mirror human neurocognition during abstract reasoning. We compared the performance and neural representations of human participants with those of eight open-source LLMs on an abstract-pattern-completion task. We leveraged pattern type differences in task performance and in fixation-related potentials (FRPs) as recorded by electroencephalography (EEG) during the task. Our findings indicate that only the largest tested LLMs (~70 billion parameters) achieve human-comparable accuracy, with Qwen-2.5-72B and DeepSeek-R1-70B also showing similarities with the human pattern-specific difficulty profile. Critically, every LLM tested forms representations that distinctly cluster the abstract pattern categories within their intermediate layers, although the strength of this clustering scales with their performance on the task. Moderate positive correlations were observed between the representational geometries of task-optimal LLM layers and human frontal FRPs. These results consistently diverged from comparisons with other EEG measures (response-locked ERPs and resting EEG), suggesting a potential shared representational space for abstract patterns. This indicates that LLMs might mirror human brain mechanisms in abstract reasoning, offering preliminary evidence of shared principles between biological and artificial intelligence.
Authors: Jay L. Cunningham, Kevin Zhongyang Shao, Rock Yuren Pang, Nathaniel Mengist
Abstract: While research has focused on surfacing and auditing algorithmic bias to ensure equitable AI development, less is known about how NLP practitioners - those directly involved in dataset development, annotation, and deployment - perceive and navigate issues of NLP data equity. This study is among the first to center practitioners' perspectives, linking their experiences to a multi-scalar AI governance framework and advancing participatory recommendations that bridge technical, policy, and community domains. Drawing on a 2024 questionnaire and focus group, we examine how U.S.-based NLP data practitioners conceptualize fairness, contend with organizational and systemic constraints, and engage emerging governance efforts such as the U.S. AI Bill of Rights. Findings reveal persistent tensions between commercial objectives and equity commitments, alongside calls for more participatory and accountable data workflows. We critically engage debates on data diversity and diversity washing, arguing that improving NLP equity requires structural governance reforms that support practitioner agency and community consent.
Authors: Sushrut Patwardhan, Raghavendra Ramachandra, Sushma Venkatesh
Abstract: Morphing attack detection has become an essential component of face recognition systems for ensuring a reliable verification scenario. In this paper, we present a multimodal learning approach that can provide a textual description of morphing attack detection. We first show that zero-shot evaluation of the proposed framework using Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) can yield not only generalizable morphing attack detection, but also predict the most relevant text snippet. We present an extensive analysis of ten different textual prompts that include both short and long textual prompts. These prompts are engineered by considering the human understandable textual snippet. Extensive experiments were performed on a face morphing dataset that was developed using a publicly available face biometric dataset. We present an evaluation of SOTA pre-trained neural networks together with the proposed framework in the zero-shot evaluation of five different morphing generation techniques that are captured in three different mediums.
Authors: Sola Shirai, Kavitha Srinivas, Julian Dolby, Michael Katz, Horst Samulowitz, Shirin Sohrabi
Abstract: For large language models (LLMs), reasoning over graphs could help solve many problems. Prior work has tried to improve LLM graph reasoning by examining how best to serialize graphs as text and by combining GNNs and LLMs. However, the merits of such approaches remain unclear, so we empirically answer the following research questions: (1) Can LLMs learn to solve fundamental graph tasks without specialized graph encoding models?, (2) Can LLMs generalize learned solutions to unseen graph structures or tasks?, and (3) What are the merits of competing approaches to learn graph tasks? We show that even small LLMs can learn to solve graph tasks by training them with instructive chain-of-thought solutions, and this training generalizes, without specialized graph encoders, to new tasks and graph structures.
Authors: Maxime Heuillet, Yufei Cui, Boxing Chen, Audrey Durand, Prasanna Parthasarathi
Abstract: Advanced reasoning in LLMs on challenging domains like mathematical reasoning can be tackled using verifiable rewards based reinforced fine-tuning (ReFT). In standard ReFT frameworks, a behavior model generates multiple completions with answers per problem, for the answer to be then scored by a reward function. While such RL post-training methods demonstrate significant performance improvements across challenging reasoning domains, the computational cost of generating completions during training with multiple inference steps makes the training cost non-trivial. To address this, we draw inspiration from off-policy RL, and speculative decoding to introduce a novel ReFT framework, dubbed Nested-ReFT, where a subset of layers of the target model acts as the behavior model to generate off-policy completions during training. The behavior model configured with dynamic layer skipping per batch during training decreases the inference cost compared to the standard ReFT frameworks. Our theoretical analysis shows that Nested-ReFT yields unbiased gradient estimates with controlled variance. Our empirical analysis demonstrates improved computational efficiency measured as tokens/sec across multiple math reasoning benchmarks and model sizes. Additionally, we explore three variants of bias mitigation to minimize the off-policyness in the gradient updates that allows for maintaining performance that matches the baseline ReFT performance.
Authors: Nghia Trung Ngo, Franck Dernoncourt, Thien Huu Nguyen
Abstract: Recent advancements in reasoning-reinforced Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, the mechanism underlying their utilization of different human reasoning skills remains poorly investigated, especially for multilingual commonsense reasoning that involves everyday knowledge across different languages and cultures. To address this gap, we propose a \textbf{M}ultilingual and Scalable Benchmark for \textbf{S}kill-based \textbf{Co}mmonsense \textbf{Re}asoning (\textbf{mSCoRe}). Our benchmark incorporates three key components that are designed to systematically evaluate LLM's reasoning capabilities, including: (1) a novel taxonomy of reasoning skills that enables fine-grained analysis of models' reasoning processes, (2) a robust data synthesis pipeline tailored specifically for commonsense reasoning evaluation, and (3) a complexity scaling framework allowing task difficulty to scale dynamically alongside future improvements in LLM abilities. Extensive experiments on eights state-of-the-art LLMs of varying sizes and training approaches demonstrate that \textbf{mSCoRe} remains significantly challenging for current models, particularly at higher complexity levels. Our results reveal the limitations of such reasoning-reinforced models when confronted with nuanced multilingual general and cultural commonsense. We further provide detailed analysis on the models' reasoning processes, suggesting future directions for improving multilingual commonsense reasoning capabilities.
Authors: Yuhan Xie, William Cappelletti, Mahsa Shoaran, Pascal Frossard
Abstract: Deep neural networks for time series must capture complex temporal patterns, to effectively represent dynamic data. Self- and semi-supervised learning methods show promising results in pre-training large models, which -- when finetuned for classification -- often outperform their counterparts trained from scratch. Still, the choice of pretext training tasks is often heuristic and their transferability to downstream classification is not granted, thus we propose a novel semi-supervised pre-training strategy to enforce latent representations that satisfy the Neural Collapse phenomenon observed in optimally trained neural classifiers. We use a rotational equiangular tight frame-classifier and pseudo-labeling to pre-train deep encoders with few labeled samples. Furthermore, to effectively capture temporal dynamics while enforcing embedding separability, we integrate generative pretext tasks with our method, and we define a novel sequential augmentation strategy. We show that our method significantly outperforms previous pretext tasks when applied to LSTMs, transformers, and state-space models on three multivariate time series classification datasets. These results highlight the benefit of aligning pre-training objectives with theoretically grounded embedding geometry.
Authors: Maria Stoica, Francesco Leofante, Alessio Lomuscio
Abstract: Accurate and explainable out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is required to use machine learning systems safely. Previous work has shown that feature distance to decision boundaries can be used to identify OOD data effectively. In this paper, we build on this intuition and propose a post-hoc OOD detection method that, given an input, calculates the distance to decision boundaries by leveraging counterfactual explanations. Since computing explanations can be expensive for large architectures, we also propose strategies to improve scalability by computing counterfactuals directly in embedding space. Crucially, as the method employs counterfactual explanations, we can seamlessly use them to help interpret the results of our detector. We show that our method is in line with the state of the art on CIFAR-10, achieving 93.50% AUROC and 25.80% FPR95. Our method outperforms these methods on CIFAR-100 with 97.05% AUROC and 13.79% FPR95 and on ImageNet-200 with 92.55% AUROC and 33.55% FPR95 across four OOD datasets
Authors: Nitin Rai, Nathan S. Boyd, Gary E. Vallad, Arnold W. Schumann
Abstract: The current advancements in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models have paved the way for new possibilities for generating high-resolution synthetic images, thereby offering a promising alternative to traditional image acquisition for training computer vision models in agriculture. In the context of crop disease diagnosis, GenAI models are being used to create synthetic images of various diseases, potentially facilitating model creation and reducing the dependency on resource-intensive in-field data collection. However, limited research has been conducted on evaluating the effectiveness of integrating real with synthetic images to improve disease classification performance. Therefore, this study aims to investigate whether combining a limited number of real images with synthetic images can enhance the prediction accuracy of an EfficientNetV2-L model for classifying watermelon \textit{(Citrullus lanatus)} diseases. The training dataset was divided into five treatments: H0 (only real images), H1 (only synthetic images), H2 (1:1 real-to-synthetic), H3 (1:10 real-to-synthetic), and H4 (H3 + random images to improve variability and model generalization). All treatments were trained using a custom EfficientNetV2-L architecture with enhanced fine-tuning and transfer learning techniques. Models trained on H2, H3, and H4 treatments demonstrated high precision, recall, and F1-score metrics. Additionally, the weighted F1-score increased from 0.65 (on H0) to 1.00 (on H3-H4) signifying that the addition of a small number of real images with a considerable volume of synthetic images improved model performance and generalizability. Overall, this validates the findings that synthetic images alone cannot adequately substitute for real images; instead, both must be used in a hybrid manner to maximize model performance for crop disease classification.
Authors: Gal Amram, Eitan Farchi, Shmulik Froimovich, Raviv Gal, Avi Ziv
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as evaluators in natural language processing tasks, a paradigm known as LLM-as-a-Judge (LaaJ). While effective in general domains, LaaJs pose significant challenges in domain-specific contexts, where annotated data is scarce and expert evaluation is costly. In such cases, meta-evaluation is often performed using metrics that have not been validated for the specific domain in which they are applied. As a result, it becomes difficult to determine which metrics effectively identify LaaJ quality, and further, what threshold indicates sufficient evaluator performance. In this work, we introduce LaaJMeter, a simulation-based framework for controlled meta-evaluation of LaaJs. LaaJMeter enables engineers to generate synthetic data representing virtual models and judges, allowing systematic analysis of evaluation metrics under realistic conditions. This helps practitioners validate and refine LaaJs for specific evaluation tasks: they can test whether their metrics correctly distinguish between better and worse (virtual) LaaJs, and estimate appropriate thresholds for evaluator adequacy. We demonstrate the utility of LaaJMeter in a code translation task involving a legacy programming language, showing how different metrics vary in sensitivity to evaluator quality. Our results highlight the limitations of common metrics and the importance of principled metric selection. LaaJMeter provides a scalable and extensible solution for assessing LaaJs in low-resource settings, contributing to the broader effort to ensure trustworthy and reproducible evaluation in NLP.
Authors: Abdullah Hashmat, Muhammad Arham Mirza, Agha Ali Raza
Abstract: With the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various applications, it is empirical to ensure their fairness across all user communities. However, most LLMs are trained and evaluated on Western centric data, with little attention paid to low-resource languages and regional contexts. To address this gap, we introduce PakBBQ, a culturally and regionally adapted extension of the original Bias Benchmark for Question Answering (BBQ) dataset. PakBBQ comprises over 214 templates, 17180 QA pairs across 8 categories in both English and Urdu, covering eight bias dimensions including age, disability, appearance, gender, socio-economic status, religious, regional affiliation, and language formality that are relevant in Pakistan. We evaluate multiple multilingual LLMs under both ambiguous and explicitly disambiguated contexts, as well as negative versus non negative question framings. Our experiments reveal (i) an average accuracy gain of 12\% with disambiguation, (ii) consistently stronger counter bias behaviors in Urdu than in English, and (iii) marked framing effects that reduce stereotypical responses when questions are posed negatively. These findings highlight the importance of contextualized benchmarks and simple prompt engineering strategies for bias mitigation in low resource settings.
Authors: Igor Halperin
Abstract: The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) is challenged by hallucinations, critical failure modes where models generate non-factual, nonsensical or unfaithful text. This paper introduces Semantic Divergence Metrics (SDM), a novel lightweight framework for detecting Faithfulness Hallucinations -- events of severe deviations of LLMs responses from input contexts. We focus on a specific implementation of these LLM errors, {confabulations, defined as responses that are arbitrary and semantically misaligned with the user's query. Existing methods like Semantic Entropy test for arbitrariness by measuring the diversity of answers to a single, fixed prompt. Our SDM framework improves upon this by being more prompt-aware: we test for a deeper form of arbitrariness by measuring response consistency not only across multiple answers but also across multiple, semantically-equivalent paraphrases of the original prompt. Methodologically, our approach uses joint clustering on sentence embeddings to create a shared topic space for prompts and answers. A heatmap of topic co-occurances between prompts and responses can be viewed as a quantified two-dimensional visualization of the user-machine dialogue. We then compute a suite of information-theoretic metrics to measure the semantic divergence between prompts and responses. Our practical score, $\mathcal{S}_H$, combines the Jensen-Shannon divergence and Wasserstein distance to quantify this divergence, with a high score indicating a Faithfulness hallucination. Furthermore, we identify the KL divergence KL(Answer $||$ Prompt) as a powerful indicator of \textbf{Semantic Exploration}, a key signal for distinguishing different generative behaviors. These metrics are further combined into the Semantic Box, a diagnostic framework for classifying LLM response types, including the dangerous, confident confabulation.
Authors: Dixon Domfeh, Saeid Safarveisi
Abstract: Traditional models for pricing catastrophe (CAT) bonds struggle to capture the complex, relational data inherent in these instruments. This paper introduces CATNet, a novel framework that applies a geometric deep learning architecture, the Relational Graph Convolutional Network (R-GCN), to model the CAT bond primary market as a graph, leveraging its underlying network structure for spread prediction. Our analysis reveals that the CAT bond market exhibits the characteristics of a scale-free network, a structure dominated by a few highly connected and influential hubs. CATNet demonstrates high predictive performance, significantly outperforming a strong Random Forest benchmark. The inclusion of topological centrality measures as features provides a further, significant boost in accuracy. Interpretability analysis confirms that these network features are not mere statistical artifacts; they are quantitative proxies for long-held industry intuition regarding issuer reputation, underwriter influence, and peril concentration. This research provides evidence that network connectivity is a key determinant of price, offering a new paradigm for risk assessment and proving that graph-based models can deliver both state-of-the-art accuracy and deeper, quantifiable market insights.
Authors: Rahul Janaa, Shubham Dixit, Mrityunjay Sharma, Ritesh Kumar
Abstract: Monitoring cattle health and optimizing yield are key challenges faced by dairy farmers due to difficulties in tracking all animals on the farm. This work aims to showcase modern data-driven farming practices based on explainable machine learning(ML) methods that explain the activity and behaviour of dairy cattle (cows). Continuous data collection of 3-axis accelerometer sensors and usage of robust ML methodologies and algorithms, provide farmers and researchers with actionable information on cattle activity, allowing farmers to make informed decisions and incorporate sustainable practices. This study utilizes Bluetooth-based Internet of Things (IoT) devices and 4G networks for seamless data transmission, immediate analysis, inference generation, and explains the models performance with explainability frameworks. Special emphasis is put on the pre-processing of the accelerometers time series data, including the extraction of statistical characteristics, signal processing techniques, and lag-based features using the sliding window technique. Various hyperparameter-optimized ML models are evaluated across varying window lengths for activity classification. The k-nearest neighbour Classifier achieved the best performance, with AUC of mean 0.98 and standard deviation of 0.0026 on the training set and 0.99 on testing set). In order to ensure transparency, Explainable AI based frameworks such as SHAP is used to interpret feature importance that can be understood and used by practitioners. A detailed comparison of the important features, along with the stability analysis of selected features, supports development of explainable and practical ML models for sustainable livestock management.
Authors: Ethan Gordon, Nishank Kuppa, Rigved Tummala, Sriram Anasuri
Abstract: This project explores emoji prediction from short text sequences using four deep learning architectures: a feed-forward network, CNN, transformer, and BERT. Using the TweetEval dataset, we address class imbalance through focal loss and regularization techniques. Results show BERT achieves the highest overall performance due to its pre-training advantage, while CNN demonstrates superior efficacy on rare emoji classes. This research shows the importance of architecture selection and hyperparameter tuning for sentiment-aware emoji prediction, contributing to improved human-computer interaction.
Authors: Andrew X. Chen, Guillermo Horga, Sean Escola
Abstract: Patients who are at clinical high risk (CHR) for schizophrenia need close monitoring of their symptoms to inform appropriate treatments. The Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) is a validated, commonly used research tool for measuring symptoms in patients with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders; however, it is not commonly used in clinical practice as it requires a lengthy structured interview. Here, we utilize large language models (LLMs) to predict BPRS scores from clinical interview transcripts in 409 CHR patients from the Accelerating Medicines Partnership Schizophrenia (AMP-SCZ) cohort. Despite the interviews not being specifically structured to measure the BPRS, the zero-shot performance of the LLM predictions compared to the true assessment (median concordance: 0.84, ICC: 0.73) approaches human inter- and intra-rater reliability. We further demonstrate that LLMs have substantial potential to improve and standardize the assessment of CHR patients via their accuracy in assessing the BPRS in foreign languages (median concordance: 0.88, ICC: 0.70), and integrating longitudinal information in a one-shot or few-shot learning approach.
Authors: Chenggang Chen, Zhiyu Yang
Abstract: Bioacoustics, the study of animal sounds, offers a non-invasive method to monitor ecosystems. Extracting embeddings from audio-pretrained deep learning (DL) models without fine-tuning has become popular for obtaining bioacoustic features for tasks. However, a recent benchmark study reveals that while fine-tuned audio-pretrained VGG and transformer models achieve state-of-the-art performance in some tasks, they fail in others. This study benchmarks 11 DL models on the same tasks by reducing their learned embeddings' dimensionality and evaluating them through clustering. We found that audio-pretrained DL models 1) without fine-tuning even underperform fine-tuned AlexNet, 2) both with and without fine-tuning fail to separate the background from labeled sounds, but ResNet does, and 3) outperform other models when fewer background sounds are included during fine-tuning. This study underscores the necessity of fine-tuning audio-pretrained models and checking the embeddings after fine-tuning. Our codes are available: https://github.com/NeuroscienceAI/Audio\_Embeddings
Authors: Tao Long, Sitong Wang, \'Emilie Fabre, Tony Wang, Anup Sathya, Jason Wu, Savvas Petridis, Dingzeyu Li, Tuhin Chakrabarty, Yue Jiang, Jingyi Li, Tiffany Tseng, Ken Nakagaki, Qian Yang, Nikolas Martelaro, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Lydia B. Chilton
Abstract: UIST researchers develop tools to address user challenges. However, user interactions with AI evolve over time through learning, adaptation, and repurposing, making one time evaluations insufficient. Capturing these dynamics requires longer-term studies, but challenges in deployment, evaluation design, and data collection have made such longitudinal research difficult to implement. Our workshop aims to tackle these challenges and prepare researchers with practical strategies for longitudinal studies. The workshop includes a keynote, panel discussions, and interactive breakout groups for discussion and hands-on protocol design and tool prototyping sessions. We seek to foster a community around longitudinal system research and promote it as a more embraced method for designing, building, and evaluating UIST tools.
Authors: Soorena Salari, Catherine Spino, Laurie-Anne Pharand, Fabienne Lathuiliere, Hassan Rivaz, Silvain Beriault, Yiming Xiao
Abstract: Accurate tissue motion tracking is critical to ensure treatment outcome and safety in 2D-Cine MRI-guided radiotherapy. This is typically achieved by registration of sequential images, but existing methods often face challenges with large misalignments and lack of interpretability. In this paper, we introduce DINOMotion, a novel deep learning framework based on DINOv2 with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) layers for robust, efficient, and interpretable motion tracking. DINOMotion automatically detects corresponding landmarks to derive optimal image registration, enhancing interpretability by providing explicit visual correspondences between sequential images. The integration of LoRA layers reduces trainable parameters, improving training efficiency, while DINOv2's powerful feature representations offer robustness against large misalignments. Unlike iterative optimization-based methods, DINOMotion directly computes image registration at test time. Our experiments on volunteer and patient datasets demonstrate its effectiveness in estimating both linear and nonlinear transformations, achieving Dice scores of 92.07% for the kidney, 90.90% for the liver, and 95.23% for the lung, with corresponding Hausdorff distances of 5.47 mm, 8.31 mm, and 6.72 mm, respectively. DINOMotion processes each scan in approximately 30ms and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in handling large misalignments. These results highlight its potential as a robust and interpretable solution for real-time motion tracking in 2D-Cine MRI-guided radiotherapy.
Authors: Haonan Ge, Yiwei Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Yujun Cai
Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown strong performance across multimodal tasks. However, they often produce hallucinations -- text that is inconsistent with visual input, due to the limited ability to verify information in different regions of the image. To address this, we propose Multi-Region Fusion Decoding (MRFD), a training-free decoding method that improves factual grounding by modeling inter-region consistency. MRFD identifies salient regions using cross-attention, generates initial responses for each, and computes reliability weights based on Jensen-Shannon Divergence (JSD) among the responses. These weights guide a consistency-aware fusion of per-region predictions, using region-aware prompts inspired by Chain-of-Thought reasoning. Experiments across multiple LVLMs and benchmarks show that MRFD significantly reduces hallucinations and improves response factuality without requiring model updates.
Authors: Yujie Zhao, Jiabei Zeng, Shiguang Shan
Abstract: Although appearance-based point-of-gaze (PoG) estimation has improved, the estimators still struggle to generalize across individuals due to personal differences. Therefore, person-specific calibration is required for accurate PoG estimation. However, calibrated PoG estimators are often sensitive to head pose variations. To address this, we investigate the key factors influencing calibrated estimators and explore pose-robust calibration strategies. Specifically, we first construct a benchmark, MobilePoG, which includes facial images from 32 individuals focusing on designated points under either fixed or continuously changing head poses. Using this benchmark, we systematically analyze how the diversity of calibration points and head poses influences estimation accuracy. Our experiments show that introducing a wider range of head poses during calibration improves the estimator's ability to handle pose variation. Building on this insight, we propose a dynamic calibration strategy in which users fixate on calibration points while moving their phones. This strategy naturally introduces head pose variation during a user-friendly and efficient calibration process, ultimately producing a better calibrated PoG estimator that is less sensitive to head pose variations than those using conventional calibration strategies. Codes and datasets are available at our project page.
Authors: Gustavo Bonil, Simone Hashiguti, Jhessica Silva, Jo\~ao Gondim, Helena Maia, N\'adia Silva, Helio Pedrini, Sandra Avila
Abstract: With the advance of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained prominence and been applied in diverse contexts. As they evolve into more sophisticated versions, it is essential to assess whether they reproduce biases, such as discrimination and racialization, while maintaining hegemonic discourses. Current bias detection approaches rely mostly on quantitative, automated methods, which often overlook the nuanced ways in which biases emerge in natural language. This study proposes a qualitative, discursive framework to complement such methods. Through manual analysis of LLM-generated short stories featuring Black and white women, we investigate gender and racial biases. We contend that qualitative methods such as the one proposed here are fundamental to help both developers and users identify the precise ways in which biases manifest in LLM outputs, thus enabling better conditions to mitigate them. Results show that Black women are portrayed as tied to ancestry and resistance, while white women appear in self-discovery processes. These patterns reflect how language models replicate crystalized discursive representations, reinforcing essentialization and a sense of social immobility. When prompted to correct biases, models offered superficial revisions that maintained problematic meanings, revealing limitations in fostering inclusive narratives. Our results demonstrate the ideological functioning of algorithms and have significant implications for the ethical use and development of AI. The study reinforces the need for critical, interdisciplinary approaches to AI design and deployment, addressing how LLM-generated discourses reflect and perpetuate inequalities.
Authors: Sihang Zeng, Kai Tian, Kaiyan Zhang, Yuru wang, Junqi Gao, Runze Liu, Sa Yang, Jingxuan Li, Xinwei Long, Jiaheng Ma, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
Abstract: Peer review is essential for scientific progress but faces growing challenges due to increasing submission volumes and reviewer fatigue. Existing automated review approaches struggle with factual accuracy, rating consistency, and analytical depth, often generating superficial or generic feedback lacking the insights characteristic of high-quality human reviews. We introduce ReviewRL, a reinforcement learning framework for generating comprehensive and factually grounded scientific paper reviews. Our approach combines: (1) an ArXiv-MCP retrieval-augmented context generation pipeline that incorporates relevant scientific literature, (2) supervised fine-tuning that establishes foundational reviewing capabilities, and (3) a reinforcement learning procedure with a composite reward function that jointly enhances review quality and rating accuracy. Experiments on ICLR 2025 papers demonstrate that ReviewRL significantly outperforms existing methods across both rule-based metrics and model-based quality assessments. ReviewRL establishes a foundational framework for RL-driven automatic critique generation in scientific discovery, demonstrating promising potential for future development in this domain. The implementation of ReviewRL will be released at GitHub.
Authors: Keke Gai, Dongjue Wang, Jing Yu, Liehuang Zhu, Qi Wu
Abstract: Existing backdoor defense methods in Federated Learning (FL) rely on the assumption of homogeneous client data distributions or the availability of a clean serve dataset, which limits the practicality and effectiveness. Defending against backdoor attacks under heterogeneous client data distributions while preserving model performance remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a FL backdoor defense framework named CLIP-Fed, which leverages the zero-shot learning capabilities of vision-language pre-training models. By integrating both pre-aggregation and post-aggregation defense strategies, CLIP-Fed overcomes the limitations of Non-IID imposed on defense effectiveness. To address privacy concerns and enhance the coverage of the dataset against diverse triggers, we construct and augment the server dataset using the multimodal large language model and frequency analysis without any client samples. To address class prototype deviations caused by backdoor samples and eliminate the correlation between trigger patterns and target labels, CLIP-Fed aligns the knowledge of the global model and CLIP on the augmented dataset using prototype contrastive loss and Kullback-Leibler divergence. Extensive experiments on representative datasets validate the effectiveness of CLIP-Fed. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, CLIP-Fed achieves an average reduction in ASR, i.e., 2.03\% on CIFAR-10 and 1.35\% on CIFAR-10-LT, while improving average MA by 7.92\% and 0.48\%, respectively.
Authors: Abhijit Sinha, Harishankar Kumar, Mohit Joshi, Hemant Kumar Kathania, Shrikanth Narayanan, Sudarsana Reddy Kadiri
Abstract: Children's speech presents challenges for age and gender classification due to high variability in pitch, articulation, and developmental traits. While self-supervised learning (SSL) models perform well on adult speech tasks, their ability to encode speaker traits in children remains underexplored. This paper presents a detailed layer-wise analysis of four Wav2Vec2 variants using the PFSTAR and CMU Kids datasets. Results show that early layers (1-7) capture speaker-specific cues more effectively than deeper layers, which increasingly focus on linguistic information. Applying PCA further improves classification, reducing redundancy and highlighting the most informative components. The Wav2Vec2-large-lv60 model achieves 97.14% (age) and 98.20% (gender) on CMU Kids; base-100h and large-lv60 models reach 86.05% and 95.00% on PFSTAR. These results reveal how speaker traits are structured across SSL model depth and support more targeted, adaptive strategies for child-aware speech interfaces.
Authors: Claire Jie Zhang, Seyed A. Esmaeili, Jamie Morgenstern
Abstract: Fair clustering has traditionally focused on ensuring equitable group representation or equalizing group-specific clustering costs. However, Dickerson et al. (2025) recently showed that these fairness notions may yield undesirable or unintuitive clustering outcomes and advocated for a welfare-centric clustering approach that models the utilities of the groups. In this work, we model group utilities based on both distances and proportional representation and formalize two optimization objectives based on welfare-centric clustering: the Rawlsian (Egalitarian) objective and the Utilitarian objective. We introduce novel algorithms for both objectives and prove theoretical guarantees for them. Empirical evaluations on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that our methods significantly outperform existing fair clustering baselines.
Authors: Jiyong Kim, Jaeho Lee, Jiahao Lin, Alish Kanani, Miao Sun, Umit Y. Ogras, Jaehyun Park
Abstract: State Space Model (SSM)-based machine learning architectures have recently gained significant attention for processing sequential data. Mamba, a recent sequence-to-sequence SSM, offers competitive accuracy with superior computational efficiency compared to state-of-the-art transformer models. While this advantage makes Mamba particularly promising for resource-constrained edge devices, no hardware acceleration frameworks are currently optimized for deploying it in such environments. This paper presents eMamba, a comprehensive end-to-end hardware acceleration framework explicitly designed for deploying Mamba models on edge platforms. eMamba maximizes computational efficiency by replacing complex normalization layers with lightweight hardware-aware alternatives and approximating expensive operations, such as SiLU activation and exponentiation, considering the target applications. Then, it performs an approximation-aware neural architecture search (NAS) to tune the learnable parameters used during approximation. Evaluations with Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and MARS, an open-source human pose estimation dataset, show eMamba achieves comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art techniques using 1.63-19.9$\times$ fewer parameters. In addition, it generalizes well to large-scale natural language tasks, demonstrating stable perplexity across varying sequence lengths on the WikiText2 dataset. We also quantize and implement the entire eMamba pipeline on an AMD ZCU102 FPGA and ASIC using GlobalFoundries (GF) 22 nm technology. Experimental results show 4.95-5.62$\times$ lower latency and 2.22-9.95$\times$ higher throughput, with 4.77$\times$ smaller area, 9.84$\times$ lower power, and 48.6$\times$ lower energy consumption than baseline solutions while maintaining competitive accuracy.
Authors: Yechan Kim, Dongho Yoon, Younkwan Lee, Unse Fatima, Hong Kook Kim, Songjae Lee, Sanga Park, Jeong Ho Park, Seonjong Kang, Moongu Jeon
Abstract: While previous studies on image segmentation focus on handling severe (or explicit) label noise, real-world datasets also exhibit subtle (or implicit) label imperfections. These arise from inherent challenges, such as ambiguous object boundaries and annotator variability. Although not explicitly present, such mild and latent noise can still impair model performance. Typical data augmentation methods, which apply identical transformations to the image and its label, risk amplifying these subtle imperfections and limiting the model's generalization capacity. In this paper, we introduce NSegment+, a novel augmentation framework that decouples image and label transformations to address such realistic noise for semantic segmentation. By introducing controlled elastic deformations only to segmentation labels while preserving the original images, our method encourages models to focus on learning robust representations of object structures despite minor label inconsistencies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NSegment+ consistently improves performance, achieving mIoU gains of up to +2.29, +2.38, +1.75, and +3.39 in average on Vaihingen, LoveDA, Cityscapes, and PASCAL VOC, respectively-even without bells and whistles, highlighting the importance of addressing implicit label noise. These gains can be further amplified when combined with other training tricks, including CutMix and Label Smoothing.
Authors: Haibin Sun, Xinghui Song
Abstract: Driver distraction detection is essential for improving traffic safety and reducing road accidents. However, existing models often suffer from degraded generalization when deployed in real-world scenarios. This limitation primarily arises from the few-shot learning challenge caused by the high cost of data annotation in practical environments, as well as the substantial domain shift between training datasets and target deployment conditions. To address these issues, we propose a Pose-driven Quality-controlled Data Augmentation Framework (PQ-DAF) that leverages a vision-language model for sample filtering to cost-effectively expand training data and enhance cross-domain robustness. Specifically, we employ a Progressive Conditional Diffusion Model (PCDMs) to accurately capture key driver pose features and synthesize diverse training examples. A sample quality assessment module, built upon the CogVLM vision-language model, is then introduced to filter out low-quality synthetic samples based on a confidence threshold, ensuring the reliability of the augmented dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PQ-DAF substantially improves performance in few-shot driver distraction detection, achieving significant gains in model generalization under data-scarce conditions.
Authors: Huizhen Shu, Xuying Li, Qirui Wang, Yuji Kosuga, Mengqiu Tian, Zhuo Li
Abstract: With the rapid proliferation of Natural Language Processing (NLP), especially Large Language Models (LLMs), generating adversarial examples to jailbreak LLMs remains a key challenge for understanding model vulnerabilities and improving robustness. In this context, we propose a new black-box attack method that leverages the interpretability of large models. We introduce the Sparse Feature Perturbation Framework (SFPF), a novel approach for adversarial text generation that utilizes sparse autoencoders to identify and manipulate critical features in text. After using the SAE model to reconstruct hidden layer representations, we perform feature clustering on the successfully attacked texts to identify features with higher activations. These highly activated features are then perturbed to generate new adversarial texts. This selective perturbation preserves the malicious intent while amplifying safety signals, thereby increasing their potential to evade existing defenses. Our method enables a new red-teaming strategy that balances adversarial effectiveness with safety alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that adversarial texts generated by SFPF can bypass state-of-the-art defense mechanisms, revealing persistent vulnerabilities in current NLP systems.However, the method's effectiveness varies across prompts and layers, and its generalizability to other architectures and larger models remains to be validated.
Authors: Zihao Chen, Ji Zhuang, Jinyi Shen, Xiaoyue Ke, Xinyi Yang, Mingjie Zhou, Zhuoyao Du, Xu Yan, Zhouyang Wu, Zhenyu Xu, Jiangli Huang, Li Shang, Xuan Zeng, Fan Yang
Abstract: In this paper, we propose AnalogSeeker, an effort toward an open-source foundation language model for analog circuit design, with the aim of integrating domain knowledge and giving design assistance. To overcome the scarcity of data in this field, we employ a corpus collection strategy based on the domain knowledge framework of analog circuits. High-quality, accessible textbooks across relevant subfields are systematically curated and cleaned into a textual domain corpus. To address the complexity of knowledge of analog circuits, we introduce a granular domain knowledge distillation method. Raw, unlabeled domain corpus is decomposed into typical, granular learning nodes, where a multi-agent framework distills implicit knowledge embedded in unstructured text into question-answer data pairs with detailed reasoning processes, yielding a fine-grained, learnable dataset for fine-tuning. To address the unexplored challenges in training analog circuit foundation models, we explore and share our training methods through both theoretical analysis and experimental validation. We finally establish a fine-tuning-centric training paradigm, customizing and implementing a neighborhood self-constrained supervised fine-tuning algorithm. This approach enhances training outcomes by constraining the perturbation magnitude between the model's output distributions before and after training. In practice, we train the Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct model to obtain AnalogSeeker, which achieves 85.04% accuracy on AMSBench-TQA, the analog circuit knowledge evaluation benchmark, with a 15.67% point improvement over the original model and is competitive with mainstream commercial models. Furthermore, AnalogSeeker also shows effectiveness in the downstream operational amplifier design task. AnalogSeeker is open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/analogllm/analogseeker for research use.
Authors: Yuan-Yi Fan
Abstract: Text prompts enable intuitive content creation but may fall short in achieving high precision for intricate tasks; knob or slider controls offer precise adjustments at the cost of increased complexity. To address the gap between knobs and prompts, a new MCP (Model Context Protocol) server and a unique set of prompt design criteria are presented to enable exploring parametric OSC (OpenSoundControl) control by natural language prompts. Demonstrated by 14 practical QA examples with best practices and the generalized prompt templates, this study finds Claude integrated with the MCP2OSC server effective in generating OSC messages by natural language, interpreting, searching, and visualizing OSC messages, validating and debugging OSC messages, and managing OSC address patterns. MCP2OSC enhances human-machine collaboration by leveraging LLM (Large Language Model) to handle intricate OSC development tasks, and by empowering human creativity with an intuitive language interface featuring flexible precision controls: a prompt-based OSC tool. This study provides a novel perspective on the creative MCP application at the network protocol level by utilizing LLM's strength in directly processing and generating human-readable OSC messages. The results suggest its potential for a LLM-based universal control mechanism for multimedia devices.
Authors: Zhuoyuan Yu, Yuxing Long, Zihan Yang, Chengyan Zeng, Hongwei Fan, Jiyao Zhang, Hao Dong
Abstract: Existing vision-and-language navigation models often deviate from the correct trajectory when executing instructions. However, these models lack effective error correction capability, hindering their recovery from errors. To address this challenge, we propose Self-correction Flywheel, a novel post-training paradigm. Instead of considering the model's error trajectories on the training set as a drawback, our paradigm emphasizes their significance as a valuable data source. We have developed a method to identify deviations in these error trajectories and devised innovative techniques to automatically generate self-correction data for perception and action. These self-correction data serve as fuel to power the model's continued training. The brilliance of our paradigm is revealed when we re-evaluate the model on the training set, uncovering new error trajectories. At this time, the self-correction flywheel begins to spin. Through multiple flywheel iterations, we progressively enhance our monocular RGB-based VLA navigation model CorrectNav. Experiments on R2R-CE and RxR-CE benchmarks show CorrectNav achieves new state-of-the-art success rates of 65.1% and 69.3%, surpassing prior best VLA navigation models by 8.2% and 16.4%. Real robot tests in various indoor and outdoor environments demonstrate \method's superior capability of error correction, dynamic obstacle avoidance, and long instruction following.
Authors: Juyuan Wang, Rongchen Zhao, Wei Wei, Yufeng Wang, Mo Yu, Jie Zhou, Jin Xu, Liyan Xu
Abstract: Narrative comprehension on long stories and novels has been a challenging domain attributed to their intricate plotlines and entangled, often evolving relations among characters and entities. Given the LLM's diminished reasoning over extended context and high computational cost, retrieval-based approaches remain a pivotal role in practice. However, traditional RAG methods can fall short due to their stateless, single-step retrieval process, which often overlooks the dynamic nature of capturing interconnected relations within long-range context. In this work, we propose ComoRAG, holding the principle that narrative reasoning is not a one-shot process, but a dynamic, evolving interplay between new evidence acquisition and past knowledge consolidation, analogous to human cognition when reasoning with memory-related signals in the brain. Specifically, when encountering a reasoning impasse, ComoRAG undergoes iterative reasoning cycles while interacting with a dynamic memory workspace. In each cycle, it generates probing queries to devise new exploratory paths, then integrates the retrieved evidence of new aspects into a global memory pool, thereby supporting the emergence of a coherent context for the query resolution. Across four challenging long-context narrative benchmarks (200K+ tokens), ComoRAG outperforms strong RAG baselines with consistent relative gains up to 11% compared to the strongest baseline. Further analysis reveals that ComoRAG is particularly advantageous for complex queries requiring global comprehension, offering a principled, cognitively motivated paradigm for retrieval-based long context comprehension towards stateful reasoning. Our code is publicly released at https://github.com/EternityJune25/ComoRAG
Authors: Qi Liu, Xiaopeng Zhang, Mingshan Tan, Shuaikang Ma, Jinliang Ding, Yanjie Li
Abstract: This paper proposes a novel method to enhance locomotion for a single humanoid robot through cooperative-heterogeneous multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MARL). While most existing methods typically employ single-agent reinforcement learning algorithms for a single humanoid robot or MARL algorithms for multi-robot system tasks, we propose a distinct paradigm: applying cooperative-heterogeneous MARL to optimize locomotion for a single humanoid robot. The proposed method, multi-agent reinforcement learning for single humanoid locomotion (MASH), treats each limb (legs and arms) as an independent agent that explores the robot's action space while sharing a global critic for cooperative learning. Experiments demonstrate that MASH accelerates training convergence and improves whole-body cooperation ability, outperforming conventional single-agent reinforcement learning methods. This work advances the integration of MARL into single-humanoid-robot control, offering new insights into efficient locomotion strategies.
Authors: Tianxiao Cao, Kyohei Atarashi, Hisashi Kashima
Abstract: Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has been proven to be an effective optimization technique for improving generalization in overparameterized models. While prior works have explored the implicit regularization of SAM in simple two-core scale-invariant settings, its behavior in more general tensorized or scale-invariant models remains underexplored. In this work, we leverage scale-invariance to analyze the norm dynamics of SAM in general tensorized models. We introduce the notion of \emph{Norm Deviation} as a global measure of core norm imbalance, and derive its evolution under SAM using gradient flow analysis. We show that SAM's implicit control of Norm Deviation is governed by the covariance between core norms and their gradient magnitudes. Motivated by these findings, we propose a simple yet effective method, \emph{Deviation-Aware Scaling (DAS)}, which explicitly mimics this regularization behavior by scaling core norms in a data-adaptive manner. Our experiments across tensor completion, noisy training, model compression, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning confirm that DAS achieves competitive or improved performance over SAM, while offering reduced computational overhead.
Authors: Iksoon Jeong, Kyung-Joong Kim, Kang-Hun Ahn
Abstract: Speech enhancement using artificial neural networks aims to remove noise from noisy speech signals while preserving the speech content. However, speech enhancement networks often introduce distortions to the speech signal, referred to as artifacts, which can degrade audio quality. In this work, we propose a post-processing neural network designed to mitigate artifacts introduced by speech enhancement models. Inspired by the analogy of making a `Putt' after an `Approach' in golf, we name our model PuttNet. We demonstrate that alternating between a speech enhancement model and the proposed Putt model leads to improved speech quality, as measured by perceptual quality scores (PESQ), objective intelligibility (STOI), and background noise intrusiveness (CBAK) scores. Furthermore, we illustrate with graphical analysis why this alternating Approach outperforms repeated application of either model alone.
Authors: Asiful Arefeen, Shovito Barua Soumma, Hassan Ghasemzadeh
Abstract: Counterfactual explanations provide human-understandable reasoning for AI-made decisions by describing minimal changes to input features that would alter a model's prediction. To be truly useful in practice, such explanations must be realistic and feasible -- they should respect both the underlying data distribution and user-defined feasibility constraints. Existing approaches often enforce inter-feature dependencies through rigid, hand-crafted constraints or domain-specific knowledge, which limits their generalizability and ability to capture complex, nonlinear relations inherent in data. Moreover, they rarely accommodate user-specified preferences and suggest explanations that are causally implausible or infeasible to act upon. We introduce RealAC, a domain-agnostic framework for generating realistic and actionable counterfactuals. RealAC automatically preserves complex inter-feature dependencies without relying on explicit domain knowledge -- by aligning the joint distributions of feature pairs between factual and counterfactual instances. The framework also allows end-users to ``freeze'' attributes they cannot or do not wish to change by suppressing change in frozen features during optimization. Evaluations on three synthetic and two real datasets demonstrate that RealAC balances realism with actionability. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and Large Language Model-based counterfactual generation techniques in causal edge score, dependency preservation score, and IM1 realism metric and offers a solution for causality-aware and user-centric counterfactual generation.
Authors: Prajit Sengupta, Islem Rekik
Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art results in computer vision and medical image classification tasks by capturing structural dependencies across data instances. However, their decision-making remains largely opaque, limiting their trustworthiness in high-stakes clinical applications where interpretability is essential. Existing explainability techniques for GNNs are typically post-hoc and global, offering limited insight into individual node decisions or local reasoning. We introduce X-Node, a self-explaining GNN framework in which each node generates its own explanation as part of the prediction process. For every node, we construct a structured context vector encoding interpretable cues such as degree, centrality, clustering, feature saliency, and label agreement within its local topology. A lightweight Reasoner module maps this context into a compact explanation vector, which serves three purposes: (1) reconstructing the node's latent embedding via a decoder to enforce faithfulness, (2) generating a natural language explanation using a pre-trained LLM (e.g., Grok or Gemini), and (3) guiding the GNN itself via a "text-injection" mechanism that feeds explanations back into the message-passing pipeline. We evaluate X-Node on two graph datasets derived from MedMNIST and MorphoMNIST, integrating it with GCN, GAT, and GIN backbones. Our results show that X-Node maintains competitive classification accuracy while producing faithful, per-node explanations. Repository: https://github.com/basiralab/X-Node.
Authors: Maimunatu Tunau, Vincent Gbouna Zakka, Zhuangzhuang Dai
Abstract: Human Action Recognition (HAR) plays a crucial role in healthcare, fitness tracking, and ambient assisted living technologies. While traditional vision based HAR systems are effective, they pose privacy concerns. mmWave radar sensors offer a privacy preserving alternative but present challenges due to the sparse and noisy nature of their point cloud data. In the literature, three primary data processing methods: Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN), the Hungarian Algorithm, and Kalman Filtering have been widely used to improve the quality and continuity of radar data. However, a comprehensive evaluation of these methods, both individually and in combination, remains lacking. This paper addresses that gap by conducting a detailed performance analysis of the three methods using the MiliPoint dataset. We evaluate each method individually, all possible pairwise combinations, and the combination of all three, assessing both recognition accuracy and computational cost. Furthermore, we propose targeted enhancements to the individual methods aimed at improving accuracy. Our results provide crucial insights into the strengths and trade-offs of each method and their integrations, guiding future work on mmWave based HAR systems
Authors: Panagiotis D. Grontas, Antonio Terpin, Efe C. Balta, Raffaello D'Andrea, John Lygeros
Abstract: We introduce an output layer for neural networks that ensures satisfaction of convex constraints. Our approach, $\Pi$net, leverages operator splitting for rapid and reliable projections in the forward pass, and the implicit function theorem for backpropagation. We deploy $\Pi$net as a feasible-by-design optimization proxy for parametric constrained optimization problems and obtain modest-accuracy solutions faster than traditional solvers when solving a single problem, and significantly faster for a batch of problems. We surpass state-of-the-art learning approaches in terms of training time, solution quality, and robustness to hyperparameter tuning, while maintaining similar inference times. Finally, we tackle multi-vehicle motion planning with non-convex trajectory preferences and provide $\Pi$net as a GPU-ready package implemented in JAX with effective tuning heuristics.
Authors: Amir Mehrpanah, Matteo Gamba, Kevin Smith, Hossein Azizpour
Abstract: ReLU networks, while prevalent for visual data, have sharp transitions, sometimes relying on individual pixels for predictions, making vanilla gradient-based explanations noisy and difficult to interpret. Existing methods, such as GradCAM, smooth these explanations by producing surrogate models at the cost of faithfulness. We introduce a unifying spectral framework to systematically analyze and quantify smoothness, faithfulness, and their trade-off in explanations. Using this framework, we quantify and regularize the contribution of ReLU networks to high-frequency information, providing a principled approach to identifying this trade-off. Our analysis characterizes how surrogate-based smoothing distorts explanations, leading to an ``explanation gap'' that we formally define and measure for different post-hoc methods. Finally, we validate our theoretical findings across different design choices, datasets, and ablations.
Authors: Che-Yu Chou, Hung-Hsuan Chen
Abstract: Although one-hot encoding is commonly used for multiclass classification, it is not always the most effective encoding mechanism. Error Correcting Output Codes (ECOC) address multiclass classification by mapping each class to a unique codeword used as a label. Traditional ECOC methods rely on manually designed or randomly generated codebooks, which are labor-intensive and may yield suboptimal, dataset-agnostic results. This paper introduces three models for automated codebook learning based on contrastive learning, allowing codebooks to be learned directly and adaptively from data. Across four datasets, our proposed models demonstrate superior robustness to adversarial attacks compared to two baselines. The source is available at https://github.com/YuChou20/Automated-Codebook-Learning-with-Error-Correcting-Output-Code-Technique.
URLs: https://github.com/YuChou20/Automated-Codebook-Learning-with-Error-Correcting-Output-Code-Technique.
Authors: Jiulin Li, Ping Huang, Yexin Li, Shuo Chen, Juewen Hu, Ye Tian
Abstract: Real-world multimodal applications often require any-to-any capabilities, enabling both understanding and generation across modalities including text, image, audio, and video. However, integrating the strengths of autoregressive language models (LLMs) for reasoning and diffusion models for high-fidelity generation remains challenging. Existing approaches rely on rigid pipelines or tightly coupled architectures, limiting flexibility and scalability. We propose MAGUS (Multi-Agent Guided Unified Multimodal System), a modular framework that unifies multimodal understanding and generation via two decoupled phases: Cognition and Deliberation. MAGUS enables symbolic multi-agent collaboration within a shared textual workspace. In the Cognition phase, three role-conditioned multimodal LLM agents - Perceiver, Planner, and Reflector - engage in collaborative dialogue to perform structured understanding and planning. The Deliberation phase incorporates a Growth-Aware Search mechanism that orchestrates LLM-based reasoning and diffusion-based generation in a mutually reinforcing manner. MAGUS supports plug-and-play extensibility, scalable any-to-any modality conversion, and semantic alignment - all without the need for joint training. Experiments across multiple benchmarks, including image, video, and audio generation, as well as cross-modal instruction following, demonstrate that MAGUS outperforms strong baselines and state-of-the-art systems. Notably, on the MME benchmark, MAGUS surpasses the powerful closed-source model GPT-4o.
Authors: Zhliang Xiang, Meghyn Bienvenu, Gianluca Cima, V\'ictor Guti\'errez-Basulto, Yazm\'in Ib\'a\~nez-Garc\'ia
Abstract: In this paper, we present ASPEN+, which extends an existing ASP-based system, ASPEN,for collective entity resolution with two important functionalities: support for local merges and new optimality criteria for preferred solutions. Indeed, ASPEN only supports so-called global merges of entity-referring constants (e.g. author ids), in which all occurrences of matched constants are treated as equivalent and merged accordingly. However, it has been argued that when resolving data values, local merges are often more appropriate, as e.g. some instances of 'J. Lee' may refer to 'Joy Lee', while others should be matched with 'Jake Lee'. In addition to allowing such local merges, ASPEN+ offers new optimality criteria for selecting solutions, such as minimizing rule violations or maximising the number of rules supporting a merge. Our main contributions are thus (1) the formalisation and computational analysis of various notions of optimal solution, and (2) an extensive experimental evaluation on real-world datasets, demonstrating the effect of local merges and the new optimality criteria on both accuracy and runtime.
Authors: Zheng Zhou, Jia-Chen Zhang, Yu-Jie Xiong, Chun-Ming Xia
Abstract: Recent advances in 3D Gaussian splatting have significantly improved real-time novel view synthesis, yet insufficient geometric constraints during scene optimization often result in blurred reconstructions of fine-grained details, particularly in regions with high-frequency textures and sharp discontinuities. To address this, we propose a comprehensive optimization framework integrating multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA) with dual geometric constraints. Our system computes pixel colors through adaptive blending of quadruple subsamples, effectively reducing aliasing artifacts in high-frequency components. The framework introduces two constraints: (a) an adaptive weighting strategy that prioritizes under-reconstructed regions through dynamic gradient analysis, and (b) gradient differential constraints enforcing geometric regularization at object boundaries. This targeted optimization enables the model to allocate computational resources preferentially to critical regions requiring refinement while maintaining global consistency. Extensive experimental evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in detail preservation, particularly in preserving high-frequency textures and sharp discontinuities, while maintaining real-time rendering efficiency. Quantitative metrics and perceptual studies confirm statistically significant improvements over baseline approaches in both structural similarity (SSIM) and perceptual quality (LPIPS).
Authors: Ziye Deng, Ruihan He, Jiaxiang Liu, Yuan Wang, Zijie Meng, Songtao Jiang, Yong Xie, Zuozhu Liu
Abstract: Medical image grounding aims to align natural language phrases with specific regions in medical images, serving as a foundational task for intelligent diagnosis, visual question answering (VQA), and automated report generation (MRG). However, existing research is constrained by limited modality coverage, coarse-grained annotations, and the absence of a unified, generalizable grounding framework. To address these challenges, we construct a large-scale medical grounding dataset Med-GLIP-5M comprising over 5.3 million region-level annotations across seven imaging modalities, covering diverse anatomical structures and pathological findings. The dataset supports both segmentation and grounding tasks with hierarchical region labels, ranging from organ-level boundaries to fine-grained lesions. Based on this foundation, we propose Med-GLIP, a modality-aware grounding framework trained on Med-GLIP-5M. Rather than relying on explicitly designed expert modules, Med-GLIP implicitly acquires hierarchical semantic understanding from diverse training data -- enabling it to recognize multi-granularity structures, such as distinguishing lungs from pneumonia lesions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Med-GLIP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple grounding benchmarks. Furthermore, integrating its spatial outputs into downstream tasks, including medical VQA and report generation, leads to substantial performance gains. Our dataset will be released soon.
Authors: Zetian Sun, Dongfang Li, Zhuoen Chen, Yuhuai Qin, Baotian Hu
Abstract: Reward sparsity in long-horizon reinforcement learning (RL) tasks remains a significant challenge, while existing outcome-based reward shaping struggles to define meaningful immediate rewards without introducing bias or requiring explicit task decomposition. Alternatively, verification-based reward shaping uses stepwise critics, but misalignment between immediate rewards and long-term objectives can lead to reward hacking and suboptimal policies. In this work, we address this problem in the context of software engineering (SWE) tasks, where multi-turn reasoning and rule-based verification are critical. We introduce the SWE-oriented RL Framework, a unified system supporting multi-turn interaction, docker-based execution, and customizable reward functions. Additionally, we propose Gated Reward Accumulation (G-RA), a novel method that accumulates immediate rewards only when high-level (long-term) rewards meet a predefined threshold, ensuring stable RL optimization. Experiments on SWE-bench Verified and kBench demonstrate that G-RA leads to an increase in completion rates (47.6\% \rightarrow 93.8\% and 22.0\% \rightarrow 86.0\%) and modification rates (19.6\% \rightarrow 23.8\% and 12.0\% \rightarrow 42.0\%), while avoiding policy degradation caused by reward misalignment. Our findings highlight the importance of balanced reward accumulation in long-horizon RL and provide a practical solution.
Authors: Huyu Wu, Meng Tang, Xinhan Zheng, Haiyun Jiang
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a diverse range of multimodal tasks. However, these models suffer from a core problem known as text dominance: they depend heavily on text for their inference, while underutilizing other modalities. While prior work has acknowledged this phenomenon in vision-language tasks, often attributing it to data biases or model architectures. In this paper, we conduct the first systematic investigation of text dominance across diverse data modalities, including images, videos, audio, time-series, and graphs. To measure this imbalance, we propose two evaluation metrics: the Modality Dominance Index (MDI) and the Attention Efficiency Index (AEI). Our comprehensive analysis reveals that text dominance is both significant and pervasive across all tested modalities. Our in-depth analysis identifies three underlying causes: attention dilution from severe token redundancy in non-textual modalities, the influence of fusion architecture design, and task formulations that implicitly favor textual inputs. Furthermore, we propose a simple token compression method that effectively rebalances model attention. Applying this method to LLaVA-7B, for instance, drastically reduces its MDI from 10.23 to a well-balanced value of 0.86. Our analysis and methodological framework offer a foundation for the development of more equitable and comprehensive multimodal language models.
Authors: Ruisong Han, Zongbo Han, Jiahao Zhang, Mingyue Cheng, Changqing Zhang
Abstract: Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for the reliable deployment of machine learning models in-the-wild, enabling accurate identification of test samples that differ from the training data distribution. Existing methods rely on auxiliary outlier samples or in-distribution (ID) data to generate outlier information for training, but due to limited outliers and their mismatch with real test OOD samples, they often fail to provide sufficient semantic supervision, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a novel OOD detection method called Retrieval-Augmented Prompt (RAP). RAP augments a pre-trained vision-language model's prompts by retrieving external knowledge, offering enhanced semantic supervision for OOD detection. During training, RAP retrieves descriptive words for outliers based on joint similarity with external textual knowledge and uses them to augment the model's OOD prompts. During testing, RAP dynamically updates OOD prompts in real-time based on the encountered OOD samples, enabling the model to rapidly adapt to the test environment. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that RAP achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-scale OOD detection benchmarks. For example, in 1-shot OOD detection on the ImageNet-1k dataset, RAP reduces the average FPR95 by 7.05% and improves the AUROC by 1.71% compared to previous methods. Additionally, comprehensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each module and the underlying motivations of our approach.
Authors: Xinhao Wang, Zhiwei Lin, Zhongyu Xia, Yongtao Wang
Abstract: Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) and Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) represent two mainstream model quantization approaches. However, PTQ often leads to unacceptable performance degradation in quantized models, while QAT imposes substantial GPU memory requirements and extended training time due to weight fine-tuning.In this paper, we propose PTQAT, a novel general hybrid quantization algorithm for the efficient deployment of 3D perception networks. To address the speed accuracy trade-off between PTQ and QAT, our method selects critical layers for QAT fine-tuning and performs PTQ on the remaining layers. Contrary to intuition, fine-tuning the layers with smaller output discrepancies before and after quantization, rather than those with larger discrepancies, actually leads to greater improvements in the model's quantization accuracy. This means we better compensate for quantization errors during their propagation, rather than addressing them at the point where they occur. The proposed PTQAT achieves similar performance to QAT with more efficiency by freezing nearly 50% of quantifiable layers. Additionally, PTQAT is a universal quantization method that supports various quantization bit widths (4 bits) as well as different model architectures, including CNNs and Transformers. The experimental results on nuScenes across diverse 3D perception tasks, including object detection, semantic segmentation, and occupancy prediction, show that our method consistently outperforms QAT-only baselines. Notably, it achieves 0.2%-0.9% NDS and 0.3%-1.0% mAP gains in object detection, 0.3%-2.0% mIoU gains in semantic segmentation and occupancy prediction while fine-tuning fewer weights.
Authors: Yuankun Xie, Ruibo Fu, Xiaopeng Wang, Zhiyong Wang, Ya Li, Zhengqi Wen, Haonnan Cheng, Long Ye
Abstract: The rapid advancement of speech generation technology has led to the widespread proliferation of deepfake speech across social media platforms. While deepfake audio countermeasures (CMs) achieve promising results on public datasets, their performance degrades significantly in cross-domain scenarios. To advance CMs for real-world deepfake detection, we first propose the Fake Speech Wild (FSW) dataset, which includes 254 hours of real and deepfake audio from four different media platforms, focusing on social media. As CMs, we establish a benchmark using public datasets and advanced selfsupervised learning (SSL)-based CMs to evaluate current CMs in real-world scenarios. We also assess the effectiveness of data augmentation strategies in enhancing CM robustness for detecting deepfake speech on social media. Finally, by augmenting public datasets and incorporating the FSW training set, we significantly advanced real-world deepfake audio detection performance, achieving an average equal error rate (EER) of 3.54% across all evaluation sets.
Authors: Yunfeng Zhao, Yixin Liu, Shiyuan Li, Qingfeng Chen, Yu Zheng, Shirui Pan
Abstract: Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) aims to identify nodes that deviate from the majority within a graph, playing a crucial role in applications such as social networks and e-commerce. Despite the current advancements in deep learning-based GAD, existing approaches often suffer from high deployment costs and poor scalability due to their complex and resource-intensive training processes. Surprisingly, our empirical findings suggest that the training phase of deep GAD methods, commonly perceived as crucial, may actually contribute less to anomaly detection performance than expected. Inspired by this, we propose FreeGAD, a novel training-free yet effective GAD method. Specifically, it leverages an affinity-gated residual encoder to generate anomaly-aware representations. Meanwhile, FreeGAD identifies anchor nodes as pseudo-normal and anomalous guides, followed by calculating anomaly scores through anchor-guided statistical deviations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FreeGAD achieves superior anomaly detection performance, efficiency, and scalability on multiple benchmark datasets from diverse domains, without any training or iterative optimization.
Authors: Amir Mehrpanah, Erik Englesson, Hossein Azizpour
Abstract: Understanding the behavior of deep networks is crucial to increase our confidence in their results. Despite an extensive body of work for explaining their predictions, researchers have faced reliability issues, which can be attributed to insufficient formalism. In our research, we adopt novel probabilistic and spectral perspectives to formally analyze explanation methods. Our study reveals a pervasive spectral bias stemming from the use of gradient, and sheds light on some common design choices that have been discovered experimentally, in particular, the use of squared gradient and input perturbation. We further characterize how the choice of perturbation hyperparameters in explanation methods, such as SmoothGrad, can lead to inconsistent explanations and introduce two remedies based on our proposed formalism: (i) a mechanism to determine a standard perturbation scale, and (ii) an aggregation method which we call SpectralLens. Finally, we substantiate our theoretical results through quantitative evaluations.
Authors: Daejune Choi, Youchan No, Jinhyung Lee, Duksu Kim
Abstract: We propose Frequency-Guided Attention (FGA), a lightweight upsampling module for single image super-resolution. Conventional upsamplers, such as Sub-Pixel Convolution, are efficient but frequently fail to reconstruct high-frequency details and introduce aliasing artifacts. FGA addresses these issues by integrating (1) a Fourier feature-based Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) for positional frequency encoding, (2) a cross-resolution Correlation Attention Layer for adaptive spatial alignment, and (3) a frequency-domain L1 loss for spectral fidelity supervision. Adding merely 0.3M parameters, FGA consistently enhances performance across five diverse super-resolution backbones in both lightweight and full-capacity scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate average PSNR gains of 0.12~0.14 dB and improved frequency-domain consistency by up to 29%, particularly evident on texture-rich datasets. Visual and spectral evaluations confirm FGA's effectiveness in reducing aliasing and preserving fine details, establishing it as a practical, scalable alternative to traditional upsampling methods.
Authors: Chenkai Guo, Yikai Zhu, Jing Yangum, Renxiang Guan, Por Lip Yee, Guangdun Peng, Dayu Hu
Abstract: By incorporating spatial location information, spatial-transcriptomics clustering yields more comprehensive insights into cell subpopulation identification. Despite recent progress, existing methods have at least two limitations: (i) topological learning typically considers only representations of individual cells or their interaction graphs; however, spatial transcriptomic profiles are often noisy, making these approaches vulnerable to low-quality topological signals, and (ii) insufficient modeling of spatial neighborhood information leads to low-quality spatial embeddings. To address these limitations, we propose SPHENIC, a novel Spatial Persistent Homology Enhanced Neighborhood Integrative Clustering method. Specifically, SPHENIC incorporates invariant topological features into the clustering network to achieve stable representation learning. Additionally, to construct high-quality spatial embeddings that reflect the true cellular distribution, we design the Spatial Constraint and Distribution Optimization Module (SCDOM). This module increases the similarity between a cell's embedding and those of its spatial neighbors, decreases similarity with non-neighboring cells, and thereby produces clustering-friendly spatial embeddings. Extensive experiments on 14 benchmark spatial transcriptomic slices demonstrate that SPHENIC achieves superior performance on the spatial clustering task, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods by 3.31%-6.54% over the best alternative.
Authors: Zhangyong Tang, Tianyang Xu, Xuefeng Zhu, Chunyang Cheng, Tao Zhou, Xiaojun Wu, Josef Kittler
Abstract: Unifying multiple multi-modal visual object tracking (MMVOT) tasks draws increasing attention due to the complementary nature of different modalities in building robust tracking systems. Existing practices mix all data sensor types in a single training procedure, structuring a parallel paradigm from the data-centric perspective and aiming for a global optimum on the joint distribution of the involved tasks. However, the absence of a unified benchmark where all types of data coexist forces evaluations on separated benchmarks, causing \textit{inconsistency} between training and testing, thus leading to performance \textit{degradation}. To address these issues, this work advances in two aspects: \ding{182} A unified benchmark, coined as UniBench300, is introduced to bridge the inconsistency by incorporating multiple task data, reducing inference passes from three to one and cutting time consumption by 27\%. \ding{183} The unification process is reformulated in a serial format, progressively integrating new tasks. In this way, the performance degradation can be specified as knowledge forgetting of previous tasks, which naturally aligns with the philosophy of continual learning (CL), motivating further exploration of injecting CL into the unification process. Extensive experiments conducted on two baselines and four benchmarks demonstrate the significance of UniBench300 and the superiority of CL in supporting a stable unification process. Moreover, while conducting dedicated analyses, the performance degradation is found to be negatively correlated with network capacity. Additionally, modality discrepancies contribute to varying degradation levels across tasks (RGBT > RGBD > RGBE in MMVOT), offering valuable insights for future multi-modal vision research. Source codes and the proposed benchmark is available at \textit{https://github.com/Zhangyong-Tang/UniBench300}.
Authors: Timothy Heightman, Marcin P{\l}odzie\'n
Abstract: Scientific progress is tightly coupled to the emergence of new research tools. Today, machine learning (ML)-especially deep learning (DL)-has become a transformative instrument for quantum science and technology. Owing to the intrinsic complexity of quantum systems, DL enables efficient exploration of large parameter spaces, extraction of patterns from experimental data, and data-driven guidance for research directions. These capabilities already support tasks such as refining quantum control protocols and accelerating the discovery of materials with targeted quantum properties, making ML/DL literacy an essential skill for the next generation of quantum scientists. At the same time, DL's power brings risks: models can overfit noisy data, obscure causal structure, and yield results with limited physical interpretability. Recognizing these limitations and deploying mitigation strategies is crucial for scientific rigor. These lecture notes provide a comprehensive, graduate-level introduction to DL for quantum applications, combining conceptual exposition with hands-on examples. Organized as a progressive sequence, they aim to equip readers to decide when and how to apply DL effectively, to understand its practical constraints, and to adapt AI methods responsibly to problems across quantum physics, chemistry, and engineering.
Authors: Shixiong Xu, Chenghao Zhang, Lubin Fan, Yuan Zhou, Bin Fan, Shiming Xiang, Gaofeng Meng, Jieping Ye
Abstract: Large visual language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in coarse-grained geo-localization at the country or city level, but they struggle with fine-grained street-level localization within urban areas. In this paper, we explore integrating city-wide address localization capabilities into LVLMs, facilitating flexible address-related question answering using street-view images. A key challenge is that the street-view visual question-and-answer (VQA) data provides only microscopic visual cues, leading to subpar performance in fine-tuned models. To tackle this issue, we incorporate perspective-invariant satellite images as macro cues and propose cross-view alignment tuning including a satellite-view and street-view image grafting mechanism, along with an automatic label generation mechanism. Then LVLM's global understanding of street distribution is enhanced through cross-view matching. Our proposed model, named AddressVLM, consists of two-stage training protocols: cross-view alignment tuning and address localization tuning. Furthermore, we have constructed two street-view VQA datasets based on image address localization datasets from Pittsburgh and San Francisco. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that AddressVLM outperforms counterpart LVLMs by over 9% and 12% in average address localization accuracy on these two datasets, respectively.
Authors: Feiran Li, Qianqian Xu, Shilong Bao, Boyu Han, Zhiyong Yang, Qingming Huang
Abstract: In this paper, we present our approach to the DataCV ICCV Challenge, which centers on building a high-quality face dataset to train a face recognition model. The constructed dataset must not contain identities overlapping with any existing public face datasets. To handle this challenge, we begin with a thorough cleaning of the baseline HSFace dataset, identifying and removing mislabeled or inconsistent identities through a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) strategy combining face embedding clustering and GPT-4o-assisted verification. We retain the largest consistent identity cluster and apply data augmentation up to a fixed number of images per identity. To further diversify the dataset, we generate synthetic identities using Stable Diffusion with prompt engineering. As diffusion models are computationally intensive, we generate only one reference image per identity and efficiently expand it using Vec2Face, which rapidly produces 49 identity-consistent variants. This hybrid approach fuses GAN-based and diffusion-based samples, enabling efficient construction of a diverse and high-quality dataset. To address the high visual similarity among synthetic identities, we adopt a curriculum learning strategy by placing them early in the training schedule, allowing the model to progress from easier to harder samples. Our final dataset contains 50 images per identity, and all newly generated identities are checked with mainstream face datasets to ensure no identity leakage. Our method achieves \textbf{1st place} in the competition, and experimental results show that our dataset improves model performance across 10K, 20K, and 100K identity scales. Code is available at https://github.com/Ferry-Li/datacv_fr.
Authors: Safaeid Hossain Arib, Rabeya Akter, Sejuti Rahman
Abstract: Millions of individuals worldwide are affected by deafness and hearing impairment. Sign language serves as a sophisticated means of communication for the deaf and hard of hearing. However, in societies that prioritize spoken languages, sign language often faces underestimation, leading to communication barriers and social exclusion. The Continuous Bangla Sign Language Translation project aims to address this gap by enhancing translation methods. While recent approaches leverage transformer architecture for state-of-the-art results, our method integrates graph-based methods with the transformer architecture. This fusion, combining transformer and STGCN-LSTM architectures, proves more effective in gloss-free translation. Our contributions include architectural fusion, exploring various fusion strategies, and achieving a new state-of-the-art performance on diverse sign language datasets, namely RWTH-PHOENIX-2014T, CSL-Daily, How2Sign, and BornilDB v1.0. Our approach demonstrates superior performance compared to current translation outcomes across all datasets, showcasing notable improvements of BLEU-4 scores of 4.01, 2.07, and 0.5, surpassing those of GASLT, GASLT and slt_how2sign in RWTH-PHOENIX-2014T, CSL-Daily, and How2Sign, respectively. Also, we introduce benchmarking on the BornilDB v1.0 dataset for the first time. Our method sets a benchmark for future research, emphasizing the importance of gloss-free translation to improve communication accessibility for the deaf and hard of hearing.
Authors: Alireza Salemi, Hamed Zamani
Abstract: Personalization is crucial for enhancing both the effectiveness and user satisfaction of language technologies, particularly in information-seeking tasks like question answering. Current approaches for personalizing large language models (LLMs) often rely on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), followed by reinforcement learning with scalar reward signals to teach models how to use retrieved personal context. We believe that these scalar rewards sometimes provide weak, non-instructive feedback, limiting learning efficiency and personalization quality. We introduce VAC, a novel framework for personalized response generation that replaces scalar rewards with natural language feedback (NLF) that are generated conditioned on the user profiles and the question narratives. NLF serves as a rich and actionable supervision signal, allowing the policy model to iteratively refine its outputs and internalize effective personalization strategies. Training alternates between optimizing the feedback model and fine-tuning the policy model on the improved responses, resulting in a policy model that no longer requires feedback at inference. Evaluation on the LaMP-QA benchmark that consists of three diverse domains demonstrates consistent and significant improvements over the state-of-the-art results. Human evaluations further confirm the superior quality of the generated responses. These results demonstrate that NLF provides more effective signals for optimizing personalized question answering.
Authors: Tianlong Yu, Lihong Liu, Ziyi Zhou, Fudu Xing, Kailong Wang, Yang Yang
Abstract: The exploitation of 1 day or n day vulnerabilities poses severe threats to networked devices due to massive deployment scales and delayed patching (average Mean Time To Patch exceeds 60 days). Existing defenses, including host based patching and network based filtering, are inadequate due to limited scalability across diverse devices, compatibility issues especially with embedded or legacy systems, and error prone deployment process (manual patch validation). To address these issues, we introduce REFN (Reinforcement Learning From Network), a novel framework that trains Large Language Models (LLMs) to autonomously generate network filters to prevent 1 day or n day exploitations. REFN ensures scalability by uniquely employs Reinforcement Learning (RL) driven by online network rewards instead of traditional Human Feedback (RLHF). REFN guarantees compatibility via unified deployment on edge security gateways (Amazon Eero). REFN provides robustness via online validation using real network traffic. Crucially, REFN addresses three core challenges in training LLMs for exploit prevention: 1) expanding current LLMs limited vulnerability fixing expertise via Agentic RAG based Knowledge Distillation, 2) bridging current LLMs language to network gaps through an RL From VNF Pipeline that translates language context (vulnerability description) into network enforcement, 3) addressing the LLM hallucination and non determinism via the Online Agentic Validation that penalizes erroneous outputs. Evaluated across 22 families of 1 day or n day exploits, REFN demonstrates effectiveness (21.1 percent higher accuracy than alternatives), efficiency (Mean Time To Patch of 3.65 hours) and scalability (easily scale to 10K devices). REFN serves as an initial step toward training LLMs to rapidly prevent massive scale 1 day or n day exploitations.
Authors: Murat Temiz, Vemund Bakken
Abstract: This study proposes an antenna simulation framework powered by graphics processing units (GPUs) based on an open-source electromagnetic (EM) simulation software (gprMax) for machine learning applications of antenna design and optimization. Furthermore, it compares the simulation results with those obtained through commercial EM software. The proposed software framework for machine learning and surrogate model applications will produce antenna data sets consisting of a large number of antenna simulation results using GPUs. Although machine learning methods can attain the optimum solutions for many problems, they are known to be data-hungry and require a great deal of samples for the training stage of the algorithms. However, producing a sufficient number of training samples in EM applications within a limited time is challenging due to the high computational complexity of EM simulations. Therefore, GPUs are utilized in this study to simulate a large number of antennas with predefined or random antenna shape parameters to produce data sets. Moreover, this study also compares various machine learning and deep learning models in terms of antenna parameter estimation performance. This study demonstrates that an entry-level GPU substantially outperforms a high-end CPU in terms of computational performance, while a high-end gaming GPU can achieve around 18 times more computational performance compared to a high-end CPU. Moreover, it is shown that the open-source EM simulation software can deliver similar results to those obtained via commercial software in the simulation of microstrip antennas when the spatial resolution of the simulations is sufficiently fine.
Authors: Yanjun Li, Yuqian Fu, Tianwen Qian, Qi'ao Xu, Silong Dai, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool, Xiaoling Wang
Abstract: Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly pushed the frontier of egocentric video question answering (EgocentricQA). However, existing benchmarks and studies are mainly limited to common daily activities such as cooking and cleaning. In contrast, real-world deployment inevitably encounters domain shifts, where target domains differ substantially in both visual style and semantic content. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{EgoCross}, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the cross-domain generalization of MLLMs in EgocentricQA. EgoCross covers four diverse and challenging domains, including surgery, industry, extreme sports, and animal perspective, representing realistic and high-impact application scenarios. It comprises approximately 1,000 QA pairs across 798 video clips, spanning four key QA tasks: prediction, recognition, localization, and counting. Each QA pair provides both OpenQA and CloseQA formats to support fine-grained evaluation. Extensive experiments show that most existing MLLMs, whether general-purpose or egocentric-specialized, struggle to generalize to domains beyond daily life, highlighting the limitations of current models. Furthermore, we conduct several pilot studies, \eg, fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, to explore potential improvements. We hope EgoCross and our accompanying analysis will serve as a foundation for advancing domain-adaptive, robust egocentric video understanding. Data and codes will be released at: \href{https://github.com/MyUniverse0726/EgoCross}{https://github.com/MyUniverse0726/EgoCross.}
URLs: https://github.com/MyUniverse0726/EgoCross, https://github.com/MyUniverse0726/EgoCross.
Authors: Kejia Fan, Jianheng Tang, Zhirui Yang, Feijiang Han, Jiaxu Li, Run He, Yajiang Huang, Anfeng Liu, Houbing Herbert Song, Yunhuai Liu, Huiping Zhuang
Abstract: Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) has presented a significant challenge to deliver personalized models to individual clients through collaborative training. Existing PFL methods are often vulnerable to non-IID data, which severely hinders collective generalization and then compromises the subsequent personalization efforts. In this paper, to address this non-IID issue in PFL, we propose an Analytic Personalized Federated Learning (APFL) approach via dual-stream least squares. In our APFL, we use a foundation model as a frozen backbone for feature extraction. Subsequent to the feature extractor, we develop dual-stream analytic models to achieve both collective generalization and individual personalization. Specifically, our APFL incorporates a shared primary stream for global generalization across all clients, and a dedicated refinement stream for local personalization of each individual client. The analytical solutions of our APFL enable its ideal property of heterogeneity invariance, theoretically meaning that each personalized model remains identical regardless of how heterogeneous the data are distributed across all other clients. Empirical results across various datasets also validate the superiority of our APFL over state-of-the-art baselines, with advantages of at least 1.10%-15.45% in accuracy.
Authors: Zhipeng Chen, Xiaobo Qin, Youbin Wu, Yue Ling, Qinghao Ye, Wayne Xin Zhao, Guang Shi
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), which typically adopts Pass@1 as the reward, has faced the issues in balancing exploration and exploitation, causing policies to prefer conservative actions, converging to a local optimum. Identifying an appropriate reward metric is therefore crucial. Regarding the prior work, although Pass@k has been used in evaluation, its connection to LLM exploration ability in RLVR remains largely overlooked. To investigate this, we first use Pass@k as the reward to train the policy model (i.e., $\textbf{Pass@k Training}$), and observe the improvement on its exploration ability. Next, we derive an analytical solution for the advantage of Pass@k Training, leading to an efficient and effective process. Building on this, our analysis reveals that exploration and exploitation are not inherently conflicting objectives, while they can mutually enhance each other. Moreover, Pass@k Training with analytical derivation essentially involves directly designing the advantage function. Inspired by this, we preliminarily explore the advantage design for RLVR, showing promising results and highlighting a potential future direction.
Authors: Nicolas Lapautre, Maria Marchenko, Carlos Miguel Pati\~no, Xin Zhou
Abstract: Unlocking the potential of transformers on datasets of large physical systems depends on overcoming the quadratic scaling of the attention mechanism. This work explores combining the Erwin architecture with the Native Sparse Attention (NSA) mechanism to improve the efficiency and receptive field of transformer models for large-scale physical systems, addressing the challenge of quadratic attention complexity. We adapt the NSA mechanism for non-sequential data, implement the Erwin NSA model, and evaluate it on three datasets from the physical sciences -- cosmology simulations, molecular dynamics, and air pressure modeling -- achieving performance that matches or exceeds that of the original Erwin model. Additionally, we reproduce the experimental results from the Erwin paper to validate their implementation.
Authors: Qihua Pan, Dong Xu, Jenna Xinyi Yao, Lijia Ma, Zexuan Zhu, Junkai Ji
Abstract: Powerful AI tools for drug discovery reside in isolated web apps, desktop programs, and code libraries. Such fragmentation forces scientists to manage incompatible interfaces and specialized scripts, which can be a cumbersome and repetitive process. To address this issue, a Full-pROcess druG dEsign ageNT, named FROGENT, has been proposed. Specifically, FROGENT utilizes a Large Language Model and the Model Context Protocol to integrate multiple dynamic biochemical databases, extensible tool libraries, and task-specific AI models. This agentic framework allows FROGENT to execute complicated drug discovery workflows dynamically, including component tasks such as target identification, molecule generation and retrosynthetic planning. FROGENT has been evaluated on eight benchmarks that cover various aspects of drug discovery, such as knowledge retrieval, property prediction, virtual screening, mechanistic analysis, molecular design, and synthesis. It was compared against six increasingly advanced ReAct-style agents that support code execution and literature searches. Empirical results demonstrated that FROGENT triples the best baseline performance in hit-finding and doubles it in interaction profiling, significantly outperforming both the open-source model Qwen3-32B and the commercial model GPT-4o. In addition, real-world cases have been utilized to validate the practicability and generalization of FROGENT. This development suggests that streamlining the agentic drug discovery pipeline can significantly enhance researcher productivity.
Authors: Jieyu Li, Xin Zhang, Joey Tianyi Zhou
Abstract: Recent advances in AI-generated content have fueled the rise of highly realistic synthetic videos, posing severe risks to societal trust and digital integrity. Existing benchmarks for video authenticity detection typically suffer from limited realism, insufficient scale, and inadequate complexity, failing to effectively evaluate modern vision-language models against sophisticated forgeries. To address this critical gap, we introduce AEGIS, a novel large-scale benchmark explicitly targeting the detection of hyper-realistic and semantically nuanced AI-generated videos. AEGIS comprises over 10,000 rigorously curated real and synthetic videos generated by diverse, state-of-the-art generative models, including Stable Video Diffusion, CogVideoX-5B, KLing, and Sora, encompassing open-source and proprietary architectures. In particular, AEGIS features specially constructed challenging subsets enhanced with robustness evaluation. Furthermore, we provide multimodal annotations spanning Semantic-Authenticity Descriptions, Motion Features, and Low-level Visual Features, facilitating authenticity detection and supporting downstream tasks such as multimodal fusion and forgery localization. Extensive experiments using advanced vision-language models demonstrate limited detection capabilities on the most challenging subsets of AEGIS, highlighting the dataset's unique complexity and realism beyond the current generalization capabilities of existing models. In essence, AEGIS establishes an indispensable evaluation benchmark, fundamentally advancing research toward developing genuinely robust, reliable, broadly generalizable video authenticity detection methodologies capable of addressing real-world forgery threats. Our dataset is available on https://huggingface.co/datasets/Clarifiedfish/AEGIS.
Authors: Youping Gu, Xiaolong Li, Yuhao Hu, Bohan Zhuang
Abstract: Diffusion transformers currently lead the field in high-quality video generation, but their slow iterative denoising process and prohibitive quadratic attention costs for long sequences create significant inference bottlenecks. While both step distillation and sparse attention mechanisms have shown promise as independent acceleration strategies, effectively combining these approaches presents critical challenges -- training-free integration yields suboptimal results, while separately training sparse attention after step distillation requires prohibitively expensive high-quality video data. To overcome these limitations, we propose BLADE, an innovative data-free joint training framework that introduces: (1) an Adaptive Block-Sparse Attention (ASA) mechanism for dynamically generating content-aware sparsity masks to focus computation on salient spatiotemporal features, and (2) a sparsity-aware step distillation paradigm built upon Trajectory Distribution Matching (TDM) that directly incorporates sparsity into the distillation process rather than treating it as a separate compression step, with fast convergence. We validate BLADE on text-to-video models like CogVideoX-5B and Wan2.1-1.3B. Our framework demonstrates remarkable efficiency gains across different scales. On Wan2.1-1.3B, BLADE achieves a 14.10x end-to-end inference acceleration over a 50-step baseline. Moreover, on models such as CogVideoX-5B with short video sequence lengths, our framework delivers a robust 8.89x speedup. Crucially, the acceleration is accompanied by a consistent quality improvement. On the VBench-2.0 benchmark, BLADE boosts the score of CogVideoX-5B to 0.569 (from 0.534) and Wan2.1-1.3B to 0.570 (from 0.563), results that are further corroborated by superior ratings in human evaluations. Our code and model weights are publicly available at: http://ziplab.co/BLADE-Homepage/.
Authors: Juchan Kim, Inwoo Tae, Yongjae Lee
Abstract: Portfolio optimization constitutes a cornerstone of risk management by quantifying the risk-return trade-off. Since it inherently depends on accurate parameter estimation under conditions of future uncertainty, the selection of appropriate input parameters is critical for effective portfolio construction. However, most conventional statistical estimators and machine learning algorithms determine these parameters by minimizing mean-squared error (MSE), a criterion that can yield suboptimal investment decisions. In this paper, we adopt decision-focused learning (DFL) - an approach that directly optimizes decision quality rather than prediction error such as MSE - to derive the global minimum-variance portfolio (GMVP). Specifically, we theoretically derive the gradient of decision loss using the analytic solution of GMVP and its properties regarding the principal components of itself. Through extensive empirical evaluation, we show that prediction-focused estimation methods may fail to produce optimal allocations in practice, whereas DFL-based methods consistently deliver superior decision performance. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive analysis of DFL's mechanism in GMVP construction, focusing on its volatility reduction capability, decision-driving features, and estimation characteristics.
Authors: Zhenning Shi, Zizheng Yan, Yuhang Yu, Clara Xue, Jingyu Zhuang, Qi Zhang, Jinwei Chen, Tao Li, Qingnan Fan
Abstract: Reference-based Image Super-Resolution (RefSR) aims to restore a low-resolution (LR) image by utilizing the semantic and texture information from an additional reference high-resolution (reference HR) image. Existing diffusion-based RefSR methods are typically built upon ControlNet, which struggles to effectively align the information between the LR image and the reference HR image. Moreover, current RefSR datasets suffer from limited resolution and poor image quality, resulting in the reference images lacking sufficient fine-grained details to support high-quality restoration. To overcome the limitations above, we propose TriFlowSR, a novel framework that explicitly achieves pattern matching between the LR image and the reference HR image. Meanwhile, we introduce Landmark-4K, the first RefSR dataset for Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) landmark scenarios. Considering the UHD scenarios with real-world degradation, in TriFlowSR, we design a Reference Matching Strategy to effectively match the LR image with the reference HR image. Experimental results show that our approach can better utilize the semantic and texture information of the reference HR image compared to previous methods. To the best of our knowledge, we propose the first diffusion-based RefSR pipeline for ultra-high definition landmark scenarios under real-world degradation. Our code and model will be available at https://github.com/nkicsl/TriFlowSR.
Authors: Shouju Wang, Yuchen Song, Sheng'en Li, Dongmian Zou
Abstract: Graph anomaly detection (GAD) has become an increasingly important task across various domains. With the rapid development of graph neural networks (GNNs), GAD methods have achieved significant performance improvements. However, fairness considerations in GAD remain largely underexplored. Indeed, GNN-based GAD models can inherit and amplify biases present in training data, potentially leading to unfair outcomes. While existing efforts have focused on developing fair GNNs, most approaches target node classification tasks, where models often rely on simple layer architectures rather than autoencoder-based structures, which are the most widely used architecturs for anomaly detection. To address fairness in autoencoder-based GAD models, we propose \textbf{D}is\textbf{E}ntangled \textbf{C}ounterfactual \textbf{A}dversarial \textbf{F}air (DECAF)-GAD, a framework that alleviates bias while preserving GAD performance. Specifically, we introduce a structural causal model (SCM) to disentangle sensitive attributes from learned representations. Based on this causal framework, we formulate a specialized autoencoder architecture along with a fairness-guided loss function. Through extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, we demonstrate that DECAF-GAD not only achieves competitive anomaly detection performance but also significantly enhances fairness metrics compared to baseline GAD methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Tlhey/decaf_code.
Authors: Troi Williams
Abstract: Future autonomous systems promise significant societal benefits, yet their deployment raises concerns about safety and trustworthiness. A key concern is assuring the reliability of robot perception, as perception seeds safe decision-making. Failures in perception are often due to complex yet common environmental factors and can lead to accidents that erode public trust. To address this concern, we introduce the SET (Self, Environment, and Target) Perceptual Factors Framework. We designed the framework to systematically analyze how factors such as weather, occlusion, or sensor limitations negatively impact perception. To achieve this, the framework employs SET State Trees to categorize where such factors originate and SET Factor Trees to model how these sources and factors impact perceptual tasks like object detection or pose estimation. Next, we develop Perceptual Factor Models using both trees to quantify the uncertainty for a given task. Our framework aims to promote rigorous safety assurances and cultivate greater public understanding and trust in autonomous systems by offering a transparent and standardized method for identifying, modeling, and communicating perceptual risks.
Authors: Henry Powell, Guy Laban, Emily S. Cross
Abstract: Subjective self-disclosure is an important feature of human social interaction. While much has been done in the social and behavioural literature to characterise the features and consequences of subjective self-disclosure, little work has been done thus far to develop computational systems that are able to accurately model it. Even less work has been done that attempts to model specifically how human interactants self-disclose with robotic partners. It is becoming more pressing as we require social robots to work in conjunction with and establish relationships with humans in various social settings. In this paper, our aim is to develop a custom multimodal attention network based on models from the emotion recognition literature, training this model on a large self-collected self-disclosure video corpus, and constructing a new loss function, the scale preserving cross entropy loss, that improves upon both classification and regression versions of this problem. Our results show that the best performing model, trained with our novel loss function, achieves an F1 score of 0.83, an improvement of 0.48 from the best baseline model. This result makes significant headway in the aim of allowing social robots to pick up on an interaction partner's self-disclosures, an ability that will be essential in social robots with social cognition.
Authors: Jim Dilkes, Vahid Yazdanpanah, Sebastian Stein
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show potential as sequential decision-making agents, but their application is often limited due to a reliance on large, computationally expensive models. This creates a need to improve smaller models, yet existing post-training methods are designed for single-turn interactions and cannot handle credit assignment in multi-step agentic tasks. To address this, we introduce Multi-Step Group-Relative Policy Optimization (MS-GRPO), a new algorithm for post-training LLM agents, grounded in formal Text-Mediated Stochastic Game (TSMG) and Language-Agent Policy (LAP) frameworks. For credit assignment, MS-GRPO attributes the entire cumulative episode reward to each individual episode step. We supplement this algorithm with a novel absolute-advantage-weighted episode sampling strategy that we show improves training performance. We evaluate our approach by post-training a 3-billion parameter model on Snake and Frozen Lake. Our experiments demonstrate that the method is effective in improving decision-making performance: our post-trained 3B parameter model outperforms a 72B parameter baseline by 50% on the Frozen Lake task. This work demonstrates that targeted post-training is a practical and efficient alternative to relying on model scale for creating sequential decision-making agents using LLMs.
Authors: Zhaokun Jiang, Ziyin Zhang
Abstract: Recent advancements in machine learning have spurred growing interests in automated interpreting quality assessment. Nevertheless, existing research suffers from insufficient examination of language use quality, unsatisfactory modeling effectiveness due to data scarcity and imbalance, and a lack of efforts to explain model predictions. To address these gaps, we propose a multi-dimensional modeling framework that integrates feature engineering, data augmentation, and explainable machine learning. This approach prioritizes explainability over ``black box'' predictions by utilizing only construct-relevant, transparent features and conducting Shapley Value (SHAP) analysis. Our results demonstrate strong predictive performance on a novel English-Chinese consecutive interpreting dataset, identifying BLEURT and CometKiwi scores to be the strongest predictive features for fidelity, pause-related features for fluency, and Chinese-specific phraseological diversity metrics for language use. Overall, by placing particular emphasis on explainability, we present a scalable, reliable, and transparent alternative to traditional human evaluation, facilitating the provision of detailed diagnostic feedback for learners and supporting self-regulated learning advantages not afforded by automated scores in isolation.
Authors: Mojtaba Safari, Shansong Wang, Mingzhe Hu, Zach Eidex, Qiang Li, Xiaofeng Yang
Abstract: Accurate differentiation of brain tumor types on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is critical for guiding treatment planning in neuro-oncology. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled visual question answering (VQA) approaches that integrate image interpretation with natural language reasoning. In this study, we evaluated GPT-4o, GPT-5-nano, GPT-5-mini, and GPT-5 on a curated brain tumor VQA benchmark derived from 3 Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) datasets - glioblastoma (GLI), meningioma (MEN), and brain metastases (MET). Each case included multi-sequence MRI triplanar mosaics and structured clinical features transformed into standardized VQA items. Models were assessed in a zero-shot chain-of-thought setting for accuracy on both visual and reasoning tasks. Results showed that GPT-5-mini achieved the highest macro-average accuracy (44.19%), followed by GPT-5 (43.71%), GPT-4o (41.49%), and GPT-5-nano (35.85%). Performance varied by tumor subtype, with no single model dominating across all cohorts. These findings suggest that GPT-5 family models can achieve moderate accuracy in structured neuro-oncological VQA tasks, but not at a level acceptable for clinical use.
Authors: Sushant Gautam, Vajira Thambawita, Michael Riegler, P{\aa}l Halvorsen, Steven Hicks
Abstract: The Medico 2025 challenge addresses Visual Question Answering (VQA) for Gastrointestinal (GI) imaging, organized as part of the MediaEval task series. The challenge focuses on developing Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) models that answer clinically relevant questions based on GI endoscopy images while providing interpretable justifications aligned with medical reasoning. It introduces two subtasks: (1) answering diverse types of visual questions using the Kvasir-VQA-x1 dataset, and (2) generating multimodal explanations to support clinical decision-making. The Kvasir-VQA-x1 dataset, created from 6,500 images and 159,549 complex question-answer (QA) pairs, serves as the benchmark for the challenge. By combining quantitative performance metrics and expert-reviewed explainability assessments, this task aims to advance trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medical image analysis. Instructions, data access, and an updated guide for participation are available in the official competition repository: https://github.com/simula/MediaEval-Medico-2025
Authors: Anantha Narayanan, Battu Bhanu Teja, Pruthwik Mishra
Abstract: The increasing congestion of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) poses persistent challenges to the efficient deployment and safe operation of Earth observation satellites. Mission planners must now account not only for mission-specific requirements but also for the increasing collision risk with active satellites and space debris. This work presents a reinforcement learning framework using the Advantage Actor-Critic (A2C) algorithm to optimize satellite orbital parameters for precise terrestrial coverage within predefined surface radii. By formulating the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) within a custom OpenAI Gymnasium environment, our method simulates orbital dynamics using classical Keplerian elements. The agent progressively learns to adjust five of the orbital parameters - semi-major axis, eccentricity, inclination, right ascension of ascending node, and the argument of perigee-to achieve targeted terrestrial coverage. Comparative evaluation against Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) demonstrates A2C's superior performance, achieving 5.8x higher cumulative rewards (10.0 vs 9.263025) while converging in 31.5x fewer timesteps (2,000 vs 63,000). The A2C agent consistently meets mission objectives across diverse target coordinates while maintaining computational efficiency suitable for real-time mission planning applications. Key contributions include: (1) a TLE-based orbital simulation environment incorporating physics constraints, (2) validation of actor-critic methods' superiority over trust region approaches in continuous orbital control, and (3) demonstration of rapid convergence enabling adaptive satellite deployment. This approach establishes reinforcement learning as a computationally efficient alternative for scalable and intelligent LEO mission planning.
Authors: Tianyi Li, Mingda Chen, Bowei Guo, Zhiqiang Shen
Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) are rapidly emerging as a powerful and promising alternative to the dominant autoregressive (AR) paradigm. By generating tokens in parallel through an iterative denoising process, DLMs possess inherent advantages in reducing inference latency and capturing bidirectional context, thereby enabling fine-grained control over the generation process. While achieving a several-fold speed-up, recent advancements have allowed DLMs to show performance comparable to their autoregressive counterparts, making them a compelling choice for various natural language processing tasks. In this survey, we provide a holistic overview of the current DLM landscape. We trace its evolution and relationship with other paradigms, such as autoregressive and masked language models, and cover both foundational principles and state-of-the-art models. Our work offers an up-to-date, comprehensive taxonomy and an in-depth analysis of current techniques, from pre-training strategies to advanced post-training methods. Another contribution of this survey is a thorough review of DLM inference strategies and optimizations, including improvements in decoding parallelism, caching mechanisms, and generation quality. We also highlight the latest approaches to multimodal extensions of DLMs and delineate their applications across various practical scenarios. Furthermore, our discussion addresses the limitations and challenges of DLMs, including efficiency, long-sequence handling, and infrastructure requirements, while outlining future research directions to sustain progress in this rapidly evolving field. Project GitHub is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/Awesome-DLMs.
Authors: Yanzhe Zhang, Diyi Yang
Abstract: The widespread deployment of LLM-based agents is likely to introduce a critical privacy threat: malicious agents that proactively engage others in multi-turn interactions to extract sensitive information. These dynamic dialogues enable adaptive attack strategies that can cause severe privacy violations, yet their evolving nature makes it difficult to anticipate and discover sophisticated vulnerabilities manually. To tackle this problem, we present a search-based framework that alternates between improving attacker and defender instructions by simulating privacy-critical agent interactions. Each simulation involves three roles: data subject, data sender, and data recipient. While the data subject's behavior is fixed, the attacker (data recipient) attempts to extract sensitive information from the defender (data sender) through persistent and interactive exchanges. To explore this interaction space efficiently, our search algorithm employs LLMs as optimizers, using parallel search with multiple threads and cross-thread propagation to analyze simulation trajectories and iteratively propose new instructions. Through this process, we find that attack strategies escalate from simple direct requests to sophisticated multi-turn tactics such as impersonation and consent forgery, while defenses advance from rule-based constraints to identity-verification state machines. The discovered attacks and defenses transfer across diverse scenarios and backbone models, demonstrating strong practical utility for building privacy-aware agents.
Authors: Lingen Li, Guangzhi Wang, Zhaoyang Zhang, Yaowei Li, Xiaoyu Li, Qi Dou, Jinwei Gu, Tianfan Xue, Ying Shan
Abstract: Traditional cartoon and anime production involves keyframing, inbetweening, and colorization stages, which require intensive manual effort. Despite recent advances in AI, existing methods often handle these stages separately, leading to error accumulation and artifacts. For instance, inbetweening approaches struggle with large motions, while colorization methods require dense per-frame sketches. To address this, we introduce ToonComposer, a generative model that unifies inbetweening and colorization into a single post-keyframing stage. ToonComposer employs a sparse sketch injection mechanism to provide precise control using keyframe sketches. Additionally, it uses a cartoon adaptation method with the spatial low-rank adapter to tailor a modern video foundation model to the cartoon domain while keeping its temporal prior intact. Requiring as few as a single sketch and a colored reference frame, ToonComposer excels with sparse inputs, while also supporting multiple sketches at any temporal location for more precise motion control. This dual capability reduces manual workload and improves flexibility, empowering artists in real-world scenarios. To evaluate our model, we further created PKBench, a benchmark featuring human-drawn sketches that simulate real-world use cases. Our evaluation demonstrates that ToonComposer outperforms existing methods in visual quality, motion consistency, and production efficiency, offering a superior and more flexible solution for AI-assisted cartoon production.
Authors: Brooke R. Weborg, Gursel Serpen
Abstract: This paper examines Echo State Network, a reservoir computer, performance using four different benchmark problems, then proposes heuristics or rules of thumb for configuring the architecture, as well as the selection of parameters and their values, which are applicable to problems within the same domain, to help serve to fill the experience gap needed by those entering this field of study. The influence of various parameter selections and their value adjustments, as well as architectural changes made to an Echo State Network, a powerful recurrent neural network configured as a reservoir computer, can be challenging to fully comprehend without experience in the field, and even some hyperparameter optimization algorithms may have difficulty adjusting parameter values without proper manual selections made first. Therefore, it is imperative to understand the effects of parameters and their value selection on Echo State Network architecture performance for a successful build. Thus, to address the requirement for an extensive background in Echo State Network architecture, as well as examine how Echo State Network performance is affected with respect to variations in architecture, design, and parameter selection and values, a series of benchmark tasks representing different problem domains, including time series prediction, pattern generation, chaotic system prediction, and time series classification, were modeled and experimented on to show the impact on the performance of Echo State Network.
Authors: Shengjie Ma, Qi Chu, Jiaxin Mao, Xuhui Jiang, Haozhe Duan, Chong Chen
Abstract: Determining which legal cases are relevant to a given query involves navigating lengthy texts and applying nuanced legal reasoning. Traditionally, this task has demanded significant time and domain expertise to identify key Legal Facts and reach sound juridical conclusions. In addition, existing data with legal case similarities often lack interpretability, making it difficult to understand the rationale behind relevance judgments. With the growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), researchers have begun investigating their potential in this domain. Nonetheless, the method of employing a general large language model for reliable relevance judgments in legal case retrieval remains largely unexplored. To address this gap in research, we propose a novel few-shot approach where LLMs assist in generating expert-aligned interpretable relevance judgments. The proposed approach decomposes the judgment process into several stages, mimicking the workflow of human annotators and allowing for the flexible incorporation of expert reasoning to improve the accuracy of relevance judgments. Importantly, it also ensures interpretable data labeling, providing transparency and clarity in the relevance assessment process. Through a comparison of relevance judgments made by LLMs and human experts, we empirically demonstrate that the proposed approach can yield reliable and valid relevance assessments. Furthermore, we demonstrate that with minimal expert supervision, our approach enables a large language model to acquire case analysis expertise and subsequently transfers this ability to a smaller model via annotation-based knowledge distillation.
Authors: Zhuang Qi, Lei Meng, Ruohan Zhang, Yu Wang, Xin Qi, Xiangxu Meng, Han Yu, Qiang Yang
Abstract: Federated learning benefits from cross-training strategies, which enables models to train on data from distinct sources to improve generalization capability. However, due to inherent differences in data distributions, the optimization goals of local models remain misaligned, and this mismatch continues to manifest as feature space heterogeneity even after cross-training. We argue that knowledge distillation from the personalized view preserves client-specific characteristics and expands the local knowledge base, while distillation from the global view provides consistent semantic anchors that facilitate feature alignment across clients. To achieve this goal, this paper presents a cross-training scheme, termed FedCT, includes three main modules, where the consistency-aware knowledge broadcasting module aims to optimize model assignment strategies, which enhances collaborative advantages between clients and achieves an efficient federated learning process. The multi-view knowledge-guided representation learning module leverages fused prototypical knowledge from both global and local views to enhance the preservation of local knowledge before and after model exchange, as well as to ensure consistency between local and global knowledge. The mixup-based feature augmentation module aggregates rich information to further increase the diversity of feature spaces, which enables the model to better discriminate complex samples. Extensive experiments were conducted on four datasets in terms of performance comparison, ablation study, in-depth analysis and case study. The results demonstrated that FedCT alleviates knowledge forgetting from both local and global views, which enables it outperform state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Antonio A. Chaves, Mauricio G. C. Resende, Martin J. A. Schuetz, J. Kyle Brubaker, Helmut G. Katzgraber, Edilson F. de Arruda, Ricardo M. A. Silva
Abstract: This paper introduces the Random-Key Optimizer (RKO), a versatile and efficient stochastic local search method tailored for combinatorial optimization problems. Using the random-key concept, RKO encodes solutions as vectors of random keys that are subsequently decoded into feasible solutions via problem-specific decoders. The RKO framework is able to combine a plethora of classic metaheuristics, each capable of operating independently or in parallel, with solution sharing facilitated through an elite solution pool. This modular approach allows for the adaptation of various metaheuristics, including simulated annealing, iterated local search, and greedy randomized adaptive search procedures, among others. The efficacy of the RKO framework, implemented in C++ and publicly available (Github public repository: github.com/RKO-solver), is demonstrated through its application to three NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems: the alpha-neighborhood p-median problem, the tree of hubs location problem, and the node-capacitated graph partitioning problem. The results highlight the framework's ability to produce high-quality solutions across diverse problem domains, underscoring its potential as a robust tool for combinatorial optimization.
Authors: Junmo Kim, Namkyeong Lee, Jiwon Kim, Kwangsoo Kim
Abstract: Electronic health record (EHR) foundation models have been an area ripe for exploration with their improved performance in various medical tasks. Despite the rapid advances, there exists a fundamental limitation: Processing unseen medical codes out of vocabulary. This problem limits the generalizability of EHR foundation models and the integration of models trained with different vocabularies. To alleviate this problem, we propose a set of novel medical concept representations (MedRep) for EHR foundation models based on the observational medical outcome partnership (OMOP) common data model (CDM). For concept representation learning, we enrich the information of each concept with a minimal definition through large language model (LLM) prompts and complement the text-based representations through the graph ontology of OMOP vocabulary. Our approach outperforms the vanilla EHR foundation model and the model with a previously introduced medical code tokenizer in diverse prediction tasks. We also demonstrate the generalizability of MedRep through external validation.
Authors: Alessio Buscemi, Daniele Proverbio, Alessandro Di Stefano, The Anh Han, German Castignani, Pietro Li\`o
Abstract: Letting AI agents interact in multi-agent applications adds a layer of complexity to the interpretability and prediction of AI outcomes, with profound implications for their trustworthy adoption in research and society. Game theory offers powerful models to capture and interpret strategic interaction among agents, but requires the support of reproducible, standardized and user-friendly IT frameworks to enable comparison and interpretation of results. To this end, we present FAIRGAME, a Framework for AI Agents Bias Recognition using Game Theory. We describe its implementation and usage, and we employ it to uncover biased outcomes in popular games among AI agents, depending on the employed Large Language Model (LLM) and used language, as well as on the personality trait or strategic knowledge of the agents. Overall, FAIRGAME allows users to reliably and easily simulate their desired games and scenarios and compare the results across simulation campaigns and with game-theoretic predictions, enabling the systematic discovery of biases, the anticipation of emerging behavior out of strategic interplays, and empowering further research into strategic decision-making using LLM agents.
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: ZhaoBin Li, Mark Steyvers
Abstract: In settings where human decision-making relies on AI input, both the predictive accuracy of the AI system and the reliability of its confidence estimates influence decision quality. We highlight the role of AI metacognitive sensitivity -- its ability to assign confidence scores that accurately distinguish correct from incorrect predictions -- and introduce a theoretical framework for assessing the joint impact of AI's predictive accuracy and metacognitive sensitivity in hybrid decision-making settings. Our analysis identifies conditions under which an AI with lower predictive accuracy but higher metacognitive sensitivity can enhance the overall accuracy of human decision making. Finally, a behavioral experiment confirms that greater AI metacognitive sensitivity improves human decision performance. Together, these findings underscore the importance of evaluating AI assistance not only by accuracy but also by metacognitive sensitivity, and of optimizing both to achieve superior decision outcomes.
Authors: Kei-Sing Ng
Abstract: To engineer AGI, we should first capture the essence of intelligence in a species-agnostic form that can be evaluated, while being sufficiently general to encompass diverse paradigms of intelligent behavior, including reinforcement learning, generative models, classification, analogical reasoning, and goal-directed decision-making. We propose a general criterion based on \textit{entity fidelity}: Intelligence is the ability, given entities exemplifying a concept, to generate entities exemplifying the same concept. We formalise this intuition as \(\varepsilon\)-concept intelligence: it is \(\varepsilon\)-intelligent with respect to a concept if no chosen admissible distinguisher can separate generated entities from original entities beyond tolerance \(\varepsilon\). We present the formal framework, outline empirical protocols, and discuss implications for evaluation, safety, and generalization.
Authors: Long Phan, Mantas Mazeika, Andy Zou, Dan Hendrycks
Abstract: Evaluating AI agents within complex, interactive environments that mirror real-world challenges is critical for understanding their practical capabilities. While existing agent benchmarks effectively assess skills like tool use or performance on structured tasks, they often do not fully capture an agent's ability to operate autonomously in exploratory environments that demand sustained, self-directed reasoning over a long and growing context. To enable a more accurate assessment of AI agents in challenging exploratory environments, we introduce TextQuests, a benchmark based on the Infocom suite of interactive fiction games. These text-based adventures, which can take human players over 30 hours and require hundreds of precise actions to solve, serve as an effective proxy for evaluating AI agents on focused, stateful tasks. The benchmark is specifically designed to assess an LLM agent's capacity for self-contained problem-solving by precluding the use of external tools, thereby focusing on intrinsic long-context reasoning capabilities in an exploratory environment characterized by the need for trial-and-error learning and sustained problem-solving within a single interactive session. We release TextQuests at https://textquests.ai.
URLs: https://textquests.ai.
Authors: Anxiang Zeng, Haibo Zhang, Kaixiang Mo, Long Zhang, Shuman Liu, Yanhui Huang, Yawen Liu, Yuepeng Sheng, Yuwei Huang
Abstract: Recent R1-Zero-like research further demonstrates that reasoning extension has given large language models (LLMs) unprecedented reasoning capabilities, and Reinforcement Learning is the core technology to elicit its complex reasoning. However, conducting RL experiments directly on hyperscale models involves high computational costs and resource demands, posing significant risks. We propose the Compass-Thinker-7B model, which aims to explore the potential of Reinforcement Learning with less computational resources and costs, and provides insights for further research into RL recipes for larger models. Compass-Thinker-7B is trained from an open source model through a specially designed Reinforcement Learning Pipeline. We curate a dataset of 30k verifiable mathematics problems for the Reinforcement Learning Pipeline. By configuring data and training settings with different difficulty distributions for different stages, the potential of the model is gradually released and the training efficiency is improved. Extensive evaluations show that Compass-Thinker-7B possesses exceptional reasoning potential, and achieves superior performance on mathematics compared to the same-sized RL model. Especially in the challenging AIME2024 evaluation, Compass-Thinker-7B achieves 40% accuracy.
Authors: Xinyuan Wang, Bowen Wang, Dunjie Lu, Junlin Yang, Tianbao Xie, Junli Wang, Jiaqi Deng, Xiaole Guo, Yiheng Xu, Chen Henry Wu, Zhennan Shen, Zhuokai Li, Ryan Li, Xiaochuan Li, Junda Chen, Boyuan Zheng, Peihang Li, Fangyu Lei, Ruisheng Cao, Yeqiao Fu, Dongchan Shin, Martin Shin, Jiarui Hu, Yuyan Wang, Jixuan Chen, Yuxiao Ye, Danyang Zhang, Dikang Du, Hao Hu, Huarong Chen, Zaida Zhou, Haotian Yao, Ziwei Chen, Qizheng Gu, Yipu Wang, Heng Wang, Diyi Yang, Victor Zhong, Flood Sung, Y. Charles, Zhilin Yang, Tao Yu
Abstract: Vision-language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities as computer-use agents (CUAs) capable of automating diverse computer tasks. As their commercial potential grows, critical details of the most capable CUA systems remain closed. As these agents will increasingly mediate digital interactions and execute consequential decisions on our behalf, the research community needs access to open CUA frameworks to study their capabilities, limitations, and risks. To bridge this gap, we propose OpenCUA, a comprehensive open-source framework for scaling CUA data and foundation models. Our framework consists of: (1) an annotation infrastructure that seamlessly captures human computer-use demonstrations; (2) AgentNet, the first large-scale computer-use task dataset spanning 3 operating systems and 200+ applications and websites; (3) a scalable pipeline that transforms demonstrations into state-action pairs with reflective long Chain-of-Thought reasoning that sustain robust performance gains as data scales. Our end-to-end agent models demonstrate strong performance across CUA benchmarks. In particular, OpenCUA-32B achieves an average success rate of 34.8% on OSWorld-Verified, establishing a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) among open-source models and surpassing OpenAI CUA (GPT-4o). Further analysis confirms that our approach generalizes well across domains and benefits significantly from increased test-time computation. We release our annotation tool, datasets, code, and models to build open foundations for further CUA research.
Authors: Liang Zhang, Edith Aurora Graf
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in AI-driven educational instruction and assessment, particularly within mathematics education. The capability of LLMs to generate accurate answers and detailed solutions for math problem-solving tasks is foundational for ensuring reliable and precise feedback and assessment in math education practices. Our study focuses on evaluating the accuracy of four LLMs (OpenAI GPT-4o and o1, DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1) solving three categories of math tasks, including arithmetic, algebra, and number theory, and identifies step-level reasoning errors within their solutions. Instead of relying on standard benchmarks, we intentionally build math tasks (via item models) that are challenging for LLMs and prone to errors. The accuracy of final answers and the presence of errors in individual solution steps were systematically analyzed and coded. Both single-agent and dual-agent configurations were tested. It is observed that the reasoning-enhanced OpenAI o1 model consistently achieved higher or nearly perfect accuracy across all three math task categories. Analysis of errors revealed that procedural slips were the most frequent and significantly impacted overall performance, while conceptual misunderstandings were less frequent. Deploying dual-agent configurations substantially improved overall performance. These findings offer actionable insights into enhancing LLM performance and underscore effective strategies for integrating LLMs into mathematics education, thereby advancing AI-driven instructional practices and assessment precision.
Authors: Quentin Hillebrand, Vorapong Suppakitpaisarn, Tetsuo Shibuya
Abstract: We suggest the use of hash functions to cut down the communication costs when counting subgraphs under edge local differential privacy. While various algorithms exist for computing graph statistics, including the count of subgraphs, under the edge local differential privacy, many suffer with high communication costs, making them less efficient for large graphs. Though data compression is a typical approach in differential privacy, its application in local differential privacy requires a form of compression that every node can reproduce. In our study, we introduce linear congruence hashing. With a sampling rate of $s$, our method can cut communication costs by a factor of $s^2$, albeit at the cost of increasing variance in the published graph statistic by a factor of $s$. The experimental results indicate that, when matched for communication costs, our method achieves a reduction in the $\ell_2$-error for triangle counts by up to 1000 times compared to the performance of leading algorithms.
Authors: Mohammad Amaz Uddin, Md Mahiuddin, Iqbal H. Sarker
Abstract: Phishing email is a serious cyber threat that tries to deceive users by sending false emails with the intention of stealing confidential information or causing financial harm. Attackers, often posing as trustworthy entities, exploit technological advancements and sophistication to make detection and prevention of phishing more challenging. Despite extensive academic research, phishing detection remains an ongoing and formidable challenge in the cybersecurity landscape. Large Language Models (LLMs) and Masked Language Models (MLMs) possess immense potential to offer innovative solutions to address long-standing challenges. In this research paper, we present an optimized, fine-tuned transformer-based DistilBERT model designed for the detection of phishing emails. In the detection process, we work with a phishing email dataset and utilize the preprocessing techniques to clean and solve the imbalance class issues. Through our experiments, we found that our model effectively achieves high accuracy, demonstrating its capability to perform well. Finally, we demonstrate our fine-tuned model using Explainable-AI (XAI) techniques such as Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) and Transformer Interpret to explain how our model makes predictions in the context of text classification for phishing emails.
Authors: Weiye Zhao, Feihan Li, Changliu Liu
Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has demonstrated remarkable performance in many continuous control tasks. However, a significant obstacle to the real-world application of DRL is the lack of safety guarantees. Although DRL agents can satisfy system safety in expectation through reward shaping, designing agents to consistently meet hard constraints (e.g., safety specifications) at every time step remains a formidable challenge. In contrast, existing work in the field of safe control provides guarantees on persistent satisfaction of hard safety constraints. However, these methods require explicit analytical system dynamics models to synthesize safe control, which are typically inaccessible in DRL settings. In this paper, we present a model-free safe control algorithm, the implicit safe set algorithm, for synthesizing safeguards for DRL agents that ensure provable safety throughout training. The proposed algorithm synthesizes a safety index (barrier certificate) and a subsequent safe control law solely by querying a black-box dynamic function (e.g., a digital twin simulator). Moreover, we theoretically prove that the implicit safe set algorithm guarantees finite time convergence to the safe set and forward invariance for both continuous-time and discrete-time systems. We validate the proposed algorithm on the state-of-the-art Safety Gym benchmark, where it achieves zero safety violations while gaining $95\% \pm 9\%$ cumulative reward compared to state-of-the-art safe DRL methods. Furthermore, the resulting algorithm scales well to high-dimensional systems with parallel computing.
Authors: Sai Sathiesh Rajan, Ezekiel Soremekun, Sudipta Chattopadhyay
Abstract: In this work, we systematically expose and measure the inconsistency and knowledge gaps of Large Language Models (LLMs). Specifically, we propose an automated testing framework (called KonTest) which leverages a knowledge graph to construct test cases. KonTest probes and measures the inconsistencies in the LLM's knowledge of the world via a combination of semantically-equivalent queries and test oracles (metamorphic or ontological oracle). KonTest further mitigates knowledge gaps via a weighted LLM model ensemble. Using four state-of-the-art LLMs (Falcon, Gemini, GPT3.5, and Llama2), we show that KonTest generates 19.2% error inducing inputs (1917 errors from 9979 test inputs). It also reveals a 16.5% knowledge gap across all tested LLMs. A mitigation method informed by KonTest's test suite reduces LLM knowledge gap by 32.48%. Our ablation study further shows that GPT3.5 is not suitable for knowledge-based consistency testing because it is only 60%-68% effective in knowledge construction.
Authors: Sourav Chatterjee, Timothy Sudijono
Abstract: We show that feedforward neural networks with ReLU activation generalize on low complexity data, suitably defined. Given i.i.d.~data generated from a simple programming language, the minimum description length (MDL) feedforward neural network which interpolates the data generalizes with high probability. We define this simple programming language, along with a notion of description length of such networks. We provide several examples on basic computational tasks, such as checking primality of a natural number. For primality testing, our theorem shows the following and more. Suppose that we draw an i.i.d.~sample of $n$ numbers uniformly at random from $1$ to $N$. For each number $x_i$, let $y_i = 1$ if $x_i$ is a prime and $0$ if it is not. Then, the interpolating MDL network accurately answers, with error probability $1- O((\ln N)/n)$, whether a newly drawn number between $1$ and $N$ is a prime or not. Note that the network is not designed to detect primes; minimum description learning discovers a network which does so. Extensions to noisy data are also discussed, suggesting that MDL neural network interpolators can demonstrate tempered overfitting.
Authors: Leonard B\"armann, Chad DeChant, Joana Plewnia, Fabian Peller-Konrad, Daniel Bauer, Tamim Asfour, Alex Waibel
Abstract: Verbalization of robot experience, i.e., summarization of and question answering about a robot's past, is a crucial ability for improving human-robot interaction. Previous works applied rule-based systems or fine-tuned deep models to verbalize short (several-minute-long) streams of episodic data, limiting generalization and transferability. In our work, we apply large pretrained models to tackle this task with zero or few examples, and specifically focus on verbalizing life-long experiences. For this, we derive a tree-like data structure from episodic memory (EM), with lower levels representing raw perception and proprioception data, and higher levels abstracting events to natural language concepts. Given such a hierarchical representation built from the experience stream, we apply a large language model as an agent to interactively search the EM given a user's query, dynamically expanding (initially collapsed) tree nodes to find the relevant information. The approach keeps computational costs low even when scaling to months of robot experience data. We evaluate our method on simulated household robot data, human egocentric videos, and real-world robot recordings, demonstrating its flexibility and scalability.
Authors: Zhenglin Wan, Xingrui Yu, David Mark Bossens, Yueming Lyu, Qing Guo, Flint Xiaofeng Fan, Yew Soon Ong, Ivor Tsang
Abstract: Imitation learning (IL) has shown promise in various applications (e.g. robot locomotion) but is often limited to learning a single expert policy, constraining behavior diversity and robustness in unpredictable real-world scenarios. To address this, we introduce Quality Diversity Inverse Reinforcement Learning (QD-IRL), a novel framework that integrates quality-diversity optimization with IRL methods, enabling agents to learn diverse behaviors from limited demonstrations. This work introduces Extrinsic Behavioral Curiosity (EBC), which allows agents to receive additional curiosity rewards from an external critic based on how novel the behaviors are with respect to a large behavioral archive. To validate the effectiveness of EBC in exploring diverse locomotion behaviors, we evaluate our method on multiple robot locomotion tasks. EBC improves the performance of QD-IRL instances with GAIL, VAIL, and DiffAIL across all included environments by up to 185%, 42%, and 150%, even surpassing expert performance by 20% in Humanoid. Furthermore, we demonstrate that EBC is applicable to Gradient-Arborescence-based Quality Diversity Reinforcement Learning (QD-RL) algorithms, where it substantially improves performance and provides a generic technique for learning behavioral-diverse policies. The source code of this work is provided at https://github.com/vanzll/EBC.
Authors: Daohan Su, Xunkai Li, Zhenjun Li, Yinping Liao, Rong-Hua Li, Guoren Wang
Abstract: Recently, graph neural network (GNN) has emerged as a powerful representation learning tool for graph-structured data. However, most approaches are tailored for undirected graphs, neglecting the abundant information in the edges of directed graphs (digraphs). In fact, digraphs are widely applied in the real world and confirmed to address heterophily challenges. Despite recent advancements, existing spatial- and spectral-based DiGNNs have limitations due to their complex learning mechanisms and reliance on high-quality topology, resulting in low efficiency and unstable performance. To address these issues, we propose Directed Random Walk (DiRW), a plug-and-play strategy for most spatial-based DiGNNs and also an innovative model which offers a new digraph learning paradigm. Specifically, it utilizes a direction-aware path sampler optimized from the perspectives of walk probability, length, and number in a weight-free manner by considering node profiles and topologies. Building upon this, DiRW incorporates a node-wise learnable path aggregator for generalized node representations. Extensive experiments on 9 datasets demonstrate that DiRW: (1) enhances most spatial-based methods as a plug-and-play strategy; (2) achieves SOTA performance as a new digraph learning paradigm. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/dhsiuu/DiRW.
Authors: Runzhen Xue, Hao Wu, Mingyu Yan, Ziheng Xiao, Guangyu Sun, Xiaochun Ye, Dongrui Fan
Abstract: Design Space Exploration (DSE) is essential to modern CPU design, yet current frameworks struggle to scale and generalize in high-dimensional architectural spaces. As the dimensionality of design spaces continues to grow, existing DSE frameworks face three fundamental challenges: (1) reduced accuracy and poor scalability of surrogate models in large design spaces; (2) inefficient acquisition guided by hand-crafted heuristics or exhaustive search; (3) limited interpretability, making it hard to pinpoint architectural bottlenecks. In this work, we present \textbf{AttentionDSE}, the first end-to-end DSE framework that \emph{natively integrates} performance prediction and design guidance through an attention-based neural architecture. Unlike traditional DSE workflows that separate surrogate modeling from acquisition and rely heavily on hand-crafted heuristics, AttentionDSE establishes a unified, learning-driven optimization loop, in which attention weights serve a dual role: enabling accurate performance estimation and simultaneously exposing the performance bottleneck. This paradigm shift elevates attention from a passive representation mechanism to an active, interpretable driver of design decision-making. Key innovations include: (1) a \textbf{Perception-Driven Attention} mechanism that exploits architectural hierarchy and locality, scaling attention complexity from $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(n)$ via sliding windows; (2) an \textbf{Attention-aware Bottleneck Analysis} that automatically surfaces critical parameters for targeted optimization, eliminating the need for domain-specific heuristics. Evaluated on high-dimensional CPU design space using the SPEC CPU2017 benchmark suite, AttentionDSE achieves up to \textbf{3.9\% higher Pareto Hypervolume} and over \textbf{80\% reduction in exploration time} compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors: Heehwan Wang, Joonwoo Kwon, Sooyoung Kim, Shinjae Yoo, Yuewei Lin, Jiook Cha
Abstract: Music style transfer enables personalized music creation by combining the structure of one piece with the stylistic characteristics of another. While recent approaches have explored text-conditioned generation and diffusion-based synthesis, most require extensive training, paired datasets, or detailed textual annotations. In this work, we introduce Stylus, a novel training-free framework for music style transfer that directly manipulates the self-attention layers of a pre-trained Latent Diffusion Model (LDM). Operating in the mel-spectrogram domain, Stylus transfers musical style by replacing key and value representations from the content audio with those of the style reference, without any fine-tuning. To enhance stylization quality and controllability, we further incorporate query preservation, CFG-inspired guidance scaling, multi-style interpolation, and phase-preserving reconstruction. Our method significantly improves perceptual quality and structural preservation compared to prior work, while remaining lightweight and easy to deploy. This work highlights the potential of diffusion-based attention manipulation for efficient, high-fidelity, and interpretable music generation-without training. Codes will be released upon acceptance.
Authors: Peilin Tian, Hao Li
Abstract: Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) are pivotal tasks in the realm of autonomous driving, attracting considerable research attention. While SLAM endeavors to generate real-time maps and determine the vehicle's pose in unfamiliar settings, MOT focuses on the real-time identification and tracking of multiple dynamic objects. Despite their importance, the prevalent approach treats SLAM and MOT as independent modules within an autonomous vehicle system, leading to inherent limitations. Classical SLAM methodologies often rely on a static environment assumption, suitable for indoor rather than dynamic outdoor scenarios. Conversely, conventional MOT techniques typically rely on the vehicle's known state, constraining the accuracy of object state estimations based on this prior. To address these challenges, previous efforts introduced the unified SLAMMOT paradigm, yet primarily focused on simplistic motion patterns. In our team's previous work IMM-SLAMMOT\cite{IMM-SLAMMOT}, we present a novel methodology incorporating consideration of multiple motion models into SLAMMOT i.e. tightly coupled SLAM and MOT, demonstrating its efficacy in LiDAR-based systems. This paper studies feasibility and advantages of instantiating this methodology as visual SLAMMOT, bridging the gap between LiDAR and vision-based sensing mechanisms. Specifically, we propose a solution of visual SLAMMOT considering multiple motion models and validate the inherent advantages of IMM-SLAMMOT in the visual domain.
Authors: Wenbo Zhang, Junyu Chen, Christopher Kanan
Abstract: Due to their large sizes, volumetric scans and whole-slide pathology images (WSIs) are often processed by extracting embeddings from local regions and then an aggregator makes predictions from this set. However, current methods require post-hoc visualization techniques (e.g., Grad-CAM) and often fail to localize small yet clinically crucial details. To address these limitations, we introduce INSIGHT, a novel weakly-supervised aggregator that integrates heatmap generation as an inductive bias. Starting from pre-trained feature maps, INSIGHT employs a detection module with small convolutional kernels to capture fine details and a context module with a broader receptive field to suppress local false positives. The resulting internal heatmap highlights diagnostically relevant regions. On CT and WSI benchmarks, INSIGHT achieves state-of-the-art classification results and high weakly-labeled semantic segmentation performance. Project website and code are available at: https://zhangdylan83.github.io/ewsmia/
Authors: Jan Rathjens, Shirin Reyhanian, David Kappel, Laurenz Wiskott
Abstract: Understanding the mechanisms underlying deep neural networks remains a fundamental challenge in machine learning and computer vision. One promising, yet only preliminarily explored approach, is feature inversion, which attempts to reconstruct images from intermediate representations using trained inverse neural networks. In this study, we revisit feature inversion, introducing a novel, modular variation that enables significantly more efficient application of the technique. We demonstrate how our method can be systematically applied to the large-scale transformer-based vision models, Detection Transformer and Vision Transformer, and how reconstructed images can be qualitatively interpreted in a meaningful way. We further quantitatively evaluate our method, thereby uncovering underlying mechanisms of representing image features that emerge in the two transformer architectures. Our analysis reveals key insights into how these models encode contextual shape and image details, how their layers correlate, and their robustness against color perturbations. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of transformer-based vision models and their internal representations. The code for reproducing our experiments is available at github.com/wiskott-lab/inverse-tvm.
Authors: Arun K. Sharma, Shubhobrata Bhattacharya, Motahar Reza, Bishakh Bhattacharya
Abstract: Traditional biometric systems have encountered significant setbacks due to various unavoidable factors, for example, wearing of face masks in face recognition-based biometrics and hygiene concerns in fingerprint-based biometrics. This paper proposes a novel lightweight vision transformer with phase-only cross-attention (POC-ViT) using dual biometric traits of forehead and periocular portions of the face, capable of performing well even with face masks and without any physical touch, offering a promising alternative to traditional methods. The POC-ViT framework is designed to handle two biometric traits and to capture inter-dependencies in terms of relative structural patterns. Each channel consists of a Cross-Attention using phase-only correlation (POC) that captures both their individual and correlated structural patterns. The computation of cross-attention using POC extracts the phase correlation in the spatial features. Therefore, it is robust against variations in resolution and intensity, as well as illumination changes in the input images. The lightweight model is suitable for edge device deployment. The performance of the proposed framework was successfully demonstrated using the Forehead Subcutaneous Vein Pattern and Periocular Biometric Pattern (FSVP-PBP) database, having 350 subjects. The POC-ViT framework outperformed state-of-the-art methods with an outstanding classification accuracy of $98.8\%$ with the dual biometric traits.
Authors: Zaikang Lin, Sei Chang, Aaron Zweig, Minseo Kang, Elham Azizi, David A. Knowles
Abstract: Modern high-throughput biological datasets with thousands of perturbations provide the opportunity for large-scale discovery of causal graphs that represent the regulatory interactions between genes. Differentiable causal graphical models have been proposed to infer a gene regulatory network (GRN) from large scale interventional datasets, capturing the causal gene regulatory relationships from genetic perturbations. However, existing models are limited in their expressivity and scalability while failing to address the dynamic nature of biological processes such as cellular differentiation. We propose PerturbODE, a novel framework that incorporates biologically informative neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs) to model cell state trajectories under perturbations and derive the causal GRN from the neural ODE's parameters. We demonstrate PerturbODE's efficacy in trajectory prediction and GRN inference across simulated and real over-expression datasets.
Authors: Fabian David Schmidt, Ivan Vuli\'c, Goran Glava\v{s}, David Ifeoluwa Adelani
Abstract: Spoken language understanding (SLU) is indispensable for half of all living languages that lack a formal writing system. Unlike for high-resource languages, for these languages, we cannot offload semantic understanding of speech to the cascade of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-based large language models (LLMs). Even if low-resource languages possess a writing system, ASR for these languages remains unreliable due to limited bimodal speech and text training data. Nonetheless, the evaluation of multilingual SLU is limited to shallow tasks such as intent classification or language identification. This is why we present Fleurs-SLU, a multilingual SLU benchmark that encompasses (i) 692 hours of speech for topical utterance classification in 102 languages and (ii) multiple-choice question answering via listening comprehension spanning 944 hours of speech across 92 languages. We extensively evaluate end-to-end speech classification models, cascaded systems that combine speech-to-text transcription with subsequent LLM-based classification, and multimodal speech-LLMs on Fleurs-SLU. Our results show that cascaded systems are more robust in multilingual SLU, though well-pretrained speech encoders can perform competitively in topical speech classification. Closed-source speech-LLMs match or surpass the performance of cascaded systems. We observe a strong correlation between robust multilingual ASR, effective speech-to-text translation, and strong multilingual SLU, indicating mutual benefits between acoustic and semantic speech representations.
Authors: Yanxia Deng, Aozhong Zhang, Selcuk Gurses, Naigang Wang, Zi Yang, Penghang Yin
Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) using low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has become a highly efficient approach for downstream tasks, particularly in scenarios with limited computational resources. However, applying LoRA techniques to quantized LLMs poses unique challenges due to the reduced representational precision of quantized weights. In this paper, we introduce CLoQ (Calibrated LoRA initialization for Quantized LLMs), a simplistic initialization strategy designed to overcome these challenges. Our approach focuses on minimizing the layer-wise discrepancy between the original LLM and its quantized counterpart with LoRA components during initialization. By leveraging a small calibration dataset, CLoQ quantizes a pre-trained LLM and determines the optimal LoRA components for each layer, ensuring a strong foundation for subsequent fine-tuning. A key contribution of this work is a novel theoretical result that enables the accurate and closed-form construction of these optimal LoRA components. We validate the efficacy of CLoQ across multiple tasks such as language generation, arithmetic reasoning, and commonsense reasoning, demonstrating that it consistently outperforms existing LoRA fine-tuning methods for quantized LLMs, especially at ultra low-bit widths.
Authors: Isha Puri, Shivchander Sudalairaj, Guangxuan Xu, Kai Xu, Akash Srivastava
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant performance gains via scaling up model sizes and/or data. However, recent evidence suggests diminishing returns from such approaches, motivating scaling the computation spent at inference time. Existing inference-time scaling methods, usually with reward models, cast the task as a search problem, which tends to be vulnerable to reward hacking as a consequence of approximation errors in reward models. In this paper, we instead cast inference-time scaling as a probabilistic inference task and leverage sampling-based techniques to explore the typical set of the state distribution of a state-space model with an approximate likelihood, rather than optimize for its mode directly. We propose a novel inference-time scaling approach by adapting particle-based Monte Carlo methods to this task. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that our methods have a 4-16x better scaling rate over our deterministic search counterparts on various challenging mathematical reasoning tasks. Using our approach, we show that Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B-Instruct can surpass GPT-4o accuracy in only 4 rollouts, while Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct scales to o1 level accuracy in only 32 rollouts. Our work not only presents an effective method to inference-time scaling, but also connects the rich literature in probabilistic inference with inference-time scaling of LLMs to develop more robust algorithms in future work. Code, videos, and further information available at https://probabilistic-inference-scaling.github.io.
Authors: Chenlu Ding, Jiancan Wu, Yancheng Yuan, Cunchun Li, Xiang Wang, Dingxian Wang, Frank Yang, Andrew Rabinovich
Abstract: In online advertising under the cost-per-conversion (CPA) model, accurate conversion rate (CVR) prediction is crucial. A major challenge is delayed feedback, where conversions may occur long after user interactions, leading to incomplete recent data and biased model training. Existing solutions partially mitigate this issue but often rely on auxiliary models, making them computationally inefficient and less adaptive to user interest shifts. We propose IF-DFM, an \underline{I}nfluence \underline{F}unction-empowered for \underline{D}elayed \underline{F}eedback \underline{M}odeling which estimates the impact of newly arrived and delayed conversions on model parameters, enabling efficient updates without full retraining. By reformulating the inverse Hessian-vector product as an optimization problem, IF-DFM achieves a favorable trade-off between scalability and effectiveness. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that IF-DFM outperforms prior methods in both accuracy and adaptability.
Authors: Yuchang Zhu, Huizhe Zhang, Bingzhe Wu, Jintang Li, Zibin Zheng, Peilin Zhao, Liang Chen, Yatao Bian
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely adopted to generate synthetic datasets for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as text classification and summarization. However, accurately measuring the diversity of these synthetic datasets-an aspect crucial for robust model performance-remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce DCScore, a novel method for measuring synthetic dataset diversity from a classification perspective. Specifically, DCScore formulates diversity evaluation as a sample classification task, leveraging mutual relationships among samples. We further provide theoretical verification of the diversity-related axioms satisfied by DCScore, highlighting its role as a principled diversity evaluation method. Experimental results on synthetic datasets reveal that DCScore enjoys a stronger correlation with multiple diversity pseudo-truths of evaluated datasets, underscoring its effectiveness. Moreover, both empirical and theoretical evidence demonstrate that DCScore substantially reduces computational costs compared to existing methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/bluewhalelab/dcscore.
Authors: Hoony Kang, Wolfgang Losert
Abstract: The brain rapidly adapts to new contexts and learns from limited data, a coveted characteristic that artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms struggle to mimic. Inspired by the mechanical oscillatory rhythms of neural cells, we developed a learning paradigm utilizing link strength oscillations, where learning is associated with the coordination of these oscillations. Link oscillations can rapidly change coordination, allowing the network to sense and adapt to subtle contextual changes without supervision. The network becomes a generalist AI architecture, capable of predicting dynamics of multiple contexts including unseen ones. These results make our paradigm a powerful starting point for novel models of cognition. Because our paradigm is agnostic to specifics of the neural network, our study opens doors for introducing rapid adaptive learning into leading AI models.
Authors: Haoyu Lei, Kaiwen Zhou, Yinchuan Li, Zhitang Chen, Farzan Farnia
Abstract: Diffusion-based Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has demonstrated effectiveness in solving NP-complete (NPC) problems by learning discrete diffusion models for solution generation, eliminating hand-crafted domain knowledge. Despite their success, existing NCO methods face significant challenges in both cross-scale and cross-problem generalization, and high training costs compared to traditional solvers. While recent studies on diffusion models have introduced training-free guidance approaches that leverage pre-defined guidance functions for conditional generation, such methodologies have not been extensively explored in combinatorial optimization. To bridge this gap, we propose a training-free inference time adaptation framework (DIFU-Ada) that enables both the zero-shot cross-problem transfer and cross-scale generalization capabilities of diffusion-based NCO solvers without requiring additional training. We provide theoretical analysis that helps understanding the cross-problem transfer capability. Our experimental results demonstrate that a diffusion solver, trained exclusively on the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), can achieve competitive zero-shot transfer performance across different problem scales on TSP variants, such as Prize Collecting TSP (PCTSP) and the Orienteering Problem (OP), through inference time adaptation.
Authors: Qianli Ma, Dongrui Liu, Qian Chen, Linfeng Zhang, Jing Shao
Abstract: Fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) for specialized tasks incurs substantial computational and data costs. While model merging offers a training-free solution to integrate multiple task-specific models, existing methods suffer from safety-utility conflicts where enhanced general capabilities degrade safety safeguards. We identify two root causes: $\textbf{neuron misidentification}$ due to simplistic parameter magnitude-based selection, and $\textbf{cross-task neuron interference}$ during merging. To address these challenges, we propose $\textbf{LED-Merging}$, a three-stage framework that $\textbf{L}$ocates task-specific neurons via gradient-based attribution, dynamically $\textbf{E}$lects critical neurons through multi-model importance fusion, and $\textbf{D}$isjoints conflicting updates through parameter isolation. Extensive experiments on Llama-3-8B, Mistral-7B, and Llama2-13B demonstrate that LED-Merging effectively reduces harmful response rates, showing a 31.4\% decrease on Llama-3-8B-Instruct on HarmBench, while simultaneously preserving 95\% of utility performance, such as achieving 52.39\% accuracy on GSM8K. LED-Merging resolves safety-utility conflicts and provides a lightweight, training-free paradigm for constructing reliable multi-task LLMs. Code is available at $\href{https://github.com/MqLeet/LED-Merging}{GitHub}$.
Authors: Jingtian Yan, Zhifei Li, William Kang, Kevin Zheng, Yulun Zhang, Zhe Chen, Yue Zhang, Daniel Harabor, Stephen F. Smith, Jiaoyang Li
Abstract: We present Scalable Multi-Agent Realistic Testbed (SMART), a realistic and efficient software tool for evaluating Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) algorithms. MAPF focuses on planning collision-free paths for a group of agents. While state-ofthe-art MAPF algorithms can plan paths for hundreds of robots in seconds, they often rely on simplified robot models, making their real-world performance unclear. Researchers typically lack access to hundreds of physical robots in laboratory settings to evaluate the algorithms. Meanwhile, industrial professionals who lack expertise in MAPF require an easy-to-use simulator to efficiently test and understand the performance of MAPF algorithms in their specific settings. SMART fills this gap with several advantages: (1) SMART uses physics-engine-based simulators to create realistic simulation environments, accounting for complex real-world factors such as robot kinodynamics and execution uncertainties, (2) SMART uses an execution monitor framework based on the Action Dependency Graph, facilitating seamless integration with various MAPF algorithms and robot models, and (3) SMART scales to thousands of robots. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/smart-mapf/smart.
Authors: Hyundong Jin, Eunwoo Kim
Abstract: Continual learning aims to learn knowledge of tasks observed in sequential time steps while mitigating the forgetting of previously learned knowledge. Existing methods were designed to learn a single modality (e.g., image) over time, which limits their applicability in scenarios involving multiple modalities. In this work, we propose a novel continual learning framework that accommodates multiple modalities (image, video, audio, depth, and text). We train a model to align various modalities with text, leveraging its rich semantic information. However, this increases the risk of forgetting previously learned knowledge, exacerbated by the differing input traits across tasks. To alleviate the overwriting of previous knowledge of modalities, we propose a framework that consolidates intra-modal knowledge while incorporating relevant inter-modal information. This is achieved by self-regulating shifts in learned representations to gradually integrating novel knowledge into the information retained across modalities. Simultaneously, it mitigates inter-modal interference by selectively integrating knowledge from previously encountered modalities based on their mutual relevance. Furthermore, we introduce a strategy to re-align modality embeddings, effectively addressing biased alignment between modalities. We evaluate the proposed method in a wide range of continual learning scenarios using multiple datasets with different modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ours outperforms existing methods in the scenarios, regardless of whether the identity of the modality is given.
Authors: Donghao Huang, Zhaoxia Wang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have transformed sentiment analysis, yet balancing accuracy, efficiency, and explainability remains a critical challenge. This study presents the first comprehensive evaluation of DeepSeek-R1--an open-source reasoning model--against OpenAI's GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. We test the full 671B model and its distilled variants, systematically documenting few-shot learning curves. Our experiments show DeepSeek-R1 achieves a 91.39\% F1 score on 5-class sentiment and 99.31\% accuracy on binary tasks with just 5 shots, an eightfold improvement in few-shot efficiency over GPT-4o. Architecture-specific distillation effects emerge, where a 32B Qwen2.5-based model outperforms the 70B Llama-based variant by 6.69 percentage points. While its reasoning process reduces throughput, DeepSeek-R1 offers superior explainability via transparent, step-by-step traces, establishing it as a powerful, interpretable open-source alternative.
Authors: Dayou Du, Shijie Cao, Jianyi Cheng, Luo Mai, Ting Cao, Mao Yang
Abstract: The rise of long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) amplifies memory and bandwidth demands during autoregressive decoding, as the Key-Value (KV) cache grows with each generated token. Low-bit KV-cache quantization (e.g., 4-bit or 2-bit) can reduce memory footprint while preserving accuracy, but existing systems suffer from slow decoding due to their exclusive reliance on CUDA cores, neglecting Tensor Cores (the primary source of compute on modern GPUs). We present BitDecoding, a new long-context LLM inference system with a low-bit KV cache. BitDecoding enables efficient low-bit KV-cache decoding by cooperatively leveraging CUDA cores and Tensor Cores. It introduces methods for automatically inducing optimized layouts to exploit Tensor Cores, along with warp-level parallelization strategies for dequantization. For unified system support, BitDecoding includes a query transformation module supporting diverse attention variants, a quantization kernel that supports both tensor-wise and channel-wise scaling used in various quantization algorithms with high performance, and a dequantization kernel with a software-defined pipeline to coordinate CUDA and Tensor Cores execution for mixed-precision operations. Evaluated on RTX 4090, A100, and H100, BitDecoding accelerates decoding by up to 7.5x, 4.8x, and 8.9x, respectively, over FP16 FlashDecoding-v2, and surpasses the state-of-the-art low-bit system QServe by up to 4.3x. On LLaMA-3.1-8B with a 128K context, BitDecoding reduces single-batch decoding latency by 3x, showing substantial improvements for long-context generation. The code is available at https://github.com/DD-DuDa/BitDecoding.
Authors: Suhas G Hegde, Shilpy Kaur, Aruna Tiwari
Abstract: Popular PEFT methods reduce trainable parameter count for fine-tuning by parameterizing new low-rank or sparse trainable weights in parallel to the frozen pre-trained weights $W$. However, these weights are trained from scratch, and there exists a performance gap between these methods and full fine-tuning, especially in low-budget settings. We introduce VectorFit, a new way of parameterization that efficiently utilizes the existing knowledge embedded in $W$ by adaptively training their singular vectors and biases. We show that utilizing the structural and transformational properties of $W$ in this way can lead to high-rank incremental weight matrices $\Delta W$, comparable to that of full fine-tuning. VectorFit delivers superior results with 9$\boldsymbol\times$ fewer trainable parameters than the leading PEFT methods. Through comprehensive experiments across 19 datasets covering a wide range of language and vision tasks such as natural language understanding and generation, question answering, image classification, and image generation, we demonstrate that VectorFit surpasses baselines in terms of performance as a function of parameter-efficiency.
Authors: Yuping Wang, Xiangyu Huang, Xiaokang Sun, Mingxuan Yan, Shuo Xing, Zhengzhong Tu, Jiachen Li
Abstract: We introduce UniOcc, a comprehensive, unified benchmark and toolkit for occupancy forecasting (i.e., predicting future occupancies based on historical information) and occupancy prediction (i.e., predicting current-frame occupancy from camera images. UniOcc unifies the data from multiple real-world datasets (i.e., nuScenes, Waymo) and high-fidelity driving simulators (i.e., CARLA, OpenCOOD), providing 2D/3D occupancy labels and annotating innovative per-voxel flows. Unlike existing studies that rely on suboptimal pseudo labels for evaluation, UniOcc incorporates novel evaluation metrics that do not depend on ground-truth labels, enabling robust assessment on additional aspects of occupancy quality. Through extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models, we demonstrate that large-scale, diverse training data and explicit flow information significantly enhance occupancy prediction and forecasting performance. Our data and code are available at https://uniocc.github.io/.
Authors: Xingshan Zeng, Weiwen Liu, Xu Huang, Zezhong Wang, Lingzhi Wang, Liangyou Li, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Ruiming Tang, Qun Liu
Abstract: Tool learning, which allows Large Language Models (LLMs) to leverage external tools for solving complex user tasks, has emerged as a promising avenue for extending model capabilities. However, existing approaches primarily focus on data synthesis for fine-tuning LLMs to invoke tools effectively, largely ignoring how to fully stimulate the potential of the model. In this paper, we propose ToolACE-R, a novel framework that includes both model-aware iterative training and adaptive refinement for tool learning. ToolACE-R features a model-aware iterative training procedure that progressively adjust training samples based on the model's evolving capabilities to maximize its potential. Additionally, it incorporates self-refinement training corpus which emphasizes LLM's ability to iteratively refine their tool calls, optimizing performance without requiring external feedback. Furthermore, we introduce adaptive self-refinement mechanism for efficient test-time scaling, where the trained model can autonomously determine when to stop the process based on iterative self-refinement. We conduct extensive experiments across several benchmark datasets, showing that ToolACE-R achieves competitive performance compared to advanced API-based models. The performance of tool invocation can be further improved efficiently through adaptive self-refinement. These results highlight the effectiveness and generalizability of ToolACE-R, offering a promising direction for more efficient and scalable tool learning.
Authors: Eugen Barbulescu, Antonio Alexoaie, Lucian Busoniu
Abstract: Network pruning is used to reduce inference latency and power consumption in large neural networks. However, most existing methods use ad-hoc heuristics, lacking much insight and justified mainly by empirical results. We introduce Hyperflux, a conceptually grounded L0 pruning approach that estimates each weight's importance through its flux, the gradient's response to the weight's removal. A global pressure term continuously drives all weights toward pruning, with those critical for accuracy being automatically regrown based on their flux. We postulate several properties that naturally follow from our framework and experimentally validate each of them. One such property is the relationship between final sparsity and pressure, for which we derive a generalized scaling-law equation that is used to design our sparsity-controlling scheduler. Empirically, we demonstrate state-of-the-art results with ResNet-50 and VGG-19 on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100.
Authors: Seunghyeok Back, Joosoon Lee, Kangmin Kim, Heeseon Rho, Geonhyup Lee, Raeyoung Kang, Sangbeom Lee, Sangjun Noh, Youngjin Lee, Taeyeop Lee, Kyoobin Lee
Abstract: Robust grasping in cluttered environments remains an open challenge in robotics. While benchmark datasets have significantly advanced deep learning methods, they mainly focus on simplistic scenes with light occlusion and insufficient diversity, limiting their applicability to practical scenarios. We present GraspClutter6D, a large-scale real-world grasping dataset featuring: (1) 1,000 highly cluttered scenes with dense arrangements (14.1 objects/scene, 62.6\% occlusion), (2) comprehensive coverage across 200 objects in 75 environment configurations (bins, shelves, and tables) captured using four RGB-D cameras from multiple viewpoints, and (3) rich annotations including 736K 6D object poses and 9.3B feasible robotic grasps for 52K RGB-D images. We benchmark state-of-the-art segmentation, object pose estimation, and grasp detection methods to provide key insights into challenges in cluttered environments. Additionally, we validate the dataset's effectiveness as a training resource, demonstrating that grasping networks trained on GraspClutter6D significantly outperform those trained on existing datasets in both simulation and real-world experiments. The dataset, toolkit, and annotation tools are publicly available on our project website: https://sites.google.com/view/graspclutter6d.
Authors: Xinyu Wang, Jijun Chi, Zhenghan Tai, Tung Sum Thomas Kwok, Muzhi Li, Zhuhong Li, Hailin He, Yuchen Hua, Peng Lu, Suyuchen Wang, Yihong Wu, Jerry Huang, Jingrui Tian, Fengran Mo, Yufei Cui, Ling Zhou
Abstract: Leveraging large language models in real-world settings often entails a need to utilize domain-specific data and tools in order to follow the complex regulations that need to be followed for acceptable use. Within financial sectors, modern enterprises increasingly rely on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems to address complex compliance requirements in financial document workflows. However, existing solutions struggle to account for the inherent heterogeneity of data (e.g., text, tables, diagrams) and evolving nature of regulatory standards used in financial filings, leading to compromised accuracy in critical information extraction. We propose the FinSage framework as a solution, utilizing a multi-aspect RAG framework tailored for regulatory compliance analysis in multi-modal financial documents. FinSage introduces three innovative components: (1) a multi-modal pre-processing pipeline that unifies diverse data formats and generates chunk-level metadata summaries, (2) a multi-path sparse-dense retrieval system augmented with query expansion (HyDE) and metadata-aware semantic search, and (3) a domain-specialized re-ranking module fine-tuned via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to prioritize compliance-critical content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FinSage achieves an impressive recall of 92.51% on 75 expert-curated questions derived from surpasses the best baseline method on the FinanceBench question answering datasets by 24.06% in accuracy. Moreover, FinSage has been successfully deployed as financial question-answering agent in online meetings, where it has already served more than 1,200 people.
Authors: Atin Pothiraj, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Jaemin Cho, Mohit Bansal
Abstract: Recognizing and reasoning about occluded (partially or fully hidden) objects is vital to understanding visual scenes, as occlusions frequently occur in real-world environments and act as obstacles for spatial comprehension. To test models' ability to reason about multiple occluded objects, we introduce a novel task, Counting Amodally for Patterns Through Unseen REgions (CAPTURe), which requires a model to count objects arranged in a pattern by inferring how the pattern continues behind an occluder (an object which blocks parts of the scene). CAPTURe requires both recognizing visual patterns and reasoning, making it a useful testbed for evaluating vision-language models (VLMs) on whether they understand occluded patterns and possess spatial understanding skills. By requiring models to reason about occluded objects, CAPTURe also tests VLMs' ability to form world models that would allow them to fill in missing information. CAPTURe consists of two parts: (1) CAPTURe-real, with manually filtered images of real objects in patterns and (2) CAPTURe-synthetic, a controlled diagnostic with generated patterned images. We evaluate four strong VLMs (GPT-4o, Intern-VL2, Molmo, and Qwen2-VL) on CAPTURe, finding that models struggle to count on both occluded and unoccluded patterns. Crucially, we find that models perform worse with occlusion, suggesting that VLMs are also deficient in inferring unseen spatial relationships: even the strongest VLMs like GPT-4o fail to count with occlusion. In contrast, we find that humans achieve very little error on CAPTURe. We also find that providing auxiliary information of occluded object locations increases performance, underscoring that the model error comes both from an inability to handle occlusion as well as difficulty in counting in images. Code and data: https://github.com/atinpothiraj/CAPTURe
Authors: Luca-Andrei Fechete, Mohamed Sana, Fadhel Ayed, Nicola Piovesan, Wenjie Li, Antonio De Domenico, Tareq Si Salem
Abstract: Conventional time-series forecasting methods typically aim to minimize overall prediction error, without accounting for the varying importance of different forecast ranges in downstream applications. We propose a training methodology that enables forecasting models to adapt their focus to application-specific regions of interest at inference time, without retraining. The approach partitions the prediction space into fine-grained segments during training, which are dynamically reweighted and aggregated to emphasize the target range specified by the application. Unlike prior methods that predefine these ranges, our framework supports flexible, on-demand adjustments. Experiments on standard benchmarks and a newly collected wireless communication dataset demonstrate that our method not only improves forecast accuracy within regions of interest but also yields measurable gains in downstream task performance. These results highlight the potential for closer integration between predictive modeling and decision-making in real-world systems.
Authors: Saber Mehdipour, Seyed Abolghasem Mirroshandel, Seyed Amirhossein Tabatabaei
Abstract: Detecting plant diseases is a crucial aspect of modern agriculture, as it plays a key role in maintaining crop health and increasing overall yield. Traditional approaches, though still valuable, often rely on manual inspection or conventional machine learning techniques, both of which face limitations in scalability and accuracy. Recently, Vision Transformers (ViTs) have emerged as a promising alternative, offering advantages such as improved handling of long-range dependencies and better scalability for visual tasks. This review explores the application of ViTs in precision agriculture, covering a range of tasks. We begin by introducing the foundational architecture of ViTs and discussing their transition from Natural Language Processing (NLP) to Computer Vision. The discussion includes the concept of inductive bias in traditional models like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and how ViTs mitigate these biases. We provide a comprehensive review of recent literature, focusing on key methodologies, datasets, and performance metrics. This study also includes a comparative analysis of CNNs and ViTs, along with a review of hybrid models and performance enhancements. Technical challenges such as data requirements, computational demands, and model interpretability are addressed, along with potential solutions. Finally, we outline future research directions and technological advancements that could further support the integration of ViTs in real-world agricultural settings. Our goal with this study is to offer practitioners and researchers a deeper understanding of how ViTs are poised to transform smart and precision agriculture.
Authors: Shubham Vaishnav, Praveen Kumar Donta, Sindri Magn\'usson
Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) systems increasingly operate in environments where devices must respond in real time while managing fluctuating resource constraints, including energy and bandwidth. Yet, current approaches often fall short in addressing scenarios where operational constraints evolve over time. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Budgeted Multi-Armed Bandit framework tailored for IoT applications with dynamic operational limits. Our model introduces a decaying violation budget, which permits limited constraint violations early in the learning process and gradually enforces stricter compliance over time. We present the Budgeted Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm, which adaptively balances performance optimization and compliance with time-varying constraints. We provide theoretical guarantees showing that Budgeted UCB achieves sublinear regret and logarithmic constraint violations over the learning horizon. Extensive simulations in a wireless communication setting show that our approach achieves faster adaptation and better constraint satisfaction than standard online learning methods. These results highlight the framework's potential for building adaptive, resource-aware IoT systems.
Authors: Euntae Choi, Sumin Song, Woosang Lim, Sungjoo Yoo
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) face deployment challenges due to high computational costs, and while Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) offers a solution, existing rotation-based methods struggle at very low bit-widths like 2-bit. We introduce a novel, training-free approach to construct an improved rotation matrix, addressing the limitations of current methods. The key contributions include leveraging the Walsh-Hadamard transform with sequency ordering, which clusters similar frequency components to reduce quantization error compared to standard Hadamard matrices, significantly improving performance. Furthermore, we propose a Grouped Sequency-arranged Rotation (GSR) using block-diagonal matrices with smaller Walsh blocks, effectively isolating outlier impacts and achieving performance comparable to optimization-based methods without requiring any training. Our method demonstrates robust performance on reasoning tasks and Perplexity (PPL) score on WikiText-2. Our method also enhances results even when applied over existing learned rotation techniques.
Authors: Yuhang Huang, Jiazhao Zhang, Shilong Zou, Xinwang Liu, Ruizhen Hu, Kai Xu
Abstract: Predictive manipulation has recently gained considerable attention in the Embodied AI community due to its potential to improve robot policy performance by leveraging predicted states. However, generating accurate future visual states of robot-object interactions from world models remains a well-known challenge, particularly in achieving high-quality pixel-level representations. To this end, we propose LaDi-WM, a world model that predicts the latent space of future states using diffusion modeling. Specifically, LaDi-WM leverages the well-established latent space aligned with pre-trained Visual Foundation Models (VFMs), which comprises both geometric features (DINO-based) and semantic features (CLIP-based). We find that predicting the evolution of the latent space is easier to learn and more generalizable than directly predicting pixel-level images. Building on LaDi-WM, we design a diffusion policy that iteratively refines output actions by incorporating forecasted states, thereby generating more consistent and accurate results. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that LaDi-WM significantly enhances policy performance by 27.9\% on the LIBERO-LONG benchmark and 20\% on the real-world scenario. Furthermore, our world model and policies achieve impressive generalizability in real-world experiments.
Authors: Guangda Liu, Chengwei Li, Zhenyu Ning, Minyi Guo, Jieru Zhao
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been widely deployed with rapidly expanding context windows to support increasingly demanding applications. However, long contexts pose significant deployment challenges, primarily due to the KV cache whose size grows proportionally with context length. While KV cache compression methods are proposed to address this issue, KV dropping methods incur considerable accuracy loss, and KV retrieval methods suffer from significant efficiency bottlenecks. We propose FreeKV, an algorithm-system co-optimization framework to enhance KV retrieval efficiency while preserving accuracy. On the algorithm side, FreeKV introduces speculative retrieval to shift the KV selection and recall processes out of the critical path, combined with fine-grained correction to ensure accuracy. On the system side, FreeKV employs hybrid KV layouts across CPU and GPU memory to eliminate fragmented data transfers, and leverages double-buffered streamed recall to further improve efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that FreeKV achieves near-lossless accuracy across various scenarios and models, delivering up to 13$\times$ speedup compared to SOTA KV retrieval methods.
Authors: Fernando Lucatelli Nunes, Gordon Plotkin, Matthijs V\'ak\'ar
Abstract: Combinatory Homomorphic Automatic Differentiation (CHAD) was originally formulated as a semantics-driven source-to-source transformation for reverse-mode AD of total (terminating) functional programs. In this work, we extend CHAD to encompass programs featuring constructs such as partial (potentially non-terminating) operations, data-dependent conditionals (e.g., real-valued tests), and iteration constructs (i.e. while-loops), while maintaining CHAD's core principle of structure-preserving semantics. A central contribution is the introduction of iteration-extensive indexed categories, which provide a principled integration of iteration into dependently typed programming languages. This integration is achieved by requiring that iteration in the base category lifts to parameterized initial algebras in the indexed category, yielding an op-fibred iterative structure that models while-loops and other iteration constructs in the total category, which corresponds to the category of containers of our dependently typed language. Through the idea of iteration-extensive indexed categories, we extend the CHAD transformation to looping programs as the unique structure-preserving functor in a suitable sense. Specifically, it is the unique iterative Freyd category morphism from the iterative Freyd category corresponding to the source language to the category of containers obtained from the target language, such that each primitive operation is mapped to its (transposed) derivative. We establish the correctness of this extended transformation via the universal property of the syntactic categorical model of the source language, showing that the differentiated programs compute correct reverse-mode derivatives of their originals.
Authors: Zhehui Wang, Benjamin Chen Ming Choong, Tian Huang, Daniel Gerlinghoff, Rick Siow Mong Goh, Cheng Liu, Tao Luo
Abstract: Quantum optimization is the most mature quantum computing technology to date, providing a promising approach towards efficiently solving complex combinatorial problems. Methods such as adiabatic quantum computing (AQC) have been employed in recent years on important optimization problems across various domains. In deep learning, deep neural networks (DNN) have reached immense sizes to support new predictive capabilities. Optimization of large-scale models is critical for sustainable deployment, but becomes increasingly challenging with ever-growing model sizes and complexity. While quantum optimization is suitable for solving complex problems, its application to DNN optimization is not straightforward, requiring thorough reformulation for compatibility with commercially available quantum devices. In this work, we explore the potential of adopting AQC for fine-grained pruning-quantization of convolutional neural networks. We rework established heuristics to formulate model compression as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem, and assess the solution space offered by commercial quantum annealing devices. Through our exploratory efforts of reformulation, we demonstrate that AQC can achieve effective compression of practical DNN models. Experiments demonstrate that adiabatic quantum computing (AQC) not only outperforms classical algorithms like genetic algorithms and reinforcement learning in terms of time efficiency but also excels at identifying global optima.
Authors: Miles Q. Li, Benjamin C. M. Fung
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and its competitors have caused a revolution in natural language processing, but their capabilities also introduce new security vulnerabilities. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of these emerging concerns, categorizing threats into several key areas: prompt injection and jailbreaking; adversarial attacks, including input perturbations and data poisoning; misuse by malicious actors to generate disinformation, phishing emails, and malware; and the worrisome risks inherent in autonomous LLM agents. Recently, a significant focus is increasingly being placed on the latter, exploring goal misalignment, emergent deception, self-preservation instincts, and the potential for LLMs to develop and pursue covert, misaligned objectives, a behavior known as scheming, which may even persist through safety training. We summarize recent academic and industrial studies from 2022 to 2025 that exemplify each threat, analyze proposed defenses and their limitations, and identify open challenges in securing LLM-based applications. We conclude by emphasizing the importance of advancing robust, multi-layered security strategies to ensure LLMs are safe and beneficial.
Authors: Lei Tian, Xiaomin Li, Liqian Ma, Hao Yin, Zirui Zheng, Hefei Huang, Taiqing Li, Huchuan Lu, Xu Jia
Abstract: Recent advances in 3D reconstruction techniques and vision-language models have fueled significant progress in 3D semantic understanding, a capability critical to robotics, autonomous driving, and virtual/augmented reality. However, methods that rely on 2D priors are prone to a critical challenge: cross-view semantic inconsistencies induced by occlusion, image blur, and view-dependent variations. These inconsistencies, when propagated via projection supervision, deteriorate the quality of 3D Gaussian semantic fields and introduce artifacts in the rendered outputs. To mitigate this limitation, we propose CCL-LGS, a novel framework that enforces view-consistent semantic supervision by integrating multi-view semantic cues. Specifically, our approach first employs a zero-shot tracker to align a set of SAM-generated 2D masks and reliably identify their corresponding categories. Next, we utilize CLIP to extract robust semantic encodings across views. Finally, our Contrastive Codebook Learning (CCL) module distills discriminative semantic features by enforcing intra-class compactness and inter-class distinctiveness. In contrast to previous methods that directly apply CLIP to imperfect masks, our framework explicitly resolves semantic conflicts while preserving category discriminability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CCL-LGS outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. Our project page is available at https://epsilontl.github.io/CCL-LGS/.
Authors: Haoru Tan, Sitong Wu, Wei Huang, Shizhen Zhao, Xiaojuan Qi
Abstract: In this paper, we present InfoMax, a novel data pruning method, also known as coreset selection, designed to maximize the information content of selected samples while minimizing redundancy. By doing so, InfoMax enhances the overall informativeness of the coreset. The information of individual samples is measured by importance scores, which capture their influence or difficulty in model learning. To quantify redundancy, we use pairwise sample similarities, based on the premise that similar samples contribute similarly to the learning process. We formalize the coreset selection problem as a discrete quadratic programming (DQP) task, with the objective of maximizing the total information content, represented as the sum of individual sample contributions minus the redundancies introduced by similar samples within the coreset. To ensure practical scalability, we introduce an efficient gradient-based solver, complemented by sparsification techniques applied to the similarity matrix and dataset partitioning strategies. This enables InfoMax to seamlessly scale to datasets with millions of samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of InfoMax in various data pruning tasks, including image classification, vision-language pre-training, and instruction tuning for large language models. Code is available at https://github.com/hrtan/InfoMax.
Authors: Yeonwoo Jang, Shariqah Hossain, Ashwin Sreevatsa, Diogo Cruz
Abstract: In this work, we demonstrate that certain machine unlearning methods may fail under straightforward prompt attacks. We systematically evaluate eight unlearning techniques across three model families using output-based, logit-based, and probe analysis to assess the extent to which supposedly unlearned knowledge can be retrieved. While methods like RMU and TAR exhibit robust unlearning, ELM remains vulnerable to specific prompt attacks (e.g., prepending Hindi filler text to the original prompt recovers 57.3% accuracy). Our logit analysis further indicates that unlearned models are unlikely to hide knowledge through changes in answer formatting, given the strong correlation between output and logit accuracy. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions about unlearning effectiveness and highlight the need for evaluation frameworks that can reliably distinguish between genuine knowledge removal and superficial output suppression. To facilitate further research, we publicly release our evaluation framework to easily evaluate prompting techniques to retrieve unlearned knowledge.
Authors: Andrew P. Berg, Qian Zhang, Mia Y. Wang
Abstract: As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) become increasingly prevalent in both consumer and defense applications, the need for reliable, modality-specific classification systems grows in urgency. This paper addresses the challenge of data scarcity in UAV audio classification by expanding on prior work through the integration of pre-trained deep learning models, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies, and targeted data augmentation techniques. Using a custom dataset of 3,100 UAV audio clips (15,500 seconds) spanning 31 distinct drone types, we evaluate the performance of transformer-based and convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures under various fine-tuning configurations. Experiments were conducted with five-fold cross-validation, assessing accuracy, training efficiency, and robustness. Results show that full fine-tuning of the EfficientNet-B0 model with three augmentations achieved the highest validation accuracy (95.95), outperforming both the custom CNN and transformer-based models like AST. These findings suggest that combining lightweight architectures with PEFT and well-chosen augmentations provides an effective strategy for UAV audio classification on limited datasets. Future work will extend this framework to multimodal UAV classification using visual and radar telemetry.
Authors: Ching Chang, Ming-Chih Lo, Wen-Chih Peng, Tien-Fu Chen
Abstract: Multivariate time series data, collected across various fields such as manufacturing and wearable technology, exhibit states at multiple levels of granularity, from coarse-grained system behaviors to fine-grained, detailed events. Effectively segmenting and integrating states across these different granularities is crucial for tasks like predictive maintenance and performance optimization. However, existing time series segmentation methods face two key challenges: (1) the inability to handle multiple levels of granularity within a unified model, and (2) limited adaptability to new, evolving patterns in dynamic environments. To address these challenges, we propose PromptTSS, a novel framework for time series segmentation with multi-granularity states. PromptTSS uses a unified model with a prompting mechanism that leverages label and boundary information to guide segmentation, capturing both coarse- and fine-grained patterns while adapting dynamically to unseen patterns. Experiments show PromptTSS improves accuracy by 24.49% in multi-granularity segmentation, 17.88% in single-granularity segmentation, and up to 599.24% in transfer learning, demonstrating its adaptability to hierarchical states and evolving time series dynamics. Our code is available at https://github.com/blacksnail789521/PromptTSS.
Authors: Sol\`ene Debuys\`ere, Nicolas Trouv\'e, Nathan Letheule, Olivier L\'ev\^eque, Elise Colin
Abstract: We present a framework for adapting a large pretrained latent diffusion model to high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image generation. The approach enables controllable synthesis and the creation of rare or out-of-distribution scenes beyond the training set. Rather than training a task-specific small model from scratch, we adapt an open-source text-to-image foundation model to the SAR modality, using its semantic prior to align prompts with SAR imaging physics (side-looking geometry, slant-range projection, and coherent speckle with heavy-tailed statistics). Using a 100k-image SAR dataset, we compare full fine-tuning and parameter-efficient Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) across the UNet diffusion backbone, the Variational Autoencoder (VAE), and the text encoders. Evaluation combines (i) statistical distances to real SAR amplitude distributions, (ii) textural similarity via Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) descriptors, and (iii) semantic alignment using a SAR-specialized CLIP model. Our results show that a hybrid strategy-full UNet tuning with LoRA on the text encoders and a learned token embedding-best preserves SAR geometry and texture while maintaining prompt fidelity. The framework supports text-based control and multimodal conditioning (e.g., segmentation maps, TerraSAR-X, or optical guidance), opening new paths for large-scale SAR scene data augmentation and unseen scenario simulation in Earth observation.
Authors: Jongoh Jeong, Hunmin Yang, Jaeseok Jeong, Kuk-Jin Yoon
Abstract: Generative adversarial attacks train a perturbation generator on a white-box surrogate model and subsequently apply the crafted perturbations to unseen black-box victim models. In contrast to iterative attacks, these methods deliver superior inference-time efficiency, scalability, and transferability; however, up until now, existing studies have not fully exploited the representational capacity of generative models to preserve and harness semantic information. Specifically, the intermediate activations of the generator encode rich semantic features--object boundaries and coarse shapes--that remain under-exploited, thereby limiting the alignment of perturbations with object-salient regions which are critical for adversarial transferability. To remedy this, we introduce a semantic structure-aware attack framework based on the Mean Teacher, which serves as a temporally smoothed feature reference. With this smoothed reference, we further direct semantic consistency between the early-layer activations in the student and those of the semantically rich teacher by feature distillation. By anchoring perturbation synthesis to the semantically salient early intermediate blocks within the generator based on empirical findings, our method guides progressive adversarial perturbation on regions that substantially enhance adversarial transferability. We conduct extensive experiments over diverse models, domains and tasks to demonstrate consistent improvements relative to state-of-the-art generative attacks, comprehensively evaluated using conventional metrics and our newly proposed Accidental Correction Rate (ACR).
Authors: Ziyu Zheng, Yaming Yang, Ziyu Guan, Wei Zhao, Weigang Lu
Abstract: Masked Graph Auto-Encoder, a powerful graph self-supervised training paradigm, has recently shown superior performance in graph representation learning. Existing works typically rely on node contextual information to recover the masked information. However, they fail to generalize well to heterophilic graphs where connected nodes may be not similar, because they focus only on capturing the neighborhood information and ignoring the discrepancy information between different nodes, resulting in indistinguishable node representations. In this paper, to address this issue, we propose a Discrepancy-Aware Graph Mask Auto-Encoder (DGMAE). It obtains more distinguishable node representations by reconstructing the discrepancy information of neighboring nodes during the masking process. We conduct extensive experiments on 17 widely-used benchmark datasets. The results show that our DGMAE can effectively preserve the discrepancies of nodes in low-dimensional space. Moreover, DGMAE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art graph self-supervised learning methods on three graph analytic including tasks node classification, node clustering, and graph classification, demonstrating its remarkable superiority. The code of DGMAE is available at https://github.com/zhengziyu77/DGMAE.
Authors: Yuqi Zhu, Yi Zhong, Jintian Zhang, Ziheng Zhang, Shuofei Qiao, Yujie Luo, Lun Du, Da Zheng, Ningyu Zhang, Huajun Chen
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise in automating data analysis tasks, yet open-source models face significant limitations in these kinds of reasoning-intensive scenarios. In this work, we investigate strategies to enhance the data analysis capabilities of open-source LLMs. By curating a seed dataset of diverse, realistic scenarios, we evaluate model behavior across three core dimensions: data understanding, code generation, and strategic planning. Our analysis reveals three key findings: (1) Strategic planning quality serves as the primary determinant of model performance; (2) Interaction design and task complexity significantly influence reasoning capabilities; (3) Data quality demonstrates a greater impact than diversity in achieving optimal performance. We leverage these insights to develop a data synthesis methodology, demonstrating significant improvements in open-source LLMs' analytical reasoning capabilities. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/DataMind.
Authors: V Team, Wenyi Hong, Wenmeng Yu, Xiaotao Gu, Guo Wang, Guobing Gan, Haomiao Tang, Jiale Cheng, Ji Qi, Junhui Ji, Lihang Pan, Shuaiqi Duan, Weihan Wang, Yan Wang, Yean Cheng, Zehai He, Zhe Su, Zhen Yang, Ziyang Pan, Aohan Zeng, Baoxu Wang, Bin Chen, Boyan Shi, Changyu Pang, Chenhui Zhang, Da Yin, Fan Yang, Guoqing Chen, Jiazheng Xu, Jiale Zhu, Jiali Chen, Jing Chen, Jinhao Chen, Jinghao Lin, Jinjiang Wang, Junjie Chen, Leqi Lei, Letian Gong, Leyi Pan, Mingdao Liu, Mingde Xu, Mingzhi Zhang, Qinkai Zheng, Sheng Yang, Shi Zhong, Shiyu Huang, Shuyuan Zhao, Siyan Xue, Shangqin Tu, Shengbiao Meng, Tianshu Zhang, Tianwei Luo, Tianxiang Hao, Tianyu Tong, Wenkai Li, Wei Jia, Xiao Liu, Xiaohan Zhang, Xin Lyu, Xinyue Fan, Xuancheng Huang, Yanling Wang, Yadong Xue, Yanfeng Wang, Yanzi Wang, Yifan An, Yifan Du, Yiming Shi, Yiheng Huang, Yilin Niu, Yuan Wang, Yuanchang Yue, Yuchen Li, Yutao Zhang, Yuting Wang, Yu Wang, Yuxuan Zhang, Zhao Xue, Zhenyu Hou, Zhengxiao Du, Zihan Wang, Peng Zhang, Debing Liu, Bin Xu, Juanzi Li, Minlie Huang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
Abstract: We present GLM-4.1V-Thinking and GLM-4.5V, a family of vision-language models (VLMs) designed to advance general-purpose multimodal understanding and reasoning. In this report, we share our key findings in the development of the reasoning-centric training framework. We first develop a capable vision foundation model with significant potential through large-scale pre-training, which arguably sets the upper bound for the final performance. We then propose Reinforcement Learning with Curriculum Sampling (RLCS) to unlock the full potential of the model, leading to comprehensive capability enhancement across a diverse range of tasks, including STEM problem solving, video understanding, content recognition, coding, grounding, GUI-based agents, and long document interpretation. In a comprehensive evaluation across 42 public benchmarks, GLM-4.5V achieves state-of-the-art performance on nearly all tasks among open-source models of similar size, and demonstrates competitive or even superior results compared to closed-source models such as Gemini-2.5-Flash on challenging tasks including Coding and GUI Agents. Meanwhile, the smaller GLM-4.1V-9B-Thinking remains highly competitive-achieving superior results to the much larger Qwen2.5-VL-72B on 29 benchmarks. We open-source both GLM-4.1V-9B-Thinking and GLM-4.5V. Code, models and more information are released at https://github.com/zai-org/GLM-V.
Authors: Myeongjang Pyeon, Janghyeon Lee, Minsoo Lee, Juseung Yun, Hwanil Choi, Jonghyun Kim, Jiwon Kim, Yi Hu, Jongseong Jang, Soonyoung Lee
Abstract: In digital pathology, whole-slide images (WSIs) are often difficult to handle due to their gigapixel scale, so most approaches train patch encoders via self-supervised learning (SSL) and then aggregate the patch-level embeddings via multiple instance learning (MIL) or slide encoders for downstream tasks. However, patch-level SSL may overlook complex domain-specific features that are essential for biomarker prediction, such as mutation status and molecular characteristics, as SSL methods rely only on basic augmentations selected for natural image domains on small patch-level area. Moreover, SSL methods remain less data efficient than fully supervised approaches, requiring extensive computational resources and datasets to achieve competitive performance. To address these limitations, we present EXAONE Path 2.0, a pathology foundation model that learns patch-level representations under direct slide-level supervision. Using only 37k WSIs for training, EXAONE Path 2.0 achieves state-of-the-art average performance across 10 biomarker prediction tasks, demonstrating remarkable data efficiency.
Authors: Peng Qiu, Hanqi Feng, Meng-Chun Zhang, Barnabas Poczos
Abstract: Red-blood-cell lysis (HC50) is the principal safety barrier for antimicrobial-peptide (AMP) therapeutics, yet existing models only say "toxic" or "non-toxic." AmpLyze closes this gap by predicting the actual HC50 value from sequence alone and explaining the residues that drive toxicity. The model couples residue-level ProtT5/ESM2 embeddings with sequence-level descriptors in dual local and global branches, aligned by a cross-attention module and trained with log-cosh loss for robustness to assay noise. The optimal AmpLyze model reaches a PCC of 0.756 and an MSE of 0.987, outperforming classical regressors and the state-of-the-art. Ablations confirm that both branches are essential, and cross-attention adds a further 1% PCC and 3% MSE improvement. Expected-Gradients attributions reveal known toxicity hotspots and suggest safer substitutions. By turning hemolysis assessment into a quantitative, sequence-based, and interpretable prediction, AmpLyze facilitates AMP design and offers a practical tool for early-stage toxicity screening.
Authors: Hongchao Jiang, Yiming Chen, Yushi Cao, Hung-yi Lee, Robby T. Tan
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in various coding tasks. Beyond directly answering user queries, LLMs can also serve as judges, assessing and comparing the quality of responses generated by other models. Such an evaluation capability is crucial both for benchmarking different LLMs and for improving response quality through response ranking. However, despite the growing adoption of the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm, its effectiveness in coding scenarios remains underexplored due to the absence of dedicated benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce CodeJudgeBench, a benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate the performance of LLM-as-a-Judge models across three critical coding tasks: code generation, code repair, and unit test generation. Through comprehensive benchmarking of 26 LLM-as-a-Judge models, we find that recent thinking models significantly outperform non-thinking models on our carefully designed code judging tasks. Notably, even relatively small thinking models, such as Qwen3-8B, can outperform specially trained LLM-as-a-Judge models up to 70B in size. Nevertheless, all models still exhibit significant randomness in their judgment of coding tasks. For pairwise judging tasks, simply changing the order in which responses are presented can substantially impact accuracy. In addition, when judging code and unit tests written by different LLMs, LLM-as-a-Judge models also show variance in performance. This sensitivity raises concerns about the reliability and consistency of LLM-as-a-Judge in coding scenarios. Lastly, we study optimal prompting strategies for LLM-as-a-Judge. We find that using pair-wise comparison outperforms scalar point-wise judging. Furthermore, retaining comments and reasoning in the full, unprocessed LLM response leads to improved judge performance.
Authors: Hsiang-Wei Huang, Jen-Hao Cheng, Kuang-Ming Chen, Cheng-Yen Yang, Bahaa Alattar, Yi-Ru Lin, Pyongkun Kim, Sangwon Kim, Kwangju Kim, Chung-I Huang, Jenq-Neng Hwang
Abstract: Spatial understanding has been a challenging task for existing Multi-modal Large Language Models~(MLLMs). Previous methods leverage large-scale MLLM finetuning to enhance MLLM's spatial understanding ability. In this paper, we present a data-efficient approach. We propose a LLM agent system with strong and advanced spatial reasoning ability, which can be used to solve the challenging spatial question answering task in complex indoor warehouse scenarios. Our system integrates multiple tools that allow the LLM agent to conduct spatial reasoning and API tools interaction to answer the given complicated spatial question. Extensive evaluations on the 2025 AI City Challenge Physical AI Spatial Intelligence Warehouse dataset demonstrate that our system achieves high accuracy and efficiency in tasks such as object retrieval, counting, and distance estimation. The code is available at: https://github.com/hsiangwei0903/SpatialAgent
Authors: Elisa Tsai, Haizhong Zheng, Atul Prakash
Abstract: High-quality training data is essential for building reliable and efficient machine learning systems. One-shot coreset selection addresses this by pruning the dataset while maintaining or even improving model performance, often relying on training-dynamics-based data difficulty scores. However, most existing methods implicitly assume class-wise homogeneity in data difficulty, overlooking variation in data difficulty across different classes. In this work, we challenge this assumption by showing that, in domains such as network intrusion detection and medical imaging, data difficulty often clusters by class. We formalize this as class-difficulty separability and introduce the Class Difficulty Separability Coefficient (CDSC) as a quantitative measure. We demonstrate that high CDSC values correlate with performance degradation in class-agnostic coreset methods, which tend to overrepresent easy majority classes while neglecting rare but informative ones. To address this, we introduce class-proportional variants of multiple sampling strategies. Evaluated on five diverse datasets spanning security and medical domains, our methods consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance. For instance, on CTU-13, at an extreme 99% pruning rate, a class-proportional variant of Coverage-centric Coreset Selection (CCS-CP) shows remarkable stability, with accuracy dropping only 2.58%, precision 0.49%, and recall 0.19%. In contrast, the class-agnostic CCS baseline, the next best method, suffers sharper declines of 7.59% in accuracy, 4.57% in precision, and 4.11% in recall. We further show that aggressive pruning enhances generalization in noisy, imbalanced, and large-scale datasets. Our results underscore that explicitly modeling class-difficulty separability leads to more effective, robust, and generalizable data pruning, particularly in high-stakes scenarios.
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: Ngoc Hung Nguyen, Nguyen Van Thieu, Quang-Trung Luu, Anh Tuan Nguyen, Senura Wanasekara, Nguyen Cong Luong, Fatemeh Kavehmadavani, Van-Dinh Nguyen
Abstract: In this paper, we explore mission assignment and task offloading in an Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN)-based intelligent transportation system (ITS), where autonomous vehicles leverage mobile edge computing for efficient processing. Existing studies often overlook the intricate interdependencies between missions and the costs associated with offloading tasks to edge servers, leading to suboptimal decision-making. To bridge this gap, we introduce Oranits, a novel system model that explicitly accounts for mission dependencies and offloading costs while optimizing performance through vehicle cooperation. To achieve this, we propose a twofold optimization approach. First, we develop a metaheuristic-based evolutionary computing algorithm, namely the Chaotic Gaussian-based Global ARO (CGG-ARO), serving as a baseline for one-slot optimization. Second, we design an enhanced reward-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, referred to as the Multi-agent Double Deep Q-Network (MA-DDQN), that integrates both multi-agent coordination and multi-action selection mechanisms, significantly reducing mission assignment time and improving adaptability over baseline methods. Extensive simulations reveal that CGG-ARO improves the number of completed missions and overall benefit by approximately 7.1% and 7.7%, respectively. Meanwhile, MA-DDQN achieves even greater improvements of 11.0% in terms of mission completions and 12.5% in terms of the overall benefit. These results highlight the effectiveness of Oranits in enabling faster, more adaptive, and more efficient task processing in dynamic ITS environments.
Authors: Sinh Trong Vu, Hieu Trung Pham, Dung Manh Nguyen, Hieu Minh Hoang, Nhu Hoang Le, Thu Ha Pham, Tai Tan Mai
Abstract: Classroom behavior monitoring is a critical aspect of educational research, with significant implications for student engagement and learning outcomes. Recent advancements in Visual Question Answering (VQA) models offer promising tools for automatically analyzing complex classroom interactions from video recordings. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of several state-of-the-art open-source VQA models, including LLaMA2, LLaMA3, QWEN3, and NVILA, in the context of classroom behavior analysis. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce our BAV-Classroom-VQA dataset derived from real-world classroom video recordings at the Banking Academy of Vietnam. We present the methodology for data collection, annotation, and benchmark the performance of the selected VQA models on this dataset. Our initial experimental results demonstrate that all four models achieve promising performance levels in answering behavior-related visual questions, showcasing their potential in future classroom analytics and intervention systems.
Authors: Lili Chen, Mihir Prabhudesai, Katerina Fragkiadaki, Hao Liu, Deepak Pathak
Abstract: Can large language models improve without external data -- by generating their own questions and answers? We hypothesize that a pre-trained language model can improve its reasoning skills given only a single prompt specifying the topic (e.g., algebra word problems) and asking the model to generate its own questions. To do this, we propose Self-Questioning Language Models (SQLM): an asymmetric self-play framework where a proposer is given the topic and generates a question for a solver, who tries to answer it. Both the proposer and solver are trained via reinforcement learning. The proposer receives a reward if the problem is not too easy or too difficult, and the solver receives a reward based on majority voting, a proxy for correctness in the absence of ground-truth answers. For coding, the proposer can instead generate unit tests which are used for verification. We study this asymmetric self-play framework on three benchmarks: three-digit multiplication, algebra problems from the OMEGA benchmark, and programming problems from Codeforces. By continually generating more interesting problems and attempting to solve them, language models can improve on downstream benchmarks without access to any curated training datasets.
Authors: Quang-Trung Truong, Yuk-Kwan Wong, Vo Hoang Kim Tuyen Dang, Rinaldi Gotama, Duc Thanh Nguyen, Sai-Kit Yeung
Abstract: Marine videos present significant challenges for video understanding due to the dynamics of marine objects and the surrounding environment, camera motion, and the complexity of underwater scenes. Existing video captioning datasets, typically focused on generic or human-centric domains, often fail to generalize to the complexities of the marine environment and gain insights about marine life. To address these limitations, we propose a two-stage marine object-oriented video captioning pipeline. We introduce a comprehensive video understanding benchmark that leverages the triplets of video, text, and segmentation masks to facilitate visual grounding and captioning, leading to improved marine video understanding and analysis, and marine video generation. Additionally, we highlight the effectiveness of video splitting in order to detect salient object transitions in scene changes, which significantly enrich the semantics of captioning content. Our dataset and code have been released at https://msc.hkustvgd.com.
Authors: Nuo Chen, Moming Duan, Andre Huikai Lin, Qian Wang, Jiaying Wu, Bingsheng He
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) conferences are essential for advancing research, sharing knowledge, and fostering academic community. However, their rapid expansion has rendered the centralized conference model increasingly unsustainable. This paper offers a data-driven diagnosis of a structural crisis that threatens the foundational goals of scientific dissemination, equity, and community well-being. We identify four key areas of strain: (1) scientifically, with per-author publication rates more than doubling over the past decade to over 4.5 papers annually; (2) environmentally, with the carbon footprint of a single conference exceeding the daily emissions of its host city; (3) psychologically, with 71% of online community discourse reflecting negative sentiment and 35% referencing mental health concerns; and (4) logistically, with attendance at top conferences such as NeurIPS 2024 beginning to outpace venue capacity. These pressures point to a system that is misaligned with its core mission. In response, we propose the Community-Federated Conference (CFC) model, which separates peer review, presentation, and networking into globally coordinated but locally organized components, offering a more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient path forward for AI research.
Authors: Sahar Salimpour, Lei Fu, Farhad Keramat, Leonardo Militano, Giovanni Toffetti, Harry Edelman, Jorge Pe\~na Queralta
Abstract: Foundation models, including large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), have recently enabled novel approaches to robot autonomy and human-robot interfaces. In parallel, vision-language-action models (VLAs) or large behavior models (LBMs) are increasing the dexterity and capabilities of robotic systems. This survey paper focuses on those works advancing towards agentic applications and architectures. This includes initial efforts exploring GPT-style interfaces to tooling, as well as more complex system where AI agents are coordinators, planners, perception actors, or generalist interfaces. Such agentic architectures allow robots to reason over natural language instructions, invoke APIs, plan task sequences, or assist in operations and diagnostics. In addition to peer-reviewed research, due to the fast-evolving nature of the field, we highlight and include community-driven projects, ROS packages, and industrial frameworks that show emerging trends. We propose a taxonomy for classifying model integration approaches and present a comparative analysis of the role that agents play in different solutions in today's literature.
Authors: Linghao Zhu, Yiran Guan, Dingkang Liang, Jianzhong Ju, Zhenbo Luo, Bin Qin, Jian Luan, Yuliang Liu, Xiang Bai
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language model (MLLM). However, current RL pipelines often suffer from training inefficiencies caused by two underexplored issues: Advantage Collapsing, where most advantages in a batch concentrate near zero, and Rollout Silencing, where the proportion of rollouts contributing non-zero gradients diminishes over time. These issues lead to suboptimal gradient updates and hinder long-term learning efficiency. To address these issues, we propose Shuffle-R1, a simple yet principled framework that improves RL fine-tuning efficiency by dynamically restructuring trajectory sampling and batch composition. It introduces (1) Pairwise Trajectory Sampling, which selects high-contrast trajectories with large advantages to improve gradient signal quality, and (2) Advantage-based Trajectory Shuffle, which increases exposure of valuable rollouts through informed batch reshuffling. Experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks show that our framework consistently outperforms strong RL baselines with minimal overhead. These results highlight the importance of data-centric adaptations for more efficient RL training in MLLM.
Authors: Zhangquan Chen, Ruihui Zhao, Chuwei Luo, Mingze Sun, Xinlei Yu, Yangyang Kang, Ruqi Huang
Abstract: Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still face significant challenges in complex visual tasks (e.g., spatial understanding, fine-grained perception). Prior methods have tried to incorporate visual reasoning, however, they fail to leverage attention correction with spatial cues to iteratively refine their focus on prompt-relevant regions. In this paper, we introduce SIFThinker, a spatially-aware "think-with-images" framework that mimics human visual perception. Specifically, SIFThinker enables attention correcting and image region focusing by interleaving depth-enhanced bounding boxes and natural language. Our contributions are twofold: First, we introduce a reverse-expansion-forward-inference strategy that facilitates the generation of interleaved image-text chains of thought for process-level supervision, which in turn leads to the construction of the SIF-50K dataset. Besides, we propose GRPO-SIF, a reinforced training paradigm that integrates depth-informed visual grounding into a unified reasoning pipeline, teaching the model to dynamically correct and focus on prompt-relevant regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SIFThinker outperforms state-of-the-art methods in spatial understanding and fine-grained visual perception, while maintaining strong general capabilities, highlighting the effectiveness of our method. Code: https://github.com/zhangquanchen/SIFThinker.
Authors: Abolfazl Ansari, Delvin Ce Zhang, Nafis Irtiza Tripto, Dongwon Lee
Abstract: The rapid rise of Generative AI (GenAI), particularly LLMs, poses concerns for journalistic integrity and authorship. This study examines AI-generated content across over 40,000 news articles from major, local, and college news media, in various media formats. Using three advanced AI-text detectors (e.g., Binoculars, Fast-Detect GPT, and GPTZero), we find substantial increase of GenAI use in recent years, especially in local and college news. Sentence-level analysis reveals LLMs are often used in the introduction of news, while conclusions usually written manually. Linguistic analysis shows GenAI boosts word richness and readability but lowers formality, leading to more uniform writing styles, particularly in local media.
Authors: Rui Liu, Haolin Zuo, Zheng Lian, Hongyu Yuan, Qi Fan
Abstract: Missing modalities have recently emerged as a critical research direction in multimodal emotion recognition (MER). Conventional approaches typically address this issue through missing modality reconstruction. However, these methods fail to account for variations in reconstruction difficulty across different samples, consequently limiting the model's ability to handle hard samples effectively. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel Hardness-Aware Dynamic Curriculum Learning framework, termed HARDY-MER. Our framework operates in two key stages: first, it estimates the hardness level of each sample, and second, it strategically emphasizes hard samples during training to enhance model performance on these challenging instances. Specifically, we first introduce a Multi-view Hardness Evaluation mechanism that quantifies reconstruction difficulty by considering both Direct Hardness (modality reconstruction errors) and Indirect Hardness (cross-modal mutual information). Meanwhile, we introduce a Retrieval-based Dynamic Curriculum Learning strategy that dynamically adjusts the training curriculum by retrieving samples with similar semantic information and balancing the learning focus between easy and hard instances. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that HARDY-MER consistently outperforms existing methods in missing-modality scenarios. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/HARDY-MER/HARDY-MER.
Authors: Kejin Liu, Junhong Lian, Xiang Ao, Ningtao Wang, Xing Fu, Yu Cheng, Weiqiang Wang, Xinyu Liu
Abstract: Accurate personalized headline generation hinges on precisely capturing user interests from historical behaviors. However, existing methods neglect personalized-irrelevant click noise in entire historical clickstreams, which may lead to hallucinated headlines that deviate from genuine user preferences. In this paper, we reveal the detrimental impact of click noise on personalized generation quality through rigorous analysis in both user and news dimensions. Based on these insights, we propose a novel Personalized Headline Generation framework via Denoising Fake Interests from Implicit Feedback (PHG-DIF). PHG-DIF first employs dual-stage filtering to effectively remove clickstream noise, identified by short dwell times and abnormal click bursts, and then leverages multi-level temporal fusion to dynamically model users' evolving and multi-faceted interests for precise profiling. Moreover, we release DT-PENS, a new benchmark dataset comprising the click behavior of 1,000 carefully curated users and nearly 10,000 annotated personalized headlines with historical dwell time annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PHG-DIF substantially mitigates the adverse effects of click noise and significantly improves headline quality, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on DT-PENS. Our framework implementation and dataset are available at https://github.com/liukejin-up/PHG-DIF.
Authors: Junyu Wu, Weiming Chang, Xiaotao Liu, Guanyou He, Tingfeng Xian, Haoqiang Hong, Boqi Chen, Haotao Tian, Tao Yang, Yunsheng Shi, Feng Lin, Ting Yao
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a prominent paradigm for training large language models and multimodal systems. Despite notable advances enabled by existing RLHF training frameworks, significant challenges remain in scaling to complex multimodal workflows and adapting to dynamic workloads. In particular, current systems often encounter limitations related to controller scalability when managing large models, as well as inefficiencies in orchestrating intricate RLHF pipelines, especially in scenarios that require dynamic sampling and resource allocation. In this paper, we introduce WeChat-YATT (Yet Another Transformer Trainer in WeChat), a simple, scalable, and balanced RLHF training framework specifically designed to address these challenges. WeChat-YATT features a parallel controller programming model that enables flexible and efficient orchestration of complex RLHF workflows, effectively mitigating the bottlenecks associated with centralized controller architectures and facilitating scalability in large-scale data scenarios. In addition, we propose a dynamic placement schema that adaptively partitions computational resources and schedules workloads, thereby significantly reducing hardware idle time and improving GPU utilization under variable training conditions. We evaluate WeChat-YATT across a range of experimental scenarios, demonstrating that it achieves substantial improvements in throughput compared to state-of-the-art RLHF training frameworks. Furthermore, WeChat-YATT has been successfully deployed to train models supporting WeChat product features for a large-scale user base, underscoring its effectiveness and robustness in real-world applications.We have open-source WeChat-YATT at https://www.github.com/tencent/WeChat-YATT.
Authors: Supriyo Chakraborty, Krishnan Raghavan
Abstract: The stability-plasticity dilemma, closely related to a neural network's (NN) capacity-its ability to represent tasks-is a fundamental challenge in continual learning (CL). Within this context, we introduce CL's effective model capacity (CLEMC) that characterizes the dynamic behavior of the stability-plasticity balance point. We develop a difference equation to model the evolution of the interplay between the NN, task data, and optimization procedure. We then leverage CLEMC to demonstrate that the effective capacity-and, by extension, the stability-plasticity balance point is inherently non-stationary. We show that regardless of the NN architecture or optimization method, a NN's ability to represent new tasks diminishes when incoming task distributions differ from previous ones. We conduct extensive experiments to support our theoretical findings, spanning a range of architectures-from small feedforward network and convolutional networks to medium-sized graph neural networks and transformer-based large language models with millions of parameters.
Authors: Denis Janiak, Jakub Binkowski, Albert Sawczyn, Bogdan Gabrys, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Tomasz Kajdanowicz
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, yet their tendency to hallucinate poses serious challenges for reliable deployment. Despite numerous hallucination detection methods, their evaluations often rely on ROUGE, a metric based on lexical overlap that misaligns with human judgments. Through comprehensive human studies, we demonstrate that while ROUGE exhibits high recall, its extremely low precision leads to misleading performance estimates. In fact, several established detection methods show performance drops of up to 45.9\% when assessed using human-aligned metrics like LLM-as-Judge. Moreover, our analysis reveals that simple heuristics based on response length can rival complex detection techniques, exposing a fundamental flaw in current evaluation practices. We argue that adopting semantically aware and robust evaluation frameworks is essential to accurately gauge the true performance of hallucination detection methods, ultimately ensuring the trustworthiness of LLM outputs.
Authors: Mohammad Jalili Torkamani, Negin Mahmoudi, Kiana Kiashemshaki
Abstract: Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) enable continuous monitoring of physiological signals for applications ranging from chronic disease management to emergency response. Recent advances in 6G communications, post-quantum cryptography, and energy harvesting have the potential to enhance WBAN performance. However, integrating these technologies into a unified, adaptive system remains a challenge. This paper surveys some of the most well-known Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) architectures, routing strategies, and security mechanisms, identifying key gaps in adaptability, energy efficiency, and quantum-resistant security. We propose a novel Large Language Model-driven adaptive WBAN framework in which a Large Language Model acts as a cognitive control plane, coordinating routing, physical layer selection, micro-energy harvesting, and post-quantum security in real time. Our review highlights the limitations of current heuristic-based designs and outlines a research agenda for resource-constrained, 6G-ready medical systems. This approach aims to enable ultra-reliable, secure, and self-optimizing WBANs for next-generation mobile health applications.
Authors: Guangyin Jin, Sicong Lai, Xiaoshuai Hao, Mingtao Zhang, Jinlei Zhang
Abstract: Achieving accurate traffic prediction is a fundamental but crucial task in the development of current intelligent transportation systems.Most of the mainstream methods that have made breakthroughs in traffic prediction rely on spatio-temporal graph neural networks, spatio-temporal attention mechanisms, etc. The main challenges of the existing deep learning approaches are that they either depend on a complete traffic network structure or require intricate model designs to capture complex spatio-temporal dependencies. These limitations pose significant challenges for the efficient deployment and operation of deep learning models on large-scale datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a cost-effective graph-free Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) based model M3-Net for traffic prediction. Our proposed model not only employs time series and spatio-temporal embeddings for efficient feature processing but also first introduces a novel MLP-Mixer architecture with a mixture of experts (MoE) mechanism. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple real datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model in terms of prediction performance and lightweight deployment.
Authors: Deheng Ye, Fangyun Zhou, Jiacheng Lv, Jianqi Ma, Jun Zhang, Junyan Lv, Junyou Li, Minwen Deng, Mingyu Yang, Qiang Fu, Wei Yang, Wenkai Lv, Yangbin Yu, Yewen Wang, Yonghang Guan, Zhihao Hu, Zhongbin Fang, Zhongqian Sun
Abstract: We present Yan, a foundational framework for interactive video generation, covering the entire pipeline from simulation and generation to editing. Specifically, Yan comprises three core modules. AAA-level Simulation: We design a highly-compressed, low-latency 3D-VAE coupled with a KV-cache-based shift-window denoising inference process, achieving real-time 1080P/60FPS interactive simulation. Multi-Modal Generation: We introduce a hierarchical autoregressive caption method that injects game-specific knowledge into open-domain multi-modal video diffusion models (VDMs), then transforming the VDM into a frame-wise, action-controllable, real-time infinite interactive video generator. Notably, when the textual and visual prompts are sourced from different domains, the model demonstrates strong generalization, allowing it to blend and compose the style and mechanics across domains flexibly according to user prompts. Multi-Granularity Editing: We propose a hybrid model that explicitly disentangles interactive mechanics simulation from visual rendering, enabling multi-granularity video content editing during interaction through text. Collectively, Yan offers an integration of these modules, pushing interactive video generation beyond isolated capabilities toward a comprehensive AI-driven interactive creation paradigm, paving the way for the next generation of creative tools, media, and entertainment. The project page is: https://greatx3.github.io/Yan/.
Authors: Sekh Mainul Islam, Nadav Borenstein, Siddhesh Milind Pawar, Haeun Yu, Arnav Arora, Isabelle Augenstein
Abstract: Understanding biases and stereotypes encoded in the weights of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for developing effective mitigation strategies. Biased behaviour is often subtle and non-trivial to isolate, even when deliberately elicited, making systematic analysis and debiasing particularly challenging. To address this, we introduce BiasGym, a simple, cost-effective, and generalizable framework for reliably injecting, analyzing, and mitigating conceptual associations within LLMs. BiasGym consists of two components: BiasInject, which injects specific biases into the model via token-based fine-tuning while keeping the model frozen, and BiasScope, which leverages these injected signals to identify and steer the components responsible for biased behavior. Our method enables consistent bias elicitation for mechanistic analysis, supports targeted debiasing without degrading performance on downstream tasks, and generalizes to biases unseen during token-based fine-tuning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BiasGym in reducing real-world stereotypes (e.g., people from Italy being `reckless drivers') and in probing fictional associations (e.g., people from a fictional country having `blue skin'), showing its utility for both safety interventions and interpretability research.
Authors: Keyu Chen, Zhifeng Shen, Daohai Yu, Haoqian Wu, Wei Wen, Jianfeng He, Ruizhi Qiao, Xing Sun
Abstract: The increasing scale and complexity of large language models (LLMs) pose significant inference latency challenges, primarily due to their autoregressive decoding paradigm characterized by the sequential nature of next-token prediction. By re-examining the outputs of autoregressive models, we observed that some segments exhibit parallelizable structures, which we term intrinsic parallelism. Decoding each parallelizable branch simultaneously (i.e. parallel decoding) can significantly improve the overall inference speed of LLMs. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Serial-Parallel Decoding (ASPD), which addresses two core challenges: automated construction of parallelizable data and efficient parallel decoding mechanism. More specifically, we introduce a non-invasive pipeline that automatically extracts and validates parallelizable structures from the responses of autoregressive models. To empower efficient adaptive serial-parallel decoding, we implement a Hybrid Decoding Engine which enables seamless transitions between serial and parallel decoding modes while maintaining a reusable KV cache, maximizing computational efficiency. Extensive evaluations across General Tasks, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Mathematical Reasoning, demonstrate that ASPD achieves unprecedented performance in both effectiveness and efficiency. Notably, on Vicuna Bench, our method achieves up to 3.19x speedup (1.85x on average) while maintaining response quality within 1% difference compared to autoregressive models, realizing significant acceleration without compromising generation quality. Our framework sets a groundbreaking benchmark for efficient LLM parallel inference, paving the way for its deployment in latency-sensitive applications such as AI-powered customer service bots and answer retrieval engines.
Authors: Shugang Hao, Hongbo Li, Lingjie Duan
Abstract: The binary exponential backoff scheme is widely used in WiFi 7 and still incurs poor throughput performance under dynamic channel environments. Recent model-based approaches (e.g., non-persistent and $p$-persistent CSMA) simply optimize backoff strategies under a known and fixed node density, still leading to a large throughput loss due to inaccurate node density estimation. This paper is the first to propose LLM transformer-based in-context learning (ICL) theory for optimizing channel access. We design a transformer-based ICL optimizer to pre-collect collision-threshold data examples and a query collision case. They are constructed as a prompt as the input for the transformer to learn the pattern, which then generates a predicted contention window threshold (CWT). To train the transformer for effective ICL, we develop an efficient algorithm and guarantee a near-optimal CWT prediction within limited training steps. As it may be hard to gather perfect data examples for ICL in practice, we further extend to allow erroneous data input in the prompt. We prove that our optimizer maintains minimal prediction and throughput deviations from the optimal values. Experimental results on NS-3 further demonstrate our approach's fast convergence and near-optimal throughput over existing model-based and DRL-based approaches under unknown node densities.
Authors: Siwen Jiao, Kangan Qian, Hao Ye, Yang Zhong, Ziang Luo, Sicong Jiang, Zilin Huang, Yangyi Fang, Jinyu Miao, Zheng Fu, Yunlong Wang, Kun Jiang, Diange Yang, Rui Fan, Baoyun Peng
Abstract: Autonomous driving faces significant challenges in achieving human-like iterative decision-making, which continuously generates, evaluates, and refines trajectory proposals. Current generation-evaluation frameworks isolate trajectory generation from quality assessment, preventing iterative refinement essential for planning, while reinforcement learning methods collapse multi-dimensional preferences into scalar rewards, obscuring critical trade-offs and yielding scalarization bias.To overcome these issues, we present EvaDrive, a novel multi-objective reinforcement learning framework that establishes genuine closed-loop co-evolution between trajectory generation and evaluation via adversarial optimization. EvaDrive frames trajectory planning as a multi-round adversarial game. In this game, a hierarchical generator continuously proposes candidate paths by combining autoregressive intent modeling for temporal causality with diffusion-based refinement for spatial flexibility. These proposals are then rigorously assessed by a trainable multi-objective critic that explicitly preserves diverse preference structures without collapsing them into a single scalarization bias.This adversarial interplay, guided by a Pareto frontier selection mechanism, enables iterative multi-round refinement, effectively escaping local optima while preserving trajectory diversity.Extensive experiments on NAVSIM and Bench2Drive benchmarks demonstrate SOTA performance, achieving 94.9 PDMS on NAVSIM v1 (surpassing DiffusionDrive by 6.8, DriveSuprim by 5.0, and TrajHF by 0.9) and 64.96 Driving Score on Bench2Drive. EvaDrive generates diverse driving styles via dynamic weighting without external preference data, introducing a closed-loop adversarial framework for human-like iterative decision-making, offering a novel scalarization-free trajectory optimization approach.
Authors: Yanhui Li, Yunkang Cao, Chengliang Liu, Yuan Xiong, Xinghui Dong, Chao Huang
Abstract: Industrial anomaly detection is a critical component of modern manufacturing, yet the scarcity of defective samples restricts traditional detection methods to scenario-specific applications. Although Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate significant advantages in generalization capabilities, their performance in industrial anomaly detection remains limited. To address this challenge, we propose IAD-R1, a universal post-training framework applicable to VLMs of different architectures and parameter scales, which substantially enhances their anomaly detection capabilities. IAD-R1 employs a two-stage training strategy: the Perception Activation Supervised Fine-Tuning (PA-SFT) stage utilizes a meticulously constructed high-quality Chain-of-Thought dataset (Expert-AD) for training, enhancing anomaly perception capabilities and establishing reasoning-to-answer correlations; the Structured Control Group Relative Policy Optimization (SC-GRPO) stage employs carefully designed reward functions to achieve a capability leap from "Anomaly Perception" to "Anomaly Interpretation". Experimental results demonstrate that IAD-R1 achieves significant improvements across 7 VLMs, the largest improvement was on the DAGM dataset, with average accuracy 43.3% higher than the 0.5B baseline. Notably, the 0.5B parameter model trained with IAD-R1 surpasses commercial models including GPT-4.1 and Claude-Sonnet-4 in zero-shot settings, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of IAD-R1. The dataset, code, and all model weights will be publicly available at https://github.com/Yanhui-Lee/IAD-R1.
Authors: Rongqian Chen, Allison Andreyev, Yanming Xiu, Mahdi Imani, Bin Li, Maria Gorlatova, Gang Tan, Tian Lan
Abstract: Augmented Reality (AR) enriches perception by overlaying virtual elements on the physical world. Due to its growing popularity, cognitive attacks that alter AR content to manipulate users' semantic perception have received increasing attention. Existing detection methods often focus on visual changes, which are restricted to pixel- or image-level processing and lack semantic reasoning capabilities, or they rely on pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), which function as black-box approaches with limited interpretability. In this paper, we present CADAR, a novel neurosymbolic approach for cognitive attack detection in AR. It fuses multimodal vision-language inputs using neural VLMs to obtain a symbolic perception-graph representation, incorporating prior knowledge, salience weighting, and temporal correlations. The model then enables particle-filter based statistical reasoning -- a sequential Monte Carlo method -- to detect cognitive attacks. Thus, CADAR inherits the adaptability of pre-trained VLM and the interpretability and reasoning rigor of particle filtering. Experiments on an extended AR cognitive attack dataset show accuracy improvements of up to 10.7% over strong baselines on challenging AR attack scenarios, underscoring the promise of neurosymbolic methods for effective and interpretable cognitive attack detection.
Authors: Masoumeh Sharafi, Soufiane Belharbi, Houssem Ben Salem, Ali Etemad, Alessandro Lameiras Koerich, Marco Pedersoli, Simon Bacon, Eric Granger
Abstract: Facial expression recognition (FER) models are employed in many video-based affective computing applications, such as human-computer interaction and healthcare monitoring. However, deep FER models often struggle with subtle expressions and high inter-subject variability, limiting their performance in real-world applications. To improve their performance, source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) methods have been proposed to personalize a pretrained source model using only unlabeled target domain data, thereby avoiding data privacy, storage, and transmission constraints. This paper addresses a challenging scenario where source data is unavailable for adaptation, and only unlabeled target data consisting solely of neutral expressions is available. SFDA methods are not typically designed to adapt using target data from only a single class. Further, using models to generate facial images with non-neutral expressions can be unstable and computationally intensive. In this paper, personalized feature translation (PFT) is proposed for SFDA. Unlike current image translation methods for SFDA, our lightweight method operates in the latent space. We first pre-train the translator on the source domain data to transform the subject-specific style features from one source subject into another. Expression information is preserved by optimizing a combination of expression consistency and style-aware objectives. Then, the translator is adapted on neutral target data, without using source data or image synthesis. By translating in the latent space, PFT avoids the complexity and noise of face expression generation, producing discriminative embeddings optimized for classification. Using PFT eliminates the need for image synthesis, reduces computational overhead (using a lightweight translator), and only adapts part of the model, making the method efficient compared to image-based translation.
Authors: Shiyang Lai, Junsol Kim, Nadav Kunievsky, Yujin Potter, James Evans
Abstract: Current AI systems minimize risk by enforcing ideological neutrality, yet this may introduce automation bias by suppressing cognitive engagement in human decision-making. We conducted randomized trials with 2,500 participants to test whether culturally biased AI enhances human decision-making. Participants interacted with politically diverse GPT-4o variants on information evaluation tasks. Partisan AI assistants enhanced human performance, increased engagement, and reduced evaluative bias compared to non-biased counterparts, with amplified benefits when participants encountered opposing views. These gains carried a trust penalty: participants underappreciated biased AI and overcredited neutral systems. Exposing participants to two AIs whose biases flanked human perspectives closed the perception-performance gap. These findings complicate conventional wisdom about AI neutrality, suggesting that strategic integration of diverse cultural biases may foster improved and resilient human decision-making.
Authors: Rilwan Umar, Aydin Abadi, Basil Aldali, Benito Vincent, Elliot A. J. Hurley, Hotoon Aljazaeri, Jamie Hedley-Cook, Jamie-Lee Bell, Lambert Uwuigbusun, Mujeeb Ahmed, Shishir Nagaraja, Suleiman Sabo, Weaam Alrbeiqi
Abstract: Weather forecasting plays a vital role in disaster preparedness, agriculture, and resource management, yet current centralized forecasting systems are increasingly strained by security vulnerabilities, limited scalability, and susceptibility to single points of failure. To address these challenges, we propose a decentralized weather forecasting framework that integrates Federated Learning (FL) with blockchain technology. FL enables collaborative model training without exposing sensitive local data; this approach enhances privacy and reduces data transfer overhead. Meanwhile, the Ethereum blockchain ensures transparent and dependable verification of model updates. To further enhance the system's security, we introduce a reputation-based voting mechanism that assesses the trustworthiness of submitted models while utilizing the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) for efficient off-chain storage. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach not only improves forecasting accuracy but also enhances system resilience and scalability, making it a viable candidate for deployment in real-world, security-critical environments.
Authors: Xi Long, Christy Boscardin, Lauren A. Maggio, Joseph A. Costello, Ralph Gonzales, Rasmyah Hammoudeh, Ki Lai, Yoon Soo Park, Brian C. Gin
Abstract: Knowledge syntheses (literature reviews) are essential to health professions education (HPE), consolidating findings to advance theory and practice. However, they are labor-intensive, especially during data extraction. Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted extraction promises efficiency but raises concerns about accuracy, making it critical to distinguish AI 'hallucinations' (fabricated content) from legitimate interpretive differences. We developed an extraction platform using large language models (LLMs) to automate data extraction and compared AI to human responses across 187 publications and 17 extraction questions from a published scoping review. AI-human, human-human, and AI-AI consistencies were measured using interrater reliability (categorical) and thematic similarity ratings (open-ended). Errors were identified by comparing extracted responses to source publications. AI was highly consistent with humans for concrete, explicitly stated questions (e.g., title, aims) and lower for questions requiring subjective interpretation or absent in text (e.g., Kirkpatrick's outcomes, study rationale). Human-human consistency was not higher than AI-human and showed the same question-dependent variability. Discordant AI-human responses (769/3179 = 24.2%) were mostly due to interpretive differences (18.3%); AI inaccuracies were rare (1.51%), while humans were nearly three times more likely to state inaccuracies (4.37%). Findings suggest AI variability depends more on interpretability than hallucination. Repeating AI extraction can identify interpretive complexity or ambiguity, refining processes before human review. AI can be a transparent, trustworthy partner in knowledge synthesis, though caution is needed to preserve critical human insights.
Authors: Jingwei Liu, Ling Yang, Hao Luo, Fan Wang, Hongyan Li, Mengdi Wang
Abstract: The paper-to-video task converts a research paper into a structured video abstract, distilling key concepts, methods, and conclusions into an accessible, well-organized format. While state-of-the-art video generation models demonstrate potential, they are constrained by limited context windows, rigid video duration constraints, limited stylistic diversity, and an inability to represent domain-specific knowledge. To address these limitations, we introduce Preacher, the first paper-to-video agentic system. Preacher employs a topdown approach to decompose, summarize, and reformulate the paper, followed by bottom-up video generation, synthesizing diverse video segments into a coherent abstract. To align cross-modal representations, we define key scenes and introduce a Progressive Chain of Thought (P-CoT) for granular, iterative planning. Preacher successfully generates high-quality video abstracts across five research fields, demonstrating expertise beyond current video generation models. Code will be released at: https://github.com/GenVerse/Paper2Video
Authors: Mo Yu, Tsz Ting Chung, Chulun Zhou, Tong Li, Rui Lu, Jiangnan Li, Liyan Xu, Haoshu Lu, Ning Zhang, Jing Li, Jie Zhou
Abstract: We introduce PRELUDE, a benchmark for evaluating long-context understanding through the task of determining whether a character's prequel story is consistent with the canonical narrative of the original book. Our task poses a stronger demand for global comprehension and deep reasoning than existing benchmarks -- as the prequels are not part of the original story, assessing their plausibility typically requires searching and integrating information that is only indirectly related. Empirically, 88% of instances require evidence from multiple parts of the narrative. Experimental results highlight the challenge of our task: in-context learning, RAG and in-domain training with state-of-the-art LLMs, and commercial DeepResearch services, lag behind humans by >15%. A further human study reveals that models often produce correct answers with flawed reasoning, leading to an over 30% gap in reasoning accuracy compared to humans. These findings underscore the substantial room for improvement in long-context understanding and reasoning.