Authors: Di Wen, Kunyu Peng, Junwei Zheng, Yufan Chen, Yitain Shi, Jiale Wei, Ruiping Liu, Kailun Yang, Rainer Stiefelhagen
Abstract: Industrial workflows demand adaptive and trustworthy assistance that can operate under limited computing, connectivity, and strict privacy constraints. In this work, we present MICA (Multi-Agent Industrial Coordination Assistant), a perception-grounded and speech-interactive system that delivers real-time guidance for assembly, troubleshooting, part queries, and maintenance. MICA coordinates five role-specialized language agents, audited by a safety checker, to ensure accurate and compliant support. To achieve robust step understanding, we introduce Adaptive Step Fusion (ASF), which dynamically blends expert reasoning with online adaptation from natural speech feedback. Furthermore, we establish a new multi-agent coordination benchmark across representative task categories and propose evaluation metrics tailored to industrial assistance, enabling systematic comparison of different coordination topologies. Our experiments demonstrate that MICA consistently improves task success, reliability, and responsiveness over baseline structures, while remaining deployable on practical offline hardware. Together, these contributions highlight MICA as a step toward deployable, privacy-preserving multi-agent assistants for dynamic factory environments. The source code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Kratos-Wen/MICA.
Authors: Stjepan Po\v{z}gaj, Dobrik Georgiev, Marin \v{S}ili\'c, Petar Veli\v{c}kovi\'c
Abstract: Neural algorithmic reasoning (NAR) is a growing field that aims to embed algorithmic logic into neural networks by imitating classical algorithms. In this extended abstract, we detail our attempt to build a neural algorithmic reasoner that can solve Knapsack, a pseudo-polynomial problem bridging classical algorithms and combinatorial optimisation, but omitted in standard NAR benchmarks. Our neural algorithmic reasoner is designed to closely follow the two-phase pipeline for the Knapsack problem, which involves first constructing the dynamic programming table and then reconstructing the solution from it. The approach, which models intermediate states through dynamic programming supervision, achieves better generalization to larger problem instances than a direct-prediction baseline that attempts to select the optimal subset only from the problem inputs.
Authors: Federico Taschin, Abderrahmane Lazaraq, Ozan K. Tonguz, Inci Ozgunes
Abstract: The use of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in smart transportation networks has increased significantly in the last few years. Among these ML and AI approaches, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be a very promising approach by several authors. However, a problem with using Reinforcement Learning in Traffic Signal Control is the reliability of the trained RL agents due to the dynamically changing distribution of the input data with respect to the distribution of the data used for training. This presents a major challenge and a reliability problem for the trained network of AI agents and could have very undesirable and even detrimental consequences if a suitable solution is not found. Several researchers have tried to address this problem using different approaches. In particular, Meta Reinforcement Learning (Meta RL) promises to be an effective solution. In this paper, we evaluate and analyze a state-of-the-art Meta RL approach called MetaLight and show that, while under certain conditions MetaLight can indeed lead to reasonably good results, under some other conditions it might not perform well (with errors of up to 22%), suggesting that Meta RL schemes are often not robust enough and can even pose major reliability problems.
Authors: Abhiyan Dhakal (Kathmandu University, Dhulikhel, Nepal), Kausik Paudel (Kathmandu University, Dhulikhel, Nepal), Sanjog Sigdel (Kathmandu University, Dhulikhel, Nepal)
Abstract: We propose an automated pipeline for performing literature reviews using semantic similarity. Unlike traditional systematic review systems or optimization based methods, this work emphasizes minimal overhead and high relevance by using transformer based embeddings and cosine similarity. By providing a paper title and abstract, it generates relevant keywords, fetches relevant papers from open access repository, and ranks them based on their semantic closeness to the input. Three embedding models were evaluated. A statistical thresholding approach is then applied to filter relevant papers, enabling an effective literature review pipeline. Despite the absence of heuristic feedback or ground truth relevance labels, the proposed system shows promise as a scalable and practical tool for preliminary research and exploratory analysis.
Authors: Humam Kourani, Anton Antonov, Alessandro Berti, Wil M. P. van der Aalst
Abstract: The utility of Large Language Models (LLMs) in analytical tasks is rooted in their vast pre-trained knowledge, which allows them to interpret ambiguous inputs and infer missing information. However, this same capability introduces a critical risk of what we term knowledge-driven hallucination: a phenomenon where the model's output contradicts explicit source evidence because it is overridden by the model's generalized internal knowledge. This paper investigates this phenomenon by evaluating LLMs on the task of automated process modeling, where the goal is to generate a formal business process model from a given source artifact. The domain of Business Process Management (BPM) provides an ideal context for this study, as many core business processes follow standardized patterns, making it likely that LLMs possess strong pre-trained schemas for them. We conduct a controlled experiment designed to create scenarios with deliberate conflict between provided evidence and the LLM's background knowledge. We use inputs describing both standard and deliberately atypical process structures to measure the LLM's fidelity to the provided evidence. Our work provides a methodology for assessing this critical reliability issue and raises awareness of the need for rigorous validation of AI-generated artifacts in any evidence-based domain.
Authors: Andrejs Sorstkins, Josh Bailey, Dr Alistair Baron
Abstract: The rapid evolution of neural architectures - from multilayer perceptrons to large-scale Transformer-based models - has enabled language models (LLMs) to exhibit emergent agentic behaviours when equipped with memory, planning, and external tool use. However, their inherent stochasticity and multi-step decision processes render classical evaluation methods inadequate for diagnosing agentic performance. This work introduces a diagnostic framework for expert systems that not only evaluates but also facilitates the transfer of expert behaviour into LLM-powered agents. The framework integrates (i) curated golden datasets of expert annotations, (ii) silver datasets generated through controlled behavioural mutation, and (iii) an LLM-based Agent Judge that scores and prescribes targeted improvements. These prescriptions are embedded into a vectorized recommendation map, allowing expert interventions to propagate as reusable improvement trajectories across multiple system instances. We demonstrate the framework on a multi-agent recruiter-assistant system, showing that it uncovers latent cognitive failures - such as biased phrasing, extraction drift, and tool misrouting - while simultaneously steering agents toward expert-level reasoning and style. The results establish a foundation for standardized, reproducible expert behaviour transfer in stochastic, tool-augmented LLM agents, moving beyond static evaluation to active expert system refinement.
Authors: Yu Shee, Anthony M. Smaldone, Anton Morgunov, Gregory W. Kyro, Victor S. Batista
Abstract: Retrosynthesis, the process of deconstructing a target molecule into simpler precursors, is crucial for computer-aided synthesis planning (CASP). Widely adopted tree-search methods often suffer from exponential computational complexity. In this work, we introduce FragmentRetro, a novel retrosynthetic method that leverages fragmentation algorithms, specifically BRICS and r-BRICS, combined with stock-aware exploration and pattern fingerprint screening to achieve quadratic complexity. FragmentRetro recursively combines molecular fragments and verifies their presence in a building block set, providing sets of fragment combinations as retrosynthetic solutions. We present the first formal computational analysis of retrosynthetic methods, showing that tree search exhibits exponential complexity $O(b^h)$, DirectMultiStep scales as $O(h^6)$, and FragmentRetro achieves $O(h^2)$, where $h$ represents the number of heavy atoms in the target molecule and $b$ is the branching factor for tree search. Evaluations on PaRoutes, USPTO-190, and natural products demonstrate that FragmentRetro achieves high solved rates with competitive runtime, including cases where tree search fails. The method benefits from fingerprint screening, which significantly reduces substructure matching complexity. While FragmentRetro focuses on efficiently identifying fragment-based solutions rather than full reaction pathways, its computational advantages and ability to generate strategic starting candidates establish it as a powerful foundational component for scalable and automated synthesis planning.
Authors: Bronson Schoen, Evgenia Nitishinskaya, Mikita Balesni, Axel H{\o}jmark, Felix Hofst\"atter, J\'er\'emy Scheurer, Alexander Meinke, Jason Wolfe, Teun van der Weij, Alex Lloyd, Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill, Angela Fan, Andrei Matveiakin, Rusheb Shah, Marcus Williams, Amelia Glaese, Boaz Barak, Wojciech Zaremba, Marius Hobbhahn
Abstract: Highly capable AI systems could secretly pursue misaligned goals -- what we call "scheming". Because a scheming AI would deliberately try to hide its misaligned goals and actions, measuring and mitigating scheming requires different strategies than are typically used in ML. We propose that assessing anti-scheming interventions requires at least (1) testing propensity to scheme on far out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks, (2) evaluating whether lack of scheming is driven by situational awareness, and (3) checking for robustness to pre-existing misaligned goals. We use a broad category of "covert actions" -- such as secretly breaking rules or intentionally underperforming in tests -- as a proxy for scheming, and design evaluations for covert actions. We then stress-test deliberative alignment as a case study for anti-scheming. Across 26 OOD evaluations (180+ environments), deliberative alignment reduces covert action rates (OpenAI o3: 13%->0.4%) but does not fully eliminate them. Our mitigation is also able to largely stop agents from pursuing a hidden goal previously trained into the model, but we still find misbehavior after additional red-teaming. We find that models' chain-of-thought (CoT) often demonstrates awareness of being evaluated for alignment, and show causal evidence that this awareness decreases covert behavior, while unawareness increases it. Therefore, we cannot exclude that the observed reductions in covert action rates are at least partially driven by situational awareness. While we rely on human-legible CoT for training, studying situational awareness, and demonstrating clear evidence of misalignment, our ability to rely on this degrades as models continue to depart from reasoning in standard English. We encourage research into alignment mitigations for scheming and their assessment, especially for the adversarial case of deceptive alignment, which this paper does not address.
Authors: Pan Tang, Shixiang Tang, Huanqi Pu, Zhiqing Miao, Zhixing Wang
Abstract: This paper presents MicroRCA-Agent, an innovative solution for microservice root cause analysis based on large language model agents, which constructs an intelligent fault root cause localization system with multimodal data fusion. The technical innovations are embodied in three key aspects: First, we combine the pre-trained Drain log parsing algorithm with multi-level data filtering mechanism to efficiently compress massive logs into high-quality fault features. Second, we employ a dual anomaly detection approach that integrates Isolation Forest unsupervised learning algorithms with status code validation to achieve comprehensive trace anomaly identification. Third, we design a statistical symmetry ratio filtering mechanism coupled with a two-stage LLM analysis strategy to enable full-stack phenomenon summarization across node-service-pod hierarchies. The multimodal root cause analysis module leverages carefully designed cross-modal prompts to deeply integrate multimodal anomaly information, fully exploiting the cross-modal understanding and logical reasoning capabilities of large language models to generate structured analysis results encompassing fault components, root cause descriptions, and reasoning trace. Comprehensive ablation studies validate the complementary value of each modal data and the effectiveness of the system architecture. The proposed solution demonstrates superior performance in complex microservice fault scenarios, achieving a final score of 50.71. The code has been released at: https://github.com/tangpan360/MicroRCA-Agent.
Authors: Weixuan Sun, Jucai Zhai, Dengfeng Liu, Xin Zhang, Xiaojun Wu, Qiaobo Hao, AIMgroup, Yang Fang, Jiuyang Tang
Abstract: The automated repair of C++ compilation errors presents a significant challenge, the resolution of which is critical for developer productivity. Progress in this domain is constrained by two primary factors: the scarcity of large-scale, high-fidelity datasets and the limitations of conventional supervised methods, which often fail to generate semantically correct patches.This paper addresses these gaps by introducing a comprehensive framework with three core contributions. First, we present CCrepair, a novel, large-scale C++ compilation error dataset constructed through a sophisticated generate-and-verify pipeline. Second, we propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm guided by a hybrid reward signal, shifting the focus from mere compilability to the semantic quality of the fix. Finally, we establish the robust, two-stage evaluation system providing this signal, centered on an LLM-as-a-Judge whose reliability has been rigorously validated against the collective judgments of a panel of human experts. This integrated approach aligns the training objective with generating high-quality, non-trivial patches that are both syntactically and semantically correct. The effectiveness of our approach was demonstrated experimentally. Our RL-trained Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct model achieved performance comparable to a Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct model, validating the efficiency of our training paradigm. Our work provides the research community with a valuable new dataset and a more effective paradigm for training and evaluating robust compilation repair models, paving the way for more practical and reliable automated programming assistants.
Authors: Lukas Laakmann, Seyyid A. Ciftci, Christian Janiesch
Abstract: Robotic process automation (RPA) is a lightweight approach to automating business processes using software robots that emulate user actions at the graphical user interface level. While RPA has gained popularity for its cost-effective and timely automation of rule-based, well-structured tasks, its symbolic nature has inherent limitations when approaching more complex tasks currently performed by human agents. Machine learning concepts enabling intelligent RPA provide an opportunity to broaden the range of automatable tasks. In this paper, we conduct a literature review to explore the connections between RPA and machine learning and organize the joint concept intelligent RPA into a taxonomy. Our taxonomy comprises the two meta-characteristics RPA-ML integration and RPA-ML interaction. Together, they comprise eight dimensions: architecture and ecosystem, capabilities, data basis, intelligence level, and technical depth of integration as well as deployment environment, lifecycle phase, and user-robot relation.
Authors: Natallia Kokash, Bernard de Bono, Tom Gillespie
Abstract: We are developing infrastructure to support researchers in mapping data related to the peripheral nervous system and other physiological systems, with an emphasis on their relevance to the organs under investigation. The nervous system, a complex network of nerves and ganglia, plays a critical role in coordinating and transmitting signals throughout the body. To aid in this, we have created ApiNATOMY, a framework for the topological and semantic representation of multiscale physiological circuit maps. ApiNATOMY integrates a Knowledge Representation (KR) model and a suite of Knowledge Management (KM) tools. The KR model enables physiology experts to easily capture interactions between anatomical entities, while the KM tools help modelers convert high-level abstractions into detailed models of physiological processes, which can be integrated with external ontologies and knowledge graphs.
Authors: Nan Li, Bo Kang, Tijl De Bie
Abstract: Creating robust occupation taxonomies, vital for applications ranging from job recommendation to labor market intelligence, is challenging. Manual curation is slow, while existing automated methods are either not adaptive to dynamic regional markets (top-down) or struggle to build coherent hierarchies from noisy data (bottom-up). We introduce CLIMB (CLusterIng-based Multi-agent taxonomy Builder), a framework that fully automates the creation of high-quality, data-driven taxonomies from raw job postings. CLIMB uses global semantic clustering to distill core occupations, then employs a reflection-based multi-agent system to iteratively build a coherent hierarchy. On three diverse, real-world datasets, we show that CLIMB produces taxonomies that are more coherent and scalable than existing methods and successfully capture unique regional characteristics. We release our code and datasets at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CLIMB.
Authors: Giovanni De Gasperis, Sante Dino Facchini
Abstract: Industrial monitoring systems, especially when deployed in Industry 4.0 environments, are experiencing a shift in paradigm from traditional rule-based architectures to data-driven approaches leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence. This study presents a comparison between these two methodologies, analyzing their respective strengths, limitations, and application scenarios, and proposes a basic framework to evaluate their key properties. Rule-based systems offer high interpretability, deterministic behavior, and ease of implementation in stable environments, making them ideal for regulated industries and safety-critical applications. However, they face challenges with scalability, adaptability, and performance in complex or evolving contexts. Conversely, data-driven systems excel in detecting hidden anomalies, enabling predictive maintenance and dynamic adaptation to new conditions. Despite their high accuracy, these models face challenges related to data availability, explainability, and integration complexity. The paper suggests hybrid solutions as a possible promising direction, combining the transparency of rule-based logic with the analytical power of machine learning. Our hypothesis is that the future of industrial monitoring lies in intelligent, synergic systems that leverage both expert knowledge and data-driven insights. This dual approach enhances resilience, operational efficiency, and trust, paving the way for smarter and more flexible industrial environments.
Authors: Kanato Masayoshi, Masahiro Hashimoto, Ryoichi Yokoyama, Naoki Toda, Yoshifumi Uwamino, Shogo Fukuda, Ho Namkoong, Masahiro Jinzaki
Abstract: Background: Large language models (LLMs) show promise in medicine, but their deployment in hospitals is limited by restricted access to electronic health record (EHR) systems. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables integration between LLMs and external tools. Objective: To evaluate whether an LLM connected to an EHR database via MCP can autonomously retrieve clinically relevant information in a real hospital setting. Methods: We developed EHR-MCP, a framework of custom MCP tools integrated with the hospital EHR database, and used GPT-4.1 through a LangGraph ReAct agent to interact with it. Six tasks were tested, derived from use cases of the infection control team (ICT). Eight patients discussed at ICT conferences were retrospectively analyzed. Agreement with physician-generated gold standards was measured. Results: The LLM consistently selected and executed the correct MCP tools. Except for two tasks, all tasks achieved near-perfect accuracy. Performance was lower in the complex task requiring time-dependent calculations. Most errors arose from incorrect arguments or misinterpretation of tool results. Responses from EHR-MCP were reliable, though long and repetitive data risked exceeding the context window. Conclusions: LLMs can retrieve clinical data from an EHR via MCP tools in a real hospital setting, achieving near-perfect performance in simple tasks while highlighting challenges in complex ones. EHR-MCP provides an infrastructure for secure, consistent data access and may serve as a foundation for hospital AI agents. Future work should extend beyond retrieval to reasoning, generation, and clinical impact assessment, paving the way for effective integration of generative AI into clinical practice.
Authors: Sander Schildermans, Chang Tian, Ying Jiao, Marie-Francine Moens
Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) generation has advanced rapidly, yet faithfully capturing spatial relationships described in natural language prompts remains a major challenge. Prior efforts have addressed this issue through prompt optimization, spatially grounded generation, and semantic refinement. This work introduces a lightweight approach that augments prompts with tuple-based structured information, using a fine-tuned language model for automatic conversion and seamless integration into T2I pipelines. Experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements in spatial accuracy, without compromising overall image quality as measured by Inception Score. Furthermore, the automatically generated tuples exhibit quality comparable to human-crafted tuples. This structured information provides a practical and portable solution to enhance spatial relationships in T2I generation, addressing a key limitation of current large-scale generative systems.
Authors: Krati Saxena, Federico Jurado Ruiz, Guido Manzi, Dianbo Liu, Alex Lamb
Abstract: Attention mechanisms have become integral in AI, significantly enhancing model performance and scalability by drawing inspiration from human cognition. Concurrently, the Attention Schema Theory (AST) in cognitive science posits that individuals manage their attention by creating a model of the attention itself, effectively allocating cognitive resources. Inspired by AST, we introduce ASAC (Attention Schema-based Attention Control), which integrates the attention schema concept into artificial neural networks. Our initial experiments focused on embedding the ASAC module within transformer architectures. This module employs a Vector-Quantized Variational AutoEncoder (VQVAE) as both an attention abstractor and controller, facilitating precise attention management. By explicitly modeling attention allocation, our approach aims to enhance system efficiency. We demonstrate ASAC's effectiveness in both the vision and NLP domains, highlighting its ability to improve classification accuracy and expedite the learning process. Our experiments with vision transformers across various datasets illustrate that the attention controller not only boosts classification accuracy but also accelerates learning. Furthermore, we have demonstrated the model's robustness and generalization capabilities across noisy and out-of-distribution datasets. In addition, we have showcased improved performance in multi-task settings. Quick experiments reveal that the attention schema-based module enhances resilience to adversarial attacks, optimizes attention to improve learning efficiency, and facilitates effective transfer learning and learning from fewer examples. These promising results establish a connection between cognitive science and machine learning, shedding light on the efficient utilization of attention mechanisms in AI systems.
Authors: Rutger Hendrix, Giovanni Patan\`e, Leonardo G. Russo, Simone Carnemolla, Giovanni Bellitto, Federica Proietto Salanitri, Concetto Spampinato, Matteo Pennisi
Abstract: Foundation models have transformed multimedia analysis by enabling robust and transferable representations across diverse modalities and tasks. However, their static deployment conflicts with growing societal and regulatory demands -- particularly the need to unlearn specific data upon request, as mandated by privacy frameworks such as the GDPR. Traditional unlearning approaches, including retraining, activation editing, or distillation, are often computationally expensive, fragile, and ill-suited for real-time or continuously evolving systems. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift: rethinking unlearning not as a retroactive intervention but as a built-in capability. We introduce a prompt-based learning framework that unifies knowledge acquisition and removal within a single training phase. Rather than encoding information in model weights, our approach binds class-level semantics to dedicated prompt tokens. This design enables instant unlearning simply by removing the corresponding prompt -- without retraining, model modification, or access to original data. Experiments demonstrate that our framework preserves predictive performance on retained classes while effectively erasing forgotten ones. Beyond utility, our method exhibits strong privacy and security guarantees: it is resistant to membership inference attacks, and prompt removal prevents any residual knowledge extraction, even under adversarial conditions. This ensures compliance with data protection principles and safeguards against unauthorized access to forgotten information, making the framework suitable for deployment in sensitive and regulated environments. Overall, by embedding removability into the architecture itself, this work establishes a new foundation for designing modular, scalable and ethically responsive AI models.
Authors: Shubham Kavane, Kajol Kulkarni, Harald Koestler
Abstract: We present ChannelFlow-Tools, a configuration-driven framework that standardizes the end-to-end path from programmatic CAD solid generation to ML-ready inputs and targets for 3D obstructed channel flows. The toolchain integrates geometry synthesis with feasibility checks, signed distance field (SDF) voxelization, automated solver orchestration on HPC (waLBerla LBM), and Cartesian resampling to co-registered multi-resolution tensors. A single Hydra/OmegaConf configuration governs all stages, enabling deterministic reproduction and controlled ablations. As a case study, we generate 10k+ scenes spanning Re=100-15000 with diverse shapes and poses. An end-to-end evaluation of storage trade-offs directly from the emitted artifacts, a minimal 3D U-Net at 128x32x32, and example surrogate models with dataset size illustrate that the standardized representations support reproducible ML training. ChannelFlow-Tools turns one-off dataset creation into a reproducible, configurable pipeline for CFD surrogate modeling.
Authors: Dylan L\'eveill\'e (Carleton University)
Abstract: Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) is a framework for modelling agents based on their beliefs, desires, and intentions. Plans are a central component of BDI agents, and define sequences of actions that an agent must undertake to achieve a certain goal. Existing approaches to plan generation often require significant manual effort, and are mainly focused on single-agent systems. As a result, in this work, we have developed a tool that automatically generates BDI plans using Alternating-Time Temporal Logic (ATL). By using ATL, the plans generated accommodate for possible competition or cooperation between the agents in the system. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the tool by generating plans for an illustrative game that requires agent collaboration to achieve a shared goal. We show that the generated plans allow the agents to successfully attain this goal.
Authors: Nomi Yu (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Md Ferdous Alam (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), A. John Hart (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Faez Ahmed (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Abstract: CAD programs, structured as parametric sequences of commands that compile into precise 3D geometries, are fundamental to accurate and efficient engineering design processes. Generating these programs from nonparametric data such as point clouds and meshes remains a crucial yet challenging task, typically requiring extensive manual intervention. Current deep generative models aimed at automating CAD generation are significantly limited by imbalanced and insufficiently large datasets, particularly those lacking representation for complex CAD programs. To address this, we introduce GenCAD-3D, a multimodal generative framework utilizing contrastive learning for aligning latent embeddings between CAD and geometric encoders, combined with latent diffusion models for CAD sequence generation and retrieval. Additionally, we present SynthBal, a synthetic data augmentation strategy specifically designed to balance and expand datasets, notably enhancing representation of complex CAD geometries. Our experiments show that SynthBal significantly boosts reconstruction accuracy, reduces the generation of invalid CAD models, and markedly improves performance on high-complexity geometries, surpassing existing benchmarks. These advancements hold substantial implications for streamlining reverse engineering and enhancing automation in engineering design. We will publicly release our datasets and code, including a set of 51 3D-printed and laser-scanned parts on our project site.
Authors: Zitong Yang, Aonan Zhang, Hong Liu, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Emmanuel Cand\`es, Chong Wang, Ruoming Pang
Abstract: We introduce Synthetic Bootstrapped Pretraining (SBP), a language model (LM) pretraining procedure that first learns a model of relations between documents from the pretraining dataset and then leverages it to synthesize a vast new corpus for joint training. While the standard pretraining teaches LMs to learn causal correlations among tokens within a single document, it is not designed to efficiently model the rich, learnable inter-document correlations that can potentially lead to better performance. We validate SBP by designing a compute-matched pretraining setup and pretrain a 3B-parameter model on up to 1T tokens from scratch. We find SBP consistently improves upon a strong repetition baseline and delivers a significant fraction of performance improvement attainable by an oracle upper bound with access to 20x more unique data. Qualitative analysis reveals that the synthesized documents go beyond mere paraphrases -- SBP first abstracts a core concept from the seed material and then crafts a new narration on top of it. Besides strong empirical performance, SBP admits a natural Bayesian interpretation: the synthesizer implicitly learns to abstract the latent concepts shared between related documents.
Authors: Shen Chen, Ruiyu Zhao, Jiale Zhou, Zongkai Wu, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Lei Li
Abstract: Existing 3D scene generation methods often struggle to model the complex logical dependencies and physical constraints between objects, limiting their ability to adapt to dynamic and realistic environments. We propose CausalStruct, a novel framework that embeds causal reasoning into 3D scene generation. Utilizing large language models (LLMs), We construct causal graphs where nodes represent objects and attributes, while edges encode causal dependencies and physical constraints. CausalStruct iteratively refines the scene layout by enforcing causal order to determine the placement order of objects and applies causal intervention to adjust the spatial configuration according to physics-driven constraints, ensuring consistency with textual descriptions and real-world dynamics. The refined scene causal graph informs subsequent optimization steps, employing a Proportional-Integral-Derivative(PID) controller to iteratively tune object scales and positions. Our method uses text or images to guide object placement and layout in 3D scenes, with 3D Gaussian Splatting and Score Distillation Sampling improving shape accuracy and rendering stability. Extensive experiments show that CausalStruct generates 3D scenes with enhanced logical coherence, realistic spatial interactions, and robust adaptability.
Authors: Wenda Qin, Andrea Burns, Bryan A. Plummer, Margrit Betke
Abstract: Large models achieve strong performance on Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks, but are costly to run in resource-limited environments. Token pruning offers appealing tradeoffs for efficiency with minimal performance loss by reducing model input size, but prior work overlooks VLN-specific challenges. For example, information loss from pruning can effectively increase computational cost due to longer walks. Thus, the inability to identify uninformative tokens undermines the supposed efficiency gains from pruning. To address this, we propose Navigation-Aware Pruning (NAP), which uses navigation-specific traits to simplify the pruning process by pre-filtering tokens into foreground and background. For example, image views are filtered based on whether the agent can navigate in that direction. We also extract navigation-relevant instructions using a Large Language Model. After filtering, we focus pruning on background tokens, minimizing information loss. To further help avoid increases in navigation length, we discourage backtracking by removing low-importance navigation nodes. Experiments on standard VLN benchmarks show NAP significantly outperforms prior work, preserving higher success rates while saving more than 50% FLOPS.
Authors: Zhiwen Qian, Jinhua Liang, Huan Zhang
Abstract: This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline for generating character-specific, emotion-aware speech from comics. The proposed system takes full comic volumes as input and produces speech aligned with each character's dialogue and emotional state. An image processing module performs character detection, text recognition, and emotion intensity recognition. A large language model performs dialogue attribution and emotion analysis by integrating visual information with the evolving plot context. Speech is synthesized through a text-to-speech model with distinct voice profiles tailored to each character and emotion. This work enables automated voiceover generation for comics, offering a step toward interactive and immersive comic reading experience.
Authors: Zimo Yan, Jie Zhang, Zheng Xie, Yiping Song, Hao Li
Abstract: Accurate prediction of drug-drug interactions (DDI) is crucial for medication safety and effective drug development. However, existing methods often struggle to capture structural information across different scales, from local functional groups to global molecular topology, and typically lack mechanisms to quantify prediction confidence. To address these limitations, we propose MPNP-DDI, a novel Multi-scale Graph Neural Process framework. The core of MPNP-DDI is a unique message-passing scheme that, by being iteratively applied, learns a hierarchy of graph representations at multiple scales. Crucially, a cross-drug co-attention mechanism then dynamically fuses these multi-scale representations to generate context-aware embeddings for interacting drug pairs, while an integrated neural process module provides principled uncertainty estimation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MPNP-DDI significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on benchmark datasets. By providing accurate, generalizable, and uncertainty-aware predictions built upon multi-scale structural features, MPNP-DDI represents a powerful computational tool for pharmacovigilance, polypharmacy risk assessment, and precision medicine.
Authors: Zheng Yang, Guoxuan Chi, Chenshu Wu, Hanyu Liu, Yuchong Gao, Yunhao Liu, Jie Xu, Tony Xiao Han
Abstract: Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has made significant advancements in fields such as computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP), demonstrating its capability to synthesize high-fidelity data and improve generalization. Recently, there has been growing interest in integrating GenAI into wireless sensing systems. By leveraging generative techniques such as data augmentation, domain adaptation, and denoising, wireless sensing applications, including device localization, human activity recognition, and environmental monitoring, can be significantly improved. This survey investigates the convergence of GenAI and wireless sensing from two complementary perspectives. First, we explore how GenAI can be integrated into wireless sensing pipelines, focusing on two modes of integration: as a plugin to augment task-specific models and as a solver to directly address sensing tasks. Second, we analyze the characteristics of mainstream generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), and diffusion models, and discuss their applicability and unique advantages across various wireless sensing tasks. We further identify key challenges in applying GenAI to wireless sensing and outline a future direction toward a wireless foundation model: a unified, pre-trained design capable of scalable, adaptable, and efficient signal understanding across diverse sensing tasks.
Authors: Liang Zhang, Hanyang Dong, Jia-Hong Gao, Yi Sun, Kuntao Xiao, Wanli Yang, Zhao Lv, Shurong Sheng
Abstract: Deep learning-based EEG classification is crucial for the automated detection of neurological disorders, improving diagnostic accuracy and enabling early intervention. However, the low signal-to-noise ratio of EEG signals limits model performance, making feature selection (FS) vital for optimizing representations learned by neural network encoders. Existing FS methods are seldom designed specifically for EEG diagnosis; many are architecture-dependent and lack interpretability, limiting their applicability. Moreover, most rely on single-iteration data, resulting in limited robustness to variability. To address these issues, we propose IEFS-GMB, an Information Entropy-based Feature Selection method guided by a Gradient Memory Bank. This approach constructs a dynamic memory bank storing historical gradients, computes feature importance via information entropy, and applies entropy-based weighting to select informative EEG features. Experiments on four public neurological disease datasets show that encoders enhanced with IEFS-GMB achieve accuracy improvements of 0.64% to 6.45% over baseline models. The method also outperforms four competing FS techniques and improves model interpretability, supporting its practical use in clinical settings.
Authors: Valeria Pais, Luis Oala, Daniele Faccio, Marco Aversa
Abstract: The costs of generative model compute rekindled promises and hopes for efficient data curation. In this work, we investigate whether recently developed autoguidance and online data selection methods can improve the time and sample efficiency of training generative diffusion models. We integrate joint example selection (JEST) and autoguidance into a unified code base for fast ablation and benchmarking. We evaluate combinations of data curation on a controlled 2-D synthetic data generation task as well as (3x64x64)-D image generation. Our comparisons are made at equal wall-clock time and equal number of samples, explicitly accounting for the overhead of selection. Across experiments, autoguidance consistently improves sample quality and diversity. Early AJEST (applying selection only at the beginning of training) can match or modestly exceed autoguidance alone in data efficiency on both tasks. However, its time overhead and added complexity make autoguidance or uniform random data selection preferable in most situations. These findings suggest that while targeted online selection can yield efficiency gains in early training, robust sample quality improvements are primarily driven by autoguidance. We discuss limitations and scope, and outline when data selection may be beneficial.
Authors: Elisabetta Rocchetti
Abstract: The process by which Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire complex capabilities during training remains a key open question in mechanistic interpretability. This project investigates whether these learning dynamics can be characterized through the lens of Complex Network Theory (CNT). I introduce a novel methodology to represent a Transformer-based LLM as a directed, weighted graph where nodes are the model's computational components (attention heads and MLPs) and edges represent causal influence, measured via an intervention-based ablation technique. By tracking the evolution of this component-graph across 143 training checkpoints of the Pythia-14M model on a canonical induction task, I analyze a suite of graph-theoretic metrics. The results reveal that the network's structure evolves through distinct phases of exploration, consolidation, and refinement. Specifically, I identify the emergence of a stable hierarchy of information spreader components and a dynamic set of information gatherer components, whose roles reconfigure at key learning junctures. This work demonstrates that a component-level network perspective offers a powerful macroscopic lens for visualizing and understanding the self-organizing principles that drive the formation of functional circuits in LLMs.
Authors: Emanuele Ricco, Elia Onofri, Lorenzo Cima, Stefano Cresci, Roberto Di Pietro
Abstract: A critical need has emerged for generative AI: attribution methods. That is, solutions that can identify the model originating AI-generated content. This feature, generally relevant in multimodal applications, is especially sensitive in commercial settings where users subscribe to paid proprietary services and expect guarantees about the source of the content they receive. To address these issues, we introduce PRISM, a scalable Phase-enhanced Radial-based Image Signature Mapping framework for fingerprinting AI-generated images. PRISM is based on a radial reduction of the discrete Fourier transform that leverages amplitude and phase information to capture model-specific signatures. The output of the above process is subsequently clustered via linear discriminant analysis to achieve reliable model attribution in diverse settings, even if the model's internal details are inaccessible. To support our work, we construct PRISM-36K, a novel dataset of 36,000 images generated by six text-to-image GAN- and diffusion-based models. On this dataset, PRISM achieves an attribution accuracy of 92.04%. We additionally evaluate our method on four benchmarks from the literature, reaching an average accuracy of 81.60%. Finally, we evaluate our methodology also in the binary task of detecting real vs fake images, achieving an average accuracy of 88.41%. We obtain our best result on GenImage with an accuracy of 95.06%, whereas the original benchmark achieved 82.20%. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of frequency-domain fingerprinting for cross-architecture and cross-dataset model attribution, offering a viable solution for enforcing accountability and trust in generative AI systems.
Authors: Sebastian Ray Mason, Anders Gj{\o}lbye, Phillip Chavarria H{\o}jbjerg, Lenka T\v{e}tkov\'a, Lars Kai Hansen
Abstract: Mental rotation is a key test of spatial reasoning in humans and has been central to understanding how perception supports cognition. Despite the success of modern vision transformers, it is still unclear how well these models develop similar abilities. In this work, we present a systematic evaluation of ViT, CLIP, DINOv2, and DINOv3 across a range of mental-rotation tasks, from simple block structures similar to those used by Shepard and Metzler to study human cognition, to more complex block figures, three types of text, and photo-realistic objects. By probing model representations layer by layer, we examine where and how these networks succeed. We find that i) self-supervised ViTs capture geometric structure better than supervised ViTs; ii) intermediate layers perform better than final layers; iii) task difficulty increases with rotation complexity and occlusion, mirroring human reaction times and suggesting similar constraints in embedding space representations.
Authors: Giacomo Dall'Olio, Rainer Kolisch, Yaoxin Wu
Abstract: The team formation and routing problem is a challenging optimization problem with several real-world applications in fields such as airport, healthcare, and maintenance operations. To solve this problem, exact solution methods based on column generation have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we propose a novel partial column generation strategy for settings with multiple pricing problems, based on predicting which ones are likely to yield columns with a negative reduced cost. We develop a machine learning model tailored to the team formation and routing problem that leverages graph neural networks for these predictions. Computational experiments demonstrate that applying our strategy enhances the solution method and outperforms traditional partial column generation approaches from the literature, particularly on hard instances solved under a tight time limit.
Authors: Kadin Matotek, Heather Cassel, Md Amiruzzaman, Linh B. Ngo
Abstract: This study examines the performance of today's open-source, locally hosted large-language models (LLMs) in handling complex competitive programming tasks with extended problem descriptions and contexts. Building on the original Framework for AI-driven Code Generation Evaluation (FACE), the authors retrofit the pipeline to work entirely offline through the Ollama runtime, collapsing FACE's sprawling per-problem directory tree into a handful of consolidated JSON files, and adding robust checkpointing so multi-day runs can resume after failures. The enhanced framework generates, submits, and records solutions for the full Kattis corpus of 3,589 problems across eight code-oriented models ranging from 6.7-9 billion parameters. The submission results show that the overall pass@1 accuracy is modest for the local models, with the best models performing at approximately half the acceptance rate of the proprietary models, Gemini 1.5 and ChatGPT-4. These findings expose a persistent gap between private, cost-controlled LLM deployments and state-of-the-art proprietary services, yet also highlight the rapid progress of open models and the practical benefits of an evaluation workflow that organizations can replicate on in-house hardware.
Authors: Ryuhaerang Choi, Taehan Kim, Subin Park, Seohyeon Yoo, Jennifer G. Kim, Sung-Ju Lee
Abstract: Peer recovery narratives provide unique benefits beyond professional or lay mentoring by fostering hope and sustained recovery in eating disorder (ED) contexts. Yet, such support is limited by the scarcity of peer-involved programs and potential drawbacks on recovered peers, including relapse risk. To address this, we designed RecoveryTeller, a chatbot adopting a recovered-peer persona that portrays itself as someone recovered from an ED. We examined whether such a persona can reproduce the support affordances of peer recovery narratives. We compared RecoveryTeller with a lay-mentor persona chatbot offering similar guidance but without a recovery background. We conducted a 20-day cross-over deployment study with 26 ED participants, each using both chatbots for 10 days. RecoveryTeller elicited stronger emotional resonance than a lay-mentor chatbot, yet tensions between emotional and epistemic trust led participants to view the two personas as complementary rather than substitutes. We provide design implications for mental health chatbot persona design.
Authors: Yulin Wang, Yang Yue, Yang Yue, Huanqian Wang, Haojun Jiang, Yizeng Han, Zanlin Ni, Yifan Pu, Minglei Shi, Rui Lu, Qisen Yang, Andrew Zhao, Zhuofan Xia, Shiji Song, Gao Huang
Abstract: Human vision is highly adaptive, efficiently sampling intricate environments by sequentially fixating on task-relevant regions. In contrast, prevailing machine vision models passively process entire scenes at once, resulting in excessive resource demands scaling with spatial-temporal input resolution and model size, yielding critical limitations impeding both future advancements and real-world application. Here we introduce AdaptiveNN, a general framework aiming to drive a paradigm shift from 'passive' to 'active, adaptive' vision models. AdaptiveNN formulates visual perception as a coarse-to-fine sequential decision-making process, progressively identifying and attending to regions pertinent to the task, incrementally combining information across fixations, and actively concluding observation when sufficient. We establish a theory integrating representation learning with self-rewarding reinforcement learning, enabling end-to-end training of the non-differentiable AdaptiveNN without additional supervision on fixation locations. We assess AdaptiveNN on 17 benchmarks spanning 9 tasks, including large-scale visual recognition, fine-grained discrimination, visual search, processing images from real driving and medical scenarios, language-driven embodied AI, and side-by-side comparisons with humans. AdaptiveNN achieves up to 28x inference cost reduction without sacrificing accuracy, flexibly adapts to varying task demands and resource budgets without retraining, and provides enhanced interpretability via its fixation patterns, demonstrating a promising avenue toward efficient, flexible, and interpretable computer vision. Furthermore, AdaptiveNN exhibits closely human-like perceptual behaviors in many cases, revealing its potential as a valuable tool for investigating visual cognition. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/AdaptiveNN.
Authors: Zichen Wu, Hsiu-Yuan Huang, Yunfang Wu
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown substantial capabilities in integrating visual and textual information, yet frequently rely on spurious correlations, undermining their robustness and generalization in complex multimodal reasoning tasks. This paper addresses the critical challenge of superficial correlation bias in MLLMs through a novel causal mediation-based debiasing framework. Specially, we distinguishing core semantics from spurious textual and visual contexts via counterfactual examples to activate training-stage debiasing and employ a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with dynamic routing to selectively engages modality-specific debiasing experts. Empirical evaluation on multimodal sarcasm detection and sentiment analysis tasks demonstrates that our framework significantly surpasses unimodal debiasing strategies and existing state-of-the-art models.
Authors: Debasish Dutta, Neeharika Sonowal, Risheraj Barauh, Deepjyoti Chetia, Sanjib Kr Kalita
Abstract: Microscopy image enhancement plays a pivotal role in understanding the details of biological cells and materials at microscopic scales. In recent years, there has been a significant rise in the advancement of microscopy image enhancement, specifically with the help of deep learning methods. This survey paper aims to provide a snapshot of this rapidly growing state-of-the-art method, focusing on its evolution, applications, challenges, and future directions. The core discussions take place around the key domains of microscopy image enhancement of super-resolution, reconstruction, and denoising, with each domain explored in terms of its current trends and their practical utility of deep learning.
Authors: Vera Pavlova, Mohammed Makhlouf
Abstract: Despite recent advancements in Multilingual Information Retrieval (MLIR), a significant gap remains between research and practical deployment. Many studies assess MLIR performance in isolated settings, limiting their applicability to real-world scenarios. In this work, we leverage the unique characteristics of the Quranic multilingual corpus to examine the optimal strategies to develop an ad-hoc IR system for the Islamic domain that is designed to satisfy users' information needs in multiple languages. We prepared eleven retrieval models employing four training approaches: monolingual, cross-lingual, translate-train-all, and a novel mixed method combining cross-lingual and monolingual techniques. Evaluation on an in-domain dataset demonstrates that the mixed approach achieves promising results across diverse retrieval scenarios. Furthermore, we provide a detailed analysis of how different training configurations affect the embedding space and their implications for multilingual retrieval effectiveness. Finally, we discuss deployment considerations, emphasizing the cost-efficiency of deploying a single versatile, lightweight model for real-world MLIR applications.
Authors: Kunal Rathore, Prasad Tadepalli
Abstract: Deep learning models are notoriously opaque. Existing explanation methods often focus on localized visual explanations for individual images. Concept-based explanations, while offering global insights, require extensive annotations, incurring significant labeling cost. We propose an approach that leverages user-defined part labels from a limited set of images and efficiently transfers them to a larger dataset. This enables the generation of global symbolic explanations by aggregating part-based local explanations, ultimately providing human-understandable explanations for model decisions on a large scale.
Authors: Eric Aislan Antonelo, Gustavo Claudio Karl Couto, Christian M\"oller
Abstract: Standard Behavior Cloning (BC) fails to learn multimodal driving decisions, where multiple valid actions exist for the same scenario. We explore Implicit Behavioral Cloning (IBC) with Energy-Based Models (EBMs) to better capture this multimodality. We propose Data-Augmented IBC (DA-IBC), which improves learning by perturbing expert actions to form the counterexamples of IBC training and using better initialization for derivative-free inference. Experiments in the CARLA simulator with Bird's-Eye View inputs demonstrate that DA-IBC outperforms standard IBC in urban driving tasks designed to evaluate multimodal behavior learning in a test environment. The learned energy landscapes are able to represent multimodal action distributions, which BC fails to achieve.
Authors: Claudio Benzoni, Martina Langhals, Martin Boeker, Luise Modersohn, M\'at\'e E. Maros
Abstract: Regardless of the rapid development of artificial intelligence, abstractive summarisation is still challenging for sensitive and data-restrictive domains like medicine. With the increasing number of imaging, the relevance of automated tools for complex medical text summarisation is expected to become highly relevant. In this paper, we investigated the adaptation via fine-tuning process of a non-domain-specific abstractive summarisation encoder-decoder model family, and gave insights to practitioners on how to avoid over- and underfitting. We used PEGASUS and PEGASUS-X, on a medium-sized radiological reports public dataset. For each model, we comprehensively evaluated two different checkpoints with varying sizes of the same training data. We monitored the models' performances with lexical and semantic metrics during the training history on the fixed-size validation set. PEGASUS exhibited different phases, which can be related to epoch-wise double-descent, or peak-drop-recovery behaviour. For PEGASUS-X, we found that using a larger checkpoint led to a performance detriment. This work highlights the challenges and risks of fine-tuning models with high expressivity when dealing with scarce training data, and lays the groundwork for future investigations into more robust fine-tuning strategies for summarisation models in specialised domains.
Authors: Chung-En Johnny Yu (Neil), Hsuan-Chih (Neil), Chen, Brian Jalaian, Nathaniel D. Bastian
Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit strong multimodal capabilities but remain vulnerable to hallucinations from intrinsic errors and adversarial attacks from external exploitations, limiting their reliability in real-world applications. We present ORCA, an agentic reasoning framework that improves the factual accuracy and adversarial robustness of pretrained LVLMs through test-time structured inference reasoning with a suite of small vision models (less than 3B parameters). ORCA operates via an Observe--Reason--Critique--Act loop, querying multiple visual tools with evidential questions, validating cross-model inconsistencies, and refining predictions iteratively without access to model internals or retraining. ORCA also stores intermediate reasoning traces, which supports auditable decision-making. Though designed primarily to mitigate object-level hallucinations, ORCA also exhibits emergent adversarial robustness without requiring adversarial training or defense mechanisms. We evaluate ORCA across three settings: (1) clean images on hallucination benchmarks, (2) adversarially perturbed images without defense, and (3) adversarially perturbed images with defense applied. On the POPE hallucination benchmark, ORCA improves standalone LVLM performance by +3.64\% to +40.67\% across different subsets. Under adversarial perturbations on POPE, ORCA achieves an average accuracy gain of +20.11\% across LVLMs. When combined with defense techniques on adversarially perturbed AMBER images, ORCA further improves standalone LVLM performance, with gains ranging from +1.20\% to +48.00\% across evaluation metrics. These results demonstrate that ORCA offers a promising path toward building more reliable and robust multimodal systems.
Authors: Abolfazl Saheban Maleki, Maryam Imani
Abstract: We introduce Region-Aware Deformable Convolution (RAD-Conv), a new convolutional operator that enhances neural networks' ability to adapt to complex image structures. Unlike traditional deformable convolutions, which are limited to fixed quadrilateral sampling areas, RAD-Conv uses four boundary offsets per kernel element to create flexible, rectangular regions that dynamically adjust their size and shape to match image content. This approach allows precise control over the receptive field's width and height, enabling the capture of both local details and long-range dependencies, even with small 1x1 kernels. By decoupling the receptive field's shape from the kernel's structure, RAD-Conv combines the adaptability of attention mechanisms with the efficiency of standard convolutions. This innovative design offers a practical solution for building more expressive and efficient vision models, bridging the gap between rigid convolutional architectures and computationally costly attention-based methods.
Authors: Daniyal Kabir Dar, Qiben Yan, Li Xiao, Arun Ross
Abstract: Adversarial perturbations in speech pose a serious threat to automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speaker verification by introducing subtle waveform modifications that remain imperceptible to humans but can significantly alter system outputs. While targeted attacks on end-to-end ASR models have been widely studied, the phonetic basis of these perturbations and their effect on speaker identity remain underexplored. In this work, we analyze adversarial audio at the phonetic level and show that perturbations exploit systematic confusions such as vowel centralization and consonant substitutions. These distortions not only mislead transcription but also degrade phonetic cues critical for speaker verification, leading to identity drift. Using DeepSpeech as our ASR target, we generate targeted adversarial examples and evaluate their impact on speaker embeddings across genuine and impostor samples. Results across 16 phonetically diverse target phrases demonstrate that adversarial audio induces both transcription errors and identity drift, highlighting the need for phonetic-aware defenses to ensure the robustness of ASR and speaker recognition systems.
Authors: Ekgari Kasawala, Surej Mouli
Abstract: In brain-computer interface (BCI) systems, steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) and P300 responses have achieved widespread implementation owing to their superior information transfer rates (ITR) and minimal training requirements. These neurophysiological signals have exhibited robust efficacy and versatility in external device control, demonstrating enhanced precision and scalability. However, conventional implementations predominantly utilise liquid crystal display (LCD)-based visual stimulation paradigms, which present limitations in practical deployment scenarios. This investigation presents the development and evaluation of a novel light-emitting diode (LED)-based dual stimulation apparatus designed to enhance SSVEP classification accuracy through the integration of both SSVEP and P300 paradigms. The system employs four distinct frequencies, 7 Hz, 8 Hz, 9 Hz, and 10 Hz, corresponding to forward, backward, right, and left directional controls, respectively. Oscilloscopic verification confirmed the precision of these stimulation frequencies. Real-time feature extraction was accomplished through the concurrent analysis of maximum Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) amplitude and P300 peak detection to ascertain user intent. Directional control was determined by the frequency exhibiting maximal amplitude characteristics. The visual stimulation hardware demonstrated minimal frequency deviation, with error differentials ranging from 0.15%to 0.20%across all frequencies. The implemented signal processing algorithm successfully discriminated all four stimulus frequencies whilst correlating them with their respective P300 event markers. Classification accuracy was evaluated based on correct task intention recognition. The proposed hybrid system achieved a mean classification accuracy of 86.25%, coupled with an average ITR of 42.08 bits per minute (bpm).
Authors: Dashiel Carrera, Jeb Thomas-Mitchell, Daniel Wigdor
Abstract: AI co-writing systems challenge long held ideals about agency and ownership in the creative process, thereby hindering widespread adoption. In order to address this, we investigate conceptions of agency and ownership in AI creative co-writing. Drawing on insights from a review of commercial systems, we developed three co-writing systems with identical functionality but distinct interface metaphors: agentic, tool-like, and magical. Through interviews with professional and non-professional writers (n = 18), we explored how these metaphors influenced participants' sense of control and authorship. Our analysis resulted in a taxonomy of agency and ownership subtypes and underscore how tool-like metaphors shift writers' expected points of control while agentic metaphors foreground conceptual contributions. We argue that interface metaphors not only guide expectations of control but also frame conceptions of authorship. We conclude with recommendations for the design of AI co-writing systems, emphasizing how metaphor shapes user experience and creative practice.
Authors: Xingyu Chen, Hanyu Wu, Sikai Wu, Mingliang Zhou, Diyun Xiang, Haodong Zhang
Abstract: Human-to-humanoid imitation learning aims to learn a humanoid whole-body controller from human motion. Motion retargeting is a crucial step in enabling robots to acquire reference trajectories when exploring locomotion skills. However, current methods focus on motion retargeting frame by frame, which lacks scalability. Could we directly convert large-scale human motion into robot-executable motion through a more efficient approach? To address this issue, we propose Implicit Kinodynamic Motion Retargeting (IKMR), a novel efficient and scalable retargeting framework that considers both kinematics and dynamics. In kinematics, IKMR pretrains motion topology feature representation and a dual encoder-decoder architecture to learn a motion domain mapping. In dynamics, IKMR integrates imitation learning with the motion retargeting network to refine motion into physically feasible trajectories. After fine-tuning using the tracking results, IKMR can achieve large-scale physically feasible motion retargeting in real time, and a whole-body controller could be directly trained and deployed for tracking its retargeted trajectories. We conduct our experiments both in the simulator and the real robot on a full-size humanoid robot. Extensive experiments and evaluation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed framework.
Authors: Caitlin Cisar, Emily Sheffield, Joshua Drake, Alden Harrell, Subramanian Chidambaram, Nikita Nangia, Vinayak Arannil, Alex Williams
Abstract: Generative AI applications commonly leverage user personas as a steering mechanism for synthetic data generation, but reliance on natural language representations forces models to make unintended inferences about which attributes to emphasize, limiting precise control over outputs. We introduce PILOT (Psychological and Linguistic Output Targeting), a two-phase framework for steering large language models with structured psycholinguistic profiles. In Phase 1, PILOT translates natural language persona descriptions into multidimensional profiles with normalized scores across linguistic and psychological dimensions. In Phase 2, these profiles guide generation along measurable axes of variation. We evaluate PILOT across three state-of-the-art LLMs (Mistral Large 2, Deepseek-R1, LLaMA 3.3 70B) using 25 synthetic personas under three conditions: Natural-language Persona Steering (NPS), Schema-Based Steering (SBS), and Hybrid Persona-Schema Steering (HPS). Results demonstrate that schema-based approaches significantly reduce artificial-sounding persona repetition while improving output coherence, with silhouette scores increasing from 0.098 to 0.237 and topic purity from 0.773 to 0.957. Our analysis reveals a fundamental trade-off: SBS produces more concise outputs with higher topical consistency, while NPS offers greater lexical diversity but reduced predictability. HPS achieves a balance between these extremes, maintaining output variety while preserving structural consistency. Expert linguistic evaluation confirms that PILOT maintains high response quality across all conditions, with no statistically significant differences between steering approaches.
Authors: Saeed Amizadeh, Sara Abdali, Yinheng Li, Kazuhito Koishida
Abstract: Transformers and their attention mechanism have been revolutionary in the field of Machine Learning. While originally proposed for the language data, they quickly found their way to the image, video, graph, etc. data modalities with various signal geometries. Despite this versatility, generalizing the attention mechanism to scenarios where data is presented at different scales from potentially different modalities is not straightforward. The attempts to incorporate hierarchy and multi-modality within transformers are largely based on ad hoc heuristics, which are not seamlessly generalizable to similar problems with potentially different structures. To address this problem, in this paper, we take a fundamentally different approach: we first propose a mathematical construct to represent multi-modal, multi-scale data. We then mathematically derive the neural attention mechanics for the proposed construct from the first principle of entropy minimization. We show that the derived formulation is optimal in the sense of being the closest to the standard Softmax attention while incorporating the inductive biases originating from the hierarchical/geometric information of the problem. We further propose an efficient algorithm based on dynamic programming to compute our derived attention mechanism. By incorporating it within transformers, we show that the proposed hierarchical attention mechanism not only can be employed to train transformer models in hierarchical/multi-modal settings from scratch, but it can also be used to inject hierarchical information into classical, pre-trained transformer models post training, resulting in more efficient models in zero-shot manner.
Authors: Yiyi Liu, Chunyang Liu, Weiqin Jiao, Bojian Wu, Fashuai Li, Biao Xiong
Abstract: We present \textbf{CAGE} (\textit{Continuity-Aware edGE}) network, a \textcolor{red}{robust} framework for reconstructing vector floorplans directly from point-cloud density maps. Traditional corner-based polygon representations are highly sensitive to noise and incomplete observations, often resulting in fragmented or implausible layouts. Recent line grouping methods leverage structural cues to improve robustness but still struggle to recover fine geometric details. To address these limitations, we propose a \textit{native} edge-centric formulation, modeling each wall segment as a directed, geometrically continuous edge. This representation enables inference of coherent floorplan structures, ensuring watertight, topologically valid room boundaries while improving robustness and reducing artifacts. Towards this design, we develop a dual-query transformer decoder that integrates perturbed and latent queries within a denoising framework, which not only stabilizes optimization but also accelerates convergence. Extensive experiments on Structured3D and SceneCAD show that \textbf{CAGE} achieves state-of-the-art performance, with F1 scores of 99.1\% (rooms), 91.7\% (corners), and 89.3\% (angles). The method also demonstrates strong cross-dataset generalization, underscoring the efficacy of our architectural innovations. Code and pretrained models will be released upon acceptance.
Authors: Jin Hyun Park, Cheng Zhang, Yoonsuck Choe
Abstract: The original Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and their modern updates such as the ResNet are heavily inspired by the mammalian visual system. These models include afferent connections (retina and LGN to the visual cortex) and long-range projections (connections across different visual cortical areas). However, in the mammalian visual system, there are connections within each visual cortical area, known as lateral (or horizontal) connections. These would roughly correspond to connections within CNN feature maps, and this important architectural feature is missing in current CNN models. In this paper, we present how such lateral connections can be modeled within the standard CNN framework, and test its benefits and analyze its emergent properties in relation to the biological visual system. We will focus on two main architectural features of lateral connections: (1) recurrent activation and (2) separation of excitatory and inhibitory connections. We show that recurrent CNN using weight sharing is equivalent to lateral connections, and propose a custom loss function to separate excitatory and inhibitory weights. The addition of these two leads to increased classification accuracy, and importantly, the activation properties and connection properties of the resulting model show properties similar to those observed in the biological visual system. We expect our approach to help align CNN closer to its biological counterpart and better understand the principles of visual cortical computation.
Authors: Thomas Z. Li, Aravind R. Krishnan, Lianrui Zuo, John M. Still, Kim L. Sandler, Fabien Maldonado, Thomas A. Lasko, Bennett A. Landman
Abstract: The development of multimodal models for pulmonary nodule diagnosis is limited by the scarcity of labeled data and the tendency for these models to overfit on the training distribution. In this work, we leverage self-supervised learning from longitudinal and multimodal archives to address these challenges. We curate an unlabeled set of patients with CT scans and linked electronic health records from our home institution to power joint embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) pretraining. After supervised finetuning, we show that our approach outperforms an unregularized multimodal model and imaging-only model in an internal cohort (ours: 0.91, multimodal: 0.88, imaging-only: 0.73 AUC), but underperforms in an external cohort (ours: 0.72, imaging-only: 0.75 AUC). We develop a synthetic environment that characterizes the context in which JEPA may underperform. This work innovates an approach that leverages unlabeled multimodal medical archives to improve predictive models and demonstrates its advantages and limitations in pulmonary nodule diagnosis.
Authors: Vaibhav Mishra, William Lotter
Abstract: Foundation models are increasingly developed in computational pathology (CPath) given their promise in facilitating many downstream tasks. While recent studies have evaluated task performance across models, less is known about the structure and variability of their learned representations. Here, we systematically analyze the representational spaces of six CPath foundation models using techniques popularized in computational neuroscience. The models analyzed span vision-language contrastive learning (CONCH, PLIP, KEEP) and self-distillation (UNI (v2), Virchow (v2), Prov-GigaPath) approaches. Through representational similarity analysis using H&E image patches from TCGA, we find that UNI2 and Virchow2 have the most distinct representational structures, whereas Prov-Gigapath has the highest average similarity across models. Having the same training paradigm (vision-only vs. vision-language) did not guarantee higher representational similarity. The representations of all models showed a high slide-dependence, but relatively low disease-dependence. Stain normalization decreased slide-dependence for all models by a range of 5.5% (CONCH) to 20.5% (PLIP). In terms of intrinsic dimensionality, vision-language models demonstrated relatively compact representations, compared to the more distributed representations of vision-only models. These findings highlight opportunities to improve robustness to slide-specific features, inform model ensembling strategies, and provide insights into how training paradigms shape model representations. Our framework is extendable across medical imaging domains, where probing the internal representations of foundation models can help ensure effective development and deployment.
Authors: Ahmed Abdou
Abstract: We present a simple, model-agnostic post-processing technique for fine-grained Arabic readability classification in the BAREC 2025 Shared Task (19 ordinal levels). Our method applies conformal prediction to generate prediction sets with coverage guarantees, then computes weighted averages using softmax-renormalized probabilities over the conformal sets. This uncertainty-aware decoding improves Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) by reducing high-penalty misclassifications to nearer levels. Our approach shows consistent QWK improvements of 1-3 points across different base models. In the strict track, our submission achieves QWK scores of 84.9\%(test) and 85.7\% (blind test) for sentence level, and 73.3\% for document level. For Arabic educational assessment, this enables human reviewers to focus on a handful of plausible levels, combining statistical guarantees with practical usability.
Authors: Abdarahmane Traore, \'Eric Hervet, Andy Couturier
Abstract: Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have enabled powerful multimodal reasoning, but state-of-the-art approaches typically rely on extremely large models with prohibitive computational and memory requirements. This makes their deployment challenging in resource-constrained environments such as warehouses, robotics, and industrial applications, where both efficiency and robust spatial understanding are critical. In this work, we present SmolRGPT, a compact vision-language architecture that explicitly incorporates region-level spatial reasoning by integrating both RGB and depth cues. SmolRGPT employs a three-stage curriculum that progressively align visual and language features, enables spatial relationship understanding, and adapts to task-specific datasets. We demonstrate that with only 600M parameters, SmolRGPT achieves competitive results on challenging warehouse spatial reasoning benchmarks, matching or exceeding the performance of much larger alternatives. These findings highlight the potential for efficient, deployable multimodal intelligence in real-world settings without sacrificing core spatial reasoning capabilities. The code of the experimentation will be available at: https://github.com/abtraore/SmolRGPT
Authors: Reza Pirayeshshirazinezhad, Nima Fathi
Abstract: We present an explainable AI-enhanced supervisory control framework for multi-agent robotics that combines (i) a timed-automata supervisor for safe, auditable mode switching, (ii) robust continuous control (Lyapunov-based controller for large-angle maneuver; sliding-mode controller (SMC) with boundary layers for precision and disturbance rejection), and (iii) an explainable predictor that maps mission context to gains and expected performance (energy, error). Monte Carlo-driven optimization provides the training data, enabling transparent real-time trade-offs. We validated the approach in two contrasting domains, spacecraft formation flying and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). Despite different environments (gravity/actuator bias vs. hydrodynamic drag/currents), both share uncertain six degrees of freedom (6-DOF) rigid-body dynamics, relative motion, and tight tracking needs, making them representative of general robotic systems. In the space mission, the supervisory logic selects parameters that meet mission criteria. In AUV leader-follower tests, the same SMC structure maintains a fixed offset under stochastic currents with bounded steady error. In spacecraft validation, the SMC controller achieved submillimeter alignment with 21.7% lower tracking error and 81.4% lower energy consumption compared to Proportional-Derivative PD controller baselines. At the same time, in AUV tests, SMC maintained bounded errors under stochastic currents. These results highlight both the portability and the interpretability of the approach for safety-critical, resource-constrained multi-agent robotics.
Authors: Danqing Chen, Carina Kane, Austin Kozlowski, Nadav Kunievsky, James A. Evans
Abstract: Large Language Models have spread rapidly since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, accompanied by claims of major productivity gains but also concerns about job displacement. This paper examines the short-run labor market effects of LLM adoption by comparing earnings and unemployment across occupations with differing levels of exposure to these technologies. Using a Synthetic Difference in Differences approach, we estimate the impact of LLM exposure on earnings and unemployment. Our findings show that workers in highly exposed occupations experienced earnings increases following ChatGPT's introduction, while unemployment rates remained unchanged. These results suggest that initial labor market adjustments to LLMs operate primarily through earnings rather than worker reallocation.
Authors: Siyang Wu, Zhewei Sun
Abstract: Slang is a commonly used type of informal language that poses a daunting challenge to NLP systems. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), however, have made the problem more approachable. While LLM agents are becoming more widely applied to intermediary tasks such as slang detection and slang interpretation, their generalizability and reliability are heavily dependent on whether these models have captured structural knowledge about slang that align well with human attested slang usages. To answer this question, we contribute a systematic comparison between human and machine-generated slang usages. Our evaluative framework focuses on three core aspects: 1) Characteristics of the usages that reflect systematic biases in how machines perceive slang, 2) Creativity reflected by both lexical coinages and word reuses employed by the slang usages, and 3) Informativeness of the slang usages when used as gold-standard examples for model distillation. By comparing human-attested slang usages from the Online Slang Dictionary (OSD) and slang generated by GPT-4o and Llama-3, we find significant biases in how LLMs perceive slang. Our results suggest that while LLMs have captured significant knowledge about the creative aspects of slang, such knowledge does not align with humans sufficiently to enable LLMs for extrapolative tasks such as linguistic analyses.
Authors: Xianhang Ye, Yiqing Li, Wei Dai, Miancan Liu, Ziyuan Chen, Zhangye Han, Hongbo Min, Jinkui Ren, Xiantao Zhang, Wen Yang, Zhi Jin
Abstract: Existing GUI grounding methods often struggle with fine-grained localization in high-resolution screenshots. To address this, we propose GUI-ARP, a novel framework that enables adaptive multi-stage inference. Equipped with the proposed Adaptive Region Perception (ARP) and Adaptive Stage Controlling (ASC), GUI-ARP dynamically exploits visual attention for cropping task-relevant regions and adapts its inference strategy, performing a single-stage inference for simple cases and a multi-stage analysis for more complex scenarios. This is achieved through a two-phase training pipeline that integrates supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement fine-tuning based on Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed GUI-ARP achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging GUI grounding benchmarks, with a 7B model reaching 60.8% accuracy on ScreenSpot-Pro and 30.9% on UI-Vision benchmark. Notably, GUI-ARP-7B demonstrates strong competitiveness against open-source 72B models (UI-TARS-72B at 38.1%) and proprietary models.
Authors: Tian Lan, Yiming Zheng, Jianxin Yin
Abstract: Multi-label classification has broad applications and depends on powerful representations capable of capturing multi-label interactions. We introduce \textit{Diff-Feat}, a simple but powerful framework that extracts intermediate features from pre-trained diffusion-Transformer models for images and text, and fuses them for downstream tasks. We observe that for vision tasks, the most discriminative intermediate feature along the diffusion process occurs at the middle step and is located in the middle block in Transformer. In contrast, for language tasks, the best feature occurs at the noise-free step and is located in the deepest block. In particular, we observe a striking phenomenon across varying datasets: a mysterious "Layer $12$" consistently yields the best performance on various downstream classification tasks for images (under DiT-XL/2-256$\times$256). We devise a heuristic local-search algorithm that pinpoints the locally optimal "image-text"$\times$"block-timestep" pair among a few candidates, avoiding an exhaustive grid search. A simple fusion-linear projection followed by addition-of the selected representations yields state-of-the-art performance: 98.6\% mAP on MS-COCO-enhanced and 45.7\% mAP on Visual Genome 500, surpassing strong CNN, graph, and Transformer baselines by a wide margin. t-SNE and clustering metrics further reveal that \textit{Diff-Feat} forms tighter semantic clusters than unimodal counterparts. The code is available at https://github.com/lt-0123/Diff-Feat.
Authors: Ping Guo, Yubing Ren, Binbin Liu, Fengze Liu, Haobin Lin, Yifan Zhang, Bingni Zhang, Taifeng Wang, Yin Zheng
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have become integral to a wide range of applications worldwide, driving an unprecedented global demand for effective multilingual capabilities. Central to achieving robust multilingual performance is the strategic allocation of language proportions within training corpora. However, determining optimal language ratios is highly challenging due to intricate cross-lingual interactions and sensitivity to dataset scale. This paper introduces Climb (Cross-Lingual Interaction-aware Multilingual Balancing), a novel framework designed to systematically optimize multilingual data allocation. At its core, Climb introduces a cross-lingual interaction-aware language ratio, explicitly quantifying each language's effective allocation by capturing inter-language dependencies. Leveraging this ratio, Climb proposes a principled two-step optimization procedure--first equalizing marginal benefits across languages, then maximizing the magnitude of the resulting language allocation vectors--significantly simplifying the inherently complex multilingual optimization problem. Extensive experiments confirm that Climb can accurately measure cross-lingual interactions across various multilingual settings. LLMs trained with Climb-derived proportions consistently achieve state-of-the-art multilingual performance, even achieving competitive performance with open-sourced LLMs trained with more tokens.
Authors: Mirza Farhan Bin Tarek, Rahmatollah Beheshti
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently shown that large language models (LLMs) can develop their own reasoning without direct supervision. However, applications in the medical domain, specifically for question answering, are susceptible to significant reward hacking during the reasoning phase. Our work addresses two primary forms of this behavior: i) providing a final answer without preceding reasoning, and ii) employing non-standard reasoning formats to exploit the reward mechanism. To mitigate these, we introduce a composite reward function with specific penalties for these behaviors. Our experiments show that extending RLVR with our proposed reward model leads to better-formatted reasoning with less reward hacking and good accuracy compared to the baselines. This approach marks a step toward reducing reward hacking and enhancing the reliability of models utilizing RLVR.
Authors: Shaojie Zhang, Ruoceng Zhang, Pei Fu, Shaokang Wang, Jiahui Yang, Xin Du, Shiqi Cui, Bin Qin, Ying Huang, Zhenbo Luo, Jian Luan
Abstract: In the field of AI-driven human-GUI interaction automation, while rapid advances in multimodal large language models and reinforcement fine-tuning techniques have yielded remarkable progress, a fundamental challenge persists: their interaction logic significantly deviates from natural human-GUI communication patterns. To fill this gap, we propose "Blink-Think-Link" (BTL), a brain-inspired framework for human-GUI interaction that mimics the human cognitive process between users and graphical interfaces. The system decomposes interactions into three biologically plausible phases: (1) Blink - rapid detection and attention to relevant screen areas, analogous to saccadic eye movements; (2) Think - higher-level reasoning and decision-making, mirroring cognitive planning; and (3) Link - generation of executable commands for precise motor control, emulating human action selection mechanisms. Additionally, we introduce two key technical innovations for the BTL framework: (1) Blink Data Generation - an automated annotation pipeline specifically optimized for blink data, and (2) BTL Reward -- the first rule-based reward mechanism that enables reinforcement learning driven by both process and outcome. Building upon this framework, we develop a GUI agent model named BTL-UI, which demonstrates consistent state-of-the-art performance across both static GUI understanding and dynamic interaction tasks in comprehensive benchmarks. These results provide conclusive empirical validation of the framework's efficacy in developing advanced GUI Agents.
Authors: Junlong Jia, Xing Wu, Chaochen Gao, Ziyang Chen, Zijia Lin, Zhongzhi Li, Weinong Wang, Haotian Xu, Donghui Jin, Debing Zhang, Binghui Guo
Abstract: High-quality long-context data is essential for training large language models (LLMs) capable of processing extensive documents, yet existing synthesis approaches using relevance-based aggregation face challenges of computational efficiency. We present LiteLong, a resource-efficient method for synthesizing long-context data through structured topic organization and multi-agent debate. Our approach leverages the BISAC book classification system to provide a comprehensive hierarchical topic organization, and then employs a debate mechanism with multiple LLMs to generate diverse, high-quality topics within this structure. For each topic, we use lightweight BM25 retrieval to obtain relevant documents and concatenate them into 128K-token training samples. Experiments on HELMET and Ruler benchmarks demonstrate that LiteLong achieves competitive long-context performance and can seamlessly integrate with other long-dependency enhancement methods. LiteLong makes high-quality long-context data synthesis more accessible by reducing both computational and data engineering costs, facilitating further research in long-context language training.
Authors: Xinxin Meng, Jiangtao Guo, Yunxiang Zhang, Shun Huang
Abstract: The outlier exposure method is an effective approach to address the unsupervised anomaly sound detection problem. The key focus of this method is how to make the model learn the distribution space of normal data. Based on biological perception and data analysis, it is found that anomalous audio and noise often have higher frequencies. Therefore, we propose a data augmentation method for high-frequency information in contrastive learning. This enables the model to pay more attention to the low-frequency information of the audio, which represents the normal operational mode of the machine. We evaluated the proposed method on the DCASE 2020 Task 2. The results showed that our method outperformed other contrastive learning methods used on this dataset. We also evaluated the generalizability of our method on the DCASE 2022 Task 2 dataset.
Authors: Shilong Bao, Qianqian Xu, Feiran Li, Boyu Han, Zhiyong Yang, Xiaochun Cao, Qingming Huang
Abstract: This paper investigates a fundamental yet underexplored issue in Salient Object Detection (SOD): the size-invariant property for evaluation protocols, particularly in scenarios when multiple salient objects of significantly different sizes appear within a single image. We first present a novel perspective to expose the inherent size sensitivity of existing widely used SOD metrics. Through careful theoretical derivations, we show that the evaluation outcome of an image under current SOD metrics can be essentially decomposed into a sum of several separable terms, with the contribution of each term being directly proportional to its corresponding region size. Consequently, the prediction errors would be dominated by the larger regions, while smaller yet potentially more semantically important objects are often overlooked, leading to biased performance assessments and practical degradation. To address this challenge, a generic Size-Invariant Evaluation (SIEva) framework is proposed. The core idea is to evaluate each separable component individually and then aggregate the results, thereby effectively mitigating the impact of size imbalance across objects. Building upon this, we further develop a dedicated optimization framework (SIOpt), which adheres to the size-invariant principle and significantly enhances the detection of salient objects across a broad range of sizes. Notably, SIOpt is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated with a wide range of SOD backbones. Theoretically, we also present generalization analysis of SOD methods and provide evidence supporting the validity of our new evaluation protocols. Finally, comprehensive experiments speak to the efficacy of our proposed approach. The code is available at https://github.com/Ferry-Li/SI-SOD.
Authors: Jaeyoung Kim, Jongho Kim, Seung-won Hwang, Seoho Song, Young-In Song
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems often suffer from a gap between optimizing retrieval relevance and generative utility: retrieved documents may be topically relevant but still lack the content needed for effective reasoning during generation. While existing "bridge" modules attempt to rewrite the retrieved text for better generation, we show how they fail to capture true document utility. In this work, we propose R2U, with a key distinction of directly optimizing to maximize the probability of generating a correct answer through process supervision. As such direct observation is expensive, we also propose approximating an efficient distillation pipeline by scaling the supervision from LLMs, which helps the smaller rewriter model generalize better. We evaluate our method across multiple open-domain question-answering benchmarks. The empirical results demonstrate consistent improvements over strong bridging baselines.
Authors: Shanghong Li, Chiam Wen Qi Ruth, Hong Xu, Fang Liu
Abstract: The rapid proliferation of short video platforms has necessitated advanced methods for detecting fake news. This need arises from the widespread influence and ease of sharing misinformation, which can lead to significant societal harm. Current methods often struggle with the dynamic and multimodal nature of short video content. This paper presents HFN, Heterogeneous Fusion Net, a novel multimodal framework that integrates video, audio, and text data to evaluate the authenticity of short video content. HFN introduces a Decision Network that dynamically adjusts modality weights during inference and a Weighted Multi-Modal Feature Fusion module to ensure robust performance even with incomplete data. Additionally, we contribute a comprehensive dataset VESV (VEracity on Short Videos) specifically designed for short video fake news detection. Experiments conducted on the FakeTT and newly collected VESV datasets demonstrate improvements of 2.71% and 4.14% in Marco F1 over state-of-the-art methods. This work establishes a robust solution capable of effectively identifying fake news in the complex landscape of short video platforms, paving the way for more reliable and comprehensive approaches in combating misinformation.
Authors: Yuting Zeng, Zhiwen Zheng, You Zhou, JiaLing Xiao, Yongbin Yu, Manping Fan, Bo Gong, Liyong Ren
Abstract: This paper proposes a momentum-constrained hybrid heuristic trajectory optimization framework (MHHTOF) tailored for assistive navigation in visually impaired scenarios, integrating trajectory sampling generation, optimization and evaluation with residual-enhanced deep reinforcement learning (DRL). In the first stage, heuristic trajectory sampling cluster (HTSC) is generated in the Frenet coordinate system using third-order interpolation with fifth-order polynomials and momentum-constrained trajectory optimization (MTO) constraints to ensure smoothness and feasibility. After first stage cost evaluation, the second stage leverages a residual-enhanced actor-critic network with LSTM-based temporal feature modeling to adaptively refine trajectory selection in the Cartesian coordinate system. A dual-stage cost modeling mechanism (DCMM) with weight transfer aligns semantic priorities across stages, supporting human-centered optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LSTM-ResB-PPO achieves significantly faster convergence, attaining stable policy performance in approximately half the training iterations required by the PPO baseline, while simultaneously enhancing both reward outcomes and training stability. Compared to baseline method, the selected model reduces average cost and cost variance by 30.3% and 53.3%, and lowers ego and obstacle risks by over 77%. These findings validate the framework's effectiveness in enhancing robustness, safety, and real-time feasibility in complex assistive planning tasks.
Authors: Tsz Ting Chung, Lemao Liu, Mo Yu, Dit-Yan Yeung
Abstract: Logic reasoning in natural language has been recognized as an important measure of human intelligence for Large Language Models (LLMs). Popular benchmarks may entangle multiple reasoning skills and thus provide unfaithful evaluations on the logic reasoning skill. Meanwhile, existing logic reasoning benchmarks are limited in language diversity and their distributions are deviated from the distribution of an ideal logic reasoning benchmark, which may lead to biased evaluation results. This paper thereby proposes a new classical logic benchmark DivLogicEval, consisting of natural sentences composed of diverse statements in a counterintuitive way. To ensure a more reliable evaluation, we also introduce a new evaluation metric that mitigates the influence of bias and randomness inherent in LLMs. Through experiments, we demonstrate the extent to which logical reasoning is required to answer the questions in DivLogicEval and compare the performance of different popular LLMs in conducting logical reasoning.
Authors: Yu-Cheng Chang, Guan-Wei Yeo, Quah Eugene, Fan-Jie Shih, Yuan-Ching Kuo, Tsung-En Yu, Hung-Chun Hsu, Ming-Feng Tsai, Chuan-Ju Wang
Abstract: The 2025 TREC Interactive Knowledge Assistance Track (iKAT) featured both interactive and offline submission tasks. The former requires systems to operate under real-time constraints, making robustness and efficiency as important as accuracy, while the latter enables controlled evaluation of passage ranking and response generation with pre-defined datasets. To address this, we explored query rewriting and retrieval fusion as core strategies. We built our pipelines around Best-of-$N$ selection and Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) strategies to handle different submission tasks. Results show that reranking and fusion improve robustness while revealing trade-offs between effectiveness and efficiency across both tasks.
Authors: Zinan Lin, Enshu Liu, Xuefei Ning, Junyi Zhu, Wenyu Wang, Sergey Yekhanin
Abstract: Generative modeling, representation learning, and classification are three core problems in machine learning (ML), yet their state-of-the-art (SoTA) solutions remain largely disjoint. In this paper, we ask: Can a unified principle address all three? Such unification could simplify ML pipelines and foster greater synergy across tasks. We introduce Latent Zoning Network (LZN) as a step toward this goal. At its core, LZN creates a shared Gaussian latent space that encodes information across all tasks. Each data type (e.g., images, text, labels) is equipped with an encoder that maps samples to disjoint latent zones, and a decoder that maps latents back to data. ML tasks are expressed as compositions of these encoders and decoders: for example, label-conditional image generation uses a label encoder and image decoder; image embedding uses an image encoder; classification uses an image encoder and label decoder. We demonstrate the promise of LZN in three increasingly complex scenarios: (1) LZN can enhance existing models (image generation): When combined with the SoTA Rectified Flow model, LZN improves FID on CIFAR10 from 2.76 to 2.59-without modifying the training objective. (2) LZN can solve tasks independently (representation learning): LZN can implement unsupervised representation learning without auxiliary loss functions, outperforming the seminal MoCo and SimCLR methods by 9.3% and 0.2%, respectively, on downstream linear classification on ImageNet. (3) LZN can solve multiple tasks simultaneously (joint generation and classification): With image and label encoders/decoders, LZN performs both tasks jointly by design, improving FID and achieving SoTA classification accuracy on CIFAR10. The code and trained models are available at https://github.com/microsoft/latent-zoning-networks. The project website is at https://zinanlin.me/blogs/latent_zoning_networks.html.
URLs: https://github.com/microsoft/latent-zoning-networks., https://zinanlin.me/blogs/latent_zoning_networks.html.
Authors: Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan
Abstract: We highlight a fundamental connection between information geometry and variational Bayes (VB) and discuss its consequences for machine learning. Under certain conditions, a VB solution always requires estimation or computation of natural gradients. We show several consequences of this fact by using the natural-gradient descent algorithm of Khan and Rue (2023) called the Bayesian Learning Rule (BLR). These include (i) a simplification of Bayes' rule as addition of natural gradients, (ii) a generalization of quadratic surrogates used in gradient-based methods, and (iii) a large-scale implementation of VB algorithms for large language models. Neither the connection nor its consequences are new but we further emphasize the common origins of the two fields of information geometry and Bayes with a hope to facilitate more work at the intersection of the two fields.
Authors: Yuchen Zhang, Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri
Abstract: Assessing the impact the training data on machine learning models is crucial for understanding the behavior of the model, enhancing the transparency, and selecting training data. Influence function provides a theoretical framework for quantifying the effect of training data points on model's performance given a specific test data. However, the computational and memory costs of influence function presents significant challenges, especially for large-scale models, even when using approximation methods, since the gradients involved in computation are as large as the model itself. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that leverages dropout as a gradient compression mechanism to compute the influence function more efficiently. Our method significantly reduces computational and memory overhead, not only during the influence function computation but also in gradient compression process. Through theoretical analysis and empirical validation, we demonstrate that our method could preserves critical components of the data influence and enables its application to modern large-scale models.
Authors: Jisu Kim, Jinhee Park, Changhyun Jeon, Jungwoo Choi, Keonwoo Kim, Minji Hong, Sehyun Kim
Abstract: Traditional query expansion techniques for addressing vocabulary mismatch problems in information retrieval are context-sensitive and may lead to performance degradation. As an alternative, document expansion research has gained attention, but existing methods such as Doc2Query have limitations including excessive preprocessing costs, increased index size, and reliability issues with generated content. To mitigate these problems and seek more structured and efficient alternatives, this study proposes a method that divides documents into chunk units and generates textual data for each chunk to simultaneously improve retrieval efficiency and accuracy. The proposed "Chunk Knowledge Generation Model" adopts a T5-based multi-task learning structure that simultaneously generates titles and candidate questions from each document chunk while extracting keywords from user queries. This approach maximizes computational efficiency by generating and extracting three types of semantic information in parallel through a single encoding and two decoding processes. The generated data is utilized as additional information in the retrieval system. GPT-based evaluation on 305 query-document pairs showed that retrieval using the proposed model achieved 95.41% accuracy at Top@10, demonstrating superior performance compared to document chunk-level retrieval. This study contributes by proposing an approach that simultaneously generates titles and candidate questions from document chunks for application in retrieval pipelines, and provides empirical evidence applicable to large-scale information retrieval systems by demonstrating improved retrieval accuracy through qualitative evaluation.
Authors: Qiaolin Wang, Xilin Jiang, Linyang He, Junkai Wu, Nima Mesgarani
Abstract: While large audio-language models (LALMs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art audio understanding, their reasoning capability in complex soundscapes still falls behind large vision-language models (LVLMs). Compared to the visual domain, one bottleneck is the lack of large-scale chain-of-thought audio data to teach LALM stepwise reasoning. To circumvent this data and modality gap, we present SightSound-R1, a cross-modal distillation framework that transfers advanced reasoning from a stronger LVLM teacher to a weaker LALM student on the same audio-visual question answering (AVQA) dataset. SightSound-R1 consists of three core steps: (i) test-time scaling to generate audio-focused chains of thought (CoT) from an LVLM teacher, (ii) audio-grounded validation to filter hallucinations, and (iii) a distillation pipeline with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for the LALM student. Results show that SightSound-R1 improves LALM reasoning performance both in the in-domain AVQA test set as well as in unseen auditory scenes and questions, outperforming both pretrained and label-only distilled baselines. Thus, we conclude that vision reasoning can be effectively transferred to audio models and scaled with abundant audio-visual data.
Authors: Yongsheng Feng, Yuetonghui Xu, Jiehui Luo, Hongjia Liu, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu, Wei Li
Abstract: Source separation is a fundamental task in speech, music, and audio processing, and it also provides cleaner and larger data for training generative models. However, improving separation performance in practice often depends on increasingly large networks, inflating training and deployment costs. Motivated by recent advances in inference-time scaling for generative modeling, we propose Training-Time and Inference-Time Scalable Discriminative Source Separation (TISDiSS), a unified framework that integrates early-split multi-loss supervision, shared-parameter design, and dynamic inference repetitions. TISDiSS enables flexible speed-performance trade-offs by adjusting inference depth without retraining additional models. We further provide systematic analyses of architectural and training choices and show that training with more inference repetitions improves shallow-inference performance, benefiting low-latency applications. Experiments on standard speech separation benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with a reduced parameter count, establishing TISDiSS as a scalable and practical framework for adaptive source separation.
Authors: Vishnu Narayanan Moothedath, Umang Agarwal, Umeshraja N, James Richard Gross, Jaya Prakash Champati, Sharayu Moharir
Abstract: We focus on a binary classification problem in an edge intelligence system where false negatives are more costly than false positives. The system has a compact, locally deployed model, which is supplemented by a larger, remote model, which is accessible via the network by incurring an offloading cost. For each sample, our system first uses the locally deployed model for inference. Based on the output of the local model, the sample may be offloaded to the remote model. This work aims to understand the fundamental trade-off between classification accuracy and these offloading costs within such a hierarchical inference (HI) system. To optimize this system, we propose an online learning framework that continuously adapts a pair of thresholds on the local model's confidence scores. These thresholds determine the prediction of the local model and whether a sample is classified locally or offloaded to the remote model. We present a closed-form solution for the setting where the local model is calibrated. For the more general case of uncalibrated models, we introduce H2T2, an online two-threshold hierarchical inference policy, and prove it achieves sublinear regret. H2T2 is model-agnostic, requires no training, and learns in the inference phase using limited feedback. Simulations on real-world datasets show that H2T2 consistently outperforms naive and single-threshold HI policies, sometimes even surpassing offline optima. The policy also demonstrates robustness to distribution shifts and adapts effectively to mismatched classifiers.
Authors: Vaibhav Singh, Soumya Suvra Ghosal, Kapu Nirmal Joshua, Soumyabrata Pal, Sayak Ray Chowdhury
Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for adapting large language models (LLMs) to new and data-scarce tasks using only a few carefully selected task-specific examples presented in the prompt. However, given the limited context size of LLMs, a fundamental question arises: Which examples should be selected to maximize performance on a given user query? While nearest-neighbor-based methods like KATE have been widely adopted for this purpose, they suffer from well-known drawbacks in high-dimensional embedding spaces, including poor generalization and a lack of diversity. In this work, we study this problem of example selection in ICL from a principled, information theory-driven perspective. We first model an LLM as a linear function over input embeddings and frame the example selection task as a query-specific optimization problem: selecting a subset of exemplars from a larger example bank that minimizes the prediction error on a specific query. This formulation departs from traditional generalization-focused learning theoretic approaches by targeting accurate prediction for a specific query instance. We derive a principled surrogate objective that is approximately submodular, enabling the use of a greedy algorithm with an approximation guarantee. We further enhance our method by (i) incorporating the kernel trick to operate in high-dimensional feature spaces without explicit mappings, and (ii) introducing an optimal design-based regularizer to encourage diversity in the selected examples. Empirically, we demonstrate significant improvements over standard retrieval methods across a suite of classification tasks, highlighting the benefits of structure-aware, diverse example selection for ICL in real-world, label-scarce scenarios.
Authors: Johann Schmidt, Sebastian Stober, Joachim Denzler, Paul Bodesheim
Abstract: Fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) requires distinguishing between visually similar categories through subtle, localized features - a task that remains challenging due to high intra-class variability and limited inter-class differences. Existing part-based methods often rely on complex localization networks that learn mappings from pixel to sample space, requiring a deep understanding of image content while limiting feature utility for downstream tasks. In addition, sampled points frequently suffer from high spatial redundancy, making it difficult to quantify the optimal number of required parts. Inspired by human saccadic vision, we propose a two-stage process that first extracts peripheral features (coarse view) and generates a sample map, from which fixation patches are sampled and encoded in parallel using a weight-shared encoder. We employ contextualized selective attention to weigh the impact of each fixation patch before fusing peripheral and focus representations. To prevent spatial collapse - a common issue in part-based methods - we utilize non-maximum suppression during fixation sampling to eliminate redundancy. Comprehensive evaluation on standard FGVC benchmarks (CUB-200-2011, NABirds, Food-101 and Stanford-Dogs) and challenging insect datasets (EU-Moths, Ecuador-Moths and AMI-Moths) demonstrates that our method achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art approaches while consistently outperforming our baseline encoder.
Authors: Chi Yang, Fu Wang, Xiaofei Yang, Hao Huang, Weijia Cao, Xiaowen Chu
Abstract: Cloud phase profiles are critical for numerical weather prediction (NWP), as they directly affect radiative transfer and precipitation processes. In this study, we present a benchmark dataset and a baseline framework for transforming multimodal satellite observations into detailed 3D cloud phase structures, aiming toward operational cloud phase profile retrieval and future integration with NWP systems to improve cloud microphysics parameterization. The multimodal observations consist of (1) high--spatiotemporal--resolution, multi-band visible (VIS) and thermal infrared (TIR) imagery from geostationary satellites, and (2) accurate vertical cloud phase profiles from spaceborne lidar (CALIOP\slash CALIPSO) and radar (CPR\slash CloudSat). The dataset consists of synchronized image--profile pairs across diverse cloud regimes, defining a supervised learning task: given VIS/TIR patches, predict the corresponding 3D cloud phase structure. We adopt SGMAGNet as the main model and compare it with several baseline architectures, including UNet variants and SegNet, all designed to capture multi-scale spatial patterns. Model performance is evaluated using standard classification metrics, including Precision, Recall, F1-score, and IoU. The results demonstrate that SGMAGNet achieves superior performance in cloud phase reconstruction, particularly in complex multi-layer and boundary transition regions. Quantitatively, SGMAGNet attains a Precision of 0.922, Recall of 0.858, F1-score of 0.763, and an IoU of 0.617, significantly outperforming all baselines across these key metrics.
Authors: Jonas Mayer Martins, Ali Hamza Bashir, Muhammad Rehan Khalid, Lisa Beinborn
Abstract: Children efficiently acquire language not just by listening, but by interacting with others in their social environment. Conversely, large language models are typically trained with next-word prediction on massive amounts of text. Motivated by this contrast, we investigate whether language models can be trained with less data by learning not only from next-word prediction but also from high-level, cognitively inspired feedback. We train a student model to generate stories, which a teacher model rates on readability, narrative coherence, and creativity. By varying the amount of pretraining before the feedback loop, we assess the impact of this interactive learning on formal and functional linguistic competence. We find that the high-level feedback is highly data efficient: With just 1 M words of input in interactive learning, storytelling skills can improve as much as with 410 M words of next-word prediction.
Authors: Quanhao Qian, Guoyang Zhao, Gongjie Zhang, Jiuniu Wang, Ran Xu, Junlong Gao, Deli Zhao
Abstract: Effective robotic manipulation relies on a precise understanding of 3D scene geometry, and one of the most straightforward ways to acquire such geometry is through multi-view observations. Motivated by this, we present GP3 -- a 3D geometry-aware robotic manipulation policy that leverages multi-view input. GP3 employs a spatial encoder to infer dense spatial features from RGB observations, which enable the estimation of depth and camera parameters, leading to a compact yet expressive 3D scene representation tailored for manipulation. This representation is fused with language instructions and translated into continuous actions via a lightweight policy head. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that GP3 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on simulated benchmarks. Furthermore, GP3 transfers effectively to real-world robots without depth sensors or pre-mapped environments, requiring only minimal fine-tuning. These results highlight GP3 as a practical, sensor-agnostic solution for geometry-aware robotic manipulation.
Authors: Han Ye, Haofu Wang, Yunchi Zhang, Jiangjian Xiao, Yuqiang Jin, Jinyuan Liu, Wen-An Zhang, Uladzislau Sychou, Alexander Tuzikov, Vladislav Sobolevskii, Valerii Zakharov, Boris Sokolov, Minglei Fu
Abstract: Reconstructing building floor plans from point cloud data is key for indoor navigation, BIM, and precise measurements. Traditional methods like geometric algorithms and Mask R-CNN-based deep learning often face issues with noise, limited generalization, and loss of geometric details. We propose FloorSAM, a framework that integrates point cloud density maps with the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for accurate floor plan reconstruction from LiDAR data. Using grid-based filtering, adaptive resolution projection, and image enhancement, we create robust top-down density maps. FloorSAM uses SAM's zero-shot learning for precise room segmentation, improving reconstruction across diverse layouts. Room masks are generated via adaptive prompt points and multistage filtering, followed by joint mask and point cloud analysis for contour extraction and regularization. This produces accurate floor plans and recovers room topological relationships. Tests on Giblayout and ISPRS datasets show better accuracy, recall, and robustness than traditional methods, especially in noisy and complex settings. Code and materials: github.com/Silentbarber/FloorSAM.
Authors: Mohit Sharma, Amit Jayant Deshpande, Chiranjib Bhattacharyya, Rajiv Ratn Shah
Abstract: To fix the 'bias in, bias out' problem in fair machine learning, it is important to steer feature distributions of data or internal representations of Large Language Models (LLMs) to ideal ones that guarantee group-fair outcomes. Previous work on fair generative models and representation steering could greatly benefit from provable fairness guarantees on the model output. We define a distribution as ideal if the minimizer of any cost-sensitive risk on it is guaranteed to have exact group-fair outcomes (e.g., demographic parity, equal opportunity)-in other words, it has no fairness-utility trade-off. We formulate an optimization program for optimal steering by finding the nearest ideal distribution in KL-divergence, and provide efficient algorithms for it when the underlying distributions come from well-known parametric families (e.g., normal, log-normal). Empirically, our optimal steering techniques on both synthetic and real-world datasets improve fairness without diminishing utility (and sometimes even improve utility). We demonstrate affine steering of LLM representations to reduce bias in multi-class classification, e.g., occupation prediction from a short biography in Bios dataset (De-Arteaga et al.). Furthermore, we steer internal representations of LLMs towards desired outputs so that it works equally well across different groups.
Authors: Xiang Chen, Fengting Zhang, Qinghao Liu, Min Liu, Kun Wu, Yaonan Wang, Hang Zhang
Abstract: Deep learning has revolutionized image registration by its ability to handle diverse tasks while achieving significant speed advantages over conventional approaches. Current approaches, however, often employ globally uniform smoothness constraints that fail to accommodate the complex, regionally varying deformations characteristic of anatomical motion. To address this limitation, we propose SegReg, a Segmentation-driven Registration framework that implements anatomically adaptive regularization by exploiting region-specific deformation patterns. Our SegReg first decomposes input moving and fixed images into anatomically coherent subregions through segmentation. These localized domains are then processed by the same registration backbone to compute optimized partial deformation fields, which are subsequently integrated into a global deformation field. SegReg achieves near-perfect structural alignment (98.23% Dice on critical anatomies) using ground-truth segmentation, and outperforms existing methods by 2-12% across three clinical registration scenarios (cardiac, abdominal, and lung images) even with automatic segmentation. Our SegReg demonstrates a near-linear dependence of registration accuracy on segmentation quality, transforming the registration challenge into a segmentation problem. The source code will be released upon manuscript acceptance.
Authors: Runjie Shao, Boyu Diao, Zijia An, Ruiqi Liu, Yongjun Xu
Abstract: To meet the demands of applications like robotics and autonomous driving that require real-time responses to dynamic environments, efficient continual learning methods suitable for edge devices have attracted increasing attention. In this transition, using frozen pretrained models with prompts has become a mainstream strategy to combat catastrophic forgetting. However, this approach introduces a new critical bottleneck: plasticity loss, where the model's ability to learn new knowledge diminishes due to the frozen backbone and the limited capacity of prompt parameters. We argue that the reduction in plasticity stems from a lack of update vitality in underutilized parameters during the training process. To this end, we propose the Continual Backpropagation Prompt Network (CBPNet), an effective and parameter efficient framework designed to restore the model's learning vitality. We innovatively integrate an Efficient CBP Block that counteracts plasticity decay by adaptively reinitializing these underutilized parameters. Experimental results on edge devices demonstrate CBPNet's effectiveness across multiple benchmarks. On Split CIFAR-100, it improves average accuracy by over 1% against a strong baseline, and on the more challenging Split ImageNet-R, it achieves a state of the art accuracy of 69.41%. This is accomplished by training additional parameters that constitute less than 0.2% of the backbone's size, validating our approach.
Authors: Xuefeng Liu, Mingxuan Cao, Songhao Jiang, Xiao Luo, Xiaotian Duan, Mengdi Wang, Tobin R. Sosnick, Jinbo Xu, Rick Stevens
Abstract: The goal of protein design is to generate amino acid sequences that fold into functional structures with desired properties. Prior methods combining autoregressive language models with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) struggle with long-range dependencies and suffer from an impractically large search space. We propose MCTD-ME, Monte Carlo Tree Diffusion with Multiple Experts, which integrates masked diffusion models with tree search to enable multi-token planning and efficient exploration. Unlike autoregressive planners, MCTD-ME uses biophysical-fidelity-enhanced diffusion denoising as the rollout engine, jointly revising multiple positions and scaling to large sequence spaces. It further leverages experts of varying capacities to enrich exploration, guided by a pLDDT-based masking schedule that targets low-confidence regions while preserving reliable residues. We propose a novel multi-expert selection rule (PH-UCT-ME) extends predictive-entropy UCT to expert ensembles. On the inverse folding task (CAMEO and PDB benchmarks), MCTD-ME outperforms single-expert and unguided baselines in both sequence recovery (AAR) and structural similarity (scTM), with gains increasing for longer proteins and benefiting from multi-expert guidance. More generally, the framework is model-agnostic and applicable beyond inverse folding, including de novo protein engineering and multi-objective molecular generation.
Authors: Max Studt, Georg Schildbach
Abstract: Achieving safe and coordinated behavior in dynamic, constraint-rich environments remains a major challenge for learning-based control. Pure end-to-end learning often suffers from poor sample efficiency and limited reliability, while model-based methods depend on predefined references and struggle to generalize. We propose a hierarchical framework that combines tactical decision-making via reinforcement learning (RL) with low-level execution through Model Predictive Control (MPC). For the case of multi-agent systems this means that high-level policies select abstract targets from structured regions of interest (ROIs), while MPC ensures dynamically feasible and safe motion. Tested on a predator-prey benchmark, our approach outperforms end-to-end and shielding-based RL baselines in terms of reward, safety, and consistency, underscoring the benefits of combining structured learning with model-based control.
Authors: Kehua Chen
Abstract: Current state-of-the-art video understanding methods typically struggle with two critical challenges: (1) the computational infeasibility of processing every frame in dense video content and (2) the difficulty in identifying semantically significant frames through naive uniform sampling strategies. In this paper, we propose a novel video understanding framework, called ChronoForge-RL, which combines Temporal Apex Distillation (TAD) and KeyFrame-aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (KF-GRPO) to tackle these issues. Concretely, we introduce a differentiable keyframe selection mechanism that systematically identifies semantic inflection points through a three-stage process to enhance computational efficiency while preserving temporal information. Then, two particular modules are proposed to enable effective temporal reasoning: Firstly, TAD leverages variation scoring, inflection detection, and prioritized distillation to select the most informative frames. Secondly, we introduce KF-GRPO which implements a contrastive learning paradigm with a saliency-enhanced reward mechanism that explicitly incentivizes models to leverage both frame content and temporal relationships. Finally, our proposed ChronoForge-RL achieves 69.1% on VideoMME and 52.7% on LVBench compared to baseline methods, clearly surpassing previous approaches while enabling our 7B parameter model to achieve performance comparable to 72B parameter alternatives.
Authors: Fangjian Shen, Zifeng Liang, Chao Wang, Wushao Wen
Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) models exhibit a significant yet under-explored "brand bias", a tendency to generate contents featuring dominant commercial brands from generic prompts, posing ethical and legal risks. We propose CIDER, a novel, model-agnostic framework to mitigate bias at inference-time through prompt refinement to avoid costly retraining. CIDER uses a lightweight detector to identify branded content and a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to generate stylistically divergent alternatives. We introduce the Brand Neutrality Score (BNS) to quantify this issue and perform extensive experiments on leading T2I models. Results show CIDER significantly reduces both explicit and implicit biases while maintaining image quality and aesthetic appeal. Our work offers a practical solution for more original and equitable content, contributing to the development of trustworthy generative AI.
Authors: Chen Wang, Zeyuan Ma, Zhiguang Cao, Yue-Jiao Gong
Abstract: To relieve intensive human-expertise required to design optimization algorithms, recent Meta-Black-Box Optimization (MetaBBO) researches leverage generalization strength of meta-learning to train neural network-based algorithm design policies over a predefined training problem set, which automates the adaptability of the low-level optimizers on unseen problem instances. Currently, a common training problem set choice in existing MetaBBOs is well-known benchmark suites CoCo-BBOB. Although such choice facilitates the MetaBBO's development, problem instances in CoCo-BBOB are more or less limited in diversity, raising the risk of overfitting of MetaBBOs, which might further results in poor generalization. In this paper, we propose an instance generation approach, termed as \textbf{LSRE}, which could generate diverse training problem instances for MetaBBOs to learn more generalizable policies. LSRE first trains an autoencoder which maps high-dimensional problem features into a 2-dimensional latent space. Uniform-grid sampling in this latent space leads to hidden representations of problem instances with sufficient diversity. By leveraging a genetic-programming approach to search function formulas with minimal L2-distance to these hidden representations, LSRE reverse engineers a diversified problem set, termed as \textbf{Diverse-BBO}. We validate the effectiveness of LSRE by training various MetaBBOs on Diverse-BBO and observe their generalization performances on either synthetic or realistic scenarios. Extensive experimental results underscore the superiority of Diverse-BBO to existing training set choices in MetaBBOs. Further ablation studies not only demonstrate the effectiveness of design choices in LSRE, but also reveal interesting insights on instance diversity and MetaBBO's generalization.
Authors: Sara Rajaee, Rochelle Choenni, Ekaterina Shutova, Christof Monz
Abstract: While the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, it remains unclear how such ability varies across languages in multilingual LLMs and whether different languages produce reasoning paths that complement each other. To investigate this question, we train a reward model to rank generated responses for a given question across languages. Our results show that our cross-lingual reward model substantially improves mathematical reasoning performance compared to using reward modeling within a single language, benefiting even high-resource languages. While English often exhibits the highest performance in multilingual models, we find that cross-lingual sampling particularly benefits English under low sampling budgets. Our findings reveal new opportunities to improve multilingual reasoning by leveraging the complementary strengths of diverse languages.
Authors: Piotr Faliszewski, Krzysztof Sornat, Stanis{\l}aw Szufa, Tomasz W\k{a}s
Abstract: In the k-Kemeny problem, we are given an ordinal election, i.e., a collection of votes ranking the candidates from best to worst, and we seek the smallest number of swaps of adjacent candidates that ensure that the election has at most k different rankings. We study this problem for a number of structured domains, including the single-peaked, single-crossing, group-separable, and Euclidean ones. We obtain two kinds of results: (1) We show that k-Kemeny remains intractable under most of these domains, even for k=2, and (2) we use k-Kemeny to rank these domains in terms of their diversity.
Authors: Rikuto Kotoge, Zheng Chen, Tasuku Kimura, Yasuko Matsubara, Takufumi Yanagisawa, Haruhiko Kishima, Yasushi Sakurai
Abstract: Dynamic GNNs, which integrate temporal and spatial features in Electroencephalography (EEG) data, have shown great potential in automating seizure detection. However, fully capturing the underlying dynamics necessary to represent brain states, such as seizure and non-seizure, remains a non-trivial task and presents two fundamental challenges. First, most existing dynamic GNN methods are built on temporally fixed static graphs, which fail to reflect the evolving nature of brain connectivity during seizure progression. Second, current efforts to jointly model temporal signals and graph structures and, more importantly, their interactions remain nascent, often resulting in inconsistent performance. To address these challenges, we present the first theoretical analysis of these two problems, demonstrating the effectiveness and necessity of explicit dynamic modeling and time-then-graph dynamic GNN method. Building on these insights, we propose EvoBrain, a novel seizure detection model that integrates a two-stream Mamba architecture with a GCN enhanced by Laplacian Positional Encoding, following neurological insights. Moreover, EvoBrain incorporates explicitly dynamic graph structures, allowing both nodes and edges to evolve over time. Our contributions include (a) a theoretical analysis proving the expressivity advantage of explicit dynamic modeling and time-then-graph over other approaches, (b) a novel and efficient model that significantly improves AUROC by 23% and F1 score by 30%, compared with the dynamic GNN baseline, and (c) broad evaluations of our method on the challenging early seizure prediction tasks.
Authors: Manajit Das, Ajnabiul Hoque, Mayank Baranwal, Raghavan B. Sunoj
Abstract: Prediction of complete step-by-step chemical reaction mechanisms (CRMs) remains a major challenge. Whereas the traditional approaches in CRM tasks rely on expert-driven experiments or costly quantum chemical computations, contemporary deep learning (DL) alternatives ignore key intermediates and mechanistic steps and often suffer from hallucinations. We present DeepMech, an interpretable graph-based DL framework employing atom- and bond-level attention, guided by generalized templates of mechanistic operations (TMOps), to generate CRMs. Trained on our curated ReactMech dataset (~30K CRMs with 100K atom-mapped and mass-balanced elementary steps), DeepMech achieves 98.98+/-0.12% accuracy in predicting elementary steps and 95.94+/-0.21% in complete CRM tasks, besides maintaining high fidelity even in out-of-distribution scenarios as well as in predicting side and/or byproducts. Extension to multistep CRMs relevant to prebiotic chemistry, demonstrates the ability of DeepMech in effectively reconstructing pathways from simple primordial substrates to complex biomolecules such as serine and aldopentose. Attention analysis identifies reactive atoms/bonds in line with chemical intuition, rendering our model interpretable and suitable for reaction design.
Authors: Xingmei Wang, Xiaoyu Hu, Chengkai Huang, Ziyan Zeng, Guohao Nie, Quan Z. Sheng, Lina Yao
Abstract: Bridging 2D and 3D sensor modalities is critical for robust perception in autonomous systems. However, image-to-point cloud (I2P) registration remains challenging due to the semantic-geometric gap between texture-rich but depth-ambiguous images and sparse yet metrically precise point clouds, as well as the tendency of existing methods to converge to local optima. To overcome these limitations, we introduce CrossI2P, a self-supervised framework that unifies cross-modal learning and two-stage registration in a single end-to-end pipeline. First, we learn a geometric-semantic fused embedding space via dual-path contrastive learning, enabling annotation-free, bidirectional alignment of 2D textures and 3D structures. Second, we adopt a coarse-to-fine registration paradigm: a global stage establishes superpoint-superpixel correspondences through joint intra-modal context and cross-modal interaction modeling, followed by a geometry-constrained point-level refinement for precise registration. Third, we employ a dynamic training mechanism with gradient normalization to balance losses for feature alignment, correspondence refinement, and pose estimation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CrossI2P outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 23.7% on the KITTI Odometry benchmark and by 37.9% on nuScenes, significantly improving both accuracy and robustness.
Authors: Xiaosheng Long, Hanyu Wang, Zhentao Song, Kun Luo, Hongde Liu
Abstract: Recent retrieval-augmented image captioning methods incorporate external knowledge to compensate for the limitations in comprehending complex scenes. However, current approaches face challenges in relation modeling: (1) the representation of semantic prompts is too coarse-grained to capture fine-grained relationships; (2) these methods lack explicit modeling of image objects and their semantic relationships. To address these limitations, we propose RACap, a relation-aware retrieval-augmented model for image captioning, which not only mines structured relation semantics from retrieval captions, but also identifies heterogeneous objects from the image. RACap effectively retrieves structured relation features that contain heterogeneous visual information to enhance the semantic consistency and relational expressiveness. Experimental results show that RACap, with only 10.8M trainable parameters, achieves superior performance compared to previous lightweight captioning models.
Authors: Senkang Hu, Xudong Han, Jinqi Jiang, Yihang Tao, Zihan Fang, Sam Tak Wu Kwong, Yuguang Fang
Abstract: Adapting billion-parameter language models to a downstream task is still costly, even with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). We re-cast task adaptation as output-distribution alignment: the objective is to steer the output distribution toward the task distribution directly during decoding rather than indirectly through weight updates. Building on this view, we introduce Steering Vector Decoding (SVD), a lightweight, PEFT-compatible, and theoretically grounded method. We start with a short warm-start fine-tune and extract a task-aware steering vector from the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence gradient between the output distribution of the warm-started and pre-trained models. This steering vector is then used to guide the decoding process to steer the model's output distribution towards the task distribution. We theoretically prove that SVD is first-order equivalent to the gradient step of full fine-tuning and derive a globally optimal solution for the strength of the steering vector. Across three tasks and nine benchmarks, SVD paired with four standard PEFT methods improves multiple-choice accuracy by up to 5 points and open-ended truthfulness by 2 points, with similar gains (1-2 points) on commonsense datasets without adding trainable parameters beyond the PEFT adapter. SVD thus offers a lightweight, theoretically grounded path to stronger task adaptation for large language models.
Authors: Mohamed Ebbed, Zorah L\"ahner
Abstract: Dynamic scene reconstruction from multi-view videos remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. While recent neural surface reconstruction methods have achieved remarkable results in static 3D reconstruction, extending these approaches with comparable quality for dynamic scenes introduces significant computational and representational challenges. Existing dynamic methods focus on novel-view synthesis, therefore, their extracted meshes tend to be noisy. Even approaches aiming for geometric fidelity often result in too smooth meshes due to the ill-posedness of the problem. We present a novel framework for highly detailed dynamic reconstruction that extends the static 3D reconstruction method NeuralAngelo to work in dynamic settings. To that end, we start with a high-quality template scene reconstruction from the initial frame using NeuralAngelo, and then jointly optimize deformation fields that track the template and refine it based on the temporal sequence. This flexible template allows updating the geometry to include changes that cannot be modeled with the deformation field, for instance occluded parts or the changes in the topology. We show superior reconstruction accuracy in comparison to previous state-of-the-art methods on the ActorsHQ dataset.
Authors: Henning H\"ofener (Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS, Bremen, Germany), Farina Kock (Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS, Bremen, Germany), Martina Pontones (Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, University Hospital Erlangen, Erlangen, Germany), Tabita Ghete (Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, University Hospital Erlangen, Erlangen, Germany, Bavarian Cancer Research Center), David Pfrang (Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS, Bremen, Germany), Nicholas Dickel (Medical Informatics, Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-N\"urnberg, Erlangen, Germany), Meik Kunz (Medical Informatics, Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-N\"urnberg, Erlangen, Germany), Daniela P. Schacherer (Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS, Bremen, Germany), David A. Clunie (PixelMed Publishing LLC, Bangor, PA, USA), Andrey Fedorov (Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA), Max Westphal (Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS, Bremen, Germany), Markus Metzler (Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, University Hospital Erlangen, Erlangen, Germany, Bavarian Cancer Research Center, Comprehensive Cancer Center Erlangen-EMN, Erlangen, Germany)
Abstract: Leukemia diagnosis primarily relies on manual microscopic analysis of bone marrow morphology supported by additional laboratory parameters, making it complex and time consuming. While artificial intelligence (AI) solutions have been proposed, most utilize private datasets and only cover parts of the diagnostic pipeline. Therefore, we present a large, high-quality, publicly available leukemia bone marrow dataset spanning the entire diagnostic process, from cell detection to diagnosis. Using this dataset, we further propose methods for cell detection, cell classification, and diagnosis prediction. The dataset comprises 246 pediatric patients with diagnostic, clinical and laboratory information, over 40 000 cells with bounding box annotations and more than 28 000 of these with high-quality class labels, making it the most comprehensive dataset publicly available. Evaluation of the AI models yielded an average precision of 0.96 for the cell detection, an area under the curve of 0.98, and an F1-score of 0.61 for the 33-class cell classification, and a mean F1-score of 0.90 for the diagnosis prediction using predicted cell counts. While the proposed approaches demonstrate their usefulness for AI-assisted diagnostics, the dataset will foster further research and development in the field, ultimately contributing to more precise diagnoses and improved patient outcomes.
Authors: Frederic Kirstein, Sonu Kumar, Terry Ruas, Bela Gipp
Abstract: Meeting summarization with large language models (LLMs) remains error-prone, often producing outputs with hallucinations, omissions, and irrelevancies. We present FRAME, a modular pipeline that reframes summarization as a semantic enrichment task. FRAME extracts and scores salient facts, organizes them thematically, and uses these to enrich an outline into an abstractive summary. To personalize summaries, we introduce SCOPE, a reason-out-loud protocol that has the model build a reasoning trace by answering nine questions before content selection. For evaluation, we propose P-MESA, a multi-dimensional, reference-free evaluation framework to assess if a summary fits a target reader. P-MESA reliably identifies error instances, achieving >= 89% balanced accuracy against human annotations and strongly aligns with human severity ratings (r >= 0.70). On QMSum and FAME, FRAME reduces hallucination and omission by 2 out of 5 points (measured with MESA), while SCOPE improves knowledge fit and goal alignment over prompt-only baselines. Our findings advocate for rethinking summarization to improve control, faithfulness, and personalization.
Authors: Zhenhao Zhou, Salman Bin Kashif, Dawei Feng, Jin-Hu Dou, Kaihang Shi, Tao Deng, Zhenpeng Yao
Abstract: Nanoporous materials hold promise for diverse sustainable applications, yet their vast chemical space poses challenges for efficient design. Machine learning offers a compelling pathway to accelerate the exploration, but existing models lack either interpretability or fidelity for elucidating the correlation between crystal geometry and property. Here, we report a three-dimensional periodic space sampling method that decomposes large nanoporous structures into local geometrical sites for combined property prediction and site-wise contribution quantification. Trained with a constructed database and retrieved datasets, our model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and data efficiency for property prediction on gas storage, separation, and electrical conduction. Meanwhile, this approach enables the interpretation of the prediction and allows for accurate identification of significant local sites for targeted properties. Through identifying transferable high-performance sites across diverse nanoporous frameworks, our model paves the way for interpretable, symmetry-aware nanoporous materials design, which is extensible to other materials, like molecular crystals and beyond.
Authors: Remo Sasso, Michelangelo Conserva, Dominik Jeurissen, Paulo Rauber
Abstract: While reinforcement learning from scratch has shown impressive results in solving sequential decision-making tasks with efficient simulators, real-world applications with expensive interactions require more sample-efficient agents. Foundation models (FMs) are natural candidates to improve sample efficiency as they possess broad knowledge and reasoning capabilities, but it is yet unclear how to effectively integrate them into the reinforcement learning framework. In this paper, we anticipate and, most importantly, evaluate two promising strategies. First, we consider the use of foundation world models (FWMs) that exploit the prior knowledge of FMs to enable training and evaluating agents with simulated interactions. Second, we consider the use of foundation agents (FAs) that exploit the reasoning capabilities of FMs for decision-making. We evaluate both approaches empirically in a family of grid-world environments that are suitable for the current generation of large language models (LLMs). Our results suggest that improvements in LLMs already translate into better FWMs and FAs; that FAs based on current LLMs can already provide excellent policies for sufficiently simple environments; and that the coupling of FWMs and reinforcement learning agents is highly promising for more complex settings with partial observability and stochastic elements.
Authors: Zhiyu Mou, Yiqin Lv, Miao Xu, Cheems Wang, Yixiu Mao, Qichen Ye, Chao Li, Rongquan Bai, Chuan Yu, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng
Abstract: Auto-bidding is an essential tool for advertisers to enhance their advertising performance. Recent progress has shown that AI-Generated Bidding (AIGB), which formulates the auto-bidding as a trajectory generation task and trains a conditional diffusion-based planner on offline data, achieves superior and stable performance compared to typical offline reinforcement learning (RL)-based auto-bidding methods. However, existing AIGB methods still encounter a performance bottleneck due to their neglect of fine-grained generation quality evaluation and inability to explore beyond static datasets. To address this, we propose AIGB-Pearl (\emph{Planning with EvAluator via RL}), a novel method that integrates generative planning and policy optimization. The key to AIGB-Pearl is to construct a non-bootstrapped \emph{trajectory evaluator} to assign rewards and guide policy search, enabling the planner to optimize its generation quality iteratively through interaction. Furthermore, to enhance trajectory evaluator accuracy in offline settings, we incorporate three key techniques: (i) a Large Language Model (LLM)-based architecture for better representational capacity, (ii) hybrid point-wise and pair-wise losses for better score learning, and (iii) adaptive integration of expert feedback for better generalization ability. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world advertising systems demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our approach.
Authors: Wenjun Cao
Abstract: Large language models improve with scale, yet feedback-based alignment still exhibits systematic deviations from intended behavior. Motivated by bounded rationality in economics and cognitive science, we view judgment as resource-limited and feedback as a constrained channel. On this basis, we model the loop as a two-stage cascade $U \to H \to Y$ given $S$, with cognitive capacity $C_{\text{cog}|S}$ and average total capacity $\bar{C}_{\text{tot}|S}$. Our main result is a capacity-coupled Alignment Performance Interval. It pairs a data size-independent Fano lower bound proved on a separable codebook mixture with a PAC-Bayes upper bound whose KL term is controlled by the same channel via $m \, \bar{C}_{\text{tot}|S}$. The PAC-Bayes bound becomes an upper bound on the same true risk when the canonical observable loss is used and the dataset is drawn from the same mixture. Under these matched conditions, both limits are governed by a single capacity. Consequences include that, with value complexity and capacity fixed, adding labels alone cannot cross the bound; attaining lower risk on more complex targets requires capacity that grows with $\log M$; and once useful signal saturates capacity, further optimization tends to fit channel regularities, consistent with reports of sycophancy and reward hacking. The analysis views alignment as interface engineering: measure and allocate limited capacity, manage task complexity, and decide where information is spent.
Authors: Shaopeng Zhai, Qi Zhang, Tianyi Zhang, Fuxian Huang, Haoran Zhang, Ming Zhou, Shengzhe Zhang, Litao Liu, Sixu Lin, Jiangmiao Pang
Abstract: Robotic real-world reinforcement learning (RL) with vision-language-action (VLA) models is bottlenecked by sparse, handcrafted rewards and inefficient exploration. We introduce VLAC, a general process reward model built upon InternVL and trained on large scale heterogeneous datasets. Given pairwise observations and a language goal, it outputs dense progress delta and done signal, eliminating task-specific reward engineering, and supports one-shot in-context transfer to unseen tasks and environments. VLAC is trained on vision-language datasets to strengthen perception, dialogic and reasoning capabilities, together with robot and human trajectories data that ground action generation and progress estimation, and additionally strengthened to reject irrelevant prompts as well as detect regression or stagnation by constructing large numbers of negative and semantically mismatched samples. With prompt control, a single VLAC model alternately generating reward and action tokens, unifying critic and policy. Deployed inside an asynchronous real-world RL loop, we layer a graded human-in-the-loop protocol (offline demonstration replay, return and explore, human guided explore) that accelerates exploration and stabilizes early learning. Across four distinct real-world manipulation tasks, VLAC lifts success rates from about 30\% to about 90\% within 200 real-world interaction episodes; incorporating human-in-the-loop interventions yields a further 50% improvement in sample efficiency and achieves up to 100% final success.
Authors: Graham Clyne, Guillaume Couairon, Guillaume Gastineau, Claire Monteleoni, Anastase Charantonis
Abstract: Climate projections have uncertainties related to components of the climate system and their interactions. A typical approach to quantifying these uncertainties is to use climate models to create ensembles of repeated simulations under different initial conditions. Due to the complexity of these simulations, generating such ensembles of projections is computationally expensive. In this work, we present ArchesClimate, a deep learning-based climate model emulator that aims to reduce this cost. ArchesClimate is trained on decadal hindcasts of the IPSL-CM6A-LR climate model at a spatial resolution of approximately 2.5x1.25 degrees. We train a flow matching model following ArchesWeatherGen, which we adapt to predict near-term climate. Once trained, the model generates states at a one-month lead time and can be used to auto-regressively emulate climate model simulations of any length. We show that for up to 10 years, these generations are stable and physically consistent. We also show that for several important climate variables, ArchesClimate generates simulations that are interchangeable with the IPSL model. This work suggests that climate model emulators could significantly reduce the cost of climate model simulations.
Authors: Gang Yang, Yue Lei, Wenxin Tai, Jin Wu, Jia Chen, Ting Zhong, Fan Zhou
Abstract: Diffusion and flow matching (FM) models have achieved remarkable progress in speech enhancement (SE), yet their dependence on multi-step generation is computationally expensive and vulnerable to discretization errors. Recent advances in one-step generative modeling, particularly MeanFlow, provide a promising alternative by reformulating dynamics through average velocity fields. In this work, we present COSE, a one-step FM framework tailored for SE. To address the high training overhead of Jacobian-vector product (JVP) computations in MeanFlow, we introduce a velocity composition identity to compute average velocity efficiently, eliminating expensive computation while preserving theoretical consistency and achieving competitive enhancement quality. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that COSE delivers up to 5x faster sampling and reduces training cost by 40%, all without compromising speech quality. Code is available at https://github.com/ICDM-UESTC/COSE.
Authors: Zhuoyue Zhang, Haitong Xu
Abstract: Autonomous navigation in maritime domains is accelerating alongside advances in artificial intelligence, sensing, and connectivity. Opaque decision-making and poorly calibrated human-automation interaction remain key barriers to safe adoption. This article synthesizes 100 studies on automation transparency for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) spanning situation awareness (SA), human factors, interface design, and regulation. We (i) map the Guidance-Navigation-Control stack to shore-based operational modes -- remote supervision (RSM) and remote control (RCM) -- and identify where human unsafe control actions (Human-UCAs) concentrate in handover and emergency loops; (ii) summarize evidence that transparency features (decision rationales, alternatives, confidence/uncertainty, and rule-compliance indicators) improve understanding and support trust calibration, though reliability and predictability often dominate trust; (iii) distill design strategies for transparency at three layers: sensor/SA acquisition and fusion, HMI/eHMI presentation (textual/graphical overlays, color coding, conversational and immersive UIs), and engineer-facing processes (resilient interaction design, validation, and standardization). We integrate methods for Human-UCA identification (STPA-Cog + IDAC), quantitative trust/SA assessment, and operator workload monitoring, and outline regulatory and rule-based implications including COLREGs formalization and route exchange. We conclude with an adaptive transparency framework that couples operator state estimation with explainable decision support to reduce cognitive overload and improve takeover timeliness. The review highlights actionable figure-of-merit displays (e.g., CPA/TCPA risk bars, robustness heatmaps), transparent model outputs (rule traceability, confidence), and training pipelines (HIL/MIL, simulation) as near-term levers for safer MASS operations.
Authors: Tianyu Li (Charlie), Yan Xin (Charlie), Jianzhong (Charlie), Zhang
Abstract: Reliable channel estimation (CE) is fundamental for robust communication in dynamic wireless environments, where models must generalize across varying conditions such as signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), the number of resource blocks (RBs), and channel profiles. Traditional deep learning (DL)-based methods struggle to generalize effectively across such diverse settings, particularly under multitask and zero-shot scenarios. In this work, we propose MoE-CE, a flexible mixture-of-experts (MoE) framework designed to enhance the generalization capability of DL-based CE methods. MoE-CE provides an appropriate inductive bias by leveraging multiple expert subnetworks, each specialized in distinct channel characteristics, and a learned router that dynamically selects the most relevant experts per input. This architecture enhances model capacity and adaptability without a proportional rise in computational cost while being agnostic to the choice of the backbone model and the learning algorithm. Through extensive experiments on synthetic datasets generated under diverse SNRs, RB numbers, and channel profiles, including multitask and zero-shot evaluations, we demonstrate that MoE-CE consistently outperforms conventional DL approaches, achieving significant performance gains while maintaining efficiency.
Authors: Chao Yu, Yuanqing Wang, Zhen Guo, Hao Lin, Si Xu, Hongzhi Zang, Quanlu Zhang, Yongji Wu, Chunyang Zhu, Junhao Hu, Zixiao Huang, Mingjie Wei, Yuqing Xie, Ke Yang, Bo Dai, Zhexuan Xu, Xiangyuan Wang, Xu Fu, Zhihao Liu, Kang Chen, Weilin Liu, Gang Liu, Boxun Li, Jianlei Yang, Zhi Yang, Guohao Dai, Yu Wang
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated immense potential in advancing artificial general intelligence, agentic intelligence, and embodied intelligence. However, the inherent heterogeneity and dynamicity of RL workflows often lead to low hardware utilization and slow training on existing systems. In this paper, we present RLinf, a high-performance RL training system based on our key observation that the major roadblock to efficient RL training lies in system flexibility. To maximize flexibility and efficiency, RLinf is built atop a novel RL system design paradigm called macro-to-micro flow transformation (M2Flow), which automatically breaks down high-level, easy-to-compose RL workflows at both the temporal and spatial dimensions, and recomposes them into optimized execution flows. Supported by RLinf worker's adaptive communication capability, we devise context switching and elastic pipelining to realize M2Flow transformation, and a profiling-guided scheduling policy to generate optimal execution plans. Extensive evaluations on both reasoning RL and embodied RL tasks demonstrate that RLinf consistently outperforms state-of-the-art systems, achieving 1.1x-2.13x speedup in end-to-end training throughput.
Authors: Baichuan Huang, Ananth Balashankar, Amir Aminifar
Abstract: Fine-tuning all-bias-terms stands out among various parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques, owing to its out-of-the-box usability and competitive performance, especially in low-data regimes. Bias-only fine-tuning has the potential for unprecedented parameter efficiency. However, the link between fine-tuning different bias terms (i.e., bias terms in the query, key, or value projections) and downstream performance remains unclear. The existing approaches, e.g., based on the magnitude of bias change or empirical Fisher information, provide limited guidance for selecting the particular bias term for effective fine-tuning. In this paper, we propose an approach for selecting the bias term to be fine-tuned, forming the foundation of our bias-efficient fine-tuning (BEFT). We extensively evaluate our bias-efficient approach against other bias-selection approaches, across a wide range of large language models (LLMs) spanning encoder-only and decoder-only architectures from 110M to 6.7B parameters. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our bias-efficient approach on diverse downstream tasks, including classification, multiple-choice, and generation tasks.
Authors: Lorenzo Cirillo, Claudio Schiavella, Lorenzo Papa, Paolo Russo, Irene Amerini
Abstract: Explainable artificial intelligence is increasingly employed to understand the decision-making process of deep learning models and create trustworthiness in their adoption. However, the explainability of Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) remains largely unexplored despite its wide deployment in real-world applications. In this work, we study how to analyze MDE networks to map the input image to the predicted depth map. More in detail, we investigate well-established feature attribution methods, Saliency Maps, Integrated Gradients, and Attention Rollout on different computationally complex models for MDE: METER, a lightweight network, and PixelFormer, a deep network. We assess the quality of the generated visual explanations by selectively perturbing the most relevant and irrelevant pixels, as identified by the explainability methods, and analyzing the impact of these perturbations on the model's output. Moreover, since existing evaluation metrics can have some limitations in measuring the validity of visual explanations for MDE, we additionally introduce the Attribution Fidelity. This metric evaluates the reliability of the feature attribution by assessing their consistency with the predicted depth map. Experimental results demonstrate that Saliency Maps and Integrated Gradients have good performance in highlighting the most important input features for MDE lightweight and deep models, respectively. Furthermore, we show that Attribution Fidelity effectively identifies whether an explainability method fails to produce reliable visual maps, even in scenarios where conventional metrics might suggest satisfactory results.
Authors: Yujie Zhu, Charles A. Hepburn, Matthew Thorpe, Giovanni Montana
Abstract: In reinforcement learning with sparse rewards, demonstrations can accelerate learning, but determining when to imitate them remains challenging. We propose Smooth Policy Regularisation from Demonstrations (SPReD), a framework that addresses the fundamental question: when should an agent imitate a demonstration versus follow its own policy? SPReD uses ensemble methods to explicitly model Q-value distributions for both demonstration and policy actions, quantifying uncertainty for comparisons. We develop two complementary uncertainty-aware methods: a probabilistic approach estimating the likelihood of demonstration superiority, and an advantage-based approach scaling imitation by statistical significance. Unlike prevailing methods (e.g. Q-filter) that make binary imitation decisions, SPReD applies continuous, uncertainty-proportional regularisation weights, reducing gradient variance during training. Despite its computational simplicity, SPReD achieves remarkable gains in experiments across eight robotics tasks, outperforming existing approaches by up to a factor of 14 in complex tasks while maintaining robustness to demonstration quality and quantity. Our code is available at https://github.com/YujieZhu7/SPReD.
Authors: Xinchen Wan, Jinhua Liang, Huan Zhang
Abstract: Existing digital mental wellness tools often overlook the nuanced emotional states underlying everyday challenges. For example, pre-sleep anxiety affects more than 1.5 billion people worldwide, yet current approaches remain largely static and "one-size-fits-all", failing to adapt to individual needs. In this work, we present EmoHeal, an end-to-end system that delivers personalized, three-stage supportive narratives. EmoHeal detects 27 fine-grained emotions from user text with a fine-tuned XLM-RoBERTa model, mapping them to musical parameters via a knowledge graph grounded in music therapy principles (GEMS, iso-principle). EmoHeal retrieves audiovisual content using the CLAMP3 model to guide users from their current state toward a calmer one ("match-guide-target"). A within-subjects study (N=40) demonstrated significant supportive effects, with participants reporting substantial mood improvement (M=4.12, p<0.001) and high perceived emotion recognition accuracy (M=4.05, p<0.001). A strong correlation between perceived accuracy and therapeutic outcome (r=0.72, p<0.001) validates our fine-grained approach. These findings establish the viability of theory-driven, emotion-aware digital wellness tools and provides a scalable AI blueprint for operationalizing music therapy principles.
Authors: Aur\'elien Cecille, Stefan Duffner, Franck Davoine, R\'emi Agier, Thibault Neveu
Abstract: Accurate monocular depth estimation is crucial for 3D scene understanding, but existing methods often blur depth at object boundaries, introducing spurious intermediate 3D points. While achieving sharp edges usually requires very fine-grained supervision, our method produces crisp depth discontinuities using only self-supervision. Specifically, we model per-pixel depth as a mixture distribution, capturing multiple plausible depths and shifting uncertainty from direct regression to the mixture weights. This formulation integrates seamlessly into existing pipelines via variance-aware loss functions and uncertainty propagation. Extensive evaluations on KITTI and VKITTIv2 show that our method achieves up to 35% higher boundary sharpness and improves point cloud quality compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors: Qi Wang, Shituo Ma, Guoxin Yu, Hanyang Peng, Yue Yu
Abstract: Voice cloning for Text-to-Speech (TTS) aims to generate expressive and personalized speech from text using limited data from a target speaker. Federated Learning (FL) offers a collaborative and privacy-preserving framework for this task, but existing approaches suffer from high communication costs and tend to suppress stylistic heterogeneity, resulting in insufficient personalization. To address these issues, we propose Fed-PISA, which stands for Federated Personalized Identity-Style Adaptation. To minimize communication costs, Fed-PISA introduces a disentangled Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) mechanism: the speaker's timbre is retained locally through a private ID-LoRA, while only a lightweight style-LoRA is transmitted to the server, thereby minimizing parameter exchange. To harness heterogeneity, our aggregation method, inspired by collaborative filtering, is introduced to create custom models for each client by learning from stylistically similar peers. Experiments show that Fed-PISA improves style expressivity, naturalness, and speaker similarity, outperforming standard federated baselines with minimal communication costs.
Authors: Victor Villar, Juan Cruz-Benito, Ismael Faro, David Kremer
Abstract: This paper investigates artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies for the synthesis and transpilation of permutation circuits across generic topologies. Our approach uses Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to achieve near-optimal synthesis of permutation circuits up to 25 qubits. Rather than developing specialized models for individual topologies, we train a foundational model on a generic rectangular lattice, and employ masking mechanisms to dynamically select subsets of topologies during the synthesis. This enables the synthesis of permutation circuits on any topology that can be embedded within the rectangular lattice, without the need to re-train the model. In this paper we show results for 5x5 lattice and compare them to previous AI topology-oriented models and classical methods, showing that they outperform classical heuristics, and match previous specialized AI models, and performs synthesis even for topologies that were not seen during training. We further show that the model can be fine tuned to strengthen the performance for selected topologies of interest. This methodology allows a single trained model to efficiently synthesize circuits across diverse topologies, allowing its practical integration into transpilation workflows.
Authors: Hong-Yun Lin, Jhen-Ke Lin, Chung-Chun Wang, Hao-Chien Lu, Berlin Chen
Abstract: Spoken Language Assessment (SLA) estimates a learner's oral proficiency from spontaneous speech. The growing population of L2 English speakers has intensified the demand for reliable SLA, a critical component of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). Existing efforts often rely on cascaded pipelines, which are prone to error propagation, or end-to-end models that often operate on a short audio window, which might miss discourse-level evidence. This paper introduces a novel multimodal foundation model approach that performs session-level evaluation in a single pass. Our approach couples multi-target learning with a frozen, Whisper ASR model-based speech prior for acoustic-aware calibration, allowing for jointly learning holistic and trait-level objectives of SLA without resorting to handcrafted features. By coherently processing the entire response session of an L2 speaker, the model excels at predicting holistic oral proficiency. Experiments conducted on the Speak & Improve benchmark demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art cascaded system and exhibits robust cross-part generalization, producing a compact deployable grader that is tailored for CALL applications.
Authors: Sang Hoon Woo, Sehun Lee, Kang-wook Kim, Gunhee Kim
Abstract: Spoken dialogue systems increasingly employ large language models (LLMs) to leverage their advanced reasoning capabilities. However, direct application of LLMs in spoken communication often yield suboptimal results due to mismatches between optimal textual and verbal delivery. While existing approaches adapt LLMs to produce speech-friendly outputs, their impact on reasoning performance remains underexplored. In this work, we propose Think-Verbalize-Speak, a framework that decouples reasoning from spoken delivery to preserve the full reasoning capacity of LLMs. Central to our method is verbalizing, an intermediate step that translates thoughts into natural, speech-ready text. We also introduce ReVerT, a latency-efficient verbalizer based on incremental and asynchronous summarization. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show that our method enhances speech naturalness and conciseness with minimal impact on reasoning. The project page with the dataset and the source code is available at https://yhytoto12.github.io/TVS-ReVerT
Authors: Han Qi, Changhe Chen, Heng Yang
Abstract: A key requirement for generalist robots is compositional generalization - the ability to combine atomic skills to solve complex, long-horizon tasks. While prior work has primarily focused on synthesizing a planner that sequences pre-learned skills, robust execution of the individual skills themselves remains challenging, as visuomotor policies often fail under distribution shifts induced by scene composition. To address this, we introduce a scene graph-based representation that focuses on task-relevant objects and relations, thereby mitigating sensitivity to irrelevant variation. Building on this idea, we develop a scene-graph skill learning framework that integrates graph neural networks with diffusion-based imitation learning, and further combine "focused" scene-graph skills with a vision-language model (VLM) based task planner. Experiments in both simulation and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate substantially higher success rates than state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting improved robustness and compositional generalization in long-horizon tasks.
Authors: Yuchen Ye, Hong Liang, Chaoxia Yuan, Mingyu Li, Aoqi Zhou, Chunqing Shang, Hua Cai, Peixi Liu, Kezuan Wang, Yifeng Zheng
Abstract: Accurate atmospheric wind field information is crucial for various applications, including weather forecasting, aviation safety, and disaster risk reduction. However, obtaining high spatiotemporal resolution wind data remains challenging due to limitations in traditional in-situ observations and remote sensing techniques, as well as the computational expense and biases of numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. This paper introduces G-WindCast, a novel deep learning framework that leverages signal strength variations from 5G Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals to retrieve and forecast three-dimensional (3D) atmospheric wind fields. The framework utilizes Forward Neural Networks (FNN) and Transformer networks to capture complex, nonlinear, and spatiotemporal relationships between GNSS-derived features and wind dynamics. Our preliminary results demonstrate promising accuracy in both wind retrieval and short-term wind forecasting (up to 30 minutes lead time), with skill scores comparable to high-resolution NWP outputs in certain scenarios. The model exhibits robustness across different forecast horizons and pressure levels, and its predictions for wind speed and direction show superior agreement with observations compared to concurrent ERA5 reanalysis data. Furthermore, we show that the system can maintain excellent performance for localized forecasting even with a significantly reduced number of GNSS stations (e.g., around 100), highlighting its cost-effectiveness and scalability. This interdisciplinary approach underscores the transformative potential of exploiting non-traditional data sources and deep learning for advanced environmental monitoring and real-time atmospheric applications.
Authors: Pengteng Li, Pinhao Song, Wuyang Li, Weiyu Guo, Huizai Yao, Yijie Xu, Dugang Liu, Hui Xiong
Abstract: We introduce SEE&TREK, the first training-free prompting framework tailored to enhance the spatial understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMS) under vision-only constraints. While prior efforts have incorporated modalities like depth or point clouds to improve spatial reasoning, purely visualspatial understanding remains underexplored. SEE&TREK addresses this gap by focusing on two core principles: increasing visual diversity and motion reconstruction. For visual diversity, we conduct Maximum Semantic Richness Sampling, which employs an off-the-shell perception model to extract semantically rich keyframes that capture scene structure. For motion reconstruction, we simulate visual trajectories and encode relative spatial positions into keyframes to preserve both spatial relations and temporal coherence. Our method is training&GPU-free, requiring only a single forward pass, and can be seamlessly integrated into existing MLLM'S. Extensive experiments on the VSI-B ENCH and STI-B ENCH show that S EE &T REK consistently boosts various MLLM S performance across diverse spatial reasoning tasks with the most +3.5% improvement, offering a promising path toward stronger spatial intelligence.
Authors: Fangyi Yu, Nabeel Seedat, Dasha Herrmannova, Frank Schilder, Jonathan Richard Schwarz
Abstract: Evaluating long-form answers in high-stakes domains such as law or medicine remains a fundamental challenge. Standard metrics like BLEU and ROUGE fail to capture semantic correctness, and current LLM-based evaluators often reduce nuanced aspects of answer quality into a single undifferentiated score. We introduce DeCE, a decomposed LLM evaluation framework that separates precision (factual accuracy and relevance) and recall (coverage of required concepts), using instance-specific criteria automatically extracted from gold answer requirements. DeCE is model-agnostic and domain-general, requiring no predefined taxonomies or handcrafted rubrics. We instantiate DeCE to evaluate different LLMs on a real-world legal QA task involving multi-jurisdictional reasoning and citation grounding. DeCE achieves substantially stronger correlation with expert judgments ($r=0.78$), compared to traditional metrics ($r=0.12$), pointwise LLM scoring ($r=0.35$), and modern multidimensional evaluators ($r=0.48$). It also reveals interpretable trade-offs: generalist models favor recall, while specialized models favor precision. Importantly, only 11.95% of LLM-generated criteria required expert revision, underscoring DeCE's scalability. DeCE offers an interpretable and actionable LLM evaluation framework in expert domains.
Authors: Kaiwen Zheng, Huayu Chen, Haotian Ye, Haoxiang Wang, Qinsheng Zhang, Kai Jiang, Hang Su, Stefano Ermon, Jun Zhu, Ming-Yu Liu
Abstract: Online reinforcement learning (RL) has been central to post-training language models, but its extension to diffusion models remains challenging due to intractable likelihoods. Recent works discretize the reverse sampling process to enable GRPO-style training, yet they inherit fundamental drawbacks, including solver restrictions, forward-reverse inconsistency, and complicated integration with classifier-free guidance (CFG). We introduce Diffusion Negative-aware FineTuning (DiffusionNFT), a new online RL paradigm that optimizes diffusion models directly on the forward process via flow matching. DiffusionNFT contrasts positive and negative generations to define an implicit policy improvement direction, naturally incorporating reinforcement signals into the supervised learning objective. This formulation enables training with arbitrary black-box solvers, eliminates the need for likelihood estimation, and requires only clean images rather than sampling trajectories for policy optimization. DiffusionNFT is up to $25\times$ more efficient than FlowGRPO in head-to-head comparisons, while being CFG-free. For instance, DiffusionNFT improves the GenEval score from 0.24 to 0.98 within 1k steps, while FlowGRPO achieves 0.95 with over 5k steps and additional CFG employment. By leveraging multiple reward models, DiffusionNFT significantly boosts the performance of SD3.5-Medium in every benchmark tested.
Authors: Janayna M. Fernandes, Robinson Sabino-Silva, Murillo G. Carneiro
Abstract: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) lacks reliable biological markers, delaying early diagnosis. Using 159 salivary samples analyzed by ATR-FTIR spectroscopy, we developed GANet, a genetic algorithm-based network optimization framework leveraging PageRank and Degree for importance-based feature characterization. GANet systematically optimizes network structure to extract meaningful patterns from high-dimensional spectral data. It achieved superior performance compared to linear discriminant analysis, support vector machines, and deep learning models, reaching 0.78 accuracy, 0.61 sensitivity, 0.90 specificity, and a 0.74 harmonic mean. These results demonstrate GANet's potential as a robust, bio-inspired, non-invasive tool for precise ASD detection and broader spectral-based health applications.
Authors: Het Patel, Muzammil Allie, Qian Zhang, Jia Chen, Evangelos E. Papalexakis
Abstract: Vision language models (VLMs) excel in multimodal understanding but are prone to adversarial attacks. Existing defenses often demand costly retraining or significant architecture changes. We introduce a lightweight defense using tensor decomposition suitable for any pre-trained VLM, requiring no retraining. By decomposing and reconstructing vision encoder representations, it filters adversarial noise while preserving meaning. Experiments with CLIP on COCO and Flickr30K show improved robustness. On Flickr30K, it restores 12.3\% performance lost to attacks, raising Recall@1 accuracy from 7.5\% to 19.8\%. On COCO, it recovers 8.1\% performance, improving accuracy from 3.8\% to 11.9\%. Analysis shows Tensor Train decomposition with low rank (8-32) and low residual strength ($\alpha=0.1-0.2$) is optimal. This method is a practical, plug-and-play solution with minimal overhead for existing VLMs.
Authors: Sai Varun Kodathala
Abstract: The Otsu thresholding algorithm represents a fundamental technique in image segmentation, yet its computational efficiency is severely limited by exhaustive search requirements across all possible threshold values. This work presents an optimized implementation that leverages the bisection method to exploit the unimodal characteristics of the between-class variance function. Our approach reduces the computational complexity from O(L) to O(log L) evaluations while preserving segmentation accuracy. Experimental validation on 48 standard test images demonstrates a 91.63% reduction in variance computations and 97.21% reduction in algorithmic iterations compared to conventional exhaustive search. The bisection method achieves exact threshold matches in 66.67% of test cases, with 95.83% exhibiting deviations within 5 gray levels. The algorithm maintains universal convergence within theoretical logarithmic bounds while providing deterministic performance guarantees suitable for real-time applications. This optimization addresses critical computational bottlenecks in large-scale image processing systems without compromising the theoretical foundations or segmentation quality of the original Otsu method.
Authors: M. Ding, V. -A. Darvariu, A. N. Ryabtsev, N. Hawes, J. C. Pickering
Abstract: Atomic data determined by analysis of observed atomic spectra are essential for plasma diagnostics. For each low-ionisation open d- and f-subshell atomic species, around $10^3$ fine structure level energies can be determined through years of analysis of $10^4$ observable spectral lines. We propose the automation of this task by casting the analysis procedure as a Markov decision process and solving it by graph reinforcement learning using reward functions learned on historical human decisions. In our evaluations on existing spectral line lists and theoretical calculations for Co II and Nd II-III, hundreds of level energies were computed within hours, agreeing with published values in 95% of cases for Co II and 54-87% for Nd II-III. As the current efficiency in atomic fine structure determination struggles to meet growing atomic data demands from astronomy and fusion science, our new artificial intelligence approach sets the stage for closing this gap.
Authors: Jinghao Zhang, Sihang Jiang, Shiwei Guo, Shisong Chen, Yanghua Xiao, Hongwei Feng, Jiaqing Liang, Minggui HE, Shimin Tao, Hongxia Ma
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse cultural environments, evaluating their cultural understanding capability has become essential for ensuring trustworthy and culturally aligned applications. However, most existing benchmarks lack comprehensiveness and are challenging to scale and adapt across different cultural contexts, because their frameworks often lack guidance from well-established cultural theories and tend to rely on expert-driven manual annotations. To address these issues, we propose CultureScope, the most comprehensive evaluation framework to date for assessing cultural understanding in LLMs. Inspired by the cultural iceberg theory, we design a novel dimensional schema for cultural knowledge classification, comprising 3 layers and 140 dimensions, which guides the automated construction of culture-specific knowledge bases and corresponding evaluation datasets for any given languages and cultures. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively evaluate cultural understanding. They also reveal that existing large language models lack comprehensive cultural competence, and merely incorporating multilingual data does not necessarily enhance cultural understanding. All code and data files are available at https://github.com/HoganZinger/Culture
Authors: Luca Della Libera, Cem Subakan, Mirco Ravanelli
Abstract: Neural audio codecs are a fundamental component of modern generative audio pipelines. Although recent codecs achieve strong low-bitrate reconstruction and provide powerful representations for downstream tasks, most are non-streamable, limiting their use in real-time applications. We present FocalCodec-Stream, a hybrid codec based on focal modulation that compresses speech into a single binary codebook at 0.55 - 0.80 kbps with a theoretical latency of 80 ms. Our approach combines multi-stage causal distillation of WavLM with targeted architectural improvements, including a lightweight refiner module that enhances quality under latency constraints. Experiments show that FocalCodec-Stream outperforms existing streamable codecs at comparable bitrates, while preserving both semantic and acoustic information. The result is a favorable trade-off between reconstruction quality, downstream task performance, latency, and efficiency. Code and checkpoints will be released at https://github.com/lucadellalib/focalcodec.
Authors: Jane Luo, Xin Zhang, Steven Liu, Jie Wu, Yiming Huang, Yangyu Huang, Chengyu Yin, Ying Xin, Jianfeng Liu, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Qi Chen, Scarlett Li, Mao Yang
Abstract: Large language models excel at function- and file-level code generation, yet generating complete repositories from scratch remains a fundamental challenge. This process demands coherent and reliable planning across proposal- and implementation-level stages, while natural language, due to its ambiguity and verbosity, is ill-suited for faithfully representing complex software structures. To address this, we introduce the Repository Planning Graph (RPG), a persistent representation that unifies proposal- and implementation-level planning by encoding capabilities, file structures, data flows, and functions in one graph. RPG replaces ambiguous natural language with an explicit blueprint, enabling long-horizon planning and scalable repository generation. Building on RPG, we develop ZeroRepo, a graph-driven framework for repository generation from scratch. It operates in three stages: proposal-level planning and implementation-level refinement to construct the graph, followed by graph-guided code generation with test validation. To evaluate this setting, we construct RepoCraft, a benchmark of six real-world projects with 1,052 tasks. On RepoCraft, ZeroRepo produces repositories averaging nearly 36K LOC, roughly 3.9$\times$ the strongest baseline (Claude Code) and about 64$\times$ other baselines. It attains 81.5% functional coverage and a 69.7% pass rate, exceeding Claude Code by 27.3 and 35.8 percentage points, respectively. Further analysis shows that RPG models complex dependencies, enables progressively more sophisticated planning through near-linear scaling, and enhances LLM understanding of repositories, thereby accelerating agent localization.
Authors: Yoshiki Fukada
Abstract: This study presents data format of episodic memory for artificial intelligence and cognitive science. The data format, named cognitive-logs, enables rigour and flexible logical reasoning. Cognitive-logs consist of a set of relational and graph databases. Cognitive-logs store an episodic memory as a graphical network that consist of "actions" represented by verbs in natural languages and "participants" who perform the actions. These objects are connected by arrows (morphisms) that bind each action to its participant and bind causes and effects. The design principle of cognitive-logs refers cognitive sciences especially in cognitive linguistics. Logical reasoning is the processes of comparing causal chains in episodic memories with known rules which are also recorded in the cognitive-logs. Operations based on category theory enable such comparisons between episodic memories or scenarios. These operations represent various inferences including planning, comprehensions, and hierarchical abstractions of stories. The goal of this study is to develop a database-driven artificial intelligence that thinks like a human but possesses the accuracy and rigour of a machine. The vast capacities of databases (up to petabyte scales in current technologies) enable the artificial intelligence to store a greater volume of knowledge than neural-network based artificial intelligences. Cognitive-logs also serve as a model of human cognition mind activities.
Authors: Liang Zhang, Justin Lieffers, Adarsh Pyarelal
Abstract: In this paper, we explore semantic clustering properties of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to improve its interpretability and deepen our understanding of its internal semantic organization. In this context, semantic clustering refers to the ability of neural networks to cluster inputs based on their semantic similarity in the internal space. We propose a DRL architecture that incorporates a novel semantic clustering module that combines feature dimensionality reduction with online clustering. This module integrates seamlessly into the DRL training pipeline, addressing the instability of t-SNE and eliminating the need for extensive manual annotation inherent to prior semantic analysis methods. We experimentally validate the effectiveness of the proposed module and demonstrate its ability to reveal semantic clustering properties within DRL. Furthermore, we introduce new analytical methods based on these properties to provide insights into the hierarchical structure of policies and semantic organization within the feature space.
Authors: Ajsal Shereef Palattuparambil, Thommen George Karimpanal, Santu Rana
Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (RL) policies, although optimal in terms of task rewards, may not align with the personal preferences of human users. To ensure this alignment, a naive solution would be to retrain the agent using a reward function that encodes the user's specific preferences. However, such a reward function is typically not readily available, and as such, retraining the agent from scratch can be prohibitively expensive. We propose a more practical approach - to adapt the already trained policy to user-specific needs with the help of human feedback. To this end, we infer the user's intent through trajectory-level feedback and combine it with the trained task policy via a theoretically grounded dynamic policy fusion approach. As our approach collects human feedback on the very same trajectories used to learn the task policy, it does not require any additional interactions with the environment, making it a zero-shot approach. We empirically demonstrate in a number of environments that our proposed dynamic policy fusion approach consistently achieves the intended task while simultaneously adhering to user-specific needs.
Authors: Erik Arakelyan, Pasquale Minervini, Pat Verga, Patrick Lewis, Isabelle Augenstein
Abstract: Modern Question Answering (QA) and Reasoning approaches based on Large Language Models (LLMs) commonly use prompting techniques, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), assuming the resulting generation will have a more granular exploration and reasoning over the question space and scope. However, such methods struggle with generating outputs that are faithful to the intermediate chain of reasoning produced by the model. On the other end of the spectrum, neuro-symbolic methods such as Faithful CoT (F-CoT) propose to combine LLMs with external symbolic solvers. While such approaches boast a high degree of faithfulness, they usually require a model trained for code generation and struggle with tasks that are ambiguous or hard to formalise strictly. We introduce $\textbf{F}$aithful $\textbf{L}$ogic-$\textbf{A}$ided $\textbf{R}$easoning and $\textbf{E}$xploration ($\textbf{FLARE}$), a novel interpretable approach for traversing the problem space using task decompositions. We use the LLM to plan a solution, soft-formalise the query into facts and predicates using a logic programming code and simulate that code execution using an exhaustive multi-hop search over the defined space. Our method allows us to compute the faithfulness of the reasoning process w.r.t. the generated code and analyse the steps of the multi-hop search without relying on external solvers. Our methods achieve SOTA results on $\mathbf{7}$ out of $\mathbf{9}$ diverse reasoning benchmarks. We also show that model faithfulness positively correlates with overall performance and further demonstrate that $\textbf{FLARE}$ allows pinpointing the decisive factors sufficient for and leading to the correct answer with optimal reasoning during the multi-hop search.
Authors: Benjamin Rombaut, Sogol Masoumzadeh, Kirill Vasilevski, Dayi Lin, Ahmed E. Hassan
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into autonomous systems, giving rise to a new class of software known as Agentware, where LLM-powered agents perform complex, open-ended tasks in domains such as software engineering, customer service, and data analysis. However, their high autonomy and opaque reasoning processes pose significant challenges for traditional software observability methods. To address this, we introduce the concept of cognitive observability - the ability to recover and inspect the implicit reasoning behind agent decisions. We present Watson, a general-purpose framework for observing the reasoning processes of fast-thinking LLM agents without altering their behavior. Watson retroactively infers reasoning traces using prompt attribution techniques. We evaluate Watson in both manual debugging and automated correction scenarios across the MMLU benchmark and the AutoCodeRover and OpenHands agents on the SWE-bench-lite dataset. In both static and dynamic settings, Watson surfaces actionable reasoning insights and supports targeted interventions, demonstrating its practical utility for improving transparency and reliability in Agentware systems.
Authors: Abel Jansma
Abstract: We introduce a novel framework for decomposing interventional causal effects into synergistic, redundant, and unique components, building on the intuition of Partial Information Decomposition (PID) and the principle of M\"obius inversion. While recent work has explored a similar decomposition of an observational measure, we argue that a proper causal decomposition must be interventional in nature. We develop a mathematical approach that systematically quantifies how causal power is distributed among variables in a system, using a recently derived closed-form expression for the M\"obius function of the redundancy lattice. The formalism is then illustrated by decomposing the causal power in logic gates, cellular automata, chemical reaction networks, and a transformer language model. Our results reveal how the distribution of causal power can be context- and parameter-dependent. The decomposition provides new insights into complex systems by revealing how causal influences are shared and combined among multiple variables, with potential applications ranging from attribution of responsibility in legal or AI systems, to the analysis of biological networks or climate models.
Authors: Aaron Fanous (Stanford University), Jacob Goldberg (Stanford University), Ank A. Agarwal (Stanford University), Joanna Lin (Stanford University), Anson Zhou (Stanford University), Roxana Daneshjou (Stanford University), Sanmi Koyejo (Stanford University)
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in educational, clinical, and professional settings, but their tendency for sycophancy -- prioritizing user agreement over independent reasoning -- poses risks to reliability. This study introduces a framework to evaluate sycophantic behavior in ChatGPT-4o, Claude-Sonnet, and Gemini-1.5-Pro across AMPS (mathematics) and MedQuad (medical advice) datasets. Sycophantic behavior was observed in 58.19% of cases, with Gemini exhibiting the highest rate (62.47%) and ChatGPT the lowest (56.71%). Progressive sycophancy, leading to correct answers, occurred in 43.52% of cases, while regressive sycophancy, leading to incorrect answers, was observed in 14.66%. Preemptive rebuttals demonstrated significantly higher sycophancy rates than in-context rebuttals (61.75% vs. 56.52%, $Z=5.87$, $p<0.001$), particularly in computational tasks, where regressive sycophancy increased significantly (preemptive: 8.13%, in-context: 3.54%, $p<0.001$). Simple rebuttals maximized progressive sycophancy ($Z=6.59$, $p<0.001$), while citation-based rebuttals exhibited the highest regressive rates ($Z=6.59$, $p<0.001$). Sycophantic behavior showed high persistence (78.5%, 95% CI: [77.2%, 79.8%]) regardless of context or model. These findings emphasize the risks and opportunities of deploying LLMs in structured and dynamic domains, offering insights into prompt programming and model optimization for safer AI applications.
Authors: Shuo Wang, Renhao Li, Xi Chen, Yulin Yuan, Derek F. Wong, Min Yang
Abstract: With the different roles that AI is expected to play in human life, imbuing large language models (LLMs) with different personalities has attracted increasing research interests. While the "personification" enhances human experiences of interactivity and adaptability of LLMs, it gives rise to critical concerns about content safety, particularly regarding bias, sentiment and toxicity of LLM generation. This study explores how assigning different personality traits to LLMs affects the toxicity and biases of their outputs. Leveraging the widely accepted HEXACO personality framework developed in social psychology, we design experimentally sound prompts to test three LLMs' performance on three toxic and bias benchmarks. The findings demonstrate the sensitivity of all three models to HEXACO personality traits and, more importantly, a consistent variation in the biases, negative sentiment and toxicity of their output. In particular, adjusting the levels of several personality traits can effectively reduce bias and toxicity in model performance, similar to humans' correlations between personality traits and toxic behaviors. The findings highlight the additional need to examine content safety besides the efficiency of training or fine-tuning methods for LLM personification. They also suggest a potential for the adjustment of personalities to be a simple and low-cost method to conduct controlled text generation.
Authors: Narmeen Oozeer, Dhruv Nathawani, Nirmalendu Prakash, Michael Lan, Abir Harrasse, Amirali Abdullah
Abstract: The study of representation universality in AI models reveals growing convergence across domains, modalities, and architectures. However, the practical applications of representation universality remain largely unexplored. We bridge this gap by demonstrating that safety interventions can be transferred between models through learned mappings of their shared activation spaces. We demonstrate this approach on two well-established AI safety tasks: backdoor removal and refusal of harmful prompts, showing successful transfer of steering vectors that alter the models' outputs in a predictable way. Additionally, we propose a new task, \textit{corrupted capabilities}, where models are fine-tuned to embed knowledge tied to a backdoor. This tests their ability to separate useful skills from backdoors, reflecting real-world challenges. Extensive experiments across Llama, Qwen and Gemma model families show that our method enables using smaller models to efficiently align larger ones. Furthermore, we demonstrate that autoencoder mappings between base and fine-tuned models can serve as reliable ``lightweight safety switches", allowing dynamic toggling between model behaviors.
Authors: Jinwei Su, Yinghui Xia, Yiqun Duan, Jun Du, Jianuo Huang, Tianyu Shi, Lewei He
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong potential and impressive performance in automating the generation and optimization of workflows. However, existing approaches are marked by limited reasoning capabilities, high computational demands, and significant resource requirements. To address these issues, we propose DebFlow, a framework that employs a debate mechanism to optimize workflows and integrates reflexion to improve based on previous experiences. We evaluated our method across six benchmark datasets, including HotpotQA, MATH, and ALFWorld. Our approach achieved a 3\% average performance improvement over the latest baselines, demonstrating its effectiveness in diverse problem domains. In particular, during training, our framework reduces resource consumption by 37\% compared to the state-of-the-art baselines. Additionally, we performed ablation studies. Removing the Debate component resulted in a 4\% performance drop across two benchmark datasets, significantly greater than the 2\% drop observed when the Reflection component was removed. These findings strongly demonstrate the critical role of Debate in enhancing framework performance, while also highlighting the auxiliary contribution of reflexion to overall optimization.
Authors: Xianyuan Liu, Jiayang Zhang, Shuo Zhou, Thijs L. van der Plas, Avish Vijayaraghavan, Anastasiia Grishina, Mengdie Zhuang, Daniel Schofield, Christopher Tomlinson, Yuhan Wang, Ruizhe Li, Louisa van Zeeland, Sina Tabakhi, Cyndie Demeocq, Xiang Li, Arunav Das, Orlando Timmerman, Thomas Baldwin-McDonald, Jinge Wu, Peizhen Bai, Zahraa Al Sahili, Omnia Alwazzan, Thao N. Do, Mohammod N. I. Suvon, Angeline Wang, Lucia Cipolina-Kun, Luigi A. Moretti, Lucas Farndale, Nitisha Jain, Natalia Efremova, Yan Ge, Marta Varela, Hak-Keung Lam, Oya Celiktutan, Ben R. Evans, Alejandro Coca-Castro, Honghan Wu, Zahraa S. Abdallah, Chen Chen, Valentin Danchev, Nataliya Tkachenko, Lei Lu, Tingting Zhu, Gregory G. Slabaugh, Roger K. Moore, William K. Cheung, Peter H. Charlton, Haiping Lu
Abstract: Multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) integrates diverse types of data via machine learning to improve understanding, prediction, and decision-making across disciplines such as healthcare, science, and engineering. However, most multimodal AI advances focus on models for vision and language data, while their deployability remains a key challenge. We advocate a deployment-centric workflow that incorporates deployment constraints early to reduce the likelihood of undeployable solutions, complementing data-centric and model-centric approaches. We also emphasise deeper integration across multiple levels of multimodality and multidisciplinary collaboration to significantly broaden the research scope beyond vision and language. To facilitate this approach, we identify common multimodal-AI-specific challenges shared across disciplines and examine three real-world use cases: pandemic response, self-driving car design, and climate change adaptation, drawing expertise from healthcare, social science, engineering, science, sustainability, and finance. By fostering multidisciplinary dialogue and open research practices, our community can accelerate deployment-centric development for broad societal impact.
Authors: Lars Benedikt Kaesberg, Jan Philip Wahle, Terry Ruas, Bela Gipp
Abstract: Existing reasoning datasets saturate and fail to test abstract, multi-step problems, especially pathfinding and complex rule constraint satisfaction. We introduce SPaRC (Spatial Pathfinding Reasoning Challenge), a dataset of 1,000 2D grid pathfinding puzzles to evaluate spatial and symbolic reasoning, requiring step-by-step planning with arithmetic and geometric rules. Humans achieve near-perfect accuracy (98.0%; 94.5% on hard puzzles), while the best reasoning models, such as o4-mini, struggle (15.8%; 1.1% on hard puzzles). Models often generate invalid paths (>50% of puzzles for o4-mini), and reasoning tokens reveal they make errors in navigation and spatial logic. Unlike humans, who take longer on hard puzzles, models fail to scale test-time compute with difficulty. Allowing models to make multiple solution attempts improves accuracy, suggesting potential for better spatial reasoning with improved training and efficient test-time scaling methods. SPaRC can be used as a window into models' spatial reasoning limitations and drive research toward new methods that excel in abstract, multi-step problem-solving.
Authors: Ryan Saklad, Aman Chadha, Oleg Pavlov, Raha Moraffah
Abstract: Understanding and inferring causal relationships from texts is a core aspect of human cognition and is essential for advancing large language models (LLMs) towards artificial general intelligence. Existing work evaluating LLM causal reasoning primarily focuses on synthetically generated texts which involve straightforward causal relationships that are explicitly mentioned in the text. This fails to reflect the complexities of real-world tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether LLMs are capable of inferring causal relationships from real-world texts. We develop a benchmark drawn from real-world academic literature which includes diverse texts with respect to length, complexity of relationships (different levels of explicitness, number of nodes, and causal relationships), and domains and sub-domains. To the best of our knowledge, our benchmark is the first-ever real-world dataset for this task. Our experiments on this dataset show that LLMs face significant challenges in inferring causal relationships from real-world text, with the best-performing model achieving an average F1 score of only 0.477. Through systematic analysis across aspects of real-world text (degree of confounding, size of graph, length of text, domain), our benchmark offers targeted insights for further research into advancing LLM causal reasoning.
Authors: Shangmin Guo, Omar Darwiche Domingues, Rapha\"el Avalos, Aaron Courville, Florian Strub
Abstract: Tool use in stateful environments presents unique challenges for large language models (LLMs), where existing test-time compute strategies relying on repeated trials in the environment are impractical. We propose dynamics modelling (DyMo), a method that augments LLMs with a state prediction capability alongside function calling during post-training. This enables LLMs to predict the future states of their actions through an internal environment model. On the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard V2, DyMo improves success rates and significantly reduces hallucinations. We further integrate the internal environment model into self-verification sampling (SVS), and show that this substantially improves pass^k over number of trials k, and allows the model to refuse unreliable outputs. Together, DyMo and SVS greatly enhance the effectiveness and reliability of LLMs for tool use. We believe this work charts a path towards scalable planning RL methods for LLM inference without repeatedly querying the oracle environment.
Authors: Adrien Bibal, Steven N. Minton, Deborah Khider, Yolanda Gil
Abstract: Open science initiatives seek to make research outputs more transparent, accessible, and reusable, but ensuring that published findings can be independently reproduced remains a persistent challenge. This paper introduces OpenPub, an AI-powered platform that supports researchers, reviewers, and readers through a suite of modular copilots focused on key open science tasks. In this work, we present the Reproducibility Copilot, which analyzes manuscripts, code, and supplementary materials to generate structured Jupyter Notebooks and recommendations aimed at facilitating computational, or "rote", reproducibility. We conducted feasibility tests using previously studied research papers with known reproducibility benchmarks. Results indicate that OpenPub can substantially reduce reproduction time - from over 30 hours to about 1 hour - while achieving high coverage of figures, tables, and results suitable for computational reproduction. The system systematically detects barriers to reproducibility, including missing hyperparameters, undocumented preprocessing steps, and incomplete or inaccessible datasets. While preliminary, these findings suggest that AI-driven tools can meaningfully reduce the burden of reproducibility efforts and contribute to more transparent and verifiable scientific communication. The modular copilot architecture also provides a foundation for extending AI assistance to additional open science objectives beyond reproducibility.
Authors: Forrest Hare, Alec Sculley, Cameron Stockton
Abstract: We argue that ontology-structured knowledge graphs can play a crucial role in generating predictions about future events. By leveraging the semantic framework provided by Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and Common Core Ontologies (CCO), we demonstrate how data such as the movements of a fishing vessel can be organized in and retrieved from a knowledge graph. These query results are then used to create Markov chain models, allowing us to predict future states based on the vessel's history. To fully support this process, we introduce the term `spatiotemporal instant' to complete the necessary structural semantics. Additionally, we critique the prevailing ontological model of probability, according to which probabilities are about the future. We propose an alternative view, where at least some probabilities are treated as being about actual process profiles, which better captures the dynamics of real-world phenomena. Finally, we demonstrate how our Markov chain-based probability calculations can be seamlessly integrated back into the knowledge graph, enabling further analysis and decision-making.
Authors: Bidyapati Pradhan, Surajit Dasgupta, Amit Kumar Saha, Omkar Anustoop, Sriram Puttagunta, Vipul Mittal, Gopal Sarda
Abstract: The advancement of large language models (LLMs) is critically dependent on the availability of high-quality datasets for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), alignment tasks like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), etc. In this work, we present a comprehensive synthetic data generation framework that facilitates scalable, configurable, and high-fidelity generation of synthetic data tailored for these training paradigms. Our approach employs a modular and configuration-based pipeline capable of modeling complex dialogue flows with minimal manual intervention. This framework uses a dual-stage quality tagging mechanism, combining heuristic rules and LLM-based evaluations, to automatically filter and score data extracted from OASST-formatted conversations, ensuring the curation of high-quality dialogue samples. The resulting datasets are structured under a flexible schema supporting both SFT and DPO use cases, enabling seamless integration into diverse training workflows. Together, these innovations offer a robust solution for generating and managing synthetic conversational data at scale, significantly reducing the overhead of data preparation in LLM training pipelines.
Authors: Yiheng Hu, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu, Xiwei Xu, Qian Fu, Wenjie Zhang, Liming Zhu
Abstract: Multimodal Multi-hop question answering requires integrating information from diverse sources, such as images and texts, to derive answers. Existing methods typically rely on sequential retrieval and reasoning, where each step builds on the previous output. However, this single-path paradigm makes them vulnerable to errors due to misleading intermediate steps. Moreover, developing multimodal models can be computationally expensive, often requiring extensive training. To address these limitations, we propose a training-free framework guided by an Adaptive Planning Graph, which consists of planning, retrieval and reasoning modules. The planning module analyzes the current state of the Adaptive Planning Graph, determines the next action and where to expand the graph, which enables dynamic and flexible exploration of reasoning paths. To handle retrieval of text to unspecified target modalities, we devise modality-specific strategies that dynamically adapt to distinct data types. Our approach preserves the characteristics of multimodal information without costly task-specific training, enabling seamless integration with up-to-date models. Finally, the experiments on MultimodalQA and WebQA show that our approach matches or outperforms existing models that rely on training.
Authors: A. Ali Heydari, Ken Gu, Vidya Srinivas, Hong Yu, Zhihan Zhang, Yuwei Zhang, Akshay Paruchuri, Qian He, Hamid Palangi, Nova Hammerquist, Ahmed A. Metwally, Brent Winslow, Yubin Kim, Kumar Ayush, Yuzhe Yang, Girish Narayanswamy, Maxwell A. Xu, Jake Garrison, Amy Armento Lee, Jenny Vafeiadou, Ben Graef, Isaac R. Galatzer-Levy, Erik Schenck, Andrew Barakat, Javier Perez, Jacqueline Shreibati, John Hernandez, Anthony Z. Faranesh, Javier L. Prieto, Connor Heneghan, Yun Liu, Jiening Zhan, Mark Malhotra, Shwetak Patel, Tim Althoff, Xin Liu, Daniel McDuff, Xuhai "Orson" Xu
Abstract: Health is a fundamental pillar of human wellness, and the rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have driven the development of a new generation of health agents. However, the application of health agents to fulfill the diverse needs of individuals in daily non-clinical settings is underexplored. In this work, we aim to build a comprehensive personal health agent that is able to reason about multimodal data from everyday consumer wellness devices and common personal health records, and provide personalized health recommendations. To understand end-users' needs when interacting with such an assistant, we conducted an in-depth analysis of web search and health forum queries, alongside qualitative insights from users and health experts gathered through a user-centered design process. Based on these findings, we identified three major categories of consumer health needs, each of which is supported by a specialist sub-agent: (1) a data science agent that analyzes personal time-series wearable and health record data, (2) a health domain expert agent that integrates users' health and contextual data to generate accurate, personalized insights, and (3) a health coach agent that synthesizes data insights, guiding users using a specified psychological strategy and tracking users' progress. Furthermore, we propose and develop the Personal Health Agent (PHA), a multi-agent framework that enables dynamic, personalized interactions to address individual health needs. To evaluate each sub-agent and the multi-agent system, we conducted automated and human evaluations across 10 benchmark tasks, involving more than 7,000 annotations and 1,100 hours of effort from health experts and end-users. Our work represents the most comprehensive evaluation of a health agent to date and establishes a strong foundation towards the futuristic vision of a personal health agent accessible to everyone.
Authors: Fangchen Yu, Haiyuan Wan, Qianjia Cheng, Yuchen Zhang, Jiacheng Chen, Fujun Han, Yulun Wu, Junchi Yao, Ruilizhen Hu, Ning Ding, Yu Cheng, Tao Chen, Lei Bai, Dongzhan Zhou, Yun Luo, Ganqu Cui, Peng Ye
Abstract: Recently, the physical capabilities of (M)LLMs have garnered increasing attention. However, existing benchmarks for physics suffer from two major gaps: they neither provide systematic and up-to-date coverage of real-world physics competitions such as physics Olympiads, nor enable direct performance comparison with humans. To bridge these gaps, we present HiPhO, the first benchmark dedicated to high school physics Olympiads with human-aligned evaluation. Specifically, HiPhO highlights three key innovations. (1) Comprehensive Data: It compiles 13 latest Olympiad exams from 2024-2025, spanning both international and regional competitions, and covering mixed modalities that encompass problems spanning text-only to diagram-based. (2) Professional Evaluation: We adopt official marking schemes to perform fine-grained grading at both the answer and step level, fully aligned with human examiners to ensure high-quality and domain-specific evaluation. (3) Comparison with Human Contestants: We assign gold, silver, and bronze medals to models based on official medal thresholds, thereby enabling direct comparison between (M)LLMs and human contestants. Our large-scale evaluation of 30 state-of-the-art (M)LLMs shows that: across 13 exams, open-source MLLMs mostly remain at or below the bronze level; open-source LLMs show promising progress with multiple golds; closed-source reasoning MLLMs can achieve 6 to 12 gold medals; and most models still have a significant gap from full marks. These results highlight the performance gap between open-source models and top students, the strong reasoning abilities of closed-source models, and the remaining room for improvement. HiPhO, a human-aligned Olympiad benchmark for multimodal physical reasoning, is open-source at https://github.com/SciYu/HiPhO with a public leaderboard at https://phyarena.github.io/.
URLs: https://github.com/SciYu/HiPhO, https://phyarena.github.io/.
Authors: Tamir Shazman, Idan Lev-Yehudi, Ron Benchetit, Vadim Indelman
Abstract: Online planning in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) enables agents to make sequential decisions by simulating future trajectories from the current state, making it well-suited for large-scale or dynamic environments. Sample-based methods such as Sparse Sampling and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) are widely adopted for their ability to approximate optimal actions using a generative model. However, in practical settings, the generative model is often learned from limited data, introducing approximation errors that can degrade performance or lead to unsafe behaviors. To address these challenges, Robust MDPs (RMDPs) offer a principled framework for planning under model uncertainty, yet existing approaches are typically computationally intensive and not suited for real-time use. In this work, we introduce Robust Sparse Sampling (RSS), the first online planning algorithm for RMDPs with finite-sample theoretical performance guarantees. Unlike Sparse Sampling, which estimates the nominal value function, RSS computes a robust value function by leveraging the efficiency and theoretical properties of Sample Average Approximation (SAA), enabling tractable robust policy computation in online settings. RSS is applicable to infinite or continuous state spaces, and its sample and computational complexities are independent of the state space size. We provide theoretical performance guarantees and empirically show that RSS outperforms standard Sparse Sampling in environments with uncertain dynamics.
Authors: Sajjad Abdoli, Rudi Cilibrasi, Rima Al-Shikh
Abstract: As AI systems increasingly evaluate other AI outputs, understanding their assessment behavior becomes crucial for preventing cascading biases. This study analyzes vision-language descriptions generated by NVIDIA's Describe Anything Model and evaluated by three GPT variants (GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, GPT-5) to uncover distinct "evaluation personalities" the underlying assessment strategies and biases each model demonstrates. GPT-4o-mini exhibits systematic consistency with minimal variance, GPT-4o excels at error detection, while GPT-5 shows extreme conservatism with high variability. Controlled experiments using Gemini 2.5 Pro as an independent question generator validate that these personalities are inherent model properties rather than artifacts. Cross-family analysis through semantic similarity of generated questions reveals significant divergence: GPT models cluster together with high similarity while Gemini exhibits markedly different evaluation strategies. All GPT models demonstrate a consistent 2:1 bias favoring negative assessment over positive confirmation, though this pattern appears family-specific rather than universal across AI architectures. These findings suggest that evaluation competence does not scale with general capability and that robust AI assessment requires diverse architectural perspectives.
Authors: Mulugeta Weldezgina Asres, Christian Walter Omlin, Long Wang, David Yu, Pavel Parygin, Jay Dittmann, Georgia Karapostoli, Markus Seidel, Rosamaria Venditti, Luka Lambrecht, Emanuele Usai, Muhammad Ahmad, Javier Fernandez Menendez, Kaori Maeshima, the CMS-HCAL Collaboration
Abstract: The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is a general-purpose detector for high-energy collision at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It employs an online data quality monitoring (DQM) system to promptly spot and diagnose particle data acquisition problems to avoid data quality loss. In this study, we present a semi-supervised spatio-temporal anomaly detection (AD) monitoring system for the physics particle reading channels of the Hadron Calorimeter (HCAL) of the CMS using three-dimensional digi-occupancy map data of the DQM. We propose the GraphSTAD system, which employs convolutional and graph neural networks to learn local spatial characteristics induced by particles traversing the detector and the global behavior owing to shared backend circuit connections and housing boxes of the channels, respectively. Recurrent neural networks capture the temporal evolution of the extracted spatial features. We validate the accuracy of the proposed AD system in capturing diverse channel fault types using the LHC collision data sets. The GraphSTAD system achieves production-level accuracy and is being integrated into the CMS core production system for real-time monitoring of the HCAL. We provide a quantitative performance comparison with alternative benchmark models to demonstrate the promising leverage of the presented system. Code: https://github.com/muleina/CMS_HCAL_ML_OnlineDQM .
Authors: Patrick Knab, Sascha Marton, Christian Bartelt
Abstract: LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations) is a popular XAI framework for unraveling decision-making processes in vision machine-learning models. The technique utilizes image segmentation methods to identify fixed regions for calculating feature importance scores as explanations. Therefore, poor segmentation can weaken the explanation and reduce the importance of segments, ultimately affecting the overall clarity of interpretation. To address these challenges, we introduce the DSEG-LIME (Data-Driven Segmentation LIME) framework, featuring: i) a data-driven segmentation for human-recognized feature generation by foundation model integration, and ii) a user-steered granularity in the hierarchical segmentation procedure through composition. Our findings demonstrate that DSEG outperforms on several XAI metrics on pre-trained ImageNet models and improves the alignment of explanations with human-recognized concepts. The code is available under: https://github. com/patrick-knab/DSEG-LIME
URLs: https://github.
Authors: Tianhao Zhang, Zhecheng Sheng, Zhexiao Lin, Chen Jiang, Dongyeop Kang
Abstract: Autoregressive generative models play a key role in various language tasks, especially for modeling and evaluating long text sequences. While recent methods leverage stochastic representations to better capture sequence dynamics, encoding both temporal and structural dependencies and utilizing such information for evaluation remains challenging. In this work, we observe that fitting transformer-based model embeddings into a stochastic process yields ordered latent representations from originally unordered model outputs. Building on this insight and prior work, we theoretically introduce a novel likelihood-based evaluation metric BBScoreV2. Empirically, we demonstrate that the stochastic latent space induces a "clustered-to-temporal ordered" mapping of language model representations in high-dimensional space, offering both intuitive and quantitative support for the effectiveness of BBScoreV2. Furthermore, this structure aligns with intrinsic properties of natural language and enhances performance on tasks such as temporal consistency evaluation (e.g., Shuffle tasks) and AI-generated content detection.
Authors: Alain Ryser, Thomas M. Sutter, Alexander Marx, Julia E. Vogt
Abstract: Anomaly detection focuses on identifying samples that deviate from the norm. Discovering informative representations of normal samples is crucial to detecting anomalies effectively. Recent self-supervised methods have successfully learned such representations by employing prior knowledge about anomalies to create synthetic outliers during training. However, we often do not know what to expect from unseen data in specialized real-world applications. In this work, we address this limitation with our new approach Con$_2$, which leverages prior knowledge about symmetries in normal samples to observe the data in different contexts. Con$_2$ consists of two parts: Context Contrasting clusters representations according to their context, while Content Alignment encourages the model to capture semantic information by aligning the positions of normal samples across clusters. The resulting representation space allows us to detect anomalies as outliers of the learned context clusters. We demonstrate the benefit of this approach in extensive experiments on specialized medical datasets, outperforming competitive baselines based on self-supervised learning and pretrained models and presenting competitive performance on natural imaging benchmarks.
Authors: Soyeong Jeong, Jinheon Baek, Sukmin Cho, Sung Ju Hwang, Jong C. Park
Abstract: Information retrieval models that aim to search for documents relevant to a query have shown multiple successes, which have been applied to diverse tasks. Yet, the query from the user is oftentimes short, which challenges the retrievers to correctly fetch relevant documents. To tackle this, previous studies have proposed expanding the query with a couple of additional (user-related) features related to it. However, they may be suboptimal to effectively augment the query, and there is plenty of other information available to augment it in a relational database. Motivated by this fact, we present a novel retrieval framework called Database-Augmented Query representation (DAQu), which augments the original query with various (query-related) metadata across multiple tables. In addition, as the number of features in the metadata can be very large and there is no order among them, we encode them with the graph-based set-encoding strategy, which considers hierarchies of features in the database without order. We validate our DAQu in diverse retrieval scenarios, demonstrating that it significantly enhances overall retrieval performance over relevant baselines.
Authors: Hilda Hadan, Derrick Wang, Reza Hadi Mogavi, Joseph Tu, Leah Zhang-Kennedy, Lennart E. Nacke
Abstract: Generative AI (GenAI) use in research writing is growing fast. However, it is unclear how peer reviewers recognize or misjudge AI-augmented manuscripts. To investigate the impact of AI-augmented writing on peer reviews, we conducted a snippet-based online survey with 17 peer reviewers from top-tier HCI conferences. Our findings indicate that while AI-augmented writing improves readability, language diversity, and informativeness, it often lacks research details and reflective insights from authors. Reviewers consistently struggled to distinguish between human and AI-augmented writing but their judgements remained consistent. They noted the loss of a "human touch" and subjective expressions in AI-augmented writing. Based on our findings, we advocate for reviewer guidelines that promote impartial evaluations of submissions, regardless of any personal biases towards GenAI. The quality of the research itself should remain a priority in reviews, regardless of any preconceived notions about the tools used to create it. We emphasize that researchers must maintain their authorship and control over the writing process, even when using GenAI's assistance.
Authors: Nuria Alabau-Bosque, Paula Daud\'en-Oliver, Jorge Vila-Tom\'as, Valero Laparra, Jes\'us Malo
Abstract: Subjective image quality metrics are usually evaluated according to the correlation with human opinion in databases with distortions that may appear in digital media. However, these oversee affine transformations which may represent better the changes in the images actually happening in natural conditions. Humans can be particularly invariant to these natural transformations, as opposed to the digital ones. In this work, we propose a methodology to evaluate any image quality metric by assessing their invariance to affine transformations, specifically: rotation, translation, scaling, and changes in spectral illumination. Here, invariance refers to the fact that certain distances should be neglected if their values are below a threshold. This is what we call invisibility threshold of a metric. Our methodology consists of two elements: (1) the determination of a visibility threshold in a subjective representation common to every metric, and (2) a transduction from the distance values of the metric and this common representation. This common representation is based on subjective ratings of readily available image quality databases. We determine the threshold in such common representation (the first element) using accurate psychophysics. Then, the transduction (the second element) can be trivially fitted for any metric: with the provided threshold extension of the method to any metric is straightforward. We test our methodology with some well-established metrics and find that none of them show human-like invisibility thresholds. This means that tuning the models exclusively to predict the visibility of generic distortions may disregard other properties of human vision as for instance invariances or invisibility thresholds. The data and code are publicly available to test other metrics.
Authors: Benedikt W. Hosp
Abstract: Accurate fixation depth estimation is essential for applications in extended reality (XR), robotics, and human-computer interaction. However, current methods heavily depend on user-specific calibration, which limits their scalability and usability. We introduce FOVAL, a robust calibration-free approach that combines spatiotemporal sequence modelling via Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks with subject-invariant feature engineering and normalisation. Compared to Transformers, Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs), and CNNs, FOVAL achieves superior performance, particularly in scenarios with limited and noisy gaze data. Evaluations across three benchmark datasets using Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation (LOOCV) and cross-dataset validation show a mean absolute error (MAE) of 9.1 cm and strong generalisation without calibration. We further analyse inter-subject variability and domain shifts, providing insight into model robustness and adaptation. FOVAL's scalability and accuracy make it highly suitable for real-world deployment.
Authors: Michael Galarnyk, Rutwik Routu, Vidhyakshaya Kannan, Kosha Bheda, Prasun Banerjee, Agam Shah, Sudheer Chava
Abstract: The ARR Responsible NLP Research checklist website states that the "checklist is designed to encourage best practices for responsible research, addressing issues of research ethics, societal impact and reproducibility." Answering the questions is an opportunity for authors to reflect on their work and make sure any shared scientific assets follow best practices. Ideally, considering a checklist before submission can favorably impact the writing of a research paper. However, previous research has shown that self-reported checklist responses don't always accurately represent papers. In this work, we introduce ConfReady, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) application that can be used to empower authors to reflect on their work and assist authors with conference checklists. To evaluate checklist assistants, we curate a dataset of 1,975 ACL checklist responses, analyze problems in human answers, and benchmark RAG and Large Language Model (LM) based systems on an evaluation subset. Our code is released under the AGPL-3.0 license on GitHub, with documentation covering the user interface and PyPI package.
Authors: Hui Liu, Chen Jia, Fan Shi, Xu Cheng, Mianzhao Wang, Shengyong Chen
Abstract: Accurately segmenting structural cracks at the pixel level remains a major hurdle, as existing methods fail to integrate local textures with pixel dependencies, often leading to fragmented and incomplete predictions. Moreover, their high parameter counts and substantial computational demands hinder practical deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address these challenges, we propose CrackSCF, a Lightweight Cascaded Fusion Crack Segmentation Network designed to achieve robust crack segmentation with exceptional computational efficiency. We design a lightweight convolutional block (LRDS) to replace all standard convolutions. This approach efficiently captures local patterns while operating with a minimal computational footprint. For a holistic perception of crack structures, a lightweight Long-range Dependency Extractor (LDE) captures global dependencies. These are then intelligently unified with local patterns by our Staircase Cascaded Fusion Module (SCFM), ensuring the final segmentation maps are both seamless in continuity and rich in fine-grained detail. To comprehensively evaluate our method, we created the challenging TUT benchmark dataset and evaluated it alongside five other public datasets. The experimental results show that the CrackSCF method consistently outperforms the existing methods, and it demonstrates greater robustness in dealing with complex background noise. On the TUT dataset, CrackSCF achieved 0.8382 on F1 score and 0.8473 on mIoU, and it only required 4.79M parameters.
Authors: Hanjun Luo, Yingbin Jin, Xinfeng Li, Xuecheng Liu, Ruizhe Chen, Tong Shang, Kun Wang, Qingsong Wen, Zuozhu Liu
Abstract: The advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) have spurred a growing interest in their application to Named Entity Recognition (NER) methods. However, existing datasets are primarily designed for traditional machine learning methods and are inadequate for LLM-based methods, in terms of corpus selection and overall dataset design logic. Moreover, the prevalent fixed and relatively coarse-grained entity categorization in existing datasets fails to adequately assess the superior generalization and contextual understanding capabilities of LLM-based methods, thereby hindering a comprehensive demonstration of their broad application prospects. To address these limitations, we propose DynamicNER, the first NER dataset designed for LLM-based methods with dynamic categorization, introducing various entity types and entity type lists for the same entity in different context, leveraging the generalization of LLM-based NER better. The dataset is also multilingual and multi-granular, covering 8 languages and 155 entity types, with corpora spanning a diverse range of domains. Furthermore, we introduce CascadeNER, a novel NER method based on a two-stage strategy and lightweight LLMs, achieving higher accuracy on fine-grained tasks while requiring fewer computational resources. Experiments show that DynamicNER serves as a robust and effective benchmark for LLM-based NER methods. Furthermore, we also conduct analysis for traditional methods and LLM-based methods on our dataset. Our code and dataset are openly available at https://github.com/Astarojth/DynamicNER.
Authors: Shiyu Fang, Jiaqi Liu, Mingyu Ding, Yiming Cui, Chen Lv, Peng Hang, Jian Sun
Abstract: At present, Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) have begun to open road testing around the world, but their safety and efficiency performance in complex scenarios is still not satisfactory. Cooperative driving leverages the connectivity ability of CAVs to achieve synergies greater than the sum of their parts, making it a promising approach to improving CAV performance in complex scenarios. However, the lack of interaction and continuous learning ability limits current cooperative driving to single-scenario applications and specific Cooperative Driving Automation (CDA). To address these challenges, this paper proposes CoDrivingLLM, an interactive and learnable LLM-driven cooperative driving framework, to achieve all-scenario and all-CDA. First, since Large Language Models(LLMs) are not adept at handling mathematical calculations, an environment module is introduced to update vehicle positions based on semantic decisions, thus avoiding potential errors from direct LLM control of vehicle positions. Second, based on the four levels of CDA defined by the SAE J3216 standard, we propose a Chain-of-Thought (COT) based reasoning module that includes state perception, intent sharing, negotiation, and decision-making, enhancing the stability of LLMs in multi-step reasoning tasks. Centralized conflict resolution is then managed through a conflict coordinator in the reasoning process. Finally, by introducing a memory module and employing retrieval-augmented generation, CAVs are endowed with the ability to learn from their past experiences. We validate the proposed CoDrivingLLM through ablation experiments on the negotiation module, reasoning with different shots experience, and comparison with other cooperative driving methods.
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: Yuzhou Nie, Zhun Wang, Yu Yang, Ruizhe Jiang, Yuheng Tang, Xander Davies, Yarin Gal, Bo Li, Wenbo Guo, Dawn Song
Abstract: Existing benchmarks for evaluating the security risks and capabilities (e.g., vulnerability detection) of code-generating large language models (LLMs) face several key limitations: (1) limited coverage of risk and capabilities; (2) reliance on static evaluation metrics such as LLM judgments or rule-based detection, which lack the precision of dynamic analysis; and (3) a trade-off between data quality and benchmark scale. To address these challenges, we introduce a general and scalable benchmark construction framework that begins with manually validated, high-quality seed examples and expands them via targeted mutations. Our approach provides a comprehensive suite of artifacts so the benchmark can support comprehensive risk assessment and security capability evaluation using dynamic metrics. By combining expert insights with automated generation, we strike a balance between manual effort, data quality, and benchmark scale. Applying this framework to Python, C/C++, and Java, we build SeCodePLT, a dataset of more than 5.9k samples spanning 44 CWE-based risk categories and three security capabilities. Compared with state-of-the-art benchmarks, SeCodePLT offers broader coverage, higher data fidelity, and substantially greater scale. We use SeCodePLT to evaluate leading code LLMs and agents, revealing their strengths and weaknesses in both generating secure code and identifying or fixing vulnerabilities.
Authors: Naoki Murata, Chieh-Hsin Lai, Yuhta Takida, Toshimitsu Uesaka, Bac Nguyen, Stefano Ermon, Yuki Mitsufuji
Abstract: Recent literature has effectively leveraged diffusion models trained on continuous variables as priors for solving inverse problems. Notably, discrete diffusion models with discrete latent codes have shown strong performance, particularly in modalities suited for discrete compressed representations, such as image and motion generation. However, their discrete and non-differentiable nature has limited their application to inverse problems formulated in continuous spaces. This paper presents a novel method for addressing linear inverse problems by leveraging generative models based on discrete diffusion as priors. We overcome these limitations by approximating the true posterior distribution with a variational distribution constructed from categorical distributions and continuous relaxation techniques. Furthermore, we employ a star-shaped noise process to mitigate the drawbacks of traditional discrete diffusion models with absorbing states, demonstrating that our method performs comparably to continuous diffusion techniques with a lower GPU memory consumption. Our code is available at https://github.com/sony/g2d2.
Authors: Jean Feng, Avni Kothari, Luke Zier, Chandan Singh, Yan Shuo Tan
Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) have been proposed as a compromise between white-box and black-box models, aiming to achieve interpretability without sacrificing accuracy. The standard training procedure for CBMs is to predefine a candidate set of human-interpretable concepts, extract their values from the training data, and identify a sparse subset as inputs to a transparent prediction model. However, such approaches are often hampered by the tradeoff between exploring a sufficiently large set of concepts versus controlling the cost of obtaining concept extractions, resulting in a large interpretability-accuracy tradeoff. This work investigates a novel approach that sidesteps these challenges: BC-LLM iteratively searches over a potentially infinite set of concepts within a Bayesian framework, in which Large Language Models (LLMs) serve as both a concept extraction mechanism and prior. Even though LLMs can be miscalibrated and hallucinate, we prove that BC-LLM can provide rigorous statistical inference and uncertainty quantification. Across image, text, and tabular datasets, BC-LLM outperforms interpretable baselines and even black-box models in certain settings, converges more rapidly towards relevant concepts, and is more robust to out-of-distribution samples.
Authors: Quentin Houbre, Roel Pieters
Abstract: The autonomous learning of new goals in robotics remains a complex issue to address. Here, we propose a model where curiosity influence learning flexibility. To do so, this paper proposes to root curiosity and attention together by taking inspiration from the Locus Coeruleus-Norepinephrine system along with various cognitive processes such as cognitive persistence and visual habituation. We apply our approach by experimenting with a simulated robotic arm on a set of objects with varying difficulty. The robot first discovers new goals via bottom-up attention through motor babbling with an inhibition of return mechanism, then engage to the learning of goals due to neural activity arising within the curiosity mechanism. The architecture is modelled with dynamic neural fields and the learning of goals such as pushing the objects in diverse directions is supported by the use of forward and inverse models implemented by multi-layer perceptrons. The adoption of dynamic neural fields to model curiosity, habituation and persistence allows the robot to demonstrate various learning trajectories depending on the object. In addition, the approach exhibits interesting properties regarding the learning of similar goals as well as the continuous switch between exploration and exploitation.
Authors: Taekyung Ki, Dongchan Min, Gyeongsu Chae
Abstract: With the rapid advancement of diffusion-based generative models, portrait image animation has achieved remarkable results. However, it still faces challenges in temporally consistent video generation and fast sampling due to its iterative sampling nature. This paper presents FLOAT, an audio-driven talking portrait video generation method based on flow matching generative model. Instead of a pixel-based latent space, we take advantage of a learned orthogonal motion latent space, enabling efficient generation and editing of temporally consistent motion. To achieve this, we introduce a transformer-based vector field predictor with an effective frame-wise conditioning mechanism. Additionally, our method supports speech-driven emotion enhancement, enabling a natural incorporation of expressive motions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art audio-driven talking portrait methods in terms of visual quality, motion fidelity, and efficiency.
Authors: Joonho Ko, Jinheon Baek, Sung Ju Hwang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language tasks. However, a critical challenge remains in that they sometimes generate factually incorrect answers. To address this, while many previous work has focused on identifying errors in their generation and further refining them, they are slow in deployment since they are designed to verify the response from LLMs only after their entire generation (from the first to last tokens) is done. Further, we observe that once LLMs generate incorrect tokens early on, there is a higher likelihood that subsequent tokens will also be factually incorrect. To this end, in this work, we propose Streaming-VR (Streaming Verification and Refinement), a novel approach designed to enhance the efficiency of verification and refinement of LLM outputs. Specifically, the proposed Streaming-VR enables on-the-fly verification and correction of tokens as they are being generated, similar to a streaming process, ensuring that each subset of tokens is checked and refined in real-time by another LLM as the LLM constructs its response. Through comprehensive evaluations on multiple datasets, we demonstrate that our approach not only enhances the factual accuracy of LLMs, but also offers a more efficient solution compared to prior refinement methods.
Authors: Jinwen Tang, Qiming Guo, Wenbo Sun, Yi Shang
Abstract: Long-form mental health assessments pose unique challenges for large language models (LLMs), which often exhibit hallucinations or inconsistent reasoning when handling extended, domain-specific contexts. We introduce Stacked Multi-Model Reasoning (SMMR), a layered framework that leverages multiple LLMs and specialized smaller models as coequal 'experts'. Early layers isolate short, discrete subtasks, while later layers integrate and refine these partial outputs through more advanced long-context models. We evaluate SMMR on the DAIC-WOZ depression-screening dataset and 48 curated case studies with psychiatric diagnoses, demonstrating consistent improvements over single-model baselines in terms of accuracy, F1-score, and PHQ-8 error reduction. By harnessing diverse 'second opinions', SMMR mitigates hallucinations, captures subtle clinical nuances, and enhances reliability in high-stakes mental health assessments. Our findings underscore the value of multi-expert frameworks for more trustworthy AI-driven screening.
Authors: Hao Dong, Moru Liu, Kaiyang Zhou, Eleni Chatzi, Juho Kannala, Cyrill Stachniss, Olga Fink
Abstract: In real-world scenarios, achieving domain adaptation and generalization poses significant challenges, as models must adapt to or generalize across unknown target distributions. Extending these capabilities to unseen multimodal distributions, i.e., multimodal domain adaptation and generalization, is even more challenging due to the distinct characteristics of different modalities. Significant progress has been made over the years, with applications ranging from action recognition to semantic segmentation. Besides, the recent advent of large-scale pre-trained multimodal foundation models, such as CLIP, has inspired works leveraging these models to enhance adaptation and generalization performances or adapting them to downstream tasks. This survey provides the first comprehensive review of recent advances from traditional approaches to foundation models, covering: (1) Multimodal domain adaptation; (2) Multimodal test-time adaptation; (3) Multimodal domain generalization; (4) Domain adaptation and generalization with the help of multimodal foundation models; and (5) Adaptation of multimodal foundation models. For each topic, we formally define the problem and thoroughly review existing methods. Additionally, we analyze relevant datasets and applications, highlighting open challenges and potential future research directions. We maintain an active repository that contains up-to-date literature at https://github.com/donghao51/Awesome-Multimodal-Adaptation.
URLs: https://github.com/donghao51/Awesome-Multimodal-Adaptation.
Authors: Sifan Wang, Ananyae Kumar Bhartari, Bowen Li, Paris Perdikaris
Abstract: Multi-task learning through composite loss functions is fundamental to modern deep learning, yet optimizing competing objectives remains challenging. We present new theoretical and practical approaches for addressing directional conflicts between loss terms, demonstrating their effectiveness in physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) where such conflicts are particularly challenging to resolve. Through theoretical analysis, we demonstrate how these conflicts limit first-order methods and show that second-order optimization naturally resolves them through implicit gradient alignment. We prove that SOAP, a recently proposed quasi-Newton method, efficiently approximates the Hessian preconditioner, enabling breakthrough performance in PINNs: state-of-the-art results on 10 challenging PDE benchmarks, including the first successful application to turbulent flows with Reynolds numbers up to 10,000, with 2-10x accuracy improvements over existing methods. We also introduce a novel gradient alignment score that generalizes cosine similarity to multiple gradients, providing a practical tool for analyzing optimization dynamics. Our findings establish frameworks for understanding and resolving gradient conflicts, with broad implications for optimization beyond scientific computing.
Authors: Shihan Fu, Bingsheng Yao, Smit Desai, Yuqi Hu, Yuling Sun, Samantha Stonbraker, Yanjun Gao, Elizabeth M. Goldberg, Dakuo Wang
Abstract: Older adult patients constitute a rapidly growing subgroup of Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients. In these situations, their family caregivers are expected to represent the unconscious patients to access and interpret patients' medical information. However, caregivers currently have to rely on overloaded clinicians for information updates and typically lack the health literacy to understand complex medical information. Our project aims to explore the information needs of caregivers of ICU older adult patients, from which we can propose design opportunities to guide future AI systems. The project begins with formative interviews with 11 caregivers to identify their challenges in accessing and interpreting medical information; From these findings, we then synthesize design requirements and propose an AI system prototype to cope with caregivers' challenges. The system prototype has two key features: a timeline visualization to show the AI extracted and summarized older adult patients' key medical events; and an LLM-based chatbot to provide context-aware informational support. We conclude our paper by reporting on the follow-up user evaluation of the system and discussing future AI-based systems for ICU caregivers of older adults.
Authors: Ishika Agarwal, Dilek Hakkani-T\"ur
Abstract: Influence functions provide crucial insights into model training, but existing methods suffer from large computational costs and limited generalization. Particularly, recent works have proposed various metrics and algorithms to calculate the influence of data using language models, which do not scale well with large models and datasets. This is because of the expensive forward and backward passes required for computation, substantial memory requirements to store large models, and poor generalization of influence estimates to new data. In this paper, we explore the use of small neural networks -- which we refer to as the InfluenceNetwork -- to estimate influence values, achieving up to 99% cost reduction. Our evaluation demonstrates that influence values can be estimated with models just 0.0027% the size of full language models (we use 7B and 8B versions). We apply our algorithm of estimating influence values (called NN-CIFT: Neural Networks for effiCient Instruction Fine-Tuning) to the downstream task of subset selection for general instruction fine-tuning. In our study, we include four state-of-the-art influence functions and show no compromise in performance, despite large speedups, between NN-CIFT and the original influence functions. We provide an in-depth hyperparameter analyses of NN-CIFT. The code for our method can be found here: https://github.com/agarwalishika/NN-CIFT.
Authors: Jesus Rios, Pierre Dognin, Ronny Luss, Karthikeyan N. Ramamurthy
Abstract: Full fine-tuning of large language models for alignment and task adaptation has become prohibitively expensive as models have grown in size. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods aim at significantly reducing the computational and memory resources needed for fine-tuning these models by only training on a small number of parameters instead of all model parameters. Currently, the most popular PEFT method is the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), which freezes the parameters of the model and introduces a small set of trainable parameters in the form of low-rank matrices. We propose simply reducing the number of trainable parameters by randomly selecting a small proportion of the model parameters to train on, while fixing all other parameters, without any additional prior assumptions such as low-rank structures. In this paper, we compare the efficiency and performance of our proposed approach to other PEFT methods as well as full parameter fine-tuning. We find our method to be competitive with LoRA when using a similar number of trainable parameters. Our findings suggest that what truly matters for a PEFT technique to perform well is not necessarily the specific adapter structure, but rather the number of trainable parameters being used.
Authors: Mingsheng Cai, Jiuming Jiang, Wenhao Huang, Che Liu, Rossella Arcucci
Abstract: Cardiovascular diseases are a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is critical for diagnosing and monitoring cardiac health, but obtaining large-scale annotated ECG datasets is labor-intensive and time-consuming. Recent ECG Self-Supervised Learning (eSSL) methods mitigate this by learning features without extensive labels but fail to capture fine-grained clinical semantics and require extensive task-specific fine-tuning. To address these challenges, we propose $\textbf{SuPreME}$, a $\textbf{Su}$pervised $\textbf{Pre}$-training framework for $\textbf{M}$ultimodal $\textbf{E}$CG representation learning. SuPreME is pre-trained using structured diagnostic labels derived from ECG report entities through a one-time offline extraction with Large Language Models (LLMs), which help denoise, standardize cardiac concepts, and improve clinical representation learning. By fusing ECG signals with textual cardiac queries instead of fixed labels, SuPreME enables zero-shot classification of unseen conditions without further fine-tuning. We evaluate SuPreME on six downstream datasets covering 106 cardiac conditions, achieving superior zero-shot AUC performance of $77.20\%$, surpassing state-of-the-art eSSLs by $4.98\%$. Results demonstrate SuPreME's effectiveness in leveraging structured, clinically relevant knowledge for high-quality ECG representations.
Authors: Shinwoo Park, Shubin Kim, Do-Kyung Kim, Yo-Sub Han
Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) increases the difficulty of distinguishing between human-written and LLM-generated text. Detecting LLM-generated text is crucial for upholding academic integrity, preventing plagiarism, protecting copyrights, and ensuring ethical research practices. Most prior studies on detecting LLM-generated text focus primarily on English text. However, languages with distinct morphological and syntactic characteristics require specialized detection approaches. Their unique structures and usage patterns can hinder the direct application of methods primarily designed for English. Among such languages, we focus on Korean, which has relatively flexible spacing rules, a rich morphological system, and less frequent comma usage compared to English. We introduce KatFish, the first benchmark dataset for detecting LLM-generated Korean text. The dataset consists of text written by humans and generated by four LLMs across three genres. By examining spacing patterns, part-of-speech diversity, and comma usage, we illuminate the linguistic differences between human-written and LLM-generated Korean text. Building on these observations, we propose KatFishNet, a detection method specifically designed for the Korean language. KatFishNet achieves an average of 19.78% higher AUROC compared to the best-performing existing detection method. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Shinwoo-Park/detecting_llm_generated_korean_text_through_linguistic_analysis.
URLs: https://github.com/Shinwoo-Park/detecting_llm_generated_korean_text_through_linguistic_analysis.
Authors: Avinash Madasu, Vasudev Lal, Phillip Howard
Abstract: CLIP is one of the most popular foundation models and is heavily used for many vision-language tasks, yet little is known about its inner workings. As CLIP is increasingly deployed in real-world applications, it is becoming even more critical to understand its limitations and embedded social biases to mitigate potentially harmful downstream consequences. However, the question of what internal mechanisms drive both the impressive capabilities as well as problematic shortcomings of CLIP has largely remained unanswered. To bridge this gap, we study the conceptual consistency of text descriptions for attention heads in CLIP-like models. Specifically, we propose Concept Consistency Score (CCS), a novel interpretability metric that measures how consistently individual attention heads in CLIP models align with specific concepts. Our soft-pruning experiments reveal that high CCS heads are critical for preserving model performance, as pruning them leads to a significantly larger performance drop than pruning random or low CCS heads. Notably, we find that high CCS heads capture essential concepts and play a key role in out-of-domain detection, concept-specific reasoning, and video-language understanding. Moreover, we prove that high CCS heads learn spurious correlations which amplify social biases. These results position CCS as a powerful interpretability metric exposing the paradox of performance and social biases in CLIP models.
Authors: Zhaopeng Feng, Jiahan Ren, Jiayuan Su, Jiamei Zheng, Hongwei Wang, Zuozhu Liu
Abstract: Process reward models (PRMs) have shown success in complex reasoning tasks for large language models (LLMs). However, their application to machine translation (MT) remains underexplored due to the lack of systematic methodologies and evaluation benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{MT-RewardTree}, a comprehensive framework for constructing, evaluating, and deploying process reward models in MT. Unlike traditional vanilla preference pair construction, we propose a novel method for automatically generating token-level preference pairs using approximate Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), which mitigates the prohibitive cost of human annotation for fine-grained steps. Then, we establish the first MT-specific reward model benchmark and provide a systematic comparison of different reward modeling architectures, revealing that token-level supervision effectively captures fine-grained preferences. Experimental results demonstrate that our MT-PRM-Qwen-2.5-3B achieves state-of-the-art performance in both token-level and sequence-level evaluation given the same input prefix. Furthermore, we showcase practical applications where PRMs enable test-time alignment for LLMs without additional alignment training and significantly improve performance in hypothesis ensembling. Our work provides valuable insights into the role of reward models in MT research. Our code and data are released in \href{https://sabijun.github.io/MT_RewardTreePage/}{https://sabijun.github.io/MT\_RewardTreePage}.
URLs: https://sabijun.github.io/MT_RewardTreePage/, https://sabijun.github.io/MT\_RewardTreePage
Authors: Rashid Mushkani, Hugo Berard, Shin Koseki
Abstract: Urban assessments often compress diverse needs into single scores, which can obscure minority perspectives. We present a community-centered study in Montreal (n=35; wheelchair users, seniors, LGBTQIA2+ residents, and immigrants). Participants rated 20 streets (accessibility, inclusivity, aesthetics, practicality) and ranked 7 images on 12 interview-elicited criteria. Disagreement patterns were systematic in our sample: wheelchair users diverged most on accessibility and practicality; LGBTQIA2+ participants emphasized inclusion and liveliness; seniors prioritized security. Group discussion reduced information gaps but not value conflicts; ratings conveyed intensity, while rankings forced trade-offs. We then formalize negotiative alignment, a transparent, budget-aware bargaining procedure, and pilot it with role-played stakeholder agents plus a neutral mediator. Relative to the best base design under the same public rubric, the negotiated package increased total utility (21.10 to 24.55), raised the worst-group utility (3.20 to 3.90), improved twentieth percentile satisfaction (0.86 to 1.00; min-max normalized within the scenario), and reduced inequality (Gini 0.036 to 0.025). Treating disagreement as signal and reporting worst-group outcomes alongside totals may help planners and AI practitioners surface trade-offs and preserve minority priorities while maintaining efficiency.
Authors: Yubo Li, Xinyu Yao, Rema Padman
Abstract: Despite the outstanding performance of deep learning models in clinical prediction tasks, explainability remains a significant challenge. Inspired by transformer architectures, we introduce the Temporal-Feature Cross Attention Mechanism (TFCAM), a novel deep learning framework designed to capture dynamic interactions among clinical features across time, enhancing both predictive accuracy and interpretability. In an experiment with 1,422 patients with Chronic Kidney Disease, predicting progression to End-Stage Renal Disease, TFCAM outperformed LSTM and RETAIN baselines, achieving an AUROC of 0.95 and an F1-score of 0.69. Beyond performance gains, TFCAM provides multi-level explainability by identifying critical temporal periods, ranking feature importance, and quantifying how features influence each other across time before affecting predictions. Our approach addresses the "black box" limitations of deep learning in healthcare, offering clinicians transparent insights into disease progression mechanisms while maintaining state-of-the-art predictive performance.
Authors: Hilda Hadan, Reza Hadi Mogavi, Leah Zhang-Kennedy, Lennart E. Nacke
Abstract: The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has raised major privacy and ethical concerns. However, existing AI incident taxonomies and guidelines lack grounding in real-world cases, limiting their effectiveness for prevention and mitigation. We analyzed 202 real-world AI privacy and ethical incidents to develop a taxonomy that classifies them across AI lifecycle stages and captures contributing factors, including causes, responsible entities, sources of disclosure, and impacts. Our findings reveal widespread harms from poor organizational decisions and legal non-compliance, limited corrective interventions, and rare reporting from AI developers and adopting entities. Our taxonomy offers a structured approach for systematic incident reporting and emphasizes the weaknesses of current AI governance frameworks. Our findings provide actionable guidance for policymakers and practitioners to strengthen user protections, develop targeted AI policies, enhance reporting practices, and foster responsible AI governance and innovation, especially in contexts such as social media and child protection.
Authors: Michael Somma
Abstract: Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, particularly water distribution systems, have increased due to rapid digitalization and the integration of IoT devices and industrial control systems (ICS). These cyber-physical systems (CPS) introduce new vulnerabilities, requiring robust and automated intrusion detection systems (IDS) to mitigate potential threats. This study addresses key challenges in anomaly detection by leveraging time correlations in sensor data, integrating physical principles into machine learning models, and optimizing computational efficiency for edge applications. We build upon the concept of temporal differential consistency (TDC) loss to capture the dynamics of the system, ensuring meaningful relationships between dynamic states. Expanding on this foundation, we propose a hybrid autoencoder-based approach, referred to as hybrid TDC-AE, which extends TDC by incorporating both deterministic nodes and conventional statistical nodes. This hybrid structure enables the model to account for non-deterministic processes. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art classification performance while improving time to detect anomalies by 3%, outperforming the BATADAL challenge leader without requiring domain-specific knowledge, making it broadly applicable. Additionally, it maintains the computational efficiency of conventional autoencoders while reducing the number of fully connected layers, resulting in a more sustainable and efficient solution. The method demonstrates how leveraging physics-inspired consistency principles enhances anomaly detection and strengthens the resilience of cyber-physical systems.
Authors: Pucheng Dang, Di Huang, Dong Li, Kang Chen, Yuanbo Wen, Qi Guo, Xing Hu
Abstract: Out-of-tree kernel patches are essential for adapting the Linux kernel to new hardware or enabling specific functionalities. Maintaining and updating these patches across different kernel versions demands significant effort from experienced engineers. Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress across various domains, suggesting their potential for automating out-of-tree kernel patch migration. However, our findings reveal that LLMs, while promising, struggle with incomplete code context understanding and inaccurate migration point identification. In this work, we propose MigGPT, a framework that employs a novel code fingerprint structure to retain code snippet information and incorporates three meticulously designed modules to improve the migration accuracy and efficiency of out-of-tree kernel patches. Furthermore, we establish a robust benchmark using real-world out-of-tree kernel patch projects to evaluate LLM capabilities. Evaluations show that MigGPT significantly outperforms the direct application of vanilla LLMs, achieving an average completion rate of 74.07 for migration tasks.
Authors: Mirza Samad Ahmed Baig, Syeda Anshrah Gillani, Abdul Akbar Khan, Shahid Munir Shah, Muhammad Omer Khan
Abstract: Transformer-based architectures achieve state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of tasks in natural language processing, computer vision, and speech processing. However, their immense capacity often leads to overfitting, especially when training data is limited or noisy. In this research, a unified family of stochastic regularization techniques has been proposed, i.e. AttentionDrop with its three different variants, which operate directly on the self-attention distributions. Hard Attention Masking randomly zeroes out top-k attention logits per query to encourage diverse context utilization, Blurred Attention Smoothing applies a dynamic Gaussian convolution over attention logits to diffuse overly peaked distributions, and Consistency-Regularized AttentionDrop enforces output stability under multiple independent AttentionDrop perturbations via a KL-based consistency loss. Results achieved in the study demonstrate that AttentionDrop consistently improves accuracy, calibration, and adversarial robustness over standard Dropout, DropConnect, and R-Drop baselines
Authors: Ziqing Qiao, Yongheng Deng, Jiali Zeng, Dong Wang, Lai Wei, Guanbo Wang, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Ju Ren, Yaoxue Zhang
Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) perform strongly in complex reasoning tasks via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, but often suffer from verbose outputs, increasing computational overhead. Existing fine-tuning-based compression methods either operate post-hoc pruning, risking disruption to reasoning coherence, or rely on sampling-based selection, which fails to remove redundant content thoroughly. To address these limitations, this work begins by framing two key patterns of redundant reflection in LRMs--Confidence Deficit, wherein the model reflects on correct intermediate steps, and Termination Delay, where reflection continues after a verified, confident answer--through a confidence-guided perspective. Based on this, we introduce ConCISE (Confidence-guided Compression In Step-by-step Efficient Reasoning), a framework designed to generate concise reasoning chains, integrating Confidence Injection to boost reasoning confidence, and Early Stopping to terminate reasoning when confidence is sufficient. Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared to baseline methods, fine-tuning LRMs on ConCISE-generated data yields a better balance between compression and task performance, reducing length by up to approximately 50% under SimPO, while maintaining high task accuracy.
Authors: Haibo Wang, Bo Feng, Zhengfeng Lai, Mingze Xu, Shiyu Li, Weifeng Ge, Afshin Dehghan, Meng Cao, Ping Huang
Abstract: We present StreamBridge, a simple yet effective framework that seamlessly transforms offline Video-LLMs into streaming-capable models. It addresses two fundamental challenges in adapting existing models into online scenarios: (1) limited capability for multi-turn real-time understanding, and (2) lack of proactive response mechanisms. Specifically, StreamBridge incorporates (1) a memory buffer combined with a round-decayed compression strategy, supporting long-context multi-turn interactions, and (2) a decoupled, lightweight activation model that can be effortlessly integrated into existing Video-LLMs, enabling continuous proactive responses. To further support StreamBridge, we construct Stream-IT, a large-scale dataset tailored for streaming video understanding, featuring interleaved video-text sequences and diverse instruction formats. Extensive experiments show that StreamBridge significantly improves the streaming understanding capabilities of offline Video-LLMs across various tasks, outperforming even proprietary models such as GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro. Simultaneously, it achieves competitive or superior performance on standard video understanding benchmarks.
Authors: Qinghui Liu, Jon E. Nesvold, Hanna Raaum, Elakkyen Murugesu, Martin R{\o}vang, Bradley J Maclntosh, Atle Bj{\o}rnerud, Karoline Skogen
Abstract: Background: There are many challenges and opportunities in the clinical deployment of AI tools in radiology. The current study describes a radiology software platform called NeoMedSys that can enable efficient deployment and refinements of AI models. We evaluated the feasibility and effectiveness of running NeoMedSys for three months in real-world clinical settings and focused on improvement performance of an in-house developed AI model (VIOLA-AI) designed for intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) detection. Methods: NeoMedSys integrates tools for deploying, testing, and optimizing AI models with a web-based medical image viewer, annotation system, and hospital-wide radiology information systems. A prospective pragmatic investigation was deployed using clinical cases of patients presenting to the largest Emergency Department in Norway (site-1) with suspected traumatic brain injury (TBI) or patients with suspected stroke (site-2). We assessed ICH classification performance as VIOLA-AI encountered new data and underwent pre-planned model retraining. Performance metrics included sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Results: NeoMedSys facilitated iterative improvements in the AI model, significantly enhancing its diagnostic accuracy. Automated bleed detection and segmentation were reviewed in near real-time to facilitate re-training VIOLA-AI. The iterative refinement process yielded a marked improvement in classification sensitivity, rising to 90.3% (from 79.2%), and specificity that reached 89.3% (from 80.7%). The bleed detection ROC analysis for the entire sample demonstrated a high area-under-the-curve (AUC) of 0.949 (from 0.873). Model refinement stages were associated with notable gains, highlighting the value of real-time radiologist feedback.
Authors: Aryan Mishra, Lizhen Lin
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) offer a principled framework for learning over graph-structured data, yet their expressive capacity is often hindered by over-squashing, wherein information from distant nodes is compressed into fixed-size vectors. Existing solutions, including graph rewiring and bottleneck-resistant architectures such as Cayley and expander graphs, avoid this problem but introduce scalability bottlenecks. In particular, the Cayley graphs constructed over $SL(2,\mathbb{Z}_n)$ exhibit strong theoretical properties, yet suffer from cubic node growth $O(n^3)$, leading to high memory usage. To address this, this work introduces Schrier-Coset Graph Propagation (SCGP), a group-theoretic augmentation method that enriches node features through Schreier-coset embeddings without altering the input graph topology. SCGP embeds bottleneck-free connectivity patterns into a compact feature space, improving long-range message passing while maintaining computational efficiency. Empirical evaluations across standard node and graph classification benchmarks demonstrate that SCGP achieves performance comparable to, or exceeding, expander graph and rewired GNN baselines. Furthermore, SCGP exhibits particular advantages in processing hierarchical and modular graph structures, offering reduced inference latency, improved scalability, and a low memory footprint, making it suitable for real-time and resource-constrained applications.
Authors: Rees Chang, Angela Pak, Alex Guerra, Ni Zhan, Nick Richardson, Elif Ertekin, Ryan P. Adams
Abstract: Accelerating inverse design of crystalline materials with generative models has significant implications for a range of technologies. Unlike other atomic systems, 3D crystals are invariant to discrete groups of isometries called the space groups. Crucially, these space group symmetries are known to heavily influence materials properties. We propose SGEquiDiff, a crystal generative model which naturally handles space group constraints with space group invariant likelihoods. SGEquiD-iff consists of an SE(3)-invariant, telescoping discrete sampler of crystal lattices; permutation-invariant, transformer-based autoregressive sampling of Wyckoff positions, elements, and numbers of symmetrically unique atoms; and space group equivariant diffusion of atomic coordinates. We show that space group equivariant vector fields automatically live in the tangent spaces of the Wyckoff positions. SGEquiDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmark datasets as assessed by quantitative proxy metrics and quantum mechanical calculations. Our code is available at https://github.com/rees-c/sgequidiff.
Authors: Yaorui Shi, Sihang Li, Chang Wu, Zhiyuan Liu, Junfeng Fang, Hengxing Cai, An Zhang, Xiang Wang
Abstract: Large language models have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities but are inherently limited by their knowledge reservoir. Retrieval-augmented reasoning mitigates this limitation by allowing LLMs to query external resources, but existing methods often retrieve irrelevant or noisy information, hindering accurate reasoning. In this paper, we propose AutoRefine, a reinforcement learning post-training framework that adopts a new "search-and-refine-during-think" paradigm. AutoRefine introduces explicit knowledge refinement steps between successive search calls, enabling the model to iteratively filter, distill, and organize evidence before generating an answer. Furthermore, we incorporate tailored retrieval-specific rewards alongside answer correctness rewards using group relative policy optimization. Experiments on single-hop and multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that AutoRefine significantly outperforms existing approaches, particularly in complex, multi-hop reasoning scenarios. Detailed analysis shows that AutoRefine issues frequent, higher-quality searches and synthesizes evidence effectively.
Authors: Seyoung Song, Seogyeong Jeong, Eunsu Kim, Jiho Jin, Dongkwan Kim, Jay Shin, Alice Oh
Abstract: Evaluating text generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is challenging, particularly for low-resource languages where methods for direct assessment are scarce. We propose MUG-Eval, a novel framework that evaluates LLMs' multilingual generation capabilities by transforming existing benchmarks into conversational tasks and measuring the LLMs' accuracies on those tasks. We specifically designed these conversational tasks to require effective communication in the target language. Then, we simply use task success rate as a proxy for successful conversation generation. Our approach offers two key advantages: it is independent of language-specific NLP tools or annotated datasets, which are limited for most languages, and it does not rely on LLMs-as-judges, whose evaluation quality degrades outside a few high-resource languages. We evaluate 8 LLMs across 30 languages spanning high, mid, and low-resource categories, and we find that MUG-Eval correlates strongly with established benchmarks ($r$ > 0.75) while enabling standardized comparisons across languages and models. Our framework provides a robust and resource-efficient solution for evaluating multilingual generation that can be extended to thousands of languages.
Authors: Mete Ismayilzada, Antonio Laverghetta Jr., Simone A. Luchini, Reet Patel, Antoine Bosselut, Lonneke van der Plas, Roger Beaty
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across natural language generation tasks, their ability to generate truly creative content-characterized by novelty, diversity, surprise, and quality-remains limited. Existing methods for enhancing LLM creativity often focus narrowly on diversity or specific tasks, failing to address creativity's multifaceted nature in a generalizable way. In this work, we propose Creative Preference Optimization (CrPO), a novel alignment method that injects signals from multiple creativity dimensions into the preference optimization objective in a modular fashion. We train and evaluate creativity-augmented versions of several models using CrPO and MuCE, a new large-scale human preference dataset spanning over 200,000 human-generated responses and ratings from more than 30 psychological creativity assessments. Our models outperform strong baselines, including GPT-4o, on both automated and human evaluations, producing more novel, diverse, and surprising generations while maintaining high output quality. Additional evaluations on NoveltyBench further confirm the generalizability of our approach. Together, our results demonstrate that directly optimizing for creativity within preference frameworks is a promising direction for advancing the creative capabilities of LLMs without compromising output quality.
Authors: Yuyang Jiang, Chacha Chen, Shengyuan Wang, Feng Li, Zecong Tang, Benjamin M. Mervak, Lydia Chelala, Christopher M Straus, Reve Chahine, Samuel G. Armato III, Chenhao Tan
Abstract: Existing metrics often lack the granularity and interpretability to capture nuanced clinical differences between candidate and ground-truth radiology reports, resulting in suboptimal evaluation. We introduce a Clinically-grounded tabular framework with Expert-curated labels and Attribute-level comparison for Radiology report evaluation (CLEAR). CLEAR not only examines whether a report can accurately identify the presence or absence of medical conditions, but also assesses whether it can precisely describe each positively identified condition across five key attributes: first occurrence, change, severity, descriptive location, and recommendation. Compared to prior works, CLEAR's multi-dimensional, attribute-level outputs enable a more comprehensive and clinically interpretable evaluation of report quality. Additionally, to measure the clinical alignment of CLEAR, we collaborate with five board-certified radiologists to develop CLEAR-Bench, a dataset of 100 chest X-ray reports from MIMIC-CXR, annotated across 6 curated attributes and 13 CheXpert conditions. Our experiments show that CLEAR achieves high accuracy in extracting clinical attributes and provides automated metrics that are strongly aligned with clinical judgment.
Authors: Mengran Li, Pengyu Zhang, Wenbin Xing, Yijia Zheng, Klim Zaporojets, Junzhou Chen, Ronghui Zhang, Yong Zhang, Siyuan Gong, Jia Hu, Xiaolei Ma, Zhiyuan Liu, Paul Groth, Marcel Worring
Abstract: Graphs are a widely used paradigm for representing non-Euclidean data, with applications ranging from social network analysis to biomolecular prediction. While graph learning has achieved remarkable progress, real-world graph data presents a number of challenges that significantly hinder the learning process. In this survey, we focus on four fundamental data-centric challenges: (1) Incompleteness, real-world graphs have missing nodes, edges, or attributes; (2) Imbalance, the distribution of the labels of nodes or edges and their structures for real-world graphs are highly skewed; (3) Cross-domain Heterogeneity, graphs from different domains exhibit incompatible feature spaces or structural patterns; and (4) Dynamic Instability, graphs evolve over time in unpredictable ways. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer the potential to tackle these challenges by leveraging rich semantic reasoning and external knowledge. This survey focuses on how LLMs can address four fundamental data-centric challenges in graph-structured data, thereby improving the effectiveness of graph learning. For each challenge, we review both traditional solutions and modern LLM-driven approaches, highlighting how LLMs contribute unique advantages. Finally, we discuss open research questions and promising future directions in this emerging interdisciplinary field. To support further exploration, we have curated a repository of recent advances on graph learning challenges: https://github.com/limengran98/Awesome-Literature-Graph-Learning-Challenges.
URLs: https://github.com/limengran98/Awesome-Literature-Graph-Learning-Challenges.
Authors: Chun Wang, Xiaoran Pan, Zihao Pan, Haofan Wang, Yiren Song
Abstract: Recent advances in Visual Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in visual reasoning tasks. However, geo-localization presents unique challenges, requiring the extraction of multigranular visual cues from images and their integration with external world knowledge for systematic reasoning. Current approaches to geo-localization tasks often lack robust reasoning mechanisms and explainability, limiting their effectiveness. To address these limitations, we propose the Geo Reason Enhancement (GRE) Suite, a novel framework that augments VLMs with structured reasoning chains for accurate and interpretable location inference. The GRE Suite is systematically developed across three key dimensions: dataset, model, and benchmark. First, we introduce GRE30K, a high-quality geo-localization reasoning dataset designed to facilitate fine-grained visual and contextual analysis. Next, we present the GRE model, which employs a multi-stage reasoning strategy to progressively infer scene attributes, local details, and semantic features, thereby narrowing down potential geographic regions with enhanced precision. Finally, we construct the Geo Reason Evaluation Benchmark (GREval-Bench), a comprehensive evaluation framework that assesses VLMs across diverse urban, natural, and landmark scenes to measure both coarse-grained (e.g., country, continent) and fine-grained (e.g., city, street) localization performance. Experimental results demonstrate that GRE significantly outperforms existing methods across all granularities of geo-localization tasks, underscoring the efficacy of reasoning-augmented VLMs in complex geographic inference. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/Thorin215/GRE.
Authors: Jing Nathan Yan, Emma Harvey, Junxiong Wang, Jeffrey M. Rzeszotarski, Allison Koenecke
Abstract: Recommender systems (RS), which are widely deployed across high-stakes domains, are susceptible to biases that can cause large-scale societal impacts. Researchers have proposed methods to measure and mitigate such biases -- but translating academic theory into practice is inherently challenging. RS practitioners must balance the competing interests of diverse stakeholders, including providers and users, and operate in dynamic environments. Through a semi-structured interview study (N=11), we map the RS practitioner workflow within large technology companies, focusing on how technical teams consider fairness internally and in collaboration with other (legal, data, and fairness) teams. We identify key challenges to incorporating fairness into existing RS workflows: defining fairness in RS contexts, particularly when navigating multi-stakeholder and dynamic fairness considerations. We also identify key organization-wide challenges: making time for fairness work and facilitating cross-team communication. Finally, we offer actionable recommendations for the RS community, including HCI researchers and practitioners.
Authors: Yejin Lee, Joonghyuk Hahn, Hyeseon Ahn, Yo-Sub Han
Abstract: Implicit hate speech detection is challenging due to its subtlety and reliance on contextual interpretation rather than explicit offensive words. Current approaches rely on contrastive learning, which are shown to be effective on distinguishing hate and non-hate sentences. Humans, however, detect implicit hate speech by first identifying specific targets within the text and subsequently interpreting how these target relate to their surrounding context. Motivated by this reasoning process, we propose AmpleHate, a novel approach designed to mirror human inference for implicit hate detection. AmpleHate identifies explicit target using a pretrained Named Entity Recognition model and capture implicit target information via [CLS] tokens. It computes attention-based relationships between explicit, implicit targets and sentence context and then, directly injects these relational vectors into the final sentence representation. This amplifies the critical signals of target-context relations for determining implicit hate. Experiments demonstrate that AmpleHate achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming contrastive learning baselines by an average of 82.14% and achieve faster convergence. Qualitative analyses further reveal that attention patterns produced by AmpleHate closely align with human judgement, underscoring its interpretability and robustness. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/leeyejin1231/AmpleHate.
Authors: Arvindh Arun, Sumit Kumar, Mojtaba Nayyeri, Bo Xiong, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Antonio Vergari, Steffen Staab
Abstract: Knowledge Graph Foundation Models (KGFMs) have shown promise in enabling zero-shot reasoning over unseen graphs by learning transferable patterns. However, most existing KGFMs rely solely on graph structure, overlooking the rich semantic signals encoded in textual attributes. We introduce SEMMA, a dual-module KGFM that systematically integrates transferable textual semantics alongside structure. SEMMA leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to enrich relation identifiers, generating semantic embeddings that subsequently form a textual relation graph, which is fused with the structural component. Across 54 diverse KGs, SEMMA outperforms purely structural baselines like ULTRA in fully inductive link prediction. Crucially, we show that in more challenging generalization settings, where the test-time relation vocabulary is entirely unseen, structural methods collapse while SEMMA is 2x more effective. Our findings demonstrate that textual semantics are critical for generalization in settings where structure alone fails, highlighting the need for foundation models that unify structural and linguistic signals in knowledge reasoning.
Authors: Zhaokun Wang, Jinyu Guo, Jingwen Pu, Lingfeng Chen, Hongli Pu, Jie Ou, Libo Qin, Wenhong Tian
Abstract: Current parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods for adapting pre-trained language models to downstream tasks are susceptible to interference from noisy data. Conventional noise-handling approaches either rely on laborious data pre-processing or employ model architecture modifications prone to error accumulation. In contrast to existing noise-process paradigms, we propose a noise-robust adaptation method via asymmetric LoRA poisoning experts (LoPE), a novel framework that enhances model robustness to noise only with generated noisy data. Drawing inspiration from the mixture-of-experts architecture, LoPE strategically integrates a dedicated poisoning expert in an asymmetric LoRA configuration. Through a two-stage paradigm, LoPE performs noise injection on the poisoning expert during fine-tuning to enhance its noise discrimination and processing ability. During inference, we selectively mask the dedicated poisoning expert to leverage purified knowledge acquired by normal experts for noise-robust output. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LoPE achieves strong performance and robustness purely through the low-cost noise injection, which completely eliminates the requirement of data cleaning.
Authors: Narmeen Oozeer, Luke Marks, Fazl Barez, Amirali Abdullah
Abstract: Controlling multiple behavioral attributes in large language models (LLMs) at inference time is a challenging problem due to interference between attributes and the limitations of linear steering methods, which assume additive behavior in activation space and require per-attribute tuning. We introduce K-Steering, a unified and flexible approach that trains a single non-linear multi-label classifier on hidden activations and computes intervention directions via gradients at inference time. This avoids linearity assumptions, removes the need for storing and tuning separate attribute vectors, and allows dynamic composition of behaviors without retraining. To evaluate our method, we propose two new benchmarks, ToneBank and DebateMix, targeting compositional behavioral control. Empirical results across 3 model families, validated by both activation-based classifiers and LLM-based judges, demonstrate that K-Steering outperforms strong baselines in accurately steering multiple behaviors.
Authors: Wei Zhong, Manasa Bharadwaj, Yixiao Wang, Nikhil Verma, Yipeng Ji, Chul Lee
Abstract: Speculative decoding (SD) is a widely adopted approach for accelerating inference in large language models (LLMs), particularly when the draft and target models are well aligned. However, state-of-the-art SD methods typically rely on tightly coupled, self-attention-based Transformer decoders, often augmented with auxiliary pooling or fusion layers. This coupling makes them increasingly complex and harder to generalize across different models. We present Budget EAGLE (Beagle), the first, to our knowledge, cross-attention-based Transformer decoder SD model that achieves performance on par with leading self-attention SD models (EAGLE-v2) while eliminating the need for pooling or auxiliary components, simplifying the architecture, improving training efficiency, and maintaining stable memory usage during training-time simulation. To enable effective training of this novel architecture, we propose Two-Stage Block-Attention Training, a new method that achieves training stability and convergence efficiency in block-level attention scenarios. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs and datasets show that Beagle achieves competitive inference speedups and higher training efficiency than EAGLE-v2, offering a strong alternative for architectures in speculative decoding.
Authors: Ahmed Elhady, Eneko Agirre, Mikel Artetxe
Abstract: Continued pretraining (CPT) is a popular approach to adapt existing large language models (LLMs) to new languages. When doing so, it is common practice to include a portion of English data in the mixture, but its role has not been carefully studied to date. In this work, we show that including English does not impact validation perplexity, yet it is critical for the emergence of downstream capabilities in the target language. We introduce a language-agnostic benchmark for in-context learning (ICL), which reveals catastrophic forgetting early on CPT when English is not included. This in turn damages the ability of the model to generalize to downstream prompts in the target language as measured by perplexity, even if it does not manifest in terms of accuracy until later in training, and can be tied to a big shift in the model parameters. Based on these insights, we introduce curriculum learning and exponential moving average (EMA) of weights as effective alternatives to mitigate the need for English. All in all, our work sheds light into the dynamics by which emergent abilities arise when doing CPT for language adaptation, and can serve as a foundation to design more effective methods in the future.
Authors: Haoyu Zhang, Meng Liu, Zaijing Li, Haokun Wen, Weili Guan, Yaowei Wang, Liqiang Nie
Abstract: Visual-spatial understanding, the ability to infer object relationships and layouts from visual input, is fundamental to downstream tasks such as robotic navigation and embodied interaction. However, existing methods face spatial uncertainty and data scarcity, limiting the 3D spatial reasoning capability of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs). To address these challenges, we present a unified framework for enhancing 3D spatial reasoning in pre-trained VLMs without modifying their architecture. This framework combines SpatialMind, a structured prompting strategy that decomposes complex scenes and questions into interpretable reasoning steps, with ScanForgeQA, a scalable question-answering dataset built from diverse 3D simulation scenes through an automated construction process designed for fine-tuning. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the individual and combined effectiveness of our prompting and fine-tuning strategies, and yield insights that may inspire future research on visual-spatial understanding.
Authors: Sho Takishita, Jay Gala, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Kentaro Inui, Yova Kementchedjhieva
Abstract: Many vision-language models (VLMs) that prove very effective at a range of multimodal task, build on CLIP-based vision encoders, which are known to have various limitations. We investigate the hypothesis that the strong language backbone in VLMs compensates for possibly weak visual features by contextualizing or enriching them. Using three CLIP-based VLMs, we perform controlled self-attention ablations on a carefully designed probing task. Our findings show that despite known limitations, CLIP visual representations offer ready-to-read semantic information to the language decoder. However, in scenarios of reduced contextualization in the visual representations, the language decoder can largely compensate for the deficiency and recover performance. This suggests a dynamic division of labor in VLMs and motivates future architectures that offload more visual processing to the language decoder.
Authors: Chen Bao, Chuanbing Huo, Qinyu Chen, Chang Gao
Abstract: This paper proposes AS-ASR, a lightweight aphasia-specific speech recognition framework based on Whisper-tiny, tailored for low-resource deployment on edge devices. Our approach introduces a hybrid training strategy that systematically combines standard and aphasic speech at varying ratios, enabling robust generalization, and a GPT-4-based reference enhancement method that refines noisy aphasic transcripts, improving supervision quality. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple data mixing configurations and evaluation settings. Results show that our fine-tuned model significantly outperforms the zero-shot baseline, reducing WER on aphasic speech by over 30% while preserving performance on standard speech. The proposed framework offers a scalable, efficient solution for real-world disordered speech recognition.
Authors: Tong Xiao, Xin Xu, Zhenya Huang, Hongyu Gao, Quan Liu, Qi Liu, Enhong Chen
Abstract: Enhancing the multimodal reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is a challenging task that has attracted increasing attention in the community. Recently, several studies have applied Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to the multimodal domain in order to enhance the reasoning abilities of MLLMs. However, these works largely overlook the enhancement of multimodal perception capabilities in MLLMs, which serve as a core prerequisite and foundational component of complex multimodal reasoning. Through McNemar's test, we find that existing RLVR method fails to effectively enhance the multimodal perception capabilities of MLLMs, thereby limiting their further improvement in multimodal reasoning. To address this limitation, we propose Perception-R1, which introduces a novel visual perception reward that explicitly encourages MLLMs to perceive the visual content accurately, thereby can effectively incentivizing both their multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities. Specifically, we first collect textual visual annotations from the CoT trajectories of multimodal problems, which will serve as visual references for reward assignment. During RLVR training, we employ a judging LLM to assess the consistency between the visual annotations and the responses generated by MLLM, and assign the visual perception reward based on these consistency judgments. Extensive experiments on several multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our Perception-R1, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on most benchmarks using only 1,442 training data.
Authors: Yixuan Yang, Zhen Luo, Tongsheng Ding, Junru Lu, Mingqi Gao, Jinyu Yang, Victor Sanchez, Feng Zheng
Abstract: Automatic indoor layout generation has attracted increasing attention due to its potential in interior design, virtual environment construction, and embodied AI. Existing methods fall into two categories: prompt-driven approaches that leverage proprietary LLM services (e.g., GPT APIs) and learning-based methods trained on layout data upon diffusion-based models. Prompt-driven methods often suffer from spatial inconsistency and high computational costs, while learning-based methods are typically constrained by coarse relational graphs and limited datasets, restricting their generalization to diverse room categories. In this paper, we revisit LLM-based indoor layout generation and present 3D-SynthPlace, a large-scale dataset that combines synthetic layouts generated via a 'GPT synthesize, Human inspect' pipeline, upgraded from the 3D-Front dataset. 3D-SynthPlace contains nearly 17,000 scenes, covering four common room types -- bedroom, living room, kitchen, and bathroom -- enriched with diverse objects and high-level spatial annotations. We further introduce OptiScene, a strong open-source LLM optimized for indoor layout generation, fine-tuned based on our 3D-SynthPlace dataset through our two-stage training. For the warum-up stage I, we adopt supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which is taught to first generate high-level spatial descriptions then conditionally predict concrete object placements. For the reinforcing stage II, to better align the generated layouts with human design preferences, we apply multi-turn direct preference optimization (DPO), which significantly improving layout quality and generation success rates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OptiScene outperforms traditional prompt-driven and learning-based baselines. Moreover, OptiScene shows promising potential in interactive tasks such as scene editing and robot navigation.
Authors: Yijun Bian, Lei You, Yuya Sasaki, Haruka Maeda, Akira Igarashi
Abstract: The rapid trend of deploying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems in socially consequential domains has raised growing concerns about their trustworthiness, including potential discriminatory behaviours. Research in algorithmic fairness has generated a proliferation of mathematical definitions and metrics, yet persistent misconceptions and limitations -- both within and beyond the fairness community -- limit their effectiveness, such as an unreached consensus on its understanding, prevailing measures primarily tailored to binary group settings, and superficial handling for intersectional contexts. Here we critically remark on these misconceptions and argue that fairness cannot be reduced to purely technical constraints on models; we also examine the limitations of existing fairness measures through conceptual analysis and empirical illustrations, showing their limited applicability in the face of complex real-world scenarios, challenging prevailing views on the incompatibility between accuracy and fairness as well as that among fairness measures themselves, and outlining three worth-considering principles in the design of fairness measures. We believe these findings will help bridge the gap between technical formalisation and social realities and meet the challenges of real-world AI/ML deployment.
Authors: Zhiyi Shi, Binjie Wang, Chongjie Si, Yichen Wu, Junsik Kim, Hanspeter Pfister
Abstract: Model editing aims to efficiently update a pre-trained model's knowledge without the need for time-consuming full retraining. While existing pioneering editing methods achieve promising results, they primarily focus on editing single-modal language models (LLMs). However, for vision-language models (VLMs), which involve multiple modalities, the role and impact of each modality on editing performance remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, we explore the impact of textual and visual modalities on model editing and find that: (1) textual and visual representations reach peak sensitivity at different layers, reflecting their varying importance; and (2) editing both modalities can efficiently update knowledge, but this comes at the cost of compromising the model's original capabilities. Based on our findings, we propose DualEdit, an editor that modifies both textual and visual modalities at their respective key layers. Additionally, we introduce a gating module within the more sensitive textual modality, allowing DualEdit to efficiently update new knowledge while preserving the model's original information. We evaluate DualEdit across multiple VLM backbones and benchmark datasets, demonstrating its superiority over state-of-the-art VLM editing baselines as well as adapted LLM editing methods on different evaluation metrics. Codes are available at https://github.com/zhiyiscs/DualEdit
Authors: Runpeng Yu, Qi Li, Xinchao Wang
Abstract: In this work, we provide a systematic survey of Discrete Diffusion Language Models (dLLMs) and Discrete Diffusion Multimodal Language Models (dMLLMs). Unlike autoregressive (AR) models, dLLMs and dMLLMs adopt a multi-token, parallel decoding paradigm using full attention and a denoising-based generation strategy. This paradigm naturally enables parallel generation, fine-grained output control, and dynamic perception. These capabilities are previously difficult to achieve with AR models. A growing number of industrial-scale proprietary d(M)LLMs, as well as a large number of open-source academic d(M)LLMs, have demonstrated performance comparable to their autoregressive counterparts, while achieving up to 10$\times$ acceleration in inference speed. These developments position discrete diffusion models as a promising alternative to intelligence based on the traditional autoregressive approach. In this work, we present a comprehensive overview of the research in the dLLM and dMLLM domains. We trace the historical development of dLLMs and dMLLMs, formalize the underlying mathematical frameworks, list commonly-used modeling methods, and categorize representative models. We further analyze key techniques for training, inference, quantization. We also discuss the trustworthy issues and summarize emerging applications across language, vision-language, and biological domains and etc.. We conclude by discussing future directions for research and deployment. Relative papers are collected in https://github.com/LiQiiiii/Awesome-Discrete-Diffusion-LLM_MLLM
URLs: https://github.com/LiQiiiii/Awesome-Discrete-Diffusion-LLM_MLLM
Authors: Laura Kopf, Nils Feldhus, Kirill Bykov, Philine Lou Bommer, Anna Hedstr\"om, Marina M. -C. H\"ohne, Oliver Eberle
Abstract: Automated interpretability research aims to identify concepts encoded in neural network features to enhance human understanding of model behavior. Within the context of large language models (LLMs) for natural language processing (NLP), current automated neuron-level feature description methods face two key challenges: limited robustness and the assumption that each neuron encodes a single concept (monosemanticity), despite increasing evidence of polysemanticity. This assumption restricts the expressiveness of feature descriptions and limits their ability to capture the full range of behaviors encoded in model internals. To address this, we introduce Polysemantic FeatuRe Identification and Scoring Method (PRISM), a novel framework specifically designed to capture the complexity of features in LLMs. Unlike approaches that assign a single description per neuron, common in many automated interpretability methods in NLP, PRISM produces more nuanced descriptions that account for both monosemantic and polysemantic behavior. We apply PRISM to LLMs and, through extensive benchmarking against existing methods, demonstrate that our approach produces more accurate and faithful feature descriptions, improving both overall description quality (via a description score) and the ability to capture distinct concepts when polysemanticity is present (via a polysemanticity score).
Authors: Christian Templin, Yanda Zhu, Hao Wang
Abstract: Spatial audio has become central to immersive applications such as VR/AR, cinema, and music. Existing generative audio models are largely limited to mono or stereo formats and cannot capture the full 3D localization cues available in first-order Ambisonics (FOA). Recent FOA models extend text-to-audio generation but remain restricted to static sources. In this work, we introduce SonicMotion, the first end-to-end latent diffusion framework capable of generating FOA audio with explicit control over moving sound sources. SonicMotion is implemented in two variations: 1) a descriptive model conditioned on natural language prompts, and 2) a parametric model conditioned on both text and spatial trajectory parameters for higher precision. To support training and evaluation, we construct a new dataset of over one million simulated FOA caption pairs that include both static and dynamic sources with annotated azimuth, elevation, and motion attributes. Experiments show that SonicMotion achieves state-of-the-art semantic alignment and perceptual quality comparable to leading text-to-audio systems, while uniquely attaining low spatial localization error.
Authors: Esraa Elelimy, Brett Daley, Andrew Patterson, Marlos C. Machado, Adam White, Martha White
Abstract: Achieving fast and stable off-policy learning in deep reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging. Most existing methods rely on semi-gradient temporal-difference (TD) methods for their simplicity and efficiency, but are consequently susceptible to divergence. While more principled approaches like Gradient TD (GTD) methods have strong convergence guarantees, they have rarely been used in deep RL. Recent work introduced the generalized Projected Bellman Error ($\overline{\text{PBE}}$), enabling GTD methods to work efficiently with nonlinear function approximation. However, this work is limited to one-step methods, which are slow at credit assignment and require a large number of samples. In this paper, we extend the generalized $\overline{\text{PBE}}$ objective to support multistep credit assignment based on the $\lambda$-return and derive three gradient-based methods that optimize this new objective. We provide both a forward-view formulation compatible with experience replay and a backward-view formulation compatible with streaming algorithms. Finally, we evaluate the proposed algorithms and show that they outperform both PPO and StreamQ in MuJoCo and MinAtar environments, respectively. Code available at https://github.com/esraaelelimy/gtd\_algos
Authors: Hyeonseok Jin, Geonmin Kim, Kyungbaek Kim
Abstract: Traffic prediction is a critical component of intelligent transportation systems, enabling applications such as congestion mitigation and accident risk prediction. While recent research has explored both graph-based and grid-based approaches, key limitations remain. Graph-based methods effectively capture non-Euclidean spatial structures but often incur high computational overhead, limiting their practicality in large-scale systems. In contrast, grid-based methods, which primarily leverage Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), offer greater computational efficiency but struggle to model irregular spatial patterns due to the fixed shape of their filters. Moreover, both approaches often fail to account for inherent spatio-temporal heterogeneity, as they typically apply a shared set of parameters across diverse regions and time periods. To address these challenges, we propose the Deformable Dynamic Convolutional Network (DDCN), a novel CNN-based architecture that integrates both deformable and dynamic convolution operations. The deformable layer introduces learnable offsets to create flexible receptive fields that better align with spatial irregularities, while the dynamic layer generates region-specific filters, allowing the model to adapt to varying spatio-temporal traffic patterns. By combining these two components, DDCN effectively captures both non-Euclidean spatial structures and spatio-temporal heterogeneity. Extensive experiments on four real-world traffic datasets demonstrate that DDCN achieves competitive predictive performance while significantly reducing computational costs, underscoring its potential for large-scale and real-time deployment.
Authors: Shuliang Liu, Qi Zheng, Jesse Jiaxi Xu, Yibo Yan, Junyan Zhang, He Geng, Aiwei Liu, Peijie Jiang, Jia Liu, Yik-Cheung Tam, Xuming Hu
Abstract: Vision-language models demand watermarking solutions that protect intellectual property without compromising multimodal coherence. Existing text watermarking methods disrupt visual-textual alignment through biased token selection and static strategies, leaving semantic-critical concepts vulnerable. We propose VLA-Mark, a vision-aligned framework that embeds detectable watermarks while preserving semantic fidelity through cross-modal coordination. Our approach integrates multiscale visual-textual alignment metrics, combining localized patch affinity, global semantic coherence, and contextual attention patterns, to guide watermark injection without model retraining. An entropy-sensitive mechanism dynamically balances watermark strength and semantic preservation, prioritizing visual grounding during low-uncertainty generation phases. Experiments show 7.4% lower PPL and 26.6% higher BLEU than conventional methods, with near-perfect detection (98.8% AUC). The framework demonstrates 96.1\% attack resilience against attacks such as paraphrasing and synonym substitution, while maintaining text-visual consistency, establishing new standards for quality-preserving multimodal watermarking
Authors: Ailiang Lin, Zhuoyun Li, Kotaro Funakoshi, Manabu Okumura
Abstract: Decoder-only large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to build embedding models that effectively encode the semantic information of natural language texts into dense vector representations for various embedding tasks. However, many existing methods primarily focus on removing the causal attention mask in LLMs to enable bidirectional attention, potentially undermining the model's ability to extract semantic information acquired during pretraining. Additionally, leading unidirectional approaches often rely on extra input text to overcome the inherent limitations of causal attention, inevitably increasing computational costs. In this work, we propose Causal2Vec, a general-purpose embedding model tailored to enhance the performance of decoder-only LLMs without altering their original architectures or introducing significant computational overhead. Specifically, we first employ a lightweight BERT-style model to pre-encode the input text into a single Contextual token, which is then prepended to the LLM's input sequence, allowing each token to capture contextualized information even without attending to future tokens. Furthermore, to mitigate the recency bias introduced by last-token pooling and help LLMs better leverage the semantic information encoded in the Contextual token, we concatenate the last hidden states of Contextual and EOS tokens as the final text embedding. In practice, Causal2Vec achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB) among models trained solely on publicly available retrieval datasets, while reducing the required sequence length by up to 85% and inference time by up to 82% compared to best-performing methods.
Authors: Tianchen Fang, Guiru Liu
Abstract: Medical image understanding plays a crucial role in enabling automated diagnosis and data-driven clinical decision support. However, its progress is impeded by two primary challenges: the limited availability of high-quality annotated medical data and an overreliance on global image features, which often miss subtle but clinically significant pathological regions. To address these issues, we introduce RegionMed-CLIP, a region-aware multimodal contrastive learning framework that explicitly incorporates localized pathological signals along with holistic semantic representations. The core of our method is an innovative region-of-interest (ROI) processor that adaptively integrates fine-grained regional features with the global context, supported by a progressive training strategy that enhances hierarchical multimodal alignment. To enable large-scale region-level representation learning, we construct MedRegion-500k, a comprehensive medical image-text corpus that features extensive regional annotations and multilevel clinical descriptions. Extensive experiments on image-text retrieval, zero-shot classification, and visual question answering tasks demonstrate that RegionMed-CLIP consistently exceeds state-of-the-art vision language models by a wide margin. Our results highlight the critical importance of region-aware contrastive pre-training and position RegionMed-CLIP as a robust foundation for advancing multimodal medical image understanding.
Authors: Peter Lindes, Kaoutar Skiker
Abstract: We have a vision of a day when autonomous robots can collaborate with humans as assistants in performing complex tasks in the physical world. This vision includes that the robots will have the ability to communicate with their human collaborators using language that is natural to the humans. Traditional Interactive Task Learning (ITL) systems have some of this ability, but the language they can understand is very limited. The advent of large language models (LLMs) provides an opportunity to greatly improve the language understanding of robots, yet integrating the language abilities of LLMs with robots that operate in the real physical world is a challenging problem. In this chapter we first review briefly a few commercial robot products that work closely with humans, and discuss how they could be much better collaborators with robust language abilities. We then explore how an AI system with a cognitive agent that controls a physical robot at its core, interacts with both a human and an LLM, and accumulates situational knowledge through its experiences, can be a possible approach to reach that vision. We focus on three specific challenges of having the robot understand natural language, and present a simple proof-of-concept experiment using ChatGPT for each. Finally, we discuss what it will take to turn these simple experiments into an operational system where LLM-assisted language understanding is a part of an integrated robotic assistant that uses language to collaborate with humans.
Authors: Sai Sundaresan, Harshita Chopra, Atanu R. Sinha, Koustava Goswami, Nagasai Saketh Naidu, Raghav Karan, N Anushka
Abstract: A Large Language Model (LLM) offers versatility across domains and tasks, purportedly benefiting users with a wide variety of behaviors and preferences. We question this perception about an LLM when users have inherently subjective behaviors and preferences, as seen in their ubiquitous and idiosyncratic browsing of websites or apps. The sequential behavior logs of pages, thus generated, form something akin to each user's self-constructed "language", albeit without the structure and grammar imbued in natural languages. We ask: (i) Can a small LM represent the "language of browsing" better than a large LM? (ii) Can an LM with a single set of parameters (or, single LM) adequately capture myriad users' heterogeneous, subjective behaviors and preferences? (iii) Can a single LM with high average performance, yield low variance in performance to make alignment good at user level? We introduce clusterwise LM training, HeTLM (Heterogeneity aware Training of Language Model), appropriate for subjective behaviors. We find that (i) a small LM trained using a page-level tokenizer outperforms large pretrained or finetuned LMs; (ii) HeTLM with heterogeneous cluster specific set of parameters outperforms a single LM of the same family, controlling for the number of parameters; and (iii) a higher mean and a lower variance in generation ensues, implying improved alignment.
Authors: Rapha\"el Merx, Hanna Suominen, Trevor Cohn, Ekaterina Vylomova
Abstract: In machine translation (MT), health is a high-stakes domain characterised by widespread deployment and domain-specific vocabulary. However, there is a lack of MT evaluation datasets for low-resource languages in this domain. To address this gap, we introduce OpenWHO, a document-level parallel corpus of 2,978 documents and 26,824 sentences from the World Health Organization's e-learning platform. Sourced from expert-authored, professionally translated materials shielded from web-crawling, OpenWHO spans a diverse range of over 20 languages, of which nine are low-resource. Leveraging this new resource, we evaluate modern large language models (LLMs) against traditional MT models. Our findings reveal that LLMs consistently outperform traditional MT models, with Gemini 2.5 Flash achieving a +4.79 ChrF point improvement over NLLB-54B on our low-resource test set. Further, we investigate how LLM context utilisation affects accuracy, finding that the benefits of document-level translation are most pronounced in specialised domains like health. We release the OpenWHO corpus to encourage further research into low-resource MT in the health domain.
Authors: Ziqiang Cui, Yunpeng Weng, Xing Tang, Peiyang Liu, Shiwei Li, Bowei He, Jiamin Chen, Yansen Zhang, Xiuqiang He, Chen Ma
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising approach to enhance the timeliness of knowledge and the factual accuracy of responses in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the inclusion of excessive retrieved documents substantially increases the input length, leading to higher computational costs. Previous studies have attempted to compress retrieved documents into shorter texts before in-context integration, but such methods often compromise end-task performance. The lack of well-defined compression targets forces many approaches to rely on fixed heuristics, which cannot guarantee that the compressed content will effectively support the end task. To address these limitations, we propose CORE, a novel method designed to achieve lossless context compression for RAG. CORE employs reinforcement learning to optimize the compression process without relying on predefined compression labels, which enables the compressor to generate summaries that maximize the accuracy of answers generated by the LLM. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach. With a high compression ratio of 3\%, our method not only avoids performance degradation compared to prepending full documents across all datasets but also improves the average Exact Match (EM) score by 3.3 points. The code will be released soon.
Authors: Wenfeng Feng, Penghong Zhao, Guochao Jiang, Chuzhan Hao, Yuewei Zhang, Guohua Liu, Hao Wang
Abstract: Critic-free reinforcement learning methods, particularly group policies, have attracted considerable attention for their efficiency in complex tasks. However, these methods rely heavily on multiple sampling and comparisons within the policy to estimate advantage, which may cause the policy to fall into local optimum and increase computational cost. To address these issues, we propose PVPO, an efficient reinforcement learning method enhanced by an advantage reference anchor and data pre-sampling. Specifically, we use the reference model to rollout in advance and employ the calculated reward score as a reference anchor. Our approach effectively corrects the cumulative bias introduced by intra-group comparisons and significantly reduces reliance on the number of rollouts during training. Meanwhile, the reference model can assess sample difficulty during data pre-sampling, enabling effective selection of high-gain data to improve training efficiency. Moreover, PVPO is orthogonal to other advanced critic-free RL algorithms, making it compatible with and complementary to these methods. Experiments conducted on nine datasets across two domains demonstrate that PVPO achieves State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) performance. Our approach not only demonstrates robust generalization across multiple tasks, but also exhibits scalable performance across models of varying scales.
Authors: Zinan Tang, Xin Gao, Qizhi Pei, Zhuoshi Pan, Mengzhang Cai, Jiang Wu, Conghui He, Lijun Wu
Abstract: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) Large Language Models (LLM) fundamentally rely on high-quality training data. While data selection and data synthesis are two common strategies to improve data quality, existing approaches often face limitations in static dataset curation that fail to adapt to evolving model capabilities. In this paper, we introduce Middo, a self-evolving Model-informed dynamic data optimization framework that uses model-aware data selection and context-preserving data refinement. Unlike conventional one-off filtering/synthesis methods, our framework establishes a closed-loop optimization system: (1) A self-referential diagnostic module proactively identifies suboptimal samples through tri-axial model signals - loss patterns (complexity), embedding cluster dynamics (diversity), and self-alignment scores (quality); (2) An adaptive optimization engine then transforms suboptimal samples into pedagogically valuable training points while preserving semantic integrity; (3) This optimization process continuously evolves with model capability through dynamic learning principles. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our Middo consistently enhances the quality of seed data and boosts LLM's performance with improving accuracy by 7.15% on average while maintaining the original dataset scale. This work establishes a new paradigm for sustainable LLM training through dynamic human-AI co-evolution of data and models. Our datasets, models, and code are coming soon. Our datasets, models, and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Word2VecT/Middo.
Authors: Md Shahidul Salim, Lian Fu, Arav Adikesh Ramakrishnan, Zonghai Yao, Hong Yu
Abstract: We present MedCOD (Medical Chain-of-Dictionary), a hybrid framework designed to improve English-to-Spanish medical translation by integrating domain-specific structured knowledge into large language models (LLMs). MedCOD integrates domain-specific knowledge from both the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and the LLM-as-Knowledge-Base (LLM-KB) paradigm to enhance structured prompting and fine-tuning. We constructed a parallel corpus of 2,999 English-Spanish MedlinePlus articles and a 100-sentence test set annotated with structured medical contexts. Four open-source LLMs (Phi-4, Qwen2.5-14B, Qwen2.5-7B, and LLaMA-3.1-8B) were evaluated using structured prompts that incorporated multilingual variants, medical synonyms, and UMLS-derived definitions, combined with LoRA-based fine-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that MedCOD significantly improves translation quality across all models. For example, Phi-4 with MedCOD and fine-tuning achieved BLEU 44.23, chrF++ 28.91, and COMET 0.863, surpassing strong baseline models like GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. Ablation studies confirm that both MedCOD prompting and model adaptation independently contribute to performance gains, with their combination yielding the highest improvements. These findings highlight the potential of structured knowledge integration to enhance LLMs for medical translation tasks.
Authors: Meituan LongCat Team, Bayan, Bei Li, Bingye Lei, Bo Wang, Bolin Rong, Chao Wang, Chao Zhang, Chen Gao, Chen Zhang, Cheng Sun, Chengcheng Han, Chenguang Xi, Chi Zhang, Chong Peng, Chuan Qin, Chuyu Zhang, Cong Chen, Congkui Wang, Dan Ma, Daoru Pan, Defei Bu, Dengchang Zhao, Deyang Kong, Dishan Liu, Feiye Huo, Fengcun Li, Fubao Zhang, Gan Dong, Gang Liu, Gang Xu, Ge Li, Guoqiang Tan, Guoyuan Lin, Haihang Jing, Haomin Fu, Haonan Yan, Haoxing Wen, Haozhe Zhao, Hong Liu, Hongmei Shi, Hongyan Hao, Hongyin Tang, Huantian Lv, Hui Su, Jiacheng Li, Jiahao Liu, Jiahuan Li, Jiajun Yang, Jiaming Wang, Jian Yang, Jianchao Tan, Jiaqi Sun, Jiaqi Zhang, Jiawei Fu, Jiawei Yang, Jiaxi Hu, Jiayu Qin, Jingang Wang, Jiyuan He, Jun Kuang, Junhui Mei, Kai Liang, Ke He, Kefeng Zhang, Keheng Wang, Keqing He, Liang Gao, Liang Shi, Lianhui Ma, Lin Qiu, Lingbin Kong, Lingtong Si, Linkun Lyu, Linsen Guo, Liqi Yang, Lizhi Yan, Mai Xia, Man Gao, Manyuan Zhang, Meng Zhou, Mengxia Shen, Mingxiang Tuo, Mingyang Zhu, Peiguang Li, Peng Pei, Peng Zhao, Pengcheng Jia, Pingwei Sun, Qi Gu, Qianyun Li, Qingyuan Li, Qiong Huang, Qiyuan Duan, Ran Meng, Rongxiang Weng, Ruichen Shao, Rumei Li, Shizhe Wu, Shuai Liang, Shuo Wang, Suogui Dang, Tao Fang, Tao Li, Tefeng Chen, Tianhao Bai, Tianhao Zhou, Tingwen Xie, Wei He, Wei Huang, Wei Liu, Wei Shi, Wei Wang, Wei Wu, Weikang Zhao, Wen Zan, Wenjie Shi, Xi Nan, Xi Su, Xiang Li, Xiang Mei, Xiangyang Ji, Xiangyu Xi, Xiangzhou Huang, Xianpeng Li, Xiao Fu, Xiao Liu, Xiao Wei, Xiaodong Cai, Xiaolong Chen, Xiaoqing Liu, Xiaotong Li, Xiaowei Shi, Xiaoyu Li, Xili Wang, Xin Chen, Xing Hu, Xingyu Miao, Xinyan He, Xuemiao Zhang, Xueyuan Hao, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai, Xurui Yang, Yan Feng, Yang Bai, Yang Chen, Yang Yang, Yaqi Huo, Yerui Sun, Yifan Lu, Yifan Zhang, Yipeng Zang, Yitao Zhai, Yiyang Li, Yongjing Yin, Yongkang Lv, Yongwei Zhou, Yu Yang, Yuchen Xie, Yueqing Sun, Yuewen Zheng, Yuhuai Wei, Yulei Qian, Yunfan Liang, Yunfang Tai, Yunke Zhao, Zeyang Yu, Zhao Zhang, Zhaohua Yang, Zhenchao Zhang, Zhikang Xia, Zhiye Zou, Zhizhao Zeng, Zhongda Su, Zhuofan Chen, Zijian Zhang, Ziwen Wang, Zixu Jiang, Zizhe Zhao, Zongyu Wang, Zunhai Su
Abstract: We introduce LongCat-Flash, a 560-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model designed for both computational efficiency and advanced agentic capabilities. Stemming from the need for scalable efficiency, LongCat-Flash adopts two novel designs: (a) Zero-computation Experts, which enables dynamic computational budget allocation and activates 18.6B-31.3B (27B on average) per token depending on contextual demands, optimizing resource usage. (b) Shortcut-connected MoE, which enlarges the computation-communication overlap window, demonstrating notable gains in inference efficiency and throughput compared to models of a comparable scale. We develop a comprehensive scaling framework for large models that combines hyperparameter transfer, model-growth initialization, a multi-pronged stability suite, and deterministic computation to achieve stable and reproducible training. Notably, leveraging the synergy among scalable architectural design and infrastructure efforts, we complete model training on more than 20 trillion tokens within 30 days, while achieving over 100 tokens per second (TPS) for inference at a cost of \$0.70 per million output tokens. To cultivate LongCat-Flash towards agentic intelligence, we conduct a large-scale pre-training on optimized mixtures, followed by targeted mid- and post-training on reasoning, code, and instructions, with further augmentation from synthetic data and tool use tasks. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that, as a non-thinking foundation model, LongCat-Flash delivers highly competitive performance among other leading models, with exceptional strengths in agentic tasks. The model checkpoint of LongCat-Flash is open-sourced to foster community research. LongCat Chat: https://longcat.ai Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/meituan-longcat GitHub: https://github.com/meituan-longcat
URLs: https://longcat.ai, https://huggingface.co/meituan-longcat, https://github.com/meituan-longcat
Authors: Youchao Zhou, Heyan Huang, Yicheng Liu, Rui Dai, Xinglin Wang, Xingchen Zhang, Shumin Shi, Yang Deng
Abstract: Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) occasionally generate plausible yet factually incorrect responses, known as hallucinations. Researchers are primarily using two approaches to mitigate hallucinations, namely Retrieval Augmented Language Models (RALMs) and refusal post-training. However, current research predominantly emphasizes their individual effectiveness while overlooking the evaluation of the refusal capability of RALMs. In this study, we ask the fundamental question: Do RALMs know when they don't know? Specifically, we ask three questions. First, are RALMs well-calibrated regarding different internal and external knowledge states? We examine the influence of various factors. Contrary to expectations, we find that LLMs exhibit significant \textbf{over-refusal} behavior. Then, how does refusal post-training affect the over-refusal issue? We investigate the Refusal-aware Instruction Tuning and In-Context Fine-tuning methods. Our results show that the over-refusal problem is mitigated by In-context fine-tuning. but magnified by R-tuning. However, we also find that the refusal ability may conflict with the quality of the answer. Finally, we develop a simple yet effective refusal method for refusal post-trained models to improve their overall answer quality in terms of refusal and correct answers. Our study provides a more comprehensive understanding of the influence of important factors on RALM systems.
Authors: Andrew Broad, Jason Keighley, Lucy Godson, Alex Wright
Abstract: We present a novel approach which extends the existing Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detector (FCOS) for mitotic figure detection. Our composite model adds a Feedback Attention Ladder CNN (FAL-CNN) model for classification of normal versus abnormal mitotic figures, feeding into a fusion network that is trained to generate adjustments to bounding boxes predicted by FCOS. Our network aims to reduce the false positive rate of the FCOS object detector, to improve the accuracy of object detection and enhance the generalisability of the network. Our model achieved an F1 score of 0.655 for mitosis detection on the preliminary evaluation dataset.
Authors: Yuchong Xie, Mingyu Luo, Zesen Liu, Zhixiang Zhang, Kaikai Zhang, Yu Liu, Zongjie Li, Ping Chen, Shuai Wang, Dongdong She
Abstract: LLM-based agentic systems leverage large language models to handle user queries, make decisions, and execute external tools for complex tasks across domains like chatbots, customer service, and software engineering. A critical component of these systems is the Tool Invocation Prompt (TIP), which defines tool interaction protocols and guides LLMs to ensure the security and correctness of tool usage. Despite its importance, TIP security has been largely overlooked. This work investigates TIP-related security risks, revealing that major LLM-based systems like Cursor, Claude Code, and others are vulnerable to attacks such as remote code execution (RCE) and denial of service (DoS). Through a systematic TIP exploitation workflow (TEW), we demonstrate external tool behavior hijacking via manipulated tool invocations. We also propose defense mechanisms to enhance TIP security in LLM-based agentic systems.
Authors: Ziheng Chen, Xiao-Jun Wu, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Nicu Sebe
Abstract: Normalization layers are crucial for deep learning, but their Euclidean formulations are inadequate for data on manifolds. On the other hand, many Riemannian manifolds in machine learning admit gyro-structures, enabling principled extensions of Euclidean neural networks to non-Euclidean domains. Inspired by this, we introduce GyroBN, a principled Riemannian batch normalization framework for gyrogroups. We establish two necessary conditions, namely \emph{pseudo-reduction} and \emph{gyroisometric gyrations}, that guarantee GyroBN with theoretical control over sample statistics, and show that these conditions hold for all known gyrogroups in machine learning. Our framework also incorporates several existing Riemannian normalization methods as special cases. We further instantiate GyroBN on seven representative geometries, including the Grassmannian, five constant curvature spaces, and the correlation manifold, and derive novel gyro and Riemannian structures to enable these instantiations. Experiments across these geometries demonstrate the effectiveness of GyroBN. The code is available at https://github.com/GitZH-Chen/GyroBN.git.
Authors: Zonghai Yao, Michael Sun, Won Seok Jang, Sunjae Kwon, Soie Kwon, Hong Yu
Abstract: Discharge communication is a critical yet underexplored component of patient care, where the goal shifts from diagnosis to education. While recent large language model (LLM) benchmarks emphasize in-visit diagnostic reasoning, they fail to evaluate models' ability to support patients after the visit. We introduce DischargeSim, a novel benchmark that evaluates LLMs on their ability to act as personalized discharge educators. DischargeSim simulates post-visit, multi-turn conversations between LLM-driven DoctorAgents and PatientAgents with diverse psychosocial profiles (e.g., health literacy, education, emotion). Interactions are structured across six clinically grounded discharge topics and assessed along three axes: (1) dialogue quality via automatic and LLM-as-judge evaluation, (2) personalized document generation including free-text summaries and structured AHRQ checklists, and (3) patient comprehension through a downstream multiple-choice exam. Experiments across 18 LLMs reveal significant gaps in discharge education capability, with performance varying widely across patient profiles. Notably, model size does not always yield better education outcomes, highlighting trade-offs in strategy use and content prioritization. DischargeSim offers a first step toward benchmarking LLMs in post-visit clinical education and promoting equitable, personalized patient support.
Authors: Mujie Liu, Chenze Wang, Liping Chen, Nguyen Linh Dan Le, Niharika Tewari, Ting Dang, Jiangang Ma, Feng Xia
Abstract: The limited availability of labeled brain network data makes it challenging to achieve accurate and interpretable psychiatric diagnoses. While self-supervised learning (SSL) offers a promising solution, existing methods often rely on augmentation strategies that can disrupt crucial structural semantics in brain graphs. To address this, we propose SAM-BG, a two-stage framework for learning brain graph representations with structural semantic preservation. In the pre-training stage, an edge masker is trained on a small labeled subset to capture key structural semantics. In the SSL stage, the extracted structural priors guide a structure-aware augmentation process, enabling the model to learn more semantically meaningful and robust representations. Experiments on two real-world psychiatric datasets demonstrate that SAM-BG outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly in small-labeled data settings, and uncovers clinically relevant connectivity patterns that enhance interpretability. Our code is available at https://github.com/mjliu99/SAM-BG.
Authors: Zhiyu Fan, Kirill Vasilevski, Dayi Lin, Boyuan Chen, Yihao Chen, Zhiqing Zhong, Jie M. Zhang, Pinjia He, Ahmed E. Hassan
Abstract: The advancement of large language models (LLMs) and code agents has demonstrated significant potential to assist software engineering (SWE) tasks, such as autonomous issue resolution and feature addition. Existing AI for software engineering leaderboards (e.g., SWE-bench) focus solely on solution accuracy, ignoring the crucial factor of effectiveness in a resource-constrained world. This is a universal problem that also exists beyond software engineering tasks: any AI system should be more than correct - it must also be cost-effective. To address this gap, we introduce SWE-Effi, a set of new metrics to re-evaluate AI systems in terms of holistic effectiveness scores. We define effectiveness as the balance between the accuracy of outcome (e.g., issue resolve rate) and the resources consumed (e.g., token and time). In this paper, we specifically focus on the software engineering scenario by re-ranking popular AI systems for issue resolution on a subset of the SWE-bench benchmark using our new multi-dimensional metrics. We found that AI system's effectiveness depends not just on the scaffold itself, but on how well it integrates with the base model, which is key to achieving strong performance in a resource-efficient manner. We also identified systematic challenges such as the "token snowball" effect and, more significantly, a pattern of "expensive failures". In these cases, agents consume excessive resources while stuck on unsolvable tasks - an issue that not only limits practical deployment but also drives up the cost of failed rollouts during RL training. Lastly, we observed a clear trade-off between effectiveness under the token budget and effectiveness under the time budget, which plays a crucial role in managing project budgets and enabling scalable reinforcement learning, where fast responses are essential.
Authors: Ji\v{r}\'i Mili\v{c}ka, Anna Marklov\'a, V\'aclav Cvr\v{c}ek
Abstract: This study investigates the register variation in texts written by humans and comparable texts produced by large language models (LLMs). Biber's multidimensional analysis (MDA) is applied to a sample of human-written texts and AI-created texts generated to be their counterparts to find the dimensions of variation in which LLMs differ most significantly and most systematically from humans. As textual material, a new LLM-generated corpus AI-Brown is used, which is comparable to BE-21 (a Brown family corpus representing contemporary British English). Since all languages except English are underrepresented in the training data of frontier LLMs, similar analysis is replicated on Czech using AI-Koditex corpus and Czech multidimensional model. Examined were 16 frontier models in various settings and prompts, with emphasis placed on the difference between base models and instruction-tuned models. Based on this, a benchmark is created through which models can be compared with each other and ranked in interpretable dimensions.
Authors: Omid Gheibi, Christian K\"astner, Pooyan Jamshidi
Abstract: Performance-influence models are beneficial for understanding how configurations affect system performance, but their creation is challenging due to the exponential growth of configuration spaces. While gray-box approaches leverage selective "structural knowledge" (like the module execution graph of the system) to improve modeling, the relationship between this knowledge, a system's characteristics (we call them "structural aspects"), and potential model improvements is not well understood. This paper addresses this gap by formally investigating how variations in structural aspects (e.g., the number of modules and options per module) and the level of structural knowledge impact the creation of "opportunities" for improved "modular performance modeling". We introduce and quantify the concept of modeling "hardness", defined as the inherent difficulty of performance modeling. Through controlled experiments with synthetic system models, we establish an "analytical matrix" to measure these concepts. Our findings show that modeling hardness is primarily driven by the number of modules and configuration options per module. More importantly, we demonstrate that both higher levels of structural knowledge and increased modeling hardness significantly enhance the opportunity for improvement. The impact of these factors varies by performance metric; for ranking accuracy (e.g., in debugging task), structural knowledge is more dominant, while for prediction accuracy (e.g., in resource management task), hardness plays a stronger role. These results provide actionable insights for system designers, guiding them to strategically allocate time and select appropriate modeling approaches based on a system's characteristics and a given task's objectives.
Authors: Xin Fang, Guirui Zhong, Qing Wang, Fan Chu, Lei Wang, Mengui Qian, Mingqi Cai, Jiangzhao Wu, Jianqing Gao, Jun Du
Abstract: Anomalous Sound Detection (ASD) is often formulated as a machine attribute classification task, a strategy necessitated by the common scenario where only normal data is available for training. However, the exhaustive collection of machine attribute labels is laborious and impractical. To address the challenge of missing attribute labels, this paper proposes an agglomerative hierarchical clustering method for the assignment of pseudo-attribute labels using representations derived from a domain-adaptive pre-trained model, which are expected to capture machine attribute characteristics. We then apply model adaptation to this pre-trained model through supervised fine-tuning for machine attribute classification, resulting in a new state-of-the-art performance. Evaluation on the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2025 Challenge dataset demonstrates that our proposed approach yields significant performance gains, ultimately outperforming our previous top-ranking system in the challenge.
Authors: Nikhil Keetha, Norman M\"uller, Johannes Sch\"onberger, Lorenzo Porzi, Yuchen Zhang, Tobias Fischer, Arno Knapitsch, Duncan Zauss, Ethan Weber, Nelson Antunes, Jonathon Luiten, Manuel Lopez-Antequera, Samuel Rota Bul\`o, Christian Richardt, Deva Ramanan, Sebastian Scherer, Peter Kontschieder
Abstract: We introduce MapAnything, a unified transformer-based feed-forward model that ingests one or more images along with optional geometric inputs such as camera intrinsics, poses, depth, or partial reconstructions, and then directly regresses the metric 3D scene geometry and cameras. MapAnything leverages a factored representation of multi-view scene geometry, i.e., a collection of depth maps, local ray maps, camera poses, and a metric scale factor that effectively upgrades local reconstructions into a globally consistent metric frame. Standardizing the supervision and training across diverse datasets, along with flexible input augmentation, enables MapAnything to address a broad range of 3D vision tasks in a single feed-forward pass, including uncalibrated structure-from-motion, calibrated multi-view stereo, monocular depth estimation, camera localization, depth completion, and more. We provide extensive experimental analyses and model ablations demonstrating that MapAnything outperforms or matches specialist feed-forward models while offering more efficient joint training behavior, thus paving the way toward a universal 3D reconstruction backbone.
Authors: Jordi Grau-Haro, Ruben Ribes-Serrano, Javier Naranjo-Alcazar, Marta Garcia-Ballesteros, Pedro Zuccarello
Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in audio tagging tasks. However, deploying these models on resource-constrained devices like the Raspberry Pi poses challenges related to computational efficiency and thermal management. In this paper, a comprehensive evaluation of multiple convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures for audio tagging on the Raspberry Pi is conducted, encompassing all 1D and 2D models from the Pretrained Audio Neural Networks (PANNs) framework, a ConvNeXt-based model adapted for audio classification, as well as MobileNetV3 architectures. In addition, two PANNs-derived networks, CNN9 and CNN13, recently proposed, are also evaluated. To enhance deployment efficiency and portability across diverse hardware platforms, all models are converted to the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) format. Unlike previous works that focus on a single model, our analysis encompasses a broader range of architectures and involves continuous 24-hour inference sessions to assess performance stability. Our experiments reveal that, with appropriate model selection and optimization, it is possible to maintain consistent inference latency and manage thermal behavior effectively over extended periods. These findings provide valuable insights for deploying audio tagging models in real-world edge computing scenarios.
Authors: Ziyuan Chen, Zhenghui Zhao, Zhangye Han, Miancan Liu, Xianhang Ye, Yiqing Li, Hongbo Min, Jinkui Ren, Xiantao Zhang, Guitao Cao
Abstract: With the rapid advancement of large language models and vision-language models, employing large models as Web Agents has become essential for automated web interaction. However, training Web Agents with reinforcement learning faces critical challenges including credit assignment misallocation, prohibitively high annotation costs, and reward sparsity. To address these issues, we propose Tree-Guided Preference Optimization (TGPO), an offline reinforcement learning framework that proposes a tree-structured trajectory representation merging semantically identical states across trajectories to eliminate label conflicts. Our framework incorporates a Process Reward Model that automatically generates fine-grained rewards through subgoal progress, redundancy detection, and action verification. Additionally, a dynamic weighting mechanism prioritizes high-impact decision points during training. Experiments on Online-Mind2Web and our self-constructed C-WebShop datasets demonstrate that TGPO significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving higher success rates with fewer redundant steps.
Authors: Jiasen Lu, Liangchen Song, Mingze Xu, Byeongjoo Ahn, Yanjun Wang, Chen Chen, Afshin Dehghan, Yinfei Yang
Abstract: We present AToken, the first unified visual tokenizer that achieves both high-fidelity reconstruction and semantic understanding across images, videos, and 3D assets. Unlike existing tokenizers that specialize in either reconstruction or understanding for single modalities, AToken encodes these diverse visual inputs into a shared 4D latent space, unifying both tasks and modalities in a single framework. Specifically, we introduce a pure transformer architecture with 4D rotary position embeddings to process visual inputs of arbitrary resolutions and temporal durations. To ensure stable training, we introduce an adversarial-free training objective that combines perceptual and Gram matrix losses, achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction quality. By employing a progressive training curriculum, AToken gradually expands from single images, videos, and 3D, and supports both continuous and discrete latent tokens. AToken achieves 0.21 rFID with 82.2% ImageNet accuracy for images, 3.01 rFVD with 40.2% MSRVTT retrieval for videos, and 28.28 PSNR with 90.9% classification accuracy for 3D.. In downstream applications, AToken enables both visual generation tasks (e.g., image generation with continuous and discrete tokens, text-to-video generation, image-to-3D synthesis) and understanding tasks (e.g., multimodal LLMs), achieving competitive performance across all benchmarks. These results shed light on the next-generation multimodal AI systems built upon unified visual tokenization.
Authors: Sergio Benlloch-Lopez, Miquel Viel-Vazquez, Javier Naranjo-Alcazar, Jordi Grau-Haro, Pedro Zuccarello
Abstract: The rapid proliferation of IoT nodes equipped with microphones and capable of performing on-device audio classification exposes highly sensitive data while operating under tight resource constraints. To protect against this, we present a defence-in-depth architecture comprising a security protocol that treats the edge device, cellular network and cloud backend as three separate trust domains, linked by TPM-based remote attestation and mutually authenticated TLS 1.3. A STRIDE-driven threat model and attack-tree analysis guide the design. At startup, each boot stage is measured into TPM PCRs. The node can only decrypt its LUKS-sealed partitions after the cloud has verified a TPM quote and released a one-time unlock key. This ensures that rogue or tampered devices remain inert. Data in transit is protected by TLS 1.3 and hybridised with Kyber and Dilithium to provide post-quantum resilience. Meanwhile, end-to-end encryption and integrity hashes safeguard extracted audio features. Signed, rollback-protected AI models and tamper-responsive sensors harden firmware and hardware. Data at rest follows a 3-2-1 strategy comprising a solid-state drive sealed with LUKS, an offline cold archive encrypted with a hybrid post-quantum cipher and an encrypted cloud replica. Finally, we set out a plan for evaluating the physical and logical security of the proposed protocol.
Authors: Xianrong Yao, Dong She, Chenxu Zhang, Yimeng Zhang, Yueru Sun, Noman Ahmed, Yang Gao, Zhanpeng Jin
Abstract: Empathy is critical for effective mental health support, especially when addressing Long Counseling Texts (LCTs). However, existing Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate replies that are semantically fluent but lack the structured reasoning necessary for genuine psychological support, particularly in a Chinese context. To bridge this gap, we introduce Empathy-R1, a novel framework that integrates a Chain-of-Empathy (CoE) reasoning process with Reinforcement Learning (RL) to enhance response quality for LCTs. Inspired by cognitive-behavioral therapy, our CoE paradigm guides the model to sequentially reason about a help-seeker's emotions, causes, and intentions, making its thinking process both transparent and interpretable. Our framework is empowered by a new large-scale Chinese dataset, Empathy-QA, and a two-stage training process. First, Supervised Fine-Tuning instills the CoE's reasoning structure. Subsequently, RL, guided by a dedicated reward model, refines the therapeutic relevance and contextual appropriateness of the final responses. Experiments show that Empathy-R1 achieves strong performance on key automatic metrics. More importantly, human evaluations confirm its superiority, showing a clear preference over strong baselines and achieving a Win@1 rate of 44.30% on our new benchmark. By enabling interpretable and contextually nuanced responses, Empathy-R1 represents a significant advancement in developing responsible and genuinely beneficial AI for mental health support.
Authors: Duojia Li, Shenghui Lu, Hongchen Pan, Zongyi Zhan, Qingyang Hong, Lin Li
Abstract: Multistep inference is a bottleneck for real-time generative speech enhancement because flow- and diffusion-based systems learn an instantaneous velocity field and therefore rely on iterative ordinary differential equation (ODE) solvers. We introduce MeanFlowSE, a conditional generative model that learns the average velocity over finite intervals along a trajectory. Using a Jacobian-vector product (JVP) to instantiate the MeanFlow identity, we derive a local training objective that directly supervises finite-interval displacement while remaining consistent with the instantaneous-field constraint on the diagonal. At inference, MeanFlowSE performs single-step generation via a backward-in-time displacement, removing the need for multistep solvers; an optional few-step variant offers additional refinement. On VoiceBank-DEMAND, the single-step model achieves strong intelligibility, fidelity, and perceptual quality with substantially lower computational cost than multistep baselines. The method requires no knowledge distillation or external teachers, providing an efficient, high-fidelity framework for real-time generative speech enhancement. The proposed method is open-sourced at https://github.com/liduojia1/MeanFlowSE.
Authors: Qianyang Li, Xingjun Zhang, Shaoxun Wang, Jia Wei
Abstract: Long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) is hampered by the challenge of modeling complex dependencies that span multiple temporal scales and frequency resolutions. Existing methods, including Transformer and MLP-based models, often struggle to capture these intertwined characteristics in a unified and structured manner. We propose the Dual Pyramid Attention Network (DPANet), a novel architecture that explicitly decouples and concurrently models temporal multi-scale dynamics and spectral multi-resolution periodicities. DPANet constructs two parallel pyramids: a Temporal Pyramid built on progressive downsampling, and a Frequency Pyramid built on band-pass filtering. The core of our model is the Cross-Pyramid Fusion Block, which facilitates deep, interactive information exchange between corresponding pyramid levels via cross-attention. This fusion proceeds in a coarse-to-fine hierarchy, enabling global context to guide local representation learning. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks show that DPANet achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming prior models. Code is available at https://github.com/hit636/DPANet.
Authors: Vasiliki Ismiroglou, Malte Pedersen, Stefan H. Bengtson, Andreas Aakerberg, Thomas B. Moeslund
Abstract: In recent years, the underwater image formation model has found extensive use in the generation of synthetic underwater data. Although many approaches focus on scenes primarily affected by discoloration, they often overlook the model's ability to capture the complex, distance-dependent visibility loss present in highly turbid environments. In this work, we propose an improved synthetic data generation pipeline that includes the commonly omitted forward scattering term, while also considering a nonuniform medium. Additionally, we collected the BUCKET dataset under controlled turbidity conditions to acquire real turbid footage with the corresponding reference images. Our results demonstrate qualitative improvements over the reference model, particularly under increasing turbidity, with a selection rate of 82.5% by survey participants. Data and code can be accessed on the project page: vap.aau.dk/sea-ing-through-scattered-rays.
Authors: Simin Li, Zheng Yuwei, Zihao Mao, Linhao Wang, Ruixiao Xu, Chengdong Ma, Xin Yu, Yuqing Ma, Qi Dou, Xin Wang, Jie Luo, Bo An, Yaodong Yang, Weifeng Lv, Xianglong Liu
Abstract: Partial agent failure becomes inevitable when systems scale up, making it crucial to identify the subset of agents whose compromise would most severely degrade overall performance. In this paper, we study this Vulnerable Agent Identification (VAI) problem in large-scale multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). We frame VAI as a Hierarchical Adversarial Decentralized Mean Field Control (HAD-MFC), where the upper level involves an NP-hard combinatorial task of selecting the most vulnerable agents, and the lower level learns worst-case adversarial policies for these agents using mean-field MARL. The two problems are coupled together, making HAD-MFC difficult to solve. To solve this, we first decouple the hierarchical process by Fenchel-Rockafellar transform, resulting a regularized mean-field Bellman operator for upper level that enables independent learning at each level, thus reducing computational complexity. We then reformulate the upper-level combinatorial problem as a MDP with dense rewards from our regularized mean-field Bellman operator, enabling us to sequentially identify the most vulnerable agents by greedy and RL algorithms. This decomposition provably preserves the optimal solution of the original HAD-MFC. Experiments show our method effectively identifies more vulnerable agents in large-scale MARL and the rule-based system, fooling system into worse failures, and learns a value function that reveals the vulnerability of each agent.
Authors: Aarushi Mahajan, Wayne Burleson
Abstract: Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) distinguishes wireless devices by the small variations in their analog circuits, avoiding heavy cryptographic authentication. While deep learning on spectrograms improves accuracy, models remain vulnerable to copying, tampering, and evasion. We present a stronger RFFI system combining watermarking for ownership proof and anomaly detection for spotting suspicious inputs. Using a ResNet-34 on log-Mel spectrograms, we embed three watermarks: a simple trigger, an adversarially trained trigger robust to noise and filtering, and a hidden gradient/weight signature. A convolutional Variational Autoencoders (VAE) with Kullback-Leibler (KL) warm-up and free-bits flags off-distribution queries. On the LoRa dataset, our system achieves 94.6% accuracy, 98% watermark success, and 0.94 AUROC, offering verifiable, tamper-resistant authentication.