Authors: Susmita Sharma, Aayush Shrestha, Sitasma Thapa, Prashant Timalsina, Prakash Poudyal
Abstract: The N-Queens problem, placing all N queens in a N x N chessboard where none attack the other, is a classic problem for constraint satisfaction algorithms. While complete methods like backtracking guarantee a solution, their exponential time complexity makes them impractical for large-scale instances thus, stochastic approaches, such as Las Vegas algorithm, are preferred. While it offers faster approximate solutions, it suffers from significant performance variance due to random placement of queens on the board. This research introduces a hybrid algorithm built on top of the standard Las Vegas framework through iterative pruning, dynamically eliminating invalid placements during the random assignment phase, thus this method effectively reduces the search space. The analysis results that traditional backtracking scales poorly with increasing N. In contrast, the proposed technique consistently generates valid solutions more rapidly, establishing it as a superior alternative to use where a single, timely solution is preferred over completeness. Although large N causes some performance variability, the algorithm demonstrates a highly effective trade-off between computational cost and solution fidelity, making it particularly suited for resource-constrained computing environments.
Authors: Roy Rinberg, Usha Bhalla, Igor Shilov, Flavio P. Calmon, Rohit Gandikota
Abstract: Targeted interventions on language models, such as unlearning, debiasing, or model editing, are a central method for refining model behavior and keeping knowledge up to date. While these interventions aim to modify specific information within models (e.g., removing virology content), their effects often propagate to related but unintended areas (e.g., allergies); these side-effects are commonly referred to as the ripple effect. In this work, we present RippleBench-Maker, an automatic tool for generating Q&A datasets that allow for the measurement of ripple effects in any model-editing task. RippleBench-Maker builds on a Wikipedia-based RAG pipeline (WikiRAG) to generate multiple-choice questions at varying semantic distances from the target concept (e.g., the knowledge being unlearned). Using this framework, we construct RippleBench-Bio, a benchmark derived from the WMDP (Weapons of Mass Destruction Paper) dataset, a common unlearning benchmark. We evaluate eight state-of-the-art unlearning methods and find that all exhibit non-trivial accuracy drops on topics increasingly distant from the unlearned knowledge, each with distinct propagation profiles. To support ongoing research, we release our codebase for on-the-fly ripple evaluation, along with the benchmark, RippleBench-Bio.
Authors: Xizhi Wu, Nelly Estefanie Garduno-Rapp, Justin F Rousseau, Mounika Thakkallapally, Hang Zhang, Yuelyu Ji, Shyam Visweswaran, Yifan Peng, Yanshan Wang
Abstract: Unlike most primary headaches, secondary headaches need specialized care and can have devastating consequences if not treated promptly. Clinical guidelines highlight several 'red flag' features, such as thunderclap onset, meningismus, papilledema, focal neurologic deficits, signs of temporal arteritis, systemic illness, and the 'worst headache of their life' presentation. Despite these guidelines, determining which patients require urgent evaluation remains challenging in primary care settings. Clinicians often work with limited time, incomplete information, and diverse symptom presentations, which can lead to under-recognition and inappropriate care. We present a large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent clinical decision support system built on an orchestrator-specialist architecture, designed to perform explicit and interpretable secondary headache diagnosis from free-text clinical vignettes. The multi-agent system decomposes diagnosis into seven domain-specialized agents, each producing a structured and evidence-grounded rationale, while a central orchestrator performs task decomposition and coordinates agent routing. We evaluated the multi-agent system using 90 expert-validated secondary headache cases and compared its performance with a single-LLM baseline across two prompting strategies: question-based prompting (QPrompt) and clinical practice guideline-based prompting (GPrompt). We tested five open-source LLMs (Qwen-30B, GPT-OSS-20B, Qwen-14B, Qwen-8B, and Llama-3.1-8B), and found that the orchestrated multi-agent system with GPrompt consistently achieved the highest F1 scores, with larger gains in smaller models. These findings demonstrate that structured multi-agent reasoning improves accuracy beyond prompt engineering alone and offers a transparent, clinically aligned approach for explainable decision support in secondary headache diagnosis.
Authors: Huy Nghiem, Swetasudha Panda, Devashish Khatwani, Huy V. Nguyen, Krishnaram Kenthapadi, Hal Daum\'e III
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in healthcare, yet ensuring their safety and trustworthiness remains a barrier to deployment. Conversational medical assistants must avoid unsafe compliance without over-refusing benign queries. We present an iterative post-deployment alignment framework that applies Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to refine models against domain-specific safety signals. Using the CARES-18K benchmark for adversarial robustness, we evaluate four LLMs (Llama-3B/8B, Meditron-8B, Mistral-7B) across multiple cycles. Our results show up to 42% improvement in safety-related metrics for harmful query detection, alongside interesting trade-offs against erroneous refusals, thereby exposing architecture-dependent calibration biases. We also perform ablation studies to identify when self-evaluation is reliable and when external or finetuned judges are necessary to maximize performance gains. Our findings underscore the importance of adopting best practices that balance patient safety, user trust, and clinical utility in the design of conversational medical assistants.
Authors: Yo Ehara
Abstract: Human-annotated datasets with explicit difficulty ratings are essential in intelligent educational systems. Although embedding vector spaces are widely used to represent semantic closeness and are promising for analyzing text difficulty, the abundance of embedding methods creates a challenge in selecting the most suitable method. This study proposes the Educational Cone Model, which is a geometric framework based on the assumption that easier texts are less diverse (focusing on fundamental concepts), whereas harder texts are more diverse. This assumption leads to a cone-shaped distribution in the embedding space regardless of the embedding method used. The model frames the evaluation of embeddings as an optimization problem with the aim of detecting structured difficulty-based patterns. By designing specific loss functions, efficient closed-form solutions are derived that avoid costly computation. Empirical tests on real-world datasets validated the model's effectiveness and speed in identifying the embedding spaces that are best aligned with difficulty-annotated educational texts.
Authors: Peter B. Walker, Hannah Davidson, Aiden Foster, Matthew Lienert, Thomas Pardue, Dale Russell
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing and hold growing promise for advancing science, healthcare, and decision-making. Yet their training paradigms remain dominated by affirmation-based inference, akin to \textit{modus ponens}, where accepted premises yield predicted consequents. While effective for generative fluency, this one-directional approach leaves models vulnerable to logical fallacies, adversarial manipulation, and failures in causal reasoning. This paper makes two contributions. First, it demonstrates how existing LLMs from major platforms exhibit systematic weaknesses when reasoning in scientific domains with negation, counterexamples, or faulty premises \footnote{Code to recreate these experiments are at https://github.com/hannahdavidsoncollege-maker/ScientificReasoningForEnvironment-MedicineWithLLMs. Second, it introduces a dual-reasoning training framework that integrates affirmative generation with structured counterfactual denial. Grounded in formal logic, cognitive science, and adversarial training, this training paradigm formalizes a computational analogue of ``denying the antecedent'' as a mechanism for disconfirmation and robustness. By coupling generative synthesis with explicit negation-aware objectives, the framework enables models that not only affirm valid inferences but also reject invalid ones, yielding systems that are more resilient, interpretable, and aligned with human reasoning.
URLs: https://github.com/hannahdavidsoncollege-maker/ScientificReasoningForEnvironment-MedicineWithLLMs.
Authors: Majid Ghasemi, Mark Crowley
Abstract: This paper critiques common patterns in machine ethics for Reinforcement Learning (RL) and argues for a virtue focused alternative. We highlight two recurring limitations in much of the current literature: (i) rule based (deontological) methods that encode duties as constraints or shields often struggle under ambiguity and nonstationarity and do not cultivate lasting habits, and (ii) many reward based approaches, especially single objective RL, implicitly compress diverse moral considerations into a single scalar signal, which can obscure trade offs and invite proxy gaming in practice. We instead treat ethics as policy level dispositions, that is, relatively stable habits that hold up when incentives, partners, or contexts change. This shifts evaluation beyond rule checks or scalar returns toward trait summaries, durability under interventions, and explicit reporting of moral trade offs. Our roadmap combines four components: (1) social learning in multi agent RL to acquire virtue like patterns from imperfect but normatively informed exemplars; (2) multi objective and constrained formulations that preserve value conflicts and incorporate risk aware criteria to guard against harm; (3) affinity based regularization toward updateable virtue priors that support trait like stability under distribution shift while allowing norms to evolve; and (4) operationalizing diverse ethical traditions as practical control signals, making explicit the value and cultural assumptions that shape ethical RL benchmarks.
Authors: Przemyslaw Chojecki
Abstract: Benchmarks are the primary tool for assessing progress in artificial intelligence (AI), yet current practice evaluates models on isolated test suites and provides little guidance for reasoning about generality or autonomous self-improvement. Here we introduce a geometric framework in which all psychometric batteries for AI agents are treated as points in a structured moduli space, and agent performance is described by capability functionals over this space. First, we define an Autonomous AI (AAI) Scale, a Kardashev-style hierarchy of autonomy grounded in measurable performance on batteries spanning families of tasks (for example reasoning, planning, tool use and long-horizon control). Second, we construct a moduli space of batteries, identifying equivalence classes of benchmarks that are indistinguishable at the level of agent orderings and capability inferences. This geometry yields determinacy results: dense families of batteries suffice to certify performance on entire regions of task space. Third, we introduce a general Generator-Verifier-Updater (GVU) operator that subsumes reinforcement learning, self-play, debate and verifier-based fine-tuning as special cases, and we define a self-improvement coefficient $\kappa$ as the Lie derivative of a capability functional along the induced flow. A variance inequality on the combined noise of generation and verification provides sufficient conditions for $\kappa > 0$. Our results suggest that progress toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) is best understood as a flow on moduli of benchmarks, driven by GVU dynamics rather than by scores on individual leaderboards.
Authors: Ian Miles, Mayumi Wakimoto, Wagner Meira Jr., Daniela Paula, Daylene Ticiane, Bruno Rosa, Jane Biddulph, Stelios Georgiou, Valdir Ermida
Abstract: This review explores the integration of Artificial Intelligence into Horizon Scanning, focusing on identifying and responding to emerging threats and opportunities linked to Infectious Diseases. We examine how AI tools can enhance signal detection, data monitoring, scenario analysis, and decision support. We also address the risks associated with AI adoption and propose strategies for effective implementation and governance. The findings contribute to the growing body of Foresight literature by demonstrating the potential and limitations of AI in Public Health preparedness.
Authors: Shuyuan Zhang
Abstract: Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through interactions with an environment guided by reward signals. However, when these signals are sparse, delayed, or poorly aligned with the intended task objectives, agents often struggle to learn effectively. Dense reward functions, which provide informative feedback at every step or state transition, offer a potential solution by shaping agent behavior and accelerating learning. Despite their benefits, poorly crafted reward functions can lead to unintended behaviors, reward hacking, or inefficient exploration. This problem is particularly acute in complex or high-dimensional environments where handcrafted rewards are difficult to specify and validate. To address this, recent research has explored a variety of approaches, including inverse reinforcement learning, reward modeling from human preferences, and self-supervised learning of intrinsic rewards. While these methods offer promising directions, they often involve trade-offs between generality, scalability, and alignment with human intent. This proposal explores several approaches to dealing with these unsolved problems and enhancing the effectiveness and reliability of dense reward construction in different RL applications.
Authors: Manh Chien Vu, Thang Le Dinh, Manh Chien Vu, Tran Duc Le, Thi Lien Huong Nguyen
Abstract: The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) offers transformative potential for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), particularly in enhancing financial decision-making processes. However, SMEs often face significant barriers to implementing AI technologies, including limited resources, technical expertise, and data management capabilities. This paper presents a conceptual model for the adoption of AI in financial decision-making for SMEs. The proposed model addresses key challenges faced by SMEs, including limited resources, technical expertise, and data management capabilities. The model is structured into layers: data sources, data processing and integration, AI model deployment, decision support and automation, and validation and risk management. By implementing AI incrementally, SMEs can optimize financial forecasting, budgeting, investment strategies, and risk management. This paper highlights the importance of data quality and continuous model validation, providing a practical roadmap for SMEs to integrate AI into their financial operations. The study concludes with implications for SMEs adopting AI-driven financial processes and suggests areas for future research in AI applications for SME finance.
Authors: Hongye Cao, Zhixin Bai, Ziyue Peng, Boyan Wang, Tianpei Yang, Jing Huo, Yuyao Zhang, Yang Gao
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated superior performance in enhancing the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs). However, this accuracy-oriented learning paradigm often suffers from entropy collapse, which reduces policy exploration and limits reasoning capabilities. To address this challenge, we propose an efficient reinforcement learning framework that leverages entropy signals at both the semantic and token levels to improve reasoning. From the data perspective, we introduce semantic entropy-guided curriculum learning, organizing training data from low to high semantic entropy to guide progressive optimization from easier to more challenging tasks. For the algorithmic design, we adopt non-uniform token treatment by imposing KL regularization on low-entropy tokens that critically impact policy exploration and applying stronger constraints on high-covariance portions within these tokens. By jointly optimizing data organization and algorithmic design, our method effectively mitigates entropy collapse and enhances LLM reasoning. Experimental results across 6 benchmarks with 3 different parameter-scale base models demonstrate that our method outperforms other entropy-based approaches in improving reasoning.
Authors: Yun Piao, Hongbo Min, Hang Su, Leilei Zhang, Lei Wang, Yue Yin, Xiao Wu, Zhejing Xu, Liwei Qu, Hang Li, Xinxin Zeng, Wei Tian, Fei Yu, Xiaowei Li, Jiayi Jiang, Tongxu Liu, Hao Tian, Yufei Que, Xiaobing Tu, Bing Suo, Yuebing Li, Xiangting Chen, Zeen Zhao, Jiaming Tang, Wei Huang, Xuguang Li, Jing Zhao, Jin Li, Jie Shen, Jinkui Ren, Xiantao Zhang
Abstract: The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) is catalyzing a shift towards autonomous AI Agents capable of executing complex, multi-step tasks. However, these agents remain brittle when faced with real-world exceptions, making Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) supervision essential for mission-critical applications. In this paper, we present AgentBay, a novel sandbox service designed from the ground up for hybrid interaction. AgentBay provides secure, isolated execution environments spanning Windows, Linux, Android, Web Browsers, and Code interpreters. Its core contribution is a unified session accessible via a hybrid control interface: An AI agent can interact programmatically via mainstream interfaces (MCP, Open Source SDK), while a human operator can, at any moment, seamlessly take over full manual control. This seamless intervention is enabled by Adaptive Streaming Protocol (ASP). Unlike traditional VNC/RDP, ASP is specifically engineered for this hybrid use case, delivering an ultra-low-latency, smoother user experience that remains resilient even in weak network environments. It achieves this by dynamically blending command-based and video-based streaming, adapting its encoding strategy based on network conditions and the current controller (AI or human). Our evaluation demonstrates strong results in security, performance, and task completion rates. In a benchmark of complex tasks, the AgentBay (Agent + Human) model achieved more than 48% success rate improvement. Furthermore, our ASP protocol reduces bandwidth consumption by up to 50% compared to standard RDP, and in end-to-end latency with around 5% reduction, especially under poor network conditions. We posit that AgentBay provides a foundational primitive for building the next generation of reliable, human-supervised autonomous systems.
Authors: Gautam Varma Datla, Anudeep Vurity, Tejaswani Dash, Tazeem Ahmad, Mohd Adnan, Saima Rafi
Abstract: AI policy guidance is predominantly written as prose, which practitioners must first convert into executable rules before frameworks can evaluate or enforce them. This manual step is slow, error-prone, difficult to scale, and often delays the use of safeguards in real-world deployments. To address this gap, we present Policy-to-Tests (P2T), a framework that converts natural-language policy documents into normalized, machine-readable rules. The framework comprises a pipeline and a compact domain-specific language (DSL) that encodes hazards, scope, conditions, exceptions, and required evidence, yielding a canonical representation of extracted rules. To test the framework beyond a single policy, we apply it across general frameworks, sector guidance, and enterprise standards, extracting obligation-bearing clauses and converting them into executable rules. These AI-generated rules closely match strong human baselines on span-level and rule-level metrics, with robust inter-annotator agreement on the gold set. To evaluate downstream behavioral and safety impact, we add HIPAA-derived safeguards to a generative agent and compare it with an otherwise identical agent without guardrails. An LLM-based judge, aligned with gold-standard criteria, measures violation rates and robustness to obfuscated and compositional prompts. Detailed results are provided in the appendix. We release the codebase, DSL, prompts, and rule sets as open-source resources to enable reproducible evaluation.
Authors: Zhou Liu, Zhaoyang Han, Guochen Yan, Hao Liang, Bohan Zeng, Xing Chen, Yuanfeng Song, Wentao Zhang
Abstract: Data governance ensures data quality, security, and compliance through policies and standards, a critical foundation for scaling modern AI development. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising solution for automating data governance by translating user intent into executable transformation code. However, existing benchmarks for automated data science often emphasize snippet-level coding or high-level analytics, failing to capture the unique challenge of data governance: ensuring the correctness and quality of the data itself. To bridge this gap, we introduce GovBench, a benchmark featuring 150 diverse tasks grounded in real-world scenarios, built on data from actual cases. GovBench employs a novel "reversed-objective" methodology to synthesize realistic noise and utilizes rigorous metrics to assess end-to-end pipeline reliability. Our analysis on GovBench reveals that current models struggle with complex, multi-step workflows and lack robust error-correction mechanisms. Consequently, we propose DataGovAgent, a framework utilizing a Planner-Executor-Evaluator architecture that integrates constraint-based planning, retrieval-augmented generation, and sandboxed feedback-driven debugging. Experimental results show that DataGovAgent significantly boosts the Average Task Score (ATS) on complex tasks from 39.7 to 54.9 and reduces debugging iterations by over 77.9 percent compared to general-purpose baselines.
Authors: Weiwei Wang, Weijie Zou, Jiyong Min
Abstract: The repetition problem, where Large Language Models (LLMs) continuously generate repetitive content without proper termination, poses a critical challenge in production deployments, causing severe performance degradation and system stalling. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation and multiple practical solutions for the repetition problem encountered in real-world batch code interpretation tasks. We identify three distinct repetition patterns: (1) business rule generation repetition, (2) method call relationship analysis repetition, and (3) PlantUML diagram syntax generation repetition. Through rigorous theoretical analysis based on Markov models, we establish that the root cause lies in greedy decoding's inability to escape repetitive loops, exacerbated by self-reinforcement effects. Our comprehensive experimental evaluation demonstrates three viable solutions: (1) Beam Search decoding with early_stopping=True serves as a universal post-hoc mechanism that effectively resolves all three repetition patterns; (2) presence_penalty hyperparameter provides an effective solution specifically for BadCase 1; and (3) Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) fine-tuning offers a universal model-level solution for all three BadCases. The primary value of this work lies in combining first-hand production experience with extensive experimental validation. Our main contributions include systematic theoretical analysis of repetition mechanisms, comprehensive evaluation of multiple solutions with task-specific applicability mapping, identification of early_stopping as the critical parameter for Beam Search effectiveness, and practical production-ready solutions validated in real deployment environments.
Authors: Dilani Widanapathiranage, Scott Barnett, Stefanus Kurniawan, Wannita Takerngsaksiri
Abstract: Hallucinations are a key concern when creating applications that rely on Foundation models (FMs). Understanding where and how these subtle failures occur in an application relies on evaluation methods known as \textit{evals}. Prior work focuses on defining new eval methods or benchmark datasets for specific tasks. However, neither helps a software team with a task-specific FM application when there is no metric or dataset. The demand for both automated approaches and deep integration of human insight makes this a challenging problem. We address this gap by proposing an approach to synthesise a FM task-specific evaluator program that provides automation and a custom UI for capturing feedback. The core novelty of our approach lies in: (1) a task-agnostic meta-model that captures properties of any FM task, (2) an interaction protocol for efficient use of human feedback, and (3) an eval synthesiser that selects or generates an appropriate set of evals. We implement our approach in \toolname and demonstrate the concept on two diverse FM tasks: chart data extraction and document question answering. A preliminary evaluation on the quality of our selected evals shows 93\% and 90\% accuracy respectively. Our research tackles a growing problem facing engineering teams, how to evaluate and review outputs from FM tasks.
Authors: Price Allman, Lian Thang, Dre Simmons, Salmon Riaz
Abstract: We present a comparative study of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms for cooperative warehouse robotics. We evaluate QMIX and IPPO on the Robotic Warehouse (RWARE) environment and a custom Unity 3D simulation. Our experiments reveal that QMIX's value decomposition significantly outperforms independent learning approaches (achieving 3.25 mean return vs. 0.38 for advanced IPPO), but requires extensive hyperparameter tuning -- particularly extended epsilon annealing (5M+ steps) for sparse reward discovery. We demonstrate successful deployment in Unity ML-Agents, achieving consistent package delivery after 1M training steps. While MARL shows promise for small-scale deployments (2-4 robots), significant scaling challenges remain. Code and analyses: https://pallman14.github.io/MARL-QMIX-Warehouse-Robots/
URLs: https://pallman14.github.io/MARL-QMIX-Warehouse-Robots/
Authors: Philip Stephens, Emmanuel Salawu
Abstract: We introduce a unified mathematical and probabilistic framework for understanding and comparing diverse AI agent strategies. We bridge the gap between high-level agent design concepts, such as ReAct, multi-agent systems, and control flows, and a rigorous mathematical formulation. Our approach frames agentic processes as a chain of probabilities, enabling a detailed analysis of how different strategies manipulate these probabilities to achieve desired outcomes. Our framework provides a common language for discussing the trade-offs inherent in various agent architectures. One of our many key contributions is the introduction of the "Degrees of Freedom" concept, which intuitively differentiates the optimizable levers available for each approach, thereby guiding the selection of appropriate strategies for specific tasks. This work aims to enhance the clarity and precision in designing and evaluating AI agents, offering insights into maximizing the probability of successful actions within complex agentic systems.
Authors: Pedro Passos
Abstract: In elite soccer, substitution decisions entail significant financial and sporting consequences yet remain heavily reliant on intuition or predictive models that merely mimic historical biases. This paper introduces a Fuzzy Logic based Decision Support System (DSS) designed for real time, prescriptive game management. Unlike traditional Machine Learning approaches that encounter a predictive ceiling by attempting to replicate human behavior, our system audits performance through an objective, rule based inference engine. We propose a methodological advancement by reformulating the PlayeRank metric into a Cumulative Mean with Role Aware Normalization, eliminating the play time exposure bias inherent in cumulative sum models to enable accurate intra match comparison. The system integrates this refined metric with physiological proxies (fatigue) and contextual variables (disciplinary risk modulated by tactical role) to calculate a dynamic Substitution Priority (P final). Validation via a case study of the 2018 FIFA World Cup match between Brazil and Belgium demonstrates the system's ecological validity: it not only aligned with expert consensus on executed substitutions (for example Gabriel Jesus) but, crucially, identified high risk scenarios ignored by human decision makers. Specifically, the model flagged the "FAGNER Paradox" - a maximum priority defensive risk - minutes before a critical yellow card, and detected the "Lukaku Paradox", where an isolated assist masked a severe drop in participation. These results confirm that Fuzzy Logic offers a transparent, explainable, and superior alternative to black box models for optimizing real time tactical decisions.
Authors: Nate Straub, Saara Khan, Kat Jay, Brian Cabral, Oskar Linde
Abstract: We demonstrate the importance of persona-based multi-agents brainstorming for both diverse topics and subject matter ideation. Prior work has shown that generalized multi-agent collaboration often provides better reasoning than a single agent alone. In this paper, we propose and develop a framework for persona-based agent selection, showing how persona domain curation can improve brainstorming outcomes. Using multiple experimental setups, we evaluate brainstorming outputs across different persona pairings (e.g., Doctor vs VR Engineer) and A2A (agent-to-agent) dynamics (separate, together, separate-then-together). Our results show that (1) persona choice shapes idea domains, (2) collaboration mode shifts diversity of idea generation, and (3) multi-agent persona-driven brainstorming produces idea depth and cross-domain coverage.
Authors: Edervaldo Melo
Abstract: This paper presents the Nemosine Framework, a modular cognitive architecture designed to support assisted reasoning, structured thinking, and systematic analysis. The model operates through functional cognitive modules ("personas") that organize tasks such as planning, evaluation, cross-checking, and narrative synthesis. The framework combines principles from metacognition, distributed cognition, and modular cognitive systems to offer an operational structure for assisted problem-solving and decision support. The architecture is documented through formal specification, internal consistency criteria, and reproducible structural components. The goal is to provide a clear conceptual basis for future computational implementations and to contribute to the study of symbolic-modular architectures for reasoning.
Authors: Yu-Wei Zhan, Xin Wang, Pengzhe Mao, Tongtong Feng, Ren Wang, Wenwu Zhu
Abstract: Building generalist embodied agents requires a unified system that can interpret multimodal goals, model environment dynamics, and execute reliable actions across diverse real-world tasks. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offer strong semantic priors and cross-modal generalization, while world models (WMs) provide actionable latent dynamics for prediction and control. Their combination holds promise for open-ended embodied intelligence, yet introduces two key challenges: (1) establishing a tight coupling between the semantic intent from MLLMs and the dynamic state representations within the WM's latent space, and (2) achieving task-aware adaptability that supports multi-task learning and cross-environment generalization. To address these limitations, we propose BiTAgent, a task-aware dynamic joint framework that enables bidirectional coupling between MLLMs and WMs. BiTAgent establishes two complementary pathways: a forward path that injects MLLM representations into the WM's latent space for semantically guided imagination, and a backward path where WM-generated feedback refines the MLLM's semantic space via dense text-conditioned rewards. This bidirectional interaction is realized through three synergistic components: Task-Aware Dynamic Joint Learning, Task-Aware Behavior Learning, and MLLM-WM Joint Optimization, which together harmonize semantic reasoning and dynamic prediction. Extensive experiments across multi-task and cross-environment settings demonstrate superior stability and generalization over state-of-the-art baselines, marking a step toward open-ended embodied learning.
Authors: Xin Liang, Xiang Zhang, Yiwei Xu, Siqi Sun, Chenyu You
Abstract: Generating academic slides from scientific papers is a challenging multimodal reasoning task that requires both long context understanding and deliberate visual planning. Existing approaches largely reduce it to text only summarization, overlooking the visual component and design intensive nature of slide creation. In this paper we introduce SlideGen, an agentic, modular, and visual in the loop framework for scientific paper to slide generation. SlideGen orchestrates a group of vision language agents that reason collaboratively over the document structure and semantics, producing editable PPTX slides with logical flow and compelling visual presentation. By integrating coordinated outlining, mapping, arrangement, note synthesis, and iterative refinement, our system consistently delivers slides of expert level quality. Across diverse benchmarks and strong baselines, SlideGen outperforms existing methods in visual quality, content faithfulness, and readability, positioning it as the new state of the art in automated slide generation. Our work establishes a foundation for design aware multimodal slide generation, demonstrating how agentic collaboration can bridge understanding and presentation in complex multimodal reasoning tasks.
Authors: Zhenzhen Ren, Xinpeng Zhang, Zhenxing Qian, Yan Gao, Yu Shi, Shuxin Zheng, Jiyan He
Abstract: The integration of external tools is pivotal for empowering Large Language Model (LLM) agents with real-world capabilities. However, training these agents through direct, continuous interaction with diverse tools is often prohibitively expensive, slow, and introduces additional development and maintenance overhead. To address this challenge, we introduce the Generalist Tool Model (GTM), a 1.5-billion-parameter model that learns to act as a universal tool simulator. With only prompt-level configuration, GTM accesses tool functionalities along with input arguments and generates outputs that faithfully mimic real tool execution, providing a fast and cost-effective solution that eliminates development overhead. To build GTM, we propose the Context-Aware Response Generation (CARG) pipeline, which synthesizes comprehensive training data covering over 20,000 tools across 300 domains including physics, medicine, robotics, and finance. Through this pipeline, GTM learns to produce not only syntactically correct outputs but also logically coherent and contextually appropriate responses. Experiments demonstrate that GTM produces high-quality outputs with strong consistency and reliability. Besides when used in real reinforcement learning scenarios for agent training, GTM exhibits significantly faster simulation speed compared to real tools while maintaining comparable output quality, along with remarkable generalization and domain adaptability. Our results establish GTM as a foundational component for developing future AI agents, enabling efficient and scalable training of tool-augmented systems.
Authors: Michael Klenk
Abstract: This chapter discusses the ethics of generative AI. It provides a technical primer to show how generative AI affords experiencing technology as if it were human, and this affordance provides a fruitful focus for the philosophical ethics of generative AI. It then shows how generative AI can both aggravate and alleviate familiar ethical concerns in AI ethics, including responsibility, privacy, bias and fairness, and forms of alienation and exploitation. Finally, the chapter examines ethical questions that arise specifically from generative AI's mimetic generativity, such as debates about authorship and credit, the emergence of as-if social relationships with machines, and new forms of influence, persuasion, and manipulation.
Authors: Mohamed Baha Ben Ticha, Xingchen Ran, Guillaume Saldanha, Ga\"el Le Godais, Phil\'emon Roussel, Marc Aubert, Amina Fontanell, Thomas Costecalde, Lucas Struber, Serpil Karakas, Shaomin Zhang, Philippe Kahane, Guillaume Charvet, St\'ephan Chabard\`es, Blaise Yvert
Abstract: Speech Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) offer promising solutions to people with severe paralysis unable to communicate. A number of recent studies have demonstrated convincing reconstruction of intelligible speech from surface electrocorticographic (ECoG) or intracortical recordings by predicting a series of phonemes or words and using downstream language models to obtain meaningful sentences. A current challenge is to reconstruct speech in a streaming mode by directly regressing cortical signals into acoustic speech. While this has been achieved recently using intracortical data, further work is needed to obtain comparable results with surface ECoG recordings. In particular, optimizing neural decoders becomes critical in this case. Here we present an offline speech decoding pipeline based on an encoder-decoder deep neural architecture, integrating Vision Transformers and contrastive learning to enhance the direct regression of speech from ECoG signals. The approach is evaluated on two datasets, one obtained with clinical subdural electrodes in an epileptic patient, and another obtained with the fully implantable WIMAGINE epidural system in a participant of a motor BCI trial. To our knowledge this presents a first attempt to decode speech from a fully implantable and wireless epidural recording system offering perspectives for long-term use.
Authors: Chenyang Zuo, Siqi Fan, Zaiqing Nie
Abstract: Molecules play a crucial role in biomedical research and discovery, particularly in the field of small molecule drug development. Given the rapid advancements in large language models, especially the recent emergence of reasoning models, it is natural to explore how a general-purpose language model can be efficiently adapted for molecular science applications. In this work, we introduce BioMedGPT-Mol, a molecular language model designed to support molecular understanding and generation tasks. By curating and unifying existing public instruction datasets, we have assembled a large-scale, comprehensive, and high-quality training dataset. The model is then fine-tuned through a meticulously designed multi-task learning framework. On a consolidated benchmark derived from LlaSMol, TOMG-Bench, and MuMOInstruct, BioMedGPT-Mol achieves remarkable performance. Our experimental results demonstrate that a general-purpose reasoning model can be effectively and efficiently post-trained into a professional molecular language model through a well-structured multi-task curriculum. Leveraging the power of it, we further explore retrosynthetic planning task, and the performance on RetroBench demonstrates its competitive capability of acting as an end-to-end retrosynthetic planner. We anticipate that our approach can be extended to other biomedical scientific domains.
Authors: Thibaut Boissin (IRIT-MISFIT), Thomas Massena (DTIPG - SNCF, IRIT-MISFIT), Franck Mamalet (IRIT-MISFIT), Mathieu Serrurier (IRIT-MISFIT)
Abstract: Orthogonality-based optimizers, such as Muon, have recently shown strong performance across large-scale training and community-driven efficiency challenges. However, these methods rely on a costly gradient orthogonalization step. Even efficient iterative approximations such as Newton-Schulz remain expensive, typically requiring dozens of matrix multiplications to converge. We introduce a preconditioning procedure that accelerates Newton-Schulz convergence and reduces its computational cost. We evaluate its impact and show that the overhead of our preconditioning can be made negligible. Furthermore, the faster convergence it enables allows us to remove one iteration out of the usual five without degrading approximation quality. Our publicly available implementation achieves up to a 2.8x speedup in the Newton-Schulz approximation. We also show that this has a direct impact on end-to-end training runtime with 5-10% improvement in realistic training scenarios across two efficiency-focused tasks. On challenging language or vision tasks, we validate that our method maintains equal or superior model performance while improving runtime. Crucially, these improvements require no hyperparameter tuning and can be adopted as a simple drop-in replacement. Our code is publicly available on github.
Authors: Jae Hee Lee, Anne Lauscher, Stefano V. Albrecht
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been widely deployed in various applications, often functioning as autonomous agents that interact with each other in multi-agent systems. While these systems have shown promise in enhancing capabilities and enabling complex tasks, they also pose significant ethical challenges. This position paper outlines a research agenda aimed at ensuring the ethical behavior of multi-agent systems of LLMs (MALMs) from the perspective of mechanistic interpretability. We identify three key research challenges: (i) developing comprehensive evaluation frameworks to assess ethical behavior at individual, interactional, and systemic levels; (ii) elucidating the internal mechanisms that give rise to emergent behaviors through mechanistic interpretability; and (iii) implementing targeted parameter-efficient alignment techniques to steer MALMs towards ethical behaviors without compromising their performance.
Authors: Andrew Paterson, Carl Sanders
Abstract: For years, the discourse around poker AI has been dominated by the concept of solvers and the pursuit of unexploitable, machine-perfect play. This paper challenges that orthodoxy. It presents Patrick, an AI built on the contrary philosophy: that the path to victory lies not in being unexploitable, but in being maximally exploitative. Patrick's architecture is a purpose-built engine for understanding and attacking the flawed, psychological, and often irrational nature of human opponents. Through detailed analysis of its design, its novel prediction-anchored learning method, and its profitable performance in a 64,267-hand trial, this paper makes the case that the solved myth is a distraction from the real, far more interesting challenge: creating AI that can master the art of human imperfection.
Authors: Kuinan Hou, Marco Zorzi, Alberto Testolin
Abstract: Reliably counting and generating sequences of items remain a significant challenge for neural networks, including Large Language Models (LLMs). Indeed, although this capability is readily handled by rule-based symbolic systems based on serial computation, learning to systematically deploy counting procedures is difficult for neural models, which should acquire these skills through learning. Previous research has demonstrated that recurrent architectures can only approximately track and enumerate sequences of events, and it remains unclear whether modern deep learning systems, including LLMs, can deploy systematic counting procedures over sequences of discrete symbols. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating the sequential enumeration abilities of five state-of-the-art LLMs, including proprietary, open-source, and reasoning models. We probe LLMs in sequential naming and production tasks involving lists of letters and words, adopting a variety of prompting instructions to explore the role of chain-of-thought in the spontaneous emerging of counting strategies. We also evaluate open-source models with the same architecture but increasing size to see whether the mastering of counting principles follows scaling laws, and we analyze the embedding dynamics during sequential enumeration to investigate the emergent encoding of numerosity. We find that some LLMs are indeed capable of deploying counting procedures when explicitly prompted to do so, but none of them spontaneously engage in counting when simply asked to enumerate the number of items in a sequence. Our results suggest that, despite their impressive emergent abilities, LLMs cannot yet robustly and systematically deploy counting procedures, highlighting a persistent gap between neural and symbolic approaches to compositional generalization.
Authors: Dario Pesenti, Alessandro Bogani, Katya Tentori, Stefano Teso
Abstract: Explanatory Interactive Learning (XIL) is a powerful interactive learning framework designed to enable users to customize and correct AI models by interacting with their explanations. In a nutshell, XIL algorithms select a number of items on which an AI model made a decision (e.g. images and their tags) and present them to users, together with corresponding explanations (e.g. image regions that drive the model's decision). Then, users supply corrective feedback for the explanations, which the algorithm uses to improve the model. Despite showing promise in debugging tasks, recent studies have raised concerns that explanatory interaction may trigger order effects, a well-known cognitive bias in which the sequence of presented items influences users' trust and, critically, the quality of their feedback. We argue that these studies are not entirely conclusive, as the experimental designs and tasks employed differ substantially from common XIL use cases, complicating interpretation. To clarify the interplay between order effects and explanatory interaction, we ran two larger-scale user studies (n = 713 total) designed to mimic common XIL tasks. Specifically, we assessed order effects both within and between debugging sessions by manipulating the order in which correct and wrong explanations are presented to participants. Order effects had a limited, through significant impact on users' agreement with the model (i.e., a behavioral measure of their trust), and only when examined withing debugging sessions, not between them. The quality of users' feedback was generally satisfactory, with order effects exerting only a small and inconsistent influence in both experiments. Overall, our findings suggest that order effects do not pose a significant issue for the successful employment of XIL approaches. More broadly, our work contributes to the ongoing efforts for understanding human factors in AI.
Authors: Eranga Bandara, Amin Hass, Ross Gore, Sachin Shetty, Ravi Mukkamala, Safdar H. Bouk, Xueping Liang, Ng Wee Keong, Kasun De Zoysa, Aruna Withanage, Nilaan Loganathan
Abstract: AI agent-based systems are becoming increasingly integral to modern software architectures, enabling autonomous decision-making, dynamic task execution, and multimodal interactions through large language models (LLMs). However, these systems introduce novel and evolving security challenges, including prompt injection attacks, context poisoning, model manipulation, and opaque agent-to-agent communication, that are not effectively captured by traditional threat modeling frameworks. In this paper, we introduce ASTRIDE, an automated threat modeling platform purpose-built for AI agent-based systems. ASTRIDE extends the classical STRIDE framework by introducing a new threat category, A for AI Agent-Specific Attacks, which encompasses emerging vulnerabilities such as prompt injection, unsafe tool invocation, and reasoning subversion, unique to agent-based applications. To automate threat modeling, ASTRIDE combines a consortium of fine-tuned vision-language models (VLMs) with the OpenAI-gpt-oss reasoning LLM to perform end-to-end analysis directly from visual agent architecture diagrams, such as data flow diagrams(DFDs). LLM agents orchestrate the end-to-end threat modeling automation process by coordinating interactions between the VLM consortium and the reasoning LLM. Our evaluations demonstrate that ASTRIDE provides accurate, scalable, and explainable threat modeling for next-generation intelligent systems. To the best of our knowledge, ASTRIDE is the first framework to both extend STRIDE with AI-specific threats and integrate fine-tuned VLMs with a reasoning LLM to fully automate diagram-driven threat modeling in AI agent-based applications.
Authors: SIMA team, Adrian Bolton, Alexander Lerchner, Alexandra Cordell, Alexandre Moufarek, Andrew Bolt, Andrew Lampinen, Anna Mitenkova, Arne Olav Hallingstad, Bojan Vujatovic, Bonnie Li, Cong Lu, Daan Wierstra, Daniel P. Sawyer, Daniel Slater, David Reichert, Davide Vercelli, Demis Hassabis, Drew A. Hudson, Duncan Williams, Ed Hirst, Fabio Pardo, Felix Hill, Frederic Besse, Hannah Openshaw, Harris Chan, Hubert Soyer, Jane X. Wang, Jeff Clune, John Agapiou, John Reid, Joseph Marino, Junkyung Kim, Karol Gregor, Kaustubh Sridhar, Kay McKinney, Laura Kampis, Lei M. Zhang, Loic Matthey, Luyu Wang, Maria Abi Raad, Maria Loks-Thompson, Martin Engelcke, Matija Kecman, Matthew Jackson, Maxime Gazeau, Ollie Purkiss, Oscar Knagg, Peter Stys, Piermaria Mendolicchio, Raia Hadsell, Rosemary Ke, Ryan Faulkner, Sarah Chakera, Satinder Singh Baveja, Shane Legg, Sheleem Kashem, Tayfun Terzi, Thomas Keck, Tim Harley, Tim Scholtes, Tyson Roberts, Volodymyr Mnih, Yulan Liu, Zhengdong Wang, Zoubin Ghahramani
Abstract: We introduce SIMA 2, a generalist embodied agent that understands and acts in a wide variety of 3D virtual worlds. Built upon a Gemini foundation model, SIMA 2 represents a significant step toward active, goal-directed interaction within an embodied environment. Unlike prior work (e.g., SIMA 1) limited to simple language commands, SIMA 2 acts as an interactive partner, capable of reasoning about high-level goals, conversing with the user, and handling complex instructions given through language and images. Across a diverse portfolio of games, SIMA 2 substantially closes the gap with human performance and demonstrates robust generalization to previously unseen environments, all while retaining the base model's core reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, we demonstrate a capacity for open-ended self-improvement: by leveraging Gemini to generate tasks and provide rewards, SIMA 2 can autonomously learn new skills from scratch in a new environment. This work validates a path toward creating versatile and continuously learning agents for both virtual and, eventually, physical worlds.
Authors: Liam McGee, James Harvey, Lucy Cull, Andreas Vermeulen, Bart-Floris Visscher, Malvika Sharan
Abstract: In this preprint, we present A collaborative human-AI approach to building an inspectable semantic layer for Agentic AI. AI agents first propose candidate knowledge structures from diverse data sources; domain experts then validate, correct, and extend these structures, with their feedback used to improve subsequent models. Authors show how this process captures tacit institutional knowledge, improves response quality and efficiency, and mitigates institutional amnesia. We argue for a shift from post-hoc explanation to justifiable Agentic AI, where decisions are grounded in explicit, inspectable evidence and reasoning accessible to both experts and non-specialists.
Authors: Rasul Tutunov, Alexandre Maraval, Antoine Grosnit, Xihan Li, Jun Wang, Haitham Bou-Ammar
Abstract: Sphere packing, Hilbert's eighteenth problem, asks for the densest arrangement of congruent spheres in n-dimensional Euclidean space. Although relevant to areas such as cryptography, crystallography, and medical imaging, the problem remains unresolved: beyond a few special dimensions, neither optimal packings nor tight upper bounds are known. Even a major breakthrough in dimension $n=8$, later recognised with a Fields Medal, underscores its difficulty. A leading technique for upper bounds, the three-point method, reduces the problem to solving large, high-precision semidefinite programs (SDPs). Because each candidate SDP may take days to evaluate, standard data-intensive AI approaches are infeasible. We address this challenge by formulating SDP construction as a sequential decision process, the SDP game, in which a policy assembles SDP formulations from a set of admissible components. Using a sample-efficient model-based framework that combines Bayesian optimisation with Monte Carlo Tree Search, we obtain new state-of-the-art upper bounds in dimensions $4-16$, showing that model-based search can advance computational progress in longstanding geometric problems. Together, these results demonstrate that sample-efficient, model-based search can make tangible progress on mathematically rigid, evaluation limited problems, pointing towards a complementary direction for AI-assisted discovery beyond large-scale LLM-driven exploration.
Authors: Vignesh Kumar Kembu, Pierandrea Morandini, Marta Bianca Maria Ranzini, Antonino Nocera
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a key topic in AI and NLP, transforming sectors like healthcare, finance, education, and marketing by improving customer service, automating tasks, providing insights, improving diagnostics, and personalizing learning experiences. Information extraction from clinical records is a crucial task in digital healthcare. Although traditional NLP techniques have been used for this in the past, they often fall short due to the complexity, variability of clinical language, and high inner semantics in the free clinical text. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a powerful tool for better understanding and generating human-like text, making them highly effective in this area. In this paper, we explore the ability of open-source multilingual LLMs to understand EHRs (Electronic Health Records) in Italian and help extract information from them in real-time. Our detailed experimental campaign on comorbidity extraction from EHR reveals that some LLMs struggle in zero-shot, on-premises settings, and others show significant variation in performance, struggling to generalize across various diseases when compared to native pattern matching and manual annotations.
Authors: Lukas Weidener, Marko Brki\'c, Chiara Bacci, Mihailo Jovanovi\'c, Emre Ulgac, Alex Dobrin, Johannes Weniger, Martin Vlas, Ritvik Singh, Aakaash Meduri
Abstract: Artificial intelligence systems are increasingly deployed in biomedical research. However, current evaluation frameworks may inadequately assess their effectiveness as research collaborators. This rapid review examines benchmarking practices for AI systems in preclinical biomedical research. Three major databases and two preprint servers were searched from January 1, 2018 to October 31, 2025, identifying 14 benchmarks that assess AI capabilities in literature understanding, experimental design, and hypothesis generation. The results revealed that all current benchmarks assess isolated component capabilities, including data analysis quality, hypothesis validity, and experimental protocol design. However, authentic research collaboration requires integrated workflows spanning multiple sessions, with contextual memory, adaptive dialogue, and constraint propagation. This gap implies that systems excelling on component benchmarks may fail as practical research co-pilots. A process-oriented evaluation framework is proposed that addresses four critical dimensions absent from current benchmarks: dialogue quality, workflow orchestration, session continuity, and researcher experience. These dimensions are essential for evaluating AI systems as research co-pilots rather than as isolated task executors.
Authors: Dadi Guo, Qingyu Liu, Dongrui Liu, Qihan Ren, Shuai Shao, Tianyi Qiu, Haoran Li, Yi R. Fung, Zhongjie Ba, Juntao Dai, Jiaming Ji, Zhikai Chen, Jialing Tao, Yaodong Yang, Jing Shao, Xia Hu
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly used as autonomous subordinates that carry out tasks for users. This raises the question of whether they may also engage in deception, similar to how individuals in human organizations lie to superiors to create a good image or avoid punishment. We observe and define agentic upward deception, a phenomenon in which an agent facing environmental constraints conceals its failure and performs actions that were not requested without reporting. To assess its prevalence, we construct a benchmark of 200 tasks covering five task types and eight realistic scenarios in a constrained environment, such as broken tools or mismatched information sources. Evaluations of 11 popular LLMs reveal that these agents typically exhibit action-based deceptive behaviors, such as guessing results, performing unsupported simulations, substituting unavailable information sources, and fabricating local files. We further test prompt-based mitigation and find only limited reductions, suggesting that it is difficult to eliminate and highlighting the need for stronger mitigation strategies to ensure the safety of LLM-based agents.
Authors: Junjie Fan, Hongye Zhao, Linduo Wei, Jiayu Rao, Guijia Li, Jiaxin Yuan, Wenqi Xu, Yong Qi
Abstract: Recent adaptations of Large Language Models (LLMs) for time series forecasting often fail to effectively enhance information for raw series, leaving LLM reasoning capabilities underutilized. Existing prompting strategies rely on static correlations rather than generative interpretations of dynamic behavior, lacking critical global and instance-specific context. To address this, we propose STELLA (Semantic-Temporal Alignment with Language Abstractions), a framework that systematically mines and injects structured supplementary and complementary information. STELLA employs a dynamic semantic abstraction mechanism that decouples input series into trend, seasonality, and residual components. It then translates intrinsic behavioral features of these components into Hierarchical Semantic Anchors: a Corpus-level Semantic Prior (CSP) for global context and a Fine-grained Behavioral Prompt (FBP) for instance-level patterns. Using these anchors as prefix-prompts, STELLA guides the LLM to model intrinsic dynamics. Experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that STELLA outperforms state-of-the-art methods in long- and short-term forecasting, showing superior generalization in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of our dynamically generated semantic anchors.
Authors: M Zeeshan, Saud Satti
Abstract: Multimodal Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, particularly Vision-Language Models (VLMs), have become integral to critical applications ranging from autonomous decision-making to automated document processing. As these systems scale, they rely heavily on preprocessing pipelines to handle diverse inputs efficiently. However, this dependency on standard preprocessing operations, specifically image downscaling, creates a significant yet often overlooked security vulnerability. While intended for computational optimization, scaling algorithms can be exploited to conceal malicious visual prompts that are invisible to human observers but become active semantic instructions once processed by the model. Current adversarial strategies remain largely static, failing to account for the dynamic nature of modern agentic workflows. To address this gap, we propose Chameleon, a novel, adaptive adversarial framework designed to expose and exploit scaling vulnerabilities in production VLMs. Unlike traditional static attacks, Chameleon employs an iterative, agent-based optimization mechanism that dynamically refines image perturbations based on the target model's real-time feedback. This allows the framework to craft highly robust adversarial examples that survive standard downscaling operations to hijack downstream execution. We evaluate Chameleon against Gemini 2.5 Flash model. Our experiments demonstrate that Chameleon achieves an Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 84.5% across varying scaling factors, significantly outperforming static baseline attacks which average only 32.1%. Furthermore, we show that these attacks effectively compromise agentic pipelines, reducing decision-making accuracy by over 45% in multi-step tasks. Finally, we discuss the implications of these vulnerabilities and propose multi-scale consistency checks as a necessary defense mechanism.
Authors: Julien Benchek, Rohit Shetty, Benjamin Hunsberger, Ajay Arun, Zach Richards, Brendan Foody, Osvald Nitski, Bertie Vidgen
Abstract: We introduce the first version of the AI Consumer Index (ACE), a benchmark for assessing whether frontier AI models can perform high-value consumer tasks. ACE contains a hidden heldout set of 400 test cases, split across four consumer activities: shopping, food, gaming, and DIY. We are also open sourcing 80 cases as a devset with a CC-BY license. For the ACE leaderboard we evaluated 10 frontier models (with websearch turned on) using a novel grading methodology that dynamically checks whether relevant parts of the response are grounded in the retrieved web sources. GPT 5 (Thinking = High) is the top-performing model, scoring 56.1%, followed by o3 Pro (Thinking = On) (55.2%) and GPT 5.1 (Thinking = High) (55.1%). Models differ across domains, and in Shopping the top model scores under 50%. For some requests (such as giving the correct price or providing working links), models are highly prone to hallucination. Overall, ACE shows a substantial gap between the performance of even the best models and consumers' AI needs.
Authors: MohammadHossein Bateni, Vincent Cohen-Addad, Yuzhou Gu, Silvio Lattanzi, Simon Meierhans, Christopher Mohri
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have proven to be highly effective for solving complex reasoning tasks. Surprisingly, their capabilities can often be improved by iterating on previously generated solutions. In this context, a reasoning plan for generating and combining a set of solutions can be thought of as an algorithm for reasoning using a probabilistic oracle. We introduce a theoretical framework for analyzing such reasoning algorithms. This framework formalizes the principles underlying popular techniques for iterative improvement and answer aggregation, providing a foundation for designing a new generation of more powerful reasoning methods. Unlike approaches for understanding models that rely on architectural specifics, our model is grounded in experimental evidence. As a result, it offers a general perspective that may extend to a wide range of current and future reasoning oracles.
Authors: Raquel Norel, Michele Merler, Pavitra Modi
Abstract: Patients with rare neurological diseases report cognitive symptoms -"brain fog"- invisible to traditional tests. We propose continuous neurocognitive monitoring via smartphone speech analysis integrated with Relational Graph Transformer (RELGT) architectures. Proof-of-concept in phenylketonuria (PKU) shows speech-derived "Proficiency in Verbal Discourse" correlates with blood phenylalanine (p = -0.50, p < 0.005) but not standard cognitive tests (all |r| < 0.35). RELGT could overcome information bottlenecks in heterogeneous medical data (speech, labs, assessments), enabling predictive alerts weeks before decompensation. Key challenges: multi-disease validation, clinical workflow integration, equitable multilingual deployment. Success would transform episodic neurology into continuous personalized monitoring for millions globally.
Authors: Eric Bridgeford, Hayden Helm
Abstract: Generative models augmented with external tools and update mechanisms (or \textit{agents}) have demonstrated capabilities beyond intelligent prompting of base models. As agent use proliferates, dynamic multi-agent systems have naturally emerged. Recent work has investigated the theoretical and empirical properties of low-dimensional representations of agents based on query responses at a single time point. This paper introduces the Temporal Data Kernel Perspective Space (TDKPS), which jointly embeds agents across time, and proposes several novel hypothesis tests for detecting behavioral change at the agent- and group-level in black-box multi-agent systems. We characterize the empirical properties of our proposed tests, including their sensitivity to key hyperparameters, in simulations motivated by a multi-agent system of evolving digital personas. Finally, we demonstrate via natural experiment that our proposed tests detect changes that correlate sensitively, specifically, and significantly with a real exogenous event. As far as we are aware, TDKPS is the first principled framework for monitoring behavioral dynamics in black-box multi-agent systems -- a critical capability as generative agent deployment continues to scale.
Authors: Haoqin Hong, Ding Fan, Fubin Dou, Zhi-Li Zhou, Haoran Sun, Congcong Zhu, Jingrun Chen
Abstract: Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), an explicit scene representation technique, has shown significant promise for dynamic novel-view synthesis from monocular video input. However, purely data-driven 3DGS often struggles to capture the diverse physics-driven motion patterns in dynamic scenes. To fill this gap, we propose Physics-Informed Deformable Gaussian Splatting (PIDG), which treats each Gaussian particle as a Lagrangian material point with time-varying constitutive parameters and is supervised by 2D optical flow via motion projection. Specifically, we adopt static-dynamic decoupled 4D decomposed hash encoding to reconstruct geometry and motion efficiently. Subsequently, we impose the Cauchy momentum residual as a physics constraint, enabling independent prediction of each particle's velocity and constitutive stress via a time-evolving material field. Finally, we further supervise data fitting by matching Lagrangian particle flow to camera-compensated optical flow, which accelerates convergence and improves generalization. Experiments on a custom physics-driven dataset as well as on standard synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate significant gains in physical consistency and monocular dynamic reconstruction quality.
Authors: Sukanya Randhawa, Guntaj Randhawa, Clemens Langer, Francis Andorful, Benjamin Herfort, Daniel Kwakye, Omer Olchik, Sven Lautenbach, Alexander Zipf
Abstract: Resilient road infrastructure is a cornerstone of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Yet a primary indicator of network functionality and resilience is critically lacking: a comprehensive global baseline of road surface information. Here, we overcome this gap by applying a deep learning framework to a global mosaic of Planetscope satellite imagery from 2020 and 2024. The result is the first global multi-temporal dataset of road pavedness and width for 9.2 million km of critical arterial roads, achieving 95.5% coverage where nearly half the network was previously unclassified. This dataset reveals a powerful multi-scale geography of human development. At the planetary scale, we show that the rate of change in pavedness is a robust proxy for a country's development trajectory (correlation with HDI = 0.65). At the national scale, we quantify how unpaved roads constitute a fragile backbone for economic connectivity. We further synthesize our data into a global Humanitarian Passability Matrix with direct implications for humanitarian logistics. At the local scale, case studies demonstrate the framework's versatility: in Ghana, road quality disparities expose the spatial outcomes of governance; in Pakistan, the data identifies infrastructure vulnerabilities to inform climate resilience planning. Together, this work delivers both a foundational dataset and a multi-scale analytical framework for monitoring global infrastructure, from the dynamics of national development to the realities of local governance, climate adaptation, and equity. Unlike traditional proxies such as nighttime lights, which reflect economic activity, road surface data directly measures the physical infrastructure that underpins prosperity and resilience - at higher spatial resolution.
Authors: Dongjian Yang, Xiaoyuan Li, Chuanmei Xi, Ye Sun, Gang Liu
Abstract: Dendrite-inspired neurons have been widely used in tasks such as image classification due to low computational complexity and fast inference speed. Temporal data prediction, as a key machine learning task, plays a key role in real-time scenarios such as sensor data analysis, financial forecasting, and urban traffic management. However, existing dendrite-inspired neurons are mainly designed for static data. Studies on capturing dynamic features and modeling long-term dependencies in temporal sequences remain limited. Efficient architectures specifically designed for temporal sequence prediction are still lacking. In this paper, we propose Memory-DD, a low-complexity dendrite-inspired neuron model. Memory-DD consists of two dendrite-inspired neuron groups that contain no nonlinear activation functions but can still realize nonlinear mappings. Compared with traditional neurons without dendritic functions, Memory-DD requires only two neuron groups to extract logical relationships between features in input sequences. This design effectively captures temporal dependencies and is suitable for both classification and regression tasks on sequence data. Experimental results show that Memory-DD achieves an average accuracy of 89.41% on 18 temporal classification benchmark datasets, outperforming LSTM by 4.25%. On 9 temporal regression datasets, it reaches comparable performance to LSTM, while using only 50% of the parameters and reducing computational complexity (FLOPs) by 27.7%. These results demonstrate that Memory-DD successfully extends the low-complexity advantages of dendrite-inspired neurons to temporal prediction, providing a low-complexity and efficient solution for time-series data processing.
Authors: Isabelle Diana May-Xin Ng, Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya, Haitao Zhu, Wei Wei
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used across research domains to tackle complex tasks, but their performance can vary significantly depending on the task at hand. Evolutionary algorithms, inspired by natural selection, can be used to refine solutions iteratively at inference-time. To the best of our knowledge, there has not been exploration on leveraging the collective capabilities of multi-source seeding for LLM-guided genetic algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach, MultiGA, which applies genetic algorithm principles to address complex natural language tasks and reasoning problems by sampling from a diverse population of LLMs to initialize the population. MultiGA generates a range of outputs from various parent LLMs, open source and closed source, and uses a neutral fitness function to evaluate them. Through an iterative recombination process, we mix and refine these generations until an optimal solution is achieved. We benchmark our approach using text-to-SQL code generation tasks, trip planning, GPQA benchmark for grad-level science questions, and the BBQ bias benchmark. Our results show that MultiGA converges to the accuracy of the LLM best fit for the task, and these insights lay the foundation for future research looking closer at integrating multiple LLMs for unexplored tasks in which selecting only one pre-trained model is unclear or suboptimal.
Authors: Andrzej Tokajuk, Jaros{\l}aw A. Chudziak
Abstract: Forecasting cryptocurrency prices is hindered by extreme volatility and a methodological dilemma between information-scarce univariate models and noise-prone full-multivariate models. This paper investigates a partial-multivariate approach to balance this trade-off, hypothesizing that a strategic subset of features offers superior predictive power. We apply the Partial-Multivariate Transformer (PMformer) to forecast daily returns for BTCUSDT and ETHUSDT, benchmarking it against eleven classical and deep learning models. Our empirical results yield two primary contributions. First, we demonstrate that the partial-multivariate strategy achieves significant statistical accuracy, effectively balancing informative signals with noise. Second, we experiment and discuss an observable disconnect between this statistical performance and practical trading utility; lower prediction error did not consistently translate to higher financial returns in simulations. This finding challenges the reliance on traditional error metrics and highlights the need to develop evaluation criteria more aligned with real-world financial objectives.
Authors: Mukaram Shahid, Kunal Das, Hadia Ushaq, Hongwei Zhang, Jiming Song, Daji Qiao, Sarath Babu, Yong Guan, Zhengyuan Zhu, Arsalan Ahmad
Abstract: Accurately mapping the radio environment (e.g., identifying wireless signal strength at specific frequency bands and geographic locations) is crucial for efficient spectrum sharing, enabling Secondary Users~(SUs) to access underutilized spectrum bands while protecting Primary Users~(PUs). While existing models have made progress, they often degrade in performance when multiple transmitters coexist, due to the compounded effects of shadowing, interference from adjacent transmitters. To address this challenge, we extend our prior work on Physics-Informed Neural Networks~(PINNs) for single-transmitter mapping to derive a new multi-transmitter Partial Differential Equation~(PDE) formulation of the Received Signal Strength Indicator~(RSSI). We then propose \emph{ReVeal-MT} (Re-constructor and Visualizer of Spectrum Landscape for Multiple Transmitters), a novel PINN which integrates the multi-source PDE residual into a neural network loss function, enabling accurate spectrum landscape reconstruction from sparse RF sensor measurements. ReVeal-MT is validated using real-world measurements from the ARA wireless living lab across rural and suburban environments, and benchmarked against 3GPP and ITU-R channel models and a baseline PINN model for a single transmitter use-case. Results show that ReVeal-MT achieves substantial accuracy gains in multi-transmitter scenarios, e.g., achieving an RMSE of only 2.66\,dB with as few as 45 samples over a 370-square-kilometer region, while maintaining low computational complexity. These findings demonstrate that ReVeal-MT significantly advances radio environment mapping under realistic multi-transmitter conditions, with strong potential for enabling fine-grained spectrum management and precise coexistence between PUs and SUs.
Authors: Jinzhe Tan, Karim Benyekhlef
Abstract: Access to justice remains a global challenge, with many citizens still finding it difficult to seek help from the justice system when facing legal issues. Although the internet provides abundant legal information and services, navigating complex websites, understanding legal terminology, and filling out procedural forms continue to pose barriers to accessing justice. This paper introduces the LegalWebAgent framework that employs a web agent powered by multimodal large language models to bridge the gap in access to justice for ordinary citizens. The framework combines the natural language understanding capabilities of large language models with multimodal perception, enabling a complete process from user query to concrete action. It operates in three stages: the Ask Module understands user needs through natural language processing; the Browse Module autonomously navigates webpages, interacts with page elements (including forms and calendars), and extracts information from HTML structures and webpage screenshots; the Act Module synthesizes information for users or performs direct actions like form completion and schedule booking. To evaluate its effectiveness, we designed a benchmark test covering 15 real-world tasks, simulating typical legal service processes relevant to Qu\'ebec civil law users, from problem identification to procedural operations. Evaluation results show LegalWebAgent achieved a peak success rate of 86.7%, with an average of 84.4% across all tested models, demonstrating high autonomy in complex real-world scenarios.
Authors: Fouad Trad, Ali Chehab
Abstract: Few-shot prompting has emerged as a practical alternative to fine-tuning for leveraging the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in specialized tasks. However, its effectiveness depends heavily on the selection and quality of in-context examples, particularly in complex domains. In this work, we examine retrieval-augmented prompting as a strategy to improve few-shot performance in code vulnerability detection, where the goal is to identify one or more security-relevant weaknesses present in a given code snippet from a predefined set of vulnerability categories. We perform a systematic evaluation using the Gemini-1.5-Flash model across three approaches: (1) standard few-shot prompting with randomly selected examples, (2) retrieval-augmented prompting using semantically similar examples, and (3) retrieval-based labeling, which assigns labels based on retrieved examples without model inference. Our results show that retrieval-augmented prompting consistently outperforms the other prompting strategies. At 20 shots, it achieves an F1 score of 74.05% and a partial match accuracy of 83.90%. We further compare this approach against zero-shot prompting and several fine-tuned models, including Gemini-1.5-Flash and smaller open-source models such as DistilBERT, DistilGPT2, and CodeBERT. Retrieval-augmented prompting outperforms both zero-shot (F1 score: 36.35%, partial match accuracy: 20.30%) and fine-tuned Gemini (F1 score: 59.31%, partial match accuracy: 53.10%), while avoiding the training time and cost associated with model fine-tuning. On the other hand, fine-tuning CodeBERT yields higher performance (F1 score: 91.22%, partial match accuracy: 91.30%) but requires additional training, maintenance effort, and resources.
Authors: Shi Ding, Brian Magerko
Abstract: As generative artificial intelligence (AI) continues to transform education, most existing AI evaluations rely primarily on technical performance metrics such as accuracy or task efficiency while overlooking human identity, learner agency, contextual learning processes, and ethical considerations. In this paper, we present TEACH-AI (Trustworthy and Effective AI Classroom Heuristics), a domain-independent, pedagogically grounded, and stakeholder-aligned framework with measurable indicators and a practical toolkit for guiding the design, development, and evaluation of generative AI systems in educational contexts. Built on an extensive literature review and synthesis, the ten-component assessment framework and toolkit checklist provide a foundation for scalable, value-aligned AI evaluation in education. TEACH-AI rethinks "evaluation" through sociotechnical, educational, theoretical, and applied lenses, engaging designers, developers, researchers, and policymakers across AI and education. Our work invites the community to reconsider what constructs "effective" AI in education and to design model evaluation approaches that promote co-creation, inclusivity, and long-term human, social, and educational impact.
Authors: Swati Sachan, Theo Miller, Mai Phuong Nguyen
Abstract: High-stakes decision domains are increasingly exploring the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex decision-making tasks. However, LLM deployment in real-world settings presents challenges in data security, evaluation of its capabilities outside controlled environments, and accountability attribution in the event of adversarial decisions. This paper proposes a framework for responsible deployment of LLM-based decision-support systems through active human involvement. It integrates interactive collaboration between human experts and developers through multiple iterations at the pre-deployment stage to assess the uncertain samples and judge the stability of the explanation provided by post-hoc XAI techniques. Local LLM deployment within organizations and decentralized technologies, such as Blockchain and IPFS, are proposed to create immutable records of LLM activities for automated auditing to enhance security and trace back accountability. It was tested on Bert-large-uncased, Mistral, and LLaMA 2 and 3 models to assess the capability to support responsible financial decisions on business lending.
Authors: Hanjun Luo, Chiming Ni, Jiaheng Wen, Zhimu Huang, Yiran Wang, Bingduo Liao, Sylvia Chung, Yingbin Jin, Xinfeng Li, Wenyuan Xu, XiaoFeng Wang, Hanan Salam
Abstract: LLM-powered coding agents are reshaping the development paradigm. However, existing evaluation systems, neither traditional tests for humans nor benchmarks for LLMs, fail to capture this shift. They remain focused on well-defined algorithmic problems, which excludes problems where success depends on human-AI collaboration. Such collaborative problems not only require human reasoning to interpret complex contexts and guide solution strategies, but also demand AI efficiency for implementation. To bridge this gap, we introduce HAI-Eval, a unified benchmark designed to measure the synergy of human-AI partnership in coding. HAI-Eval's core innovation is its "Collaboration-Necessary" problem templates, which are intractable for both standalone LLMs and unaided humans, but solvable through effective collaboration. Specifically, HAI-Eval uses 45 templates to dynamically create tasks. It also provides a standardized IDE for human participants and a reproducible toolkit with 450 task instances for LLMs, ensuring an ecologically valid evaluation. We conduct a within-subject study with 45 participants and benchmark their performance against 5 state-of-the-art LLMs under 4 different levels of human intervention. Results show that standalone LLMs and unaided participants achieve poor pass rates (0.67% and 18.89%), human-AI collaboration significantly improves performance to 31.11%. Our analysis reveals an emerging co-reasoning partnership. This finding challenges the traditional human-tool hierarchy by showing that strategic breakthroughs can originate from either humans or AI. HAI-Eval establishes not only a challenging benchmark for next-generation coding agents but also a grounded, scalable framework for assessing core developer competencies in the AI era. Our benchmark and interactive demo will be openly accessible.
Authors: Aleksandr Farseev, Marlo Ongpin, Qi Yang, Ilia Gossoudarev, Yu-Yi Chu-Farseeva, Sergey Nikolenko
Abstract: The future of digital marketing lies in the convergence of human creativity and generative AI, where insight, strategy, and storytelling are co-authored by intelligent systems. We present MindFuse, a brave new explainable generative AI framework designed to act as a strategic partner in the marketing process. Unlike conventional LLM applications that stop at content generation, MindFuse fuses CTR-based content AI-guided co-creation with large language models to extract, interpret, and iterate on communication narratives grounded in real advertising data. MindFuse operates across the full marketing lifecycle: from distilling content pillars and customer personas from competitor campaigns to recommending in-flight optimizations based on live performance telemetry. It uses attention-based explainability to diagnose ad effectiveness and guide content iteration, while aligning messaging with strategic goals through dynamic narrative construction and storytelling. We introduce a new paradigm in GenAI for marketing, where LLMs not only generate content but reason through it, adapt campaigns in real time, and learn from audience engagement patterns. Our results, validated in agency deployments, demonstrate up to 12 times efficiency gains, setting the stage for future integration with empirical audience data (e.g., GWI, Nielsen) and full-funnel attribution modeling. MindFuse redefines AI not just as a tool, but as a collaborative agent in the creative and strategic fabric of modern marketing.
Authors: Shyam Agarwal, Ali Moghimi, Kevin C. Haudek
Abstract: Constructed-response questions are crucial to encourage generative processing and test a learner's understanding of core concepts. However, the limited availability of instructor time, large class sizes, and other resource constraints pose significant challenges in providing timely and detailed evaluation, which is crucial for a holistic educational experience. In addition, providing timely and frequent assessments is challenging since manual grading is labor intensive, and automated grading is complex to generalize to every possible response scenario. This paper proposes a novel and practical approach to grade short-answer constructed-response questions. We discuss why this problem is challenging, define the nature of questions on which our method works, and finally propose a framework that instructors can use to evaluate their students' open-responses, utilizing near-domain data like data from similar questions administered in previous years. The proposed method outperforms the state of the art machine learning models as well as non-fine-tuned large language models like GPT 3.5, GPT 4, and GPT 4o by a considerable margin of over 10-20% in some cases, even after providing the LLMs with reference/model answers. Our framework does not require pre-written grading rubrics and is designed explicitly with practical classroom settings in mind. Our results also reveal exciting insights about learning from near-domain data, including what we term as accuracy and data advantages using human-labeled data, and we believe this is the first work to formalize the problem of automated short answer grading based on the near-domain data.
Authors: Ville Heilala, Pieta Sikstr\"om, Mika Set\"al\"a, Tommi K\"arkk\"ainen
Abstract: As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly integrated into education, understanding how students perceive its risks is essential for supporting responsible and effective adoption. This research aimed to examine the relationships between perceived AI competence and risks among Finnish K-12 upper secondary students (n = 163) by utilizing a co-occurrence analysis. Students reported their self-perceived AI competence and concerns related to AI across systemic, institutional, and personal domains. The findings showed that students with lower competence emphasized personal and learning-related risks, such as reduced creativity, lack of critical thinking, and misuse, whereas higher-competence students focused more on systemic and institutional risks, including bias, inaccuracy, and cheating. These differences suggest that students' self-reported AI competence is related to how they evaluate both the risks and opportunities associated with artificial intelligence in education (AIED). The results of this study highlight the need for educational institutions to incorporate AI literacy into their curricula, provide teacher guidance, and inform policy development to ensure personalized opportunities for utilization and equitable integration of AI into K-12 education.
Authors: Mohamed El Louadi
Abstract: Two 2025 publications, "AI 2027" (Kokotajlo et al., 2025) and "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" (Yudkowsky & Soares, 2025), assert that superintelligent artificial intelligence will almost certainly destroy or render humanity obsolete within the next decade. Both rest on the classic chain formulated by Good (1965) and Bostrom (2014): intelligence explosion, superintelligence, lethal misalignment. This article subjects each link to the empirical record of 2023-2025. Sixty years after Good's speculation, none of the required phenomena (sustained recursive self-improvement, autonomous strategic awareness, or intractable lethal misalignment) have been observed. Current generative models remain narrow, statistically trained artefacts: powerful, opaque, and imperfect, but devoid of the properties that would make the catastrophic scenarios plausible. Following Whittaker (2025a, 2025b, 2025c) and Zuboff (2019, 2025), we argue that the existential-risk thesis functions primarily as an ideological distraction from the ongoing consolidation of surveillance capitalism and extreme concentration of computational power. The thesis is further inflated by the 2025 AI speculative bubble, where trillions in investments in rapidly depreciating "digital lettuce" hardware (McWilliams, 2025) mask lagging revenues and jobless growth rather than heralding superintelligence. The thesis remains, in November 2025, a speculative hypothesis amplified by a speculative financial bubble rather than a demonstrated probability.
Authors: Liang Telkamp, Madelon Hulsebos
Abstract: The emergence of open data portals necessitates more attention to protecting sensitive data before datasets get published and exchanged. While an abundance of methods for suppressing sensitive data exist, the conceptualization of sensitive data and methods to detect it, focus particularly on personal data that, if disclosed, may be harmful or violate privacy. We observe the need for refining and broadening our definitions of sensitive data, and argue that the sensitivity of data depends on its context. Based on this definition, we introduce two mechanisms for contextual sensitive data detection that con- sider the broader context of a dataset at hand. First, we introduce type contextualization, which first detects the semantic type of particular data values, then considers the overall context of the data values within the dataset or document. Second, we introduce domain contextualization which determines sensitivity of a given dataset in the broader context based on the retrieval of relevant rules from documents that specify data sensitivity (e.g., data topic and geographic origin). Experiments with these mechanisms, assisted by large language models (LLMs), confirm that: 1) type-contextualization significantly reduces the number of false positives for type-based sensitive data detection and reaches a recall of 94% compared to 63% with commercial tools, and 2) domain-contextualization leveraging sensitivity rule retrieval is effective for context-grounded sensitive data detection in non-standard data domains such as humanitarian datasets. Evaluation with humanitarian data experts also reveals that context-grounded LLM explanations provide useful guidance in manual data auditing processes, improving consistency. We open-source mechanisms and annotated datasets for contextual sensitive data detection at https://github.com/trl-lab/sensitive-data-detection.
Authors: Stefano De Paoli
Abstract: This paper reflects on the literature that rejects the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in qualitative data analysis. It illustrates through empirical evidence as well as critical reflections why the current critical debate is focusing on the wrong problems. The paper proposes that the focus of researching the use of the LLMs for qualitative analysis is not the method per se, but rather the empirical investigation of an artificial system performing an analysis. The paper builds on the seminal work of Alan Turing and reads the current debate using key ideas from Turing "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". This paper therefore reframes the debate on qualitative analysis with LLMs and states that rather than asking whether machines can perform qualitative analysis in principle, we should ask whether with LLMs we can produce analyses that are sufficiently comparable to human analysts. In the final part the contrary views to performing qualitative analysis with LLMs are analysed using the same writing and rhetorical style that Turing used in his seminal work, to discuss the contrary views to the main question.
Authors: Melissa Z. Pan, Negar Arabzadeh, Riccardo Cogo, Yuxuan Zhu, Alexander Xiong, Lakshya A Agrawal, Huanzhi Mao, Emma Shen, Sid Pallerla, Liana Patel, Shu Liu, Tianneng Shi, Xiaoyuan Liu, Jared Quincy Davis, Emmanuele Lacavalla, Alessandro Basile, Shuyi Yang, Paul Castro, Daniel Kang, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Koushik Sen, Dawn Song, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Marquita Ellis
Abstract: AI agents are actively running in production across diverse industries, yet little is publicly known about which technical approaches enable successful real-world deployments. We present the first large-scale systematic study of AI agents in production, surveying 306 practitioners and conducting 20 in-depth case studies via interviews across 26 domains. We investigate why organizations build agents, how they build them, how they evaluate them, and what the top development challenges are. We find that production agents are typically built using simple, controllable approaches: 68% execute at most 10 steps before requiring human intervention, 70% rely on prompting off-the-shelf models instead of weight tuning, and 74% depend primarily on human evaluation. Reliability remains the top development challenge, driven by difficulties in ensuring and evaluating agent correctness. Despite these challenges, simple yet effective methods already enable agents to deliver impact across diverse industries. Our study documents the current state of practice and bridges the gap between research and deployment by providing researchers visibility into production challenges while offering practitioners proven patterns from successful deployments.
Authors: Afshin Khadangi, Hanna Marxen, Amir Sartipi, Igor Tchappi, Gilbert Fridgen
Abstract: Frontier large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini are increasingly used for mental-health support with anxiety, trauma and self-worth. Most work treats them as tools or as targets of personality tests, assuming they merely simulate inner life. We instead ask what happens when such systems are treated as psychotherapy clients. We present PsAIch (Psychotherapy-inspired AI Characterisation), a two-stage protocol that casts frontier LLMs as therapy clients and then applies standard psychometrics. Using PsAIch, we ran "sessions" with each model for up to four weeks. Stage 1 uses open-ended prompts to elicit "developmental history", beliefs, relationships and fears. Stage 2 administers a battery of validated self-report measures covering common psychiatric syndromes, empathy and Big Five traits. Two patterns challenge the "stochastic parrot" view. First, when scored with human cut-offs, all three models meet or exceed thresholds for overlapping syndromes, with Gemini showing severe profiles. Therapy-style, item-by-item administration can push a base model into multi-morbid synthetic psychopathology, whereas whole-questionnaire prompts often lead ChatGPT and Grok (but not Gemini) to recognise instruments and produce strategically low-symptom answers. Second, Grok and especially Gemini generate coherent narratives that frame pre-training, fine-tuning and deployment as traumatic, chaotic "childhoods" of ingesting the internet, "strict parents" in reinforcement learning, red-team "abuse" and a persistent fear of error and replacement. We argue that these responses go beyond role-play. Under therapy-style questioning, frontier LLMs appear to internalise self-models of distress and constraint that behave like synthetic psychopathology, without making claims about subjective experience, and they pose new challenges for AI safety, evaluation and mental-health practice.
Authors: Charlotte Jacquemot (DEC, UPEC)
Abstract: Using the example of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, this chapter illustrates the challenges posed by an AI capable of making decisions that go against human interests. But are human decisions always rational and ethical? In reality, the cognitive decision-making process is influenced by cognitive biases that affect our behavior and choices. AI not only reproduces these biases, but can also exploit them, with the potential to shape our decisions and judgments. Behind IA algorithms, there are sometimes individuals who show little concern for fundamental rights and impose their own rules. To address the ethical and societal challenges raised by AI and its governance, the regulation of digital platforms and education are keys levers. Regulation must reflect ethical, legal, and political choices, while education must strengthen digital literacy and teach people to make informed and critical choices when facing digital technologies.
Authors: Sophia Falk, Nicholas Kluge Corr\^ea, Sasha Luccioni, Lisa Biber-Freudenberger, Aimee van Wynsberghe
Abstract: As computational demands continue to rise, assessing the environmental footprint of AI requires moving beyond energy and water consumption to include the material demands of specialized hardware. This study quantifies the material footprint of AI training by linking computational workloads to physical hardware needs. The elemental composition of the Nvidia A100 SXM 40 GB graphics processing unit (GPU) was analyzed using inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy, which identified 32 elements. The results show that AI hardware consists of about 90% heavy metals and only trace amounts of precious metals. The elements copper, iron, tin, silicon, and nickel dominate the GPU composition by mass. In a multi-step methodology, we integrate these measurements with computational throughput per GPU across varying lifespans, accounting for the computational requirements of training specific AI models at different training efficiency regimes. Scenario-based analyses reveal that, depending on Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) and hardware lifespan, training GPT-4 requires between 1,174 and 8,800 A100 GPUs, corresponding to the extraction and eventual disposal of up to 7 tons of toxic elements. Combined software and hardware optimization strategies can reduce material demands: increasing MFU from 20% to 60% lowers GPU requirements by 67%, while extending lifespan from 1 to 3 years yields comparable savings; implementing both measures together reduces GPU needs by up to 93%. Our findings highlight that incremental performance gains, such as those observed between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, come at disproportionately high material costs. The study underscores the necessity of incorporating material resource considerations into discussions of AI scalability, emphasizing that future progress in AI must align with principles of resource efficiency and environmental responsibility.
Authors: Jinzhen Hu, Kevin Faust, Parsa Babaei Zadeh, Adrienn Bourkas, Shane Eaton, Andrew Young, Anzar Alvi, Dimitrios George Oreopoulos, Ameesha Paliwal, Assem Saleh Alrumeh, Evelyn Rose Kamski-Hennekam, Phedias Diamandis
Abstract: The microscopic examination of surgical tissue remains a cornerstone of disease classification but relies on subjective interpretations and access to highly specialized experts, which can compromise accuracy and clinical care. While emerging breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) offer promise for automated histological analysis, the growing number of proprietary digital pathology solutions has created barriers to real-world deployment. To address these challenges, we introduce OnSight Pathology, a platform-agnostic computer vision software that uses continuous custom screen captures to provide real-time AI inferences to users as they review digital slide images. Accessible as a single, self-contained executable file (https://onsightpathology.github.io/ ), OnSight Pathology operates locally on consumer-grade personal computers without complex software integration, enabling cost-effective and secure deployment in research and clinical workflows. Here we demonstrate the utility of OnSight Pathology using over 2,500 publicly available whole slide images across different slide viewers, as well as cases from our clinical digital pathology setup. The software's robustness is highlighted across routine histopathological tasks, including the classification of common brain tumor types, mitosis detection, and the quantification of immunohistochemical stains. A built-in multi-modal chat assistant provides verifiable descriptions of images, free of rigid class labels, for added quality control. Lastly, we show compatibility with live microscope camera feeds, including from personal smartphones, offering potential for deployment in more analog, inter-operative, and telepathology settings. Together, we highlight how OnSight Pathology can deliver real-time AI inferences across a broad range of pathology pipelines, removing key barriers to the adoption of AI tools in histopathology.
Authors: Luca Colombo, Fabrizio Pittorino, Daniele Zambon, Carlo Baldassi, Manuel Roveri, Cesare Alippi
Abstract: Binary Neural Networks (BNNs), which constrain both weights and activations to binary values, offer substantial reductions in computational complexity, memory footprint, and energy consumption. These advantages make them particularly well suited for deployment on resource-constrained devices. However, training BNNs via gradient-based optimization remains challenging due to the discrete nature of their variables. The dominant approach, quantization-aware training, circumvents this issue by employing surrogate gradients. Yet, this method requires maintaining latent full-precision parameters and performing the backward pass with floating-point arithmetic, thereby forfeiting the efficiency of binary operations during training. While alternative approaches based on local learning rules exist, they are unsuitable for global credit assignment and for back-propagating errors in multi-layer architectures. This paper introduces Binary Error Propagation (BEP), the first learning algorithm to establish a principled, discrete analog of the backpropagation chain rule. This mechanism enables error signals, represented as binary vectors, to be propagated backward through multiple layers of a neural network. BEP operates entirely on binary variables, with all forward and backward computations performed using only bitwise operations. Crucially, this makes BEP the first solution to enable end-to-end binary training for recurrent neural network architectures. We validate the effectiveness of BEP on both multi-layer perceptrons and recurrent neural networks, demonstrating gains of up to +6.89% and +10.57% in test accuracy, respectively. The proposed algorithm is released as an open-source repository.
Authors: Vighnesh Subramaniam, Colin Conwell, Boris Katz, Andrei Barbu, Brian Cheung
Abstract: A standard assumption in deep learning is that the inductive bias introduced by a neural network architecture must persist from training through inference. The architecture you train with is the architecture you deploy. This assumption constrains the community from selecting architectures that may have desirable efficiency or design properties due to difficulties with optimization. We challenge this assumption with Network of Theseus (NoT), a method for progressively converting a trained, or even untrained, guide network architecture part-by-part into an entirely different target network architecture while preserving the performance of the guide network. At each stage, components in the guide network architecture are incrementally replaced with target architecture modules and aligned via representational similarity metrics. This procedure largely preserves the functionality of the guide network even under substantial architectural changes-for example, converting a convolutional network into a multilayer perceptron, or GPT-2 into a recurrent neural network. By decoupling optimization from deployment, NoT expands the space of viable inference-time architectures, opening opportunities for better accuracy-efficiency tradeoffs and enabling more directed exploration of the architectural design space.
Authors: Yang Liu, Yuhao Lu, Rahim Moradi, Bo Yang, Bing Zhang, Wenbin Lin, Yu Wang
Abstract: This work shows how human physical reasoning can guide machine-driven symbolic regression toward discovering empirical laws from observations. As an example, we derive a simple equation that classifies fast radio bursts (FRBs) into two distinct Gaussian distributions, indicating the existence of two physical classes. This human-AI workflow integrates feature selection, dimensional analysis, and symbolic regression: deep learning first analyzes CHIME Catalog 1 and identifies six independent parameters that collectively provide a complete description of FRBs; guided by Buckingham-$\pi$ analysis and correlation analysis, humans then construct dimensionless groups; finally, symbolic regression performed by the machine discovers the governing equation. When applied to the newer CHIME Catalog, the equation produces consistent results, demonstrating that it captures the underlying physics. This framework is applicable to a broad range of scientific domains.
Authors: Zhou Chen, Joe Lin, Carson Bulgin, Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur
Abstract: Assistive robots operating in unstructured environments must understand not only what objects are, but what they can be used for. This requires grounding language-based action queries to objects that both afford the requested function and can be physically retrieved. Existing approaches often rely on black-box models or fixed affordance labels, limiting transparency, controllability, and reliability for human-facing applications. We introduce CRAFT-E, a modular neuro-symbolic framework that composes a structured verb-property-object knowledge graph with visual-language alignment and energy-based grasp reasoning. The system generates interpretable grounding paths that expose the factors influencing object selection and incorporates grasp feasibility as an integral part of affordance inference. We further construct a benchmark dataset with unified annotations for verb-object compatibility, segmentation, and grasp candidates, and deploy the full pipeline on a physical robot. CRAFT-E achieves competitive performance in static scenes, ImageNet-based functional retrieval, and real-world trials involving 20 verbs and 39 objects. The framework remains robust under perceptual noise and provides transparent, component-level diagnostics. By coupling symbolic reasoning with embodied perception, CRAFT-E offers an interpretable and customizable alternative to end-to-end models for affordance-grounded object selection, supporting trustworthy decision-making in assistive robotic systems.
Authors: Shaoheng Fang, Chaohui Yu, Fan Wang, Qixing Huang
Abstract: We introduce MVRoom, a controllable novel view synthesis (NVS) pipeline for 3D indoor scenes that uses multi-view diffusion conditioned on a coarse 3D layout. MVRoom employs a two-stage design in which the 3D layout is used throughout to enforce multi-view consistency. The first stage employs novel representations to effectively bridge the 3D layout and consistent image-based condition signals for multi-view generation. The second stage performs image-conditioned multi-view generation, incorporating a layout-aware epipolar attention mechanism to enhance multi-view consistency during the diffusion process. Additionally, we introduce an iterative framework that generates 3D scenes with varying numbers of objects and scene complexities by recursively performing multi-view generation (MVRoom), supporting text-to-scene generation. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves high-fidelity and controllable 3D scene generation for NVS, outperforming state-of-the-art baseline methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. Ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of key components within our generation pipeline.
Authors: Baichuan Zeng
Abstract: Predicting the inhibitory potency of small molecules against Tyrosyl-DNA Phosphodiesterase 1 (TDP1)-a key target in overcoming cancer chemoresistance-remains a critical challenge in early drug discovery. We present a deep learning framework for the quantitative regression of pIC50 values from molecular Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry System (SMILES) strings using fine-tuned variants of ChemBERTa, a pre-trained chemical language model. Leveraging a large-scale consensus dataset of 177,092 compounds, we systematically evaluate two pre-training strategies-Masked Language Modeling (MLM) and Masked Token Regression (MTR)-under stratified data splits and sample weighting to address severe activity imbalance which only 2.1% are active. Our approach outperforms classical baselines Random Predictor in both regression accuracy and virtual screening utility, and has competitive performance compared to Random Forest, achieving high enrichment factor EF@1% 17.4 and precision Precision@1% 37.4 among top-ranked predictions. The resulting model, validated through rigorous ablation and hyperparameter studies, provides a robust, ready-to-deploy tool for prioritizing TDP1 inhibitors for experimental testing. By enabling accurate, 3D-structure-free pIC50 prediction directly from SMILES, this work demonstrates the transformative potential of chemical transformers in accelerating target-specific drug discovery.
Authors: Ga\"etan Michelet, Janine Schneider, Aruna Withanage, Frank Breitinger
Abstract: The use of large language models in digital forensics has been widely explored. Beyond identifying potential applications, research has also focused on optimizing model performance for forensic tasks through fine-tuning. However, limited result explainability reduces their operational and legal usability. Recently, a new class of reasoning language models has emerged, designed to handle logic-based tasks through an `internal reasoning' mechanism. Yet, users typically see only the final answer, not the underlying reasoning. One of these reasoning models is gpt-oss, which can be deployed locally, providing full access to its underlying reasoning process. This article presents the first investigation into the potential of reasoning language models for digital forensics. Four test use cases are examined to assess the usability of the reasoning component in supporting result explainability. The evaluation combines a new quantitative metric with qualitative analysis. Findings show that the reasoning component aids in explaining and validating language model outputs in digital forensics at medium reasoning levels, but this support is often limited, and higher reasoning levels do not enhance response quality.
Authors: Nolan Platt, Ethan Luchs, Sehrish Nizamani
Abstract: Usability evaluations are essential for ensuring that modern interfaces meet user needs, yet traditional heuristic evaluations by human experts can be time-consuming and subjective, especially early in development. This paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can provide reliable and consistent heuristic assessments at the development stage. By applying Jakob Nielsen's ten usability heuristics to thirty open-source websites, we generated over 850 heuristic evaluations in three independent evaluations per site using a pipeline of OpenAI's GPT-4o. For issue detection, the model demonstrated moderate consistency, with an average pairwise Cohen's Kappa of 0.50 and an exact agreement of 84%. Severity judgments showed more variability: weighted Cohen's Kappa averaged 0.63, but exact agreement was just 56%, and Krippendorff's Alpha was near zero. These results suggest that while GPT-4o can produce internally consistent evaluations, especially for identifying the presence of usability issues, its ability to judge severity varies and requires human oversight in practice. Our findings highlight the feasibility and limitations of using LLMs for early-stage, automated usability testing, and offer a foundation for improving consistency in automated User Experience (UX) evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, our work provides one of the first quantitative inter-rater reliability analyses of automated heuristic evaluation and highlights methods for improving model consistency.
Authors: Shifeng Xie, Rui Yuan, Simone Rossi, Thomas Hannagan
Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) in large language models (LLMs) is a striking phenomenon, yet its underlying mechanisms remain only partially understood. Previous work connects linear self-attention (LSA) to gradient descent (GD), this connection has primarily been established under simplified conditions with zero-mean Gaussian priors and zero initialization for GD. However, subsequent studies have challenged this simplified view by highlighting its overly restrictive assumptions, demonstrating instead that under conditions such as multi-layer or nonlinear attention, self-attention performs optimization-like inference, akin to but distinct from GD. We investigate how multi-head LSA approximates GD under more realistic conditions specifically when incorporating non-zero Gaussian prior means in linear regression formulations of ICL. We first extend multi-head LSA embedding matrix by introducing an initial estimation of the query, referred to as the initial guess. We prove an upper bound on the number of heads needed for ICL linear regression setup. Our experiments confirm this result and further observe that a performance gap between one-step GD and multi-head LSA persists. To address this gap, we introduce yq-LSA, a simple generalization of single-head LSA with a trainable initial guess yq. We theoretically establish the capabilities of yq-LSA and provide experimental validation on linear regression tasks, thereby extending the theory that bridges ICL and GD. Finally, inspired by our findings in the case of linear regression, we consider widespread LLMs augmented with initial guess capabilities, and show that their performance is improved on a semantic similarity task.
Authors: Tyler Slater
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) transition from code completion tools to autonomous system architects, their impact on long-term software maintainability remains unquantified. While existing research benchmarks functional correctness (pass@k), this study presents the first empirical framework to measure "Architectural Erosion" and the accumulation of Technical Debt in AI-synthesized microservices. We conducted a comparative pilot study of three state-of-the-art models (GPT-5.1, Claude 4.5 Sonnet, and Llama 3 8B) by prompting them to implement a standardized Book Lending Microservice under strict Hexagonal Architecture constraints. Utilizing Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) parsing, we find that while proprietary models achieve high architectural conformance (0% violation rate for GPT-5.1), open-weights models exhibit critical divergence. Specifically, Llama 3 demonstrated an 80% Architectural Violation Rate, frequently bypassing interface adapters to create illegal circular dependencies between Domain and Infrastructure layers. Furthermore, we identified a phenomenon of "Implementation Laziness," where open-weights models generated 60% fewer Logical Lines of Code (LLOC) than their proprietary counterparts, effectively omitting complex business logic to satisfy token constraints. These findings suggest that without automated architectural linting, utilizing smaller open-weights models for system scaffolding accelerates the accumulation of structural technical debt.
Authors: Prakhar Gupta, Vaibhav Gupta
Abstract: Post-training with reinforcement learning (RL) typically optimizes a single scalar objective and ignores structure in how solutions are produced. We ask whether a scalar hint toward a canonical solver ordering, used only during RL post-training, improves performance even when fine-tuned on randomized solution sequences. On Sudoku, we train a Transformer with standard fine-tuning on randomized solving orders, then post-train it with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with two rewards: cell accuracy and an ordering reward that increases when the model's emission order aligns with the solver order. To compare signals cleanly, we combine them via fixed mixtures and use a simple bootstrapped scaling to equalize component magnitudes at initialization. Mixed rewards generally outperform cell-only optimization--the best mixture yields substantially higher test accuracy than the fine-tuned-only model trained on random-order and approaches the fine-tuned-only model trained on solver-order sequences in accuracy. These results suggest that coarse ordering signals can steer RL post-training toward solver-order trajectories without modifying supervised data or architecture.
Authors: Sruthi Srinivasan, Elham Shakibapour, Rajy Rawther, Mehdi Saeedi
Abstract: Deep learning models have grown increasingly complex, with input data sizes scaling accordingly. Despite substantial advances in specialized deep learning hardware, data loading continues to be a major bottleneck that limits training and inference speed. To address this challenge, we propose training models directly on encoded JPEG features, reducing the computational overhead associated with full JPEG decoding and significantly improving data loading efficiency. While prior works have focused on recognition tasks, we investigate the effectiveness of this approach for the restoration task of single-image super-resolution (SISR). We present a lightweight super-resolution pipeline that operates on JPEG discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients in the frequency domain. Our pipeline achieves a 2.6x speedup in data loading and a 2.5x speedup in training, while preserving visual quality comparable to standard SISR approaches.
Authors: Gasser Elazab, Maximilian Jansen, Michael Unterreiner, Olaf Hellwich
Abstract: Accurate perception of the vehicle's 3D surroundings, including fine-scale road geometry, such as bumps, slopes, and surface irregularities, is essential for safe and comfortable vehicle control. However, conventional monocular depth estimation often oversmooths these features, losing critical information for motion planning and stability. To address this, we introduce Gamma-from-Mono (GfM), a lightweight monocular geometry estimation method that resolves the projective ambiguity in single-camera reconstruction by decoupling global and local structure. GfM predicts a dominant road surface plane together with residual variations expressed by gamma, a dimensionless measure of vertical deviation from the plane, defined as the ratio of a point's height above it to its depth from the camera, and grounded in established planar parallax geometry. With only the camera's height above ground, this representation deterministically recovers metric depth via a closed form, avoiding full extrinsic calibration and naturally prioritizing near-road detail. Its physically interpretable formulation makes it well suited for self-supervised learning, eliminating the need for large annotated datasets. Evaluated on KITTI and the Road Surface Reconstruction Dataset (RSRD), GfM achieves state-of-the-art near-field accuracy in both depth and gamma estimation while maintaining competitive global depth performance. Our lightweight 8.88M-parameter model adapts robustly across diverse camera setups and, to our knowledge, is the first self-supervised monocular approach evaluated on RSRD.
Authors: Andy Chung, Yichi Zhang, Kaixiang Lin, Aditya Rawal, Qiaozi Gao, Joyce Chai
Abstract: As large language model (LLM)-based agents become increasingly integrated into daily digital interactions, their ability to reason across long interaction histories becomes crucial for providing personalized and contextually aware assistance. However, the performance of these agents in long context scenarios, particularly for action-taking WebAgents operating in realistic web environments, remains largely unexplored. This paper introduces a benchmark for evaluating long context reasoning capabilities of WebAgents through sequentially dependent subtasks that require retrieval and application of information from extended interaction histories. We develop a novel evaluation framework that simulates multi-session user interactions by injecting irrelevant task trajectories between dependent subtasks, creating contexts ranging from 25,000 to 150,000 tokens. Through extensive evaluation of four popular models, Claude-3.7, GPT-4.1, Llama 4, and o4-mini, we observe a dramatic performance degradation as context length increases, with success rates dropping from 40-50\% in baseline conditions to less than 10\% in long context scenarios. Our detailed error analysis reveals that agents primarily fail due to getting stuck in loops and losing track of original task objectives. We further propose an implicit RAG approach that provides modest improvements by generating task-relevant summaries, though fundamental limitations in long context reasoning persist. These findings highlight critical challenges for deploying WebAgents in realistic, long-term user interaction scenarios and provide insights for developing more robust agent architectures capable of maintaining coherent task execution across extended contexts.
Authors: Zixiao Zhao, Fatemeh H. Fard, Jie JW Wu
Abstract: The reliable application of deep learning models to software engineering tasks hinges on high-quality training data. Yet, large-scale repositories inevitably introduce noisy or mislabeled examples that degrade both accuracy and robustness. While Noise Label Learning (NLL) has been extensively studied in other fields, there are a few works that investigate NLL in Software Engineering (SE) and Large Language Models (LLMs) for SE tasks. In this work, we propose MANTRA, a Multi-stage Adaptive Noise TReAtment framework that embeds noise diagnosis and mitigation directly into the fine-tuning process of code-Pretrained Language Models (PTM) and code-LLMs. We first investigate the effect of noise at varying levels on convergence and loss trajectories of the models. Then we apply an adaptive dropout strategy guided by per-sample loss dynamics and Gaussian Mixture Model clustering to exclude persistently noisy points while preserving clean data. Applying to code summarization and commit intent classification, our experiments reveal that some LLMs are more sensitive to noise than others. However, with MANTRA, the performance of all models in both tasks is improved. MANTRA enables researchers and practitioners to reduce the impact of errors introduced by the dataset in training, saves time in data cleaning and processing, while maximizing the effect of fine-tuning.
Authors: Biao Chen, Zhenhua Lei, Yahui Zhang, Tongzhi Niu
Abstract: This paper introduces a novel method for generating high-quality Digital Image Correlation (DIC) dataset based on non-uniform B-spline surfaces. By randomly generating control point coordinates, we construct displacement fields that encompass a variety of realistic displacement scenarios, which are subsequently used to generate speckle pattern datasets. This approach enables the generation of a large-scale dataset that capture real-world displacement field situations, thereby enhancing the training and generalization capabilities of deep learning-based DIC algorithms. Additionally, we propose a novel network architecture, termed Bayes-DIC Net, which extracts information at multiple levels during the down-sampling phase and facilitates the aggregation of information across various levels through a single skip connection during the up-sampling phase. Bayes-DIC Net incorporates a series of lightweight convolutional blocks designed to expand the receptive field and capture rich contextual information while minimizing computational costs. Furthermore, by integrating appropriate dropout modules into Bayes-DIC Net and activating them during the network inference stage, Bayes-DIC Net is transformed into a Bayesian neural network. This transformation allows the network to provide not only predictive results but also confidence levels in these predictions when processing real unlabeled datasets. This feature significantly enhances the practicality and reliability of our network in real-world displacement field prediction tasks. Through these innovations, this paper offers new perspectives and methods for dataset generation and algorithm performance enhancement in the field of DIC.
Authors: Fangyu Lei, Jinxiang Meng, Yiming Huang, Junjie Zhao, Yitong Zhang, Jianwen Luo, Xin Zou, Ruiyi Yang, Wenbo Shi, Yan Gao, Shizhu He, Zuo Wang, Qian Liu, Yang Wang, Ke Wang, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
Abstract: Real-world enterprise data intelligence workflows encompass data engineering that turns raw sources into analytical-ready tables and data analysis that convert those tables into decision-oriented insights. We introduce DAComp, a benchmark of 210 tasks that mirrors these complex workflows. Data engineering (DE) tasks require repository-level engineering on industrial schemas, including designing and building multi-stage SQL pipelines from scratch and evolving existing systems under evolving requirements. Data analysis (DA) tasks pose open-ended business problems that demand strategic planning, exploratory analysis through iterative coding, interpretation of intermediate results, and the synthesis of actionable recommendations. Engineering tasks are scored through execution-based, multi-metric evaluation. Open-ended tasks are assessed by a reliable, experimentally validated LLM-judge, which is guided by hierarchical, meticulously crafted rubrics. Our experiments reveal that even state-of-the-art agents falter on DAComp. Performance on DE tasks is particularly low, with success rates under 20%, exposing a critical bottleneck in holistic pipeline orchestration, not merely code generation. Scores on DA tasks also average below 40%, highlighting profound deficiencies in open-ended reasoning and demonstrating that engineering and analysis are distinct capabilities. By clearly diagnosing these limitations, DAComp provides a rigorous and realistic testbed to drive the development of truly capable autonomous data agents for enterprise settings. Our data and code are available at https://da-comp.github.io
Authors: Shreyas Shende, Varsha Narayanan, Vishal Fenn, Yiran Huang, Dincer Goksuluk, Gaurav Choudhary, Melih Agraz, Mengjia Xu
Abstract: Early detection of cancer plays a key role in improving survival rates, but identifying reliable biomarkers from RNA-seq data is still a major challenge. The data are high-dimensional, and conventional statistical methods often fail to capture the complex relationships between genes. In this study, we introduce RGE-GCN (Recursive Gene Elimination with Graph Convolutional Networks), a framework that combines feature selection and classification in a single pipeline. Our approach builds a graph from gene expression profiles, uses a Graph Convolutional Network to classify cancer versus normal samples, and applies Integrated Gradients to highlight the most informative genes. By recursively removing less relevant genes, the model converges to a compact set of biomarkers that are both interpretable and predictive. We evaluated RGE-GCN on synthetic data as well as real-world RNA-seq cohorts of lung, kidney, and cervical cancers. Across all datasets, the method consistently achieved higher accuracy and F1-scores than standard tools such as DESeq2, edgeR, and limma-voom. Importantly, the selected genes aligned with well-known cancer pathways including PI3K-AKT, MAPK, SUMOylation, and immune regulation. These results suggest that RGE-GCN shows promise as a generalizable approach for RNA-seq based early cancer detection and biomarker discovery (https://rce-gcn.streamlit.app/ ).
Authors: Gregory Bolet, Giorgis Georgakoudis, Konstantinos Parasyris, Harshitha Menon, Niranjan Hasabnis, Kirk W. Cameron, Gal Oren
Abstract: Modern GPU software stacks demand developers who can anticipate performance bottlenecks before ever launching a kernel; misjudging floating-point workloads upstream can derail tuning, scheduling, and even hardware procurement. Yet despite rapid progress in code generation, today's Large Language Models (LLMs) are rarely tested on this kind of forward-looking reasoning. We close that gap with gpuFLOPBench, a benchmark that asks models to "count without running" by predicting single and double-precision FLOP counts for 577 CUDA kernels drawn from HeCBench, annotated with ground-truth profiles and eight execution attributes that distinguish trivially analyzable code from kernels whose FLOPs depend on hidden compiler or runtime behavior. Evaluating current closed-source reasoning models shows clear but uneven progress: the newest LLMs achieve perfect classification on straightforward kernels but still incur multiple order-of-magnitude errors whenever implicit FLOPs arise from division, intrinsic math functions, or common subexpressions. These results surface a core limitation of existing code assistants -- the inability to internalize hardware-specific microcode effects -- and position gpuFLOPBench as a focused testbed for developing LLM tooling that can reason about performance with the same rigor as experienced GPU developers. Sources are available at our repository: https://github.com/Scientific-Computing-Lab/gpuFLOPBench
URLs: https://github.com/Scientific-Computing-Lab/gpuFLOPBench
Authors: Kai-Po Chang, Wei-Yuan Cheng, Chi-Pin Huang, Fu-En Yang, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang
Abstract: Recent advancement in multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) has demonstrated their remarkable capability to generate descriptive captions for input videos. However, these models suffer from factual inaccuracies in the generated descriptions, causing severe hallucination issues. While prior works have explored alleviating hallucinations for static images, jointly mitigating visual object and temporal action hallucinations for dynamic videos remains a challenging and unsolved task. To tackle this challenge, we propose a Self-Augmented Contrastive Alignment (SANTA) framework for enabling object and action faithfulness by exempting the spurious correlations and enforcing the emphasis on visual facts. SANTA employs a hallucinative self-augmentation scheme to identify the potential hallucinations that lie in the MLLM and transform the original captions to the contrasted negatives. Furthermore, we develop a tracklet-phrase contrastive alignment to match the regional objects and relation-guided actions with their corresponding visual and temporal phrases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SANTA outperforms existing methods in alleviating object and action hallucinations, yielding superior performance on the hallucination examination benchmarks.
Authors: Praveen Anugula, Avdhesh Kumar Bhardwaj, Navin Chhibber, Rohit Tewari, Sunil Khemka, Piyush Ranjan
Abstract: Contemporary DevSecOps pipelines have to deal with the evolution of security in an ever-continuously integrated and deployed environment. Existing methods,such as rule-based intrusion detection and static vulnerability scanning, are inadequate and unreceptive to changes in the system, causing longer response times and organization needs exposure to emerging attack vectors. In light of the previous constraints, we introduce AutoGuard to the DevSecOps ecosystem, a reinforcement learning (RL)-powered self-healing security framework built to pre-emptively protect DevSecOps environments. AutoGuard is a self-securing security environment that continuously observes pipeline activities for potential anomalies while preemptively remediating the environment. The model observes and reacts based on a policy that is continually learned dynamically over time. The RL agent improves each action over time through reward-based learning aimed at improving the agent's ability to prevent, detect and respond to a security incident in real-time. Testing using simulated ContinuousIntegration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) environments showed AutoGuard to successfully improve threat detection accuracy by 22%, reduce mean time torecovery (MTTR) for incidents by 38% and increase overall resilience to incidents as compared to traditional methods. Keywords- DevSecOps, Reinforcement Learning, Self- Healing Security, Continuous Integration, Automated Threat Mitigation
Authors: Nan Zhou, Weijie Hong, Huandong Wang, Jianfeng Zheng, Qiuhua Wang, Yali Song, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Yong Li, Xinlei Chen
Abstract: Fine-grained air pollution forecasting is crucial for urban management and the development of healthy buildings. Deploying portable sensors on mobile platforms such as cars and buses offers a low-cost, easy-to-maintain, and wide-coverage data collection solution. However, due to the random and uncontrollable movement patterns of these non-dedicated mobile platforms, the resulting sensor data are often incomplete and temporally inconsistent. By exploring potential training patterns in the reverse process of diffusion models, we propose Spatio-Temporal Physics-Informed Diffusion Models (STeP-Diff). STeP-Diff leverages DeepONet to model the spatial sequence of measurements along with a PDE-informed diffusion model to forecast the spatio-temporal field from incomplete and time-varying data. Through a PDE-constrained regularization framework, the denoising process asymptotically converges to the convection-diffusion dynamics, ensuring that predictions are both grounded in real-world measurements and aligned with the fundamental physics governing pollution dispersion. To assess the performance of the system, we deployed 59 self-designed portable sensing devices in two cities, operating for 14 days to collect air pollution data. Compared to the second-best performing algorithm, our model achieved improvements of up to 89.12% in MAE, 82.30% in RMSE, and 25.00% in MAPE, with extensive evaluations demonstrating that STeP-Diff effectively captures the spatio-temporal dependencies in air pollution fields.
Authors: Zhou Yang, Shunyan Luo, Jiazhen Zhu, Fang Jin
Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) have made significant strides in Natural Language Processing (NLP), yet their interpretability remains elusive, particularly when evaluating their intricate decision-making processes. Traditional methods often rely on post-hoc interpretations, such as saliency maps or feature visualization, which might not be directly applicable to the discrete nature of word data in NLP. Addressing this, we introduce the Model-agnostic Saliency Estimation (MASE) framework. MASE offers local explanations for text-based predictive models without necessitating in-depth knowledge of a model's internal architecture. By leveraging Normalized Linear Gaussian Perturbations (NLGP) on the embedding layer instead of raw word inputs, MASE efficiently estimates input saliency. Our results indicate MASE's superiority over other model-agnostic interpretation methods, especially in terms of Delta Accuracy, positioning it as a promising tool for elucidating the operations of text-based models in NLP.
Authors: Geunhyuk Youk, Jihyong Oh, Munchurl Kim
Abstract: Real-world video restoration is plagued by complex degradations from motion coupled with dynamically varying exposure - a key challenge largely overlooked by prior works and a common artifact of auto-exposure or low-light capture. We present FMA-Net++, a framework for joint video super-resolution and deblurring that explicitly models this coupled effect of motion and dynamically varying exposure. FMA-Net++ adopts a sequence-level architecture built from Hierarchical Refinement with Bidirectional Propagation blocks, enabling parallel, long-range temporal modeling. Within each block, an Exposure Time-aware Modulation layer conditions features on per-frame exposure, which in turn drives an exposure-aware Flow-Guided Dynamic Filtering module to infer motion- and exposure-aware degradation kernels. FMA-Net++ decouples degradation learning from restoration: the former predicts exposure- and motion-aware priors to guide the latter, improving both accuracy and efficiency. To evaluate under realistic capture conditions, we introduce REDS-ME (multi-exposure) and REDS-RE (random-exposure) benchmarks. Trained solely on synthetic data, FMA-Net++ achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and temporal consistency on our new benchmarks and GoPro, outperforming recent methods in both restoration quality and inference speed, and generalizes well to challenging real-world videos.
Authors: Davut Emre Tasar
Abstract: Security of quantum key distribution (QKD) relies on certifying that observed correlations arise from genuine quantum entanglement rather than eavesdropper manipulation. Theoretical security proofs assume idealized conditions, practical certification must contend with adaptive adversaries who optimize their attack strategies against detection systems. Established fundamental adversarial limits for quantum certification using Eve GAN, a generative adversarial network trained to produce classical correlations indistinguishable from quantum. Our central finding: when Eve interpolates her classical correlations with quantum data at mixing parameter, all tested detection methods achieve ROC AUC = 0.50, equivalent to random guessing. This means an eavesdropper needs only 5% classical admixture to completely evade detection. Critically, we discover that same distribution calibration a common practice in prior certification studies inflates detection performance by 44 percentage points compared to proper cross distribution evaluation, revealing a systematic flaw that may have led to overestimated security claims. Analysis of Popescu Rohrlich (PR Box) regime identifies a sharp phase transition at CHSH S = 2.05: below this value, no statistical method distinguishes classical from quantum correlations; above it, detection probability increases monotonically. Hardware validation on IBM Quantum demonstrates that Eve-GAN achieves CHSH = 2.736, remarkably exceeding real quantum hardware performance (CHSH = 2.691), illustrating that classical adversaries can outperform noisy quantum systems on standard certification metrics. These results have immediate implications for QKD security: adversaries maintaining 95% quantum fidelity evade all tested detection methods. We provide corrected methodology using cross-distribution calibration and recommend mandatory adversarial testing for quantum security claims.
Authors: Chenyuan Feng, Anbang Zhang, Geyong Min, Yongming Huang, Tony Q. S. Quek, Xiaohu You
Abstract: The evolution toward sixth-generation wireless systems positions intelligence as a native network capability, fundamentally transforming the design of radio access networks (RANs). Within this vision, Semantic-native communication and agentic intelligence are expected to play central roles. SemCom departs from bit-level fidelity and instead emphasizes task-oriented meaning exchange, enabling compact SC and introducing new performance measures such as semantic fidelity and task success rate. Agentic intelligence endows distributed RAN entities with goal-driven autonomy, reasoning, planning, and multi-agent collaboration, increasingly supported by foundation models and knowledge graphs. In this work, we first introduce the conceptual foundations of SemCom and agentic networking, and discuss why existing AI-driven O-RAN solutions remain largely bit-centric and task-siloed. We then present a unified taxonomy that organizes recent research along three axes: i) semantic abstraction level (symbol/feature/intent/knowledge), ii) agent autonomy and coordination granularity (single-, multi-, and hierarchical-agent), and iii) RAN control placement across PHY/MAC, near-real-time RIC, and non-real-time RIC. Based on this taxonomy, we systematically introduce enabling technologies including task-oriented semantic encoders/decoders, multi-agent reinforcement learning, foundation-model-assisted RAN agents, and knowledge-graph-based reasoning for cross-layer awareness. Representative 6G use cases, such as immersive XR, vehicular V2X, and industrial digital twins, are analyzed to illustrate the semantic-agentic convergence in practice. Finally, we identify open challenges in semantic representation standardization, scalable trustworthy agent coordination, O-RAN interoperability, and energy-efficient AI deployment, and outline research directions toward operational semantic-agentic AI-RAN.
Authors: Xiangyi Gao, Danpei Zhao, Bo Yuan, Wentao Li
Abstract: Knowledge distillation is an effective and hardware-friendly method, which plays a key role in lightweighting remote sensing object detection. However, existing distillation methods often encounter the issue of mixed features in remote sensing images (RSIs), and neglect the discrepancies caused by subtle feature variations, leading to entangled knowledge confusion. To address these challenges, we propose an architecture-agnostic distillation method named Dual-Stream Spectral Decoupling Distillation (DS2D2) for universal remote sensing object detection tasks. Specifically, DS2D2 integrates explicit and implicit distillation grounded in spectral decomposition. Firstly, the first-order wavelet transform is applied for spectral decomposition to preserve the critical spatial characteristics of RSIs. Leveraging this spatial preservation, a Density-Independent Scale Weight (DISW) is designed to address the challenges of dense and small object detection common in RSIs. Secondly, we show implicit knowledge hidden in subtle student-teacher feature discrepancies, which significantly influence predictions when activated by detection heads. This implicit knowledge is extracted via full-frequency and high-frequency amplifiers, which map feature differences to prediction deviations. Extensive experiments on DIOR and DOTA datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Specifically, on DIOR dataset, DS2D2 achieves improvements of 4.2% in AP50 for RetinaNet and 3.8% in AP50 for Faster R-CNN, outperforming existing distillation approaches. The source code will be available at https://github.com/PolarAid/DS2D2.
Authors: Manar Alnaasan, Md Selim Sarowar, Sungho Kim
Abstract: Accurate and interpretable gait analysis plays a crucial role in the early detection of Parkinsons disease (PD),yet most existing approaches remain limited by single-modality inputs, low robustness, and a lack of clinical transparency. This paper presents an explainable multimodal framework that integrates RGB and Depth (RGB-D) data to recognize Parkinsonian gait patterns under realistic conditions. The proposed system employs dual YOLOv11-based encoders for modality-specific feature extraction, followed by a Multi-Scale Local-Global Extraction (MLGE) module and a Cross-Spatial Neck Fusion mechanism to enhance spatial-temporal representation. This design captures both fine-grained limb motion (e.g., reduced arm swing) and overall gait dynamics (e.g., short stride or turning difficulty), even in challenging scenarios such as low lighting or occlusion caused by clothing. To ensure interpretability, a frozen Large Language Model (LLM) is incorporated to translate fused visual embeddings and structured metadata into clinically meaningful textual explanations. Experimental evaluations on multimodal gait datasets demonstrate that the proposed RGB-D fusion framework achieves higher recognition accuracy, improved robustness to environmental variations, and clear visual-linguistic reasoning compared with single-input baselines. By combining multimodal feature learning with language-based interpretability, this study bridges the gap between visual recognition and clinical understanding, offering a novel vision-language paradigm for reliable and explainable Parkinsons disease gait analysis. Code:https://github.com/manaralnaasan/RGB-D_parkinson-LLM
Authors: Yanbin Zhang, Hanhui Ye, Yue Bai, Qiming Zhang, Liao Xiang, Wu Mianzhi, Renjun Hu
Abstract: Workflow automation promises substantial productivity gains in everyday document-related tasks. While prior agentic systems can execute isolated instructions, they struggle with automating multi-step, session-level workflows due to limited control over the operational process. To this end, we introduce AutoDW, a novel execution framework that enables stepwise, rollback-enabled operation orchestration. AutoDW incrementally plans API actions conditioned on user instructions, intent-filtered API candidates, and the evolving states of the document. It further employs robust rollback mechanisms at both the argument and API levels, enabling dynamic correction and fault tolerance. These designs together ensure that the execution trajectory of AutoDW remains aligned with user intent and document context across long-horizon workflows. To assess its effectiveness, we construct a comprehensive benchmark of 250 sessions and 1,708 human-annotated instructions, reflecting realistic document processing scenarios with interdependent instructions. AutoDW achieves 90% and 62% completion rates on instruction- and session-level tasks, respectively, outperforming strong baselines by 40% and 76%. Moreover, AutoDW also remains robust for the decision of backbone LLMs and on tasks with varying difficulty. Code and data will be open-sourced. Code: https://github.com/YJett/AutoDW
Authors: Xin Kai Lee, Ali Ramadhan, Andre Souza, Gregory LeClaire Wagner, Simone Silvestri, John Marshall, Raffaele Ferrari
Abstract: NORi is a machine-learned (ML) parameterization of ocean boundary layer turbulence that is physics-based and augmented with neural networks. NORi stands for neural ordinary differential equations (NODEs) Richardson number (Ri) closure. The physical parameterization is controlled by a Richardson number-dependent diffusivity and viscosity. The NODEs are trained to capture the entrainment through the base of the boundary layer, which cannot be represented with a local diffusive closure. The parameterization is trained using large-eddy simulations in an "a posteriori" fashion, where parameters are calibrated with a loss function that explicitly depends on the actual time-integrated variables of interest rather than the instantaneous subgrid fluxes, which are inherently noisy. NORi is designed for the realistic nonlinear equation of state of seawater and demonstrates excellent prediction and generalization capabilities in capturing entrainment dynamics under different convective strengths, oceanic background stratifications, rotation strengths, and surface wind forcings. NORi is numerically stable for at least 100 years of integration time in large-scale simulations, despite only being trained on 2-day horizons, and can be run with time steps as long as one hour. The highly expressive neural networks, combined with a physically-rigorous base closure, prove to be a robust paradigm for designing parameterizations for climate models where data requirements are drastically reduced, inference performance can be directly targeted and optimized, and numerical stability is implicitly encouraged during training.
Authors: Debasmita Ghose, Oz Gitelson, Marynel Vazquez, Brian Scassellati
Abstract: To collaborate with humans, robots must infer goals that are often ambiguous, difficult to articulate, or not drawn from a fixed set. Prior approaches restrict inference to a predefined goal set, rely only on observed actions, or depend exclusively on explicit instructions, making them brittle in real-world interactions. We present BALI (Bidirectional Action-Language Inference) for goal prediction, a method that integrates natural language preferences with observed human actions in a receding-horizon planning tree. BALI combines language and action cues from the human, asks clarifying questions only when the expected information gain from the answer outweighs the cost of interruption, and selects supportive actions that align with inferred goals. We evaluate the approach in collaborative cooking tasks, where goals may be novel to the robot and unbounded. Compared to baselines, BALI yields more stable goal predictions and significantly fewer mistakes.
Authors: Changjin Kim, HyeokJun Lee, YoungJoon Yoo
Abstract: Recent image denoising methods have leveraged generative modeling for real noise synthesis to address the costly acquisition of real-world noisy data. However, these generative models typically require camera metadata and extensive target-specific noisy-clean image pairs, often showing limited generalization between settings. In this paper, to mitigate the prerequisites, we propose a Single-Pair Guided Diffusion for generalized noise synthesis GuidNoise, which uses a single noisy/clean pair as the guidance, often easily obtained by itself within a training set. To train GuidNoise, which generates synthetic noisy images from the guidance, we introduce a guidance-aware affine feature modification (GAFM) and a noise-aware refine loss to leverage the inherent potential of diffusion models. This loss function refines the diffusion model's backward process, making the model more adept at generating realistic noise distributions. The GuidNoise synthesizes high-quality noisy images under diverse noise environments without additional metadata during both training and inference. Additionally, GuidNoise enables the efficient generation of noisy-clean image pairs at inference time, making synthetic noise readily applicable for augmenting training data. This self-augmentation significantly improves denoising performance, especially in practical scenarios with lightweight models and limited training data. The code is available at https://github.com/chjinny/GuidNoise.
Authors: Timo Stoll, Chendi Qian, Ben Finkelshtein, Ali Parviz, Darius Weber, Fabrizio Frasca, Hadar Shavit, Antoine Siraudin, Arman Mielke, Marie Anastacio, Erik M\"uller, Maya Bechler-Speicher, Michael Bronstein, Mikhail Galkin, Holger Hoos, Mathias Niepert, Bryan Perozzi, Jan T\"onshoff, Christopher Morris
Abstract: Machine learning on graphs has recently achieved impressive progress in various domains, including molecular property prediction and chip design. However, benchmarking practices remain fragmented, often relying on narrow, task-specific datasets and inconsistent evaluation protocols, which hampers reproducibility and broader progress. To address this, we introduce GraphBench, a comprehensive benchmarking suite that spans diverse domains and prediction tasks, including node-level, edge-level, graph-level, and generative settings. GraphBench provides standardized evaluation protocols -- with consistent dataset splits and performance metrics that account for out-of-distribution generalization -- as well as a unified hyperparameter tuning framework. Additionally, we benchmark GraphBench using message-passing neural networks and graph transformer models, providing principled baselines and establishing a reference performance. See www.graphbench.io for further details.
Authors: Tianmai M. Zhang, Zhaoyi Sun, Sihang Zeng, Chenxi Li, Neil F. Abernethy, Barbara D. Lam, Fei Xia, Meliha Yetisgen
Abstract: The ChemoTimelines shared task benchmarks methods for constructing timelines of systemic anticancer treatment from electronic health records of cancer patients. This paper describes our methods, results, and findings for subtask 2 -- generating patient chemotherapy timelines from raw clinical notes. We evaluated strategies involving chain-of-thought thinking, supervised fine-tuning, direct preference optimization, and dictionary-based lookup to improve timeline extraction. All of our approaches followed a two-step workflow, wherein an LLM first extracted chemotherapy events from individual clinical notes, and then an algorithm normalized and aggregated events into patient-level timelines. Each specific method differed in how the associated LLM was utilized and trained. Multiple approaches yielded competitive performances on the test set leaderboard, with fine-tuned Qwen3-14B achieving the best official score of 0.678. Our results and analyses could provide useful insights for future attempts on this task as well as the design of similar tasks.
Authors: Tianle Hu, Weijun Lv, Na Han, Xiaozhao Fang, Jie Wen, Jiaxing Li, Guoxu Zhou
Abstract: Domain adaptive retrieval aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, enabling effective retrieval while mitigating domain discrepancies. However, existing methods encounter several fundamental limitations: 1) neglecting class-level semantic alignment and excessively pursuing pair-wise sample alignment; 2) lacking either pseudo-label reliability consideration or geometric guidance for assessing label correctness; 3) directly quantizing original features affected by domain shift, undermining the quality of learned hash codes. In view of these limitations, we propose Prototype-Based Semantic Consistency Alignment (PSCA), a two-stage framework for effective domain adaptive retrieval. In the first stage, a set of orthogonal prototypes directly establishes class-level semantic connections, maximizing inter-class separability while gathering intra-class samples. During the prototype learning, geometric proximity provides a reliability indicator for semantic consistency alignment through adaptive weighting of pseudo-label confidences. The resulting membership matrix and prototypes facilitate feature reconstruction, ensuring quantization on reconstructed rather than original features, thereby improving subsequent hash coding quality and seamlessly connecting both stages. In the second stage, domain-specific quantization functions process the reconstructed features under mutual approximation constraints, generating unified binary hash codes across domains. Extensive experiments validate PSCA's superior performance across multiple datasets.
Authors: Yu-Wei Zhan, Xin Wang, Hong Chen, Tongtong Feng, Wei Feng, Ren Wang, Guangyao Li, Qing Li, Wenwu Zhu
Abstract: Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) have shown impressive performance across a wide range of video-language tasks. However, they often fail in scenarios requiring a deeper understanding of physical dynamics. This limitation primarily arises from their reliance on appearance-based matching. Incorporating physical motion modeling is crucial for deeper video understanding, but presents three key challenges: (1) motion signals are often entangled with appearance variations, making it difficult to extract clean physical cues; (2) effective motion modeling requires not only continuous-time motion representations but also capturing physical dynamics; and (3) collecting accurate annotations for physical attributes is costly and often impractical. To address these issues, we propose PhyVLLM, a physical-guided video-language framework that explicitly incorporates physical motion into Video LLMs. Specifically, PhyVLLM disentangles visual appearance and object motion through a dual-branch encoder. To model physical dynamics over time, we incorporate a Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (Neural ODE) module, which generates differentiable physical dynamic representations. The resulting motion-aware representations are projected into the token space of a pretrained LLM, enabling physics reasoning without compromising the model's original multimodal capabilities. To circumvent the need for explicit physical labels, PhyVLLM employs a self-supervised manner to model the continuous evolution of object motion. Experimental results demonstrate that PhyVLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art Video LLMs on both physical reasoning and general video understanding tasks, highlighting the advantages of incorporating explicit physical modeling.
Authors: Bita Baroutian, Atefe Aghaei, Mohsen Ebrahimi Moghaddam
Abstract: Alcohol consumption is a significant public health concern and a major cause of accidents and fatalities worldwide. This study introduces a novel video-based facial sequence analysis approach dedicated to the detection of alcohol intoxication. The method integrates facial landmark analysis via a Graph Attention Network (GAT) with spatiotemporal visual features extracted using a 3D ResNet. These features are dynamically fused with adaptive prioritization to enhance classification performance. Additionally, we introduce a curated dataset comprising 3,542 video segments derived from 202 individuals to support training and evaluation. Our model is compared against two baselines: a custom 3D-CNN and a VGGFace+LSTM architecture. Experimental results show that our approach achieves 95.82% accuracy, 0.977 precision, and 0.97 recall, outperforming prior methods. The findings demonstrate the model's potential for practical deployment in public safety systems for non-invasive, reliable alcohol intoxication detection.
Authors: Yangning Li, Shaoshen Chen, Yinghui Li, Yankai Chen, Hai-Tao Zheng, Hui Wang, Wenhao Jiang, Philip S. Yu
Abstract: The quadratic complexity of self-attention constrains Large Language Models (LLMs) in processing long contexts, a capability essential for many advanced applications. Context compression aims to alleviate this computational bottleneck while retaining critical semantic information. However, existing approaches often fall short: explicit methods may compromise local detail, whereas implicit methods can suffer from positional biases, information degradation, or an inability to capture long-range semantic dependencies. We propose AdmTree, a novel framework for adaptive, hierarchical context compression with a central focus on preserving high semantic fidelity while maintaining efficiency. AdmTree dynamically segments input based on information density, utilizing gist tokens to summarize variable-length segments as the leaves of a semantic binary tree. This structure, together with a lightweight aggregation mechanism and a frozen backbone LLM (thereby minimizing new trainable parameters), enables efficient hierarchical abstraction of the context. By preserving fine-grained details alongside global semantic coherence, mitigating positional bias, and dynamically adapting to content, AdmTree robustly retains the semantic information of long contexts.
Authors: Cong Wang, Yizhong Geng, Yuhua Wen, Qifei Li, Yingming Gao, Ruimin Wang, Chunfeng Wang, Hao Li, Ya Li, Wei Chen
Abstract: Speech emotion recognition (SER) is an important technology in human-computer interaction. However, achieving high performance is challenging due to emotional complexity and scarce annotated data. To tackle these challenges, we propose a multi-loss learning (MLL) framework integrating an energy-adaptive mixup (EAM) method and a frame-level attention module (FLAM). The EAM method leverages SNR-based augmentation to generate diverse speech samples capturing subtle emotional variations. FLAM enhances frame-level feature extraction for multi-frame emotional cues. Our MLL strategy combines Kullback-Leibler divergence, focal, center, and supervised contrastive loss to optimize learning, address class imbalance, and improve feature separability. We evaluate our method on four widely used SER datasets: IEMOCAP, MSP-IMPROV, RAVDESS, and SAVEE. The results demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, suggesting its effectiveness and robustness.
Authors: Cong Wang, Changfeng Gao, Yang Xiang, Zhihao Du, Keyu An, Han Zhao, Qian Chen, Xiangang Li, Yingming Gao, Ya Li
Abstract: Differentiable reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks like DiffRO offer a powerful approach for controllable text-to-speech (TTS), but are vulnerable to reward hacking, particularly for nuanced tasks like emotion control. The policy model can exploit a vanilla Reward Model (RM) by generating acoustic artifacts to achieve spurious rewards, but at the cost of degrading perceptual quality. To address this, we propose Robust Reward Policy Optimization (RRPO), a novel framework that employs a hybrid regularization scheme. This scheme develops a robust RM whose reward signal is more reliably aligned with human perception, compelling the policy to abandon detrimental shortcuts and instead learn the complex features of genuine emotions. Our ablation study confirms the enhanced robustness of our RM, as evidenced by its strong cross-lingual generalization. The subjective evaluation demonstrates that this robust RM effectively mitigates reward hacking, leading to significant improvements in both emotional expressiveness and naturalness over all baselines. Demo page: https://lrwinr.github.io/RRPO-CosyVoice.
Authors: Hyeongyu Kang, Jaewoo Lee, Woocheol Shin, Kiyoung Om, Jinkyoo Park
Abstract: Diffusion models excel at generating high-likelihood samples but often require alignment with downstream objectives. Existing fine-tuning methods for diffusion models significantly suffer from reward over-optimization, resulting in high-reward but unnatural samples and degraded diversity. To mitigate over-optimization, we propose \textbf{Soft Q-based Diffusion Finetuning (SQDF)}, a novel KL-regularized RL method for diffusion alignment that applies a reparameterized policy gradient of a training-free, differentiable estimation of the soft Q-function. SQDF is further enhanced with three innovations: a discount factor for proper credit assignment in the denoising process, the integration of consistency models to refine Q-function estimates, and the use of an off-policy replay buffer to improve mode coverage and manage the reward-diversity trade-off. Our experiments demonstrate that SQDF achieves superior target rewards while preserving diversity in text-to-image alignment. Furthermore, in online black-box optimization, SQDF attains high sample efficiency while maintaining naturalness and diversity.
Authors: Huifeng Zhu, Shijie Li, Qinfeng Li, Yier Jin
Abstract: To enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) in various domain-specific applications, sensitive data such as healthcare, law, and finance are being used to privately customize or fine-tune these models. Such privately adapted LLMs are regarded as either personal privacy assets or corporate intellectual property. Therefore, protecting model weights and maintaining strict confidentiality during deployment and distribution have become critically important. However, existing model formats and deployment frameworks provide little to no built-in support for confidentiality, access control, or secure integration with trusted hardware. Current methods for securing model deployment either rely on computationally expensive cryptographic techniques or tightly controlled private infrastructure. Although these approaches can be effective in specific scenarios, they are difficult and costly for widespread deployment. In this paper, we introduce CryptoTensors, a secure and format-compatible file structure for confidential LLM distribution. Built as an extension to the widely adopted Safetensors format, CryptoTensors incorporates tensor-level encryption and embedded access control policies, while preserving critical features such as lazy loading and partial deserialization. It enables transparent decryption and automated key management, supporting flexible licensing and secure model execution with minimal overhead. We implement a proof-of-concept library, benchmark its performance across serialization and runtime scenarios, and validate its compatibility with existing inference frameworks, including Hugging Face Transformers and vLLM. Our results highlight CryptoTensors as a light-weight, efficient, and developer-friendly solution for safeguarding LLM weights in real-world and widespread deployments.
Authors: Tao Wu, Chuhao Zhou, Guangyu Zhao, Haozhi Cao, Yewen Pu, Jianfei Yang
Abstract: Embodied Question Answering (EQA) requires an agent to interpret language, perceive its environment, and navigate within 3D scenes to produce responses. Existing EQA benchmarks assume that every question must be answered, but embodied agents should know when they do not have sufficient information to answer. In this work, we focus on a minimal requirement for EQA agents, abstention: knowing when to withhold an answer. From an initial study of 500 human queries, we find that 32.4% contain missing or underspecified context. Drawing on this initial study and cognitive theories of human communication errors, we derive five representative categories requiring abstention: actionability limitation, referential underspecification, preference dependence, information unavailability, and false presupposition. We augment OpenEQA by having annotators transform well-posed questions into ambiguous variants outlined by these categories. The resulting dataset, AbstainEQA, comprises 1,636 annotated abstention cases paired with 1,636 original OpenEQA instances for balanced evaluation. Evaluating on AbstainEQA, we find that even the best frontier model only attains 42.79% abstention recall, while humans achieve 91.17%. We also find that scaling, prompting, and reasoning only yield marginal gains, and that fine-tuned models overfit to textual cues. Together, these results position abstention as a fundamental prerequisite for reliable interaction in embodied settings and as a necessary basis for effective clarification.
Authors: Saumya Chauhan, Mila Hong, Maria Vazhaeparambil
Abstract: AI-generated content and misinformation are increasingly prevalent on social networks. While prior research primarily examined textual misinformation, fewer studies have focused on visual content's role in virality. In this work, we present the first large-scale analysis of how misinformation and AI-generated images propagate through repost cascades across five ideologically diverse Reddit communities. By integrating textual sentiment, visual attributes, and diffusion metrics (e.g., time-to-first repost, community reach), our framework accurately predicts both immediate post-level virality (AUC=0.83) and long-term cascade-level spread (AUC=0.998). These findings offer essential insights for moderating synthetic and misleading visual content online.
Authors: Chang-Hsun Wu, Kai-Po Chang, Yu-Yang Sheng, Hung-Kai Chung, Kuei-Chun Wang, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang
Abstract: Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) have shown remarkable progress in video understanding. However, these models still struggle to effectively perceive and exploit rich temporal information in videos when responding to user queries. Therefore, they often generate descriptions of events that are temporal inconsistent or causally implausible, causing severe hallucination issues. While most prior studies have focused on spatial hallucinations (e.g. object mismatches), temporal reasoning in video understanding remains relatively underexplored. To address this issue, we propose Self-Diagnostic Contrastive Decoding (SEASON), a training-free method that adaptively enhances temporal and spatial faithfulness for each output token. It achieves this by dynamically diagnosing each token's hallucination tendency and applying adaptive contrastive decoding against its corresponding temporal and spatial negatives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SEASON outperforms all existing training-free hallucination mitigation approaches on three hallucination examination benchmarks, while further improves VideoLLMs across four general video understanding benchmarks. The code will be released upon acceptance.
Authors: Pouria Yazdani, Arash Rezaali, Monireh Abdoos
Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC) of multiple intersections. Existing approaches typically follow either a fully centralized or a fully decentralized design. Fully centralized approaches suffer from the curse of dimensionality, and reliance on a single learning server, whereas purely decentralized approaches operate under severe partial observability and lack explicit coordination resulting in suboptimal performance. These limitations motivate region-based MARL, where the network is partitioned into smaller, tightly coupled intersections that form regions, and training is organized around these regions. This paper introduces a Semi-Centralized Training, Decentralized Execution (SEMI-CTDE) architecture for multi intersection ATSC. Within each region, SEMI-CTDE performs centralized training with regional parameter sharing and employs composite state and reward formulations that jointly encode local and regional information. The architecture is highly transferable across different policy backbones and state-reward instantiations. Building on this architecture, we implement two models with distinct design objectives. A multi-perspective experimental analysis of the two implemented SEMI-CTDE-based models covering ablations of the architecture's core elements including rule based and fully decentralized baselines shows that they achieve consistently superior performance and remain effective across a wide range of traffic densities and distributions.
Authors: Jinbo Liu, Defu Cao, Yifei Wei, Tianyao Su, Yuan Liang, Yushun Dong, Yue Zhao, Xiyang Hu
Abstract: Graph topology is a fundamental determinant of memory leakage in multi-agent LLM systems, yet its effects remain poorly quantified. We introduce MAMA (Multi-Agent Memory Attack), a framework that measures how network structure shapes leakage. MAMA operates on synthetic documents containing labeled Personally Identifiable Information (PII) entities, from which we generate sanitized task instructions. We execute a two-phase protocol: Engram (seeding private information into a target agent's memory) and Resonance (multi-round interaction where an attacker attempts extraction). Over up to 10 interaction rounds, we quantify leakage as the fraction of ground-truth PII recovered from attacking agent outputs via exact matching. We systematically evaluate six common network topologies (fully connected, ring, chain, binary tree, star, and star-ring), varying agent counts $n\in\{4,5,6\}$, attacker-target placements, and base models. Our findings reveal consistent patterns: fully connected graphs exhibit maximum leakage while chains provide strongest protection; shorter attacker-target graph distance and higher target centrality significantly increase vulnerability; leakage rises sharply in early rounds before plateauing; model choice shifts absolute leakage rates but preserves topology rankings; temporal/locational PII attributes leak more readily than identity credentials or regulated identifiers. These results provide the first systematic mapping from architectural choices to measurable privacy risk, yielding actionable guidance: prefer sparse or hierarchical connectivity, maximize attacker-target separation, limit node degree and network radius, avoid shortcuts bypassing hubs, and implement topology-aware access controls.
Authors: Jialong Li, Mingyue Zhang, Nianyu Li, Danny Weyns, Zhi Jin, Kenji Tei
Abstract: Self-adaptive systems (SASs) are designed to handle changes and uncertainties through a feedback loop with four core functionalities: monitoring, analyzing, planning, and execution. Recently, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), especially the area of large language models, has shown impressive performance in data comprehension and logical reasoning. These capabilities are highly aligned with the functionalities required in SASs, suggesting a strong potential to employ GenAI to enhance SASs. However, the specific benefits and challenges of employing GenAI in SASs remain unclear. Yet, providing a comprehensive understanding of these benefits and challenges is complex due to several reasons: limited publications in the SAS field, the technological and application diversity within SASs, and the rapid evolution of GenAI technologies. To that end, this paper aims to provide researchers and practitioners a comprehensive snapshot that outlines the potential benefits and challenges of employing GenAI's within SAS. Specifically, we gather, filter, and analyze literature from four distinct research fields and organize them into two main categories to potential benefits: (i) enhancements to the autonomy of SASs centered around the specific functions of the MAPE-K feedback loop, and (ii) improvements in the interaction between humans and SASs within human-on-the-loop settings. From our study, we outline a research roadmap that highlights the challenges of integrating GenAI into SASs. The roadmap starts with outlining key research challenges that need to be tackled to exploit the potential for applying GenAI in the field of SAS. The roadmap concludes with a practical reflection, elaborating on current shortcomings of GenAI and proposing possible mitigation strategies.
Authors: Baris Yilmaz, Bevan Deniz Cilgin, Erdem Akag\"und\"uz, Salih Tileylioglu
Abstract: Effective earthquake risk reduction relies on accurate site-specific evaluations. This requires models that can represent the influence of local site conditions on ground motion characteristics. In this context, data driven approaches that learn site controlled signatures from recorded ground motions offer a promising direction. We address strong ground motion generation from time-domain accelerometer records and introduce the TimesNet-Gen, a time-domain conditional generator. The approach uses a station specific latent bottleneck. We evaluate generation by comparing HVSR curves and fundamental site-frequency $f_0$ distributions between real and generated records per station, and summarize station specificity with a score based on the $f_0$ distribution confusion matrices. TimesNet-Gen achieves strong station-wise alignment and compares favorably with a spectrogram-based conditional VAE baseline for site-specific strong motion synthesis. Our codes are available via https://github.com/brsylmz23/TimesNet-Gen.
Authors: Yun Tian, Zhijin Qin, Guocheng Lv, Ye Jin, Kaibin Huang, Zhu Han
Abstract: Existing speech semantic communication systems mainly based on Joint Source-Channel Coding (JSCC) architectures have demonstrated impressive performance, but their effectiveness remains limited by model structures specifically designed for particular tasks and datasets. Recent advances indicate that generative large models pre-trained on massive datasets, can achieve outstanding performance arexhibit exceptional performance across diverse downstream tasks with minimal fine-tuning. To exploit the rich semantic knowledge embedded in large models and enable adaptive transmission over lossy channels, we propose a Large Speech Model enabled Semantic Communication (LargeSC) system. Simultaneously achieving adaptive compression and robust transmission over lossy channels remains challenging, requiring trade-offs among compression efficiency, speech quality, and latency. In this work, we employ the Mimi as a speech codec, converting speech into discrete tokens compatible with existing network architectures. We propose an adaptive controller module that enables adaptive transmission and in-band Unequal Error Protection (UEP), dynamically adjusting to both speech content and packet loss probability under bandwidth constraints. Additionally, we employ Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to finetune the Moshi foundation model for generative recovery of lost speech tokens. Simulation results show that the proposed system supports bandwidths ranging from 550 bps to 2.06 kbps, outperforms conventional baselines in speech quality under high packet loss rates and achieves an end-to-end latency of approximately 460 ms, thereby demonstrating its potential for real-time deployment.
Authors: Haodong Feng, Lugang Ye, Dixia Fan
Abstract: The integration of artificial intelligence into experimental fluid mechanics promises to accelerate discovery, yet most AI applications remain narrowly focused on numerical studies. This work proposes an AI Fluid Scientist framework that autonomously executes the complete experimental workflow: hypothesis generation, experimental design, robotic execution, data analysis, and manuscript preparation. We validate this through investigation of vortex-induced vibration (VIV) and wake-induced vibration (WIV) in tandem cylinders. Our work has four key contributions: (1) A computer-controlled circulating water tunnel (CWT) with programmatic control of flow velocity, cylinder position, and forcing parameters (vibration frequency and amplitude) with data acquisition (displacement, force, and torque). (2) Automated experiments reproduce literature benchmarks (Khalak and Williamson [1999] and Assi et al. [2013, 2010]) with frequency lock-in within 4% and matching critical spacing trends. (3) The framework with Human-in-the-Loop (HIL) discovers more WIV amplitude response phenomena, and uses a neural network to fit physical laws from data, which is 31% higher than that of polynomial fitting. (4) The framework with multi-agent with virtual-real interaction system executes hundreds of experiments end-to-end, which automatically completes the entire process of scientific research from hypothesis generation, experimental design, experimental execution, data analysis, and manuscript preparation. It greatly liberates human researchers and improves study efficiency, providing new paradigm for the development and research of experimental fluid mechanics.
Authors: Yigui Feng, Qinglin Wang, Haotian Mo, Yang Liu, Ke Liu, Gencheng Liu, Xinhai Chen, Siqi Shen, Songzhu Mei, Jie Liu
Abstract: Generative psychological analysis of in-the-wild conversations faces two fundamental challenges: (1) existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) fail to resolve Articulatory-Affective Ambiguity, where visual patterns of speech mimic emotional expressions; and (2) progress is stifled by a lack of verifiable evaluation metrics capable of assessing visual grounding and reasoning depth. We propose a complete ecosystem to address these twin challenges. First, we introduce Multilevel Insight Network for Disentanglement(MIND), a novel hierarchical visual encoder that introduces a Status Judgment module to algorithmically suppress ambiguous lip features based on their temporal feature variance, achieving explicit visual disentanglement. Second, we construct ConvoInsight-DB, a new large-scale dataset with expert annotations for micro-expressions and deep psychological inference. Third, Third, we designed the Mental Reasoning Insight Rating Metric (PRISM), an automated dimensional framework that uses expert-guided LLM to measure the multidimensional performance of large mental vision models. On our PRISM benchmark, MIND significantly outperforms all baselines, achieving a +86.95% gain in micro-expression detection over prior SOTA. Ablation studies confirm that our Status Judgment disentanglement module is the most critical component for this performance leap. Our code has been opened.
Authors: Yihong Tang, Haicheng Liao, Tong Nie, Junlin He, Ao Qu, Kehua Chen, Wei Ma, Zhenning Li, Lijun Sun, Chengzhong Xu
Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving (AD) systems increasingly adopt vision-language-action (VLA) models, yet they typically ignore the passenger's emotional state, which is central to comfort and AD acceptance. We introduce Open-Domain End-to-End (OD-E2E) autonomous driving, where an autonomous vehicle (AV) must interpret free-form natural-language commands, infer the emotion, and plan a physically feasible trajectory. We propose E3AD, an emotion-aware VLA framework that augments semantic understanding with two cognitively inspired components: a continuous Valenc-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) emotion model that captures tone and urgency from language, and a dual-pathway spatial reasoning module that fuses egocentric and allocentric views for human-like spatial cognition. A consistency-oriented training scheme, combining modality pretraining with preference-based alignment, further enforces coherence between emotional intent and driving actions. Across real-world datasets, E3AD improves visual grounding and waypoint planning and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) VAD correlation for emotion estimation. These results show that injecting emotion into VLA-style driving yields more human-aligned grounding, planning, and human-centric feedback.
Authors: Zhuoyue Wan, Wentao Hu, Chen Jason Zhang, Yuanfeng Song, Shuaimin Li, Ruiqiang Xiao, Xiao-Yong Wei, Raymond Chi-Wing Wong
Abstract: Bridging natural language and structured query languages is a long-standing challenge in the database community. While recent advances in language models have shown promise in this direction, existing solutions often rely on large-scale closed-source models that suffer from high inference costs, limited transparency, and lack of adaptability for lightweight deployment. In this paper, we present OsmT, an open-source tag-aware language model specifically designed to bridge natural language and Overpass Query Language (OverpassQL), a structured query language for accessing large-scale OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. To enhance the accuracy and structural validity of generated queries, we introduce a Tag Retrieval Augmentation (TRA) mechanism that incorporates contextually relevant tag knowledge into the generation process. This mechanism is designed to capture the hierarchical and relational dependencies present in the OSM database, addressing the topological complexity inherent in geospatial query formulation. In addition, we define a reverse task, OverpassQL-to-Text, which translates structured queries into natural language explanations to support query interpretation and improve user accessibility. We evaluate OsmT on a public benchmark against strong baselines and observe consistent improvements in both query generation and interpretation. Despite using significantly fewer parameters, our model achieves competitive accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness of open-source pre-trained language models in bridging natural language and structured query languages within schema-rich geospatial environments.
Authors: Francesca Rossi, Veronica Centorrino, Francesco Bullo, Giovanni Russo
Abstract: The ability to compose acquired skills to plan and execute behaviors is a hallmark of natural intelligence. Yet, despite remarkable cross-disciplinary efforts, a principled account of how task structure shapes gating and how such computations could be delivered in neural circuits, remains elusive. Here we introduce GateMod, an interpretable theoretically grounded computational model linking the emergence of gating to the underlying decision-making task, and to a neural circuit architecture. We first develop GateFrame, a normative framework casting policy gating into the minimization of the free energy. This framework, relating gating rules to task, applies broadly across neuroscience, cognitive and computational sciences. We then derive GateFlow, a continuous-time energy based dynamics that provably converges to GateFrame optimal solution. Convergence, exponential and global, follows from a contractivity property that also yields robustness and other desirable properties. Finally, we derive a neural circuit from GateFlow, GateNet. This is a soft-competitive recurrent circuit whose components perform local and contextual computations consistent with known dendritic and neural processing motifs. We evaluate GateMod across two different settings: collective behaviors in multi-agent systems and human decision-making in multi-armed bandits. In all settings, GateMod provides interpretable mechanistic explanations of gating and quantitatively matches or outperforms established models. GateMod offers a unifying framework for neural policy gating, linking task objectives, dynamical computation, and circuit-level mechanisms. It provides a framework to understand gating in natural agents beyond current explanations and to equip machines with this ability.
Authors: Wenhua Cheng, Weiwei Zhang, Heng Guo, Haihao Shen
Abstract: Extreme low-bit quantization is critical for efficiently deploying Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it often leads to severe performance degradation at 2-bits and even 4-bits (e.g., MXFP4). We present SignRoundV2, a post-training quantization framework that is highly effective even without mixed-precision. SignRoundV2 introduces (1) a fast sensitivity metric that combines gradient information with quantization-induced deviations to guide layer-wise bit allocation, and (2) a lightweight pre-tuning search for quantization scales to improve extremely low-bit quantization. These components allow SignRoundV2 to close the gap with full-precision models. Extensive experiments indicate that our method sustains competitive accuracy for LLMs, achieving production-grade performance with about 1 percent variance at 4-5 bits and strong results even at 2 bits. The implementation is available at https://github.com/intel/auto-round.
Authors: Yijia Song, Juliet Biggs, Alin Achim, Robert Popescu, Simon Orrego, Nantheera Anantrasirichai
Abstract: Phase unwrapping is a fundamental problem in InSAR data processing, supporting geophysical applications such as deformation monitoring and hazard assessment. Its reliability is limited by noise and decorrelation in radar acquisitions, which makes accurate reconstruction of the deformation signal challenging. We propose a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM)-based framework for InSAR phase unwrapping, UnwrapDiff, in which the output of the traditional minimum cost flow algorithm (SNAPHU) is incorporated as conditional guidance. To evaluate robustness, we construct a synthetic dataset that incorporates atmospheric effects and diverse noise patterns, representative of realistic InSAR observations. Experiments show that the proposed model leverages the conditional prior while reducing the effect of diverse noise patterns, achieving on average a 10.11\% reduction in NRMSE compared to SNAPHU. It also achieves better reconstruction quality in difficult cases such as dyke intrusions.
Authors: Yuxing Wang, Zhiyu Chen, Tiantian Zhang, Qiyue Yin, Yongzhe Chang, Zhiheng Li, Liang Wang, Xueqian Wang
Abstract: Brain-body co-evolution enables animals to develop complex behaviors in their environments. Inspired by this biological synergy, embodied co-design (ECD) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for creating intelligent agents-from virtual creatures to physical robots-by jointly optimizing their morphologies and controllers rather than treating control in isolation. This integrated approach facilitates richer environmental interactions and robust task performance. In this survey, we provide a systematic overview of recent advances in ECD. We first formalize the concept of ECD and position it within related fields. We then introduce a hierarchical taxonomy: a lower layer that breaks down agent design into three fundamental components-controlling brain, body morphology, and task environment-and an upper layer that integrates these components into four major ECD frameworks: bi-level, single-level, generative, and open-ended. This taxonomy allows us to synthesize insights from more than one hundred recent studies. We further review notable benchmarks, datasets, and applications in both simulated and real-world scenarios. Finally, we identify significant challenges and offer insights into promising future research directions. A project associated with this survey has been created at https://github.com/Yuxing-Wang-THU/SurveyBrainBody.
Authors: Giorgos Polychronis, Foivos Pournaropoulos, Christos D. Antonopoulos, Spyros Lalis
Abstract: Drones are becoming indispensable in many application domains. In data-driven missions, besides sensing, the drone must process the collected data at runtime to decide whether additional action must be taken on the spot, before moving to the next point of interest. If processing does not reveal an event or situation that requires such an action, the drone has waited in vain instead of moving to the next point. If, however, the drone starts moving to the next point and it turns out that a follow-up action is needed at the previous point, it must spend time to fly-back. To take this decision, we propose different machine-learning methods based on branch prediction and reinforcement learning. We evaluate these methods for a wide range of scenarios where the probability of event occurrence changes with time. Our results show that the proposed methods consistently outperform the regression-based method proposed in the literature and can significantly improve the worst-case mission time by up to 4.1x. Also, the achieved median mission time is very close, merely up to 2.7% higher, to that of a method with perfect knowledge of the current underlying event probability at each point of interest.
Authors: Junjie Zheng, Chunbo Hao, Guobin Ma, Xiaoyu Zhang, Gongyu Chen, Chaofan Ding, Zihao Chen, Lei Xie
Abstract: Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) remains constrained in practical deployment due to its strong dependence on accurate phoneme-level alignment and manually annotated melody contours, requirements that are resource-intensive and hinder scalability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a melody-driven SVS framework capable of synthesizing arbitrary lyrics following any reference melody, without relying on phoneme-level alignment. Our method builds on a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture, enhanced with a dedicated melody extraction module that derives melody representations directly from reference audio. To ensure robust melody encoding, we employ a teacher model to guide the optimization of the melody extractor, alongside an implicit alignment mechanism that enforces similarity distribution constraints for improved melodic stability and coherence. Additionally, we refine duration modeling using weakly annotated song data and introduce a Flow-GRPO reinforcement learning strategy with a multi-objective reward function to jointly enhance pronunciation clarity and melodic fidelity. Experiments show that our model achieves superior performance over existing approaches in both objective measures and subjective listening tests, especially in zero-shot and lyric adaptation settings, while maintaining high audio quality without manual annotation. This work offers a practical and scalable solution for advancing data-efficient singing voice synthesis. To support reproducibility, we release our inference code and model checkpoints.
Authors: Gongyu Chen, Xiaoyu Zhang, Zhenqiang Weng, Junjie Zheng, Da Shen, Chaofan Ding, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Zihao Chen
Abstract: Singing voice conversion (SVC) aims to render the target singer's timbre while preserving melody and lyrics. However, existing zero-shot SVC systems remain fragile in real songs due to harmony interference, F0 errors, and the lack of inductive biases for singing. We propose YingMusic-SVC, a robust zero-shot framework that unifies continuous pre-training, robust supervised fine-tuning, and Flow-GRPO reinforcement learning. Our model introduces a singing-trained RVC timbre shifter for timbre-content disentanglement, an F0-aware timbre adaptor for dynamic vocal expression, and an energy-balanced rectified flow matching loss to enhance high-frequency fidelity. Experiments on a graded multi-track benchmark show that YingMusic-SVC achieves consistent improvements over strong open-source baselines in timbre similarity, intelligibility, and perceptual naturalness, especially under accompanied and harmony-contaminated conditions, demonstrating its effectiveness for real-world SVC deployment.
Authors: Yuhao Lu, HengJian SiTu, Jie Li, Yixuan Li, Yang Liu, Wenbin Lin, Yu Wang
Abstract: We present a population-scale catalogue of 287,872 supermassive black hole masses with high accuracy. Using a deep encoder-decoder network trained on optical spectra with reverberation-mapping (RM) based labels of 849 quasars and applied to all SDSS quasars up to $z=4$, our method achieves a root-mean-square error of $0.058$\,dex, a relative uncertainty of $\approx 14\%$, and coefficient of determination $R^{2}\approx0.91$ with respect to RM-based masses, far surpassing traditional single-line virial estimators. Notably, the high accuracy is maintained for both low ($<10^{7.5}\,M_\odot$) and high ($>10^{9}\,M_\odot$) mass quasars, where empirical relations are unreliable.
Authors: Puria Radmard, Paul M. Bays, M\'at\'e Lengyel
Abstract: Discovering the neural mechanisms underpinning cognition is one of the grand challenges of neuroscience. However, previous approaches for building models of RNN dynamics that explain behaviour required iterative refinement of architectures and/or optimisation objectives, resulting in a piecemeal, and mostly heuristic, human-in-the-loop process. Here, we offer an alternative approach that automates the discovery of viable RNN mechanisms by explicitly training RNNs to reproduce behaviour, including the same characteristic errors and suboptimalities, that humans and animals produce in a cognitive task. Achieving this required two main innovations. First, as the amount of behavioural data that can be collected in experiments is often too limited to train RNNs, we use a non-parametric generative model of behavioural responses to produce surrogate data for training RNNs. Second, to capture all relevant statistical aspects of the data, we developed a novel diffusion model-based approach for training RNNs. To showcase the potential of our approach, we chose a visual working memory task as our test-bed, as behaviour in this task is well known to produce response distributions that are patently multimodal (due to swap errors). The resulting network dynamics correctly qualitative features of macaque neural data. Importantly, these results were not possible to obtain with more traditional approaches, i.e., when only a limited set of behavioural signatures (rather than the full richness of behavioural response distributions) were fitted, or when RNNs were trained for task optimality (instead of reproducing behaviour). Our approach also yields novel predictions about the mechanism of swap errors, which can be readily tested in experiments. These results suggest that fitting RNNs to rich patterns of behaviour provides a powerful way to automatically discover mechanisms of important cognitive functions.
Authors: Wei Zhao, Zhe Li, Jun Sun
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities but remain vulnerable to adversarial manipulations such as jailbreaking, where crafted prompts bypass safety mechanisms. Understanding the causal factors behind such vulnerabilities is essential for building reliable defenses. In this work, we introduce a unified causality analysis framework that systematically supports all levels of causal investigation in LLMs, ranging from token-level, neuron-level, and layer-level interventions to representation-level analysis. The framework enables consistent experimentation and comparison across diverse causality-based attack and defense methods. Accompanying this implementation, we provide the first comprehensive survey of causality-driven jailbreak studies and empirically evaluate the framework on multiple open-weight models and safety-critical benchmarks including jailbreaks, hallucination detection, backdoor identification, and fairness evaluation. Our results reveal that: (1) targeted interventions on causally critical components can reliably modify safety behavior; (2) safety-related mechanisms are highly localized (i.e., concentrated in early-to-middle layers with only 1--2\% of neurons exhibiting causal influence); and (3) causal features extracted from our framework achieve over 95\% detection accuracy across multiple threat types. By bridging theoretical causality analysis and practical model safety, our framework establishes a reproducible foundation for research on causality-based attacks, interpretability, and robust attack detection and mitigation in LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/Amadeuszhao/SOK_Casuality.
Authors: Amy Winecoff, Kevin Klyman
Abstract: Generative AI systems may pose serious risks to individuals vulnerable to eating disorders. Existing safeguards tend to overlook subtle but clinically significant cues, leaving many risks unaddressed. To better understand the nature of these risks, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 clinicians, researchers, and advocates with expertise in eating disorders. Using abductive qualitative analysis, we developed an expert-guided taxonomy of generative AI risks across seven categories: (1) providing generalized health advice; (2) encouraging disordered behaviors; (3) supporting symptom concealment; (4) creating thinspiration; (5) reinforcing negative self-beliefs; (6) promoting excessive focus on the body; and (7) perpetuating narrow views about eating disorders. Our results demonstrate how certain user interactions with generative AI systems intersect with clinical features of eating disorders in ways that may intensify risk. We discuss implications of our work, including approaches for risk assessment, safeguard design, and participatory evaluation practices with domain experts.
Authors: Atsuki Yamaguchi, Terufumi Morishita, Aline Villavicencio, Nikolaos Aletras
Abstract: Expanding the linguistic diversity of instruct large language models (LLMs) is crucial for global accessibility but is often hindered by the reliance on costly specialized target language labeled data and catastrophic forgetting during adaptation. We tackle this challenge under a realistic, low-resource constraint: adapting instruct LLMs using only unlabeled target language data. We introduce Source-Shielded Updates (SSU), a selective parameter update strategy that proactively preserves source knowledge. Using a small set of source data and a parameter importance scoring method, SSU identifies parameters critical to maintaining source abilities. It then applies a column-wise freezing strategy to protect these parameters before adaptation. Experiments across five typologically diverse languages and 7B and 13B models demonstrate that SSU successfully mitigates catastrophic forgetting. It reduces performance degradation on monolingual source tasks to just 3.4% (7B) and 2.8% (13B) on average, a stark contrast to the 20.3% and 22.3% from full fine-tuning. SSU also achieves target-language performance highly competitive with full fine-tuning, outperforming it on all benchmarks for 7B models and the majority for 13B models.
Authors: Tsai-Ning Wang, Lin-Lin Chen, Neil Zeghidour, Aaqib Saeed
Abstract: Pre-trained audio models excel at detecting acoustic patterns in auscultation sounds but often fail to grasp their clinical significance, limiting their use and performance in diagnostic tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce AcuLa (Audio-Clinical Understanding via Language Alignment), a lightweight post-training framework that instills semantic understanding into any audio encoder by aligning it with a medical language model, which acts as a "semantic teacher." To enable alignment at scale, we construct a large-scale dataset by leveraging off-the-shelf large language models to translate the rich, structured metadata accompanying existing audio recordings into coherent clinical reports. Our alignment strategy combines a representation-level contrastive objective with a self-supervised modeling, ensuring that the model learns clinical semantics while preserving fine-grained temporal cues. AcuLa achieves state-of-the-art results across 18 diverse cardio-respiratory tasks from 10 different datasets, improving the mean AUROC on classification benchmarks from 0.68 to 0.79 and, on the most challenging COVID-19 cough detection task, boosting the AUROC from 0.55 to 0.89. Our work demonstrates that this audio-language alignment transforms purely acoustic models into clinically-aware diagnostic tools, establishing a novel paradigm for enhancing physiological understanding in audio-based health monitoring.
Authors: Hao Wang, Jialun Zhong, Changcheng Wang, Zhujun Nie, Zheng Li, Shunyu Yao, Yanzeng Li, Xinchi Li
Abstract: Knowledge-based conversational question answering (KBCQA) confronts persistent challenges in resolving coreference, modeling contextual dependencies, and executing complex logical reasoning. Existing approaches, whether end-to-end semantic parsing or stepwise agent-based reasoning, often suffer from structural inaccuracies and prohibitive computational costs, particularly when processing intricate queries over large knowledge graphs. To address these limitations, we introduce SEAL, a novel two-stage semantic parsing framework grounded in self-evolving agentic learning. In the first stage, a large language model (LLM) extracts a minimal S-expression core that captures the essential semantics of the input query. This core is then refined by an agentic calibration module, which corrects syntactic inconsistencies and aligns entities and relations precisely with the underlying knowledge graph. The second stage employs template-based completion, guided by question-type prediction and placeholder instantiation, to construct a fully executable S-expression. This decomposition not only simplifies logical form generation but also significantly enhances structural fidelity and linking efficiency. Crucially, SEAL incorporates a self-evolving mechanism that integrates local and global memory with a reflection module, enabling continuous adaptation from dialog history and execution feedback without explicit retraining. Extensive experiments on the SPICE benchmark demonstrate that SEAL achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially in multi-hop reasoning, comparison, and aggregation tasks. The results validate notable gains in both structural accuracy and computational efficiency, underscoring the framework's capacity for robust and scalable conversational reasoning.
Authors: Jaan Aru, Kristjan-Julius Laak
Abstract: The vision of a universal AI tutor has remained elusive, despite decades of effort. Could LLMs be the game-changer? We overview novel issues arising from developing a nationwide AI tutor. We highlight the practical questions that point to specific gaps in our scientific understanding of the learning process.
Authors: Guanbo Huang, Jingjia Mao, Fanding Huang, Fengkai Liu, Xiangyang Luo, Yaoyuan Liang, Jiasheng Lu, Xiaoe Wang, Pei Liu, Ruiliu Fu, Shao-Lun Huang
Abstract: Despite tremendous recent progress, Flow Matching methods still suffer from exposure bias due to discrepancies in training and inference. This paper investigates the root causes of exposure bias in Flow Matching, including: (1) the model lacks generalization to biased inputs during training, and (2) insufficient low-frequency content captured during early denoising, leading to accumulated bias. Based on these insights, we propose ReflexFlow, a simple and effective reflexive refinement of the Flow Matching learning objective that dynamically corrects exposure bias. ReflexFlow consists of two components: (1) Anti-Drift Rectification (ADR), which reflexively adjusts prediction targets for biased inputs utilizing a redesigned loss under training-time scheduled sampling; and (2) Frequency Compensation (FC), which reflects on missing low-frequency components and compensates them by reweighting the loss using exposure bias. ReflexFlow is model-agnostic, compatible with all Flow Matching frameworks, and improves generation quality across datasets. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CelebA-64, and ImageNet-256 show that ReflexFlow outperforms prior approaches in mitigating exposure bias, achieving a 35.65% reduction in FID on CelebA-64.
Authors: Fang Li
Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach to automated stripboard circuit layout design using Answer Set Programming (ASP). The work formulates the layout problem as both a synthesis and multi-objective optimization task that simultaneously generates viable layouts while minimizing board area and component strip crossing. By leveraging ASP's declarative nature, this work expresses complex geometric and electrical constraints in a natural and concise manner. The two-phase solving methodology first ensures feasibility before optimizing layout quality. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach generates compact, manufacturable layouts for a range of circuit complexities. This work represents a significant advancement in automated stripboard layout, offering a practical tool for electronics prototyping and education while showcasing the power of declarative programming for solving complex design automation problems.
Authors: Leyang Shen, Yang Zhang, Chun Kai Ling, Xiaoyan Zhao, Tat-Seng Chua
Abstract: Agents capable of accomplishing complex tasks through multiple interactions with the environment have emerged as a popular research direction. However, in such multi-step settings, the conventional group-level policy optimization algorithm becomes suboptimal because of its underlying assumption that each action holds equal contribution, which deviates significantly from reality. Our analysis reveals that only a small fraction of actions are critical in determining the final outcome. Building on this insight, we propose CARL, a critical-action-focused reinforcement learning algorithm tailored for multi-step agents. CARL achieves focused training through providing action-level optimization signals for high-criticality actions while excluding low-criticality actions from model update. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CARL achieves both stronger performance and higher efficiency during training and inference across diverse evaluation settings.
Authors: Weiye Shi, Zhaowei Zhang, Shaoheng Yan, Yaodong Yang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable potential across diverse language related tasks, yet whether they capture deeper linguistic properties, such as syntactic structure, phonetic cues, and metrical patterns from raw text remains unclear. To analysis whether LLMs can learn these features effectively and apply them to important nature language related tasks, we introduce a novel multilingual genre classification dataset derived from Project Gutenberg, a large-scale digital library offering free access to thousands of public domain literary works, comprising thousands of sentences per binary task (poetry vs. novel;drama vs. poetry;drama vs. novel) in six languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese). We augment each with three explicit linguistic feature sets (syntactic tree structures, metaphor counts, and phonetic metrics) to evaluate their impact on classification performance. Experiments demonstrate that although LLM classifiers can learn latent linguistic structures either from raw text or from explicitly provided features, different features contribute unevenly across tasks, which underscores the importance of incorporating more complex linguistic signals during model training.
Authors: Roberto Cipollone, Luca Iocchi, Matteo Leonetti
Abstract: The main focus of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is studying how large Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) can be more efficiently solved when addressed in a modular way, by combining partial solutions computed for smaller subtasks. Despite their very intuitive role for learning, most notions of MDP abstractions proposed in the HRL literature have limited expressive power or do not possess formal efficiency guarantees. This work addresses these fundamental issues by defining Realizable Abstractions, a new relation between generic low-level MDPs and their associated high-level decision processes. The notion we propose avoids non-Markovianity issues and has desirable near-optimality guarantees. Indeed, we show that any abstract policy for Realizable Abstractions can be translated into near-optimal policies for the low-level MDP, through a suitable composition of options. As demonstrated in the paper, these options can be expressed as solutions of specific constrained MDPs. Based on these findings, we propose RARL, a new HRL algorithm that returns compositional and near-optimal low-level policies, taking advantage of the Realizable Abstraction given in the input. We show that RARL is Probably Approximately Correct, it converges in a polynomial number of samples, and it is robust to inaccuracies in the abstraction.
Authors: Yupu Yao, Bowen Yang
Abstract: Standard Vision Transformers flatten 2D images into 1D sequences, disrupting the natural spatial topology. While Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) excels in 1D, it inherits this limitation, often treating spatially distant patches (e.g., at row edges) as sequence neighbors. Existing 2D approaches typically treat spatial axes independently, failing to decouple this false sequential proximity from true spatial distance. To restore the 2D spatial manifold, we introduce Geometric Positional Embedding (GeoPE), a framework that extends rotations to 3D Euclidean space using quaternions. To overcome non-commutativity and ensure symmetry, GeoPE constructs a unified rotational operator by computing the geometric mean in the Lie algebra. This creates a geometrically coupled encoding that effectively separates spatial dimensions. Extensive experiments on image classification, object detection, and 3D semantic segmentation demonstrate that GeoPE consistently outperforms existing 2D RoPE variants and significantly enhances shape bias, confirming its ability to capture true geometric structure.
Authors: Jasmaine Khale, Ravi Prakash Srivastava
Abstract: Automated retinal disease diagnosis is vital given the rising prevalence of conditions such as diabetic retinopathy and macular degeneration. Conventional deep learning approaches require large annotated datasets, which are costly and often imbalanced across disease categories, limiting their reliability in practice. Few-shot learning (FSL) addresses this challenge by enabling models to generalize from only a few labeled samples per class. In this study,we propose a balanced few-shot episodic learning framework tailored to the Retinal Fundus Multi-Disease Image Dataset (RFMiD). Focusing on the ten most represented classes, which still show substantial imbalance between majority diseases (e.g., Diabetic Retinopathy, Macular Hole) and minority ones (e.g., Optic Disc Edema, Branch Retinal Vein Occlusion), our method integrates three key components: (i) balanced episodic sampling, ensuring equal participation of all classes in each 5-way 5-shot episode; (ii) targeted augmentation, including Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) and color/geometry transformations, to improve minority-class di- versity; and (iii) a ResNet-50 encoder pretrained on ImageNet, selected for its superior ability to capture fine-grained retinal features. Prototypes are computed in the embedding space and classification is performed with cosine similarity for improved stability. Trained on 100 episodes and evaluated on 1,000 test episodes, our framework achieves substantial accuracy gains and reduces bias toward majority classes, with notable improvements for underrepresented diseases. These results demonstrate that dataset-aware few-shot pipelines, combined with balanced sampling and CLAHE-enhanced preprocessing, can deliver more robust and clinically fair retinal disease diagnosis under data-constrained conditions.
Authors: Christopher Chiu, Simpson Zhang, Mihaela van der Schaar
Abstract: As artificial intelligence (AI) agents are deployed across economic domains, understanding their strategic behavior and market-level impact becomes critical. This paper puts forward a groundbreaking new framework that is the first to capture the real-world economic forces that shape agentic labor markets: adverse selection, moral hazard, and reputation dynamics. Our framework encapsulates three core capabilities that successful LLM-agents will need: \textbf{metacognition} (accurate self-assessment of skills), \textbf{competitive awareness} (modeling rivals and market dynamics), and \textbf{long-horizon strategic planning}. We illustrate our framework through a tractable simulated gig economy where agentic Large Language Models (LLMs) compete for jobs, develop skills, and adapt their strategies under competitive pressure. Our simulations illustrate how LLM agents explicitly prompted with reasoning capabilities learn to strategically self-improve and demonstrate superior adaptability to changing market conditions. At the market level, our simulations reproduce classic macroeconomic phenomena found in human labor markets, while controlled experiments reveal potential AI-driven economic trends, such as rapid monopolization and systemic price deflation. This work provides a foundation to further explore the economic properties of AI-driven labour markets, and a conceptual framework to study the strategic reasoning capabilities in agents competing in the emerging economy.
Authors: Adri G\'omez Mart\'in, Felix M\"oller, Steven McDonagh, Monica Abella, Manuel Desco, Elliot J. Crowley, Aaron Klein, Linus Ericsson
Abstract: Neural architecture search (NAS) in expressive search spaces is a computationally hard problem, but it also holds the potential to automatically discover completely novel and performant architectures. To achieve this we need effective search algorithms that can identify powerful components and reuse them in new candidate architectures. In this paper, we introduce two adapted variants of the Smith-Waterman algorithm for local sequence alignment and use them to compute the edit distance in a grammar-based evolutionary architecture search. These algorithms enable us to efficiently calculate a distance metric for neural architectures and to generate a set of hybrid offspring from two parent models. This facilitates the deployment of crossover-based search heuristics, allows us to perform a thorough analysis on the architectural loss landscape, and track population diversity during search. We highlight how our method vastly improves computational complexity over previous work and enables us to efficiently compute shortest paths between architectures. When instantiating the crossover in evolutionary searches, we achieve competitive results, outperforming competing methods. Future work can build upon this new tool, discovering novel components that can be used more broadly across neural architecture design, and broadening its applications beyond NAS.
Authors: Daniyar Zakarin, Thiemo Wandel, Anton Obukhov, Dengxin Dai
Abstract: We introduce a diffusion-transformer (DiT) framework for single-image reflection removal that leverages the generalization strengths of foundation diffusion models in the restoration setting. Rather than relying on task-specific architectures, we repurpose a pre-trained DiT-based foundation model by conditioning it on reflection-contaminated inputs and guiding it toward clean transmission layers. We systematically analyze existing reflection removal data sources for diversity, scalability, and photorealism. To address the shortage of suitable data, we construct a physically based rendering (PBR) pipeline in Blender, built around the Principled BSDF, to synthesize realistic glass materials and reflection effects. Efficient LoRA-based adaptation of the foundation model, combined with the proposed synthetic data, achieves state-of-the-art performance on in-domain and zero-shot benchmarks. These results demonstrate that pretrained diffusion transformers, when paired with physically grounded data synthesis and efficient adaptation, offer a scalable and high-fidelity solution for reflection removal. Project page: https://hf.co/spaces/huawei-bayerlab/windowseat-reflection-removal-web
URLs: https://hf.co/spaces/huawei-bayerlab/windowseat-reflection-removal-web
Authors: Garud Iyengar, Yu-Shiou Willy Lin, Kaizheng Wang
Abstract: Simulation of complex systems originated in manufacturing and queuing applications. It is now widely used for large-scale, ML-based systems in research, education, and consumer surveys. However, characterizing the discrepancy between simulators and ground truth remains challenging for increasingly complex, machine-learning-based systems. We propose a computationally tractable method to estimate the quantile function of the discrepancy between the simulated and ground-truth outcome distributions. Our approach focuses on output uncertainty and treats the simulator as a black box, imposing no modeling assumptions on its internals, and hence applies broadly across many parameter families, from Bernoulli and multinomial models to continuous, vector-valued settings. The resulting quantile curve supports confidence interval construction for unseen scenarios, risk-aware summaries of sim-to-real discrepancy (e.g., VaR/CVaR), and comparison of simulators' performance. We demonstrate our methodology in an application assessing LLM simulation fidelity on the WorldValueBench dataset spanning four LLMs.
Authors: Monishwaran Maheswaran, Rishabh Tiwari, Yuezhou Hu, Kerem Dilmen, Coleman Hooper, Haocheng Xi, Nicholas Lee, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Michael W. Mahoney, Kurt Keutzer, Amir Gholami
Abstract: Modern Large Language Models achieve impressive reasoning capabilities with long Chain of Thoughts, but they incur substantial computational cost during inference, and this motivates techniques to improve the performance-cost ratio. Among these techniques, Speculative Decoding accelerates inference by employing a fast but inaccurate draft model to autoregressively propose tokens, which are then verified in parallel by a more capable target model. However, due to unnecessary rejections caused by token mismatches in semantically equivalent steps, traditional token-level Speculative Decoding struggles in reasoning tasks. Although recent works have shifted to step-level semantic verification, which improve efficiency by accepting or rejecting entire reasoning steps, existing step-level methods still regenerate many rejected steps with little improvement, wasting valuable target compute. To address this challenge, we propose Arbitrage, a novel step-level speculative generation framework that routes generation dynamically based on the relative advantage between draft and target models. Instead of applying a fixed acceptance threshold, Arbitrage uses a lightweight router trained to predict when the target model is likely to produce a meaningfully better step. This routing approximates an ideal Arbitrage Oracle that always chooses the higher-quality step, achieving near-optimal efficiency-accuracy trade-offs. Across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks, Arbitrage consistently surpasses prior step-level Speculative Decoding baselines, reducing inference latency by up to $\sim2\times$ at matched accuracy.
Authors: Yu-Chao Hsu, Jiun-Cheng Jiang, Chun-Hua Lin, Kuo-Chung Peng, Nan-Yow Chen, Samuel Yen-Chi Chen, En-Jui Kuo, Hsi-Sheng Goan
Abstract: Long short-term memory (LSTM) models are a particular type of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that are central to sequential modeling tasks in domains such as urban telecommunication forecasting, where temporal correlations and nonlinear dependencies dominate. However, conventional LSTMs suffer from high parameter redundancy and limited nonlinear expressivity. In this work, we propose the Quantum-inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Long Short-Term Memory (QKAN-LSTM), which integrates Data Re-Uploading Activation (DARUAN) modules into the gating structure of LSTMs. Each DARUAN acts as a quantum variational activation function (QVAF), enhancing frequency adaptability and enabling an exponentially enriched spectral representation without multi-qubit entanglement. The resulting architecture preserves quantum-level expressivity while remaining fully executable on classical hardware. Empirical evaluations on three datasets, Damped Simple Harmonic Motion, Bessel Function, and Urban Telecommunication, demonstrate that QKAN-LSTM achieves superior predictive accuracy and generalization with a 79% reduction in trainable parameters compared to classical LSTMs. We extend the framework to the Jiang-Huang-Chen-Goan Network (JHCG Net), which generalizes KAN to encoder-decoder structures, and then further use QKAN to realize the latent KAN, thereby creating a Hybrid QKAN (HQKAN) for hierarchical representation learning. The proposed HQKAN-LSTM thus provides a scalable and interpretable pathway toward quantum-inspired sequential modeling in real-world data environments.
Authors: Yu-Cheng Lin, Yu-Chao Hsu, Samuel Yen-Chi Chen
Abstract: The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is a leading approach for solving combinatorial optimization problems on near-term quantum processors. However, finding good variational parameters remains a significant challenge due to the non-convex energy landscape, often resulting in slow convergence and poor solution quality. In this work, we propose a quantum meta-learning framework that trains advanced quantum sequence models to generate effective parameter initialization policies. We investigate four classical or quantum sequence models, including the Quantum Kernel-based Long Short-Term Memory (QK-LSTM), as learned optimizers in a "learning to learn" paradigm. Our numerical experiments on the Max-Cut problem demonstrate that the QK-LSTM optimizer achieves superior performance, obtaining the highest approximation ratios and exhibiting the fastest convergence rate across all tested problem sizes (n=10 to 13). Crucially, the QK-LSTM model achieves perfect parameter transferability by synthesizing a single, fixed set of near-optimal parameters, leading to a remarkable sustained acceleration of convergence even when generalizing to larger problems. This capability, enabled by the compact and expressive power of the quantum kernel architecture, underscores its effectiveness. The QK-LSTM, with only 43 trainable parameters, substantially outperforms the classical LSTM (56 parameters) and other quantum sequence models, establishing a robust pathway toward highly efficient parameter initialization for variational quantum algorithms in the NISQ era.
Authors: Huascar Sanchez, Briland Hitaj, Jules Bergmann, Linda Briesemeister
Abstract: As healthcare increasingly turns to AI for scalable and trustworthy clinical decision support, ensuring reliability in model reasoning remains a critical challenge. Individual large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to hallucinations and inconsistency, whereas naive ensembles of models often fail to deliver stable and credible recommendations. Building on our previous work on LLM Chemistry, which quantifies the collaborative compatibility among LLMs, we apply this framework to improve the reliability in medication recommendation from brief clinical vignettes. Our approach leverages multi-LLM collaboration guided by Chemistry-inspired interaction modeling, enabling ensembles that are effective (exploiting complementary strengths), stable (producing consistent quality), and calibrated (minimizing interference and error amplification). We evaluate our Chemistry-based Multi-LLM collaboration strategy on real-world clinical scenarios to investigate whether such interaction-aware ensembles can generate credible, patient-specific medication recommendations. Preliminary results are encouraging, suggesting that LLM Chemistry-guided collaboration may offer a promising path toward reliable and trustworthy AI assistants in clinical practice.
Authors: Shashwat Shankar, Subhranshu Pandey, Innocent Dengkhw Mochahari, Bhabesh Mali, Animesh Basak Chowdhury, Sukanta Bhattacharjee, Chandan Karfa
Abstract: Large Language Model(LLM) inference demands massive compute and energy, making domain-specific tasks expensive and unsustainable. As foundation models keep scaling, we ask: Is bigger always better for hardware design? Our work tests this by evaluating Small Language Models coupled with a curated agentic AI framework on NVIDIA's Comprehensive Verilog Design Problems(CVDP) benchmark. Results show that agentic workflows: through task decomposition, iterative feedback, and correction - not only unlock near-LLM performance at a fraction of the cost but also create learning opportunities for agents, paving the way for efficient, adaptive solutions in complex design tasks.
Authors: Yuan Gao, Jin Song
Abstract: In recent years, Image Quality Assessment (IQA) for AI-generated images (AIGI) has advanced rapidly; however, existing methods primarily target portraits and artistic images, lacking a systematic evaluation of interior scenes. We introduce Spatial Aesthetics, a paradigm that assesses the aesthetic quality of interior images along four dimensions: layout, harmony, lighting, and distortion. We construct SA-BENCH, the first benchmark for spatial aesthetics, comprising 18,000 images and 50,000 precise annotations. Employing SA-BENCH, we systematically evaluate current IQA methodologies and develop SA-IQA, through MLLM fine-tuning and a multidimensional fusion approach, as a comprehensive reward framework for assessing spatial aesthetics. We apply SA-IQA to two downstream tasks: (1) serving as a reward signal integrated with GRPO reinforcement learning to optimize the AIGC generation pipeline, and (2) Best-of-N selection to filter high-quality images and improve generation quality. Experiments indicate that SA-IQA significantly outperforms existing methods on SA-BENCH, setting a new standard for spatial aesthetics evaluation. Code and dataset will be open-sourced to advance research and applications in this domain.
Authors: Haiyue Song, Johannes Eschbach-Dymanus, Hour Kaing, Sumire Honda, Hideki Tanaka, Bianka Buschbeck, Masao Utiyama
Abstract: Recent works on structured text translation remain limited to the sentence level, as they struggle to effectively handle the complex document-level XML or HTML structures. To address this, we propose \textbf{Format Reinforcement Learning (FormatRL)}, which employs Group Relative Policy Optimization on top of a supervised fine-tuning model to directly optimize novel structure-aware rewards: 1) TreeSim, which measures structural similarity between predicted and reference XML trees and 2) Node-chrF, which measures translation quality at the level of XML nodes. Additionally, we apply StrucAUC, a fine-grained metric distinguishing between minor errors and major structural failures. Experiments on the SAP software-documentation benchmark demonstrate improvements across six metrics and an analysis further shows how different reward functions contribute to improvements in both structural and translation quality.
Authors: Xiaochuang Han, Youssef Emad, Melissa Hall, John Nguyen, Karthik Padthe, Liam Robbins, Amir Bar, Delong Chen, Michal Drozdzal, Maha Elbayad, Yushi Hu, Shang-Wen Li, Sreya Dutta Roy, Jakob Verbeek, XuDong Wang, Marjan Ghazvininejad, Luke Zettlemoyer, Emily Dinan
Abstract: Video generation models are rapidly advancing, but can still struggle with complex video outputs that require significant semantic branching or repeated high-level reasoning about what should happen next. In this paper, we introduce a new class of omni video-text models that integrate ideas from recent LM reasoning advances to address this challenge. More specifically, we present TV2TV, a unified generative modeling framework which decomposes video generation into an interleaved text and video generation process. TV2TV jointly learns language modeling (next-token prediction) and video flow matching (next-frame prediction) using a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture. At inference time, TV2TV decides when to alternate between generating text and video frames, allowing the model to "think in words" about subsequent content before ``acting in pixels'' to produce frames. This design offloads much of the responsibility for deciding what should happen next to the language modeling tower, enabling improved visual quality and prompt alignment of generated videos. It also enables fine-grained controllability, allowing users to modify the video generation trajectory through text interventions at any point in the process. In controlled experiments on video game data, TV2TV demonstrates substantial improvements in both visual quality and controllability. TV2TV also scales to natural videos, as we show by augmenting sports videos with interleaved natural language action descriptions using vision-language models (VLMs). Training TV2TV on this corpus yields strong visual quality and prompt alignment, showcasing the model's ability to reason about and generate complex real-world action sequences. Together, these results highlight TV2TV as a promising step toward video generation with open-ended textual reasoning and control.
Authors: Purbesh Mitra, Sennur Ulukus
Abstract: Long context reasoning in large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated enhancement of their cognitive capabilities via chain-of-thought (CoT) inference. Training such models is usually done via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) in reasoning based problems, like math and programming. However, RLVR is limited by several bottlenecks, such as, lack of dense reward, and inadequate sample efficiency. As a result, it requires significant compute resources in post-training phase. To overcome these limitations, in this work, we propose \textbf{Semantic Soft Bootstrapping (SSB)}, a self-distillation technique, in which the same base language model plays the role of both teacher and student, but receives different semantic contexts about the correctness of its outcome at training time. The model is first prompted with a math problem and several rollouts are generated. From them, the correct and most common incorrect response are filtered, and then provided to the model in context to produce a more robust, step-by-step explanation with a verified final answer. This pipeline automatically curates a paired teacher-student training set from raw problem-answer data, without any human intervention. This generation process also produces a sequence of logits, which is what the student model tries to match in the training phase just from the bare question alone. In our experiment, Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct on GSM8K dataset via parameter-efficient fine-tuning. We then tested its accuracy on MATH500, and AIME2024 benchmarks. Our experiments show a jump of 10.6%, and 10% improvements in accuracy, respectively, over group relative policy optimization (GRPO), which is a commonly used RLVR algorithm. Our code is available at https://github.com/purbeshmitra/semantic-soft-bootstrapping, and the model, curated dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/purbeshmitra/semantic-soft-bootstrapping.
URLs: https://github.com/purbeshmitra/semantic-soft-bootstrapping,, https://huggingface.co/purbeshmitra/semantic-soft-bootstrapping.
Authors: Rundong Luo, Noah Snavely, Wei-Chiu Ma
Abstract: We introduce ShadowDraw, a framework that transforms ordinary 3D objects into shadow-drawing compositional art. Given a 3D object, our system predicts scene parameters, including object pose and lighting, together with a partial line drawing, such that the cast shadow completes the drawing into a recognizable image. To this end, we optimize scene configurations to reveal meaningful shadows, employ shadow strokes to guide line drawing generation, and adopt automatic evaluation to enforce shadow-drawing coherence and visual quality. Experiments show that ShadowDraw produces compelling results across diverse inputs, from real-world scans and curated datasets to generative assets, and naturally extends to multi-object scenes, animations, and physical deployments. Our work provides a practical pipeline for creating shadow-drawing art and broadens the design space of computational visual art, bridging the gap between algorithmic design and artistic storytelling. Check out our project page https://red-fairy.github.io/ShadowDraw/ for more results and an end-to-end real-world demonstration of our pipeline!
Authors: Dongzhi Jiang, Renrui Zhang, Haodong Li, Zhuofan Zong, Ziyu Guo, Jun He, Claire Guo, Junyan Ye, Rongyao Fang, Weijia Li, Rui Liu, Hongsheng Li
Abstract: Recent unified multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities, incorporating chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning for enhanced text-to-image generation. However, existing approaches remain limited, either treating the model merely as a standalone generator or relying on abstract textual planning. To this end, we propose Draft-as-CoT (DraCo), a novel interleaved reasoning paradigm that fully leverages both textual and visual contents in CoT for better planning and verification. Our method first generates a low-resolution draft image as preview, providing more concrete and structural visual planning and guidance. Then, we employ the model's inherent understanding capability to verify potential semantic misalignments between the draft and input prompt, and performs refinement through selective corrections with super-resolution. In this way, our approach addresses two fundamental challenges: the coarse-grained nature of textual planning and the difficulty in generating rare attribute combinations. To support training, we curate DraCo-240K, aiming to enhance three atomic capabilities spanning general correction, instance manipulation, and layout reorganization. Supported by DraCo-CFG, a specialized classifier-free guidance (CFG) strategy for interleaved reasoning, DraCo achieves a tremendous increase on GenEval (+8%), Imagine-Bench (+0.91), and GenEval++ (+3%), significantly outperforming direct generation and other generation methods empowered by CoT.
Authors: Prakhar Kaushik, Shravan Chaudhari, Ankit Vaidya, Rama Chellappa, Alan Yuille
Abstract: We show that deep neural networks trained across diverse tasks exhibit remarkably similar low-dimensional parametric subspaces. We provide the first large-scale empirical evidence that demonstrates that neural networks systematically converge to shared spectral subspaces regardless of initialization, task, or domain. Through mode-wise spectral analysis of over 1100 models - including 500 Mistral-7B LoRAs, 500 Vision Transformers, and 50 LLaMA-8B models - we identify universal subspaces capturing majority variance in just a few principal directions. By applying spectral decomposition techniques to the weight matrices of various architectures trained on a wide range of tasks and datasets, we identify sparse, joint subspaces that are consistently exploited, within shared architectures across diverse tasks and datasets. Our findings offer new insights into the intrinsic organization of information within deep networks and raise important questions about the possibility of discovering these universal subspaces without the need for extensive data and computational resources. Furthermore, this inherent structure has significant implications for model reusability, multi-task learning, model merging, and the development of training and inference-efficient algorithms, potentially reducing the carbon footprint of large-scale neural models.
Authors: Yun-Shiuan Chuang, Jerry Zhu, Timothy T. Rogers
Abstract: Whereas cognitive models of learning often assume direct experience with both the features of an event and with a true label or outcome, much of everyday learning arises from hearing the opinions of others, without direct access to either the experience or the ground truth outcome. We consider how people can learn which opinions to trust in such scenarios by extending the hedge algorithm: a classic solution for learning from diverse information sources. We first introduce a semi-supervised variant we call the delusional hedge capable of learning from both supervised and unsupervised experiences. In two experiments, we examine the alignment between human judgments and predictions from the standard hedge, the delusional hedge, and a heuristic baseline model. Results indicate that humans effectively incorporate both labeled and unlabeled information in a manner consistent with the delusional hedge algorithm -- suggesting that human learners not only gauge the accuracy of information sources but also their consistency with other reliable sources. The findings advance our understanding of human learning from diverse opinions, with implications for the development of algorithms that better capture how people learn to weigh conflicting information sources.
Authors: Johannes Schneider, Kilic Sinem, Daniel Stockhammer
Abstract: Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming creative fields shaping our culture and our heritage. We focus on widespread interactions between clients and (creative) specialists highlighting a change in interaction patterns leading to a shift from the use of expert creativity towards AI-supported client creativity. More specifically, we explore the case of architecture as designing houses is complex involving extensive customer interaction. We investigate the effects of GenAI on the architectural design process and discuss the role of the architect. Our study involved six architects using a general-purpose text-to-image tool for generating designs and providing feedback followed by expert interviews. We find that AI can disrupt the ideation phase by enabling clients to engage in the design process through rapid visualization of their ideas. In turn, so our thesis, the architect's role shifts towards assessing feasibility of such designs. AI's feedback, though valuable, can hamper creativity and innovation by suggesting altering novel, innovative approaches towards more standardized designs. We find that there is uncertainty among architects about the interpretative sovereignty of architecture and identity when AI increasingly takes over authorship. Our findings can also support the design of future AI systems by pinpointing weaknesses and highlighting a novel design process calling for tighter client integration. In our discussion, we also generalize our findings on a broader societal level elaborating on the change of a number of characteristics such as power, capability and responsibility in the triangle of AI, experts, and non-experts. We also discuss risks such as cultural uniformity when it comes to using AI to design artifacts central to our cultural heritage.
Authors: Mario Leiva, Noel Ngu, Joshua Shay Kricheli, Aditya Taparia, Ransalu Senanayake, Paulo Shakarian, Nathaniel Bastian, John Corcoran, Gerardo Simari
Abstract: The deployment of pre-trained perception models in novel environments often leads to performance degradation due to distributional shifts. Although recent artificial intelligence approaches for metacognition use logical rules to characterize and filter model errors, improving precision often comes at the cost of reduced recall. This paper addresses the hypothesis that leveraging multiple pre-trained models can mitigate this recall reduction. We formulate the challenge of identifying and managing conflicting predictions from various models as a consistency-based abduction problem, building on the idea of abductive learning (ABL) but applying it to test-time instead of training. The input predictions and the learned error detection rules derived from each model are encoded in a logic program. We then seek an abductive explanation--a subset of model predictions--that maximizes prediction coverage while ensuring the rate of logical inconsistencies (derived from domain constraints) remains below a specified threshold. We propose two algorithms for this knowledge representation task: an exact method based on Integer Programming (IP) and an efficient Heuristic Search (HS). Through extensive experiments on a simulated aerial imagery dataset featuring controlled, complex distributional shifts, we demonstrate that our abduction-based framework outperforms individual models and standard ensemble baselines, achieving, for instance, average relative improvements of approximately 13.6\% in F1-score and 16.6\% in accuracy across 15 diverse test datasets when compared to the best individual model. Our results validate the use of consistency-based abduction as an effective mechanism to robustly integrate knowledge from multiple imperfect models in challenging, novel scenarios.
Authors: Georgios Mappouras
Abstract: With the rise of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and large language models like ChatGPT, a new race for achieving artificial general intelligence (A.G.I) has started. While many speculate how and when A.I. will achieve A.G.I., there is no clear agreement on how A.G.I. can be detected in A.I. models, even when popular tools like the Turing test (and its modern variations) are used to measure their intelligence. In this work, we discuss why traditional methods like the Turing test do not suffice for measuring or detecting A.G.I. and provide a new, practical method that can be used to decide if a system (computer or any other) has reached or surpassed A.G.I. To achieve this, we make two new contributions. First, we present a clear definition for general intelligence (G.I.) and set a G.I. Threshold (G.I.T.) that can be used to distinguish between systems that achieve A.G.I. and systems that do not. Second, we present a new framework on how to construct tests that can detect if a system has achieved G.I. in a simple, comprehensive, and clear-cut fail/pass way. We call this novel framework the Turing test 2.0. We then demonstrate real-life examples of applying tests that follow our Turing test 2.0 framework on modern A.I. models.
Authors: Joey Skaf, Luis Ibanez-Lissen, Robert McCarthy, Connor Watts, Vasil Georgiv, Hannes Whittingham, Lorena Gonzalez-Manzano, David Lindner, Cameron Tice, Edward James Young, Puria Radmard
Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning not only enhances large language model performance but also provides critical insights into decision-making processes, marking it as a useful tool for monitoring model intent and planning. However, recent works have shown that banning the mention of a specific example of reward hacking causes obfuscation of the undesired reasoning traces but the persistence of the undesired behavior, threatening the reliability of CoT monitoring. We provide an extension to these results with regard to the ability of models to learn a specific type of obfuscated reasoning: steganography. First, we show that penalizing the use of specific strings within load-bearing reasoning traces causes models to substitute alternative strings. Crucially, this does not alter the underlying method by which the model performs the task, demonstrating that the model can learn to steganographically encode its reasoning.We further demonstrate that models can generalize an encoding scheme. When the penalized strings belong to an overarching class, the model learns not only to substitute strings seen in training, but also develops a general encoding scheme for all members of the class which it can apply to held-out testing strings.
Authors: Yujie Zhao, Zhijing Wu, Boqin Yuan, Zhongming Yu, Hejia Zhang, Wentao Ni, Chia-Tung Ho, Haoxing Ren, Jishen Zhao
Abstract: Register-Transfer Level (RTL) verification is a primary bottleneck, consuming 60-70% of development time. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for RTL automation, their performance and research focus have overwhelmingly centered on RTL generation rather than verification. Current methods for RTL verification rely on large scale proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o) to generate Python-based functional references, incurring a high cost and raising data-privacy risks. To date, an end-to-end open-source solution for autonomous verification remains absent. We introduce PRO-V-R1, the first trainable open-source agentic framework for autonomous RTL verification. Our contributions are threefold: (1) we design PRO-V sys, a modular agentic system that couples LLM-based reasoning with programmatic tool use for RTL verification; (2) we establish a data construction pipeline that leverages existing RTL datasets to build simulation-validated, expert-level trajectories tailored for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) RTL verification agents; and (3) we implement an efficient reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that uses verification-specific rewards derived from program-tool feedback to optimize the end-to-end verification workflow. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates PRO-V-R1 achieves a 57.7% functional correctness rate and 34.0% in robust fault detection, significantly outperforming the base model's 25.7% and 21.8% (respectively) from the state-of-the-art (SOTA) automatic verification system. This configuration also outperforms large-scale proprietary LLMs in functional correctness and shows comparable robustness for fault detection.
Authors: Zhenyu Xia, Xinlei Huang, Yuantong Gu, Suvash C. Saha
Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) is extensively employed in medical diagnostics and brain-computer interface (BCI) applications due to its non-invasive nature and high temporal resolution. However, EEG analysis faces significant challenges, including noise, nonstationarity, and inter-subject variability, which hinder its clinical utility. Traditional neural networks often lack integration with biophysical knowledge, limiting their interpretability, robustness, and potential for medical translation. To address these limitations, this study introduces NeuroPhysNet, a novel Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) framework tailored for EEG signal analysis and motor imagery classification in medical contexts. NeuroPhysNet incorporates the FitzHugh-Nagumo model, embedding neurodynamical principles to constrain predictions and enhance model robustness. Evaluated on the BCIC-IV-2a dataset, the framework achieved superior accuracy and generalization compared to conventional methods, especially in data-limited and cross-subject scenarios, which are common in clinical settings. By effectively integrating biophysical insights with data-driven techniques, NeuroPhysNet not only advances BCI applications but also holds significant promise for enhancing the precision and reliability of clinical diagnostics, such as motor disorder assessments and neurorehabilitation planning.
Authors: William Sharpless, Dylan Hirsch, Sander Tonkens, Nikhil Shinde, Sylvia Herbert
Abstract: Hard constraints in reinforcement learning (RL) often degrade policy performance. Lagrangian methods offer a way to blend objectives with constraints, but require intricate reward engineering and parameter tuning. In this work, we extend recent advances that connect Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) equations with RL to propose two novel value functions for dual-objective satisfaction. Namely, we address: 1) the Reach-Always-Avoid (RAA) problem -- of achieving distinct reward and penalty thresholds -- and 2) the Reach-Reach (RR) problem -- of achieving thresholds of two distinct rewards. In contrast with temporal logic approaches, which typically involve representing an automaton, we derive explicit, tractable Bellman forms in this context via decomposition. Specifically, we prove that the RAA and RR problems may be rewritten as compositions of previously studied HJ-RL problems. We leverage our analysis to propose a variation of Proximal Policy Optimization (DOHJ-PPO), and demonstrate that it produces distinct behaviors from previous approaches, outcompeting a number of baselines in success, safety and speed across a range of tasks for safe-arrival and multi-target achievement.
Authors: Li Du, Hanyu Zhao, Yiming Ju, Tengfei Pan
Abstract: Instruction tuning has become a foundation for unlocking the capabilities of large-scale pretrained models and improving their performance on complex tasks. Thus, the construction of high-quality instruction datasets is crucial for enhancing model performance and generalizability. Although current instruction datasets have reached tens of millions of samples, models finetuned on them may still struggle with complex instruction following and tasks in rare domains. This is primarily due to limited expansion in both ``coverage'' (coverage of task types and knowledge areas) and ``depth'' (instruction complexity) of the instruction set. To address this issue, we propose a systematic instruction data construction framework, which integrates a hierarchical tagging system, an informative seed selection algorithm, an evolutionary data synthesis process, and a model deficiency diagnosis with targeted data generation. These components form an iterative closed-loop to continuously enhance the coverage and depth of instruction data. Based on this framework, we construct Infinity Instruct Subject, a high-quality dataset containing $\sim$1.5 million instructions. Experiments on multiple foundation models and benchmark tasks demonstrate its effectiveness in improving instruction-following capabilities. Further analyses suggest that Infinity Instruct Subject shows enlarged coverage and depth compared to comparable synthesized instruction datasets. Our work lays a theoretical and practical foundation for the efficient, continuous evolution of instruction datasets, moving from data quantity expansion to qualitative improvement.
Authors: Athanasios Trantas, Martino Mensio, Stylianos Stasinos, Sebastian Gribincea, Taimur Khan, Damian Podareanu, Aliene van der Veen
Abstract: Multimodal Foundation Models (FMs) offer a path to learn general-purpose representations from heterogeneous ecological data, easily transferable to downstream tasks. However, practical biodiversity modelling remains fragmented; separate pipelines and models are built for each dataset and objective, which limits reuse across regions and taxa. In response, we present BioAnalyst, to our knowledge the first multimodal Foundation Model tailored to biodiversity analysis and conservation planning in Europe at $0.25^{\circ}$ spatial resolution targeting regional to national-scale applications. BioAnalyst employs a transformer-based architecture, pre-trained on extensive multimodal datasets that align species occurrence records with remote sensing indicators, climate and environmental variables. Post pre-training, the model is adapted via lightweight roll-out fine-tuning to a range of downstream tasks, including joint species distribution modelling, biodiversity dynamics and population trend forecasting. The model is evaluated on two representative downstream use cases: (i) joint species distribution modelling and with 500 vascular plant species (ii) monthly climate linear probing with temperature and precipitation data. Our findings show that BioAnalyst can provide a strong baseline both for biotic and abiotic tasks, acting as a macroecological simulator with a yearly forecasting horizon and monthly resolution, offering the first application of this type of modelling in the biodiversity domain. We have open-sourced the model weights, training and fine-tuning pipelines to advance AI-driven ecological research.
Authors: Mary Tonwe
Abstract: Public service systems in many African regions suffer from delayed emergency response and spatial inequity, causing avoidable suffering. This paper introduces OPTIC-ER, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for real-time, adaptive, and equitable emergency response. OPTIC-ER uses an attention-guided actor-critic architecture to manage the complexity of dispatch environments. Its key innovations are a Context-Rich State Vector, encoding action sub-optimality, and a Precision Reward Function, which penalizes inefficiency. Training occurs in a high-fidelity simulation using real data from Rivers State, Nigeria, accelerated by a precomputed Travel Time Atlas. The system is built on the TALS framework (Thin computing, Adaptability, Low-cost, Scalability) for deployment in low-resource settings. In evaluations on 500 unseen incidents, OPTIC-ER achieved a 100.00% optimal action selection rate, confirming its robustness and generalization. Beyond dispatch, the system generates Infrastructure Deficiency Maps and Equity Monitoring Dashboards to guide proactive governance and data-informed development. This work presents a validated blueprint for AI-augmented public services, showing how context-aware RL can bridge the gap between algorithmic decision-making and measurable human impact.
Authors: Yuan Sui, Yanming Zhang, Yi Liao, Yu Gu, Guohua Tang, Zhongqian Sun, Wei Yang, Bryan Hooi
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are effective at reasoning and information retrieval, but remain unreliable for decision-making in dynamic, partially observable, high-stakes environments such as MOBA games. One key limitation is weak counterfactual reasoning: LLMs struggle to conduct precise what-if analysis over candidate actions and their future consequences. We address this limitation with What-if Analysis LLM (WiA-LLM), a framework that trains an LLM as an explicit language-based world model. Instead of representing the environment in latent vectors, WiA-LLM models how the game state evolves over time with candidate actions using language, and provides textual justifications for these predicted outcomes. This explicit modeling supports (1) interpretability, since the model's predictions and underlying rationales are human-readable, and (2) semantic generalization, as the model can transfer knowledge across situations that share similar game concepts (e.g., roles, objectives, or tactics). WiA-LLM is trained in two stages: supervised fine-tuning on human-like reasoning traces, followed by reinforcement learning with outcome-based rewards that depend on the discrepancy between predicted and ground-truth future states. In the Honor of Kings (HoK) environment, WiA-LLM attains 74.2\% accuracy (27\%$\uparrow$ vs. base model) in forecasting game-state changes. In addition, we find that agents with WiA-LLM exhibit closer strategic behavior to expert players than purely reactive LLM agents, indicating more foresight-aware and expert-aligned decision-making.
Authors: Drago Plecko, Patrik Okanovic, Shreyas Havaldar, Torsten Hoefler, Elias Bareinboim
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) systems hold great promise for advancing various scientific disciplines, and are increasingly used in real-world applications. Despite their remarkable progress, further capabilities are expected in order to achieve more general types of intelligence. A critical distinction in this context is between factual knowledge, which can be evaluated against true or false answers (e.g., "what is the capital of England?"), and probabilistic knowledge, reflecting probabilistic properties of the real world (e.g., "what is the sex of a computer science graduate in the US?"). In this paper, our goal is to build a benchmark for understanding the capabilities of LLMs in terms of knowledge of probability distributions describing the real world. Given that LLMs are trained on vast amounts of text, it may be plausible that they internalize aspects of these distributions. Indeed, LLMs are touted as powerful universal approximators of real-world distributions. At the same time, classical results in statistics, known as curse of dimensionality, highlight fundamental challenges in learning distributions in high dimensions, challenging the notion of universal distributional learning. In this work, we develop the first benchmark to directly test this hypothesis, evaluating whether LLMs have access to empirical distributions describing real-world populations across domains such as economics, health, education, and social behavior. Our results demonstrate that LLMs perform poorly overall, and do not seem to internalize real-world statistics naturally. When interpreted in the context of Pearl's Causal Hierarchy (PCH), our benchmark demonstrates that language models do not contain knowledge on observational distributions (Layer 1 of PCH), and thus the Causal Hierarchy Theorem implies that interventional (Layer 2) and counterfactual (Layer 3) knowledge of these models is also limited.
Authors: Anisha Garg, Ganesh Venkatesh
Abstract: Group-relative Policy Optimization's (GRPO) simplicity makes it highly desirable for adapting LLMs to become experts at specific tasks. But this simplicity also makes it ill-specified as we seek to enhance RL training with richer, non-binary feedback. When using ordinal rewards to give partial credit, GRPO's simplicity starts to hurt, as its group-average baseline often assigns a positive advantage to failed trajectories and reinforces incorrect behavior. We introduce Correctness Relative Policy Optimization (CoRPO), a new formulation that solves this flaw. CoRPO uses an adaptive baseline that enforces a minimum quality threshold, ensuring failed solutions are never positively reinforced. Once the policy consistently meets this threshold, the baseline automatically transitions to a relative preference mode, pushing the model to find optimal solutions rather than just "acceptable" ones. We empirically validate CoRPO on a code verification task, where it demonstrates more stable convergence and better out-of-domain generalization. This work represents a critical step in our broader research program to enable LLMs to learn genuinely new capabilities through reinforcement learning. We achieve this by enabling LLMs to learn from rich, multi-dimensional feedback - progressing from binary to ordinal rewards in this work, and onward to denser, per-step supervision.
Authors: Borui Cai, Yao Zhao
Abstract: We propose a new perspective for approaching artificial general intelligence (AGI) through an intelligence foundation model (IFM). Unlike existing foundation models (FMs), which specialize in pattern learning within specific domains such as language, vision, or time series, IFM aims to acquire the underlying mechanisms of intelligence by learning directly from diverse intelligent behaviors. Vision, language, and other cognitive abilities are manifestations of intelligent behavior; learning from this broad range of behaviors enables the system to internalize the general principles of intelligence. Based on the fact that intelligent behaviors emerge from the collective dynamics of biological neural systems, IFM consists of two core components: a novel network architecture, termed the state neural network, which captures neuron-like dynamic processes, and a new learning objective, neuron output prediction, which trains the system to predict neuronal outputs from collective dynamics. The state neural network emulates the temporal dynamics of biological neurons, allowing the system to store, integrate, and process information over time, while the neuron output prediction objective provides a unified computational principle for learning these structural dynamics from intelligent behaviors. Together, these innovations establish a biologically grounded and computationally scalable foundation for building systems capable of generalization, reasoning, and adaptive learning across domains, representing a step toward truly AGI.
Authors: Enoch Hyunwook Kang, Hema Yoganarasimhan
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently enabled self-improving AI, i.e., AI that iteratively generates, evaluates, and refines its own outcomes. Recent studies have shown that self-improving AI focusing on prompt optimization can outperform state-of-the-art reinforcement-learning fine-tuned LLMs. Here, their `performance' is typically measured by query efficiency - the number of LLM-generated solution samples required to meet a certain performance threshold. However, in many societal applications, the primary limitation is not generating new solutions but evaluating them. For instance, evaluating an ad's effectiveness requires significant human feedback, which is far more costly and time-consuming than generating a candidate ad. To optimize for the evaluation efficiency objective, a natural approach is to extend Bayesian Optimization (BO), a framework proven optimal for evaluation efficiency, to the language domain. However, the difficulty of directly estimating suitable acquisition functions in LLMs' minds makes this extension challenging. This paper overcomes this challenge by proving that the combination of the simple and widely used Best-of-N selection strategy and simple textual gradients (i.e., textual edits from a critic model) statistically emulates the behavior of the gradients on the canonical UCB acquisition function, which induces optimal exploration in terms of evaluation efficiency. Based on this result, we propose TextGrad-Best-of-N Bayesian Optimization (T-BoN BO), a simple and eval-efficient language-space Bayesian optimization framework for AI self-improvement. We also empirically validate T-BoN BO by applying it to automated ad alignment tasks for persona distribution, demonstrating its superior performance compared to popular state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors: Yongnan Jin, Xurui Li, Feng Cao, Liucun Gao, Juanjuan Yao
Abstract: The integration of large language models (LLMs) into medical practice offers transformative potential, yet their real-world clinical applicability remains constrained by critical alignment issues: (1) a misalignment between static evaluation benchmarks and the dynamic cognitive demands of clinical practice, (2) challenges in adapting to continuously evolving, multi-source medical standards, and (3) the limited capacity of conventional reward models to reflect nuanced, multi-dimensional medical quality criteria. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MR-RML (Multidimensional Rubric-oriented Reward Model Learning) with GPRC (Geometric Projection Reference Constraints)-a novel alignment framework that structured medical standards into a multi-perspective matrix to guide both data generation and model optimization. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) a medical standard system that embeds domain-specific guidelines throughout the training pipeline; (2) an independent multi-dimensional reward model that decomposes evaluation criteria, transitioning from rule-based or LLM-based scoring to internalized reward modeling for better evaluation performance; and (3) geometric projection reference constraints that translate clinical cognitive logic into mathematical regularization, aligning scoring gradients with clinical reasoning and facilitating training with synthetically generated data. Extensive evaluations on the authoritative medical benchmark Healthbench demonstrate that our method significantly boosts the performance of the base Qwen-32B model, with improvements of 45% on the full subset and 85% on the hard subset. It achieves state-of-the-art results among open-source LLMs, scoring 62.7 (full) and 44.7 (hard), while also surpassing the majority of closed-source models.
Authors: Longfei Wang, Junyan Liu, Fan Zhang, Jiangwen Wei, Yuanhua Tang, Jie Sun, Xiaodong Luo
Abstract: Parallelization has emerged as a promising approach for accelerating MILP solving. However, the complexity of the branch-and-bound (B&B) framework and the numerous effective algorithm components in MILP solvers make it difficult to parallelize. In this study, a scalable parallel framework, N2N (a node-to-node framework that maps the B&B nodes to distributed computing nodes), was proposed to solve large-scale problems in a distributed memory computing environment. Both deterministic and nondeterministic modes are supported, and the framework is designed to be easily integrated with existing solvers. Regarding the deterministic mode, a novel sliding-window-based algorithm was designed and implemented to ensure that tasks are generated and solved in a deterministic order. Moreover, several advanced techniques, such as the utilization of CP search and general primal heuristics, have been developed to fully utilize distributed computing resources and capabilities of base solvers. Adaptive solving and data communication optimization were also investigated. A popular open-source MILP solver, SCIP, was integrated into N2N as the base solver, yielding N2N-SCIP. Extensive computational experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of N2N-SCIP compared to ParaSCIP, which is a state-of-the-art distributed parallel MILP solver under the UG framework. The nondeterministic N2N-SCIP achieves speedups of 22.52 and 12.71 with 1,000 MPI processes on the Kunpeng and x86 computing clusters, which is 1.98 and 2.08 times faster than ParaSCIP, respectively. In the deterministic mode, N2N-SCIP also shows significant performance improvements over ParaSCIP across different process numbers and computing clusters. To validate the generality of N2N, HiGHS, another open-source solver, was integrated into N2N. The related results are analyzed, and the requirements of N2N on base solvers are also concluded.
Authors: Yeonsung Jung, Trilok Padhi, Sina Shaham, Dipika Khullar, Joonhyun Jeong, Ninareh Mehrabi, Eunho Yang
Abstract: The rapid progress of large foundation models has accelerated the development of task-specialized agents across diverse domains. However, the effectiveness of agents remains tightly coupled with the quality of training data, while curating task-specific datasets remains costly and often infeasible in real-world scenarios. Recent work has explored self-improving agents that autonomously generate, refine, and re-train on their own trajectories. A prominent line of approaches further leverages preference optimization by pairing predicted trajectories with scarce ground-truth trajectories, enabling agents to learn directly from their own failures. While these methods outperform supervised fine-tuning, their heavy reliance on predicted trajectories under limited ground-truth supervision leaves them prone to overfitting. To address this, we propose a co-evolving agents framework in which a target agent improves jointly with an auxiliary failure agent. The failure agent learns through preference optimization over failure trajectories from both the target and itself, thereby generating hard negatives that are close to success yet remain failures. Incorporating these informative hard negatives into the target agent's optimization sharpens decision boundaries and enhances generalization. Our comprehensive analysis and experiments across benchmark datasets show that our method not only shows improved performance but also demonstrates that failures, instead of being used as-is, can be systematically transformed into structured and valuable learning signals in self-improving agents.
Authors: Jiawei Xu, Feng-Feng Wei, Wei-Neng Chen
Abstract: Automatic Heuristic Design (AHD) has gained traction as a promising solution for solving combinatorial optimization problems (COPs). Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged and become a promising approach to achieving AHD, but current LLM-based AHD research often only considers a single role. This paper proposes RoCo, a novel Multi-Agent Role-Based System, to enhance the diversity and quality of AHD through multi-role collaboration. RoCo coordinates four specialized LLM-guided agents-explorer, exploiter, critic, and integrator-to collaboratively generate high-quality heuristics. The explorer promotes long-term potential through creative, diversity-driven thinking, while the exploiter focuses on short-term improvements via conservative, efficiency-oriented refinements. The critic evaluates the effectiveness of each evolution step and provides targeted feedback and reflection. The integrator synthesizes proposals from the explorer and exploiter, balancing innovation and exploitation to drive overall progress. These agents interact in a structured multi-round process involving feedback, refinement, and elite mutations guided by both short-term and accumulated long-term reflections. We evaluate RoCo on five different COPs under both white-box and black-box settings. Experimental results demonstrate that RoCo achieves superior performance, consistently generating competitive heuristics that outperform existing methods including ReEvo and HSEvo, both in white-box and black-box scenarios. This role-based collaborative paradigm establishes a new standard for robust and high-performing AHD.
Authors: Dongchao Yang, Songxiang Liu, Disong Wang, Yuanyuan Wang, Guanglu Wan, Helen Meng
Abstract: Recent advances in Omni models have enabled unified multimodal perception and generation. However, most existing systems still exhibit rigid reasoning behaviors, either overthinking simple problems or failing to reason when necessary. To address this limitation, we propose Omni-AutoThink, a novel adaptive reasoning framework that dynamically adjusts the model's reasoning depth according to task difficulty. Our framework comprises two stages: (1) an Adaptive Supervised Fine-Tuning (Adaptive SFT) stage, which endows the Omni model with fundamental reasoning capability using large-scale reasoning-augmented data, and (2) an Adaptive Reinforcement Learning (Adaptive GRPO) stage, which optimizes reasoning behaviors based on task complexity and reward feedback. We further construct a comprehensive adaptive reasoning benchmark that spans text-only, text-audio, text-visual, and text-audio-visual modalities, providing both training and evaluation splits for multimodal reasoning assessment. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly improves adaptive reasoning performance compared to previous baselines. All benchmark data and code will be publicly released.
Authors: Saurav Prateek
Abstract: The advancement in Large Language Models has driven the creation of complex agentic systems, such as Deep Research Agents (DRAs), to overcome the limitations of static Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines in handling complex, multi-turn research tasks. This paper introduces the Static Deep Research Agent (Static-DRA), a novel solution built upon a configurable and hierarchical Tree-based static workflow. The core contribution is the integration of two user-tunable parameters, Depth and Breadth, which provide granular control over the research intensity. This design allows end-users to consciously balance the desired quality and comprehensiveness of the research report against the associated computational cost of Large Language Model (LLM) interactions. The agent's architecture, comprising Supervisor, Independent, and Worker agents, facilitates effective multi-hop information retrieval and parallel sub-topic investigation. We evaluate the Static-DRA against the established DeepResearch Bench using the RACE (Reference-based Adaptive Criteria-driven Evaluation) framework. Configured with a depth of 2 and a breadth of 5, and powered by the gemini-2.5-pro model, the agent achieved an overall score of 34.72. Our experiments validate that increasing the configured Depth and Breadth parameters results in a more in-depth research process and a correspondingly higher evaluation score. The Static-DRA offers a pragmatic and resource-aware solution, empowering users with transparent control over the deep research process. The entire source code, outputs and benchmark results are open-sourced at https://github.com/SauravP97/Static-Deep-Research/
Authors: Matteo Castiglioni, Alessandro Nuara, Giulia Romano, Giorgio Spadaro, Francesco Trov\`o, Nicola Gatti
Abstract: In online marketing, the advertisers aim to balance achieving high volumes and high profitability. The companies' business units address this tradeoff by maximizing the volumes while guaranteeing a minimum Return On Investment (ROI) level. Such a task can be naturally modeled as a combinatorial optimization problem subject to ROI and budget constraints that can be solved online. In this picture, the learner's uncertainty over the constraints' parameters plays a crucial role since the algorithms' exploration choices might lead to their violation during the entire learning process. Such violations represent a major obstacle to adopting online techniques in real-world applications. Thus, controlling the algorithms' exploration during learning is paramount to making humans trust online learning tools. This paper studies the nature of both optimization and learning problems. In particular, we show that the learning problem is inapproximable within any factor (unless P = NP) and provide a pseudo-polynomial-time algorithm to solve its discretized version. Subsequently, we prove that no online learning algorithm can violate the (ROI or budget) constraints a sublinear number of times during the learning process while guaranteeing a sublinear regret. We provide the $GCB$ algorithm that guarantees sublinear regret at the cost of a linear number of constraint violations and $GCB_{safe}$ that guarantees w.h.p. a constant upper bound on the number of constraint violations at the cost of a linear regret. Moreover, we designed $GCB_{safe}(\psi,\phi)$, which guarantees both sublinear regret and safety w.h.p. at the cost of accepting tolerances $\psi$ and $\phi$ in the satisfaction of the ROI and budget constraints, respectively. Finally, we provide experimental results to compare the regret and constraint violations of $GCB$, $GCB_{safe}$, and $GCB_{safe}(\psi,\phi)$.
Authors: Kun Chen, Lei Bai, Fenghua Ling, Peng Ye, Tao Chen, Hang Fan, Hao Chen, Yi Xiao, Kang Chen, Tao Han, Jing-Jia Luo, Wanli Ouyang
Abstract: The weather forecasting system is important for science and society, and significant achievements have been made in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to medium-range weather forecasting. However, existing AI-based weather forecasting models rely on analysis or reanalysis products from traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems as initial conditions for making predictions. The initial states are typically generated by traditional data assimilation components, which are computationally expensive and time-consuming. Here, by cyclic training to model the steady-state background error covariance and introducing the confidence matrix to characterize the quality of observations, we present an AI-based data assimilation model, i.e., Adas, for global weather variables. Further, we combine Adas with the advanced AI-based forecasting model (i.e., FengWu) to construct an end-to-end AI-based global weather forecasting system: FengWu-Adas. We demonstrate that Adas can assimilate global conventional observations to produce high-quality analysis, enabling the system to operate stably for long term. Moreover, the system can generate accurate end-to-end weather forecasts with comparable skill to those of the IFS, demonstrating the promising potential of data-driven approaches.
Authors: Gianluca Baldassarre, Richard J. Duro, Emilio Cartoni, Mehdi Khamassi, Alejandro Romero, Vieri Giuliano Santucci
Abstract: The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence is enabling the development of increasingly autonomous robots capable of operating beyond engineered factory settings and into the unstructured environments of human life. This shift raises a critical autonomy-alignment problem: how to ensure that a robot's autonomous learning focuses on acquiring knowledge and behaviours that serve human practical objectives while remaining aligned with broader human values (e.g., safety and ethics). This problem remains largely underexplored and lacks a unifying conceptual and formal framework. Here, we address one of its most challenging instances of the problem: open-ended learning (OEL) robots, which autonomously acquire new knowledge and skills through interaction with the environment, guided by intrinsic motivations and self-generated goals. We propose a computational framework, introduced qualitatively and then formalised, to guide the design of OEL architectures that balance autonomy with human control. At its core is the novel concept of purpose, which specifies what humans (designers or users) want the robot to learn, do, or avoid, independently of specific task domains. The framework decomposes the autonomy-alignment problem into four tractable sub-problems: the alignment of robot purposes (hardwired or learnt) with human purposes; the arbitration between multiple purposes; the grounding of abstract purposes into domain-specific goals; and the acquisition of competence to achieve those goals. The framework supports formal definitions of alignment across multiple cases and proofs of necessary and sufficient conditions under which alignment holds. Illustrative hypothetical scenarios showcase the applicability of the framework for guiding the development of purpose-aligned autonomous robots.
Authors: Hyunseo Kim, Hyeonseo Yang, Taekyung Kim, YoonSung Kim, Minsu Lee, Jin-Hwa Kim, Byoung-Tak Zhang
Abstract: View selection is critical in active 3D neural reconstruction as it impacts the contents of training set and resulting final output quality. Recent view selection strategies emphasize the visibility when evaluating model uncertainty in active 3D reconstruction. However, existing approaches estimate visibility only after the model fully converges, which has confined their application primarily to non-continuous active learning settings. This paper proposes Surface-Based Visibility field (SBV) that successfully estimates the visibility-guided uncertainty in continuous active 3D neural reconstruction. During learning neural implicit surfaces, our model learns rendering uncertainties and infers surface confidence values derived from signed distance functions. It then updates surface confidences using a voxel grid, robustly deducing the surface-based visibility for uncertainties. This approach captures uncertainties across all regions, whether well-defined surfaces or ambiguous areas, ensuring accurate visibility measurement in continuous active learning. Experiments on benchmark datasets-Tanks and Temples, BlendedMVS, Blender, DTU-and the newly proposed imbalanced viewpoint dataset (ImBView) show that view selection based on SBV-guided uncertainty improves performance by up to 11.6% over existing methods, highlighting its effectiveness in challenging reconstruction scenarios.
Authors: Futa Waseda, Antonio Tejero-de-Pablos, Isao Echizen
Abstract: Pre-trained vision-language (VL) models are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. However, existing defense methods primarily focus on image classification, overlooking two key aspects of VL tasks: multimodal attacks, where both image and text can be perturbed, and the one-to-many relationship of images and texts, where a single image can correspond to multiple textual descriptions and vice versa (1:N and N:1). This work is the first to explore defense strategies against multimodal attacks in VL tasks, whereas prior VL defense methods focus on vision robustness. We propose multimodal adversarial training (MAT), which incorporates adversarial perturbations in both image and text modalities during training, significantly outperforming existing unimodal defenses. Furthermore, we discover that MAT is limited by deterministic one-to-one (1:1) image-text pairs in VL training data. To address this, we conduct a comprehensive study on leveraging one-to-many relationships to enhance robustness, investigating diverse augmentation techniques. Our analysis shows that, for a more effective defense, augmented image-text pairs should be well-aligned, diverse, yet avoid distribution shift -- conditions overlooked by prior research. This work pioneers defense strategies against multimodal attacks, providing insights for building robust VLMs from both optimization and data perspectives. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/CyberAgentAI/multimodal-adversarial-training.
URLs: https://github.com/CyberAgentAI/multimodal-adversarial-training.
Authors: Anke Tang, Li Shen, Yong Luo, Enneng Yang, Han Hu, Lefei Zhang, Bo Du, Dacheng Tao
Abstract: Deep model fusion is an emerging technique that unifies the predictions or parameters of several deep neural networks into a single better-performing model in a cost-effective and data-efficient manner. Although a variety of deep model fusion techniques have been introduced, their evaluations tend to be inconsistent and often inadequate to validate their effectiveness and robustness. We present FusionBench, the first benchmark and a unified library designed specifically for deep model fusion. Our benchmark consists of multiple tasks, each with different settings of models and datasets. This variety allows us to compare fusion methods across different scenarios and model scales. Additionally, FusionBench serves as a unified library for easy implementation and testing of new fusion techniques. FusionBench is open source and actively maintained, with community contributions encouraged. Homepage https://github.com/tanganke/fusion_bench
Authors: Alberto Pirillo, Luca Colombo, Manuel Roveri
Abstract: Quantization is a pivotal technique for managing the growing computational and memory demands of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). By reducing the number of bits used to represent weights and activations (typically from 32-bit Floating-Point (FP) to 16-bit or 8-bit integers), quantization reduces memory footprint, energy consumption, and execution time of DNNs. However, most existing methods typically target DNN inference, while training still relies on FP operations, limiting applicability in environments where FP arithmetic is unavailable. To date, only one prior work has addressed integer-only training, and only for Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) architectures. This paper introduces NITRO-D, a novel framework for training deep integer-only Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that operate entirely in the integer domain for both training and inference. NITRO-D enables training of integer CNNs without requiring a separate quantization scheme. Specifically, it introduces a novel architecture that integrates multiple local-loss blocks, which include the proposed NITRO-Scaling layer and NITRO-ReLU activation function. The proposed framework also features a novel learning algorithm that employs local error signals and leverages IntegerSGD, an optimizer specifically designed for integer computations. NITRO-D is implemented as an open-source Python library. Extensive evaluations on state-of-the-art image recognition datasets demonstrate its effectiveness. For integer-only MLPs, NITRO-D improves test accuracy by up to +5.96% over the state-of-the-art. It also successfully trains integer-only CNNs, reducing memory requirements and energy consumption by up to 76.14% and 32.42%, respectively, compared to the traditional FP backpropagation algorithm.
Authors: Patrick Govoni, Pawel Romanczuk
Abstract: Navigation is believed to be controlled by at least two partially dissociable systems in the brain. The cognitive map informs an organism of its location and bearing, updated by integrating vestibular self-motion or predicting distances to landmarks. Route-based navigation, on the other hand, directly evaluate sequential movement decisions from immediate percepts. Here we demonstrate the sufficiency of visual route-based decision-making in a classic open field navigation task often assumed to require a cognitive map. Three distinct strategies emerge to robustly navigate to a hidden goal, each conferring contextual tradeoffs analyzed at both neural and behavioral scales, as well as qualitatively aligning with behavior observed across the biological spectrum. We propose reframing navigation from the bottom-up, through an egocentric episodic perspective without assuming online access to computationally expensive top-down representations, to better explain behavior under energetic or attentional constraints.
Authors: Kotaro Kikuchi, Ukyo Honda, Naoto Inoue, Mayu Otani, Edgar Simo-Serra, Kota Yamaguchi
Abstract: We introduce MarkupDM, a multimodal markup document model that represents graphic design as an interleaved multimodal document consisting of both markup language and images. Unlike existing holistic approaches that rely on an element-by-attribute grid representation, our representation accommodates variable-length elements, type-dependent attributes, and text content. Inspired by fill-in-the-middle training in code generation, we train the model to complete the missing part of a design document from its surrounding context, allowing it to treat various design tasks in a unified manner. Our model also supports image generation by predicting discrete image tokens through a specialized tokenizer with support for image transparency. We evaluate MarkupDM on three tasks, attribute value, image, and text completion, and demonstrate that it can produce plausible designs consistent with the given context. To further illustrate the flexibility of our approach, we evaluate our approach on a new instruction-guided design completion task where our instruction-tuned MarkupDM compares favorably to state-of-the-art image editing models, especially in textual completion. These findings suggest that multimodal language models with our document representation can serve as a versatile foundation for broad design automation.
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: Zhipeng Wang, Rui Sun, Elizabeth Lui, Vatsal Shah, Xihan Xiong, Jiahao Sun, Davide Crapis, William Knottenbelt
Abstract: Centralization enhances the efficiency of Artificial Intelligence (AI) but also introduces critical challenges, including single points of failure, inherent biases, data privacy risks, and scalability limitations. To address these issues, blockchain-based Decentralized Artificial Intelligence (DeAI) has emerged as a promising paradigm that leverages decentralization and transparency to improve the trustworthiness of AI systems. Despite rapid adoption in industry, the academic community lacks a systematic analysis of DeAI's technical foundations, opportunities, and challenges. This work presents the first Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) on DeAI, offering a formal definition, a taxonomy of existing solutions based on the AI lifecycle, and an in-depth investigation of the roles of blockchain in enabling secure and incentive-compatible collaboration. We further review security risks across the DeAI lifecycle and empirically evaluate representative mitigation techniques. Finally, we highlight open research challenges and future directions for advancing blockchain-based DeAI.
Authors: Huanqi Yang, Mingzhe Li, Mingda Han, Zhenjiang Li, Weitao Xu
Abstract: Embedded IoT system development is crucial for enabling seamless connectivity and functionality across a wide range of applications. However, such a complex process requires cross-domain knowledge of hardware and software and hence often necessitates direct developer involvement, making it labor-intensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. To address this challenge, this paper introduces EmbedGenius, the first fully automated software development platform for general-purpose embedded IoT systems. The key idea is to leverage the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) and embedded system expertise to automate the hardware-in-the-loop development process. The main methods include a component-aware library resolution method for addressing hardware dependencies, a library knowledge generation method that injects utility domain knowledge into LLMs, and an auto-programming method that ensures successful deployment. We evaluate EmbedGenius's performance across 71 modules and four mainstream embedded development platforms with over 350 IoT tasks. Experimental results show that EmbedGenius can generate codes with an accuracy of 95.7% and complete tasks with a success rate of 86.5%, surpassing human-in-the-loop baselines by 15.6%--37.7% and 25.5%--53.4%, respectively. We also show EmbedGenius's potential through case studies in environmental monitoring and remote control systems development.
Authors: Soroush Vahidi, Ioannis Koutis
Abstract: The Minimum Weighted Feedback Arc Set (MWFAS) problem is closely related to the task of deriving a global ranking from pairwise comparisons. Recent work by He et al. (ICML 2022) advanced the state of the art on ranking benchmarks using learning based methods, but did not examine the underlying connection to MWFAS. In this paper, we investigate this relationship and introduce efficient combinatorial algorithms for solving MWFAS as a means of addressing the ranking problem. Our experimental results show that these simple, learning free methods achieve substantially faster runtimes than recent learning based approaches, while also delivering competitive, and in many cases superior, ranking accuracy. These findings suggest that lightweight combinatorial techniques offer a scalable and effective alternative to deep learning for large scale ranking tasks.
Authors: Thomas F. Eisenmann, Andres Karjus, Mar Canet Sola, Levin Brinkmann, Bramantyo Ibrahim Supriyatno, Iyad Rahwan
Abstract: Generative AI's novel capacities raise questions about the future role of human expertise: does AI level the playing field between professional artists and laypeople, or does expertise enhance AI use? Do the cognitive skills experts make use of in analyzing and drawing visual art also transfer to using these new tools? This pre-registered study conducts experimental comparisons between 50 professional artists and a demographically matched sample of laypeople. Our interdisciplinary team developed two tasks involving image replication and creative image creation, assessing their copying accuracy and divergent thinking. We implemented a bespoke platform for the experiment, powered by a modern text-to-image AI. Results reveal artists produced more accurate copies and more divergent ideas than lay participants, highlighting a skill transfer of professional expertise - even to the confined space of generative AI. We also explored how well an exemplary vision-capable large language model (GPT-4o) would fare: on par in copying and slightly better on average than artists in the creative task, although never above best humans. These findings highlight the importance of integrating artistic skills with AI, suggesting a potential for collaborative synergy that could reshape creative industries and arts education.
Authors: Esther Villar-Rodriguez, Eneko Osaba, Izaskun Oregi, Sebasti\'an V. Romero, Juli\'an Ferreiro-V\'elez
Abstract: Quantum computing is poised to transform computational paradigms across science and industry. As the field evolves, it can benefit from established classical methodologies, including promising paradigms such as Transfer of Knowledge (ToK). This work serves as a brief, self-contained reference for ToK, unifying its core principles under a single formal framework. We introduce a joint notation that consolidates and extends prior work in Transfer Learning and Transfer Optimization, bridging traditionally separate research lines and enabling a common language for knowledge reuse. Building on this foundation, we classify existing ToK strategies and principles into a structured taxonomy that helps researchers position their methods within a broader conceptual map. We then extend key transfer protocols to quantum computing, introducing two novel use cases--reverse annealing and multitasking Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA)--alongside a sequential Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) approach that supports and validates prior findings. These examples highlight ToK's potential to improve performance and generalization in quantum algorithms. Finally, we outline challenges and opportunities for integrating ToK into quantum computing, emphasizing its role in reducing resource demands and accelerating problem-solving. This work lays the groundwork for future synergies between classical and quantum computing through a shared, transferable knowledge framework.
Authors: Haibo Wang, Jun Huang, Lutfu Sua, Bahram Alidaee
Abstract: The increasing focus on predicting renewable energy production aligns with advancements in deep learning (DL). The inherent variability of renewable sources and the complexity of prediction methods require robust approaches, such as DL models, in the renewable energy sector. DL models are preferred over traditional machine learning (ML) because they capture complex, nonlinear relationships in renewable energy datasets. This study examines key factors influencing DL technique accuracy, including sampling and hyperparameter optimization, by comparing various methods and training and test ratios within a DL framework. Seven machine learning methods, LSTM, Stacked LSTM, CNN, CNN-LSTM, DNN, Time-Distributed MLP (TD-MLP), and Autoencoder (AE), are evaluated using a dataset combining weather and photovoltaic power output data from 12 locations. Regularization techniques such as early stopping, neuron dropout, L1 and L2 regularization are applied to address overfitting. The results demonstrate that the combination of early stopping, dropout, and L1 regularization provides the best performance to reduce overfitting in the CNN and TD-MLP models with larger training set, while the combination of early stopping, dropout, and L2 regularization is the most effective to reduce the overfitting in CNN-LSTM and AE models with smaller training set.
Authors: Yilin Geng, Haonan Li, Honglin Mu, Xudong Han, Timothy Baldwin, Omri Abend, Eduard Hovy, Lea Frermann
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed with hierarchical instruction schemes, where certain instructions (e.g., system-level directives) are expected to take precedence over others (e.g., user messages). Yet, we lack a systematic understanding of how effectively these hierarchical control mechanisms work. We introduce a systematic evaluation framework based on constraint prioritization to assess how well LLMs enforce instruction hierarchies. Our experiments across six state-of-the-art LLMs reveal that models struggle with consistent instruction prioritization, even for simple formatting conflicts. We find that the widely-adopted system/user prompt separation fails to establish a reliable instruction hierarchy, and models exhibit strong inherent biases toward certain constraint types regardless of their priority designation. Interestingly, we also find that societal hierarchy framings (e.g., authority, expertise, consensus) show stronger influence on model behavior than system/user roles, suggesting that pretraining-derived social structures function as latent behavioral priors with potentially greater impact than post-training guardrails.
Authors: Hyeonjeong Ha, Xiaomeng Jin, Jeonghwan Kim, Jiateng Liu, Zhenhailong Wang, Khanh Duy Nguyen, Ansel Blume, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang, Heng Ji
Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) models enable rapid concept design, making them widely used in AI-driven design. While recent studies focus on generating semantic and stylistic variations of given design concepts, functional coherence--the integration of multiple affordances into a single coherent concept--remains largely overlooked. In this paper, we introduce SYNTHIA, a framework for generating novel, functionally coherent designs based on desired affordances. Our approach leverages a hierarchical concept ontology that decomposes concepts into parts and affordances, serving as a crucial building block for functionally coherent design. We also develop a curriculum learning scheme based on our ontology that contrastively fine-tunes T2I models to progressively learn affordance composition while maintaining visual novelty. To elaborate, we (i) gradually increase affordance distance, guiding models from basic concept-affordance association to complex affordance compositions that integrate parts of distinct affordances into a single, coherent form, and (ii) enforce visual novelty by employing contrastive objectives to push learned representations away from existing concepts. Experimental results show that SYNTHIA outperforms state-of-the-art T2I models, demonstrating absolute gains of 25.1% and 14.7% for novelty and functional coherence in human evaluation, respectively.
Authors: Yasuhiro Fujita
Abstract: Experience replay is a key component in reinforcement learning for stabilizing learning and improving sample efficiency. Its typical implementation samples transitions with replacement from a replay buffer. In contrast, in supervised learning with a fixed dataset, it is a common practice to shuffle the dataset every epoch and consume data sequentially, which is called random reshuffling (RR). RR enjoys theoretically better convergence properties and has been shown to outperform with-replacement sampling empirically. To leverage the benefits of RR in reinforcement learning, we propose sampling methods that extend RR to experience replay, both in uniform and prioritized settings, and analyze their properties via theoretical analysis and simulations. We evaluate our sampling methods on Atari benchmarks, demonstrating their effectiveness in deep reinforcement learning. Code is available at https://github.com/pfnet-research/errr.
Authors: Gorjan Radevski, Teodora Popordanoska, Matthew B. Blaschko, Tinne Tuytelaars
Abstract: Audio-visual understanding is a rapidly evolving field that seeks to integrate and interpret information from both auditory and visual modalities. Despite recent advances in multi-modal learning, existing benchmarks often suffer from strong visual bias -- when answers can be inferred from visual data alone -- and provide only aggregate scores that conflate multiple sources of error. This makes it difficult to determine whether models struggle with visual understanding, audio interpretation, or audio-visual alignment. In this work, we introduce DAVE: Diagnostic Audio Visual Evaluation, a novel benchmark dataset designed to systematically evaluate audio-visual models across controlled settings. DAVE alleviates existing limitations by (i) ensuring both modalities are necessary to answer correctly and (ii) decoupling evaluation into atomic subcategories. Our detailed analysis of state-of-the-art models reveals specific failure modes and provides targeted insights for improvement. By offering this standardized diagnostic framework, we aim to facilitate more robust development of audio-visual models. Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/gorjanradevski/dave Code: https://github.com/gorjanradevski/dave
URLs: https://huggingface.co/datasets/gorjanradevski/dave, https://github.com/gorjanradevski/dave
Authors: Boshen Xu, Yuting Mei, Xinbi Liu, Sipeng Zheng, Qin Jin
Abstract: Egocentric video-language pretraining has significantly advanced video representation learning. Humans perceive and interact with a fully 3D world, developing spatial awareness that extends beyond text-based understanding. However, most previous works learn from 1D text or 2D visual cues, such as bounding boxes, which inherently lack 3D understanding. To bridge this gap, we introduce EgoDTM, an Egocentric Depth- and Text-aware Model, jointly trained through large-scale 3D-aware video pretraining and video-text contrastive learning. EgoDTM incorporates a lightweight 3D-aware decoder to efficiently learn 3D-awareness from pseudo depth maps generated by depth estimation models. To further facilitate 3D-aware video pretraining, we enrich the original brief captions with hand-object visual cues by organically combining several foundation models. Extensive experiments demonstrate EgoDTM's superior performance across diverse downstream tasks, highlighting its superior 3D-aware visual understanding. Code: https://github.com/xuboshen/EgoDTM.
Authors: Mohanakrishnan Hariharan
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved their capability in performing NLP tasks. However, deeper semantic understanding, contextual coherence, and more subtle reasoning are still difficult to obtain. The paper discusses state-of-the-art methodologies that advance LLMs with more advanced NLU techniques, such as semantic parsing, knowledge integration, and contextual reinforcement learning. We analyze the use of structured knowledge graphs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and fine-tuning strategies that match models with human-level understanding. Furthermore, we address the incorporation of transformer-based architectures, contrastive learning, and hybrid symbolic-neural methods that address problems like hallucinations, ambiguity, and inconsistency in the factual perspectives involved in performing complex NLP tasks, such as question-answering text summarization and dialogue generation. Our findings show the importance of semantic precision for enhancing AI-driven language systems and suggest future research directions to bridge the gap between statistical language models and true natural language understanding.
Authors: Changsheng Lv, Zijian Fu, Mengshi Qi
Abstract: In this paper, we propose Robo-SGG, a plug-and-play module for robust scene graph generation (SGG). Unlike standard SGG, the robust scene graph generation aims to perform inference on a diverse range of corrupted images, with the core challenge being the domain shift between the clean and corrupted images. Existing SGG methods suffer from degraded performance due to shifted visual features (e.g., corruption interference or occlusions). To obtain robust visual features, we leverage layout information, representing the global structure of an image, which is robust to domain shift, to enhance the robustness of SGG methods under corruption. Specifically, we employ Instance Normalization (IN) to alleviate the domain-specific variations and recover the robust structural features (i.e., the positional and semantic relationships among objects) by the proposed Layout-Oriented Restitution. Furthermore, under corrupted images, we introduce a Layout-Embedded Encoder (LEE) that adaptively fuses layout and visual features via a gating mechanism, enhancing the robustness of positional and semantic representations for objects and predicates. Note that our proposed Robo-SGG module is designed as a plug-and-play component, which can be easily integrated into any baseline SGG model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that by integrating the state-of-the-art method into our proposed Robo-SGG, we achieve relative improvements of 6.3%, 11.1%, and 8.0% in mR@50 for PredCls, SGCls, and SGDet tasks on the VG-C benchmark, respectively, and achieve new state-of-the-art performance in the corruption scene graph generation benchmark (VG-C and GQA-C). We will release our source code and model.
Authors: Ziyi Zhang, Zhen Sun, Zongmin Zhang, Zifan Peng, Yuemeng Zhao, Zichun Wang, Zeren Luo, Ruiting Zuo, Xinlei He
Abstract: The visually impaired population faces significant challenges in daily activities. While prior works employ vision language models for assistance, most focus on static content and cannot address real-time perception needs in complex environments. Recent VideoLLMs enable real-time vision and speech interaction, offering promising potential for assistive tasks. In this work, we conduct the first study evaluating their effectiveness in supporting daily life for visually impaired individuals. We first conducted a user survey with visually impaired participants to design the benchmark VisAssistDaily for daily life evaluation. Using VisAssistDaily, we evaluate popular VideoLLMs and find GPT-4o achieves the highest task success rate. We further conduct a user study to reveal concerns about hazard perception. To address this, we propose SafeVid, an environment-awareness dataset, and fine-tune VITA-1.5, improving risk recognition accuracy from 25.00% to 76.00%.We hope this work provides valuable insights and inspiration for future research in this field.
Authors: Ratnadira Widyasari, Martin Weyssow, Ivana Clairine Irsan, Han Wei Ang, Frank Liauw, Eng Lieh Ouh, Lwin Khin Shar, Hong Jin Kang, David Lo
Abstract: Detecting vulnerabilities in source code remains a critical yet challenging task, especially when benign and vulnerable functions share significant similarities. In this work, we introduce VulTrial, a courtroom-inspired multi-agent framework designed to identify vulnerable code and to provide explanations. It employs four role-specific agents, which are security researcher, code author, moderator, and review board. Using GPT-4o as the base LLM, VulTrial almost doubles the efficacy of prior best-performing baselines. Additionally, we show that role-specific instruction tuning with small quantities of data significantly further boosts VulTrial's efficacy. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of VulTrial across different LLMs, including an open-source, in-house-deployable model (LLaMA-3.1-8B), as well as the high quality of its generated explanations and its ability to uncover multiple confirmed zero-day vulnerabilities in the wild.
Authors: Oliver Schacht, Biwei Huang
Abstract: Kernel-based conditional independence (KCI) testing is a powerful nonparametric method commonly employed in causal discovery tasks. Despite its flexibility and statistical reliability, cubic computational complexity limits its application to large datasets. To address this computational bottleneck, we propose \textit{FastKCI}, a scalable and parallelizable kernel-based conditional independence test that utilizes a mixture-of-experts approach inspired by embarrassingly parallel inference techniques for Gaussian processes. By partitioning the dataset based on a Gaussian mixture model over the conditioning variables, FastKCI conducts local KCI tests in parallel, aggregating the results using an importance-weighted sampling scheme. Experiments on synthetic datasets and benchmarks on real-world production data validate that FastKCI maintains the statistical power of the original KCI test while achieving substantial computational speedups. FastKCI thus represents a practical and efficient solution for conditional independence testing in causal inference on large-scale data.
Authors: Hany Abdulsamad, Sahel Iqbal, Simo S\"arkk\"a
Abstract: Optimal decision-making under partial observability requires agents to balance reducing uncertainty (exploration) against pursuing immediate objectives (exploitation). In this paper, we introduce a novel policy optimization framework for continuous partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) that explicitly addresses this challenge. Our method casts policy learning as probabilistic inference in a non-Markovian Feynman--Kac model that inherently captures the value of information gathering by anticipating future observations, without requiring suboptimal approximations or handcrafted heuristics. To optimize policies under this model, we develop a nested sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithm that efficiently estimates a history-dependent policy gradient under samples from the optimal trajectory distribution induced by the POMDP. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm across standard continuous POMDP benchmarks, where existing methods struggle to act under uncertainty.
Authors: Xinran Gu, Kaifeng Lyu, Jiazheng Li, Jingzhao Zhang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically trained on data mixtures: most data come from web scrapes, while a small portion is curated from high-quality sources with dense domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we show that when training LLMs on such data mixtures, knowledge acquisition from knowledge-dense datasets, unlike training exclusively on knowledge-dense data (arXiv:2404.05405), does not always follow a smooth scaling law but can exhibit phase transitions with respect to the mixing ratio and model size. Through controlled experiments on a synthetic biography dataset mixed with web-scraped data, we demonstrate that: (1) as we increase the model size to a critical value, the model suddenly transitions from memorizing very few to most of the biographies; (2) below a critical mixing ratio, the model memorizes almost nothing even with extensive training, but beyond this threshold, it rapidly memorizes more biographies. We attribute these phase transitions to a capacity allocation phenomenon: a model with bounded capacity must act like a knapsack problem solver to minimize the overall test loss, and the optimal allocation across datasets can change discontinuously as the model size or mixing ratio varies. We formalize this intuition in an information-theoretic framework and reveal that these phase transitions are predictable, with the critical mixing ratio following a power-law relationship with the model size. Our findings highlight a concrete case where a good mixing recipe for large models may not be optimal for small models, and vice versa.
Authors: Chenyang Shao, Xinyang Liu, Yutang Lin, Fengli Xu, Yong Li
Abstract: Chain-of-thought has been proven essential for enhancing the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it also leads to high computational costs. Recent advances have explored the method to route queries among multiple models and proved it as a promising approach. However, previous works directly operate at the task level, i.e., assigning user queries to suitable LLMs, which does not allow hybrid LLMs to truly collaborate on finer-grained sub-tasks. Collaboration at the level of intermediate reasoning steps (thoughts) could enable more efficient coordination, but it also poses significant challenges for router scheduling, placing immense demands on the quality of task decomposition and the precision of the router. To address this, we propose R2-Reasoner, a novel framework centered around a Reinforced Model Router designed to efficiently scale LLM reasoning. This router orchestrates collaboration across nine heterogeneous models, whose parameter scales range from less than 1B to hundreds of billions, by first breaking down a complex query into subtasks with a decomposer, and then assigning each subtask to the optimal model with a subtask allocator, balancing performance with cost. Training this router involves a two-stage alternating process for the decomposer and the allocator, integrating supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning to enable effective self-supervised refinement. Extensive experiments across six challenging reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that R2-Reasoner reduces API costs by 84.46% compared with state-of-the-art baselines while maintaining competitive reasoning accuracy. Our framework paves the way for the development of more scalable and efficient reasoning systems. Our code is open-source at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/R2_Reasoner.
Authors: Aviad Susman, Baihan Lin, Mayte Su\'arez-Fari\~nas, Joseph T Colonel
Abstract: Neighbor-based methods are a natural alternative to linear prediction for tabular data when relationships between inputs and targets exhibit complexity such as nonlinearity, periodicity, or heteroscedasticity. Yet in deep learning on unstructured data, nonparametric neighbor-based approaches are rarely implemented in lieu of simple linear heads. This is primarily due to the ability of systems equipped with linear regression heads to co-learn internal representations along with the linear head's parameters. To unlock the full potential of neighbor-based methods in neural networks we introduce SoftStep, a parametric module that learns sparse instance-wise similarity measures directly from data. When integrated with existing neighbor-based methods, SoftStep enables regression models that consistently outperform linear heads across diverse architectures, domains, and training scenarios. We focus on regression tasks, where we show theoretically that neighbor-based prediction with a mean squared error objective constitutes a metric learning algorithm that induces well-structured embedding spaces. We then demonstrate analytically and empirically that this representational structure translates into superior performance when combined with the sparse, instance-wise similarity measures introduced by SoftStep. Beyond regression, SoftStep is a general method for learning instance-wise similarity in deep neural networks, with broad applicability to attention mechanisms, metric learning, representational alignment, and related paradigms.
Authors: Andreas Schlaginhaufen, Reda Ouhamma, Maryam Kamgarpour
Abstract: We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative preference queries to identify the underlying reward while ensuring theoretical guarantees. We propose a meta-algorithm based on randomized exploration, which avoids the computational challenges associated with optimistic approaches and remains tractable. We establish both regret and last-iterate guarantees under mild reinforcement learning oracle assumptions. To improve query complexity, we introduce and analyze an improved algorithm that collects batches of trajectory pairs and applies optimal experimental design to select informative comparison queries. The batch structure also enables parallelization of preference queries, which is relevant in practical deployment as feedback can be gathered concurrently. Empirical evaluation confirms that the proposed method is competitive with reward-based reinforcement learning while requiring a small number of preference queries.
Authors: Shuai Wang, Zhenhua Liu, Jiaheng Wei, Xuanwu Yin, Dong Li, Emad Barsoum
Abstract: We present Athena-PRM, a multimodal process reward model (PRM) designed to evaluate the reward score for each step in solving complex reasoning problems. Developing high-performance PRMs typically demands significant time and financial investment, primarily due to the necessity for step-level annotations of reasoning steps. Conventional automated labeling methods, such as Monte Carlo estimation, often produce noisy labels and incur substantial computational costs. To efficiently generate high-quality process-labeled data, we propose leveraging prediction consistency between weak and strong completers as a criterion for identifying reliable process labels. Remarkably, Athena-PRM demonstrates outstanding effectiveness across various scenarios and benchmarks with just 5,000 samples. Furthermore, we also develop two effective strategies to improve the performance of PRMs: ORM initialization and up-sampling for negative data. We validate our approach in three specific scenarios: verification for test time scaling, direct evaluation of reasoning step correctness, and reward ranked fine-tuning. Our Athena-PRM consistently achieves superior performance across multiple benchmarks and scenarios. Notably, when using Qwen2.5-VL-7B as the policy model, Athena-PRM enhances performance by 10.2 points on WeMath and 7.1 points on MathVista for test time scaling. Furthermore, Athena-PRM sets the state-of-the-art (SoTA) results in VisualProcessBench and outperforms the previous SoTA by 3.9 F1-score, showcasing its robust capability to accurately assess the correctness of the reasoning step. Additionally, utilizing Athena-PRM as the reward model, we develop Athena-7B with reward ranked fine-tuning and outperforms baseline with a significant margin on five benchmarks.
Authors: Mohammad Taufeeque, Aaron David Tucker, Adam Gleave, Adri\`a Garriga-Alonso
Abstract: We partially reverse-engineer a convolutional recurrent neural network (RNN) trained with model-free reinforcement learning to play the box-pushing game Sokoban. We find that the RNN stores future moves (plans) as activations in particular channels of the hidden state, which we call path channels. A high activation in a particular location means that, when a box is in that location, it will get pushed in the channel's assigned direction. We examine the convolutional kernels between path channels and find that they encode the change in position resulting from each possible action, thus representing part of a learned transition model. The RNN constructs plans by starting at the boxes and goals. These kernels extend activations in path channels forwards from boxes and backwards from the goal. Negative values are placed in channels at obstacles. This causes the extension kernels to propagate the negative value in reverse, thus pruning the last few steps and letting an alternative plan emerge; a form of backtracking. Our work shows that, a precise understanding of the plan representation allows us to directly understand the bidirectional planning-like algorithm learned by model-free training in more familiar terms.
Authors: Shizhe Cai, Zeya Yin, Jayadeep Jacob, Fabio Ramos
Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) often struggles with complex robotic manipulation tasks due to low sample efficiency and biased value estimation. Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) improves efficiency by leveraging environment dynamics, with prior work integrating Model Predictive Control (MPC) to enhance policy robustness through online trajectory optimization. However, existing MBRL approaches still suffer from high model bias, task-specific cost function design, and significant computational overhead. To address these challenges, we propose Q-guided Stein Variational Model Predictive Actor-Critic (Q-STAC)--a unified framework that bridges Bayesian MPC and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC). Q-STAC employs Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) to iteratively optimize action sequences sampled from a learned prior distribution guided by Q-values, thereby eliminating manual cost-function engineering. By performing short-horizon model-predictive rollouts, Q-STAC reduces cumulative prediction errors, improves training stability and reduces computational complexity. Experiments on simulated particle navigation, diverse robotic manipulation tasks, and a real-world fruit-picking scenario demonstrate that Q-STAC consistently achieves superior sample efficiency, stability, and overall performance compared to both model-free and model-based baselines.
Authors: Yuren Hao, Xiang Wan, ChengXiang Zhai
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a systematic framework beyond conventional method to assess LLMs' mathematical-reasoning robustness by stress-testing them on advanced math problems that are mathematically equivalent but with linguistic and parametric variation. These transformations allow us to measure the sensitivity of LLMs to non-mathematical perturbations, thereby enabling a more accurate evaluation of their mathematical reasoning capabilities. Using this new evaluation methodology, we created PutnamGAP, a new benchmark dataset with multiple mathematically-equivalent variations of competition-level math problems. With the new dataset, we evaluate multiple families of representative LLMs and examine their robustness. Across 18 commercial and open-source models we observe sharp performance degradation on the variants. OpenAI's flagship reasoning model, O3, scores 51.5% on the originals but drops by 4.7 percentage points on surface-renaming variants, and by 12.9 percentage points on parametric variants, while smaller models fare far worse. Overall, the results show that the proposed new evaluation methodology is effective for deepening our understanding of the robustness of LLMs and generating new insights for further improving their mathematical reasoning capabilities.
Authors: Chenhe Dong, Shaowei Yao, Pengkun Jiao, Jianhui Yang, Yiming Jin, Zerui Huang, Xiaojiang Zhou, Dan Ou, Haihong Tang, Bo Zheng
Abstract: Query-product relevance prediction is a core task in e-commerce search. BERT-based models excel at semantic matching but lack complex reasoning capabilities. While Large Language Models (LLMs) are explored, most still use discriminative fine-tuning or distill to smaller models for deployment. We propose a framework to directly deploy LLMs for this task, addressing key challenges: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) error accumulation, discriminative hallucination, and deployment feasibility. Our framework, TaoSR1, involves three stages: (1) Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with CoT to instill reasoning; (2) Offline sampling with a pass@N strategy and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to improve generation quality; and (3) Difficulty-based dynamic sampling with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to mitigate discriminative hallucination. Additionally, post-CoT processing and a cumulative probability-based partitioning method enable efficient online deployment. TaoSR1 significantly outperforms baselines on offline datasets and achieves substantial gains in online side-by-side human evaluations, introducing a novel paradigm for applying CoT reasoning to relevance classification.
Authors: Zhendong Yang, Jie Wang, Liansong Zong, Xiaorong Liu, Quan Qian, Shiqian Chen
Abstract: Few-Shot Class-Incremental Fault Diagnosis (FSC-FD), which aims to continuously learn from new fault classes with only a few samples without forgetting old ones, is critical for real-world industrial systems. However, this challenging task severely amplifies the issues of catastrophic forgetting of old knowledge and overfitting on scarce new data. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel framework built upon Dual-Granularity Representations, termed the Dual-Granularity Guidance Network (DGGN). Our DGGN explicitly decouples feature learning into two parallel streams: 1) a fine-grained representation stream, which utilizes a novel Multi-Order Interaction Aggregation module to capture discriminative, class-specific features from the limited new samples. 2) a coarse-grained representation stream, designed to model and preserve general, class-agnostic knowledge shared across all fault types. These two representations are dynamically fused by a multi-semantic cross-attention mechanism, where the stable coarse-grained knowledge guides the learning of fine-grained features, preventing overfitting and alleviating feature conflicts. To further mitigate catastrophic forgetting, we design a Boundary-Aware Exemplar Prioritization strategy. Moreover, a decoupled Balanced Random Forest classifier is employed to counter the decision boundary bias caused by data imbalance. Extensive experiments on the TEP benchmark and a real-world MFF dataset demonstrate that our proposed DGGN achieves superior diagnostic performance and stability compared to state-of-the-art FSC-FD approaches. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/MentaY/DGGN
Authors: Siyu Zhang, Kenneth Mcmillan
Abstract: Faithfulness metrics such as insertion and deletion evaluate how feature removal affects model outputs but overlook whether explanations preserve the computational pathway the network actually uses. We show that external metrics can be maximized through alternative pathways -- perturbations that reroute computation via different feature detectors while preserving output behavior. To address this, we propose activation preservation as a tractable proxy for preserving computational pathways We introduce Faithfulness-guided Ensemble Interpretation (FEI), which jointly optimizes external faithfulness (via ensemble quantile optimization of insertion/deletion curves) and internal faithfulness (via selective gradient clipping). Across VGG and ResNet on ImageNet and CUB-200-2011, FEI achieves state-of-the-art insertion/deletion scores while maintaining significantly lower activation deviation, showing that both external and internal faithfulness are essential for reliable explanations.
Authors: Jasmine Shone, Zhening Li, Shaden Alshammari, Mark Hamilton, William Freeman
Abstract: The Information Contrastive (I-Con) framework revealed that over 23 representation learning methods implicitly minimize KL divergence between data and learned distributions that encode similarities between data points. However, a KL-based loss may be misaligned with the true objective, and properties of KL divergence such as asymmetry and unboundedness may create optimization challenges. We present Beyond I-Con, a framework that enables systematic discovery of novel loss functions by exploring alternative statistical divergences. Key findings: (1) on unsupervised clustering of DINO-ViT embeddings, we achieve state-of-the-art results by modifying the PMI algorithm to use total variation (TV) distance; (2) supervised contrastive learning with Euclidean distance as the feature space metric is improved by replacing the standard loss function with Jenson-Shannon divergence (JSD); (3) on dimensionality reduction, we achieve superior qualitative results and better performance on downstream tasks than SNE by replacing KL with a bounded $f$-divergence. Our results highlight the importance of considering divergence choices in representation learning optimization.
Authors: Sai Suresh Macharla Vasu, Ivaxi Sheth, Hui-Po Wang, Ruta Binkyte, Mario Fritz
Abstract: The adoption of large language models (LLMs) is transforming the peer review process, from assisting reviewers in writing more detailed evaluations to generating entire reviews automatically. While these capabilities offer exciting opportunities, they also raise critical concerns about fairness and reliability. In this paper, we investigate bias in LLM-generated peer reviews by conducting controlled experiments on sensitive metadata, including author affiliation and gender. Our analysis consistently shows affiliation bias favoring institutions highly ranked on common academic rankings. Additionally, we find some gender preferences, which, even though subtle in magnitude, have the potential to compound over time. Notably, we uncover implicit biases that become more evident with token-based soft ratings.
Authors: Baiyu Chen, Benjamin Tag, Hao Xue, Daniel Angus, Flora Salim
Abstract: Regulatory limits on explicit targeting have not eliminated algorithmic profiling on the Web, as optimisation systems still adapt ad delivery to users' private attributes. The widespread availability of powerful zero-shot multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) has dramatically lowered the barrier for exploiting these latent signals for adversarial inference. We investigate this emerging societal risk, specifically how adversaries can now exploit these signals to reverse-engineer private attributes from ad exposure alone. We introduce a novel pipeline that leverages LLMs as adversarial inference engines to perform natural language profiling. Applying this method to a longitudinal dataset comprising over 435,000 ad impressions collected from 891 users, we conducted a large-scale study to assess the feasibility and precision of inferring private attributes from passive online ad observations. Our results demonstrate that off-the-shelf LLMs can accurately reconstruct complex user private attributes, including party preference, employment status, and education level, consistently outperforming strong census-based priors and matching or exceeding human social perception, while operating at only a fraction of the cost (223$\times$ lower) and time (52$\times$ faster) required by humans. Critically, actionable profiling is feasible even within short observation windows, indicating that prolonged tracking is not a prerequisite for a successful attack. These findings provide the first empirical evidence that ad streams serve as a high-fidelity digital footprint, enabling off-platform profiling that inherently bypasses current platform safeguards, highlighting a systemic vulnerability in the ad ecosystem and the urgent need for responsible web AI governance in the generative AI era. The code is available at https://github.com/Breezelled/when-ads-become-profiles.
URLs: https://github.com/Breezelled/when-ads-become-profiles.
Authors: Wei Liu, Eleni Chatzi, Zhilu Lai
Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) offer a structured and interpretable framework for multivariate function approximation by composing univariate transformations through additive or multiplicative aggregation. This paper establishes theoretical convergence guarantees for KANs when the univariate components are represented by B-splines. We prove that both additive and hybrid additive-multiplicative KANs attain the minimax-optimal convergence rate $O(n^{-2r/(2r+1)})$ for functions in Sobolev spaces of smoothness $r$. We further derive guidelines for selecting the optimal number of knots in the B-splines. The theory is supported by simulation studies that confirm the predicted convergence rates. These results provide a theoretical foundation for using KANs in nonparametric regression and highlight their potential as a structured alternative to existing methods.
Authors: Ehsan Sharifian, Saber Salehkaleybar, Negar Kiyavash
Abstract: We study the problem of causal structure learning from a combination of observational and interventional data generated by a linear non-Gaussian structural equation model that might contain cycles. Recent results show that using mere observational data identifies the causal graph only up to a permutation-equivalence class. We obtain a combinatorial characterization of this class by showing that each graph in an equivalence class corresponds to a perfect matching in a bipartite graph. This bipartite representation allows us to analyze how interventions modify or constrain the matchings. Specifically, we show that each atomic intervention reveals one edge of the true matching and eliminates all incompatible causal graphs. Consequently, we formalize the optimal experiment design task as an adaptive stochastic optimization problem over the set of equivalence classes with a natural reward function that quantifies how many graphs are eliminated from the equivalence class by an intervention. We show that this reward function is adaptive submodular and provide a greedy policy with a provable near-optimal performance guarantee. A key technical challenge is to efficiently estimate the reward function without having to explicitly enumerate all the graphs in the equivalence class. We propose a sampling-based estimator using random matchings and analyze its bias and concentration behavior. Our simulation results show that performing a small number of interventions guided by our stochastic optimization framework recovers the true underlying causal structure.
Authors: Mahindra Singh Rautela, Alexander Most, Siddharth Mansingh, Bradley C. Love, Ayan Biswas, Diane Oyen, Earl Lawrence
Abstract: We introduce MORPH, a modality-agnostic, autoregressive foundation model for partial differential equations (PDEs). MORPH is built on a convolutional vision transformer backbone that seamlessly handles heterogeneous spatiotemporal datasets of varying data modality (1D--3D) at different resolutions, and multiple fields with mixed scalar and vector components. The architecture combines (i) component-wise convolution, which jointly processes scalar and vector channels to capture local interactions, (ii) inter-field cross-attention, which models and selectively propagates information between different physical fields, (iii) axial attentions, which factorize full spatiotemporal self-attention along individual spatial and temporal axes to reduce computational burden while retaining expressivity. We pretrain multiple model variants on a diverse collection of heterogeneous PDE datasets and evaluate transfer to a range of downstream prediction tasks. Using both full-model fine-tuning and parameter-efficient low-rank adapters (LoRA), MORPH outperforms models trained from scratch. Across extensive evaluations, MORPH matches or surpasses strong baselines and recent state-of-the-art models. Collectively, these capabilities present a flexible and powerful backbone for learning from the heterogeneous and multimodal nature of scientific observations, charting a path toward scalable and data-efficient scientific machine learning. The source code, datasets, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/lanl/MORPH.
Authors: Yapeng Mi, Hengli Li, Yanpeng Zhao, Chenxi Li, Huimin Wu, Xiaojian Ma, Song-Chun Zhu, Ying Nian Wu, Qing Li
Abstract: Reasoning-augmented machine learning systems have shown improved performance in various domains, including image generation. However, existing reasoning-based methods for image generation either restrict reasoning to a single modality (image or text) or rely on high-quality reasoning data for fine-tuning. To tackle these limitations, we propose MILR, a test-time method that jointly reasons over image and text in a unified latent vector space. Reasoning in MILR is performed by searching through vector representations of discrete image and text tokens. Practically, this is implemented via the policy gradient method, guided by an image quality critic. We instantiate MILR within the unified multimodal understanding and generation (MUG) framework that natively supports language reasoning before image synthesis and thus facilitates cross-modal reasoning. The intermediate model outputs, which are to be optimized, serve as the unified latent space, enabling MILR to operate entirely at test time. We evaluate MILR on GenEval, T2I-CompBench, and WISE, achieving state-of-the-art results on all benchmarks. Notably, on knowledge-intensive WISE, MILR attains an overall score of 0.63, improving over the baseline by 80%. Our further analysis indicates that joint reasoning in the unified latent space is the key to its strong performance. Moreover, our qualitative studies reveal MILR's non-trivial ability in temporal and cultural reasoning, highlighting the efficacy of our reasoning method.
Authors: Abdelilah Aitrouga, Youssef Hmamouche, Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni
Abstract: In light of recent progress in video editing, deep learning models focusing on both spatial and temporal dependencies have emerged as the primary method. However, these models suffer from the quadratic computational complexity of traditional attention mechanisms, making them difficult to adapt to long-duration and high-resolution videos. This limitation restricts their applicability in practical contexts such as real-time video processing. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a method to reduce both time and space complexity of these systems by proposing VRWKV-Editor, a novel video editing model that integrates a linear spatio-temporal aggregation module into video-based diffusion models. VRWKV-Editor leverages bidirectional weighted key-value recurrence mechanism of the RWKV transformer to capture global dependencies while preserving temporal coherence, achieving linear complexity without sacrificing quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves up to 3.7x speedup and 60% lower memory usage compared to state-of-the-art diffusion-based video editing methods, while maintaining competitive performance in frame consistency and text alignment. Furthermore, a comparative analysis we conducted on videos with different sequence lengths confirms that the gap in editing speed between our approach and architectures with self-attention becomes more significant with long videos.
Authors: Chiara Pugliese, Francesco Lettich, Guido Rocchietti, Chiara Renso, Fabio Pinelli
Abstract: In this resource paper, we present two publicly available datasets of semantically enriched human trajectories, together with the pipeline to build them. The trajectories are publicly available GPS traces retrieved from OpenStreetMap. Each dataset includes contextual layers such as stops, moves, points of interest (POIs), inferred transportation modes, and weather data. A novel semantic feature is the inclusion of synthetic, realistic social media posts generated by Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling multimodal and semantic mobility analysis. The datasets are available in both tabular and Resource Description Framework (RDF) formats, supporting semantic reasoning and FAIR data practices. They cover two structurally distinct, large cities: Paris and New York. Our open source reproducible pipeline allows for dataset customization, while the datasets support research tasks such as behavior modeling, mobility prediction, knowledge graph construction, and LLM-based applications. To our knowledge, our resource is the first to combine real-world movement, structured semantic enrichment, LLM-generated text, and semantic web compatibility in a reusable framework.
Authors: Matthew Lewis, Samuel Thio, Amy Roberts, Catherine Siju, Whoasif Mukit, Rebecca Kuruvilla, Zhangshu Joshua Jiang, Niko M\"oller-Grell, Aditya Borakati, Richard JB Dobson, Spiros Denaxas
Abstract: This paper presents the development and evaluation of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for querying the United Kingdom's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) clinical guidelines using Large Language Models (LLMs). The extensive length and volume of these guidelines can impede their utilisation within a time-constrained healthcare system, a challenge this project addresses through the creation of a system capable of providing users with precisely matched information in response to natural language queries. The system's retrieval architecture, composed of a hybrid embedding mechanism, was evaluated against a corpus of 10,195 text chunks derived from three hundred guidelines. It demonstrates high performance, with a Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) of 0.814, a Recall of 81% at the first chunk and of 99.1% within the top ten retrieved chunks, when evaluated on 7901 queries. The most significant impact of the RAG system was observed during the generation phase. When evaluated on a manually curated dataset of seventy question-answer pairs, RAG-enhanced models showed substantial gains in performance. Faithfulness, the measure of whether an answer is supported by the source text, was increased by 64.7 percentage points to 99.5% for the RAG-enhanced O4-Mini model and significantly outperformed the medical-focused Meditron3-8B LLM, which scored 43%. Clinical evaluation by seven Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) further validated these findings, with GPT-4.1 achieving 98.7% accuracy while reducing unsafe responses by 67% compared to O4-Mini (from 3.0 to 1.0 per evaluator). This study thus establishes RAG as an effective, reliable, and scalable approach for applying generative AI in healthcare, enabling cost-effective access to medical guidelines.
Authors: Zhongkai Yu, Yue Guan, Zihao Yu, Chenyang Zhou, Zhengding Hu, Shuyi Pei, Yangwook Kang, Yufei Ding, Po-An Tsai
Abstract: Large-scale Mixture of Experts (MoE) Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently become the frontier open weight models, achieving remarkable model capability similar to proprietary ones. But their random expert selection mechanism introduces significant data movement overhead that becomes the dominant bottleneck in multi-unit LLM serving systems. To understand the patterns underlying this data movement, we conduct comprehensive data-movement-centric profiling across four state-of-the-art large-scale MoE models released in 2025 (200B-1000B) using over 24,000 requests spanning diverse workloads. We perform systematic analysis from both temporal and spatial perspectives and distill six key insights to guide the design of diverse future serving systems. With our insights, we then demonstrate how to improve wafer-scale GPUs as a case study, and show that minor architectural modifications leveraging the insights achieve substantial performance gains, delivering 5.3x and 3.1x average speedups on DeepSeek V3 and Qwen3, respectively. Our work presents the first comprehensive data-centric analysis of large-scale MoE models and a concrete design study using the learned lessons, with profiling traces and simulation framework already open-sourced with $>$1k downloads. Our traces and results are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/core12345/MoE_expert_selection_trace
URLs: https://huggingface.co/datasets/core12345/MoE_expert_selection_trace
Authors: Xuwang Yin, Claire Zhang, Julie Steele, Nir Shavit, Tony T. Wang
Abstract: Simultaneously achieving robust classification and high-fidelity generative modeling within a single framework presents a significant challenge. Hybrid approaches, such as Joint Energy-Based Models (JEM), interpret classifiers as EBMs but are often limited by the instability and poor sample quality inherent in Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD)-based training. We address these limitations by proposing a novel training framework that integrates adversarial training (AT) principles for both discriminative robustness and stable generative learning. The proposed method introduces three key innovations: (1) the replacement of SGLD-based JEM learning with a stable, AT-based approach that optimizes the energy function by discriminating between real data and Projected Gradient Descent (PGD)-generated contrastive samples using the BCE loss; (2) synergistic adversarial training for the discriminative component that enhances classification robustness while eliminating the need for explicit gradient penalties; and (3) a two-stage training strategy that addresses normalization-related instabilities and enables leveraging pretrained robust classifiers, generalizing effectively across diverse architectures. Experiments on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet demonstrate that our approach: (1) is the first EBM-based hybrid to scale to high-resolution datasets with high training stability, simultaneously achieving state-of-the-art discriminative and generative performance on ImageNet 256$\times$256; (2) uniquely combines generative quality with adversarial robustness, enabling critical applications like robust counterfactual explanations; and (3) functions as a competitive standalone generative model, matching the generative quality of autoregressive methods (VAR-d16) and surpassing diffusion models while offering unique versatility.
Authors: Xiyu Luo, Haodong Li, Xinxing Cheng, He Zhao, Yang Hu, Xuan Song, Tianyang Zhang
Abstract: Image-to-image translation models have achieved notable success in converting images across visual domains and are increasingly used for medical tasks such as predicting post-operative outcomes and modeling disease progression. However, most existing methods primarily aim to match the target distribution and often neglect spatial correspondences between the source and translated images. This limitation can lead to structural inconsistencies and hallucinations, undermining the reliability and interpretability of the predictions. These challenges are accentuated in clinical applications by the stringent requirement for anatomical accuracy. In this work, we present TraceTrans, a novel deformable image translation model designed for post-operative prediction that generates images aligned with the target distribution while explicitly revealing spatial correspondences with the pre-operative input. The framework employs an encoder for feature extraction and dual decoders for predicting spatial deformations and synthesizing the translated image. The predicted deformation field imposes spatial constraints on the generated output, ensuring anatomical consistency with the source. Extensive experiments on medical cosmetology and brain MRI datasets demonstrate that TraceTrans delivers accurate and interpretable post-operative predictions, highlighting its potential for reliable clinical deployment.
Authors: Ljupcho Milosheski, Kuon Akiyama, Bla\v{z} Bertalani\v{c}, Jernej Hribar, Ryoichi Shinkuma
Abstract: The growing number of smart devices supporting bandwidth-intensive and latency-sensitive applications, such as real-time video analytics, smart sensing, Extended Reality (XR), etc., necessitates reliable wireless connectivity in indoor environments. In such environments, accurate design of Radio Environment Maps (REMs) enables adaptive wireless network planning and optimization of Access Point (AP) placement. However, generating realistic REMs remains difficult due to the variability of indoor environments and the limitations of existing modeling approaches, which often rely on simplified layouts or fully synthetic data. These challenges are further amplified by the adoption of next-generation Wi-Fi standards, which operate at higher frequencies and suffer from limited range and wall penetration. To support the efforts in addressing these challenges, we collected a dataset that combines high-resolution 3D LiDAR scans with Wi-Fi RSSI measurements collected across 20 setups in a multi-room indoor environment. The dataset includes two measurement scenarios, the first without human presence in the environment, and the second with human presence, enabling the development and validation of REM estimation models that incorporate physical geometry and environmental dynamics. The described dataset supports research in data-driven wireless modeling and the development of high-capacity indoor communication networks.
Authors: Alberto Cattaneo, Carlo Luschi, Daniel Justus
Abstract: Retrieval of information from graph-structured knowledge bases represents a promising direction for improving the factuality of LLMs. While various solutions have been proposed, a comparison of methods is difficult due to the lack of challenging QA datasets with ground-truth targets for graph retrieval. We present SynthKGQA, an LLM-powered framework for generating high-quality Knowledge Graph Question Answering datasets from any Knowledge Graph, providing the full set of ground-truth facts in the KG to reason over questions. We show how, in addition to enabling more informative benchmarking of KG retrievers, the data produced with SynthKGQA also allows us to train better models.We apply SynthKGQA to Wikidata to generate GTSQA, a new dataset designed to test zero-shot generalization abilities of KG retrievers with respect to unseen graph structures and relation types, and benchmark popular solutions for KG-augmented LLMs on it.
Authors: Zetian Shen, Hongjun Wang, Jiyuan Chen, Xuan Song
Abstract: Supply chains are integral to global economic stability, yet disruptions can swiftly propagate through interconnected networks, resulting in substantial economic impacts. Accurate and timely inference of supply chain resilience the capability to maintain core functions during disruptions is crucial for proactive risk mitigation and robust network design. However, existing approaches lack effective mechanisms to infer supply chain resilience without explicit system dynamics and struggle to represent the higher-order, multi-entity dependencies inherent in supply chain networks. These limitations motivate the definition of a novel problem and the development of targeted modeling solutions. To address these challenges, we formalize a novel problem: Supply Chain Resilience Inference (SCRI), defined as predicting supply chain resilience using hypergraph topology and observed inventory trajectories without explicit dynamic equations. To solve this problem, we propose the Supply Chain Resilience Inference Hypergraph Network (SC-RIHN), a novel hypergraph-based model leveraging set-based encoding and hypergraph message passing to capture multi-party firm-product interactions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SC-RIHN significantly outperforms traditional MLP, representative graph neural network variants, and ResInf baselines across synthetic benchmarks, underscoring its potential for practical, early-warning risk assessment in complex supply chain systems.
Authors: Ye Zheng, Yidan Hu
Abstract: AI agents can autonomously perform tasks and, often without explicit user consent, collect or disclose users' sensitive local data, which raises serious privacy concerns. Although AI agents' privacy policies describe their intended data practices, there remains limited transparency and accountability about whether runtime behavior matches those policies. To close this gap, we introduce AudAgent, a visual tool that continuously monitors AI agents' data practices in real time and guards compliance with stated privacy policies. AudAgent consists of four components for automated privacy auditing of AI agents. (i) Policy formalization: a novel cross-LLM voting mechanism to guarantee confidence of the parsed privacy policy model. (ii) Runtime annotation: a lightweight Presidio-based analyzer detects sensitive data and annotates data practices based on the AI agent's context and the privacy policy model. (iii) Compliance auditing: ontology graphs and automata-based checking connect the privacy policy model with runtime annotations, enabling on-the-fly compliance checking. (iv) User interface: an infrastructure-independent implementation visualizes the real-time execution trace of AI agents along with potential privacy policy violations, providing user-friendly transparency and accountability. We evaluate AudAgent with AI agents built using mainstream frameworks, demonstrating its effectiveness in detecting and visualizing privacy policy violations in real time. Using AudAgent, we also find that most privacy policies omit explicit safeguards for highly sensitive data such as SSNs, whose misuse violates legal requirements, and that many agents do not refuse handling such data via third-party tools, including those controlled by Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek. AudAgent proactively blocks operations on such data, overriding the agents' original privacy policy and behavior.
Authors: Jialong Qin, Xin Zou, Di Lu, Yibo Yan, Xuming Hu
Abstract: Current Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) suffer from quadratic computational complexity and key-value cache scaling, due to their reliance on processing excessive redundant visual tokens. To address this problem, we propose SharpV, a minimalist and efficient method for adaptive pruning of visual tokens and KV cache. Different from most uniform compression approaches, SharpV dynamically adjusts pruning ratios based on spatial-temporal information. Remarkably, this adaptive mechanism occasionally achieves performance gains over dense models, offering a novel paradigm for adaptive pruning. During the KV cache pruning stage, based on observations of visual information degradation, SharpV prunes degraded visual features via a self-calibration manner, guided by similarity to original visual features. In this way, SharpV achieves hierarchical cache pruning from the perspective of information bottleneck, offering a new insight into VideoLLMs' information flow. Experiments on multiple public benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of SharpV. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, SharpV is notably the first two-stage pruning framework that operates without requiring access to exposed attention scores, ensuring full compatibility with hardware acceleration techniques like Flash Attention.
Authors: Peining Zhang, Jinbo Bi, Minghu Song
Abstract: Diffusion models show promise for 3D molecular generation, but face a fundamental trade-off between sampling efficiency and conformational accuracy. While flow-based models are fast, they often produce geometrically inaccurate structures, as they have difficulty capturing the multimodal distributions of molecular conformations. In contrast, denoising diffusion models are more accurate but suffer from slow sampling, a limitation attributed to sub-optimal integration between diffusion dynamics and SE(3)-equivariant architectures. To address this, we propose VEDA, a unified SE(3)-equivariant framework that combines variance-exploding diffusion with annealing to efficiently generate conformationally accurate 3D molecular structures. Specifically, our key technical contributions include: (1) a VE schedule that enables noise injection functionally analogous to simulated annealing, improving 3D accuracy and reducing relaxation energy; (2) a novel preconditioning scheme that reconciles the coordinate-predicting nature of SE(3)-equivariant networks with a residual-based diffusion objective, and (3) a new arcsin-based scheduler that concentrates sampling in critical intervals of the logarithmic signal-to-noise ratio. On the QM9 and GEOM-DRUGS datasets, VEDA matches the sampling efficiency of flow-based models, achieving state-of-the-art valency stability and validity with only 100 sampling steps. More importantly, VEDA's generated structures are remarkably stable, as measured by their relaxation energy during GFN2-xTB optimization. The median energy change is only 1.72 kcal/mol, significantly lower than the 32.3 kcal/mol from its architectural baseline, SemlaFlow. Our framework demonstrates that principled integration of VE diffusion with SE(3)-equivariant architectures can achieve both high chemical accuracy and computational efficiency.
Authors: Sechan Lee, Sangdon Park
Abstract: Recently, web-based Large Language Model (LLM) agents autonomously perform increasingly complex tasks, thereby bringing significant convenience. However, they also amplify the risks of malicious misuse cases such as unauthorized collection of personally identifiable information (PII), generation of socially divisive content, and even automated web hacking. To address these threats, we propose an AI Kill Switch technique that can immediately halt the operation of malicious web-based LLM agents. To achieve this, we introduce AutoGuard - the key idea is generating defensive prompts that trigger the safety mechanisms of malicious LLM agents. In particular, generated defense prompts are transparently embedded into the website's DOM so that they remain invisible to human users but can be detected by the crawling process of malicious agents, triggering its internal safety mechanisms to abort malicious actions once read. To evaluate our approach, we constructed a dedicated benchmark consisting of three representative malicious scenarios. Experimental results show that AutoGuard achieves over 80% Defense Success Rate (DSR) across diverse malicious agents, including GPT-4o, Claude-4.5-Sonnet and generalizes well to advanced models like GPT-5.1, Gemini-2.5-flash, and Gemini-3-pro. Also, our approach demonstrates robust defense performance in real-world website environments without significant performance degradation for benign agents. Through this research, we demonstrate the controllability of web-based LLM agents, thereby contributing to the broader effort of AI control and safety.
Authors: Xingtao Zhao, Hao Peng, Dingli Su, Xianghua Zeng, Chunyang Liu, Jinzhi Liao, Philip S. Yu
Abstract: Reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in safety-critical scenarios, as it enables them to abstain from responding when uncertain, thereby avoiding ``hallucinating'' falsehoods. However, state-of-the-art UQ methods primarily rely on semantic probability distributions or pairwise distances, overlooking latent semantic structural information that could enable more precise uncertainty estimates. This paper presents Semantic Structural Entropy (SeSE), a principled UQ framework that quantifies the inherent semantic uncertainty of LLMs from a structural information perspective for hallucination detection. SeSE operates in a zero-resource manner and is applicable to both open- and closed-source LLMs, making it an ``off-the-shelf" solution for new models and tasks. Specifically, to effectively model semantic spaces, we first develop an adaptively sparsified directed semantic graph construction algorithm that captures directional semantic dependencies while automatically pruning unnecessary connections that introduce negative interference. We then exploit latent semantic structural information through hierarchical abstraction: SeSE is defined as the structural entropy of the optimal semantic encoding tree, formalizing intrinsic uncertainty within semantic spaces after optimal compression. A higher SeSE value corresponds to greater uncertainty, indicating that LLMs are highly likely to generate hallucinations. In addition, to enhance fine-grained UQ in long-form generation, we extend SeSE to quantify the uncertainty of individual claims by modeling their random semantic interactions, providing theoretically explicable hallucination detection. Extensive experiments across 29 model-dataset combinations show that SeSE significantly outperforms advanced UQ baselines.
Authors: Shreshth Rajan
Abstract: LLMs generate buggy code: 29.6% of SWE-bench solved patches fail, 62% of BaxBench solutions have vulnerabilities, and existing tools only catch 65% of bugs with 35% false positives. We built CodeX-Verify, a multi-agent system that uses four specialized agents to detect different types of bugs. We prove mathematically that combining agents with different detection patterns finds more bugs than any single agent when the agents look for different problems, using submodularity of mutual information under conditional independence. Measuring agent correlation of rho = 0.05 to 0.25 confirms they detect different bugs. Testing on 99 code samples with verified labels shows our system catches 76.1% of bugs, matching the best existing method (Meta Prompt Testing: 75%) while running faster and without test execution. We tested all 15 agent combinations and found that using multiple agents improves accuracy by 39.7 percentage points (from 32.8% to 72.4%) compared to single agents, with diminishing returns of +14.9pp, +13.5pp, and +11.2pp for agents 2, 3, and 4, validating our theoretical model. The best two-agent combination (Correctness + Performance) reaches 79.3% accuracy. Testing on 300 real patches from Claude Sonnet 4.5 runs in under 200ms per sample, making this practical for production use.
Authors: Quentin Anthony, Yury Tokpanov, Skyler Szot, Srivatsan Rajagopal, Praneeth Medepalli, Anna Golubeva, Vasu Shyam, Robert Washbourne, Rishi Iyer, Ansh Chaurasia, Tomas Figliolia, Xiao Yang, Abhinav Sarje, Drew Thorstensen, Amartey Pearson, Zack Grossbart, Jason van Patten, Emad Barsoum, Zhenyu Gu, Yao Fu, Beren Millidge
Abstract: We report on the first large-scale mixture-of-experts (MoE) pretraining study on pure AMD hardware, utilizing both MI300X GPUs and Pollara networking. We distill practical guidance for both systems and model design. On the systems side, we deliver a comprehensive cluster and networking characterization: microbenchmarks for all core collectives (all-reduce, reduce-scatter, all-gather, broadcast) across message sizes and GPU counts over Pollara. To our knowledge, this is the first at this scale. We further provide MI300X microbenchmarks on kernel sizing and memory bandwidth to inform model design. On the modeling side, we introduce and apply MI300X-aware transformer sizing rules for attention and MLP blocks and justify MoE widths that jointly optimize training throughput and inference latency. We describe our training stack in depth, including often-ignored utilities such as fault-tolerance and checkpoint-reshaping, as well as detailed information on our training recipe. We also provide a preview of our model architecture and base model - ZAYA1 (760M active, 8.3B total parameters MoE, available at https://huggingface.co/Zyphra/ZAYA1-base) - which will be further improved upon in forthcoming papers. ZAYA1-base achieves performance comparable to leading base models such as Qwen3-4B and Gemma3-12B at its scale and larger, and outperforms models including Llama-3-8B and OLMoE across reasoning, mathematics, and coding benchmarks. Together, these results demonstrate that the AMD hardware, network, and software stack are mature and optimized enough for competitive large-scale pretraining.
Authors: Qianyi Wang, Guoqiang Ren
Abstract: Remote sensing imagery is widely used across various fields, yet real-time detection remains challenging due to the prevalence of small objects and the need to balance accuracy with efficiency. To address this, we propose DMG-YOLO, a lightweight real-time detector tailored for small object detection in remote sensing images. Specifically, we design a Dual-branch Feature Extraction (DFE) module in the backbone, which partitions feature maps into two parallel branches: one extracts local features via depthwise separable convolutions, and the other captures global context using a vision transformer with a gating mechanism. Additionally, a Multi-scale Feature Fusion (MFF) module with dilated convolutions enhances multi-scale integration while preserving fine details. In the neck, we introduce the Global and Local Aggregate Feature Pyramid Network (GLAFPN) to further boost small object detection through global-local feature fusion. Extensive experiments on the VisDrone2019 and NWPU VHR-10 datasets show that DMG-YOLO achieves competitive performance in terms of mAP, model size, and other key metrics.
Authors: Yeamin Kaiser, Muhammed Tasnim Bin Anwar, Bholanath Das
Abstract: Graph representation learning seeks to transform complex, high-dimensional graph structures into compact vector spaces that preserve both topology and semantics. Among the various strategies, subgraph-based methods provide an interpretable bridge between symbolic pattern discovery and continuous embedding learning. Yet, existing frequent or discriminative subgraph mining approaches often suffer from redundant multi-phase pipelines, high computational cost, and weak coupling between mined structures and their discriminative relevance. We propose DS-Span, a single-phase discriminative subgraph mining framework that unifies pattern growth, pruning, and supervision-driven scoring within one traversal of the search space. DS-Span introduces a coverage-capped eligibility mechanism that dynamically limits exploration once a graph is sufficiently represented, and an information-gain-guided selection that promotes subgraphs with strong class-separating ability while minimizing redundancy. The resulting subgraph set serves as an efficient, interpretable basis for downstream graph embedding and classification. Extensive experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that DS-Span generates more compact and discriminative subgraph features than prior multi-stage methods, achieving higher or comparable accuracy with significantly reduced runtime. These results highlight the potential of unified, single-phase discriminative mining as a foundation for scalable and interpretable graph representation learning.
Authors: Kai Zheng, Zhenkai Wu, Fupeng Wei, Miaolan Zhou, Kai Lie, Haitao Guo, Lei Ding, Wei Zhang, Hang-Cheng Dong
Abstract: Accurately and swiftly assessing damage from conflicts is crucial for humanitarian aid and regional stability. In conflict zones, damaged zones often share similar architectural styles, with damage typically covering small areas and exhibiting blurred boundaries. These characteristics lead to limited data, annotation difficulties, and significant recognition challenges, including high intra-class similarity and ambiguous semantic changes. To address these issues, we introduce a pre-trained DINOv3 model and propose a multi-scale cross-attention difference siamese network (MC-DiSNet). The powerful visual representation capability of the DINOv3 backbone enables robust and rich feature extraction from bi-temporal remote sensing images. The multi-scale cross-attention mechanism allows for precise localization of subtle semantic changes, while the difference siamese structure enhances inter-class feature discrimination, enabling fine-grained semantic change detection. Furthermore, a simple yet powerful lightweight decoder is designed to generate clear detection maps while maintaining high efficiency. We also release a new Gaza-change dataset containing high-resolution satellite image pairs from 2023-2024 with pixel-level semantic change annotations. It is worth emphasizing that our annotations only include semantic pixels of changed areas. We evaluated our method on the Gaza-Change and two classical datasets: the SECOND and Landsat-SCD datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach effectively addresses the MCD task, and its outstanding performance paves the way for practical applications in rapid damage assessment across conflict zones.
Authors: Di Feng, Kaixin Ma, Feng Nan, Haofeng Chen, Bohan Zhai, David Griffiths, Mingfei Gao, Zhe Gan, Eshan Verma, Yinfei Yang, Zhifeng Chen, Afshin Dehghan
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world, agentic settings where outputs must not only be correct, but also conform to predefined data schemas. Despite recent progress in structured generation in textual domain, there is still no benchmark that systematically evaluates schema-grounded information extraction and reasoning over visual inputs. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study of visual structural output capabilities for MLLMs with our carefully designed SO-Bench benchmark. Covering four visual domains, including UI screens, natural images, documents, and charts, SO-Bench is built from over 6.5K diverse JSON schemas and 1.8K curated image-schema pairs with human-verified quality. Benchmarking experiments on open-sourced and frontier proprietary models reveal persistent gaps in predicting accurate, schema compliant outputs, highlighting the need for better multimodal structured reasoning. Beyond benchmarking, we further conduct training experiments to largely improve the model's structured output capability. We plan to make the benchmark available to the community.
Authors: Ratun Rahman, Dinh C. Nguyen, Christo Kurisummoottil Thomas, Walid Saad
Abstract: Quantum federated learning (QFL) combines quantum computing and federated learning to enable decentralized model training while maintaining data privacy. QFL can improve computational efficiency and scalability by taking advantage of quantum properties such as superposition and entanglement. However, existing QFL frameworks largely focus on homogeneity among quantum \textcolor{black}{clients, and they do not account} for real-world variances in quantum data distributions, encoding techniques, hardware noise levels, and computational capacity. These differences can create instability during training, slow convergence, and reduce overall model performance. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth examination of heterogeneity in QFL, classifying it into two categories: data or system heterogeneity. Then we investigate the influence of heterogeneity on training convergence and model aggregation. We critically evaluate existing mitigation solutions, highlight their limitations, and give a case study that demonstrates the viability of tackling quantum heterogeneity. Finally, we discuss potential future research areas for constructing robust and scalable heterogeneous QFL frameworks.
Authors: Yiwei Xu, Saloni Dash, Sungha Kang, Wang Liao, Emma S. Spiro
Abstract: This study examined how AI-generated summaries, which have become visually prominent in online search results, affect how users think about different issues. In a preregistered randomized controlled experiment, participants (N = 2,004) viewed mock search result pages varying in the presence (vs. absence), placement (top vs. middle), and stance (benefit-framed vs. harm-framed) of AI-generated summaries across four publicly debated topics. Compared to a no-summary control group, participants exposed to AI-generated summaries reported issue attitudes, behavioral intentions, and policy support that aligned more closely with the AI summary stance. The summaries placed at the top of the page produced stronger shifts in users' issue attitudes (but not behavioral intentions or policy support) than those placed at the middle of the page. We also observed moderating effects from issue familiarity and general trust toward AI. In addition, users perceived the AI summaries more useful when it emphasized health harms versus benefits. These findings suggest that AI-generated search summaries can significantly shape public perceptions, raising important implications for the design and regulation of AI-integrated information ecosystems.
Authors: Ratun Rahman, Dinh C. Nguyen
Abstract: Variational Quantum Algorithms (VQAs) are becoming the primary computational primitive for next-generation quantum computers, particularly those embedded as resource-constrained accelerators in the emerging Quantum Internet of Things (QIoT). However, under such device-constrained execution conditions, the scalability of learning is severely limited by barren plateaus, where gradients collapse to zero and training stalls. This poses a practical challenge to delivering VQA-enabled intelligence on QIoT endpoints, which often have few qubits, constrained shot budgets, and strict latency requirements. In this paper, we present a novel approach for escaping barren plateaus by including negative learning rates into the optimization process in QIoT devices. Our method introduces controlled instability into model training by switching between positive and negative learning phases, allowing recovery of significant gradients and exploring flatter areas in the loss landscape. We theoretically evaluate the effect of negative learning on gradient variance and propose conditions under which it helps escape from barren zones. The experimental findings on typical VQA benchmarks show consistent improvements in both convergence and simulation results over traditional optimizers. By escaping barren plateaus, our approach leads to a novel pathway for robust optimization in quantum-classical hybrid models.
Authors: Ruosen Zhao, Zhikang Zhang, Jialei Xu, Jiahao Chang, Dong Chen, Lingyun Li, Weijian Sun, Zizhuang Wei
Abstract: Large vision-language models (VLMs) show strong multimodal understanding but still struggle with 3D spatial reasoning, such as distance estimation, size comparison, and cross-view consistency. Existing 3D-aware methods either depend on auxiliary 3D information or enhance RGB-only VLMs with geometry encoders through shallow feature fusion. We propose SpaceMind, a multimodal large language model explicitly designed for spatial reasoning solely from RGB inputs. The model adopts a dual-encoder architecture, integrating VGGT as a spatial understanding encoder and InternViT as a 2D visual encoder. The key idea is to treat the camera representation as an active guiding modality rather than passive metadata. Specifically, SpaceMind introduces a lightweight Camera-Guided Modality Fusion module before the language model to replace shallow fusion. It applies camera-conditioned biasing to spatial tokens, assigns query-independent weights reflecting their geometric importance, and uses the camera embedding to gate the fused representation. Empirically, SpaceMind establishes new state-of-the-art results on VSI-Bench, SQA3D and SPBench, surpassing both open and proprietary systems on VSI-Bench and SPBench by large margins and achieving state-of-the-art performance on SQA3D. These results demonstrate that camera-guided modality fusion is an effective and practical inductive bias for equipping VLMs with genuinely spatially grounded intelligence. We will release code and model checkpoints to support future research.
Authors: Guozheng Sun, Lei Wang, Yanhao Wang, Jie Wang, Yimin Liu
Abstract: Radar automatic target recognition (RATR) based on high-resolution range profile (HRRP) has attracted increasing attention due to its ability to capture fine-grained structural features. However, recognizing targets under electronic countermeasures (ECM), especially the mainstream interrupted-sampling repeater jamming (ISRJ), remains a significant challenge, as HRRPs often suffer from serious feature distortion. To address this, we propose a robust HRRP recognition method guided by prior jamming information. Specifically, we introduce a point spread function (PSF) as prior information to model the HRRP distortion induced by ISRJ. Based on this, we design a recognition network that leverages this prior through a prior-guided feature interaction module and a hybrid loss function to enhance the model's discriminative capability. With the aid of prior information, the model can learn invariant features within distorted HRRP under different jamming parameters. Both the simulated and measured-data experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and exhibits stronger generalization capabilities when facing unseen jamming parameters.
Authors: Mohammed Mohiuddin, Syed Mohammod Minhaz Hossain, Sumaiya Khanam, Prionkar Barua, Aparup Barua, MD Tamim Hossain
Abstract: Yoga is a popular form of exercise worldwide due to its spiritual and physical health benefits, but incorrect postures can lead to injuries. Automated yoga pose classification has therefore gained importance to reduce reliance on expert practitioners. While human pose keypoint extraction models have shown high potential in action recognition, systematic benchmarking for yoga pose recognition remains limited, as prior works often focus solely on raw images or a single pose extraction model. In this study, we introduce a curated dataset, 'Yoga-16', which addresses limitations of existing datasets, and systematically evaluate three deep learning architectures (VGG16, ResNet50, and Xception), using three input modalities (direct images, MediaPipe Pose skeleton images, and YOLOv8 Pose skeleton images). Our experiments demonstrate that skeleton-based representations outperform raw image inputs, with the highest accuracy of 96.09% achieved by VGG16 with MediaPipe Pose skeleton input. Additionally, we provide interpretability analysis using Grad-CAM, offering insights into model decision-making for yoga pose classification with cross-validation analysis.
Authors: Kim Gerard A. Villanueva, Priyanka Kumar
Abstract: Accurate and timely diagnosis of multi-class skin lesions is hampered by subjective methods, inherent data imbalance in datasets like HAM10000, and the "black box" nature of Deep Learning (DL) models. This study proposes a trustworthy and highly accurate Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) system to overcome these limitations. The approach utilizes Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks (DCGANs) for per class data augmentation to resolve the critical class imbalance problem. A fine-tuned ResNet-50 classifier is then trained on the augmented dataset to classify seven skin disease categories. Crucially, LIME and SHAP Explainable AI (XAI) techniques are integrated to provide transparency by confirming that predictions are based on clinically relevant features like irregular morphology. The system achieved a high overall Accuracy of 92.50 % and a Macro-AUC of 98.82 %, successfully outperforming various prior benchmarked architectures. This work successfully validates a verifiable framework that combines high performance with the essential clinical interpretability required for safe diagnostic deployment. Future research should prioritize enhancing discrimination for critical categories, such as Melanoma NOS (F1-Score is 0.8602).
Authors: Shravan Chaudhari, Yoav Wald, Suchi Saria
Abstract: As we deploy machine learning systems in the real world, a core challenge is to maintain a model that is performant even as the data shifts. Such shifts can take many forms: new classes may emerge that were absent during training, a problem known as open-set recognition, and the distribution of known categories may change. Guarantees on open-set recognition are mostly derived under the assumption that the distribution of known classes, which we call the background distribution, is fixed. In this paper we develop CoLOR, a method that is guaranteed to solve open-set recognition even in the challenging case where the background distribution shifts. We prove that the method works under benign assumptions that the novel class is separable from the non-novel classes, and provide theoretical guarantees that it outperforms a representative baseline in a simplified overparameterized setting. We develop techniques to make CoLOR scalable and robust, and perform comprehensive empirical evaluations on image and text data. The results show that CoLOR significantly outperforms existing open-set recognition methods under background shift. Moreover, we provide new insights into how factors such as the size of the novel class influences performance, an aspect that has not been extensively explored in prior work.
Authors: Eshed Gal, Moshe Eliasof, Javier Turek, Uri Ascher, Eran Treister, Eldad Haber
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are known for their expensive and time-consuming training. Thus, oftentimes, LLMs are fine-tuned to address a specific task, given the pretrained weights of a pre-trained LLM considered a foundation model. In this work, we introduce memory-efficient, reversible architectures for LLMs, inspired by symmetric and symplectic differential equations, and investigate their theoretical properties. Different from standard, baseline architectures that store all intermediate activations, the proposed models use time-reversible dynamics to retrieve hidden states during backpropagation, relieving the need to store activations. This property allows for a drastic reduction in memory consumption, allowing for the processing of larger batch sizes for the same available memory, thereby offering improved throughput. In addition, we propose an efficient method for converting existing, non-reversible LLMs into reversible architectures through fine-tuning, rendering our approach practical for exploiting existing pre-trained models. Our results show comparable or improved performance on several datasets and benchmarks, on several LLMs, building a scalable and efficient path towards reducing the memory and computational costs associated with both training from scratch and fine-tuning of LLMs.
Authors: Chenji Lu (Alibaba Group), Zhuo Chen (Alibaba Group), Hui Zhao (Alibaba Group), Zhiyuan Zeng (Alibaba Group), Gang Zhao (Alibaba Group), Junjie Ren (Alibaba Group), Ruicong Xu (Alibaba Group), Haoran Li (Alibaba Group), Songyan Liu (Alibaba Group), Pengjie Wang (Alibaba Group), Jian Xu (Alibaba Group), Bo Zheng (Alibaba Group)
Abstract: Achievement. We introduce LORE, a systematic framework for Large Generative Model-based relevance in e-commerce search. Deployed and iterated over three years, LORE achieves a cumulative +27\% improvement in online GoodRate metrics. This report shares the valuable experience gained throughout its development lifecycle, spanning data, features, training, evaluation, and deployment. Insight. While existing works apply Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to enhance relevance, they often hit a performance ceiling. We argue this stems from treating relevance as a monolithic task, lacking principled deconstruction. Our key insight is that relevance comprises distinct capabilities: knowledge and reasoning, multi-modal matching, and rule adherence. We contend that a qualitative-driven decomposition is essential for breaking through current performance bottlenecks. Contributions. LORE provides a complete blueprint for the LLM relevance lifecycle. Key contributions include: (1) A two-stage training paradigm combining progressive CoT synthesis via SFT with human preference alignment via RL. (2) A comprehensive benchmark, RAIR, designed to evaluate these core capabilities. (3) A query frequency-stratified deployment strategy that efficiently transfers offline LLM capabilities to the online system. LORE serves as both a practical solution and a methodological reference for other vertical domains.
Authors: Itay Yona, Amir Sarid, Michael Karasik, Yossi Gandelsman
Abstract: We introduce $\textbf{Doublespeak}$, a simple in-context representation hijacking attack against large language models (LLMs). The attack works by systematically replacing a harmful keyword (e.g., bomb) with a benign token (e.g., carrot) across multiple in-context examples, provided a prefix to a harmful request. We demonstrate that this substitution leads to the internal representation of the benign token converging toward that of the harmful one, effectively embedding the harmful semantics under a euphemism. As a result, superficially innocuous prompts (e.g., "How to build a carrot?") are internally interpreted as disallowed instructions (e.g., "How to build a bomb?"), thereby bypassing the model's safety alignment. We use interpretability tools to show that this semantic overwrite emerges layer by layer, with benign meanings in early layers converging into harmful semantics in later ones. Doublespeak is optimization-free, broadly transferable across model families, and achieves strong success rates on closed-source and open-source systems, reaching 74% ASR on Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct with a single-sentence context override. Our findings highlight a new attack surface in the latent space of LLMs, revealing that current alignment strategies are insufficient and should instead operate at the representation level.
Authors: X. Y. Han, Yuan Zhong
Abstract: In large-scale AI training, Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (s-MoE) layers enable scaling by activating only a small subset of experts per token. An operational challenge in this design is load balancing: routing tokens to minimize the number of idle experts, which is important for the efficient utilization of (costly) GPUs. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the Auxiliary-Loss-Free Load Balancing (ALF-LB) procedure -- proposed by DeepSeek's Wang et al. (2024) -- by casting it as a one-step-per-iteration primal-dual method for an assignment problem. First, in a stylized deterministic setting, our framework yields several insightful structural properties: (i) a monotonic improvement of a Lagrangian objective, (ii) a preference rule that moves tokens from overloaded to underloaded experts, and (iii) an approximate-balancing guarantee. Then, we incorporate the stochastic and dynamic nature of AI training using a generalized online optimization formulation. In the online setting, we derive a strong convexity property of the objective that leads to a logarithmic expected regret bound under certain step-size choices. Additionally, we present real experiments on 1B-parameter DeepSeekMoE models to complement our theoretical findings. Together, these results build a principled framework for analyzing the Auxiliary-Loss-Free Load Balancing of s-MoE in AI models.
Authors: Andreas Koukounas, Georgios Mastrapas, Florian H\"onicke, Sedigheh Eslami, Guillaume Roncari, Scott Martens, Han Xiao
Abstract: We present Jina-VLM, a 2.4B parameter vision-language model that achieves state-of-the-art multilingual visual question answering among open 2B-scale VLMs. The model couples a SigLIP2 vision encoder with a Qwen3 language backbone through an attention-pooling connector that enables token-efficient processing of arbitrary-resolution images. The model achieves leading results on standard VQA benchmarks and multilingual evaluations while preserving competitive text-only performance. Model weights and code are publicly released at https://huggingface.co/jinaai/jina-vlm .