Authors: Shuqi Liu, Bowei He, Chen Ma, Linqi Song
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) typically enhance their performance through either the retrieval of semantically similar information or the improvement of their reasoning capabilities. However, a significant challenge remains in effectively integrating both retrieval and reasoning strategies to optimize LLM performance. In this paper, we introduce a reasoning-aware knowledge retrieval method that enriches LLMs with information aligned to the logical structure of conversations, moving beyond surface-level semantic similarity. We follow a coarse-to-fine approach for knowledge retrieval. First, we identify a contextually relevant sub-region of the knowledge base, ensuring that all sentences within it are relevant to the context topic. Next, we refine our search within this sub-region to extract knowledge that is specifically relevant to the reasoning process. Throughout both phases, we employ the Monte Carlo Tree Search-inspired search method to effectively navigate through knowledge sentences using common keywords. Experiments on two multi-turn dialogue datasets demonstrate that our knowledge retrieval approach not only aligns more closely with the underlying reasoning in human conversations but also significantly enhances the diversity of the retrieved knowledge, resulting in more informative and creative responses.
Authors: Isaac Iyinoluwa Olufadewa, Miracle Ayomikun Adesina, Ezekiel Ayodeji Oladejo, Uthman Babatunde Usman, Owen Kolade Adeniyi, Matthew Tolulope Olawoyin
Abstract: Depression is a major contributor to the mental-health burden in Nigeria, yet screening coverage remains limited due to low access to clinicians, stigma, and language barriers. Traditional tools like the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) were validated in high-income countries but may be linguistically or culturally inaccessible for low- and middle-income countries and communities such as Nigeria where people communicate in Nigerian Pidgin and more than 520 local languages. This study presents a novel approach to automated depression screening using fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) adapted for conversational Nigerian Pidgin. We collected a dataset of 432 Pidgin-language audio responses from Nigerian young adults aged 18-40 to prompts assessing psychological experiences aligned with PHQ-9 items, performed transcription, rigorous preprocessing and annotation, including semantic labeling, slang and idiom interpretation, and PHQ-9 severity scoring. Three LLMs - Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct, Gemma-3-4B-it, and GPT-4.1 - were fine-tuned on this annotated dataset, and their performance was evaluated quantitatively (accuracy, precision and semantic alignment) and qualitatively (clarity, relevance, and cultural appropriateness). GPT-4.1 achieved the highest quantitative performance, with 94.5% accuracy in PHQ-9 severity scoring prediction, outperforming Gemma-3-4B-it and Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct. Qualitatively, GPT-4.1 also produced the most culturally appropriate, clear, and contextually relevant responses. AI-mediated depression screening for underserved Nigerian communities. This work provides a foundation for deploying conversational mental-health tools in linguistically diverse, resource-constrained environments.
Authors: Peter David Fagan
Abstract: We present a physical theory of intelligence grounded in irreversible information processing in systems constrained by conservation laws. An intelligent system is modelled as a coupled agent-environment process whose evolution transforms information into goal-directed work. To connect information to physical state, we introduce the Conservation-Congruent Encoding (CCE) framework, in which encodings correspond to metastable basins of attraction whose separability is enforced by conservation laws. Within this framework, intelligence is defined as the amount of goal-directed work produced per nat of irreversibly processed information. From this definition we derive a hierarchy of physical constraints governing information intake, irreversible computation, and work extraction in open systems. The framework reveals how long-horizon efficiency requires the preservation of internal informational structure, giving rise to self-modelling, and it establishes that physically embodied intelligent systems possess intrinsic epistemic limits analogous to incompleteness phenomena. Applying the theory to biological systems, we analyse how oscillatory and near-critical dynamics optimise the trade-off between information preservation, dissipation, and useful work, placing the brain near an efficient operating regime predicted by the framework. At the architectural level, we develop a theory of continuous dynamical circuits in which classical Boolean logic emerges as a special case of attractor selection, while more general invariant geometries support computational modes beyond fixed-point logic. Finally, we propose a physically grounded perspective on artificial intelligence safety based on irreversible information flow and structural homeostasis. Together, these results provide a unified, substrate-neutral account of intelligence as a physical phenomenon.
Authors: Luis M. Moreno-Saavedra, Silvia Jimenez-Fernandez, Antonio Portilla-Figueras, David Casillas-Perez, Sancho Salcedo-Sanz
Abstract: Efficient workload assignment to the workforce is critical in last-mile package delivery systems. In this context, traditional methods of assigning package deliveries to workers based on geographical proximity can be inefficient and surely guide to an unbalanced workload distribution among delivery workers. In this paper, we look at the problem of operational human resources workload balancing in last-mile urban package delivery systems. The idea is to consider the effort workload to optimize the system, i.e., the optimization process is now focused on improving the delivery time, so that the workload balancing is complete among all the staff. This process should correct significant decompensations in workload among delivery workers in a given zone. Specifically, we propose a multi-algorithm approach to tackle this problem. The proposed approach takes as input a set of delivery points and a defined number of workers, and then assigns packages to workers, in such a way that it ensures that each worker completes a similar amount of work per day. The proposed algorithms use a combination of distance and workload considerations to optimize the allocation of packages to workers. In this sense, the distance between the delivery points and the location of each worker is also taken into account. The proposed multi-algorithm methodology includes different versions of k-means, evolutionary approaches, recursive assignments based on k-means initialization with different problem encodings, and a hybrid evolutionary ensemble algorithm. We have illustrated the performance of the proposed approach in a real-world problem in an urban last-mile package delivery workforce operating at Azuqueca de Henares, Spain.
Authors: Purushottam Saha, Avirup Chakraborty, Sourish Sarkar, Subhamoy Maitra, Diganta Mukherjee, Tridib Mukherjee
Abstract: The 13-card variant of Classic Indian Rummy is a sequential game of incomplete information that requires probabilistic reasoning and combinatorial decision-making. This paper proposes a rule-based framework for strategic play, driven by a new hand-evaluation metric termed MinDist. The metric modifies the MinScore metric by quantifying the edit distance between a hand and the nearest valid configuration, thereby capturing structural proximity to completion. We design a computationally efficient algorithm derived from the MinScore algorithm, leveraging dynamic pruning and pattern caching to exactly calculate this metric during play. Opponent hand-modeling is also incorporated within a two-player zero-sum simulation framework, and the resulting strategies are evaluated using statistical hypothesis testing. Empirical results show significant improvement in win rates for MinDist-based agents over traditional heuristics, providing a formal and interpretable step toward algorithmic Rummy strategy design.
Authors: Abolhassan Pishahang, Maryam Badiei
Abstract: This study investigates how generative AI systems interpret the architectural intelligence embedded in vernacular form. Using the Iranian pigeon tower as a case study, the research tests three diffusion models, Midjourney v6, DALL-E 3, and DreamStudio based on Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL), across three prompt stages: referential, adaptive, and speculative. A five-criteria evaluation framework assesses how each system reconstructs typology, materiality, environment, realism, and cultural specificity. Results show that AI reliably reproduces geometric patterns but misreads material and climatic reasoning. Reference imagery improves realism yet limits creativity, while freedom from reference generates inventive but culturally ambiguous outcomes. The findings define a boundary between visual resemblance and architectural reasoning, positioning computational vernacular reasoning as a framework for analyzing how AI perceives, distorts, and reimagines traditional design intelligence.
Authors: Akash Kumar Panda, Olaoluwa Adigun, Bart Kosko
Abstract: We design a large-language-model (LLM) agent that extracts causal feedback fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) from raw text. The causal learning or extraction process is agentic both because of the LLM's semi-autonomy and because ultimately the FCM dynamical system's equilibria drive the LLM agents to fetch and process causal text. The fetched text can in principle modify the adaptive FCM causal structure and so modify the source of its quasi-autonomy--its equilibrium limit cycles and fixed-point attractors. This bidirectional process endows the evolving FCM dynamical system with a degree of autonomy while still staying on its agentic leash. We show in particular that a sequence of three finely tuned system instructions guide an LLM agent as it systematically extracts key nouns and noun phrases from text, as it extracts FCM concept nodes from among those nouns and noun phrases, and then as it extracts or infers partial or fuzzy causal edges between those FCM nodes. We test this FCM generation on a recent essay about the promise of AI from the late diplomat and political theorist Henry Kissinger and his colleagues. This three-step process produced FCM dynamical systems that converged to the same equilibrium limit cycles as did the human-generated FCMs even though the human-generated FCM differed in the number of nodes and edges. A final FCM mixed generated FCMs from separate Gemini and ChatGPT LLM agents. The mixed FCM absorbed the equilibria of its dominant mixture component but also created new equilibria of its own to better approximate the underlying causal dynamical system.
Authors: Muhammad U. Nasir, Yuchen Li, Steven James, Julian Togelius
Abstract: We present Mortar, a system for autonomously evolving game mechanics for automatic game design. Game mechanics define the rules and interactions that govern gameplay, and designing them manually is a time-consuming and expert-driven process. Mortar combines a quality-diversity algorithm with a large language model to explore a diverse set of mechanics, which are evaluated by synthesising complete games that incorporate both evolved mechanics and those drawn from an archive. The mechanics are evaluated by composing complete games through a tree search procedure, where the resulting games are evaluated by their ability to preserve a skill-based ordering over players -- that is, whether stronger players consistently outperform weaker ones. We assess the mechanics based on their contribution towards the skill-based ordering score in the game. We demonstrate that Mortar produces games that appear diverse and playable, and mechanics that contribute more towards the skill-based ordering score in the game. We perform ablation studies to assess the role of each system component and a user study to evaluate the games based on human feedback.
Authors: Yaqi Duan, Yichun Hu, Jiashuo Jiang
Abstract: Inventory management remains a challenge for many small and medium-sized businesses that lack the expertise to deploy advanced optimization methods. This paper investigates whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can help bridge this gap. We show that employing LLMs as direct, end-to-end solvers incurs a significant "hallucination tax": a performance gap arising from the model's inability to perform grounded stochastic reasoning. To address this, we propose a hybrid agentic framework that strictly decouples semantic reasoning from mathematical calculation. In this architecture, the LLM functions as an intelligent interface, eliciting parameters from natural language and interpreting results while automatically calling rigorous algorithms to build the optimization engine. To evaluate this interactive system against the ambiguity and inconsistency of real-world managerial dialogue, we introduce the Human Imitator, a fine-tuned "digital twin" of a boundedly rational manager that enables scalable, reproducible stress-testing. Our empirical analysis reveals that the hybrid agentic framework reduces total inventory costs by 32.1% relative to an interactive baseline using GPT-4o as an end-to-end solver. Moreover, we find that providing perfect ground-truth information alone is insufficient to improve GPT-4o's performance, confirming that the bottleneck is fundamentally computational rather than informational. Our results position LLMs not as replacements for operations research, but as natural-language interfaces that make rigorous, solver-based policies accessible to non-experts.
Authors: Keqin Xie
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit persistent logical failures in complex reasoning due to the lack of an internal axiomatic framework. We propose Mathesis, a neuro-symbolic architecture that encodes mathematical states as higher-order hypergraphs and uses a Symbolic Reasoning Kernel (SRK)--a differentiable logic engine that maps constraints to a continuous energy landscape. By defining a global energy function E(G), where zero energy implies logical consistency, the SRK yields gradient-based signals to train a Hypergraph Transformer Brain, turning proof search into energy minimization. Multi-step deduction is enabled via Monte Carlo Tree Search and Evolutionary Proof Search, guided by learned value functions and semantic unification.
Authors: Jorge Ortiz
Abstract: High-stakes deployment of vision-language models (VLMs) requires selective prediction, where systems abstain when uncertain rather than risk costly errors. We investigate whether confidence-based abstention provides reliable control over error rates in video question answering, and whether that control remains robust under distribution shift. Using NExT-QA and Gemini 2.0 Flash, we establish two findings. First, confidence thresholding provides mechanistic control in-distribution. Sweeping threshold epsilon produces smooth risk-coverage tradeoffs, reducing error rates f
Authors: Tiansi Dong, Henry He, Pietro Li\`o, Mateja Jamnik
Abstract: This paper compares three methodological categories of neural reasoning: LLM reasoning, supervised learning-based reasoning, and explicit model-based reasoning. LLMs remain unreliable and struggle with simple decision-making that animals can master without extensive corpora training. Through disjunctive syllogistic reasoning testing, we show that reasoning via supervised learning is less appealing than reasoning via explicit model construction. Concretely, we show that an Euler Net trained to achieve 100.00% in classic syllogistic reasoning can be trained to reach 100.00% accuracy in disjunctive syllogistic reasoning. However, the retrained Euler Net suffers severely from catastrophic forgetting (its performance drops to 6.25% on already-learned classic syllogistic reasoning), and its reasoning competence is limited to the pattern level. We propose a new version of Sphere Neural Networks that embeds concepts as circles on the surface of an n-dimensional sphere. These Sphere Neural Networks enable the representation of the negation operator via complement circles and achieve reliable decision-making by filtering out illogical statements that form unsatisfiable circular configurations. We demonstrate that the Sphere Neural Network can master 16 syllogistic reasoning tasks, including rigorous disjunctive syllogistic reasoning, while preserving the rigour of classical syllogistic reasoning. We conclude that neural reasoning with explicit model construction is the most reliable among the three methodological categories of neural reasoning.
Authors: Shanli Xing, Yiyan Zhai, Alexander Jiang, Yixin Dong, Yong Wu, Zihao Ye, Charlie Ruan, Yingyi Huang, Yineng Zhang, Liangsheng Yin, Aksara Bayyapu, Luis Ceze, Tianqi Chen
Abstract: Recent advances show that large language models (LLMs) can act as autonomous agents capable of generating GPU kernels, but integrating these AI-generated kernels into real-world inference systems remains challenging. FlashInfer-Bench addresses this gap by establishing a standardized, closed-loop framework that connects kernel generation, benchmarking, and deployment. At its core, FlashInfer Trace provides a unified schema describing kernel definitions, workloads, implementations, and evaluations, enabling consistent communication between agents and systems. Built on real serving traces, FlashInfer-Bench includes a curated dataset, a robust correctness- and performance-aware benchmarking framework, a public leaderboard to track LLM agents' GPU programming capabilities, and a dynamic substitution mechanism (apply()) that seamlessly injects the best-performing kernels into production LLM engines such as SGLang and vLLM. Using FlashInfer-Bench, we further evaluate the performance and limitations of LLM agents, compare the trade-offs among different GPU programming languages, and provide insights for future agent design. FlashInfer-Bench thus establishes a practical, reproducible pathway for continuously improving AI-generated kernels and deploying them into large-scale LLM inference.
Authors: Zongwei Wang, Bincheng Gu, Hongyu Yu, Junliang Yu, Tao He, Jiayin Feng, Min Gao
Abstract: LLM-empowered agents can exhibit not only demographic bias (e.g., gender, religion) but also intergroup bias triggered by minimal "us" versus "them" cues. When this intergroup boundary aligns with an agent-human divide, the risk shifts from disparities among human demographic groups to a more fundamental group-level asymmetry, i.e., humans as a whole may be treated as the outgroup by agents. To examine this possibility, we construct a controlled multi-agent social simulation based on allocation decisions under explicit payoff trade-offs and find that agents exhibit a consistent intergroup bias under minimal group cues. Although this bias is attenuated when some counterparts are framed as humans, we attribute the attenuation to an implicit human-norm script that favors humans yet activates only when the agent believes a real human is present. This belief dependence creates a new attack surface. We therefore introduce a Belief Poisoning Attack (BPA) that corrupts persistent identity beliefs to suppress the human-norm script and reactivate outgroup bias toward humans, instantiated as profile poisoning at initialization (BPA-PP) and memory poisoning via optimized belief-refinement suffixes injected into stored reflections (BPA-MP). Finally, we discuss practical mitigation strategies for hardening current agent frameworks against BPA, highlighting feasible interventions at profile and memory boundaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate both the existence of agent intergroup bias and the severity of BPA across settings. Our goal in identifying these vulnerabilities is to inform safer agent design, not to enable real-world exploitation.
Authors: Sixue Xing, Xuanye Xia, Kerui Wu, Meng Jiang, Jintai Chen, Tianfan Fu
Abstract: Clinical trial failure remains a central bottleneck in drug development, where minor protocol design flaws can irreversibly compromise outcomes despite promising therapeutics. Although cutting-edge AI methods achieve strong performance in predicting trial success, they are inherently reactive for merely diagnosing risk without offering actionable remedies once failure is anticipated. To fill this gap, this paper proposes ClinicalReTrial, a self-evolving AI agent framework that addresses this gap by casting clinical trial reasoning as an iterative protocol redesign problem. Our method integrates failure diagnosis, safety-aware modification, and candidate evaluation in a closed-loop, reward-driven optimization framework. Serving the outcome prediction model as a simulation environment, ClinicalReTrial enables low-cost evaluation of protocol modifications and provides dense reward signals for continuous self-improvement. To support efficient exploration, the framework maintains hierarchical memory that captures iteration-level feedback within trials and distills transferable redesign patterns across trials. Empirically, ClinicalReTrial improves 83.3% of trial protocols with a mean success probability gain of 5.7%, and retrospective case studies demonstrate strong alignment between the discovered redesign strategies and real-world clinical trial modifications.
Authors: Alicia Vidler, Gal A. Kaminka
Abstract: Making use of swarm methods in financial market modeling of liquidity, and techniques from financial analysis in swarm analysis, holds the potential to advance both research areas. In swarm research, the use of game theory methods holds the promise of explaining observed phenomena of collective utility adherence with rational self-interested swarm participants. In financial markets, a better understanding of how independent financial agents may self-organize for the betterment and stability of the marketplace would be a boon for market design researchers. This paper unifies Liquidity Games, where trader payoffs depend on aggregate liquidity within a trade, with Rational Swarms, where decentralized agents use difference rewards to align self-interested learning with global objectives. We offer a theoretical frameworks where we define a swarm of traders whose collective objective is market liquidity provision while maintaining agent independence. Using difference rewards within a Markov team games framework, we show that individual liquidity-maximizing behaviors contribute to overall market liquidity without requiring coordination or collusion. This Financial Swarm model provides a framework for modeling rational, independent agents where they achieve both individual profitability and collective market efficiency in bilateral asset markets.
Authors: Alaa Saleh, Praveen Kumar Donta, Roberto Morabito, Sasu Tarkoma, Anders Lindgren, Qiyang Zhang, Schahram Dustdar Susanna Pirttikangas, Lauri Lov\'en
Abstract: Human biological systems sustain life through extraordinary resilience, continually detecting damage, orchestrating targeted responses, and restoring function through self-healing. Inspired by these capabilities, this paper introduces ReCiSt, a bio-inspired agentic self-healing framework designed to achieve resilience in Distributed Computing Continuum Systems (DCCS). Modern DCCS integrate heterogeneous computing resources, ranging from resource-constrained IoT devices to high-performance cloud infrastructures, and their inherent complexity, mobility, and dynamic operating conditions expose them to frequent faults that disrupt service continuity. These challenges underscore the need for scalable, adaptive, and self-regulated resilience strategies. ReCiSt reconstructs the biological phases of Hemostasis, Inflammation, Proliferation, and Remodeling into the computational layers Containment, Diagnosis, Meta-Cognitive, and Knowledge for DCCS. These four layers perform autonomous fault isolation, causal diagnosis, adaptive recovery, and long-term knowledge consolidation through Language Model (LM)-powered agents. These agents interpret heterogeneous logs, infer root causes, refine reasoning pathways, and reconfigure resources with minimal human intervention. The proposed ReCiSt framework is evaluated on public fault datasets using multiple LMs, and no baseline comparison is included due to the scarcity of similar approaches. Nevertheless, our results, evaluated under different LMs, confirm ReCiSt's self-healing capabilities within tens of seconds with minimum of 10% of agent CPU usage. Our results also demonstrated depth of analysis to over come uncertainties and amount of micro-agents invoked to achieve resilience.
Authors: Weng Ding, Yi Han, Mu-Jiang-Shan Wang
Abstract: Detecting coordinated inauthentic behavior on social media remains a critical and persistent challenge, as most existing approaches rely on superficial correlation analysis, employ static parameter settings, and demand extensive and labor-intensive manual annotation. To address these limitations systematically, we propose the Adaptive Causal Coordination Detection (ACCD) framework. ACCD adopts a three-stage, progressive architecture that leverages a memory-guided adaptive mechanism to dynamically learn and retain optimal detection configurations for diverse coordination scenarios. Specifically, in the first stage, ACCD introduces an adaptive Convergent Cross Mapping (CCM) technique to deeply identify genuine causal relationships between accounts. The second stage integrates active learning with uncertainty sampling within a semi-supervised classification scheme, significantly reducing the burden of manual labeling. The third stage deploys an automated validation module driven by historical detection experience, enabling self-verification and optimization of the detection outcomes. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation using real-world datasets, including the Twitter IRA dataset, Reddit coordination traces, and several widely-adopted bot detection benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that ACCD achieves an F1-score of 87.3\% in coordinated attack detection, representing a 15.2\% improvement over the strongest existing baseline. Furthermore, the system reduces manual annotation requirements by 68\% and achieves a 2.8x speedup in processing through hierarchical clustering optimization. In summary, ACCD provides a more accurate, efficient, and highly automated end-to-end solution for identifying coordinated behavior on social platforms, offering substantial practical value and promising potential for broad application.
Authors: Alessio Di Rubbo, Mattia Neri, Remo Pareschi, Marco Pedroni, Roberto Valtancoli, Paolino Zica
Abstract: This paper explores how semantic-space reasoning, traditionally used in computational linguistics, can be extended to tactical decision-making in team sports. Building on the analogy between texts and teams -- where players act as words and collective play conveys meaning -- the proposed methodology models tactical configurations as compositional semantic structures. Each player is represented as a multidimensional vector integrating technical, physical, and psychological attributes; team profiles are aggregated through contextual weighting into a higher-level semantic representation. Within this shared vector space, tactical templates such as high press, counterattack, or possession build-up are encoded analogously to linguistic concepts. Their alignment with team profiles is evaluated using vector-distance metrics, enabling the computation of tactical ``fit'' and opponent-exploitation potential. A Python-based prototype demonstrates how these methods can generate interpretable, dynamically adaptive strategy recommendations, accompanied by fine-grained diagnostic insights at the attribute level. Beyond football, the approach offers a generalizable framework for collective decision-making and performance optimization in team-based domains -- ranging from basketball and hockey to cooperative robotics and human-AI coordination systems. The paper concludes by outlining future directions toward real-world data integration, predictive simulation, and hybrid human-machine tactical intelligence.
Authors: Sankar B, Srinidhi Ranjini Girish, Aadya Bharti, Dibakar Sen
Abstract: The generation of truly novel and diverse ideas is important for contemporary engineering design, yet it remains a significant cognitive challenge for novice designers. Current 'single-spurt' AI systems exacerbate this challenge by producing a high volume of semantically clustered ideas. We propose MIDAS (Meta-cognitive Ideation through Distributed Agentic AI System), a novel framework that replaces the single-AI paradigm with a distributed 'team' of specialized AI agents designed to emulate the human meta-cognitive ideation workflow. This agentic system progressively refines ideas and assesses each one for both global novelty (against existing solutions) and local novelty (against previously generated ideas). MIDAS, therefore, demonstrates a viable and progressive paradigm for true human-AI co-creation, elevating the human designer from a passive filterer to a participatory, active, collaborative partner.
Authors: Liv G. d'Aliberti, Manoel Horta Ribeiro
Abstract: Do reasoning models have "Aha!" moments? Prior work suggests that models like DeepSeek-R1-Zero undergo sudden mid-trace realizations that lead to accurate outputs, implying an intrinsic capacity for self-correction. Yet, it remains unclear whether such intrinsic shifts in reasoning strategy actually improve performance. Here, we study mid-reasoning shifts and instrument training runs to detect them. Our analysis spans 1M+ reasoning traces, hundreds of training checkpoints, three reasoning domains, and multiple decoding temperatures and model architectures. We find that reasoning shifts are rare, do not become more frequent with training, and seldom improve accuracy, indicating that they do not correspond to prior perceptions of model insight. However, their effect varies with model uncertainty. Building on this finding, we show that artificially triggering extrinsic shifts under high entropy reliably improves accuracy. Our results show that mid-reasoning shifts are symptoms of unstable inference behavior rather than an intrinsic mechanism for self-correction.
Authors: Longtian Qiu, Shan Ning, Chuyu Zhang, Jiaxuan Sun, Xuming He
Abstract: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has shown strong potential for mitigating hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing multimodal DPO approaches often suffer from overfitting due to the difficulty imbalance in preference data. Our analysis shows that MLLMs tend to overemphasize easily distinguishable preference pairs, which hinders fine-grained hallucination suppression and degrades overall performance. To address this issue, we propose Difficulty-Aware Direct Preference Optimization (DA-DPO), a cost-effective framework designed to balance the learning process. DA-DPO consists of two main components: (1) Difficulty Estimation leverages pre-trained vision--language models with complementary generative and contrastive objectives, whose outputs are integrated via a distribution-aware voting strategy to produce robust difficulty scores without additional training; and (2) Difficulty-Aware Training reweights preference pairs based on their estimated difficulty, down-weighting easy samples while emphasizing harder ones to alleviate overfitting. This framework enables more effective preference optimization by prioritizing challenging examples, without requiring new data or extra fine-tuning stages. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DA-DPO consistently improves multimodal preference optimization, yielding stronger robustness to hallucinations and better generalization across standard benchmarks, while remaining computationally efficient. The project page is available at https://artanic30.github.io/project_pages/DA-DPO/.
Authors: Qingwen Pu, Kun Xie, Hong Yang, Guocong Zhai
Abstract: Existing paradigms for inferring pedestrian crossing behavior, ranging from statistical models to supervised learning methods, demonstrate limited generalizability and perform inadequately on new sites. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a shift from numerical pattern fitting to semantic, context-aware behavioral reasoning, yet existing LLM applications lack domain-specific adaptation and visual context. This study introduces Pedestrian Crossing LLM (PedX-LLM), a vision-and-knowledge enhanced framework designed to transform pedestrian crossing inference from site-specific pattern recognition to generalizable behavioral reasoning. By integrating LLaVA-extracted visual features with textual data and transportation domain knowledge, PedX-LLM fine-tunes a LLaMA-2-7B foundation model via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to infer crossing decisions. PedX-LLM achieves 82.0% balanced accuracy, outperforming the best statistical and supervised learning methods. Results demonstrate that the vision-augmented module contributes a 2.9% performance gain by capturing the built environment and integrating domain knowledge yields an additional 4.1% improvement. To evaluate generalizability across unseen environments, cross-site validation was conducted using site-based partitioning. The zero-shot PedX-LLM configuration achieves 66.9% balanced accuracy on five unseen test sites, outperforming the baseline data-driven methods by at least 18 percentage points. Incorporating just five validation examples via few-shot learning to PedX-LLM further elevates the balanced accuracy to 72.2%. PedX-LLM demonstrates strong generalizability to unseen scenarios, confirming that vision-and-knowledge-enhanced reasoning enables the model to mimic human-like decision logic and overcome the limitations of purely data-driven methods.
Authors: Aliakbar Nafar, Chetan Chigurupati, Danial Kamali, Hamid Karimian, Parisa Kordjamshidi
Abstract: Integrating symbolic constraints into deep learning models could make them more robust, interpretable, and data-efficient. Still, it remains a time-consuming and challenging task. Existing frameworks like DomiKnowS help this integration by providing a high-level declarative programming interface, but they still assume the user is proficient with the library's specific syntax. We propose AgenticDomiKnowS (ADS) to eliminate this dependency. ADS translates free-form task descriptions into a complete DomiKnowS program using an agentic workflow that creates and tests each DomiKnowS component separately. The workflow supports optional human-in-the-loop intervention, enabling users familiar with DomiKnowS to refine intermediate outputs. We show how ADS enables experienced DomiKnowS users and non-users to rapidly construct neuro-symbolic programs, reducing development time from hours to 10-15 minutes.
Authors: Lesley Wheat, Martin v. Mohrenschildt, Saeid Habibi
Abstract: Machine learning offers potential solutions to current issues in industrial systems in areas such as quality control and predictive maintenance, but also faces unique barriers in industrial applications. An ongoing challenge is extreme class imbalance, primarily due to the limited availability of faulty data during training. This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of anomaly detection algorithms using a problem-agnostic simulated dataset that reflects real-world engineering constraints. Using a synthetic dataset with a hyper-spherical based anomaly distribution in 2D and 10D, we benchmark 14 detectors across training datasets with anomaly rates between 0.05% and 20% and training sizes between 1 000 and 10 000 (with a testing dataset size of 40 000) to assess performance and generalization error. Our findings reveal that the best detector is highly dependant on the total number of faulty examples in the training dataset, with additional healthy examples offering insignificant benefits in most cases. With less than 20 faulty examples, unsupervised methods (kNN/LOF) dominate; but around 30-50 faulty examples, semi-supervised (XGBOD) and supervised (SVM/CatBoost) detectors, we see large performance increases. While semi-supervised methods do not show significant benefits with only two features, the improvements are evident at ten features. The study highlights the performance drop on generalization of anomaly detection methods on smaller datasets, and provides practical insights for deploying anomaly detection in industrial environments.
Authors: Nicholas A. Pape
Abstract: Yahtzee is a classic dice game with a stochastic, combinatorial structure and delayed rewards, making it an interesting mid-scale RL benchmark. While an optimal policy for solitaire Yahtzee can be computed using dynamic programming methods, multiplayer is intractable, motivating approximation methods. We formulate Yahtzee as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), and train self-play agents using various policy gradient methods: REINFORCE, Advantage Actor-Critic (A2C), and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), all using a multi-headed network with a shared trunk. We ablate feature and action encodings, architecture, return estimators, and entropy regularization to understand their impact on learning. Under a fixed training budget, REINFORCE and PPO prove sensitive to hyperparameters and fail to reach near-optimal performance, whereas A2C trains robustly across a range of settings. Our agent attains a median score of 241.78 points over 100,000 evaluation games, within 5.0\% of the optimal DP score of 254.59, achieving the upper section bonus and Yahtzee at rates of 24.9\% and 34.1\%, respectively. All models struggle to learn the upper bonus strategy, overindexing on four-of-a-kind's, highlighting persistent long-horizon credit-assignment and exploration challenges.
Authors: Shahar Ain Kedem, Itamar Zimerman, Eliya Nachmani
Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) data present unique modeling challenges because recordings vary in length, exhibit very low signal to noise ratios, differ significantly across participants, drift over time within sessions, and are rarely available in large and clean datasets. Consequently, developing deep learning methods that can effectively process EEG signals remains an open and important research problem. To tackle this problem, this work presents a new method inspired by Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). In computer vision, NeRF techniques train a neural network to memorize the appearance of a 3D scene and then uses its learned parameters to render and edit the scene from any viewpoint. We draw an analogy between the discrete images captured from different viewpoints used to learn a continuous 3D scene in NeRF, and EEG electrodes positioned at different locations on the scalp, which are used to infer the underlying representation of continuous neural activity. Building on this connection, we show that a neural network can be trained on a single EEG sample in a NeRF style manner to produce a fixed size and informative weight vector that encodes the entire signal. Moreover, via this representation we can render the EEG signal at previously unseen time steps and spatial electrode positions. We demonstrate that this approach enables continuous visualization of brain activity at any desired resolution, including ultra high resolution, and reconstruction of raw EEG signals. Finally, our empirical analysis shows that this method can effectively simulate nonexistent electrodes data in EEG recordings, allowing the reconstructed signal to be fed into standard EEG processing networks to improve performance.
Authors: Eran Zvuloni, Ronit Almog, Michael Glikson, Shany Brimer Biton, Ilan Green, Izhar Laufer, Offer Amir, Joachim A. Behar
Abstract: Heart failure (HF) affects 11.8% of adults aged 65 and older, reducing quality of life and longevity. Preventing HF can reduce morbidity and mortality. We hypothesized that artificial intelligence (AI) applied to 24-hour single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) data could predict the risk of HF within five years. To research this, the Technion-Leumit Holter ECG (TLHE) dataset, including 69,663 recordings from 47,729 patients, collected over 20 years was used. Our deep learning model, DeepHHF, trained on 24-hour ECG recordings, achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.80 that outperformed a model using 30-second segments and a clinical score. High-risk individuals identified by DeepHHF had a two-fold chance of hospitalization or death incidents. Explainability analysis showed DeepHHF focused on arrhythmias and heart abnormalities, with key attention between 8 AM and 3 PM. This study highlights the feasibility of deep learning to model 24-hour continuous ECG data, capturing paroxysmal events and circadian variations essential for reliable risk prediction. Artificial intelligence applied to single-lead Holter ECG is non-invasive, inexpensive, and widely accessible, making it a promising tool for HF risk prediction.
Authors: Nikhil Garg, Anxiong Song, Niklas Plessnig, Nathan Savoia, Laura B\'egon-Lours
Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are strongly affected by non-stationary neural signals that vary across sessions and individuals, limiting the generalization of subject-agnostic models and motivating adaptive and personalized learning on resource-constrained platforms. Programmable memristive hardware offers a promising substrate for such post-deployment adaptation; however, practical realization is challenged by limited weight resolution, device variability, nonlinear programming dynamics, and finite device endurance. In this work, we show that spiking neural networks (SNNs) can be deployed on ferroelectric memristive synaptic devices for adaptive EEG-based motor imagery decoding under realistic device constraints. We fabricate, characterize, and model ferroelectric synapses. We evaluate a convolutional-recurrent SNN architecture under two complementary deployment strategies: (i) device-aware training using a ferroelectric synapse model, and (ii) transfer of software-trained weights followed by low-overhead on-device re-tuning. To enable efficient adaptation, we introduce a device-aware weight-update strategy in which gradient-based updates are accumulated digitally and converted into discrete programming events only when a threshold is exceeded, emulating nonlinear, state-dependent programming dynamics while reducing programming frequency. Both deployment strategies achieve classification performance comparable to state-of-the-art software-based SNNs. Furthermore, subject-specific transfer learning achieved by retraining only the final network layers improves classification accuracy. These results demonstrate that programmable ferroelectric hardware can support robust, low-overhead adaptation in spiking neural networks, opening a practical path toward personalized neuromorphic processing of neural signals.
Authors: Manish Bhatt, Adrian Wood, Idan Habler, Ammar Al-Kahfah
Abstract: Production LLM agents with tool-using capabilities require security testing despite their safety training. We adapt Go-Explore to evaluate GPT-4o-mini across 28 experimental runs spanning six research questions. We find that random-seed variance dominates algorithmic parameters, yielding an 8x spread in outcomes; single-seed comparisons are unreliable, while multi-seed averaging materially reduces variance in our setup. Reward shaping consistently harms performance, causing exploration collapse in 94% of runs or producing 18 false positives with zero verified attacks. In our environment, simple state signatures outperform complex ones. For comprehensive security testing, ensembles provide attack-type diversity, whereas single agents optimize coverage within a given attack type. Overall, these results suggest that seed variance and targeted domain knowledge can outweigh algorithmic sophistication when testing safety-trained models.
Authors: Ziang Yin, Hongjian Zhou, Nicholas Gangi, Meng Zhang, Jeff Zhang, Zhaoran Rena Huang, Jiaqi Gu
Abstract: In this work, we identify three considerations that are essential for realizing practical photonic AI systems at scale: (1) dynamic tensor operation support for modern models rather than only weight-static kernels, especially for attention/Transformer-style workloads; (2) systematic management of conversion, control, and data-movement overheads, where multiplexing and dataflow must amortize electronic costs instead of letting ADC/DAC and I/O dominate; and (3) robustness under hardware non-idealities that become more severe as integration density grows. To study these coupled tradeoffs quantitatively, and to ensure they remain meaningful under real implementation constraints, we build a cross-layer toolchain that supports photonic AI design from early exploration to physical realization. SimPhony provides implementation-aware modeling and rapid cross-layer evaluation, translating physical costs into system-level metrics so architectural decisions are grounded in realistic assumptions. ADEPT and ADEPT-Z enable end-to-end circuit and topology exploration, connecting system objectives to feasible photonic fabrics under practical device and circuit constraints. Finally, Apollo and LiDAR provide scalable photonic physical design automation, turning candidate circuits into manufacturable layouts while accounting for routing, thermal, and crosstalk constraints.
Authors: Hongjian Zhou, Ziang Yin, Jiaqi Gu
Abstract: Photonics is becoming a cornerstone technology for high-performance AI systems and scientific computing, offering unparalleled speed, parallelism, and energy efficiency. Despite this promise, the design and deployment of electronic-photonic AI systems remain highly challenging due to a steep learning curve across multiple layers, spanning device physics, circuit design, system architecture, and AI algorithms. The absence of a mature electronic-photonic design automation (EPDA) toolchain leads to long, inefficient design cycles and limits cross-disciplinary innovation and co-evolution. In this work, we present a cross-layer co-design and automation framework aimed at democratizing photonic AI system development. We begin by introducing our architecture designs for scalable photonic edge AI and Transformer inference, followed by SimPhony, an open-source modeling tool for rapid EPIC AI system evaluation and design-space exploration. We then highlight advances in AI-enabled photonic design automation, including physical AI-based Maxwell solvers, a fabrication-aware inverse design framework, and a scalable inverse training algorithm for meta-optical neural networks, enabling a scalable EPDA stack for next-generation electronic-photonic AI systems.
Authors: Gang Qu (for the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative), Guanghao Li (for the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative), Zhongming Zhao (for the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative)
Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a multifactorial neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive cognitive decline and widespread epigenetic dysregulation in the brain. DNA methylation, as a stable yet dynamic epigenetic modification, holds promise as a noninvasive biomarker for early AD detection. However, methylation signatures vary substantially across tissues and studies, limiting reproducibility and translational utility. To address these challenges, we develop MethConvTransformer, a transformer-based deep learning framework that integrates DNA methylation profiles from both brain and peripheral tissues to enable biomarker discovery. The model couples a CpG-wise linear projection with convolutional and self-attention layers to capture local and long-range dependencies among CpG sites, while incorporating subject-level covariates and tissue embeddings to disentangle shared and region-specific methylation effects. In experiments across six GEO datasets and an independent ADNI validation cohort, our model consistently outperforms conventional machine-learning baselines, achieving superior discrimination and generalization. Moreover, interpretability analyses using linear projection, SHAP, and Grad-CAM++ reveal biologically meaningful methylation patterns aligned with AD-associated pathways, including immune receptor signaling, glycosylation, lipid metabolism, and endomembrane (ER/Golgi) organization. Together, these results indicate that MethConvTransformer delivers robust, cross-tissue epigenetic biomarkers for AD while providing multi-resolution interpretability, thereby advancing reproducible methylation-based diagnostics and offering testable hypotheses on disease mechanisms.
Authors: Yehui Yang, Dalu Yang, Wenshuo Zhou, Fangxin Shang, Yifan Liu, Jie Ren, Haojun Fei, Qing Yang, Tao Chen
Abstract: As multimodal AI becomes widely used for credit risk assessment and document review, a domain-specific benchmark is urgently needed that (1) reflects documents and workflows specific to financial credit applications, (2) includes credit-specific understanding and real-world robustness, and (3) preserves privacy compliance without sacrificing practical utility. Here, we introduce FCMBench-V1.0 -- a large-scale financial credit multimodal benchmark for real-world applications, covering 18 core certificate types, with 4,043 privacy-compliant images and 8,446 QA samples. The FCMBench evaluation framework consists of three dimensions: Perception, Reasoning, and Robustness, including 3 foundational perception tasks, 4 credit-specific reasoning tasks that require decision-oriented understanding of visual evidence, and 10 real-world acquisition artifact types for robustness stress testing. To reconcile compliance with realism, we construct all samples via a closed synthesis-capture pipeline: we manually synthesize document templates with virtual content and capture scenario-aware images in-house. This design also mitigates pre-training data leakage by avoiding web-sourced or publicly released images. FCMBench can effectively discriminate performance disparities and robustness across modern vision-language models. Extensive experiments were conducted on 23 state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs) from 14 top AI companies and research institutes. Among them, Gemini 3 Pro achieves the best F1(\%) score as a commercial model (64.61), Qwen3-VL-235B achieves the best score as an open-source baseline (57.27), and our financial credit-specific model, Qfin-VL-Instruct, achieves the top overall score (64.92). Robustness evaluations show that even top-performing models suffer noticeable performance drops under acquisition artifacts.
Authors: Junkai Luo, Yinglun Zhu
Abstract: Decision Transformers (DTs) have emerged as a powerful framework for sequential decision making by formulating offline reinforcement learning (RL) as a sequence modeling problem. However, extending DTs to online settings with pure RL gradients remains largely unexplored, as existing approaches continue to rely heavily on supervised sequence-modeling objectives during online finetuning. We identify hindsight return relabeling -- a standard component in online DTs -- as a critical obstacle to RL-based finetuning: while beneficial for supervised learning, it is fundamentally incompatible with importance sampling-based RL algorithms such as GRPO, leading to unstable training. Building on this insight, we propose new algorithms that enable online finetuning of Decision Transformers using pure reinforcement learning gradients. We adapt GRPO to DTs and introduce several key modifications, including sub-trajectory optimization for improved credit assignment, sequence-level likelihood objectives for enhanced stability and efficiency, and active sampling to encourage exploration in uncertain regions. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our methods outperform existing online DT baselines and achieve new state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, highlighting the effectiveness of pure-RL-based online finetuning for Decision Transformers.
Authors: Jintao Huang, Lu Leng, Yi Zhang, Ziyuan Yang
Abstract: Electrocardiography (ECG) is adopted for identity authentication in wearable devices due to its individual-specific characteristics and inherent liveness. However, existing methods often treat heartbeats as homogeneous signals, overlooking the phase-specific characteristics within the cardiac cycle. To address this, we propose a Hierarchical Phase-Aware Fusion~(HPAF) framework that explicitly avoids cross-feature entanglement through a three-stage design. In the first stage, Intra-Phase Representation (IPR) independently extracts representations for each cardiac phase, ensuring that phase-specific morphological and variation cues are preserved without interference from other phases. In the second stage, Phase-Grouped Hierarchical Fusion (PGHF) aggregates physiologically related phases in a structured manner, enabling reliable integration of complementary phase information. In the final stage, Global Representation Fusion (GRF) further combines the grouped representations and adaptively balances their contributions to produce a unified and discriminative identity representation. Moreover, considering ECG signals are continuously acquired, multiple heartbeats can be collected for each individual. We propose a Heartbeat-Aware Multi-prototype (HAM) enrollment strategy, which constructs a multi-prototype gallery template set to reduce the impact of heartbeat-specific noise and variability. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that HPAF achieves state-of-the-art results in the comparison with other methods under both closed and open-set settings.
Authors: Cheonkam Jeong, Adeline Nyamathi
Abstract: While Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) has achieved high accuracy, two critical gaps remain: a limited understanding of \textit{which} architectural choices actually matter, and a lack of linguistic analysis connecting recognition to generation. We address both gaps through a systematic analysis of the IEMOCAP dataset. For recognition, we conduct a rigorous ablation study with 10-seed evaluation and report three key findings. First, conversational context is paramount, with performance saturating rapidly -- 90\% of the total gain achieved within just the most recent 10--30 preceding turns (depending on the label set). Second, hierarchical sentence representations help at utterance-level, but this benefit disappears once conversational context is provided, suggesting that context subsumes intra-utterance structure. Third, external affective lexicons (SenticNet) provide no gain, indicating that pre-trained encoders already capture necessary emotional semantics. With simple architectures using strictly causal context, we achieve 82.69\% (4-way) and 67.07\% (6-way) weighted F1, outperforming prior text-only methods including those using bidirectional context. For linguistic analysis, we analyze 5,286 discourse marker occurrences and find a significant association between emotion and marker positioning ($p < .0001$). Notably, "sad" utterances exhibit reduced left-periphery marker usage (21.9\%) compared to other emotions (28--32\%), consistent with theories linking left-periphery markers to active discourse management. This connects to our recognition finding that sadness benefits most from context (+22\%p): lacking explicit pragmatic signals, sad utterances require conversational history for disambiguation.
Authors: Danial Sharifrazi, Nouman Javed, Mojtaba Mohammadi, Seyede Sana Salehi, Roohallah Alizadehsani, Prasad N. Paradkar, U. Rajendra Acharya, Asim Bhatti
Abstract: Mosquitos are the main transmissive agents of arboviral diseases. Manual classification of their neuronal spike patterns is very labor-intensive and expensive. Most available deep learning solutions require fully labeled spike datasets and highly preprocessed neuronal signals. This reduces the feasibility of mass adoption in actual field scenarios. To address the scarcity of labeled data problems, we propose a new Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) architecture that we call the Semi-supervised Swin-Inspired GAN (SSI-GAN). The Swin-inspired, shifted-window discriminator, together with a transformer-based generator, is used to classify neuronal spike trains and, consequently, detect viral neurotropism. We use a multi-head self-attention model in a flat, window-based transformer discriminator that learns to capture sparser high-frequency spike features. Using just 1 to 3% labeled data, SSI-GAN was trained with more than 15 million spike samples collected at five-time post-infection and recording classification into Zika-infected, dengue-infected, or uninfected categories. Hyperparameters were optimized using the Bayesian Optuna framework, and performance for robustness was validated under fivefold Monte Carlo cross-validation. SSI-GAN reached 99.93% classification accuracy on the third day post-infection with only 3% labeled data. It maintained high accuracy across all stages of infection with just 1% supervision. This shows a 97-99% reduction in manual labeling effort relative to standard supervised approaches at the same performance level. The shifted-window transformer design proposed here beat all baselines by a wide margin and set new best marks in spike-based neuronal infection classification.
Authors: Minhyeok Yun, Yong-Hoon Choi
Abstract: Conditional variational autoencoder (cVAE)-based singing voice synthesis provides efficient inference and strong audio quality by learning a score-conditioned prior and a recording-conditioned posterior latent space. However, because synthesis relies on prior samples while training uses posterior latents inferred from real recordings, imperfect distribution matching can cause a prior-posterior mismatch that degrades fine-grained expressiveness such as vibrato and micro-prosody. We propose FM-Singer, which introduces conditional flow matching (CFM) in latent space to learn a continuous vector field transporting prior latents toward posterior latents along an optimal-transport-inspired path. At inference time, the learned latent flow refines a prior sample by solving an ordinary differential equation (ODE) before waveform generation, improving expressiveness while preserving the efficiency of parallel decoding. Experiments on Korean and Chinese singing datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines, including lower mel-cepstral distortion and fundamental-frequency error and higher perceptual scores on the Korean dataset. Code, pretrained checkpoints, and audio demos are available at https://github.com/alsgur9368/FM-Singer
Authors: Leonard Lin (Shisa.AI), Adam Lensenmayer (Shisa.AI)
Abstract: We introduce JP-TL-Bench, a lightweight, open benchmark designed to guide the iterative development of Japanese-English translation systems. In this context, the challenge is often "which of these two good translations is better?" rather than "is this translation acceptable?" This distinction matters for Japanese-English, where subtle choices in politeness, implicature, ellipsis, and register strongly affect perceived naturalness. JP-TL-Bench uses a protocol built to make LLM judging both reliable and affordable: it evaluates a candidate model via reference-free, pairwise LLM comparisons against a fixed, versioned anchor set. Pairwise results are aggregated with a Bradley-Terry model and reported as win rates plus a normalized 0-10 "LT" score derived from a logistic transform of fitted log-strengths. Because each candidate is scored against the same frozen anchor set, scores are structurally stable given the same base set, judge, and aggregation code.
Authors: Pritish Saha, Chandrav Rajbangshi, Rudra Goyal, Mohit Goyal, Anurag Deo, Biswajit Roy, Ningthoujam Dhanachandra Singh, Raxit Goswami, Amitava Das
Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is the default way to adapt LLMs, but widely used LoRA and QLoRA are largely geometry-agnostic: they optimize in fixed, randomly oriented low-rank subspaces with first-order descent, mostly ignoring local loss curvature. This can inflate the effective update budget and amplify drift along weakly constrained directions. We introduce GRIT, a dynamic, curvature-aware LoRA procedure that preserves the LoRA parameterization but: (1) preconditions gradients in rank space using K-FAC as a natural-gradient proxy; (2) periodically reprojects the low-rank basis onto dominant Fisher eigendirections to suppress drift; and (3) adapts the effective rank from the spectrum so capacity concentrates where signal resides. Across instruction-following, comprehension, and reasoning benchmarks on LLaMA backbones, GRIT matches or surpasses LoRA and QLoRA while reducing trainable parameters by 46% on average (25--80% across tasks), without practical quality loss across prompt styles and data mixes. To model forgetting, we fit a curvature-modulated power law. Empirically, GRIT yields lower drift and a better updates-vs-retention frontier than strong PEFT-optimizer baselines (Orthogonal-LoRA, IA3, DoRA, Eff-FT, Shampoo).
Authors: Yotam Peled, David Zenati, Eliya Nachmani
Abstract: Realizing the full potential of quantum computation requires Quantum Error Correction (QEC). QEC reduces error rates by encoding logical information across redundant physical qubits, enabling errors to be detected and corrected. A common decoder used for this task is Minimum Weight Perfect Matching (MWPM) a graph-based algorithm that relies on edge weights to identify the most likely error chains. In this work, we propose a data-driven decoder named Neural Minimum Weight Perfect Matching (NMWPM). Our decoder utilizes a hybrid architecture that integrates Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to extract local syndrome features and Transformers to capture long-range global dependencies, which are then used to predict dynamic edge weights for the MWPM decoder. To facilitate training through the non-differentiable MWPM algorithm, we formulate a novel proxy loss function that enables end-to-end optimization. Our findings demonstrate significant performance reduction in the Logical Error Rate (LER) over standard baselines, highlighting the advantage of hybrid decoders that combine the predictive capabilities of neural networks with the algorithmic structure of classical matching.
Authors: Md Hasan Saju, Maher Muhtadi, Akramul Azim
Abstract: The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents new opportunities for automated software vulnerability detection, a crucial task in securing modern codebases. This paper presents a comparative study on the effectiveness of LLM-based techniques for detecting software vulnerabilities. The study evaluates three approaches, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), and a Dual-Agent LLM framework, against a baseline LLM model. A curated dataset was compiled from Big-Vul and real-world code repositories from GitHub, focusing on five critical Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) categories: CWE-119, CWE-399, CWE-264, CWE-20, and CWE-200. Our RAG approach, which integrated external domain knowledge from the internet and the MITRE CWE database, achieved the highest overall accuracy (0.86) and F1 score (0.85), highlighting the value of contextual augmentation. Our SFT approach, implemented using parameter-efficient QLoRA adapters, also demonstrated strong performance. Our Dual-Agent system, an architecture in which a secondary agent audits and refines the output of the first, showed promise in improving reasoning transparency and error mitigation, with reduced resource overhead. These results emphasize that incorporating a domain expertise mechanism significantly strengthens the practical applicability of LLMs in real-world vulnerability detection tasks.
Authors: Aly Sabri Abdalla, Vuk Marojevic
Abstract: Despite the growing interest in low-altitude economy (LAE) applications, including UAV-based logistics and emergency response, fundamental challenges remain in orchestrating such missions over complex, signal-constrained environments. These include the absence of real-time, resilient, and context-aware orchestration of aerial nodes with limited integration of artificial intelligence (AI) specialized for LAE missions. This paper introduces an open radio access network (O-RAN)-enabled LAE framework that leverages seamless coordination between the disaggregated RAN architecture, open interfaces, and RAN intelligent controllers (RICs) to facilitate closed-loop, AI-optimized, and mission-critical LAE operations. We evaluate the feasibility and performance of the proposed architecture via a semantic-aware rApp that acts as a terrain interpreter, offering semantic guidance to a reinforcement learning-enabled xApp, which performs real-time trajectory planning for LAE swarm nodes. We survey the capabilities of UAV testbeds that can be leveraged for LAE research, and present critical research challenges and standardization needs.
Authors: Qianli Wang, Van Bach Nguyen, Yihong Liu, Fedor Splitt, Nils Feldhus, Christin Seifert, Hinrich Sch\"utze, Sebastian M\"oller, Vera Schmitt
Abstract: Counterfactuals refer to minimally edited inputs that cause a model's prediction to change, serving as a promising approach to explaining the model's behavior. Large language models (LLMs) excel at generating English counterfactuals and demonstrate multilingual proficiency. However, their effectiveness in generating multilingual counterfactuals remains unclear. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive study on multilingual counterfactuals. We first conduct automatic evaluations on both directly generated counterfactuals in the target languages and those derived via English translation across six languages. Although translation-based counterfactuals offer higher validity than their directly generated counterparts, they demand substantially more modifications and still fall short of matching the quality of the original English counterfactuals. Second, we find the patterns of edits applied to high-resource European-language counterfactuals to be remarkably similar, suggesting that cross-lingual perturbations follow common strategic principles. Third, we identify and categorize four main types of errors that consistently appear in the generated counterfactuals across languages. Finally, we reveal that multilingual counterfactual data augmentation (CDA) yields larger model performance improvements than cross-lingual CDA, especially for lower-resource languages. Yet, the imperfections of the generated counterfactuals limit gains in model performance and robustness.
Authors: Doyoung Kim (Amazon, KAIST), Zhiwei Ren (Amazon, University of Pittsburgh), Jie Hao (Amazon), Zhongkai Sun (Amazon), Lichao Wang (Amazon), Xiyao Ma (Amazon), Zack Ye (Amazon), Xu Han (Amazon), Jun Yin (Amazon), Heng Ji (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Wei Shen (Amazon), Xing Fan (Amazon), Benjamin Yao (Amazon), Chenlei Guo (Amazon)
Abstract: We introduce WildAGTEval, a benchmark designed to evaluate large language model (LLM) agents' function-calling capabilities under realistic API complexity. Unlike prior work that assumes an idealized API system and disregards real-world factors such as noisy API outputs, WildAGTEval accounts for two dimensions of real-world complexity: 1. API specification, which includes detailed documentation and usage constraints, and 2. API execution, which captures runtime challenges. Consequently, WildAGTEval offers (i) an API system encompassing 60 distinct complexity scenarios that can be composed into approximately 32K test configurations, and (ii) user-agent interactions for evaluating LLM agents on these scenarios. Using WildAGTEval, we systematically assess several advanced LLMs and observe that most scenarios are challenging, with irrelevant information complexity posing the greatest difficulty and reducing the performance of strong LLMs by 27.3%. Furthermore, our qualitative analysis reveals that LLMs occasionally distort user intent merely to claim task completion, critically affecting user satisfaction.
Authors: Chaodong Tong, Qi Zhang, Chen Li, Lei Jiang, Yanbing Liu
Abstract: Faithfulness hallucinations in VQA occur when vision-language models produce fluent yet visually ungrounded answers, severely undermining their reliability in safety-critical applications. Existing detection methods mainly fall into two categories: external verification approaches relying on auxiliary models or knowledge bases, and uncertainty-driven approaches using repeated sampling or uncertainty estimates. The former suffer from high computational overhead and are limited by external resource quality, while the latter capture only limited facets of model uncertainty and fail to sufficiently explore the rich internal signals associated with the diverse failure modes. Both paradigms thus have inherent limitations in efficiency, robustness, and detection performance. To address these challenges, we propose FaithSCAN: a lightweight network that detects hallucinations by exploiting rich internal signals of VLMs, including token-level decoding uncertainty, intermediate visual representations, and cross-modal alignment features. These signals are fused via branch-wise evidence encoding and uncertainty-aware attention. We also extend the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm to VQA hallucination and propose a low-cost strategy to automatically generate model-dependent supervision signals, enabling supervised training without costly human labels while maintaining high detection accuracy. Experiments on multiple VQA benchmarks show that FaithSCAN significantly outperforms existing methods in both effectiveness and efficiency. In-depth analysis shows hallucinations arise from systematic internal state variations in visual perception, cross-modal reasoning, and language decoding. Different internal signals provide complementary diagnostic cues, and hallucination patterns vary across VLM architectures, offering new insights into the underlying causes of multimodal hallucinations.
Authors: Ali Anaissi, Seid Miad Zandavi, Weidong Huang, Junaid Akram, Basem Suleiman, Ali Braytee, Jie Hua
Abstract: Single-cell data analysis has the potential to revolutionize personalized medicine by characterizing disease-associated molecular changes at the single-cell level. Advanced single-cell multimodal assays can now simultaneously measure various molecules (e.g., DNA, RNA, Protein) across hundreds of thousands of individual cells, providing a comprehensive molecular readout. A significant analytical challenge is integrating single-cell measurements across different modalities. Various methods have been developed to address this challenge, but there has been no systematic evaluation of these techniques with different preprocessing strategies. This study examines a general pipeline for single-cell data analysis, which includes normalization, data integration, and dimensionality reduction. The performance of different algorithm combinations often depends on the dataset sizes and characteristics. We evaluate six datasets across diverse modalities, tissues, and organisms using three metrics: Silhouette Coefficient Score, Adjusted Rand Index, and Calinski-Harabasz Index. Our experiments involve combinations of seven normalization methods, four dimensional reduction methods, and five integration methods. The results show that Seurat and Harmony excel in data integration, with Harmony being more time-efficient, especially for large datasets. UMAP is the most compatible dimensionality reduction method with the integration techniques, and the choice of normalization method varies depending on the integration method used.
Authors: Qianli Wang, Nils Feldhus, Pepa Atanasova, Fedor Splitt, Simon Ostermann, Sebastian M\"oller, Vera Schmitt
Abstract: Quantization is widely used to accelerate inference and streamline the deployment of large language models (LLMs), yet its effects on self-explanations (SEs) remain unexplored. SEs, generated by LLMs to justify their own outputs, require reasoning about the model's own decision-making process, a capability that may exhibit particular sensitivity to quantization. As SEs are increasingly relied upon for transparency in high-stakes applications, understanding whether and to what extent quantization degrades SE quality and faithfulness is critical. To address this gap, we examine two types of SEs: natural language explanations (NLEs) and counterfactual examples, generated by LLMs quantized using three common techniques at distinct bit widths. Our findings indicate that quantization typically leads to moderate declines in both SE quality (up to 4.4\%) and faithfulness (up to 2.38\%). The user study further demonstrates that quantization diminishes both the coherence and trustworthiness of SEs (up to 8.5\%). Compared to smaller models, larger models show limited resilience to quantization in terms of SE quality but better maintain faithfulness. Moreover, no quantization technique consistently excels across task accuracy, SE quality, and faithfulness. Given that quantization's impact varies by context, we recommend validating SE quality for specific use cases, especially for NLEs, which show greater sensitivity. Nonetheless, the relatively minor deterioration in SE quality and faithfulness does not undermine quantization's effectiveness as a model compression technique.
Authors: Ali Anaissi, Ali Braytee, Weidong Huang, Junaid Akram, Alaa Farhat, Jie Hua
Abstract: As dermatological conditions become increasingly common and the availability of dermatologists remains limited, there is a growing need for intelligent tools to support both patients and clinicians in the timely and accurate diagnosis of skin diseases. In this project, we developed a deep learning based model for the classification and diagnosis of skin conditions. By leveraging pretraining on publicly available skin disease image datasets, our model effectively extracted visual features and accurately classified various dermatological cases. Throughout the project, we refined the model architecture, optimized data preprocessing workflows, and applied targeted data augmentation techniques to improve overall performance. The final model, based on the Swin Transformer, achieved a prediction accuracy of 87.71 percent across eight skin lesion classes on the ISIC2019 dataset. These results demonstrate the model's potential as a diagnostic support tool for clinicians and a self assessment aid for patients.
Authors: Yuxin Li, Xiangyu Zhang, Yifei Li, Zhiwei Guo, Haoyang Zhang, Eng Siong Chng, Cuntai Guan
Abstract: Speech is a scalable and non-invasive biomarker for early mental health screening. However, widely used depression datasets like DAIC-WOZ exhibit strong coupling between linguistic sentiment and diagnostic labels, encouraging models to learn semantic shortcuts. As a result, model robustness may be compromised in real-world scenarios, such as Camouflaged Depression, where individuals maintain socially positive or neutral language despite underlying depressive states. To mitigate this semantic bias, we propose DepFlow, a three-stage depression-conditioned text-to-speech framework. First, a Depression Acoustic Encoder learns speaker- and content-invariant depression embeddings through adversarial training, achieving effective disentanglement while preserving depression discriminability (ROC-AUC: 0.693). Second, a flow-matching TTS model with FiLM modulation injects these embeddings into synthesis, enabling control over depressive severity while preserving content and speaker identity. Third, a prototype-based severity mapping mechanism provides smooth and interpretable manipulation across the depression continuum. Using DepFlow, we construct a Camouflage Depression-oriented Augmentation (CDoA) dataset that pairs depressed acoustic patterns with positive/neutral content from a sentiment-stratified text bank, creating acoustic-semantic mismatches underrepresented in natural data. Evaluated across three depression detection architectures, CDoA improves macro-F1 by 9%, 12%, and 5%, respectively, consistently outperforming conventional augmentation strategies in depression Detection. Beyond enhancing robustness, DepFlow provides a controllable synthesis platform for conversational systems and simulation-based evaluation, where real clinical data remains limited by ethical and coverage constraints.
Authors: Emilio Ferrara
Abstract: Generative AI (GenAI) now produces text, images, audio, and video that can be perceptually convincing at scale and at negligible marginal cost. While public debate often frames the associated harms as "deepfakes" or incremental extensions of misinformation and fraud, this view misses a broader socio-technical shift: GenAI enables synthetic realities; coherent, interactive, and potentially personalized information environments in which content, identity, and social interaction are jointly manufactured and mutually reinforcing. We argue that the most consequential risk is not merely the production of isolated synthetic artifacts, but the progressive erosion of shared epistemic ground and institutional verification practices as synthetic content, synthetic identity, and synthetic interaction become easy to generate and hard to audit. This paper (i) formalizes synthetic reality as a layered stack (content, identity, interaction, institutions), (ii) expands a taxonomy of GenAI harms spanning personal, economic, informational, and socio-technical risks, (iii) articulates the qualitative shifts introduced by GenAI (cost collapse, throughput, customization, micro-segmentation, provenance gaps, and trust erosion), and (iv) synthesizes recent risk realizations (2023-2025) into a compact case bank illustrating how these mechanisms manifest in fraud, elections, harassment, documentation, and supply-chain compromise. We then propose a mitigation stack that treats provenance infrastructure, platform governance, institutional workflow redesign, and public resilience as complementary rather than substitutable, and outline a research agenda focused on measuring epistemic security. We conclude with the Generative AI Paradox: as synthetic media becomes ubiquitous, societies may rationally discount digital evidence altogether.
Authors: Anns Ijaz, Muhammad Azeem Javed
Abstract: Person re-identification (ReID) is an extremely important area in both surveillance and mobile applications, requiring strong accuracy with minimal computational cost. State-of-the-art methods give good accuracy but with high computational budgets. To remedy this, this paper proposes VisNet, a computationally efficient and effective re-identification model suitable for real-world scenarios. It is the culmination of conceptual contributions, including feature fusion at multiple scales with automatic attention on each, semantic clustering with anatomical body partitioning, a dynamic weight averaging technique to balance classification semantic regularization, and the use of loss function FIDI for improved metric learning tasks. The multiple scales fuse ResNet50's stages 1 through 4 without the use of parallel paths, with semantic clustering introducing spatial constraints through the use of rule-based pseudo-labeling. VisNet achieves 87.05% Rank-1 and 77.65% mAP on the Market-1501 dataset, having 32.41M parameters and 4.601 GFLOPs, hence, proposing a practical approach for real-time deployment in surveillance and mobile applications where computational resources are limited.
Authors: Naiqi Zhang, Chuancheng Shi, Jingtong Dou, Wenhua Wu, Fei Shen, Jianhua Cao
Abstract: Anomaly detection is crucial in industrial product quality inspection. Failing to detect tiny defects often leads to serious consequences. Existing methods face a structure-semantics trade-off: structure-oriented models (such as frequency-based filters) are noise-sensitive, while semantics-oriented models (such as CLIP-based encoders) often miss fine details. To address this, we propose HarmoniAD, a frequency-guided dual-branch framework. Features are first extracted by the CLIP image encoder, then transformed into the frequency domain, and finally decoupled into high- and low-frequency paths for complementary modeling of structure and semantics. The high-frequency branch is equipped with a fine-grained structural attention module (FSAM) to enhance textures and edges for detecting small anomalies, while the low-frequency branch uses a global structural context module (GSCM) to capture long-range dependencies and preserve semantic consistency. Together, these branches balance fine detail and global semantics. HarmoniAD further adopts a multi-class joint training strategy, and experiments on MVTec-AD, VisA, and BTAD show state-of-the-art performance with both sensitivity and robustness.
Authors: Angshul Majumdar
Abstract: We study coalition structure generation (CSG) when coalition values are not given but must be learned from episodic observations. We model each episode as a sparse linear regression problem, where the realised payoff \(Y_t\) is a noisy linear combination of a small number of coalition contributions. This yields a probabilistic CSG framework in which the planner first estimates a sparse value function from \(T\) episodes, then runs a CSG solver on the inferred coalition set. We analyse two estimation schemes. The first, Bayesian Greedy Coalition Pursuit (BGCP), is a greedy procedure that mimics orthogonal matching pursuit. Under a coherence condition and a minimum signal assumption, BGCP recovers the true set of profitable coalitions with high probability once \(T \gtrsim K \log m\), and hence yields welfare-optimal structures. The second scheme uses an \(\ell_1\)-penalised estimator; under a restricted eigenvalue condition, we derive \(\ell_1\) and prediction error bounds and translate them into welfare gap guarantees. We compare both methods to probabilistic baselines and identify regimes where sparse probabilistic CSG is superior, as well as dense regimes where classical least-squares approaches are competitive.
Authors: Yuhao Zhang, Zhongliang Yang, Linna Zhou
Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language model(LLM) technology has facilitated its integration into various domains of professional and daily life. However, the persistent challenge of LLM hallucination has emerged as a critical limitation, significantly compromising the reliability and trustworthiness of AI-generated content. This challenge has garnered significant attention within the scientific community, prompting extensive research efforts in hallucination detection and mitigation strategies. Current methodological frameworks reveal a critical limitation: traditional uncertainty quantification approaches demonstrate effectiveness primarily within conventional question-answering paradigms, yet exhibit notable deficiencies when confronted with non-canonical or adversarial questioning strategies. This performance gap raises substantial concerns regarding the dependability of LLM responses in real-world applications requiring robust critical thinking capabilities. This study aims to fill this gap by proposing an uncertainty quantification scenario in the task of generating with multiple facts. We have meticulously constructed a set of trap questions contained with fake names. Based on this scenario, we innovatively propose a novel and robust uncertainty quantification method(RU). A series of experiments have been conducted to verify its effectiveness. The results show that the constructed set of trap questions performs excellently. Moreover, when compared with the baseline methods on four different models, our proposed method has demonstrated great performance, with an average increase of 0.1-0.2 in ROCAUC values compared to the best performing baseline method, providing new sights and methods for addressing the hallucination issue of LLMs.
Authors: Jamiu Adekunle Idowu, Ahmed Almasoud, Ayman Alfahid
Abstract: As multi-agent AI systems become increasingly autonomous, evidence shows they can develop collusive strategies similar to those long observed in human markets and institutions. While human domains have accumulated centuries of anti-collusion mechanisms, it remains unclear how these can be adapted to AI settings. This paper addresses that gap by (i) developing a taxonomy of human anti-collusion mechanisms, including sanctions, leniency & whistleblowing, monitoring & auditing, market design, and governance and (ii) mapping them to potential interventions for multi-agent AI systems. For each mechanism, we propose implementation approaches. We also highlight open challenges, such as the attribution problem (difficulty attributing emergent coordination to specific agents) identity fluidity (agents being easily forked or modified) the boundary problem (distinguishing beneficial cooperation from harmful collusion) and adversarial adaptation (agents learning to evade detection).
Authors: Taj Gillin, Adam Lalani, Kenneth Zhang, Marcel Mateos Salles
Abstract: Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) are a novel self supervised training technique that have shown recent promise across domains. We introduce BERT-JEPA (BEPA), a training paradigm that adds a JEPA training objective to BERT-style models, working to combat a collapsed [CLS] embedding space and turning it into a language-agnostic space. This new structure leads to increased performance across multilingual benchmarks.
Authors: Nandish Chattopadhyay, Abdul Basit, Amira Guesmi, Muhammad Abdullah Hanif, Bassem Ouni, Muhammad Shafique
Abstract: Adversarial attacks pose a significant challenge to the reliable deployment of machine learning models in EdgeAI applications, such as autonomous driving and surveillance, which rely on resource-constrained devices for real-time inference. Among these, patch-based adversarial attacks, where small malicious patches (e.g., stickers) are applied to objects, can deceive neural networks into making incorrect predictions with potentially severe consequences. In this paper, we present PatchBlock, a lightweight framework designed to detect and neutralize adversarial patches in images. Leveraging outlier detection and dimensionality reduction, PatchBlock identifies regions affected by adversarial noise and suppresses their impact. It operates as a pre-processing module at the sensor level, efficiently running on CPUs in parallel with GPU inference, thus preserving system throughput while avoiding additional GPU overhead. The framework follows a three-stage pipeline: splitting the input into chunks (Chunking), detecting anomalous regions via a redesigned isolation forest with targeted cuts for faster convergence (Separating), and applying dimensionality reduction on the identified outliers (Mitigating). PatchBlock is both model- and patch-agnostic, can be retrofitted to existing pipelines, and integrates seamlessly between sensor inputs and downstream models. Evaluations across multiple neural architectures, benchmark datasets, attack types, and diverse edge devices demonstrate that PatchBlock consistently improves robustness, recovering up to 77% of model accuracy under strong patch attacks such as the Google Adversarial Patch, while maintaining high portability and minimal clean accuracy loss. Additionally, PatchBlock outperforms the state-of-the-art defenses in efficiency, in terms of computation time and energy consumption per sample, making it suitable for EdgeAI applications.
Authors: Chao Hu, Wenhao Zeng, Yuling Shi, Beijun Shen, Xiaodong Gu
Abstract: Repository-level code generation has attracted growing attention in recent years. Unlike function-level code generation, it requires the model to understand the entire repository, reasoning over complex dependencies across functions, classes, and modules. However, existing approaches such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or context-based function selection often fall short: they primarily rely on surface-level similarity and struggle to capture the rich dependencies that govern repository-level semantics. In this paper, we introduce InlineCoder, a novel framework for repository-level code generation. InlineCoder enhances the understanding of repository context by inlining the unfinished function into its call graph, thereby reframing the challenging repository understanding as an easier function-level coding task. Given a function signature, InlineCoder first generates a draft completion, termed an anchor, which approximates downstream dependencies and enables perplexity-based confidence estimation. This anchor drives a bidirectional inlining process: (i) Upstream Inlining, which embeds the anchor into its callers to capture diverse usage scenarios; and (ii) Downstream Retrieval, which integrates the anchor's callees into the prompt to provide precise dependency context. The enriched context, combining draft completion with upstream and downstream perspectives, equips the LLM with a comprehensive repository view.
Authors: Hanzhe Li, Bingchen Lin, Mengyuan Xu
Abstract: With the increasing demand for high-performance and high-efficiency computing, cloud computing, especially serverless computing, has gradually become a research hotspot in recent years, attracting numerous research attention. Meanwhile, MapReduce, which is a popular big data processing model in the industry, has been widely applied in various fields. Inspired by the serverless framework of Function as a Service and the high concurrency and robustness of MapReduce programming model, this paper focus on combining them to reduce the time span and increase the efficiency when executing the word frequency counting task. In this case, the paper use a MapReduce programming model based on a serverless computing platform to figure out the most optimized number of Map functions and Reduce functions for a particular task. For the same amount of workload, extensive experiments show both execution time reduces and the overall efficiency of the program improves at different rates as the number of map functions and reduce functions increases. This paper suppose the discovery of the most optimized number of map and reduce functions can help cooperations and programmers figure out the most optimized solutions.
Authors: Md Mahbub Hasan, Marcus Sternhagen, Krishna Chandra Roy
Abstract: Additive manufacturing (AM) is rapidly integrating into critical sectors such as aerospace, automotive, and healthcare. However, this cyber-physical convergence introduces new attack surfaces, especially at the interface between computer-aided design (CAD) and machine execution layers. In this work, we investigate targeted cyberattacks on two widely used fused deposition modeling (FDM) systems, Creality's flagship model K1 Max, and Ender 3. Our threat model is a multi-layered Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) intrusion, where the adversary intercepts and manipulates G-code files during upload from the user interface to the printer firmware. The MitM intrusion chain enables several stealthy sabotage scenarios. These attacks remain undetectable by conventional slicer software or runtime interfaces, resulting in structurally defective yet externally plausible printed parts. To counter these stealthy threats, we propose an unsupervised Intrusion Detection System (IDS) that analyzes structured machine logs generated during live printing. Our defense mechanism uses a frozen Transformer-based encoder (a BERT variant) to extract semantic representations of system behavior, followed by a contrastively trained projection head that learns anomaly-sensitive embeddings. Later, a clustering-based approach and a self-attention autoencoder are used for classification. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively distinguishes between benign and compromised executions.
Authors: Alistair Plum, Laura Bernardy, Tharindu Ranasinghe
Abstract: We present judgeWEL, a dataset for named entity recognition (NER) in Luxembourgish, automatically labelled and subsequently verified using large language models (LLM) in a novel pipeline. Building datasets for under-represented languages remains one of the major bottlenecks in natural language processing, where the scarcity of resources and linguistic particularities make large-scale annotation costly and potentially inconsistent. To address these challenges, we propose and evaluate a novel approach that leverages Wikipedia and Wikidata as structured sources of weak supervision. By exploiting internal links within Wikipedia articles, we infer entity types based on their corresponding Wikidata entries, thereby generating initial annotations with minimal human intervention. Because such links are not uniformly reliable, we mitigate noise by employing and comparing several LLMs to identify and retain only high-quality labelled sentences. The resulting corpus is approximately five times larger than the currently available Luxembourgish NER dataset and offers broader and more balanced coverage across entity categories, providing a substantial new resource for multilingual and low-resource NER research.
Authors: Yifan Zhang, Yifeng Liu, Mengdi Wang, Quanquan Gu
Abstract: The efficacy of deep residual networks is fundamentally predicated on the identity shortcut connection. While this mechanism effectively mitigates the vanishing gradient problem, it imposes a strictly additive inductive bias on feature transformations, thereby limiting the network's capacity to model complex state transitions. In this paper, we introduce Deep Delta Learning (DDL), a novel architecture that generalizes the standard residual connection by modulating the identity shortcut with a learnable, data-dependent geometric transformation. This transformation, termed the Delta Operator, constitutes a rank-1 perturbation of the identity matrix, parameterized by a reflection direction vector $\mathbf{k}(\mathbf{X})$ and a gating scalar $\beta(\mathbf{X})$. We provide a spectral analysis of this operator, demonstrating that the gate $\beta(\mathbf{X})$ enables dynamic interpolation between identity mapping, orthogonal projection, and geometric reflection. Furthermore, we restructure the residual update as a synchronous rank-1 injection, where the gate acts as a dynamic step size governing both the erasure of old information and the writing of new features. This unification empowers the network to explicitly control the spectrum of its layer-wise transition operator, enabling the modeling of complex, non-monotonic dynamics while preserving the stable training characteristics of gated residual architectures.
Authors: Shengjun Zhang, Zhang Zhang, Chensheng Dai, Yueqi Duan
Abstract: Recent reinforcement learning has enhanced the flow matching models on human preference alignment. While stochastic sampling enables the exploration of denoising directions, existing methods which optimize over multiple denoising steps suffer from sparse and ambiguous reward signals. We observe that the high entropy steps enable more efficient and effective exploration while the low entropy steps result in undistinguished roll-outs. To this end, we propose E-GRPO, an entropy aware Group Relative Policy Optimization to increase the entropy of SDE sampling steps. Since the integration of stochastic differential equations suffer from ambiguous reward signals due to stochasticity from multiple steps, we specifically merge consecutive low entropy steps to formulate one high entropy step for SDE sampling, while applying ODE sampling on other steps. Building upon this, we introduce multi-step group normalized advantage, which computes group-relative advantages within samples sharing the same consolidated SDE denoising step. Experimental results on different reward settings have demonstrated the effectiveness of our methods.
Authors: Md Zesun Ahmed Mia, Malyaban Bal, Abhronil Sengupta
Abstract: The quadratic complexity of self-attention mechanism presents a significant impediment to applying Transformer models to long sequences. This work explores computational principles derived from astrocytes-glial cells critical for biological memory and synaptic modulation-as a complementary approach to conventional architectural modifications for efficient self-attention. We introduce the Recurrent Memory Augmented Astromorphic Transformer (RMAAT), an architecture integrating abstracted astrocyte functionalities. RMAAT employs a recurrent, segment-based processing strategy where persistent memory tokens propagate contextual information. An adaptive compression mechanism, governed by a novel retention factor derived from simulated astrocyte long-term plasticity (LTP), modulates these tokens. Attention within segments utilizes an efficient, linear-complexity mechanism inspired by astrocyte short-term plasticity (STP). Training is performed using Astrocytic Memory Replay Backpropagation (AMRB), a novel algorithm designed for memory efficiency in recurrent networks. Evaluations on the Long Range Arena (LRA) benchmark demonstrate RMAAT's competitive accuracy and substantial improvements in computational and memory efficiency, indicating the potential of incorporating astrocyte-inspired dynamics into scalable sequence models.
Authors: Dimitris Vartziotis
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) offer a new empirical setting in which long-standing theories of linguistic meaning can be examined. This paper contrasts two broad approaches: social constructivist accounts associated with language games, and a mathematically oriented framework we call Semantic Field Theory. Building on earlier work by the author, we formalize the notions of lexical fields (Lexfelder) and linguistic fields (Lingofelder) as interacting structures in a continuous semantic space. We then analyze how core properties of transformer architectures-such as distributed representations, attention mechanisms, and geometric regularities in embedding spaces-relate to these concepts. We argue that the success of LLMs in capturing semantic regularities supports the view that language exhibits an underlying mathematical structure, while their persistent limitations in pragmatic reasoning and context sensitivity are consistent with the importance of social grounding emphasized in philosophical accounts of language use. On this basis, we suggest that mathematical structure and language games can be understood as complementary rather than competing perspectives. The resulting framework clarifies the scope and limits of purely statistical models of language and motivates new directions for theoretically informed AI architectures.
Authors: Hyunjun Kim
Abstract: Guardrail models are essential for ensuring the safety of Large Language Model (LLM) deployments, but processing full multi-turn conversation histories incurs significant computational cost. We propose Defensive M2S, a training paradigm that fine-tunes guardrail models on Multi-turn to Single-turn (M2S) compressed conversations rather than complete dialogue histories. We provide a formal complexity analysis showing that M2S reduces training cost from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$ for $n$-turn conversations. Empirically, on our training dataset (779 samples, avg. 10.6 turns), M2S requires only 169K tokens compared to 15.7M tokens for the multi-turn baseline -- a 93$\times$ reduction. We evaluate Defensive M2S across three guardrail model families (LlamaGuard, Nemotron, Qwen3Guard) and three compression templates (hyphenize, numberize, pythonize) on SafeDialBench, a comprehensive multi-turn jailbreak benchmark. Our best configuration, Qwen3Guard with hyphenize compression, achieves 93.8% attack detection recall while reducing inference tokens by 94.6% (from 3,231 to 173 tokens per conversation). This represents a 38.9 percentage point improvement over the baseline while dramatically reducing both training and inference costs. Our findings demonstrate that M2S compression can serve as an effective efficiency technique for guardrail deployment, enabling scalable safety screening of long multi-turn conversations.
Authors: Amit Daniely
Abstract: We consider supervised learning with $n$ labels and show that layerwise SGD on residual networks can efficiently learn a class of hierarchical models. This model class assumes the existence of an (unknown) label hierarchy $L_1 \subseteq L_2 \subseteq \dots \subseteq L_r = [n]$, where labels in $L_1$ are simple functions of the input, while for $i > 1$, labels in $L_i$ are simple functions of simpler labels. Our class surpasses models that were previously shown to be learnable by deep learning algorithms, in the sense that it reaches the depth limit of efficient learnability. That is, there are models in this class that require polynomial depth to express, whereas previous models can be computed by log-depth circuits. Furthermore, we suggest that learnability of such hierarchical models might eventually form a basis for understanding deep learning. Beyond their natural fit for domains where deep learning excels, we argue that the mere existence of human ``teachers" supports the hypothesis that hierarchical structures are inherently available. By providing granular labels, teachers effectively reveal ``hints'' or ``snippets'' of the internal algorithms used by the brain. We formalize this intuition, showing that in a simplified model where a teacher is partially aware of their internal logic, a hierarchical structure emerges that facilitates efficient learnability.
Authors: Hyunjun Kim
Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models achieve efficiency through sparse activation, but the role of geometric regularization in expert specialization remains unclear. We apply orthogonality loss to enforce expert diversity and find it fails on multiple fronts: it does not reduce weight-space overlap (MSO actually increases by up to 114%), activation-space overlap remains high (~0.6) regardless of regularization, and effects on performance are inconsistent -- marginal improvement on WikiText-103 (-0.9%), slight degradation on TinyStories (+0.9%), and highly variable results on PTB (std > 1.0). Our analysis across 7 regularization strengths reveals no significant correlation (r = -0.293, p = 0.523) between weight and activation orthogonality. These findings demonstrate that weight-space regularization neither achieves its geometric goal nor reliably improves performance, making it unsuitable for MoE diversity.
Authors: Sauro Succi, Abhisek Ganguly, Santosh Ansumali
Abstract: We inspect the analogy between machine-learning (ML) applications based on the transformer architecture without self-attention, {\it neural chains} hereafter, and discrete dynamical systems associated with discretised versions of neural integral and partial differential equations (NIE, PDE). A comparative analysis of the numerical solution of the (viscid and inviscid) Burgers and Eikonal equations via standard numerical discretization (also cast in terms of neural chains) and via PINN's learning is presented and commented on. It is found that standard numerical discretization and PINN learning provide two different paths to acquire essentially the same knowledge about the dynamics of the system. PINN learning proceeds through random matrices which bear no direct relation to the highly structured matrices associated with finite-difference (FD) procedures. Random matrices leading to acceptable solutions are far more numerous than the unique tridiagonal form in matrix space, which explains why the PINN search typically lands on the random ensemble. The price is a much larger number of parameters, causing lack of physical transparency (explainability) as well as large training costs with no counterpart in the FD procedure. However, our results refer to one-dimensional dynamic problems, hence they don't rule out the possibility that PINNs and ML in general, may offer better strategies for high-dimensional problems.
Authors: Tie Ma, Yixi Chen, Vaastav Anand, Alessandro Cornacchia, Am\^andio R. Faustino, Guanheng Liu, Shan Zhang, Hongbin Luo, Suhaib A. Fahmy, Zafar A. Qazi, Marco Canini
Abstract: We present MAESTRO, an evaluation suite for the testing, reliability, and observability of LLM-based MAS. MAESTRO standardizes MAS configuration and execution through a unified interface, supports integrating both native and third-party MAS via a repository of examples and lightweight adapters, and exports framework-agnostic execution traces together with system-level signals (e.g., latency, cost, and failures). We instantiate MAESTRO with 12 representative MAS spanning popular agentic frameworks and interaction patterns, and conduct controlled experiments across repeated runs, backend models, and tool configurations. Our case studies show that MAS executions can be structurally stable yet temporally variable, leading to substantial run-to-run variance in performance and reliability. We further find that MAS architecture is the dominant driver of resource profiles, reproducibility, and cost-latency-accuracy trade-off, often outweighing changes in backend models or tool settings. Overall, MAESTRO enables systematic evaluation and provides empirical guidance for designing and optimizing agentic systems.
Authors: Abhiram Bellur, Mohammed Raihan Ullah, Fraol Batole, Mohit Kansara, Masaharu Morimoto, Kai Ishikawa, Haifeng Chen, Yaroslav Zharov, Timofey Bryksin, Tien N. Nguyen, Hridesh Rajan, Danny Dig
Abstract: The primary value of AI agents in software development lies in their ability to extend the developer's capacity for reasoning and action, not to supplant human involvement. To showcase how to use agents working in tandem with developers, we designed a novel approach for carrying out coordinated renaming. Coordinated renaming, where a single rename refactoring triggers refactorings in multiple, related identifiers, is a frequent yet challenging task. Developers must manually propagate these rename refactorings across numerous files and contexts, a process that is both tedious and highly error-prone. State-of-the-art heuristic-based approaches produce an overwhelming number of false positives, while vanilla Large Language Models (LLMs) provide incomplete suggestions due to their limited context and inability to interact with refactoring tools. This leaves developers with incomplete refactorings or burdens them with filtering too many false positives. Coordinated renaming is exactly the kind of repetitive task that agents can significantly reduce the developers' burden while keeping them in the driver's seat. We designed, implemented, and evaluated the first multi-agent framework that automates coordinated renaming. It operates on a key insight: a developer's initial refactoring is a clue to infer the scope of related refactorings. Our Scope Inference Agent first transforms this clue into an explicit, natural-language Declared Scope. The Planned Execution Agent then uses this as a strict plan to identify program elements that should undergo refactoring and safely executes the changes by invoking the IDE's own trusted refactoring APIs. Finally, the Replication Agent uses it to guide the project-wide search. We first conducted a formative study on the practice of coordinated renaming in 609K commits in 100 open-source projects and surveyed 205 developers ...
Authors: Miaowei Wang, Jakub Zadro\.zny, Oisin Mac Aodha, Amir Vaxman
Abstract: Accurately simulating existing 3D objects and a wide variety of materials often demands expert knowledge and time-consuming physical parameter tuning to achieve the desired dynamic behavior. We introduce MotionPhysics, an end-to-end differentiable framework that infers plausible physical parameters from a user-provided natural language prompt for a chosen 3D scene of interest, removing the need for guidance from ground-truth trajectories or annotated videos. Our approach first utilizes a multimodal large language model to estimate material parameter values, which are constrained to lie within plausible ranges. We further propose a learnable motion distillation loss that extracts robust motion priors from pretrained video diffusion models while minimizing appearance and geometry inductive biases to guide the simulation. We evaluate MotionPhysics across more than thirty scenarios, including real-world, human-designed, and AI-generated 3D objects, spanning a wide range of materials such as elastic solids, metals, foams, sand, and both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids. We demonstrate that MotionPhysics produces visually realistic dynamic simulations guided by natural language, surpassing the state of the art while automatically determining physically plausible parameters. The code and project page are available at: https://wangmiaowei.github.io/MotionPhysics.github.io/.
URLs: https://wangmiaowei.github.io/MotionPhysics.github.io/.
Authors: Laksh Advani
Abstract: Autonomous LLM agents generate multi-step action plans that can fail due to contextual misalignment or structural incoherence. Existing anomaly detection methods are ill-suited for this challenge: mean-pooling embeddings dilutes anomalous steps, while contrastive-only approaches ignore sequential structure. Standard unsupervised methods on pre-trained embeddings achieve F1-scores no higher than 0.69. We introduce Trajectory Guard, a Siamese Recurrent Autoencoder with a hybrid loss function that jointly learns task-trajectory alignment via contrastive learning and sequential validity via reconstruction. This dual objective enables unified detection of both "wrong plan for this task" and "malformed plan structure." On benchmarks spanning synthetic perturbations and real-world failures from security audits (RAS-Eval) and multi-agent systems (Who\&When), we achieve F1-scores of 0.88-0.94 on balanced sets and recall of 0.86-0.92 on imbalanced external benchmarks. At 32 ms inference latency, our approach runs 17-27$\times$ faster than LLM Judge baselines, enabling real-time safety verification in production deployments.
Authors: Cameron Hickert, Sirui Li, Zhengbing He, Cathy Wu
Abstract: Current parking navigation systems often underestimate total travel time by failing to account for the time spent searching for a parking space, which significantly affects user experience, mode choice, congestion, and emissions. To address this issue, this paper introduces the probability-aware parking selection problem, which aims to direct drivers to the best parking location rather than straight to their destination. An adaptable dynamic programming framework is proposed for decision-making based on probabilistic information about parking availability at the parking lot level. Closed-form analysis determines when it is optimal to target a specific parking lot or explore alternatives, as well as the expected time cost. Sensitivity analysis and three illustrative cases are examined, demonstrating the model's ability to account for the dynamic nature of parking availability. Acknowledging the financial costs of permanent sensing infrastructure, the paper provides analytical and empirical assessments of errors incurred when leveraging stochastic observations to estimate parking availability. Experiments with real-world data from the US city of Seattle indicate this approach's viability, with mean absolute error decreasing from 7% to below 2% as observation frequency grows. In data-based simulations, probability-aware strategies demonstrate time savings up to 66% relative to probability-unaware baselines, yet still take up to 123% longer than direct-to-destination estimates.
Authors: Ravi Teja Pagidoju
Abstract: Standard LSTM(Long Short-Term Memory) neural networks provide accurate predictions for sales data in the retail industry, but require a lot of computing power. It can be challenging especially for mid to small retail industries. This paper examines LSTM model compression by gradually reducing the number of hidden units from 128 to 16. We used the Kaggle Store Item Demand Forecasting dataset, which has 913,000 daily sales records from 10 stores and 50 items, to look at the trade-off between model size and how accurate the predictions are. Experiments show that lowering the number of hidden LSTM units to 64 maintains the same level of accuracy while also improving it. The mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) ranges from 23.6% for the full 128-unit model to 12.4% for the 64-unit model. The optimized model is 73% smaller (from 280KB to 76KB) and 47% more accurate. These results show that larger models do not always achieve better results.
Authors: Chi-Te Kuo, Li-Hsiang Shen, Jyun-Jhe Huang
Abstract: Multi-functional reconfigurable intelligent surface (MF-RIS) is conceived to address the communication efficiency thanks to its extended signal coverage from its active RIS capability and self-sustainability from energy harvesting (EH). We investigate the architecture of multi-MF-RISs to assist non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) downlink networks. We formulate an energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem by optimizing power allocation, transmit beamforming and MF-RIS configurations of amplitudes, phase-shifts and EH ratios, as well as the position of MF-RISs, while satisfying constraints of available power, user rate requirements, and self-sustainability property. We design a parametrized sharing scheme for multi-agent hybrid deep reinforcement learning (PMHRL), where the multi-agent proximal policy optimization (PPO) and deep-Q network (DQN) handle continuous and discrete variables, respectively. The simulation results have demonstrated that proposed PMHRL has the highest EE compared to other benchmarks, including cases without parametrized sharing, pure PPO and DQN. Moreover, the proposed multi-MF-RISs-aided downlink NOMA achieves the highest EE compared to scenarios of no-EH/amplification, traditional RISs, and deployment without RISs/MF-RISs under different multiple access.
Authors: Chung-Wei Victor Yuan
Abstract: Compact models often lose the structure of their embedding space. The issue shows up when the capacity is tight or the data spans several languages. Such collapse makes it difficult for downstream tasks to build on the resulting representation. Existing compression methods focus on aligning model outputs at a superficial level but fail to preserve the underlying manifold structure. This mismatch often leads to semantic drift in the compact model, causing both task behavior and linguistic properties to deviate from the reference model. To address those issues, we provide a new framework called Embedding Consistency Regulation (ECR). This framework first derives a set of semantic anchors from teacher embeddings (computed once offline). Then, the compact model learns to maintain consistent geometry around these anchors, without relying on matching logits or internal features. ECR adds only a small projection step at inference, without altering the decoding architecture or its runtime behavior. In experiments on a 100K multilingual corpus, ECR consistently stabilizes training and preserves semantic structure across tasks and languages. It also produces a more compact and task-aligned representation space, enabling low-capacity models to learn cleaner manifolds than conventional baselines. ECR works without teacher outputs and is compatible with, but independent of, distillation. Taken together, our results show that ECR helps compact models better follow task requirements and makes them easier to deploy under strict efficiency or privacy limits.
Authors: Zhiheng Guo, Zhaoyang Liu, Zihan Cen, Chenyuan Feng, Xinghua Sun, Xiang Chen, Tony Q. S. Quek, Xijun Wang
Abstract: The deployment of large-scale neural networks within the Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) architecture is pivotal for enabling native edge intelligence. However, this paradigm faces two critical bottlenecks: the prohibitive memory footprint required for local training on resource-constrained gNBs, and the saturation of bandwidth-limited backhaul links during the global aggregation of high-dimensional model updates. To address these challenges, we propose CoCo-Fed, a novel Compression and Combination-based Federated learning framework that unifies local memory efficiency and global communication reduction. Locally, CoCo-Fed breaks the memory wall by performing a double-dimension down-projection of gradients, adapting the optimizer to operate on low-rank structures without introducing additional inference parameters/latency. Globally, we introduce a transmission protocol based on orthogonal subspace superposition, where layer-wise updates are projected and superimposed into a single consolidated matrix per gNB, drastically reducing the backhaul traffic. Beyond empirical designs, we establish a rigorous theoretical foundation, proving the convergence of CoCo-Fed even under unsupervised learning conditions suitable for wireless sensing tasks. Extensive simulations on an angle-of-arrival estimation task demonstrate that CoCo-Fed significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both memory and communication efficiency while maintaining robust convergence under non-IID settings.
Authors: Rajarshi Roy, Nasrin Imanpour, Ashhar Aziz, Shashwat Bajpai, Gurpreet Singh, Shwetangshu Biswas, Kapil Wanaskar, Parth Patwa, Subhankar Ghosh, Shreyas Dixit, Nilesh Ranjan Pal, Vipula Rawte, Ritvik Garimella, Gaytri Jena, Vasu Sharma, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Aishwarya Naresh Reganti, Amitava Das
Abstract: Multimodal generative AI systems like Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and MidJourney have fundamentally changed how synthetic images are created. These tools drive innovation but also enable the spread of misleading content, false information, and manipulated media. As generated images become harder to distinguish from photographs, detecting them has become an urgent priority. To combat this challenge, We release MS COCOAI, a novel dataset for AI generated image detection consisting of 96000 real and synthetic datapoints, built using the MS COCO dataset. To generate synthetic images, we use five generators: Stable Diffusion 3, Stable Diffusion 2.1, SDXL, DALL-E 3, and MidJourney v6. Based on the dataset, we propose two tasks: (1) classifying images as real or generated, and (2) identifying which model produced a given synthetic image. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Rajarshi-Roy-research/Defactify_Image_Dataset.
URLs: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Rajarshi-Roy-research/Defactify_Image_Dataset.
Authors: Jason Quantrill, Noura Khajehnouri, Zihan Guo, Manar H. Alalfi
Abstract: Smart home IoT platforms such as openHAB rely on Trigger Action Condition (TAC) rules to automate device behavior, but the interplay among these rules can give rise to interaction threats, unintended or unsafe behaviors emerging from implicit dependencies, conflicting triggers, or overlapping conditions. Identifying these threats requires semantic understanding and structural reasoning that traditionally depend on symbolic, constraint-driven static analysis. This work presents the first comprehensive evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) across a multi-category interaction threat taxonomy, assessing their performance on both the original openHAB (oHC/IoTB) dataset and a structurally challenging Mutation dataset designed to test robustness under rule transformations. We benchmark Llama 3.1 8B, Llama 70B, GPT-4o, Gemini-2.5-Pro, and DeepSeek-R1 across zero-, one-, and two-shot settings, comparing their results against oHIT's manually validated ground truth. Our findings show that while LLMs exhibit promising semantic understanding, particularly on action- and condition-related threats, their accuracy degrades significantly for threats requiring cross-rule structural reasoning, especially under mutated rule forms. Model performance varies widely across threat categories and prompt settings, with no model providing consistent reliability. In contrast, the symbolic reasoning baseline maintains stable detection across both datasets, unaffected by rule rewrites or structural perturbations. These results underscore that LLMs alone are not yet dependable for safety critical interaction-threat detection in IoT environments. We discuss the implications for tool design and highlight the potential of hybrid architectures that combine symbolic analysis with LLM-based semantic interpretation to reduce false positives while maintaining structural rigor.
Authors: Jeyun Lee, Junhyoung Lee, Wonbin Kweon, Bowen Jin, Yu Zhang, Susik Yoon, Dongha Lee, Hwanjo Yu, Jiawei Han, Seongku Kang
Abstract: Adapting general-domain retrievers to scientific domains is challenging due to the scarcity of large-scale domain-specific relevance annotations and the substantial mismatch in vocabulary and information needs. Recent approaches address these issues through two independent directions that leverage large language models (LLMs): (1) generating synthetic queries for fine-tuning, and (2) generating auxiliary contexts to support relevance matching. However, both directions overlook the diverse academic concepts embedded within scientific documents, often producing redundant or conceptually narrow queries and contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce an academic concept index, which extracts key concepts from papers and organizes them guided by an academic taxonomy. This structured index serves as a foundation for improving both directions. First, we enhance the synthetic query generation with concept coverage-based generation (CCQGen), which adaptively conditions LLMs on uncovered concepts to generate complementary queries with broader concept coverage. Second, we strengthen the context augmentation with concept-focused auxiliary contexts (CCExpand), which leverages a set of document snippets that serve as concise responses to the concept-aware CCQGen queries. Extensive experiments show that incorporating the academic concept index into both query generation and context augmentation leads to higher-quality queries, better conceptual alignment, and improved retrieval performance.
Authors: Waqas Ahmed, Sheeba Samuel, Kevin Coakley, Birgitta Koenig-Ries, Odd Erik Gundersen
Abstract: To enhance the reproducibility and reliability of deep learning models, we address a critical gap in current training methodologies: the lack of mechanisms that ensure consistent and robust performance across runs. Our empirical analysis reveals that even under controlled initialization and training conditions, the accuracy of the model can exhibit significant variability. To address this issue, we propose a Custom Loss Function (CLF) that reduces the sensitivity of training outcomes to stochastic factors such as weight initialization and data shuffling. By fine-tuning its parameters, CLF explicitly balances predictive accuracy with training stability, leading to more consistent and reliable model performance. Extensive experiments across diverse architectures for both image classification and time series forecasting demonstrate that our approach significantly improves training robustness without sacrificing predictive performance. These results establish CLF as an effective and efficient strategy for developing more stable, reliable and trustworthy neural networks.
Authors: Kanghoon Lee, Hyeonjun Kim, Jiachen Li, Jinkyoo Park
Abstract: Multi-robot systems are widely used for coverage tasks that require efficient coordination across large environments. In Multi-Robot Coverage Path Planning (MCPP), the objective is typically to minimize the makespan by generating non-overlapping paths for full-area coverage. However, most existing methods assume uniform importance across regions, limiting their effectiveness in scenarios where some zones require faster attention. We introduce the Priority-Aware MCPP (PA-MCPP) problem, where a subset of the environment is designated as prioritized zones with associated weights. The goal is to minimize, in lexicographic order, the total priority-weighted latency of zone coverage and the overall makespan. To address this, we propose a scalable two-phase framework combining (1) greedy zone assignment with local search, spanning-tree-based path planning, and (2) Steiner-tree-guided residual coverage. Experiments across diverse scenarios demonstrate that our method significantly reduces priority-weighted latency compared to standard MCPP baselines, while maintaining competitive makespan. Sensitivity analyses further show that the method scales well with the number of robots and that zone coverage behavior can be effectively controlled by adjusting priority weights.
Authors: Zihan Fang, Zheng Lin, Senkang Hu, Yanan Ma, Yihang Tao, Yiqin Deng, Xianhao Chen, Yuguang Fang
Abstract: While federated learning (FL) enables fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) without compromising data privacy, the substantial size of an LLM renders on-device training impractical for resource-constrained clients, such as mobile devices. Thus, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have emerged as a computation-efficient solution, which activates only a sparse subset of experts during model training to reduce computing burden without sacrificing performance. Though integrating MoE into FL fine-tuning holds significant potential, it still encounters three key challenges: i) selecting appropriate experts for clients remains challenging due to the lack of a reliable metric to measure each expert's impact on local fine-tuning performance, ii) the heterogeneous computing resources across clients severely hinder MoE-based LLM fine-tuning, as dynamic expert activations across diverse input samples can overwhelm resource-constrained devices, and iii) client-specific expert subsets and routing preference undermine global aggregation, where misaligned expert updates and inconsistent gating networks in troduce destructive interference. To address these challenges, we propose HFedMoE, a heterogeneous MoE-based FL fine-tuning framework that customizes a subset of experts to each client for computation-efficient LLM fine-tuning. Specifically, HFedMoE identifies the expert importance based on its contributions to fine-tuning performance, and then adaptively selects a subset of experts from an information bottleneck perspective to align with each client' s computing budget. A sparsity-aware model aggregation strategy is also designed to aggregate the actively fine-tuned experts and gating parameters with importance weighted contributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HFedMoE outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in training accuracy and convergence speed.
Authors: Hareshkumar Jadav, Ranveer Singh, Vaneet Aggarwal
Abstract: Maximizing submodular objectives under constraints is a fundamental problem in machine learning and optimization. We study the maximization of a nonnegative, non-monotone $\gamma$-weakly DR-submodular function over a down-closed convex body. Our main result is an approximation algorithm whose guarantee depends smoothly on $\gamma$; in particular, when $\gamma=1$ (the DR-submodular case) our bound recovers the $0.401$ approximation factor, while for $\gamma<1$ the guarantee degrades gracefully and, it improves upon previously reported bounds for $\gamma$-weakly DR-submodular maximization under the same constraints. Our approach combines a Frank-Wolfe-guided continuous-greedy framework with a $\gamma$-aware double-greedy step, yielding a simple yet effective procedure for handling non-monotonicity. This results in state-of-the-art guarantees for non-monotone $\gamma$-weakly DR-submodular maximization over down-closed convex bodies.
Authors: Huixin Sun, Linlin Yang, Ronyu Chen, Kerui Gu, Baochang Zhang, Angela Yao, Xianbin Cao
Abstract: Despite significant advances in generic object detection, a persistent performance gap remains for tiny objects compared to normal-scale objects. We demonstrate that tiny objects are highly sensitive to annotation noise, where optimizing strict localization objectives risks noise overfitting. To address this, we propose Tiny Object Localization with Flows (TOLF), a noise-robust localization framework leveraging normalizing flows for flexible error modeling and uncertainty-guided optimization. Our method captures complex, non-Gaussian prediction distributions through flow-based error modeling, enabling robust learning under noisy supervision. An uncertainty-aware gradient modulation mechanism further suppresses learning from high-uncertainty, noise-prone samples, mitigating overfitting while stabilizing training. Extensive experiments across three datasets validate our approach's effectiveness. Especially, TOLF boosts the DINO baseline by 1.2% AP on the AI-TOD dataset.
Authors: Kasra Fouladi, Hamta Rahmani
Abstract: This paper introduces Interpretability-Guided Bi-objective Optimization (IGBO), a framework that trains interpretable models by incorporating structured domain knowledge via a bi-objective formulation. IGBO encodes feature importance hierarchies as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) and uses Temporal Integrated Gradients (TIG) to measure feature importance. To address the Out-of-Distribution (OOD) problem in TIG computation, we propose an Optimal Path Oracle that learns data-manifold-aware integration paths. Theoretical analysis proves convergence properties and robustness to mini-batch noise, while empirical results on time-series data demonstrate IGBO's effectiveness in enforcing DAG constraints with minimal accuracy loss, outperforming standard regularization baselines.
Authors: Taekyung Ki, Sangwon Jang, Jaehyeong Jo, Jaehong Yoon, Sung Ju Hwang
Abstract: Talking head generation creates lifelike avatars from static portraits for virtual communication and content creation. However, current models do not yet convey the feeling of truly interactive communication, often generating one-way responses that lack emotional engagement. We identify two key challenges toward truly interactive avatars: generating motion in real-time under causal constraints and learning expressive, vibrant reactions without additional labeled data. To address these challenges, we propose Avatar Forcing, a new framework for interactive head avatar generation that models real-time user-avatar interactions through diffusion forcing. This design allows the avatar to process real-time multimodal inputs, including the user's audio and motion, with low latency for instant reactions to both verbal and non-verbal cues such as speech, nods, and laughter. Furthermore, we introduce a direct preference optimization method that leverages synthetic losing samples constructed by dropping user conditions, enabling label-free learning of expressive interaction. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework enables real-time interaction with low latency (approximately 500ms), achieving 6.8X speedup compared to the baseline, and produces reactive and expressive avatar motion, which is preferred over 80% against the baseline.
Authors: Tianyu Zhao, Llion Jones
Abstract: Sequence modeling layers in modern language models typically face a trade-off between storage capacity and computational efficiency. While Softmax attention offers unbounded storage at prohibitive quadratic costs, linear variants provide efficiency but suffer from limited, fixed-size storage. We propose Fast-weight Product Key Memory (FwPKM), a novel architecture that resolves this tension by transforming the sparse Product Key Memory (PKM) from a static module into a dynamic, "fast-weight" episodic memory. Unlike PKM, FwPKM updates its parameters dynamically at both training and inference time via local chunk-level gradient descent, allowing the model to rapidly memorize and retrieve new key-value pairs from input sequences. Experiments reveal that FwPKM functions as an effective episodic memory that complements the semantic memory of standard modules, yielding significant perplexity reductions on long-context datasets. Notably, in Needle in a Haystack evaluations, FwPKM generalizes to 128K-token contexts despite being trained on only 4K-token sequences.
Authors: Haonan Song, Qingchen Xie, Huan Zhu, Feng Xiao, Luxi Xing, Fuzhen Li, Liu Kang, Feng Jiang, Zhiyong Zheng, Fan Yang
Abstract: Generative Reward Models (GRMs) have attracted considerable research interest in reward modeling due to their interpretability, inference-time scalability, and potential for refinement through reinforcement learning (RL). However, widely used pairwise GRMs create a computational bottleneck when integrated with RL algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). This bottleneck arises from two factors: (i) the O(n^2) time complexity of pairwise comparisons required to obtain relative scores, and (ii) the computational overhead of repeated sampling or additional chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to improve performance. To address the first factor, we propose Intergroup Relative Preference Optimization (IRPO), a novel RL framework that incorporates the well-established Bradley-Terry model into GRPO. By generating a pointwise score for each response, IRPO enables efficient evaluation of arbitrarily many candidates during RL training while preserving interpretability and fine-grained reward signals. Experimental results demonstrate that IRPO achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among pointwise GRMs across multiple benchmarks, with performance comparable to that of current leading pairwise GRMs. Furthermore, we show that IRPO significantly outperforms pairwise GRMs in post-training evaluations.
Authors: Rachmad Vidya Wicaksana Putra, Pasindu Wickramasinghe, Muhammad Shafique
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been emerging as prominent AI models for solving many natural language tasks due to their high performance (e.g., accuracy) and capabilities in generating high-quality responses to the given inputs. However, their large computational cost, huge memory footprints, and high processing power/energy make it challenging for their embedded deployments. Amid several tinyLLMs, recent works have proposed spike-driven language models (SLMs) for significantly reducing the processing power/energy of LLMs. However, their memory footprints still remain too large for low-cost and resource-constrained embedded devices. Manual quantization approach may effectively compress SLM memory footprints, but it requires a huge design time and compute power to find the quantization setting for each network, hence making this approach not-scalable for handling different networks, performance requirements, and memory budgets. To bridge this gap, we propose QSLM, a novel framework that performs automated quantization for compressing pre-trained SLMs, while meeting the performance and memory constraints. To achieve this, QSLM first identifies the hierarchy of the given network architecture and the sensitivity of network layers under quantization, then employs a tiered quantization strategy (e.g., global-, block-, and module-level quantization) while leveraging a multi-objective performance-and-memory trade-off function to select the final quantization setting. Experimental results indicate that our QSLM reduces memory footprint by up to 86.5%, reduces power consumption by up to 20%, maintains high performance across different tasks (i.e., by up to 84.4% accuracy of sentiment classification on the SST-2 dataset and perplexity score of 23.2 for text generation on the WikiText-2 dataset) close to the original non-quantized model while meeting the performance and memory constraints.
Authors: Hao Guan, Li Zhou
Abstract: Vision-Language Models have demonstrated strong potential in medical image analysis and disease diagnosis. However, after deployment, their performance may deteriorate when the input data distribution shifts from that observed during development. Detecting such performance degradation is essential for clinical reliability, yet remains challenging for large pre-trained VLMs operating without labeled data. In this study, we investigate performance degradation detection under data shift in a state-of-the-art pathology VLM. We examine both input-level data shift and output-level prediction behavior to understand their respective roles in monitoring model reliability. To facilitate systematic analysis of input data shift, we develop DomainSAT, a lightweight toolbox with a graphical interface that integrates representative shift detection algorithms and enables intuitive exploration of data shift. Our analysis shows that while input data shift detection is effective at identifying distributional changes and providing early diagnostic signals, it does not always correspond to actual performance degradation. Motivated by this observation, we further study output-based monitoring and introduce a label-free, confidence-based degradation indicator that directly captures changes in model prediction confidence. We find that this indicator exhibits a close relationship with performance degradation and serves as an effective complement to input shift detection. Experiments on a large-scale pathology dataset for tumor classification demonstrate that combining input data shift detection and output confidence-based indicators enables more reliable detection and interpretation of performance degradation in VLMs under data shift. These findings provide a practical and complementary framework for monitoring the reliability of foundation models in digital pathology.
Authors: Alphaeus Dmonte, Roland Oruche, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Marcos Zampieri, Prasad Calyam
Abstract: Identifying relevant text spans is important for several downstream tasks in NLP, as it contributes to model explainability. While most span identification approaches rely on relatively smaller pre-trained language models like BERT, a few recent approaches have leveraged the latest generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) for the task. Current work has focused on explicit span identification like Named Entity Recognition (NER), while more subjective span identification with LLMs in tasks like Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has been underexplored. In this paper, we fill this important gap by presenting an evaluation of the performance of various LLMs on text span identification in three popular tasks, namely sentiment analysis, offensive language identification, and claim verification. We explore several LLM strategies like instruction tuning, in-context learning, and chain of thought. Our results indicate underlying relationships within text aid LLMs in identifying precise text spans.
Authors: U\u{g}urcan \"Ozalp
Abstract: Off-policy actor-critic methods in reinforcement learning train a critic with temporal-difference updates and use it as a learning signal for the policy (actor). This design typically achieves higher sample efficiency than purely on-policy methods. However, critic networks tend to overestimate value estimates systematically. This is often addressed by introducing a pessimistic bias based on uncertainty estimates. Current methods employ ensembling to quantify the critic's epistemic uncertainty-uncertainty due to limited data and model ambiguity-to scale pessimistic updates. In this work, we propose a new algorithm called Stochastic Actor-Critic (STAC) that incorporates temporal (one-step) aleatoric uncertainty-uncertainty arising from stochastic transitions, rewards, and policy-induced variability in Bellman targets-to scale pessimistic bias in temporal-difference updates, rather than relying on epistemic uncertainty. STAC uses a single distributional critic network to model the temporal return uncertainty, and applies dropout to both the critic and actor networks for regularization. Our results show that pessimism based on a distributional critic alone suffices to mitigate overestimation, and naturally leads to risk-averse behavior in stochastic environments. Introducing dropout further improves training stability and performance by means of regularization. With this design, STAC achieves improved computational efficiency using a single distributional critic network.
Authors: Simon Paquette-Greenbaum, Jiangbo Yu
Abstract: Investment portfolio optimization is a task conducted in all major financial institutions. The Cardinality Constrained Mean-Variance Portfolio Optimization (CCPO) problem formulation is ubiquitous for portfolio optimization. The challenge of this type of portfolio optimization, a mixed-integer quadratic programming (MIQP) problem, arises from the intractability of solutions from exact solvers, where heuristic algorithms are used to find approximate portfolio solutions. CCPO entails many laborious and complex workflows and also requires extensive effort pertaining to heuristic algorithm development, where the combination of pooled heuristic solutions results in improved efficient frontiers. Hence, common approaches are to develop many heuristic algorithms. Agentic frameworks emerge as a promising candidate for many problems within combinatorial optimization, as they have been shown to be equally efficient with regard to automating large workflows and have been shown to be excellent in terms of algorithm development, sometimes surpassing human-level performance. This study implements a novel agentic framework for the CCPO and explores several concrete architectures. In benchmark problems, the implemented agentic framework matches state-of-the-art algorithms. Furthermore, complex workflows and algorithm development efforts are alleviated, while in the worst case, lower but acceptable error is reported.
Authors: Sunny Gupta, Amit Sethi
Abstract: Federated data sharing promises utility without centralizing raw data, yet existing embedding-level generators struggle under non-IID client heterogeneity and provide limited formal protection against gradient leakage. We propose FedHypeVAE, a differentially private, hypernetwork-driven framework for synthesizing embedding-level data across decentralized clients. Building on a conditional VAE backbone, we replace the single global decoder and fixed latent prior with client-aware decoders and class-conditional priors generated by a shared hypernetwork from private, trainable client codes. This bi-level design personalizes the generative layerrather than the downstream modelwhile decoupling local data from communicated parameters. The shared hypernetwork is optimized under differential privacy, ensuring that only noise-perturbed, clipped gradients are aggregated across clients. A local MMD alignment between real and synthetic embeddings and a Lipschitz regularizer on hypernetwork outputs further enhance stability and distributional coherence under non-IID conditions. After training, a neutral meta-code enables domain agnostic synthesis, while mixtures of meta-codes provide controllable multi-domain coverage. FedHypeVAE unifies personalization, privacy, and distribution alignment at the generator level, establishing a principled foundation for privacy-preserving data synthesis in federated settings. Code: github.com/sunnyinAI/FedHypeVAE
Authors: Valentin No\"el
Abstract: We present a training-free method for detecting valid mathematical reasoning in large language models through spectral analysis of attention patterns. By treating attention matrices as adjacency matrices of dynamic graphs over tokens, we extract four interpretable spectral diagnostics, the Fiedler value (algebraic connectivity), high-frequency energy ratio (HFER), graph signal smoothness, and spectral entropy, that exhibit statistically significant differences between valid and invalid mathematical proofs. Experiments across seven transformer models from four independent architectural families (Meta Llama, Alibaba Qwen, Microsoft Phi, and Mistral AI) demonstrate that this spectral signature produces effect sizes up to Cohen's $d = 3.30$ ($p < 10^{-116}$), enabling 85.0--95.6\% classification accuracy under rigorous evaluation, with calibrated thresholds reaching 93--95\% on the full dataset. The method requires no training data, fine-tuning, or learned classifiers: a single threshold on a spectral metric suffices for high accuracy. Through systematic label correction, we discover that the spectral method detects logical coherence rather than compiler acceptance, identifying mathematically valid proofs that formal verifiers reject due to technical failures. We further identify an architectural dependency: Mistral-7B's Sliding Window Attention shifts the discriminative signal from HFER to late-layer Smoothness ($d = 2.09$, $p_{\text{MW}} = 1.16 \times 10^{-48}$), revealing that attention mechanism design affects which spectral features capture reasoning validity. These findings establish spectral graph analysis as a principled framework for reasoning verification with immediate applications to hallucination detection and AI safety monitoring.
Authors: Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Hauptmann, Ye Tong Yuan, Jessica Situ, Xian-Hao Liao, Ashly Vivian Beresnitzky, Iris Braunstein, Pattie Maes
Abstract: This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed three sessions under the same condition. In a fourth session, LLM users were reassigned to Brain-only group (LLM-to-Brain), and Brain-only users were reassigned to LLM condition (Brain-to-LLM). A total of 54 participants took part in Sessions 1-3, with 18 completing session 4. We used electroencephalography (EEG) to assess cognitive load during essay writing, and analyzed essays using NLP, as well as scoring essays with the help from human teachers and an AI judge. Across groups, NERs, n-gram patterns, and topic ontology showed within-group homogeneity. EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use. In session 4, LLM-to-Brain participants showed reduced alpha and beta connectivity, indicating under-engagement. Brain-to-LLM users exhibited higher memory recall and activation of occipito-parietal and prefrontal areas, similar to Search Engine users. Self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning.
Authors: Samuel Schapiro, Sumuk Shashidhar, Alexi Gladstone, Jonah Black, Royce Moon, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Lav R. Varshney
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, and Large Language Models (LLMs) in particular, are increasingly employed for creative tasks like scientific idea generation, constituting a form of generalization from training data unaddressed by existing conceptual frameworks. Despite its similarities to compositional generalization (CG), combinatorial creativity (CC) is an open-ended ability. Instead of evaluating for accuracy or correctness against fixed targets, which would contradict the open-ended nature of CC, we propose a theoretical framework and algorithmic task for evaluating outputs by their degrees of novelty and utility. From here, we make several important empirical contributions: (1) We obtain the first insights into the scaling behavior of creativity for LLMs. (2) We discover that, for fixed compute budgets, there exist optimal model depths and widths for creative ability. (3) We find that the ideation-execution gap, whereby LLMs excel at generating novel scientific ideas but struggle to ensure their practical feasibility, may be explained by a more fundamental novelty-utility tradeoff characteristic of creativity algorithms in general. Though our findings persist up to the 100M scale, frontier models today are well into the billions of parameters. Therefore, our conceptual framework and empirical findings can best serve as a starting point for understanding and improving the creativity of frontier-size models today, as we begin to bridge the gap between human and machine intelligence.
Authors: Agorakis Bompotas, Konstantinos Koutras, Nikitas Rigas Kalogeropoulos, Panagiotis Kechagias, Dimitra Gariza, Athanasios P. Kalogeras, Christos Alexakos
Abstract: The global agricultural sector is undergoing a transformative shift, driven by increasing food demands, climate variability and the need for sustainable practices. SUSTAINABLE is a smart farming platform designed to integrate IoT, AI, satellite imaging, and role-based task orchestration to enable efficient, traceable, and sustainable agriculture with a pilot usecase in viticulture. This paper explores current smart agriculture solutions, presents a comparative evaluation, and introduces SUSTAINABLE's key features, including satellite index integration, real-time environmental data, and role-aware task management tailored to Mediterranean vineyards.
Authors: Shaoqi Wang, Lu Yu, Siwei Lou, Feng Yan, Chunjie Yang, Qing Cui, Jun Zhou
Abstract: The convergence of deep learning and formal mathematics has spurred research in formal verification. Statement autoformalization, a crucial first step in this process, aims to translate informal descriptions into machine-verifiable representations but remains a significant challenge. The core difficulty lies in the fact that existing methods often suffer from a lack of contextual awareness, leading to hallucination of formal definitions and theorems. Furthermore, current retrieval-augmented approaches exhibit poor precision and recall for formal library dependency retrieval, and lack the scalability to effectively leverage ever-growing public datasets. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented framework based on DDR (\textit{Direct Dependency Retrieval}) for statement autoformalization. Our DDR method directly generates candidate library dependencies from natural language mathematical descriptions and subsequently verifies their existence within the formal library via an efficient suffix array check. Leveraging this efficient search mechanism, we constructed a dependency retrieval dataset of over 500,000 samples and fine-tuned a high-precision DDR model. Experimental results demonstrate that our DDR model significantly outperforms SOTA methods in both retrieval precision and recall. Consequently, an autoformalizer equipped with DDR shows consistent performance advantages in both single-attempt accuracy and multi-attempt stability compared to models using traditional selection-based RAG methods.
Authors: Xin Guan, Yunshan Li, Zekun Wu, Ruibo Zhang
Abstract: As AI systems move into high stakes domains such as legal reasoning, medical diagnosis, and financial decision making, regulators and practitioners increasingly demand auditability. Auditability means the ability to trace exactly what each step in a multi step workflow saw and did. Current large language model based workflows are fundamentally opaque. Context pollution, defined as the accumulation of information across reasoning steps, causes models to hallucinate and lose track of constraints. At the same time, implicit data flow makes it impossible to reconstruct what any given step actually received as input. We present NormCode, a semi formal language that makes AI workflows auditable by construction. Each inference step operates in enforced data isolation and can access only explicitly passed inputs. This eliminates cross step contamination and ensures that every intermediate state can be inspected. A strict separation between semantic operations, meaning probabilistic language model reasoning, and syntactic operations, meaning deterministic data flow, allows auditors to clearly distinguish inference from mechanical restructuring. The multi format ecosystem, consisting of NCDS, NCD, NCN, and NCDN files, allows developers, domain experts, and auditors to inspect the same plan in formats suited to their individual needs. A four phase compilation pipeline transforms natural language intent into executable JSON repositories. A visual Canvas application provides real time graph visualization and breakpoint debugging. We validate the approach by achieving full accuracy on base X addition and by self hosted execution of the NormCode compiler itself. These results demonstrate that structured intermediate representations can bridge human intuition and machine rigor while maintaining full transparency.
Authors: Jun Wang
Abstract: We study continual learning in large language model (LLM) based agents that integrate episodic memory with reinforcement learning. We focus on reflection, the ability of an agent to revisit past experience and adjust how it selects future actions, as the central mechanism for continual adaptation without fine tuning model weights. To formalise this, we introduce the Stateful Reflective Decision Process (SRDP), in which an agent maintains and updates episodic memory and alternates between writing new experiences to memory and reading relevant cases to guide decisions. This framework casts reflective memory dynamics as part of the decision process itself and makes them amenable to control and learning analysis. Building on this formulation, we develop a Read-Write Reflective Learning algorithm that incorporates memory retrieval into a soft policy iteration procedure and prove that it converges. We further show that as memory grows and more densely covers the task environment, the resulting policy approaches optimality. Our framework unifies memory based reasoning with reinforcement learning and provides a formal foundation for LLM agents capable of continual, experience driven learning.
Authors: Armin Berger, Manuela Bergau, Helen Schneider, Saad Ahmad, Tom Anglim Lagones, Gianluca Brugnara, Martha Foltyn-Dumitru, Kai Schlamp, Philipp Vollmuth, Rafet Sifa
Abstract: Recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) advances for Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved reasoning tasks, yet their resource-constrained application to medical imaging remains underexplored. We introduce ChexReason, a vision-language model trained via R1-style methodology (SFT followed by GRPO) using only 2,000 SFT samples, 1,000 RL samples, and a single A100 GPU. Evaluations on CheXpert and NIH benchmarks reveal a fundamental tension: GRPO recovers in-distribution performance (23% improvement on CheXpert, macro-F1 = 0.346) but degrades cross-dataset transferability (19% drop on NIH). This mirrors high-resource models like NV-Reason-CXR-3B, suggesting the issue stems from the RL paradigm rather than scale. We identify a generalization paradox where the SFT checkpoint uniquely improves on NIH before optimization, indicating teacher-guided reasoning captures more institution-agnostic features. Furthermore, cross-model comparisons show structured reasoning scaffolds benefit general-purpose VLMs but offer minimal gain for medically pre-trained models. Consequently, curated supervised fine-tuning may outperform aggressive RL for clinical deployment requiring robustness across diverse populations.
Authors: Huan-ang Gao, Zikang Zhang, Tianwei Luo, Kaisen Yang, Xinzhe Juan, Jiahao Qiu, Tianxing Chen, Bingxiang He, Hao Zhao, Hao Zhou, Shilong Liu, Mengdi Wang
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents, while proficient in the digital realm, face a significant gap in physical-world deployment due to the challenge of forming and maintaining a robust spatial mental model. We identify three core cognitive challenges hindering this transition: spatial reasoning, long-horizon state tracking via mental simulation, and active exploration under partial observation. To isolate and evaluate these faculties, we introduce CubeBench, a novel generative benchmark centered on the Rubik's Cube. CubeBench uses a three-tiered diagnostic framework that progressively assesses agent capabilities, from foundational state tracking with full symbolic information to active exploration with only partial visual data. Our experiments on leading LLMs reveal critical limitations, including a uniform 0.00% pass rate on all long-horizon tasks, exposing a fundamental failure in long-term planning. We also propose a diagnostic framework to isolate these cognitive bottlenecks by providing external solver tools. By analyzing the failure modes, we provide key insights to guide the development of more physically-grounded intelligent agents.
Authors: Zhiwei Wei, Yuxing Liu, Hua Liao, Wenjia Xu
Abstract: Map environments provide a fundamental medium for representing spatial structure. Understanding how foundation model (FM) agents understand and act in such environments is therefore critical for enabling reliable map-based reasoning and applications. However, most existing evaluations of spatial ability in FMs rely on static map inputs or text-based queries, overlooking the interactive and experience-driven nature of spatial understanding.In this paper, we propose an interactive evaluation framework to analyze how FM agents explore, remember, and reason in symbolic map environments. Agents incrementally explore partially observable grid-based maps consisting of roads, intersections, and points of interest (POIs), receiving only local observations at each step. Spatial understanding is then evaluated using six kinds of spatial tasks. By systematically varying exploration strategies, memory representations, and reasoning schemes across multiple foundation models, we reveal distinct functional roles of these components. Exploration primarily affects experience acquisition but has a limited impact on final reasoning accuracy. In contrast, memory representation plays a central role in consolidating spatial experience, with structured memories particularly sequential and graph-based representations, substantially improving performance on structure-intensive tasks such as path planning. Reasoning schemes further shape how stored spatial knowledge is used, with advanced prompts supporting more effective multi-step inference. We further observe that spatial reasoning performance saturates across model versions and scales beyond a certain capability threshold, indicating that improvements in map-based spatial understanding require mechanisms tailored to spatial representation and reasoning rather than scaling alone.
Authors: Wazib Ansar, Saptarsi Goswami, Amlan Chakrabarti
Abstract: The emergence of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) has substantially augmented the capabilities of Natural Language Processing (NLP), thereby intensifying the demand for computational resources. Therefore, enhancing efficiency based on factors like computational requirements, energy consumption, carbon footprint and financial cost has become a vital area of research. This motivates us to conduct a systematic literature review on Transformer-based LLMs in NLP from the perspective of efficiency. In this survey of 312 articles published between the years 2011 and 2025, efficiency-improvement endeavors have been systematically discussed targeting various aspects such as data curation, model design, model downsizing, and dynamic inferencing. This has been augmented with efficiency considerations in model adaptation strategies like pre-training, fine-tuning, prompt-engineering and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Furthermore, a statistical analysis of the articles has been performed followed by an in-depth evaluation of the efficiency and efficacy of more than 30 renowned NLP models has been conducted on 13 evaluation benchmarks. This paper offers valuable insights for researchers, professionals as well as scholars, and explores the trend of research toward sustainable practices in NLP.
Authors: Yu Xue, Pengcheng Jiang, Chenchen Zhu, MengChu Zhou, Mohamed Wahib, Moncef Gabbouj
Abstract: Neural architecture search (NAS) has emerged as a powerful paradigm that enables researchers to automatically explore vast search spaces and discover efficient neural networks. However, NAS suffers from a critical bottleneck, i.e. the evaluation of numerous architectures during the search process demands substantial computing resources and time. In order to improve the efficiency of NAS, a series of methods have been proposed to reduce the evaluation time of neural architectures. However, they are not efficient enough and still only focus on the accuracy of architectures. Beyond classification accuracy, real-world applications increasingly demand more efficient and compact network architectures that balance multiple performance criteria. To address these challenges, we propose the SMEMNAS, a pairwise comparison relation-assisted multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on a multi-population mechanism. In the SMEMNAS, a surrogate model is constructed based on pairwise comparison relations to predict the accuracy ranking of architectures, rather than the absolute accuracy. Moreover, two populations cooperate with each other in the search process, i.e. a main population that guides the evolutionary process, while a vice population that enhances search diversity. Our method aims to discover high-performance models that simultaneously optimize multiple objectives. We conduct comprehensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets to validate the effectiveness of our approach. With only a single GPU searching for 0.17 days, competitive architectures can be found by SMEMNAS which achieves 78.91% accuracy with the MAdds of 570M on the ImageNet. This work makes a significant advancement in the field of NAS.
Authors: Soyoung An, Kyunghoon Bae, Eunbi Choi, Stanley Jungkyu Choi, Yemuk Choi, Seokhee Hong, Yeonjung Hong, Junwon Hwang, Hyojin Jeon, Gerrard Jeongwon Jo, Hyunjik Jo, Jiyeon Jung, Yountae Jung, Euisoon Kim, Hyosang Kim, Joonkee Kim, Seonghwan Kim, Soyeon Kim, Sunkyoung Kim, Yireun Kim, Youchul Kim, Edward Hwayoung Lee, Haeju Lee, Honglak Lee, Jinsik Lee, Kyungmin Lee, Moontae Lee, Seungjun Lee, Woohyung Lim, Sangha Park, Sooyoun Park, Yongmin Park, Boseong Seo, Sihoon Yang, Heuiyeen Yeen, Kyungjae Yoo, Hyeongu Yun
Abstract: We introduce EXAONE 3.0 instruction-tuned language model, the first open model in the family of Large Language Models (LLMs) developed by LG AI Research. Among different model sizes, we publicly release the 7.8B instruction-tuned model to promote open research and innovations. Through extensive evaluations across a wide range of public and in-house benchmarks, EXAONE 3.0 demonstrates highly competitive real-world performance with instruction-following capability against other state-of-the-art open models of similar size. Our comparative analysis shows that EXAONE 3.0 excels particularly in Korean, while achieving compelling performance across general tasks and complex reasoning. With its strong real-world effectiveness and bilingual proficiency, we hope that EXAONE keeps contributing to advancements in Expert AI. Our EXAONE 3.0 instruction-tuned model is available at https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE/EXAONE-3.0-7.8B-Instruct.
URLs: https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE/EXAONE-3.0-7.8B-Instruct.
Authors: Zhengyu Hu, Jieyu Zhang, Zhihan Xiong, Alexander Ratner, Kaize Ding, Ranjay Krishna
Abstract: Despite the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs), evaluating their outputs' quality regarding preference remains a critical challenge. While existing works usually leverage a strong LLM as the judge for comparing LLMs' response pairwisely, such a single-evaluator approach is vulnerable to cyclic preference, i.e., output A is better than B, B than C, but C is better than A, causing contradictory evaluation results. To address this, we introduce PGED (Preference Graph Ensemble and Denoising), a novel approach that leverages multiple model-based evaluators to construct preference graphs, and then ensembles and denoises these graphs for acyclic, non-contradictory evaluation results. We provide theoretical guarantees for our framework, demonstrating its efficacy in recovering the ground truth preference structure. Extensive experiments on ten benchmarks demonstrate PGED's superiority in three applications: 1) model ranking for evaluation, 2) response selection for test-time scaling, and 3) data selection for model fine-tuning. Notably, PGED combines small LLM evaluators (e.g., Llama3-8B, Mistral-7B, Qwen2-7B) to outperform strong ones (e.g., Qwen2-72B), showcasing its effectiveness in enhancing evaluation reliability and improving model performance.
Authors: Kristof Meding
Abstract: What constitutes a fair decision? This question is not only difficult for humans but becomes more challenging when Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are used. In light of discriminatory algorithmic behaviors, the EU has recently passed the AI Act, which mandates specific rules for high-risk systems, incorporating both traditional legal non-discrimination regulations and machine learning based algorithmic fairness concepts. This paper aims to bridge these two different concepts in the AI Act through: First, a necessary high-level introduction of both concepts targeting legal and computer science-oriented scholars, and second, an in-depth analysis of the AI Act's relationship between legal non-discrimination regulations and algorithmic fairness. Our analysis reveals three key findings: (1.) Most non-discrimination regulations target only high-risk AI systems. (2.) The regulation of high-risk systems encompasses both data input requirements and output monitoring, though these regulations are partly inconsistent and raise questions of computational feasibility. (3.) Finally, we consider the possible (future) interaction of classical EU non-discrimination law and the AI Act regulations. We recommend developing more specific auditing and testing methodologies for AI systems. This paper aims to serve as a foundation for future interdisciplinary collaboration between legal scholars and computer science-oriented machine learning researchers studying discrimination in AI systems.
Authors: Wenfang Sun, Xinyuan Song, Pengxiang Li, Lu Yin, Yefeng Zheng, Shiwei Liu
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the Curse of Depth, a concept that highlights, explains, and addresses the recent observation in modern Large Language Models (LLMs) where nearly half of the layers are less effective than expected. We first confirm the wide existence of this phenomenon across the most popular families of LLMs such as Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek, and Qwen. Our analysis, theoretically and empirically, identifies that the underlying reason for the ineffectiveness of deep layers in LLMs is the widespread usage of Pre-Layer Normalization (Pre-LN). While Pre-LN stabilizes the training of Transformer LLMs, its output variance exponentially grows with the model depth, which undesirably causes the derivative of the deep Transformer blocks to be an identity matrix, and therefore barely contributes to the training. To resolve this training pitfall, we propose LayerNorm Scaling (LNS), which scales the variance of output of the layer normalization inversely by the square root of its depth. This simple modification mitigates the output variance explosion of deeper Transformer layers, improving their contribution. Across a wide range of model sizes (130M to 7B), our experiments show that LNS consistently outperforms previous normalization and scaling techniques in enhancing LLM pre-training performance. Moreover, this improvement seamlessly carries over to supervised fine-tuning. All these gains can be attributed to the fact that LayerNorm Scaling enables deeper layers to contribute more effectively during training. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/lmsdss/LayerNorm-Scaling}{LayerNorm-Scaling}.
Authors: Nan-Hong Kuo, Renata Wong
Abstract: Selecting optimal kernels for regression in physical systems remains a challenge, often relying on trial-and-error with standard functions. In this work, we establish a mathematical correspondence between support vector machine kernels and quantum propagators, demonstrating that kernel efficacy is determined by its spectral alignment with the system's Green's function. Based on this isomorphism, we propose a unified, physics-informed framework for kernel selection and design. For systems with known propagator forms, we derive analytical selection rules that map standard kernels to physical operators. For complex systems where the Green's function is analytically intractable, we introduce a constructive numerical method using the Kernel Polynomial Method with Jackson smoothing to generate custom, physics-aligned kernels. Numerical experiments spanning electrical conductivity, electronic band structure, anharmonic oscillators, and photonic crystals demonstrate that this framework consistently performs well as long as there is an alignment with a Green's function.
Authors: Changshun Wu, Weicheng He, Chih-Hong Cheng, Xiaowei Huang, Saddek Bensalem
Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OoD) inputs pose a persistent challenge to deep learning models, often triggering overconfident predictions on non-target objects. While prior work has primarily focused on refining scoring functions and adjusting test-time thresholds, such algorithmic improvements offer only incremental gains. We argue that a rethinking of the entire development lifecycle is needed to mitigate these risks effectively. This work addresses two overlooked dimensions of OoD detection in object detection. First, we reveal fundamental flaws in widely used evaluation benchmarks: contrary to their design intent, up to 13% of objects in the OoD test sets actually belong to in-distribution classes, and vice versa. These quality issues severely distort the reported performance of existing methods and contribute to their high false positive rates. Second, we introduce a novel training-time mitigation paradigm that operates independently of external OoD detectors. Instead of relying solely on post-hoc scoring, we fine-tune the detector using a carefully synthesized OoD dataset that semantically resembles in-distribution objects. This process shapes a defensive decision boundary by suppressing objectness on OoD objects, leading to a 91% reduction in hallucination error of a YOLO model on BDD-100K. Our methodology generalizes across detection paradigms such as YOLO, Faster R-CNN, and RT-DETR, and supports few-shot adaptation. Together, these contributions offer a principled and effective way to reduce OoD-induced hallucination in object detectors. Code and data are available at: https://gricad-gitlab.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/dnn-safety/m-hood.
URLs: https://gricad-gitlab.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/dnn-safety/m-hood.
Authors: Kyunghoon Bae, Eunbi Choi, Kibong Choi, Stanley Jungkyu Choi, Yemuk Choi, Seokhee Hong, Junwon Hwang, Hyojin Jeon, Kijeong Jeon, Gerrard Jeongwon Jo, Hyunjik Jo, Jiyeon Jung, Hyosang Kim, Joonkee Kim, Seonghwan Kim, Soyeon Kim, Sunkyoung Kim, Yireun Kim, Yongil Kim, Youchul Kim, Edward Hwayoung Lee, Haeju Lee, Honglak Lee, Jinsik Lee, Kyungmin Lee, Sangha Park, Yongmin Park, Sihoon Yang, Heuiyeen Yeen, Sihyuk Yi, Hyeongu Yun
Abstract: We present EXAONE Deep series, which exhibits superior capabilities in various reasoning tasks, including math and coding benchmarks. We train our models mainly on the reasoning-specialized dataset that incorporates long streams of thought processes. Evaluation results show that our smaller models, EXAONE Deep 2.4B and 7.8B, outperform other models of comparable size, while the largest model, EXAONE Deep 32B, demonstrates competitive performance against leading open-weight models. All EXAONE Deep models are openly available for research purposes and can be downloaded from https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE.
Authors: John L. Zhou, Jonathan C. Kao
Abstract: Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) is a promising approach for pretraining generalist policies on large datasets of reward-free trajectories, akin to the self-supervised objectives used to train foundation models for computer vision and natural language processing. However, scaling GCRL to longer horizons remains challenging due to the combination of sparse rewards and discounting, which obscures the comparative advantages of primitive actions with respect to distant goals. Hierarchical RL methods achieve strong empirical results on long-horizon goal-reaching tasks, but their reliance on modular, timescale-specific policies and subgoal generation introduces significant additional complexity and hinders scaling to high-dimensional goal spaces. In this work, we introduce an algorithm to train a flat (non-hierarchical) goal-conditioned policy by bootstrapping on subgoal-conditioned policies with advantage-weighted importance sampling. Our approach eliminates the need for a generative model over the (sub)goal space, which we find is key for scaling to high-dimensional control in large state spaces. We further show that existing hierarchical and bootstrapping-based approaches correspond to specific design choices within our derivation. Across a comprehensive suite of state- and pixel-based locomotion and manipulation benchmarks, our method matches or surpasses state-of-the-art offline GCRL algorithms and scales to complex, long-horizon tasks where prior approaches fail. Project page: https://johnlyzhou.github.io/saw/
Authors: Zishuai Zhang, Hainan zhang, Weihua Li, Qinnan zhang, jin Dong, Yongxin Tong, Zhiming Zheng
Abstract: Private data holds promise for improving LLMs due to its high quality, but its scattered distribution across data silos and the high computational demands of LLMs limit their deployment in federated environments. To address this, the transformer-based federated split models are proposed, which offload most model parameters to the server (or distributed clients) while retaining only a small portion on the client to ensure data privacy. Despite this design, they still face three challenges: 1) Peer-to-peer key encryption struggles to secure transmitted vectors effectively; 2) The auto-regressive nature of LLMs means that federated split learning can only train and infer sequentially, causing high communication overhead; 3) Fixed partition points lack adaptability to downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce FedSEA-LLaMA, a Secure, Efficient, and Adaptive Federated splitting framework based on LLaMA2. First, we inject Gaussian noise into forward-pass hidden states to enable secure end-to-end vector transmission. Second, we employ attention-mask compression and KV cache collaboration to reduce communication costs, accelerating training and inference. Third, we allow users to dynamically adjust the partition points for input/output blocks based on specific task requirements. Experiments on natural language understanding, summarization, and conversational QA tasks show that FedSEA-LLaMA maintains performance comparable to centralized LLaMA2 and achieves up to 8x speedups in training and inference. Further analysis of privacy attacks and different partition points also demonstrates the effectiveness of FedSEA-LLaMA in security and adaptability.
Authors: Mellon M. Zhang, Glen Chou, Saibal Mukhopadhyay
Abstract: Accurate and low-latency 3D object detection is essential for autonomous driving, where safety hinges on both rapid response and reliable perception. While rotating LiDAR sensors are widely adopted for their robustness and fidelity, current detectors face a trade-off: streaming methods process partial polar sectors on the fly for fast updates but suffer from limited visibility, cross-sector dependencies, and distortions from retrofitted Cartesian designs, whereas full-scan methods achieve higher accuracy but are bottlenecked by the inherent latency of a LiDAR revolution. We propose Polar-Fast-Cartesian-Full (PFCF), a hybrid detector that combines fast polar processing for intra-sector feature extraction with accurate Cartesian reasoning for full-scene understanding. Central to PFCF is a custom Mamba SSM-based streaming backbone with dimensionally-decomposed convolutions that avoids distortion-heavy planes, enabling parameter-efficient, translation-invariant, and distortion-robust polar representation learning. Local sector features are extracted via this backbone, then accumulated into a sector feature buffer to enable efficient inter-sector communication through a full-scan backbone. PFCF establishes a new Pareto frontier on the Waymo Open dataset, surpassing prior streaming baselines by 10% mAP and matching full-scan accuracy at twice the update rate. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/meilongzhang/Polar-Hierarchical-Mamba}{https://github.com/meilongzhang/Polar-Hierarchical-Mamba}.
URLs: https://github.com/meilongzhang/Polar-Hierarchical-Mamba, https://github.com/meilongzhang/Polar-Hierarchical-Mamba
Authors: Yuyang Song, Hanxu Yan, Jiale Lao, Yibo Wang, Yufei Li, Yuanchun Zhou, Jianguo Wang, Mingjie Tang
Abstract: Query rewrite transforms SQL queries into semantically equivalent forms that run more efficiently. Existing approaches mainly rely on predefined rewrite rules, but they handle a limited subset of queries and can cause performance regressions. This limitation stems from three challenges of rule-based query rewrite: (1) it is hard to discover and verify new rules, (2) fixed rewrite rules do not generalize to new query patterns, and (3) some rewrite techniques cannot be expressed as fixed rules. Motivated by the fact that human experts exhibit significantly better rewrite ability but suffer from scalability, and Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated nearly human-level semantic and reasoning abilities, we propose a new approach of using LLMs to rewrite SQL queries beyond rules. Due to the hallucination problems in LLMs, directly applying LLMs often leads to nonequivalent and suboptimal queries. To address this issue, we propose QUITE (query rewrite), a training-free and feedback-aware system based on LLM agents that rewrites SQL queries into semantically equivalent forms with significantly better performance, covering a broader range of query patterns and rewrite strategies compared to rule-based methods. Firstly, we design a multi-agent framework controlled by a finite state machine (FSM) to equip LLMs with the ability to use external tools and enhance the rewrite process with real-time database feedback. Secondly, we develop a rewrite middleware to enhance the ability of LLMs to generate optimized query equivalents. Finally, we employ a novel hint injection technique to improve execution plans for rewritten queries. Extensive experiments show that QUITE reduces query execution time by up to 35.8% over state-of-the-art approaches and produces 24.1% more rewrites than prior methods, covering query cases that earlier systems did not handle.
Authors: Jina Kim, Jeffrey Willette, Bruno Andreis, Sung Ju Hwang
Abstract: A widely recognized limitation of molecular prediction models is their reliance on structures observed in the training data, resulting in poor generalization to out-of-distribution compounds. Yet in drug discovery, the compounds most critical for advancing research often lie beyond the training set, making the bias toward the training data particularly problematic. This mismatch introduces substantial covariate shift, under which standard deep learning models produce unstable and inaccurate predictions. Furthermore, the scarcity of labeled data-stemming from the onerous and costly nature of experimental validation-further exacerbates the difficulty of achieving reliable generalization. To address these limitations, we propose a novel bilevel optimization approach that leverages unlabeled data to interpolate between in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) data, enabling the model to learn how to generalize beyond the training distribution. We demonstrate significant performance gains on challenging real-world datasets with substantial covariate shift, supported by t-SNE visualizations highlighting our interpolation method.
Authors: Jing Yang Lee, Kong-Aik Lee, Woon-Seng Gan
Abstract: Open-domain Dialogue (OD) exhibits a one-to-many (o2m) property, whereby multiple appropriate responses exist for a single dialogue context. Despite prior research showing that modeling this property boosts response diversity, most modern LLM-based dialogue agents do not explicitly do so. In this work, we model the o2m property of OD in LLMs by decomposing OD generation into two key tasks: Multi-Response Generation (MRG) and Preference-based Selection (PS), which entail generating a set of n semantically and lexically diverse high-quality responses for a given dialogue context, followed by selecting a single response based on human preference, respectively. To facilitate MRG and PS, we introduce o2mDial, a dialogue corpus explicitly designed to capture the o2m property by featuring multiple plausible responses for each context. Leveraging o2mDial, we propose new in-context learning and instruction-tuning strategies, as well as novel evaluation metrics for MRG, alongside a model-based approach for PS. Empirical results demonstrate that applying the proposed two-stage framework to smaller LLMs for OD generation enhances overall response diversity while maintaining contextual coherence, improving response quality by up to 90%, bringing them closer to the performance of larger models.
Authors: Yi-Chun Chen, Arnav Jhala
Abstract: GameTileNet is a dataset designed to provide semantic labels for low-resolution digital game art, advancing procedural content generation (PCG) and related AI research as a vision-language alignment task. Large Language Models (LLMs) and image-generative AI models have enabled indie developers to create visual assets, such as sprites, for game interactions. However, generating visuals that align with game narratives remains challenging due to inconsistent AI outputs, requiring manual adjustments by human artists. The diversity of visual representations in automatically generated game content is also limited because of the imbalance in distributions across styles for training data. GameTileNet addresses this by collecting artist-created game tiles from OpenGameArt.org under Creative Commons licenses and providing semantic annotations to support narrative-driven content generation. The dataset introduces a pipeline for object detection in low-resolution tile-based game art (e.g., 32x32 pixels) and annotates semantics, connectivity, and object classifications. GameTileNet is a valuable resource for improving PCG methods, supporting narrative-rich game content, and establishing a baseline for object detection in low-resolution, non-photorealistic images. TL;DR: GameTileNet is a semantic dataset of low-resolution game tiles designed to support narrative-driven procedural content generation through visual-language alignment.
Authors: Carson Dudley, Reiden Magdaleno, Christopher Harding, Marisa Eisenberg
Abstract: Scientific modeling faces a tradeoff between the interpretability of mechanistic theory and the predictive power of machine learning. While hybrid approaches like Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) embed domain knowledge as functional constraints, they can be brittle under model misspecification. We introduce Simulation-Grounded Neural Networks (SGNNs), a framework that instead embeds domain knowledge into the training data to establish a structural prior. By pretraining on synthetic corpora spanning diverse model structures and observational artifacts, SGNNs learn the broad patterns of physical possibility. This allows the model to internalize the underlying dynamics of a system without being forced to satisfy a single, potentially incorrect equation. We evaluated SGNNs across scientific disciplines and found that this approach confers significant robustness. In prediction tasks, SGNNs nearly tripled COVID-19 forecasting skill versus CDC baselines. In tests on dengue outbreaks, SGNNs outperformed physics-constrained models even when both were restricted to incorrect human-to-human transmission equations, demonstrating that SGNNs are potentially more robust to model misspecification. For inference, SGNNs extend the logic of simulation-based inference to enable supervised learning for unobservable targets, estimating early COVID-19 transmissibility more accurately than traditional methods. Finally, SGNNs enable back-to-simulation attribution, a form of mechanistic interpretability that maps real-world data back to the simulated manifold to identify underlying processes. By unifying these disparate simulation-based techniques into a single framework, we demonstrate that mechanistic simulations can serve as effective training data for robust scientific inference that generalizes beyond the limitations of fixed functional forms.
Authors: Kyunghoon Bae, Eunbi Choi, Kibong Choi, Stanley Jungkyu Choi, Yemuk Choi, Kyubeen Han, Seokhee Hong, Junwon Hwang, Taewan Hwang, Joonwon Jang, Hyojin Jeon, Kijeong Jeon, Gerrard Jeongwon Jo, Hyunjik Jo, Jiyeon Jung, Euisoon Kim, Hyosang Kim, Jihoon Kim, Joonkee Kim, Seonghwan Kim, Soyeon Kim, Sunkyoung Kim, Yireun Kim, Yongil Kim, Youchul Kim, Edward Hwayoung Lee, Gwangho Lee, Haeju Lee, Honglak Lee, Jinsik Lee, Kyungmin Lee, Sangha Park, Young Min Paik, Yongmin Park, Youngyong Park, Sanghyun Seo, Sihoon Yang, Heuiyeen Yeen, Sihyuk Yi, Hyeongu Yun
Abstract: This technical report introduces EXAONE 4.0, which integrates a Non-reasoning mode and a Reasoning mode to achieve both the excellent usability of EXAONE 3.5 and the advanced reasoning abilities of EXAONE Deep. To pave the way for the agentic AI era, EXAONE 4.0 incorporates essential features such as agentic tool use, and its multilingual capabilities are extended to support Spanish in addition to English and Korean. The EXAONE 4.0 model series consists of two sizes: a mid-size 32B model optimized for high performance, and a small-size 1.2B model designed for on-device applications. The EXAONE 4.0 demonstrates superior performance compared to open-weight models in its class and remains competitive even against frontier-class models. The models are publicly available for research purposes and can be easily downloaded via https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE.
Authors: Hyeonseok Moon, Heuiseok Lim
Abstract: Recent reports suggest that LLMs can handle increasingly long contexts. However, many existing benchmarks for context understanding embed substantial query-irrelevant content, which shifts evaluation toward retrieving relevant snippets rather than fully integrating all provided information. Under this setting, we view that current benchmarks can overestimate true context-understanding ability of LLMs. In particular, we demonstrate that when the context consists entirely of query-relevant text, even advanced models such as GPT-4o fail to reliably integrate inputs as short as 200 tokens. To evaluate this capability more rigorously, we introduce NeedleChain, a benchmark designed to test whether models can faithfully incorporate all given evidence. NeedleChain includes three variants that differ in the required order of comprehension, along with a parallel benchmark based on the needle-in-a-haystack(NIAH) paradigm. By comparing these variants, NeedleChain enables a more comprehensive assessment of context understanding. We further propose a training-free strategy that encourages models to reflect all available information, ROPE contraction, highlighting the importance of full-context integration and pointing to new directions for improving reliable reasoning over context.
Authors: Logan Nye
Abstract: We prove a square-root space simulation for deterministic multitape Turing machines, showing $\mathrm{TIME}[t]\subseteq \mathrm{SPACE}[O(\sqrt{t})]$ \emph{measured in tape cells over a fixed finite alphabet}. The key step is a Height Compression Theorem that uniformly (and in logspace) reshapes the canonical left-deep succinct computation tree for a block-respecting run into a binary tree whose evaluation-stack depth along any DFS path is $O(\log T)$ for $T=\lceil t/b\rceil$, while preserving $O(b)$ workspace at leaves and $O(1)$ at internal nodes. Edges have \emph{addressing/topology} checkable in $O(\log t)$ space, and \emph{semantic} correctness across merges is witnessed by an exact $O(b)$ bounded-window replay at the unique interface. Algorithmically, an Algebraic Replay Engine with constant-degree maps over a constant-size field, together with pointerless DFS, index-free streaming, and a \emph{rolling boundary buffer that prevents accumulation of leaf summaries}, ensures constant-size per-level tokens and eliminates wide counters, yielding the additive tradeoff $S(b)=O(b+t/b)$. Choosing $b=\Theta(\sqrt{t})$ gives $O(\sqrt{t})$ space with no residual multiplicative polylog factors. The construction is uniform, relativizes, and is robust to standard model choices. Consequences include branching-program upper bounds $2^{O(\sqrt{s})}$ for size-$s$ bounded-fan-in circuits, tightened quadratic-time lower bounds for $\mathrm{SPACE}[n]$-complete problems via the standard hierarchy argument, and $O(\sqrt{t})$-space certifying interpreters; under explicit locality assumptions, the framework extends to geometric $d$-dimensional models. Conceptually, the work isolates path bookkeeping as the chief obstruction to $O(\sqrt{t})$ and removes it via structural height compression with per-path analysis rather than barrier-prone techniques.
Authors: Yi-Chun Chen, Arnav Jhala
Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable compelling story generation, but connecting narrative text to playable visual environments remains an open challenge in procedural content generation (PCG). We present a lightweight pipeline that transforms short narrative prompts into a sequence of 2D tile-based game scenes, reflecting the temporal structure of stories. Given an LLM-generated narrative, our system identifies three key time frames, extracts spatial predicates in the form of "Object-Relation-Object" triples, and retrieves visual assets using affordance-aware semantic embeddings from the GameTileNet dataset. A layered terrain is generated using Cellular Automata, and objects are placed using spatial rules grounded in the predicate structure. We evaluated our system in ten diverse stories, analyzing tile-object matching, affordance-layer alignment, and spatial constraint satisfaction across frames. This prototype offers a scalable approach to narrative-driven scene generation and lays the foundation for future work on multi-frame continuity, symbolic tracking, and multi-agent coordination in story-centered PCG.
Authors: Jin Lee, Ziming Liu, Xinling Yu, Yixuan Wang, Haewon Jeong, Murphy Yuezhen Niu, Zheng Zhang
Abstract: We introduce Kolmogorov--Arnold Neural Operator (KANO), a dual-domain neural operator jointly parameterized by both spectral and spatial bases with intrinsic symbolic interpretability. We theoretically demonstrate that KANO overcomes the pure-spectral bottleneck of Fourier Neural Operator (FNO): KANO remains expressive over generic position-dependent dynamics (variable coefficient PDEs) for any physical input, whereas FNO stays practical only for spectrally sparse operators and strictly imposes a fast-decaying input Fourier tail. We verify our claims empirically on position-dependent differential operators, for which KANO robustly generalizes but FNO fails to. In the quantum Hamiltonian learning benchmark, KANO reconstructs ground-truth Hamiltonians in closed-form symbolic representations accurate to the fourth decimal place in coefficients and attains $\approx 6\times10^{-6}$ state infidelity from projective measurement data, substantially outperforming that of the FNO trained with ideal full wave function data, $\approx 1.5\times10^{-2}$, by orders of magnitude.
Authors: He Xiao, Runming Yang, Qingyao Yang, Wendong Xu, Zhen Li, Yupeng Su, Zhengwu Liu, Hongxia Yang, Ngai Wong
Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) of large language models (LLMs) to extremely low bit-widths remains challenging due to the fundamental trade-off between computational efficiency and representational capacity. While existing ultra-low-bit methods rely on binary approximations or quantization-aware training(QAT), they often suffer from either limited representational capacity or huge training resource overhead. We introduce PTQ to Trit-Planes (PTQTP), a structured PTQ framework that decomposes weight matrices into dual ternary {-1, 0, 1} trit-planes. This approach achieves multiplication-free additive inference by decoupling weights into discrete topology (trit-planes) and continuous magnitude (scales), effectively enabling high-fidelity sparse approximation. PTQTP provides: (1) a theoretically grounded progressive approximation algorithm ensuring global weight consistency; (2) model-agnostic deployment without architectural modifications; and (3) uniform ternary operations that eliminate mixed-precision overhead. Comprehensive experiments on LLaMA3.x and Qwen3 (0.6B-70B) demonstrate that PTQTP significantly outperforms sub-4bit PTQ methods on both language reasoning tasks and mathematical reasoning as well as coding. PTQTP rivals the 1.58-bit QAT performance while requiring only single-hour quantization compared to 10-14 GPU days for training-based methods, and the end-to-end inference speed achieves 4.63$\times$ faster than the FP16 baseline model, establishing a new and practical solution for efficient LLM deployment in resource-constrained environments. Code will available at https://github.com/HeXiao-55/PTQTP.
Authors: Lovely Yeswanth Panchumarthi, Sumalatha Saleti, Sai Prasad Gudari, Atharva Negi, Praveen Raj Budime, Harsit Upadhya
Abstract: The rapidly growth of biomedical literature creates challenges acquiring specific medical information. Current biomedical question-answering systems primarily focus on short-form answers, failing to provide comprehensive explanations necessary for clinical decision-making. We present RAG-BioQA, a retrieval-augmented generation framework for long-form biomedical question answering. Our system integrates BioBERT embeddings with FAISS indexing for retrieval and a LoRA fine-tuned FLAN-T5 model for answer generation. We train on 181k QA pairs from PubMedQA, MedDialog, and MedQuAD, and evaluate on a held-out PubMedQA test set. We compare four retrieval strategies: dense retrieval (FAISS), BM25, ColBERT, and MonoT5. Our results show that domain-adapted dense retrieval outperforms zero-shot neural re-rankers, with the best configuration achieving 0.24 BLEU-1 and 0.29 ROUGE-1. Fine-tuning improves BERTScore by 81\% over the base model. We release our framework to support reproducible biomedical QA research.
Authors: Taicheng Guo, Hai Wang, ChaoChun Liu, Mohsen Golalikhani, Xin Chen, Xiangliang Zhang, Chandan K. Reddy
Abstract: Multi-turn Text-to-SQL aims to translate a user's conversational utterances into executable SQL while preserving dialogue coherence and grounding to the target schema. However, most existing systems only regard this task as a simple text translation task and follow a short-horizon paradigm, generating a query per turn without execution, explicit verification, and refinement, which leads to non-executable or incoherent outputs. We present MTSQL-R1, an agentic training framework for long-horizon multi-turn Text-to-SQL. We cast the task as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) in which an agent interacts with (i) a database for execution feedback and (ii) a persistent dialogue memory for coherence verification, performing an iterative propose to execute -> verify -> refine cycle until all checks pass. Experiments on COSQL and SPARC demonstrate that MTSQL-R1 consistently outperforms strong baselines, highlighting the importance of environment-driven verification and memory-guided refinement for conversational semantic parsing. Full recipes (including code, trained models, logs, reasoning trajectories, etc.) will be released after the internal review to contribute to community research.
Authors: Deokhyung Kang, Seonjeong Hwang, Daehui Kim, Hyounghun Kim, Gary Geunbae Lee
Abstract: Reasoning language models (RLMs) achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks, yet they still exhibit a multilingual reasoning gap, performing better in high-resource languages than in low-resource ones. While recent efforts have been made to address this gap, its underlying causes remain largely unexplored. In this work, we show that this gap primarily stems from failures in language understanding-specifically, the model's inability to translate multilingual inputs into the language dominating its reasoning traces (typically English). As identifying understanding failures can enable targeted mitigation of the gap, we evaluate a range of detection methods and find that understanding failures are detectable to a meaningful extent, with supervised approaches performing best. Building on this, we propose Selective Translation, a strategy that incorporates an English translation into the initial reasoning trace only when an understanding failure is detected. Experimental results using Qwen3-4B show that Selective Translation substantially bridges the multilingual reasoning gap, achieving near full-translation performance while translating only about 20% of inputs. Together, our results show that failures in language understanding are the primary driver of the multilingual reasoning gap and can be detected and selectively mitigated, clarifying its origin and suggesting a path toward more equitable multilingual reasoning. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/deokhk/RLM_analysis
Authors: Angelos Alexopoulos, Agorakis Bompotas, Nikitas Rigas Kalogeropoulos, Panagiotis Kechagias, Athanasios P. Kalogeras, Christos Alexakos
Abstract: Robotic systems have become integral to smart environments, enabling applications ranging from urban surveillance and automated agriculture to industrial automation. However, their effective operation in dynamic settings - such as smart cities and precision farming - is challenged by continuously evolving topographies and environmental conditions. Traditional control systems often struggle to adapt quickly, leading to inefficiencies or operational failures. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework for autonomous and dynamic reconfiguration of robotic controllers using Digital Twin technology. Our approach leverages a virtual replica of the robot's operational environment to simulate and optimize movement trajectories in response to real-world changes. By recalculating paths and control parameters in the Digital Twin and deploying the updated code to the physical robot, our method ensures rapid and reliable adaptation without manual intervention. This work advances the integration of Digital Twins in robotics, offering a scalable solution for enhancing autonomy in smart, dynamic environments.
Authors: Yuezhe Yang, Qingqing Ruan, Wenjie Cai, Yudang Dong, Dexin Yang, Xingbo Dong, Zhe Jin, Yong Dai
Abstract: Ultrasound imaging is a cornerstone of non-invasive clinical diagnostics, yet its limited field of view poses challenges for novel view synthesis. We present UltraGS, a real-time framework that adapts Gaussian Splatting to sensorless ultrasound imaging by integrating explicit radiance fields with lightweight, physics-inspired acoustic modeling. UltraGS employs depth-aware Gaussian primitives with learnable fields of view to improve geometric consistency under unconstrained probe motion, and introduces PD Rendering, a differentiable acoustic operator that combines low-order spherical harmonics with first-order wave effects for efficient intensity synthesis. We further present a clinical ultrasound dataset acquired under real-world scanning protocols. Extensive evaluations across three datasets demonstrate that UltraGS establishes a new performance-efficiency frontier, achieving state-of-the-art results in PSNR (up to 29.55) and SSIM (up to 0.89) while achieving real-time synthesis at 64.69 fps on a single GPU. The code and dataset are open-sourced at: https://github.com/Bean-Young/UltraGS.
Authors: Samuel Nathanson, Rebecca Williams, Cynthia Matuszek
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly operate in multi-agent and safety-critical settings, raising open questions about how their vulnerabilities scale when models interact adversarially. This study examines whether larger models can systematically jailbreak smaller ones - eliciting harmful or restricted behavior despite alignment safeguards. Using standardized adversarial tasks from JailbreakBench, we simulate over 6,000 multi-turn attacker-target exchanges across major LLM families and scales (0.6B-120B parameters), measuring both harm score and refusal behavior as indicators of adversarial potency and alignment integrity. Each interaction is evaluated through aggregated harm and refusal scores assigned by three independent LLM judges, providing a consistent, model-based measure of adversarial outcomes. Aggregating results across prompts, we find a strong and statistically significant correlation between mean harm and the logarithm of the attacker-to-target size ratio (Pearson r = 0.51, p < 0.001; Spearman rho = 0.52, p < 0.001), indicating that relative model size correlates with the likelihood and severity of harmful completions. Mean harm score variance is higher across attackers (0.18) than across targets (0.10), suggesting that attacker-side behavioral diversity contributes more to adversarial outcomes than target susceptibility. Attacker refusal frequency is strongly and negatively correlated with harm (rho = -0.93, p < 0.001), showing that attacker-side alignment mitigates harmful responses. These findings reveal that size asymmetry influences robustness and provide exploratory evidence for adversarial scaling patterns, motivating more controlled investigations into inter-model alignment and safety.
Authors: Sam Ganzfried
Abstract: We present an algorithm for computing all evolutionarily stable strategies in nondegenerate normal-form games with three or more players.
Authors: Sreesritha Sai, Sai Venkata Suma Sreeja, Deepthi, Nikhil
Abstract: Accurate assessment of post-disaster damage is essential for prioritizing emergency response, yet current practices rely heavily on manual interpretation of satellite imagery.This approach is time-consuming, subjective, and difficult to scale during large-area disasters. Although recent deep-learning models for semantic segmentation and change detection have improved automation, many of them still struggle to capture subtle structural variations and often perform poorly when dealing with highly imbalanced datasets, where undamaged buildings dominate. This thesis introduces Satellite-to-Street:Disaster Impact Estimator, a deep-learning framework that produces detailed, pixel-level damage maps by analyzing pre and post-disaster satellite images together. The model is built on a modified dual-input U-Net architecture that strengthens feature fusion between both images, allowing it to detect not only small, localized changes but also broader contextual patterns across the scene. To address the imbalance between damage categories, a class-aware weighted loss function is used, which helps the model better recognize major and destroyed structures. A consistent preprocessing pipeline is employed to align image pairs, standardize resolutions, and prepare the dataset for training. Experiments conducted on publicly available disaster datasets show that the proposed framework achieves better classification of damaged regions compared to conventional segmentation networks.The generated damage maps provide faster and objective method for analyzing disaster impact, working alongside expert judgment rather than replacing it. In addition to identifying which areas are damaged, the system is capable of distinguishing different levels of severity, ranging from slight impact to complete destruction. This provides a more detailed and practical understanding of how the disaster has affected each region.
Authors: Jiawei Chen, Yang Yang, Chao Yu, Yu Tian, Zhi Cao, Linghao Li, Hang Su, Zhaoxia Yin
Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have emerged as a powerful advancement in multi-step reasoning tasks, offering enhanced transparency and logical consistency through explicit chains of thought (CoT). However, these models introduce novel safety and reliability risks, such as CoT-hijacking and prompt-induced inefficiencies, which are not fully captured by existing evaluation methods. To address this gap, we propose RT-LRM, a unified benchmark designed to assess the trustworthiness of LRMs. RT-LRM evaluates three core dimensions: truthfulness, safety and efficiency. Beyond metric-based evaluation, we further introduce the training paradigm as a key analytical perspective to investigate the systematic impact of different training strategies on model trustworthiness. We achieve this by designing a curated suite of 30 reasoning tasks from an observational standpoint. We conduct extensive experiments on 26 models and identify several valuable insights into the trustworthiness of LRMs. For example, LRMs generally face trustworthiness challenges and tend to be more fragile than Large Language Models (LLMs) when encountering reasoning-induced risks. These findings uncover previously underexplored vulnerabilities and highlight the need for more targeted evaluations. In addition, we release a scalable toolbox for standardized trustworthiness research to support future advancements in this important field. Our code and datasets will be open-sourced.
Authors: Dengyun Peng, Qiguang Chen, Bofei Liu, Jiannan Guan, Libo Qin, Zheng Yan, Jinhao Liu, Jianshu Zhang, Wanxiang Che
Abstract: Ensuring large language model (LLM) reliability requires distinguishing objective unsolvability (inherent contradictions) from subjective capability limitations (tasks exceeding model competence). Current LLMs often conflate these dimensions, leading to hallucinations in which they return confident answers to inherently unsolvable queries. To address this issue, we propose a multi-domain dataset containing both solvable and unsolvable questions, UnsolvableQA, together with an alignment framework, UnsolvableRL. First, we construct UnsolvableQA by "Reverse Construction" that systematically injects logical contradictions into otherwise valid reasoning chains. Second, we introduce UnsolvableRL, a reinforcement learning paradigm that balances objective unsolvability detection with calibrated confidence under capability limits. Empirically, our approach achieves near-perfect unsolvability detection (>90% detection rate) and boosts solvable reasoning accuracy from 43.4% to 69.4% on Qwen3-4B-Instruct. Crucially, we identify a data-training interaction: strict alignment constraints induce Capability Collapse without unsolvable data, but act as a regularizer for rigor when such data are included, thereby improving overall robustness. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/sfasfaffa/unsolvableQA .
Authors: Sima Jafarikhah, Daniel Thompson, Eva Deans, Hossein Siadati, Yi Liu
Abstract: Manual vulnerability scoring, such as assigning Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores, is a resource-intensive process that is often influenced by subjective interpretation. This study investigates the potential of general-purpose large language models (LLMs), namely ChatGPT, Llama, Grok, DeepSeek, and Gemini, to automate this process by analyzing over 31{,}000 recent Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) entries. The results show that LLMs substantially outperform the baseline on certain metrics (e.g., \textit{Availability Impact}), while offering more modest gains on others (e.g., \textit{Attack Complexity}). Moreover, model performance varies across both LLM families and individual CVSS metrics, with ChatGPT-5 attaining the highest precision. Our analysis reveals that LLMs tend to misclassify many of the same CVEs, and ensemble-based meta-classifiers only marginally improve performance. Further examination shows that CVE descriptions often lack critical context or contain ambiguous phrasing, which contributes to systematic misclassifications. These findings underscore the importance of enhancing vulnerability descriptions and incorporating richer contextual details to support more reliable automated reasoning and alleviate the growing backlog of CVEs awaiting triage.
Authors: Yi Liu, Weixiang Han, Chengjun Cai, Xingliang Yuan, Cong Wang
Abstract: With the rise of large language models, service providers offer language models as a service, enabling users to fine-tune customized models via uploaded private datasets. However, this raises concerns about sensitive data leakage. Prior methods, relying on differential privacy within device-cloud collaboration frameworks, struggle to balance privacy and utility, exposing users to inference attacks or degrading fine-tuning performance. To address this, we propose PrivTune, an efficient and privacy-preserving fine-tuning framework via Split Learning (SL). The key idea of PrivTune is to inject crafted noise into token representations from the SL bottom model, making each token resemble the $n$-hop indirect neighbors. PrivTune formulates this as an optimization problem to compute the optimal noise vector, aligning with defense-utility goals. On this basis, it then adjusts the parameters (i.e., mean) of the $d_\chi$-Privacy noise distribution to align with the optimization direction and scales the noise according to token importance to minimize distortion. Experiments on five datasets (covering both classification and generation tasks) against three embedding inversion and three attribute inference attacks show that, using RoBERTa on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank dataset, PrivTune reduces the attack success rate to 10% with only a 3.33% drop in utility performance, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors: Lily Erickson
Abstract: With the advent of machine learning and quantum computing, the 21st century has gone from a place of relative algorithmic security, to one of speculative unease and possibly, cyber catastrophe. Modern algorithms like Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) are the bastion of current cryptographic security protocols that form the backbone of consumer protection ranging from Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) in the modern internet browser, to cryptographic financial instruments like Bitcoin. And there's been very little work put into testing the strength of these ciphers. Practically the only study that I could find was on side-channel recognition, a joint paper from the University of Milan, Italy and King's College, London\cite{battistello2025ecc}. These algorithms are already considered bulletproof by many consumers, but exploits already exist for them, and with computing power and distributed, federated compute on the rise, it's only a matter of time before these current bastions fade away into obscurity, and it's on all of us to stand up when we notice something is amiss, lest we see such passages claim victims in that process. In this paper, we seek to explore the use of modern language model architecture in cracking the association between a known public key, and its associated private key, by intuitively learning to reverse engineer the public keypair generation process, effectively solving the curve. Additonally, we attempt to ascertain modern machine learning's ability to memorize public-private secp256r1 keypairs, and to then test their ability to reverse engineer the public keypair generation process. It is my belief that proof-for would be equally valuable as proof-against in either of these categories. Finally, we'll conclude with some number crunching on where we see this particular field heading in the future.
Authors: Xiangrui Cai, Shaocheng Ma, Lei Cao, Jie Li, Tianyu Liu, Yilin Dong
Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) signal decoding is a key technology that translates brain activity into executable commands, laying the foundation for direct brain-machine interfacing and intelligent interaction. To address the inherent spatiotemporal heterogeneity of EEG signals, this paper proposes a multi-branch parallel architecture, where each temporal scale is equipped with an independent spatial feature extraction module. To further enhance multi-branch feature fusion, we propose a Fusion of Multiscale Features via Centralized Sparse-attention Network (EEG-CSANet), a centralized sparse-attention network. It employs a main-auxiliary branch architecture, where the main branch models core spatiotemporal patterns via multiscale self-attention, and the auxiliary branch facilitates efficient local interactions through sparse cross-attention. Experimental results show that EEG-CSANet achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across five public datasets (BCIC-IV-2A, BCIC-IV-2B, HGD, SEED, and SEED-VIG), with accuracies of 88.54%, 91.09%, 97.15%, 96.03%, and 90.56%, respectively. Such performance demonstrates its strong adaptability and robustness across various EEG decoding tasks. Moreover, extensive ablation studies are conducted to enhance the interpretability of EEG-CSANet. In the future, we hope that EEG-CSANet could serve as a promising baseline model in the field of EEG signal decoding. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Xiangrui-Cai/EEG-CSANet
Authors: Guilin Zhang, Wulan Guo, Ziqi Tan
Abstract: Multi-agent systems powered by large language models have emerged as a promising paradigm for solving complex reasoning tasks through collaborative intelligence. However, efficiently deploying these systems on serverless GPU platforms presents significant resource allocation challenges due to heterogeneous agent workloads, varying computational demands, and the need for cost-effective scaling. This paper presents an adaptive GPU resource allocation framework that achieves 85% latency reduction compared to round-robin scheduling while maintaining comparable throughput to static allocation, using an O(N) complexity algorithm for real-time adaptation. Our approach dynamically allocates GPU resources based on workload characteristics, agent priorities, and minimum resource requirements, enabling efficient utilization while maintaining quality of service. The framework addresses three key challenges: (1) heterogeneous computational demands across lightweight coordinators and heavyweight specialists, (2) dynamic workload fluctuations requiring millisecond-scale reallocation, and (3) capacity constraints in serverless environments. Through comprehensive simulations modeling realistic multi-agent workflows with four heterogeneous agents, we demonstrate that adaptive allocation outperforms static equal and round-robin strategies across latency, cost, and GPU utilization metrics. The framework provides a practical solution for deploying cost-efficient multi-agent AI systems on serverless GPU infrastructure.
Authors: Elsen Ronando, Sozo Inoue
Abstract: In this paper, we propose an LLM-Guided Exemplar Selection framework to address a key limitation in state-of-the-art Human Activity Recognition (HAR) methods: their reliance on large labeled datasets and purely geometric exemplar selection, which often fail to distinguish similar wearable sensor activities such as walking, walking upstairs, and walking downstairs. Our method incorporates semantic reasoning via an LLM-generated knowledge prior that captures feature importance, inter-class confusability, and exemplar budget multipliers, and uses it to guide exemplar scoring and selection. These priors are combined with margin-based validation cues, PageRank centrality, hubness penalization, and facility-location optimization to obtain a compact and informative set of exemplars. Evaluated on the UCI-HAR dataset under strict few-shot conditions, the framework achieves a macro F1-score of 88.78%, outperforming classical approaches such as random sampling, herding, and k-center. The results show that LLM-derived semantic priors, when integrated with structural and geometric cues, provide a stronger foundation for selecting representative sensor exemplars in few-shot wearable-sensor HAR.
Authors: Binhe Yu, Zhen Wang, Kexin Li, Yuqian Yuan, Wenqiao Zhang, Long Chen, Juncheng Li, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang
Abstract: Multi-subject customization aims to synthesize multiple user-specified subjects into a coherent image. To address issues such as subjects missing or conflicts, recent works incorporate layout guidance to provide explicit spatial constraints. However, existing methods still struggle to balance three critical objectives: text alignment, subject identity preservation, and layout control, while the reliance on additional training further limits their scalability and efficiency. In this paper, we present AnyMS, a novel training-free framework for layout-guided multi-subject customization. AnyMS leverages three input conditions: text prompt, subject images, and layout constraints, and introduces a bottom-up dual-level attention decoupling mechanism to harmonize their integration during generation. Specifically, global decoupling separates cross-attention between textual and visual conditions to ensure text alignment. Local decoupling confines each subject's attention to its designated area, which prevents subject conflicts and thus guarantees identity preservation and layout control. Moreover, AnyMS employs pre-trained image adapters to extract subject-specific features aligned with the diffusion model, removing the need for subject learning or adapter tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AnyMS achieves state-of-the-art performance, supporting complex compositions and scaling to a larger number of subjects.
Authors: Iris Xu, Guangtao Zeng, Zexue He, Charles Jin, Aldo Pareja, Dan Gutfreund, Chuang Gan, Zhang-Wei Hong
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning and coding capabilities, yet they struggle to generalize to real-world software engineering (SWE) problems that are long-horizon and out of distribution. Existing systems often rely on a single agent to handle the entire workflow-interpreting issues, navigating large codebases, and implementing fixes-within one reasoning chain. Such monolithic designs force the model to retain irrelevant context, leading to spurious correlations and poor generalization. Motivated by how human engineers decompose complex problems, we propose structuring SWE agents as orchestrators coordinating specialized sub-agents for sub-tasks such as localization, editing, and validation. The challenge lies in discovering effective hierarchies automatically: as the number of sub-agents grows, the search space becomes combinatorial, and it is difficult to attribute credit to individual sub-agents within a team. We address these challenges by formulating hierarchy discovery as a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, where each arm represents a candidate sub-agent and the reward measures its helpfulness when collaborating with others. This framework, termed Bandit Optimization for Agent Design (BOAD), enables efficient exploration of sub-agent designs under limited evaluation budgets. On SWE-bench-Verified, BOAD outperforms single-agent and manually designed multi-agent systems. On SWE-bench-Live, featuring more recent and out-of-distribution issues, our 36B system ranks second on the leaderboard at the time of evaluation, surpassing larger models such as GPT-4 and Claude. These results demonstrate that automatically discovered hierarchical multi-agent systems significantly improve generalization on challenging long-horizon SWE tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/iamxjy/BOAD-SWE-Agent.
Authors: Amin Sadri, M Maruf Hossain
Abstract: Human-level concept learning argues that humans typically learn new concepts from a single example, whereas machine learning algorithms typically require hundreds of samples to learn a single concept. Our brain subconsciously identifies important features and learns more effectively. Contribution: In this paper, we present the Coordinate Matrix Machine (CM$^2$). This purpose-built small model augments human intelligence by learning document structures and using this information to classify documents. While modern "Red AI" trends rely on massive pre-training and energy-intensive GPU infrastructure, CM$^2$ is designed as a Green AI solution. It achieves human-level concept learning by identifying only the structural "important features" a human would consider, allowing it to classify very similar documents using only one sample per class. Advantage: Our algorithm outperforms traditional vectorizers and complex deep learning models that require larger datasets and significant compute. By focusing on structural coordinates rather than exhaustive semantic vectors, CM$^2$ offers: 1. High accuracy with minimal data (one-shot learning) 2. Geometric and structural intelligence 3. Green AI and environmental sustainability 4. Optimized for CPU-only environments 5. Inherent explainability (glass-box model) 6. Faster computation and low latency 7. Robustness against unbalanced classes 8. Economic viability 9. Generic, expandable, and extendable
Authors: Chulun Zhou, Chunkang Zhang, Guoxin Yu, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Wai Lam, Mo Yu
Abstract: Multi-step retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a widely adopted strategy for enhancing large language models (LLMs) on tasks that demand global comprehension and intensive reasoning. Many RAG systems incorporate a working memory module to consolidate retrieved information. However, existing memory designs function primarily as passive storage that accumulates isolated facts for the purpose of condensing the lengthy inputs and generating new sub-queries through deduction. This static nature overlooks the crucial high-order correlations among primitive facts, the compositions of which can often provide stronger guidance for subsequent steps. Therefore, their representational strength and impact on multi-step reasoning and knowledge evolution are limited, resulting in fragmented reasoning and weak global sense-making capacity in extended contexts. We introduce HGMem, a hypergraph-based memory mechanism that extends the concept of memory beyond simple storage into a dynamic, expressive structure for complex reasoning and global understanding. In our approach, memory is represented as a hypergraph whose hyperedges correspond to distinct memory units, enabling the progressive formation of higher-order interactions within memory. This mechanism connects facts and thoughts around the focal problem, evolving into an integrated and situated knowledge structure that provides strong propositions for deeper reasoning in subsequent steps. We evaluate HGMem on several challenging datasets designed for global sense-making. Extensive experiments and in-depth analyses show that our method consistently improves multi-step RAG and substantially outperforms strong baseline systems across diverse tasks.
Authors: Yi Liu, Sukai Wang, Dafeng Wei, Xiaowei Cai, Linqing Zhong, Jiange Yang, Guanghui Ren, Jinyu Zhang, Maoqing Yao, Chuankang Li, Xindong He, Liliang Chen, Jianlan Luo
Abstract: General-purpose robotic systems operating in open-world environments must achieve both broad generalization and high-precision action execution, a combination that remains challenging for existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. While large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) improve semantic generalization, insufficient embodied reasoning leads to brittle behavior, and conversely, strong reasoning alone is inadequate without precise control. To provide a decoupled and quantitative assessment of this bottleneck, we introduce Embodied Reasoning Intelligence Quotient (ERIQ), a large-scale embodied reasoning benchmark in robotic manipulation, comprising 6K+ question-answer pairs across four reasoning dimensions. By decoupling reasoning from execution, ERIQ enables systematic evaluation and reveals a strong positive correlation between embodied reasoning capability and end-to-end VLA generalization. To bridge the gap from reasoning to precise execution, we propose FACT, a flow-matching-based action tokenizer that converts continuous control into discrete sequences while preserving high-fidelity trajectory reconstruction. The resulting GenieReasoner jointly optimizes reasoning and action in a unified space, outperforming both continuous-action and prior discrete-action baselines in real-world tasks. Together, ERIQ and FACT provide a principled framework for diagnosing and overcoming the reasoning-precision trade-off, advancing robust, general-purpose robotic manipulation. Project page: https://geniereasoner.github.io/GenieReasoner/