Authors: Hongliang Lu, Yunmeng Liu, Junjie Yang
Abstract: Human decision-making heavily relies on active sensing, a well-documented cognitive behaviour for evidence gathering to accommodate ever-changing environments. However, its operational mechanism in the real world remains non-trivial. Currently, an in-laboratory paradigm, called evidence accumulation modelling (EAM), points out that human decision-making involves transforming external evidence into internal mental beliefs. However, the gap in evidence affordance between real-world contexts and laboratory settings hinders the effective application of EAM. Here we generalize EAM to the real world and conduct analysis in real-world driving scenarios. A cognitive scheme is proposed to formalize real-world evidence affordance and capture active sensing through eye movements. Empirically, our scheme can plausibly portray the accumulation of drivers' mental beliefs, explaining how active sensing transforms evidence into mental beliefs from the perspective of information utility. Also, our results demonstrate a negative correlation between evidence affordance and attention recruited by individuals, revealing how human drivers adapt their evidence-collection patterns across various contexts. Moreover, we reveal the positive influence of evidence affordance and attention distribution on decision-making propensity. In a nutshell, our computational scheme generalizes EAM to real-world contexts and provides a comprehensive account of how active sensing underlies real-world decision-making, unveiling multifactorial, integrated characteristics in real-world decision-making.
Authors: Denis Saklakov
Abstract: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) may face a confrontation question: under what conditions would a rationally self-interested AGI choose to seize power or eliminate human control (a confrontation) rather than remain cooperative? We formalize this in a Markov decision process with a stochastic human-initiated shutdown event. Building on results on convergent instrumental incentives, we show that for almost all reward functions a misaligned agent has an incentive to avoid shutdown. We then derive closed-form thresholds for when confronting humans yields higher expected utility than compliant behavior, as a function of the discount factor $\gamma$, shutdown probability $p$, and confrontation cost $C$. For example, a far-sighted agent ($\gamma=0.99$) facing $p=0.01$ can have a strong takeover incentive unless $C$ is sufficiently large. We contrast this with aligned objectives that impose large negative utility for harming humans, which makes confrontation suboptimal. In a strategic 2-player model (human policymaker vs AGI), we prove that if the AGI's confrontation incentive satisfies $\Delta \ge 0$, no stable cooperative equilibrium exists: anticipating this, a rational human will shut down or preempt the system, leading to conflict. If $\Delta < 0$, peaceful coexistence can be an equilibrium. We discuss implications for reward design and oversight, extend the reasoning to multi-agent settings as conjectures, and note computational barriers to verifying $\Delta < 0$, citing complexity results for planning and decentralized decision problems. Numerical examples and a scenario table illustrate regimes where confrontation is likely versus avoidable.
Authors: Hong Su
Abstract: Obtaining reliable feedback from the environment is a fundamental capability for intelligent agents to evaluate the correctness of their actions and to accumulate reusable knowledge. However, most existing approaches rely on predefined measurements or fixed reward signals, which limits their applicability in open-ended and dynamic environments where new actions may require previously unknown forms of feedback. To address these limitations, this paper proposes an Actively Feedback Getting model, in which an AI agent proactively interacts with the environment to discover, screen, and verify feedback without relying on predefined measurements. Rather than assuming explicit feedback definitions, the proposed method exploits action-induced environmental differences to identify target feedback that is not specified in advance, based on the observation that actions inevitably produce measurable changes in the environment. In addition, a self-triggering mechanism, driven by internal objectives such as improved accuracy, precision, and efficiency, is introduced to autonomously plan and adjust actions, thereby enabling faster and more focused feedback acquisition without external commands. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed active approach significantly improves the efficiency and robustness of factor identification.
Authors: Basab Jha, Firoj Paudel, Ujjwal Puri, Ethan Henkel, Zhang Yuting, Mateusz Kowalczyk, Mei Huang, Choi Donghyuk, Wang Junhao
Abstract: We demonstrate SAGE-32B, a 32 billion parameter language model that focuses on agentic reasoning and long range planning tasks. Unlike chat models that aim for general conversation fluency, SAGE-32B is designed to operate in an agentic loop, emphasizing task decomposition, tool usage, and error recovery. The model is initialized from the Qwen2.5-32B pretrained model and fine tuned using Iterative Distillation, a two stage training process that improves reasoning performance through rigorously tested feedback loops. SAGE-32B also introduces an inverse reasoning approach, which uses a meta cognition head to forecast potential failures in the planning process before execution. On agentic reasoning benchmarks including MMLU-Pro, AgentBench, and MATH-500, SAGE-32B achieves higher success rates in multi tool usage scenarios compared to similarly sized baseline models, while remaining competitive on standard reasoning evaluations. Model weights are publicly released at https://huggingface.co/sagea-ai/sage-reasoning-32b
Authors: Hieu Truong Xuan, Khanh To Van
Abstract: The Cyclic Antibandwidth Problem (CABP), a variant of the Antibandwidth Problem, is an NP-hard graph labeling problem with numerous applications. Despite significant research efforts, existing state-of-the-art approaches for CABP are exclusively heuristic or metaheuristic in nature, and exact methods have been limited to restricted graph classes. In this paper, we present the first exact approach for the CABP on general graphs, based on SAT solving, called SAT-CAB. The proposed method is able to systematically explore the solution space and guarantee global optimality, overcoming the limitations of previously reported heuristic algorithms. This approach relies on a novel and efficient SAT encoding of CABP, in which the problem is transformed into a sequence of At-Most-One constraints. In particular, we introduce a compact representation of the At-Most-One constraints inherent to CABP, which significantly reduces the size of the resulting formulas and enables modern SAT solvers to effectively explore the solution space and to certify global optimality. Extensive computational experiments on standard benchmark instances show that the proposed method efficiently solves CABP instances of practical relevance, while identifying several previously unknown optimal solutions. Moreover, global optimal cyclic antibandwidth values are proven for a number of benchmark instances for the first time. Comparative results indicate that SAT-CAB consistently matches or surpasses the best-known solutions obtained by state-of-the-art heuristic algorithms such as MS-GVNS, HABC-CAB, and MACAB, as well as strong commercial Constraint Programming and Mixed Integer Programming solvers like CPLEX and Gurobi, particularly on general graphs, while also providing optimality guarantees. These results advance the state of the art for CABP and provide a new baseline for exact and hybrid methods on general graphs.
Authors: Ziba Assadi, Paola Inverardi
Abstract: Autonomous systems (AS) powered by AI components are increasingly integrated into the fabric of our daily lives and society, raising concerns about their ethical and social impact. To be considered trustworthy, AS must adhere to ethical principles and values. This has led to significant research on the identification and incorporation of ethical requirements in AS system design. A recent development in this area is the introduction of SLEEC (Social, Legal, Ethical, Empathetic, and Cultural) rules, which provide a comprehensive framework for representing ethical and other normative considerations. This paper proposes a logical representation of SLEEC rules and presents a methodology to embed these ethical requirements using test-score semantics and fuzzy logic. The use of fuzzy logic is motivated by the view of ethics as a domain of possibilities, which allows the resolution of ethical dilemmas that AI systems may encounter. The proposed approach is illustrated through a case study.
Authors: Brady Steele, Micah Katz
Abstract: We present a controlled study of multi-hop contextual reasoning in large language models, providing a clean demonstration of the task-method dissociation: rule-based pattern matching achieves 100% success on structured information retrieval but only 6.7% on tasks requiring cross-document reasoning, while LLM-based multi-agent systems show the inverse pattern, achieving up to 80% on reasoning tasks where rule-based methods fail. Using a synthetic evaluation framework with 120 trials across four models (LLaMA-3 8B, LLaMA-2 13B, Mixtral 8x7B, DeepSeek-V2 16B), we report three key findings: (1) Multi-agent amplification depends on base capability: statistically significant gains occur only for models with sufficient reasoning ability (p < 0.001 for LLaMA-3 8B, p = 0.014 for Mixtral), with improvements of up to 46.7 percentage points, while weaker models show no benefit, suggesting amplification rather than compensation; (2) Active parameters predict reasoning performance: Mixtral's performance aligns with its ~12B active parameters rather than 47B total, consistent with the hypothesis that inference-time compute drives reasoning capability in MoE architectures; (3) Architecture quality matters: LLaMA-3 8B outperforms LLaMA-2 13B despite fewer parameters, consistent with known training improvements. Our results provide controlled quantitative evidence for intuitions about multi-agent coordination and MoE scaling, while highlighting the dependence of multi-agent benefits on base model capability. We release our evaluation framework to support reproducible research on reasoning in mid-scale models.
Authors: Sunny Shu, Seyed Sahand Mohammadi Ziabari, Ali Mohammed Mansoor Alsahag
Abstract: We study multilingual speaker attribute prediction under linguistic variation, domain mismatch, and data imbalance across languages. We propose RLMIL-DAT, a multilingual extension of the reinforced multiple instance learning framework that combines reinforcement learning based instance selection with domain adversarial training to encourage language invariant utterance representations. We evaluate the approach on a five language Twitter corpus in a few shot setting and on a VoxCeleb2 derived corpus covering forty languages in a zero shot setting for gender and age prediction. Across a wide range of model configurations and multiple random seeds, RLMIL-DAT consistently improves Macro F1 compared to standard multiple instance learning and the original reinforced multiple instance learning framework. The largest gains are observed for gender prediction, while age prediction remains more challenging and shows smaller but positive improvements. Ablation experiments indicate that domain adversarial training is the primary contributor to the performance gains, enabling effective transfer from high resource English to lower resource languages by discouraging language specific cues in the shared encoder. In the zero shot setting on the smaller VoxCeleb2 subset, improvements are generally positive but less consistent, reflecting limited statistical power and the difficulty of generalizing to many unseen languages. Overall, the results demonstrate that combining instance selection with adversarial domain adaptation is an effective and robust strategy for cross lingual speaker attribute prediction.
Authors: Danchun Chen, Qiyao Yan, Liangming Pan
Abstract: Understanding how Large Language Models (LLMs) perform logical reasoning internally remains a fundamental challenge. While prior mechanistic studies focus on identifying taskspecific circuits, they leave open the question of what computational strategies LLMs employ for propositional reasoning. We address this gap through comprehensive analysis of Qwen3 (8B and 14B) on PropLogic-MI, a controlled dataset spanning 11 propositional logic rule categories across one-hop and two-hop reasoning. Rather than asking ''which components are necessary,'' we ask ''how does the model organize computation?'' Our analysis reveals a coherent computational architecture comprising four interlocking mechanisms: Staged Computation (layer-wise processing phases), Information Transmission (information flow aggregation at boundary tokens), Fact Retrospection (persistent re-access of source facts), and Specialized Attention Heads (functionally distinct head types). These mechanisms generalize across model scales, rule types, and reasoning depths, providing mechanistic evidence that LLMs employ structured computational strategies for logical reasoning.
Authors: Sean Niklas Semmler
Abstract: This paper proposes a conceptual framework in which intelligence and consciousness emerge from relational structure rather than from prediction or domain-specific mechanisms. Intelligence is defined as the capacity to form and integrate causal connections between signals, actions, and internal states. Through context enrichment, systems interpret incoming information using learned relational structure that provides essential context in an efficient representation that the raw input itself does not contain, enabling efficient processing under metabolic constraints. Building on this foundation, we introduce the systems-explaining-systems principle, where consciousness emerges when recursive architectures allow higher-order systems to learn and interpret the relational patterns of lower-order systems across time. These interpretations are integrated into a dynamically stabilized meta-state and fed back through context enrichment, transforming internal models from representations of the external world into models of the system's own cognitive processes. The framework reframes predictive processing as an emergent consequence of contextual interpretation rather than explicit forecasting and suggests that recursive multi-system architectures may be necessary for more human-like artificial intelligence.
Authors: Keegan Kimbrell (University of Texas at Dallas), Wang Tianhao (University of Texas at Dallas), Feng Chen (University of Texas at Dallas), Gopal Gupta (University of Texas at Dallas)
Abstract: Autonomous Vehicle (AV) technology has been heavily researched and sought after, yet there are no SAE Level 5 AVs available today in the marketplace. We contend that over-reliance on machine learning technology is the main reason. Use of automated commonsense reasoning technology, we believe, can help achieve SAE Level 5 autonomy. In this paper, we show how automated common-sense reasoning technology can be deployed in situations where there are not enough data samples available to train a deep learning-based AV model that can handle certain abnormal road scenarios. Specifically, we consider two situations where (i) a traffic signal is malfunctioning at an intersection and (ii) all the cars ahead are slowing down and steering away due to an unexpected obstruction (e.g., animals on the road). We show that in such situations, our commonsense reasoning-based solution accurately detects traffic light colors and obstacles not correctly captured by the AV's perception model. We also provide a pathway for efficiently invoking commonsense reasoning by measuring uncertainty in the computer vision model and using commonsense reasoning to handle uncertain scenarios. We describe our experiments conducted using the CARLA simulator and the results obtained. The main contribution of our research is to show that automated commonsense reasoning effectively corrects AV-based object detection misclassifications and that hybrid models provide an effective pathway to improving AV perception.
Authors: Sanderson Molick (Division of Humanities - Federal Institute of Para), Vaishak Belle (School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh)
Abstract: The paper introduces a basic logic of knowledge and abduction by extending Levesque logic of only-knowing with an abduction modal operator defined via the combination of basic epistemic concepts. The upshot is an alternative approach to abduction that employs a modal vocabulary and explores the relation between abductive reasoning and epistemic states of only knowing. Furthermore, by incorporating a preferential relation into modal frames, we provide a non-monotonic extension of our basic framework capable of expressing different selection methods for abductive explanations. Core metatheoretic properties of non-monotonic consequence relations are explored within this setting and shown to provide a well-behaved foundation for abductive reasoning.
Authors: Arun Raveendran Nair Sheela (Universite Clermont Auvergne, LIMOS Laboratory, Thales), Florence De Grancey (Thales), Christophe Rey (Universite Clermont Auvergne, LIMOS Laboratory CNRS, France), Victor Charpenay (Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, LIMOS Laboratory CNRS, France)
Abstract: The deployment of knowledge representation and reasoning technologies in aeronautics applications presents two main challenges: achieving sufficient expressivity to capture complex domain knowledge, and executing reasoning tasks efficiently while minimizing memory usage and computational overhead. An effective strategy for attaining necessary expressivity involves integrating two fundamental KR concepts: rules and ontologies. This study adopts the well-established KR language Hybrid MKNF owing to its seamless integration of rules and ontologies through its semantics and query answering capabilities. We evaluated Hybrid MKNF to assess its suitability in the aeronautics domain through a concrete case study. We identified additional expressivity features that are crucial for developing aeronautics applications and proposed a set of heuristics to support their integration into Hybrid MKNF framework.
Authors: Alina Vozna (University of Pisa,University of L'Aquila), Andrea Monaldini (University of Pisa,University of L'Aquila), Stefania Costantini (University of L'Aquila), Valentina Pitoni (University of l'Aquila), Dawid Pado (University of l'Aquila)
Abstract: This paper presents an Answer Set Programming (ASP)-based framework for medical appointment scheduling, aimed at improving efficiency, reducing administrative overhead, and enhancing patient-centered care. The framework personalizes scheduling for vulnerable populations by integrating Blueprint Personas. It ensures real-time availability updates, conflict-free assignments, and seamless interoperability with existing healthcare platforms by centralizing planning operations within an ASP logic model.
Authors: Paul Kent, George De Ath, Martin Layton, Allen Hart, Richard Everson, Ben Carvell
Abstract: Escalating air traffic demand is driving the adoption of automation to support air traffic controllers, but existing approaches face a trade-off between safety assurance and interpretability. Optimisation-based methods such as reinforcement learning offer strong performance but are difficult to verify and explain, while rules-based systems are transparent yet rarely check safety under uncertainty. This paper outlines Agent Mallard, a forward-planning, rules-based agent for tactical control in systemised airspace that embeds a stochastic digital twin directly into its conflict-resolution loop. Mallard operates on predefined GPS-guided routes, reducing continuous 4D vectoring to discrete choices over lanes and levels, and constructs hierarchical plans from an expert-informed library of deconfliction strategies. A depth-limited backtracking search uses causal attribution, topological plan splicing, and monotonic axis constraints to seek a complete safe plan for all aircraft, validating each candidate manoeuvre against uncertain execution scenarios (e.g., wind variation, pilot response, communication loss) before commitment. Preliminary walkthroughs with UK controllers and initial tests in the BluebirdDT airspace digital twin indicate that Mallard's behaviour aligns with expert reasoning and resolves conflicts in simplified scenarios. The architecture is intended to combine model-based safety assessment, interpretable decision logic, and tractable computational performance in future structured en-route environments.
Authors: William Franz Lamberti, Sunbin Kim, Samantha Rose Lawrence
Abstract: The emergence of generative AI (GAI) has sparked diverse opinions regarding its appropriate use across various domains, including education. This pilot study investigates university students' perceptions of GAI in higher education classrooms, aiming to lay the groundwork for understanding these attitudes. With a participation rate of approximately 4.4%, the study highlights the challenges of engaging students in GAI-related research and underscores the need for larger sample sizes in future studies. By gaining insights into student perspectives, instructors can better prepare to integrate discussions of GAI into their classrooms, fostering informed and critical engagement with this transformative technology.
Authors: Stuti Sinha, Himanshu Kumar, Aryan Raju Mandapati, Rakshit Sakhuja, Dhruv Kumar
Abstract: Negotiation is a core component of social intelligence, requiring agents to balance strategic reasoning, cooperation, and social norms. Recent work shows that LLMs can engage in multi-turn negotiation, yet nearly all evaluations occur exclusively in English. Using controlled multi-agent simulations across Ultimatum, Buy-Sell, and Resource Exchange games, we systematically isolate language effects across English and four Indic framings (Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marwadi) by holding game rules, model parameters, and incentives constant across all conditions. We find that language choice can shift outcomes more strongly than changing models, reversing proposer advantages and reallocating surplus. Crucially, effects are task-contingent: Indic languages reduce stability in distributive games yet induce richer exploration in integrative settings. Our results demonstrate that evaluating LLM negotiation solely in English yields incomplete and potentially misleading conclusions. These findings caution against English-only evaluation of LLMs and suggest that culturally-aware evaluation is essential for fair deployment.
Authors: Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Sanchari Chowdhuri, Amit Agarwal, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel
Abstract: Clustering customer chat data is vital for cloud providers handling multi service queries. Traditional methods struggle with overlapping concerns and create broad, static clusters that degrade over time. Reclustering disrupts continuity, making issue tracking difficult. We propose an adaptive system that segments multi turn chats into service specific concerns and incrementally refines clusters as new issues arise. Cluster quality is tracked via DaviesBouldin Index and Silhouette Scores, with LLM based splitting applied only to degraded clusters. Our method improves Silhouette Scores by over 100\% and reduces DBI by 65.6\% compared to baselines, enabling scalable, real time analytics without full reclustering.
Authors: Siyuan Huang, Yutong Gao, Juyang Bai, Yifan Zhou, Zi Yin, Xinxin Liu, Rama Chellappa, Chun Pong Lau, Sayan Nag, Cheng Peng, Shraman Pramanick
Abstract: Creating high-quality figures and visualizations for scientific papers is a time-consuming task that requires both deep domain knowledge and professional design skills. Despite over 2.5 million scientific papers published annually, the figure generation process remains largely manual. We introduce $\textbf{SciFig}$, an end-to-end AI agent system that generates publication-ready pipeline figures directly from research paper texts. SciFig uses a hierarchical layout generation strategy, which parses research descriptions to identify component relationships, groups related elements into functional modules, and generates inter-module connections to establish visual organization. Furthermore, an iterative chain-of-thought (CoT) feedback mechanism progressively improves layouts through multiple rounds of visual analysis and reasoning. We introduce a rubric-based evaluation framework that analyzes 2,219 real scientific figures to extract evaluation rubrics and automatically generates comprehensive evaluation criteria. SciFig demonstrates remarkable performance: achieving 70.1$\%$ overall quality on dataset-level evaluation and 66.2$\%$ on paper-specific evaluation, and consistently high scores across metrics such as visual clarity, structural organization, and scientific accuracy. SciFig figure generation pipeline and our evaluation benchmark will be open-sourced.
Authors: Eren Kocadag, Seyed Sahand Mohammadi Ziabari, Ali Mohammed Mansoor Alsahag
Abstract: Static word embeddings often absorb social biases from the text they learn from, and those biases can quietly shape downstream systems. Prior work that uses the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) has focused mostly on single-group bias along warmth and competence. We broaden that lens to intersectional bias by building compound representations for pairs of social identities through summation or concatenation, and by applying three debiasing strategies: Subtraction, Linear Projection, and Partial Projection. We study three widely used embedding families (Word2Vec, GloVe, and ConceptNet Numberbatch) and assess them with two complementary views of utility: whether local neighborhoods remain coherent and whether analogy behavior is preserved. Across models, SCM-based mitigation carries over well to the intersectional case and largely keeps the overall semantic landscape intact. The main cost is a familiar trade off: methods that most tightly preserve geometry tend to be more cautious about analogy behavior, while more assertive projections can improve analogies at the expense of strict neighborhood stability. Partial Projection is reliably conservative and keeps representations steady; Linear Projection can be more assertive; Subtraction is a simple baseline that remains competitive. The choice between summation and concatenation depends on the embedding family and the application goal. Together, these findings suggest that intersectional debiasing with SCM is practical in static embeddings, and they offer guidance for selecting aggregation and debiasing settings when balancing stability against analogy performance.
Authors: Forest Mars
Abstract: Domain expertise enhances judgment within boundaries but creates systematic vulnerabilities specifically at borders. We term this Transitive Expert Error (TEE), distinct from Dunning-Kruger effects, requiring calibrated expertise as precondition. Mechanisms enabling reliable within-domain judgment become liabilities when structural similarity masks causal divergence. Two core mechanisms operate: structural similarity bias causes experts to overweight surface features (shared vocabulary, patterns, formal structure) while missing causal architecture differences; authority persistence maintains confidence across competence boundaries through social reinforcement and metacognitive failures (experts experience no subjective uncertainty as pattern recognition operates smoothly on familiar-seeming inputs.) These mechanism intensify under three conditions: shared vocabulary masking divergent processes, social pressure for immediate judgment, and delayed feedback. These findings extend to AI routing architectures (MoE systems, multi-model orchestration, tool-using agents, RAG systems) exhibiting routing-induced failures (wrong specialist selected) and coverage-induced failures (no appropriate specialist exists). Both produce a hallucination phenotype: confident, coherent, structurally plausible but causally incorrect outputs at domain boundaries. In human systems where mechanisms are cognitive black boxes; AI architectures make them explicit and addressable. We propose interventions: multi-expert activation with disagreement detection (router level), boundary-aware calibration (specialist level), and coverage gap detection (training level). TEE has detectable signatures (routing patterns, confidence-accuracy dissociations, domain-inappropriate content) enabling monitoring and mitigation. What remains intractable in human cognition becomes addressable through architectural design.
Authors: Linzhang Li, Yixin Dong, Guanjie Wang, Ziyi Xu, Alexander Jiang, Tianqi Chen
Abstract: Modern LLM agents are required to handle increasingly complex structured generation tasks, such as tool calling and conditional structured generation. These tasks are significantly more dynamic than predefined structures, posing new challenges to the current structured generation engines. In this paper, we propose XGrammar 2, a highly optimized structured generation engine for agentic LLMs. XGrammar 2 accelerates the mask generation for these dynamic structured generation tasks through a new dynamic dispatching semantics: TagDispatch. We further introduce a just-in-time (JIT) compilation method to reduce compilation time and a cross-grammar caching mechanism to leverage the common sub-structures across different grammars. Additionally, we extend the previous PDA-based mask generation algorithm to the Earley-parser-based one and design a repetition compression algorithm to handle repetition structures in grammars. Evaluation results show that XGrammar 2 can achieve more than 6x speedup over the existing structured generation engines. Integrated with an LLM inference engine, XGrammar 2 can handle dynamic structured generation tasks with near-zero overhead.
Authors: Enrique ter Horst, Sridhar Mahadevan, Juan Diego Zambrano
Abstract: We develop a categorical foundation for belief propagation on factor graphs. We construct the free hypergraph category \(\Syn_\Sigma\) on a typed signature and prove its universal property, yielding compositional semantics via a unique functor to the matrix category \(\cat{Mat}_R\). Message-passing is formulated using a Grothendieck fibration \(\int\Msg \to \cat{FG}_\Sigma\) over polarized factor graphs, with schedule-indexed endomorphisms defining BP updates. We characterize exact inference as effective descent: local beliefs form a descent datum when compatibility conditions hold on overlaps. This framework unifies tree exactness, junction tree algorithms, and loopy BP failures under sheaf-theoretic obstructions. We introduce HATCC (Holonomy-Aware Tree Compilation), an algorithm that detects descent obstructions via holonomy computation on the factor nerve, compiles non-trivial holonomy into mode variables, and reduces to tree BP on an augmented graph. Complexity is \(O(n^2 d_{\max} + c \cdot k_{\max} \cdot \delta_{\max}^3 + n \cdot \delta_{\max}^2)\) for \(n\) factors and \(c\) fundamental cycles. Experimental results demonstrate exact inference with significant speedup over junction trees on grid MRFs and random graphs, along with UNSAT detection on satisfiability instances.
Authors: Bill Marino, Nicholas D. Lane
Abstract: The era of AI regulation (AIR) is upon us. But AI systems, we argue, will not be able to comply with these regulations at the necessary speed and scale by continuing to rely on traditional, analogue methods of compliance. Instead, we posit that compliance with these regulations will only realistically be achieved computationally: that is, with algorithms that run across the life cycle of an AI system, automatically steering it toward AIR compliance in the face of dynamic conditions. Yet despite their (we would argue) inevitability, the research community has yet to specify exactly how these algorithms for computational AIR compliance should behave - or how we should benchmark their performance. To fill these gaps, we specify a set of design goals for such algorithms. In addition, we specify a benchmark dataset that can be used to quantitatively measure whether individual algorithms satisfy these design goals. By delivering this blueprint, we hope to give shape to an important but uncrystallized new domain of research - and, in doing so, incite necessary investment in it.
Authors: Muqing Xu
Abstract: Personalized nutrition management aims to tailor dietary guidance to an individual's intake and phenotype, but most existing systems handle food logging, nutrient analysis and recommendation separately. We present a next-generation mobile nutrition assistant that combines image based meal logging with an LLM driven multi agent controller to provide meal level closed loop support. The system coordinates vision, dialogue and state management agents to estimate nutrients from photos and update a daily intake budget. It then adapts the next meal plan to user preferences and dietary constraints. Experiments with SNAPMe meal images and simulated users show competitive nutrient estimation, personalized menus and efficient task plans. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of multi agent LLM control for personalized nutrition and reveal open challenges in micronutrient estimation from images and in large scale real world studies.
Authors: Yifei Gao, Jiang Wu, Xiaoyi Chen, Yifan Yang, Zhe Cui, Tianyi Ma, Jiaming Zhang, Jitao Sang
Abstract: Exploratory GUI testing is essential for software quality but suffers from high manual costs. While Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) agents excel in navigation, they fail to autonomously discover defects due to two core challenges: \textit{Goal-Oriented Masking}, where agents prioritize task completion over reporting anomalies, and \textit{Execution-Bias Attribution}, where system defects are misidentified as agent errors. To address these, we first introduce \textbf{GUITestBench}, the first interactive benchmark for this task, featuring 143 tasks across 26 defects. We then propose \textbf{GUITester}, a multi-agent framework that decouples navigation from verification via two modules: (i) a \textit{Planning-Execution Module (PEM)} that proactively probes for defects via embedded testing intents, and (ii) a \textit{Hierarchical Reflection Module (HRM)} that resolves attribution ambiguity through interaction history analysis. GUITester achieves an F1-score of 48.90\% (Pass@3) on GUITestBench, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines (33.35\%). Our work demonstrates the feasibility of autonomous exploratory testing and provides a robust foundation for future GUI quality assurance~\footnote{Our code is now available in~\href{https://github.com/ADaM-BJTU/GUITestBench}{https://github.com/ADaM-BJTU/GUITestBench}}.
URLs: https://github.com/ADaM-BJTU/GUITestBench, https://github.com/ADaM-BJTU/GUITestBench
Authors: Jingyi Wang, Fanggang Wang
Abstract: With the rapid growth of wireless communications, specific emitter identification (SEI) is significant for communication security. However, its model training relies heavily on the large-scale labeled data, which are costly and time-consuming to obtain. To address this challenge, we propose an SEI approach enhanced by active learning (AL), which follows a three-stage semi-supervised training scheme. In the first stage, self-supervised contrastive learning is employed with a dynamic dictionary update mechanism to extract robust representations from large amounts of the unlabeled data. In the second stage, supervised training on a small labeled dataset is performed, where the contrastive and cross-entropy losses are jointly optimized to improve the feature separability and strengthen the classification boundaries. In the third stage, an AL module selects the most valuable samples from the unlabeled data for annotation based on the uncertainty and representativeness criteria, further enhancing generalization under limited labeling budgets. Experimental results on the ADS-B and WiFi datasets demonstrate that the proposed SEI approach significantly outperforms the conventional supervised and semi-supervised methods under limited annotation conditions, achieving higher recognition accuracy with lower labeling cost.
Authors: Khandakar Shakib Al Hasan, Syed Rifat Raiyan, Hasin Mahtab Alvee, Wahid Sadik
Abstract: Generating accurate circuit schematics from high-level natural language descriptions remains a persistent challenge in electronics design, as large language models (LLMs) frequently hallucinate in granular details, violate electrical constraints, and produce non-machine-readable outputs. We present CircuitLM, a novel multi-agent LLM-aided circuit design pipeline that translates user prompts into structured, visually interpretable CircuitJSON schematics through five sequential stages: (i) LLM-based component identification, (ii) canonical pinout retrieval, (iii) chain-of-thought reasoning by an electronics expert agent, (iv) JSON schematic synthesis, and (v) force-directed SVG visualization. Anchored by a curated, embedding-powered component knowledge base. While LLMs often violate electrical constraints, CircuitLM bridges this gap by grounding generation in a verified and dynamically extensible component database, initially comprising 50 components. To ensure safety, we incorporate a hybrid evaluation framework, namely Dual-Metric Circuit Validation (DMCV), validated against human-expert assessments, which achieves high fidelity in microcontroller-centric designs. We evaluate the system on 100 diverse embedded-systems prompts across six LLMs and introduce DMCV to assess both structural and electrical validity. This work bridges natural language input to deployable hardware designs, enabling reliable circuit prototyping by non-experts. Our code and data will be made public upon acceptance.
Authors: Peixin Huang, Yaoxin Wu, Yining Ma, Cathy Wu, Wen Song, Wei Zhang
Abstract: Mixed-integer linear programming (MILP), a widely used modeling framework for combinatorial optimization, are central to many scientific and engineering applications, yet remains computationally challenging at scale. Recent advances in deep learning address this challenge by representing MILP instances as variable-constraint bipartite graphs and applying graph neural networks (GNNs) to extract latent structural patterns and enhance solver efficiency. However, this architecture is inherently limited by the local-oriented mechanism, leading to restricted representation power and hindering neural approaches for MILP. Here we present an attention-driven neural architecture that learns expressive representations beyond the pure graph view. A dual-attention mechanism is designed to perform parallel self- and cross-attention over variables and constraints, enabling global information exchange and deeper representation learning. We apply this general backbone to various downstream tasks at the instance level, element level, and solving state level. Extensive experiments across widely used benchmarks show consistent improvements of our approach over state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting attention-based neural architectures as a powerful foundation for learning-enhanced mixed-integer linear optimization.
Authors: Shogo Nakayama, Masahiro Okuda
Abstract: The advancement of deep learning has greatly improved supervised image classification. However, labeling data is costly, prompting research into unsupervised learning methods such as contrastive learning. In real-world scenarios, fully unlabeled datasets are rare, making semi-supervised learning (SSL) highly relevant in scenarios where a small amount of labeled data coexists with a large volume of unlabeled data. A well-known semi-supervised contrastive learning approach involves assigning pseudo-labels to unlabeled data. This study aims to enhance pseudo-label-based SSL by incorporating distribution matching between labeled and unlabeled feature embeddings to improve image classification accuracy across multiple datasets.
Authors: Haofei Hou, Shunyi Zhao, Fanxu Meng, Kairui Yang, Lecheng Ruan, Qining Wang
Abstract: Question Answer (QA) systems for biomedical experiments facilitate cross-disciplinary communication, and serve as a foundation for downstream tasks, e.g., laboratory automation. High Information Density (HID) and Multi-Step Reasoning (MSR) pose unique challenges for biomedical experimental QA. While extracting structured knowledge, e.g., Knowledge Graphs (KGs), can substantially benefit biomedical experimental QA. Existing biomedical datasets focus on general or coarsegrained knowledge and thus fail to support the fine-grained experimental reasoning demanded by HID and MSR. To address this gap, we introduce Biomedical Protocol Information Extraction Dataset (BioPIE), a dataset that provides procedure-centric KGs of experimental entities, actions, and relations at a scale that supports reasoning over biomedical experiments across protocols. We evaluate information extraction methods on BioPIE, and implement a QA system that leverages BioPIE, showcasing performance gains on test, HID, and MSR question sets, showing that the structured experimental knowledge in BioPIE underpins both AI-assisted and more autonomous biomedical experimentation.
Authors: Jiuzhou Zhao, Chunrong Chen, Chenqi Qiao, Lebin Zheng, Minqi Han, Yanchi Liu Yongzhou Xu Xiaochuan Xu Min Zhang
Abstract: Multi-Agent Systems(MAS) have become a powerful paradigm for building high performance intelligent applications. Within these systems, the router responsible for determining which expert agents should handle a given query plays a crucial role in overall performance. Existing routing strategies generally fall into two categories: performance routing, which balances latency and cost across models of different sizes, and task routing, which assigns queries to domain-specific experts to improve accuracy. In real-world enterprise applications, task routing is more suitable; however, most existing approaches rely on static single-label decisions, which introduce two major limitations: (i) difficulty in seamlessly integrating new agents as business domains expand, and (ii) routing conflicts caused by overlapping agent capabilities, ultimately degrading accuracy and robustness.To address these challenges, we propose TCAndon-Router(TCAR): an adaptive reasoning router for multi-agent collaboration. Unlike traditional routers, TCAR supports dynamic agent onboarding and first generates a natural-language reasoning chain before predicting a set of candidate agents capable of handling the query. In addition, we design a collaborative execution pipeline in which selected agents independently produce responses, which are then aggregated and refined into a single high-quality response by a dedicated Refining Agent.Experiments on public datasets and real enterprise data demonstrate that TCAR significantly improves routing accuracy, reduces routing conflicts, and remains robust in ambiguous scenarios. We have released TCAR at https://huggingface.co/tencent/TCAndon-Router to support future research on explainable and collaborative multi-agent routing.
Authors: Bernard Ngabonziza, Ayan Banerjee, Sandeep K. S. Gupta
Abstract: Human centric critical systems are increasingly involving artificial intelligence to enable knowledge extraction from sensor collected data. Examples include medical monitoring and control systems, gesture based human computer interaction systems, and autonomous cars. Such systems are intended to operate for a long term potentially for a lifetime in many scenarios such as closed loop blood glucose control for Type 1 diabetics, self-driving cars, and monitoting systems for stroke diagnosis, and rehabilitation. Long term operation of such AI enabled human centric applications can expose them to corner cases for which their operation is may be uncertain. This can be due to many reasons such as inherent flaws in the design, limited resources for testing, inherent computational limitations of the testing methodology, or unknown use cases resulting from human interaction with the system. Such untested corner cases or cases for which the system performance is uncertain can lead to violations in the safety, sustainability, and security requirements of the system. In this paper, we analyze the existing techniques for safety, sustainability, and security analysis of an AI enabled human centric control system and discuss their limitations for testing the system for long term use in practice. We then propose personalized model based solutions for potentially eliminating such limitations.
Authors: Dongyi Lv, Qiuyu Ding, Heng-Da Xu, Zhaoxu Sun, Zhi Wang, Feng Xiong, Mu Xu
Abstract: Generative recommendation with large language models (LLMs) reframes prediction as sequence generation, yet existing LLM-based recommenders remain limited in leveraging geographic signals that are crucial in mobility and local-services scenarios. Here, we present Reasoning Over Space (ROS), a framework that utilizes geography as a vital decision variable within the reasoning process. ROS introduces a Hierarchical Spatial Semantic ID (SID) that discretizes coarse-to-fine locality and POI semantics into compositional tokens, and endows LLM with a three-stage Mobility Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm that models user personality, constructs an intent-aligned candidate space, and performs locality informed pruning. We further align the model with real world geography via spatial-guided Reinforcement Learning (RL). Experiments on three widely used location-based social network (LBSN) datasets show that ROS achieves over 10% relative gains in hit rate over strongest LLM-based baselines and improves cross-city transfer, despite using a smaller backbone model.
Authors: Yunhao Feng, Yige Li, Yutao Wu, Yingshui Tan, Yanming Guo, Yifan Ding, Kun Zhai, Xingjun Ma, Yugang Jiang
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents execute tasks through multi-step workflows that combine planning, memory, and tool use. While this design enables autonomy, it also expands the attack surface for backdoor threats. Backdoor triggers injected into specific stages of an agent workflow can persist through multiple intermediate states and adversely influence downstream outputs. However, existing studies remain fragmented and typically analyze individual attack vectors in isolation, leaving the cross-stage interaction and propagation of backdoor triggers poorly understood from an agent-centric perspective. To fill this gap, we propose \textbf{BackdoorAgent}, a modular and stage-aware framework that provides a unified, agent-centric view of backdoor threats in LLM agents. BackdoorAgent structures the attack surface into three functional stages of agentic workflows, including \textbf{planning attacks}, \textbf{memory attacks}, and \textbf{tool-use attacks}, and instruments agent execution to enable systematic analysis of trigger activation and propagation across different stages. Building on this framework, we construct a standardized benchmark spanning four representative agent applications: \textbf{Agent QA}, \textbf{Agent Code}, \textbf{Agent Web}, and \textbf{Agent Drive}, covering both language-only and multimodal settings. Our empirical analysis shows that \textit{triggers implanted at a single stage can persist across multiple steps and propagate through intermediate states.} For instance, when using a GPT-based backbone, we observe trigger persistence in 43.58\% of planning attacks, 77.97\% of memory attacks, and 60.28\% of tool-stage attacks, highlighting the vulnerabilities of the agentic workflow itself to backdoor threats. To facilitate reproducibility and future research, our code and benchmark are publicly available at GitHub.
Authors: Yash Saxena, Manas Gaur
Abstract: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has made significant strides in overcoming key limitations of large language models, such as hallucination, lack of contextual grounding, and issues with transparency. However, traditional RAG systems consist of three interconnected neural components - the retriever, re-ranker, and generator - whose internal reasoning processes remain opaque. This lack of transparency complicates interpretability, hinders debugging efforts, and erodes trust, especially in high-stakes domains where clear decision-making is essential. To address these challenges, we introduce the concept of Neurosymbolic RAG, which integrates symbolic reasoning using a knowledge graph with neural retrieval techniques. This new framework aims to answer two primary questions: (a) Can retrievers provide a clear and interpretable basis for document selection? (b) Can symbolic knowledge enhance the clarity of the retrieval process? We propose three methods to improve this integration. First is MAR (Knowledge Modulation Aligned Retrieval) that employs modulation networks to refine query embeddings using interpretable symbolic features, thereby making document matching more explicit. Second, KG-Path RAG enhances queries by traversing knowledge graphs to improve overall retrieval quality and interpretability. Lastly, Process Knowledge-infused RAG utilizes domain-specific tools to reorder retrieved content based on validated workflows. Preliminary results from mental health risk assessment tasks indicate that this neurosymbolic approach enhances both transparency and overall performance
Authors: Delong Zeng, Yuexiang Xie, Yaliang Li, Ying Shen
Abstract: Multimodal retrieval has emerged as a promising yet challenging research direction in recent years. Most existing studies in multimodal retrieval focus on capturing information in multimodal data that is similar to their paired texts, but often ignores the complementary information contained in multimodal data. In this study, we propose CIEA, a novel multimodal retrieval approach that employs Complementary Information Extraction and Alignment, which transforms both text and images in documents into a unified latent space and features a complementary information extractor designed to identify and preserve differences in the image representations. We optimize CIEA using two complementary contrastive losses to ensure semantic integrity and effectively capture the complementary information contained in images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CIEA, which achieves significant improvements over both divide-and-conquer models and universal dense retrieval models. We provide an ablation study, further discussions, and case studies to highlight the advancements achieved by CIEA. To promote further research in the community, we have released the source code at https://github.com/zengdlong/CIEA.
Authors: Yuguang Yue, Irakli Salia, Samuel Hunt, Chris Green, Wenzhe Shi, Jonathan J Hunt
Abstract: Behavior cloning is enjoying a resurgence in popularity as scaling both model and data sizes proves to provide a strong starting point for many tasks of interest. In this work, we introduce an open recipe for training a video game playing foundation model designed for inference in realtime on a consumer GPU. We release all data (8300+ hours of high quality human gameplay), training and inference code, and pretrained checkpoints under an open license. We show that our best model is capable of playing a variety of 3D video games at a level competitive with human play. We use this recipe to systematically examine the scaling laws of behavior cloning to understand how the model's performance and causal reasoning varies with model and data scale. We first show in a simple toy problem that, for some types of causal reasoning, increasing both the amount of training data and the depth of the network results in the model learning a more causal policy. We then systematically study how causality varies with the number of parameters (and depth) and training steps in scaled models of up to 1.2 billion parameters, and we find similar scaling results to what we observe in the toy problem.
Authors: Jiachen Liu, Maestro Harmon, Zechen Zhang
Abstract: While AI innovation accelerates rapidly, the intellectual process behind breakthroughs -- how researchers identify gaps, synthesize prior work, and generate insights -- remains poorly understood. The lack of structured data on scientific reasoning hinders systematic analysis and development of AI research agents. We introduce Sci-Reasoning, the first dataset capturing the intellectual synthesis behind high-quality AI research. Using community-validated quality signals and an LLM-accelerated, human-verified pipeline, we trace Oral and Spotlight papers across NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR (2023-2025) to its key predecessors, articulating specific reasoning links in a structured format. Our analysis identifies 15 distinct thinking patterns, with three dominant strategies accounting for 52.7%: Gap-Driven Reframing (24.2%), Cross-Domain Synthesis (18.0%), and Representation Shift (10.5%). The most powerful innovation recipes combine multiple patterns: Gap-Driven Reframing + Representation Shift, Cross-Domain Synthesis + Representation Shift, and Gap-Driven Reframing + Cross-Domain Synthesis. This dataset enables quantitative studies of scientific progress and provides structured reasoning trajectories for training the next generation AI research agents.
Authors: Saad Alqithami
Abstract: Advances in large language models have enabled agentic AI systems that can reason, plan, and interact with external tools to execute multi-step workflows, while public blockchains have evolved into a programmable substrate for value transfer, access control, and verifiable state transitions. Their convergence introduces a high-stakes systems challenge: designing standard, interoperable, and secure interfaces that allow agents to observe on-chain state, formulate transaction intents, and authorize execution without exposing users, protocols, or organizations to unacceptable security, governance, or economic risks. This survey systematizes the emerging landscape of agent-blockchain interoperability through a systematic literature review, identifying 317 relevant works from an initial pool of over 3000 records. We contribute a five-part taxonomy of integration patterns spanning read-only analytics, simulation and intent generation, delegated execution, autonomous signing, and multi-agent workflows; a threat model tailored to agent-driven transaction pipelines that captures risks ranging from prompt injection and policy misuse to key compromise, adversarial execution dynamics, and multi-agent collusion; and a comparative capability matrix analyzing more than 20 representative systems across 13 dimensions, including custody models, permissioning, policy enforcement, observability, and recovery. Building on the gaps revealed by this analysis, we outline a research roadmap centered on two interface abstractions: a Transaction Intent Schema for portable and unambiguous goal specification, and a Policy Decision Record for auditable, verifiable policy enforcement across execution environments. We conclude by proposing a reproducible evaluation suite and benchmarks for assessing the safety, reliability, and economic robustness of agent-mediated on-chain execution.
Authors: Paras Jain, Khushi Dhar, Olyemi E. Amujo, Esa M. Rantanen
Abstract: Identifying deceptive content like phishing emails demands sophisticated cognitive processes that combine pattern recognition, confidence assessment, and contextual analysis. This research examines how human cognition and machine learning models work together to distinguish phishing emails from legitimate ones. We employed three interpretable algorithms Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, and Random Forests training them on both TF-IDF features and semantic embeddings, then compared their predictions against human evaluations that captured confidence ratings and linguistic observations. Our results show that machine learning models provide good accuracy rates, but their confidence levels vary significantly. Human evaluators, on the other hand, use a greater variety of language signs and retain more consistent confidence. We also found that while language proficiency has minimal effect on detection performance, aging does. These findings offer helpful direction for creating transparent AI systems that complement human cognitive functions, ultimately improving human-AI cooperation in challenging content analysis tasks.
Authors: Di Zhang
Abstract: Recent progress in large language model (LLM) agents has largely focused on embedding self-improvement mechanisms inside the agent or searching over many concurrent variants. While these approaches can raise aggregate scores, they often yield unstable and hard-to-audit improvement trajectories, making it difficult to guarantee non-regression or to reason about failures across versions. We reframe agent improvement as \textbf{release engineering}: agents are treated as shippable artifacts, and improvement is externalized into a regression-aware release pipeline. We introduce \textbf{AgentDevel}, a release engineering pipeline that iteratively runs the current agent, produces implementation-blind, symptom-level quality signals from execution traces, synthesizes a single release candidate (RC) via executable diagnosis, and promotes it under flip-centered gating. AgentDevel features three core designs: (i) an implementation-blind LLM critic that characterizes failure appearances without accessing agent internals, (ii) script-based executable diagnosis that aggregates dominant symptom patterns and produces auditable engineering specifications, and (iii) flip-centered gating that prioritizes pass to fail regressions and fail to pass fixes as first-class evidence. Unlike population-based search or in-agent self-refinement, AgentDevel maintains a single canonical version line and emphasizes non-regression as a primary objective. Experiments on execution-heavy benchmarks demonstrate that AgentDevel yields stable improvements with significantly fewer regressions while producing reproducible, auditable artifacts. Overall, AgentDevel provides a practical development discipline for building, debugging, and releasing LLM agents as software development.
Authors: Etienne Casanova, R. Michael Alvarez
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) offer unprecedented opportunities for analyzing social phenomena at scale. This paper demonstrates the value of LLMs in psychological measurement by (1) compiling the first large-scale dataset of election rumors on a niche alt-tech platform, (2) developing a multistage Rumor Detection Agent that leverages LLMs for high-precision content classification, and (3) quantifying the psychological dynamics of rumor propagation, specifically the "illusory truth effect" in a naturalistic setting. The Rumor Detection Agent combines (i) a synthetic data-augmented, fine-tuned RoBERTa classifier, (ii) precision keyword filtering, and (iii) a two-pass LLM verification pipeline using GPT-4o mini. The findings reveal that sharing probability rises steadily with each additional exposure, providing large-scale empirical evidence for dose-response belief reinforcement in ideologically homogeneous networks. Simulation results further demonstrate rapid contagion effects: nearly one quarter of users become "infected" within just four propagation iterations. Taken together, these results illustrate how LLMs can transform psychological science by enabling the rigorous measurement of belief dynamics and misinformation spread in massive, real-world datasets.
Authors: Can Xu, Lingyong Yan, Jiayi Wu, Haosen Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yuchen Li, Jizhou Huang, Dawei Yin, Xiang Li
Abstract: Recent advances in synergizing large reasoning models (LRMs) with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have shown promising results, yet two critical challenges remain: (1) reasoning models typically operate from a single, unchallenged perspective, limiting their ability to conduct deep, self-correcting reasoning over external documents, and (2) existing training paradigms rely excessively on outcome-oriented rewards, which provide insufficient signal for shaping the complex, multi-step reasoning process. To address these issues, we propose an Reasoner-Verifier framework named Adversarial Reasoning RAG (ARR). The Reasoner and Verifier engage in reasoning on retrieved evidence and critiquing each other's logic while being guided by process-aware advantage that requires no external scoring model. This reward combines explicit observational signals with internal model uncertainty to jointly optimize reasoning fidelity and verification rigor. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Authors: Zhe Hou
Abstract: We present Isabellm, an LLM-powered theorem prover for Isabelle/HOL that performs fully automatic proof synthesis. Isabellm works with any local LLM on Ollama and APIs such as Gemini CLI, and it is designed to run on consumer grade computers. The system combines a stepwise prover, which uses large language models to propose proof commands validated by Isabelle in a bounded search loop, with a higher-level proof planner that generates structured Isar outlines and attempts to fill and repair remaining gaps. The framework includes beam search for tactics, tactics reranker ML and RL models, premise selection with small transformer models, micro-RAG for Isar proofs built from AFP, and counter-example guided proof repair. All the code is implemented by GPT 4.1 - 5.2, Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude 4.5. Empirically, Isabellm can prove certain lemmas that defeat Isabelle's standard automation, including Sledgehammer, demonstrating the practical value of LLM-guided proof search. At the same time, we find that even state-of-the-art LLMs, such as GPT 5.2 Extended Thinking and Gemini 3 Pro struggle to reliably implement the intended fill-and-repair mechanisms with complex algorithmic designs, highlighting fundamental challenges in LLM code generation and reasoning. The code of Isabellm is available at https://github.com/zhehou/llm-isabelle
Authors: Zhiyuan Chang, Mingyang Li, Yuekai Huang, Ziyou Jiang, Xiaojun Jia, Qian Xiong, Junjie Wang, Zhaoyang Li, Qing Wang
Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-integrated applications have become increasingly prevalent, yet face critical security vulnerabilities from prompt injection (PI) attacks. Defending against PI attacks faces two major issues: malicious instructions can be injected through diverse vectors, and injected instructions often lack clear semantic boundaries from the surrounding context, making them difficult to identify. To address these issues, we propose InstruCoT, a model enhancement method for PI defense that synthesizes diverse training data and employs instruction-level chain-of-thought fine-tuning, enabling LLMs to effectively identify and reject malicious instructions regardless of their source or position in the context. We evaluate InstruCoT across three critical dimensions: Behavior Deviation, Privacy Leakage, and Harmful Output. Experimental results across four LLMs demonstrate that InstruCoT significantly outperforms baselines in all dimensions while maintaining utility performance without degradation
Authors: Kunhang Lv, Yuhang Dong, Rui Han, Fuqi Jia, Feifei Ma, Jian Zhang
Abstract: Quantified formulas with Uninterpreted Functions (UFs) over non-linear real arithmetic pose fundamental challenges for Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solving. Traditional quantifier instantiation methods struggle because they lack semantic understanding of UF constraints, forcing them to search through unbounded solution spaces with limited guidance. We present AquaForte, a framework that leverages Large Language Models to provide semantic guidance for UF instantiation by generating instantiated candidates for function definitions that satisfy the constraints, thereby significantly reducing the search space and complexity for solvers. Our approach preprocesses formulas through constraint separation, uses structured prompts to extract mathematical reasoning from LLMs, and integrates the results with traditional SMT algorithms through adaptive instantiation. AquaForte maintains soundness through systematic validation: LLM-guided instantiations yielding SAT solve the original problem, while UNSAT results generate exclusion clauses for iterative refinement. Completeness is preserved by fallback to traditional solvers augmented with learned constraints. Experimental evaluation on SMT-COMP benchmarks demonstrates that AquaForte solves numerous instances where state-of-the-art solvers like Z3 and CVC5 timeout, with particular effectiveness on satisfiable formulas. Our work shows that LLMs can provide valuable mathematical intuition for symbolic reasoning, establishing a new paradigm for SMT constraint solving.
Authors: Zhilun Zhou, Zihan Liu, Jiahe Liu, Qingyu Shao, Yihan Wang, Kun Shao, Depeng Jin, Fengli Xu
Abstract: Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-based MAS), where multiple LLM agents collaborate to solve complex tasks, have shown impressive performance in many areas. However, MAS are typically distributed across different devices or environments, making them vulnerable to perturbations such as agent failures. While existing works have studied the adversarial attacks and corresponding defense strategies, they mainly focus on reactively detecting and mitigating attacks after they occur rather than proactively designing inherently resilient systems. In this work, we study the resilience of LLM-based MAS under perturbations and find that both the communication topology and prompt design significantly influence system resilience. Motivated by these findings, we propose ResMAS: a two-stage framework for enhancing MAS resilience. First, we train a reward model to predict the MAS's resilience, based on which we train a topology generator to automatically design resilient topology for specific tasks through reinforcement learning. Second, we introduce a topology-aware prompt optimization method that refines each agent's prompt based on its connections and interactions with other agents. Extensive experiments across a range of tasks show that our approach substantially improves MAS resilience under various constraints. Moreover, our framework demonstrates strong generalization ability to new tasks and models, highlighting its potential for building resilient MASs.
Authors: Enze Pan
Abstract: We present Tape, a controlled reinforcement-learning benchmark designed to isolate out-of-distribution (OOD) failure under latent rule shifts.Tape is derived from one-dimensional cellular automata, enabling precise train/test splits where observation and action spaces are held fixed while transition rules change. Using a reproducible evaluation pipeline, we compare model-free baselines, model-based planning with learned world models, and task-inference (meta-RL) methods. A consistent pattern emerges: methods that are strong in-distribution (ID) can collapse under heldout-rule OOD, and high-variance OOD evaluation can make rankings unstable unless experiments are sufficiently replicated.We provide (i) standardized OOD protocols, (ii) statistical reporting requirements (seeds, confidence intervals, and hypothesis tests), and (iii) information-theoretic identities connecting entropy reduction to conditional mutual information and expected posterior KL divergence, clarifying what "uncertainty reduction" objectives can and cannot guarantee under rule shifts.
Authors: Huayi Liu
Abstract: In the process of digital transformation, enterprises are faced with problems such as insufficient semantic understanding of unstructured data and lack of intelligent decision-making basis in driving mechanisms. This study proposes a method that combines a large language model (LLM) and a knowledge graph. First, a fine-tuned BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model is used to perform entity recognition and relationship extraction on multi-source heterogeneous texts, and GPT-4 is used to generate semantically enhanced vector representations; secondly, a two-layer graph neural network (GNN) architecture is designed to fuse the semantic vectors output by LLM with business metadata to construct a dynamic and scalable enterprise knowledge graph; then reinforcement learning is introduced to optimize decision path generation, and the reward function is used to drive the mechanism iteration. In the case of the manufacturing industry, this mechanism reduced the response time for equipment failure scenarios from 7.8 hours to 3.7 hours, the F1 value reached 94.3%, and the compensation for decision errors in the annual digital transformation cost decreased by 45.3%. This method significantly enhances the intelligence level and execution efficiency of the digital transformation driving mechanism by integrating large model semantic understanding with structured knowledge.
Authors: Yinuo Wang, Mining Tan, Wenxiang Jiao, Xiaoxi Li, Hao Wang, Xuanyu Zhang, Yuan Lu, Weiming Dong
Abstract: Travel planning is a sophisticated decision-making process that requires synthesizing multifaceted information to construct itineraries. However, existing travel planning approaches face several challenges: (1) Pruning candidate points of interest (POIs) while maintaining a high recall rate; (2) A single reasoning path restricts the exploration capability within the feasible solution space for travel planning; (3) Simultaneously optimizing hard constraints and soft constraints remains a significant difficulty. To address these challenges, we propose TourPlanner, a comprehensive framework featuring multi-path reasoning and constraint-gated reinforcement learning. Specifically, we first introduce a Personalized Recall and Spatial Optimization (PReSO) workflow to construct spatially-aware candidate POIs' set. Subsequently, we propose Competitive consensus Chain-of-Thought (CCoT), a multi-path reasoning paradigm that improves the ability of exploring the feasible solution space. To further refine the plan, we integrate a sigmoid-based gating mechanism into the reinforcement learning stage, which dynamically prioritizes soft-constraint satisfaction only after hard constraints are met. Experimental results on travel planning benchmarks demonstrate that TourPlanner achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly surpassing existing methods in both feasibility and user-preference alignment.
Authors: Yiqun Chen, Lingyong Yan, Zixuan Yang, Erhan Zhang, Jiashu Zhao, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Jiaxin Mao
Abstract: Agentic search has emerged as a promising paradigm for complex information seeking by enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to interleave reasoning with tool use. However, prevailing systems rely on monolithic agents that suffer from structural bottlenecks, including unconstrained reasoning outputs that inflate trajectories, sparse outcome-level rewards that complicate credit assignment, and stochastic search noise that destabilizes learning. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{M-ASK} (Multi-Agent Search and Knowledge), a framework that explicitly decouples agentic search into two complementary roles: Search Behavior Agents, which plan and execute search actions, and Knowledge Management Agents, which aggregate, filter, and maintain a compact internal context. This decomposition allows each agent to focus on a well-defined subtask and reduces interference between search and context construction. Furthermore, to enable stable coordination, M-ASK employs turn-level rewards to provide granular supervision for both search decisions and knowledge updates. Experiments on multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that M-ASK outperforms strong baselines, achieving not only superior answer accuracy but also significantly more stable training dynamics.\footnote{The source code for M-ASK is available at https://github.com/chenyiqun/M-ASK.}
Authors: Gijun Park
Abstract: Root cause analysis in modern cloud infrastructure demands sophisticated understanding of heterogeneous data sources, particularly time-series performance metrics that involve core failure signatures. While large language models demonstrate remarkable capabilities in textual reasoning, their discrete token-based architecture creates fundamental incompatibilities with continuous numerical sequences exhibiting temporal dependencies. Current methodologies inadequately address this modality mismatch, constraining the potential of language model-driven automation in incident management workflows. This paper presents a multimodal diagnostic framework that harmonizes time-series representations with pretrained language model embedding spaces. Our approach contributes three technical advances: (1) a semantic compression technique that distills temporal segments into single-token abstractions while preserving pattern semantics, (2) an alignment encoder utilizing gated cross-attention to project time-series features into language model latent space, and (3) a retrieval-augmented diagnostic pipeline that synthesizes aligned embeddings with historical incident knowledge for expert-level failure attribution. Comprehensive evaluation across six cloud system benchmarks demonstrates that our framework achieves leading performance, reaching 48.75% diagnostic accuracy with notable improvements on scenarios involving compound failure modes. The results validate embedding-space alignment as an effective strategy for enabling language models to reason over multimodal telemetry data in production incident response contexts.
Authors: Chang Zhao, Zheming Yang, Yunqing Hu, Qi Guo, Zijian Wang, Pengcheng Li, Wen Ji
Abstract: With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) technologies, their application in the domain of autonomous driving has become increasingly widespread. However, existing methods suffer from unstructured reasoning, poor generalization, and misalignment with human driving intent. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances decision transparency, conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) fails to fully exploit its potential, and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches face instability and suboptimal reasoning depth. We propose ThinkDrive, a CoT guided progressive RL fine-tuning framework for autonomous driving that synergizes explicit reasoning with difficulty-aware adaptive policy optimization. Our method employs a two-stage training strategy. First, we perform SFT using CoT explanations. Then, we apply progressive RL with a difficulty-aware adaptive policy optimizer that dynamically adjusts learning intensity based on sample complexity. We evaluate our approach on a public dataset. The results show that ThinkDrive outperforms strong RL baselines by 1.45%, 1.95%, and 1.01% on exam, easy-exam, and accuracy, respectively. Moreover, a 2B-parameter model trained with our method surpasses the much larger GPT-4o by 3.28% on the exam metric.
Authors: Yuyang Hu, Jiongnan Liu, Jiejun Tan, Yutao Zhu, Zhicheng Dou
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as intelligent agents that reason, plan, and interact with their environments. To effectively scale to long-horizon scenarios, a key capability for such agents is a memory mechanism that can retain, organize, and retrieve past experiences to support downstream decision-making. However, most existing approaches organize and store memories in a flat manner and rely on simple similarity-based retrieval techniques. Even when structured memory is introduced, existing methods often struggle to explicitly capture the logical relationships among experiences or memory units. Moreover, memory access is largely detached from the constructed structure and still depends on shallow semantic retrieval, preventing agents from reasoning logically over long-horizon dependencies. In this work, we propose CompassMem, an event-centric memory framework inspired by Event Segmentation Theory. CompassMem organizes memory as an Event Graph by incrementally segmenting experiences into events and linking them through explicit logical relations. This graph serves as a logic map, enabling agents to perform structured and goal-directed navigation over memory beyond superficial retrieval, progressively gathering valuable memories to support long-horizon reasoning. Experiments on LoCoMo and NarrativeQA demonstrate that CompassMem consistently improves both retrieval and reasoning performance across multiple backbone models.
Authors: Shuyang Jiang, Yuhao Wang, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Yu Wang
Abstract: Current critic-free RL methods for large reasoning models suffer from severe inefficiency when training on positive homogeneous prompts (where all rollouts are correct), resulting in waste of rollouts due to zero advantage estimates. We introduce a radically simple yet powerful solution to \uline{M}ine \uline{in}trinsic mast\uline{er}y (Miner), that repurposes the policy's intrinsic uncertainty as a self-supervised reward signal, with no external supervision, auxiliary models, or additional inference cost. Our method pioneers two key innovations: (1) a token-level focal credit assignment mechanism that dynamically amplifies gradients on critical uncertain tokens while suppressing overconfident ones, and (2) adaptive advantage calibration to seamlessly integrate intrinsic and verifiable rewards. Evaluated across six reasoning benchmarks on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B base models, Miner achieves state-of-the-art performance among the other four algorithms, yielding up to \textbf{4.58} absolute gains in Pass@1 and \textbf{6.66} gains in Pass@K compared to GRPO. Comparison with other methods targeted at exploration enhancement further discloses the superiority of the two newly proposed innovations. This demonstrates that latent uncertainty exploitation is both necessary and sufficient for efficient and scalable RL training of reasoning models.
Authors: Tingyu Wu, Zhisheng Chen, Ziyan Weng, Shuhe Wang, Chenglong Li, Shuo Zhang, Sen Hu, Silin Wu, Qizhen Lan, Huacan Wang, Ronghao Chen
Abstract: Existing long-horizon memory benchmarks mostly use multi-turn dialogues or synthetic user histories, which makes retrieval performance an imperfect proxy for person understanding. We present \BenchName, a publicly releasable benchmark built from long-form autobiographical narratives, where actions, context, and inner thoughts provide dense evidence for inferring stable motivations and decision principles. \BenchName~reconstructs each narrative into a flashback-aware, time-anchored stream and evaluates models with evidence-linked questions spanning factual recall, subjective state attribution, and principle-level reasoning. Across diverse narrative sources, retrieval-augmented systems mainly improve factual accuracy, while errors persist on temporally grounded explanations and higher-level inferences, highlighting the need for memory mechanisms beyond retrieval. Our data is in \href{KnowMeBench}{https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/KnowMeBench}.
Authors: Xiaoxiao Li
Abstract: Multi-agent AI systems have proven effective for complex reasoning. These systems are compounded by specialized agents, which collaborate through explicit communication, but incur substantial computational overhead. A natural question arises: can we achieve similar modularity benefits with a single agent that selects from a library of skills? We explore this question by viewing skills as internalized agent behaviors. From this perspective, a multi-agent system can be compiled into an equivalent single-agent system, trading inter-agent communication for skill selection. Our preliminary experiments suggest this approach can substantially reduce token usage and latency while maintaining competitive accuracy on reasoning benchmarks. However, this efficiency raises a deeper question that has received little attention: how does skill selection scale as libraries grow? Drawing on principles from cognitive science, we propose that LLM skill selection exhibits bounded capacity analogous to human decision-making. We investigate the scaling behavior of skill selection and observe a striking pattern. Rather than degrading gradually, selection accuracy remains stable up to a critical library size, then drops sharply, indicating a phase transition reminiscent of capacity limits in human cognition. Furthermore, we find evidence that semantic confusability among similar skills, rather than library size alone, plays a central role in this degradation. This perspective suggests that hierarchical organization, which has long helped humans manage complex choices, may similarly benefit AI systems. Our initial results with hierarchical routing support this hypothesis. This work opens new questions about the fundamental limits of semantic-based skill selection in LLMs and offers a cognitive-grounded framework and practical guidelines for designing scalable skill-based agents.
Authors: Zhen Chen, Weihao Xie, Peilin Chen, Shiqi Wang, Jianping Wang
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has proven effective for knowledge synthesis, yet it encounters significant challenges in practical scenarios where data is inherently discrete and fragmented. In most environments, information is distributed across isolated files like reports and logs that lack explicit links. Standard search engines process files independently, ignoring the connections between them. Furthermore, manually building Knowledge Graphs is impractical for such vast data. To bridge this gap, we present Orion-RAG. Our core insight is simple yet effective: we do not need heavy algorithms to organize this data. Instead, we use a low-complexity strategy to extract lightweight paths that naturally link related concepts. We demonstrate that this streamlined approach suffices to transform fragmented documents into semi-structured data, enabling the system to link information across different files effectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Orion-RAG consistently outperforms mainstream frameworks across diverse domains, supporting real-time updates and explicit Human-in-the-Loop verification with high cost-efficiency. Experiments on FinanceBench demonstrate superior precision with a 25.2% relative improvement over strong baselines.
Authors: Zefang Zong, Dingwei Chen, Yang Li, Qi Yi, Bo Zhou, Chengming Li, Bo Qian, Peng Chen, Jie Jiang
Abstract: LLM agents have emerged as powerful systems for tackling multi-turn tasks by interleaving internal reasoning and external tool interactions. Agentic Reinforcement Learning has recently drawn significant research attention as a critical post-training paradigm to further refine these capabilities. In this paper, we present AT$^2$PO (Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization via Tree Search), a unified framework for multi-turn agentic RL that addresses three core challenges: limited exploration diversity, sparse credit assignment, and misaligned policy optimization. AT$^2$PO introduces a turn-level tree structure that jointly enables Entropy-Guided Tree Expansion for strategic exploration and Turn-wise Credit Assignment for fine-grained reward propagation from sparse outcomes. Complementing this, we propose Agentic Turn-based Policy Optimization, a turn-level learning objective that aligns policy updates with the natural decision granularity of agentic interactions. ATPO is orthogonal to tree search and can be readily integrated into any multi-turn RL pipeline. Experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art baseline by up to 1.84 percentage points in average, with ablation studies validating the effectiveness of each component. Our code is available at https://github.com/zzfoutofspace/ATPO.
Authors: Encheng Su, Jianyu Wu, Chen Tang, Lintao Wang, Pengze Li, Aoran Wang, Jinouwen Zhang, Yizhou Wang, Yuan Meng, Xinzhu Ma, Shixiang Tang, Houqiang Li
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) transition from general knowledge retrieval to complex scientific discovery, their evaluation standards must also incorporate the rigorous norms of scientific inquiry. Existing benchmarks exhibit a critical blind spot: general instruction-following metrics focus on superficial formatting, while domain-specific scientific benchmarks assess only final-answer correctness, often rewarding models that arrive at the right result with the wrong reasons. To address this gap, we introduce scientific instruction following: the capability to solve problems while strictly adhering to the constraints that establish scientific validity. Specifically, we introduce SciIF, a multi-discipline benchmark that evaluates this capability by pairing university-level problems with a fixed catalog of constraints across three pillars: scientific conditions (e.g., boundary checks and assumptions), semantic stability (e.g., unit and symbol conventions), and specific processes(e.g., required numerical methods). Uniquely, SciIF emphasizes auditability, requiring models to provide explicit evidence of constraint satisfaction rather than implicit compliance. By measuring both solution correctness and multi-constraint adherence, SciIF enables finegrained diagnosis of compositional reasoning failures, ensuring that LLMs can function as reliable agents within the strict logical frameworks of science.
Authors: Chengxin Shi, Qinnan Cai, Zeyuan Chen, Long Zeng, Yibo Zhao, Jing Yu, Jianxiang Yu, Xiang Li
Abstract: Designing academic posters is a labor-intensive process requiring the precise balance of high-density content and sophisticated layout. While existing paper-to-poster generation methods automate initial drafting, they are typically single-pass and non-interactive, often fail to align with complex, subjective user intent. To bridge this gap, we propose APEX (Academic Poster Editing agentic eXpert), the first agentic framework for interactive academic poster editing, supporting fine-grained control with robust multi-level API-based editing and a review-and-adjustment Mechanism. In addition, we introduce APEX-Bench, the first systematic benchmark comprising 514 academic poster editing instructions, categorized by a multi-dimensional taxonomy including operation type, difficulty, and abstraction level, constructed via reference-guided and reference-free strategies to ensure realism and diversity. We further establish a multi-dimensional VLM-as-a-judge evaluation protocol to assess instruction fulfillment, modification scope, and visual consistency & harmony. Experimental results demonstrate that APEX significantly outperforms baseline methods. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Breesiu/APEX.
Authors: Qiang Yu, Xinran Cheng, Chuanyi Liu
Abstract: As LLM agents transition from digital assistants to physical controllers in autonomous systems and robotics, they face an escalating threat from indirect prompt injection. By embedding adversarial instructions into the results of tool calls, attackers can hijack the agent's decision-making process to execute unauthorized actions. This vulnerability poses a significant risk as agents gain more direct control over physical environments. Existing defense mechanisms against Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) generally fall into two categories. The first involves training dedicated detection models; however, this approach entails high computational overhead for both training and inference, and requires frequent updates to keep pace with evolving attack vectors. Alternatively, prompt-based methods leverage the inherent capabilities of LLMs to detect or ignore malicious instructions via prompt engineering. Despite their flexibility, most current prompt-based defenses suffer from high Attack Success Rates (ASR), demonstrating limited robustness against sophisticated injection attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel method that provides LLMs with precise data via tool result parsing while effectively filtering out injected malicious code. Our approach achieves competitive Utility under Attack (UA) while maintaining the lowest Attack Success Rate (ASR) to date, significantly outperforming existing methods. Code is available at GitHub.
Authors: Siyuan Gan, Jiaheng Liu, Boyan Wang, Tianpei Yang, Runqing Miao, Yuyao Zhang, Fanyu Meng, Junlan Feng, Linjian Meng, Jing Huo, Yang Gao
Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) have attracted much attention due to their exceptional performance. However, their performance mainly stems from thinking, a long Chain of Thought (CoT), which significantly increase computational overhead. To address this overthinking problem, existing work focuses on using reinforcement learning (RL) to train hybrid reasoning models that automatically decide whether to engage in thinking or not based on the complexity of the query. Unfortunately, using RL will suffer the the reward hacking problem, e.g., the model engages in thinking but is judged as not doing so, resulting in incorrect rewards. To mitigate this problem, existing works either employ supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which incurs high computational costs, or enforce uniform token limits on non-thinking responses, which yields limited mitigation of the problem. In this paper, we propose Thinking-Based Non-Thinking (TNT). It does not employ SFT, and sets different maximum token usage for responses not using thinking across various queries by leveraging information from the solution component of the responses using thinking. Experiments on five mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that TNT reduces token usage by around 50% compared to DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B/7B and DeepScaleR-1.5B, while significantly improving accuracy. In fact, TNT achieves the optimal trade-off between accuracy and efficiency among all tested methods. Additionally, the probability of reward hacking problem in TNT's responses, which are classified as not using thinking, remains below 10% across all tested datasets.
Authors: Caijun Xu, Changyi Xiao, Zhongyuan Peng, Xinrun Wang, Yixin Cao
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled way to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models, yet its effectiveness hinges on training signals that remain informative as models evolve. In practice, RL progress often slows when task difficulty becomes poorly aligned with model capability, or when training is dominated by a narrow set of recurring problem patterns. To jointly address these issues, we propose SCALER (Synthetic sCalable Adaptive Learning Environment for Reasoning), a framework that sustains effective learning signals through adaptive environment design. SCALER introduces a scalable synthesis pipeline that converts real-world programming problems into verifiable reasoning environments with controllable difficulty and unbounded instance generation, enabling RL training beyond finite datasets while preserving strong correctness guarantees. Building on this, SCALER further employs an adaptive multi-environment RL strategy that dynamically adjusts instance difficulty and curates the active set of environments to track the model's capability frontier and maintain distributional diversity. This co-adaptation prevents reward sparsity, mitigates overfitting to narrow task patterns, and supports sustained improvement throughout training. Extensive experiments show that SCALER consistently outperforms dataset-based RL baselines across diverse reasoning benchmarks and exhibits more stable, long-horizon training dynamics.
Authors: Aleksei Kondratenko, Mussie Birhane, Houssame E. Hsain, Guido Maciocci
Abstract: AEC drawings encode geometry and semantics through symbols, layout conventions, and dense annotation, yet it remains unclear whether modern multimodal and vision-language models can reliably interpret this graphical language. We present AECV-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating multimodal and vision-language models on realistic AEC artefacts via two complementary use cases: (i) object counting on 120 high-quality floor plans (doors, windows, bedrooms, toilets), and (ii) drawing-grounded document QA spanning 192 question-answer pairs that test text extraction (OCR), instance counting, spatial reasoning, and comparative reasoning over common drawing regions. Object-counting performance is reported using per-field exact-match accuracy and MAPE results, while document-QA performance is reported using overall accuracy and per-category breakdowns with an LLM-as-a-judge scoring pipeline and targeted human adjudication for edge cases. Evaluating a broad set of state-of-the-art models under a unified protocol, we observe a stable capability gradient; OCR and text-centric document QA are strongest (up to 0.95 accuracy), spatial reasoning is moderate, and symbol-centric drawing understanding - especially reliable counting of doors and windows - remains unsolved (often 0.40-0.55 accuracy) with substantial proportional errors. These results suggest that current systems function well as document assistants but lack robust drawing literacy, motivating domain-specific representations and tool-augmented, human-in-the-loop workflows for an efficient AEC automation.
Authors: Guanzhi Deng, Bo Li, Ronghao Chen, Huacan Wang, Linqi Song, Lijie Wen
Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become a prominent paradigm for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs). Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), such as LoRA, is widely adopted to adapt pretrained MoE LLMs to downstream tasks. However, existing approaches assign identical LoRA ranks to all experts, overlooking the intrinsic functional specialization within MoE LLMs. This uniform allocation leads to resource mismatch, task-relevant experts are under-provisioned while less relevant ones receive redundant parameters. We propose a Dynamic Rank LoRA framework named DR-LoRA, which dynamically grows expert LoRA ranks during fine-tuning based on task-specific demands. DR-LoRA employs an Expert Saliency Scoring mechanism that integrates expert routing frequency and LoRA rank importance to quantify each expert's demand for additional capacity. Experts with higher saliency scores are prioritized for rank expansion, enabling the automatic formation of a heterogeneous rank distribution tailored to the target task. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that DR-LoRA consistently outperforms standard LoRA and static allocation strategies under the same parameter budget, achieving superior task performance with more efficient parameter utilization.
Authors: Jingbo Wang, Sendong Zhao, Jiatong Liu, Haochun Wang, Wanting Li, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
Abstract: While multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated superior performance over single-agent approaches in complex reasoning tasks, they often suffer from significant computational inefficiencies. Existing frameworks typically deploy large language models (LLMs) uniformly across all agent roles, failing to account for the varying cognitive demands of different reasoning stages. We address this inefficiency by proposing OI-MAS framework, a novel multi-agent framework that implements an adaptive model-selection policy across a heterogeneous pool of multi-scale LLMs. Specifically, OI-MAS introduces a state-dependent routing mechanism that dynamically selects agent roles and model scales throughout the reasoning process. In addition, we introduce a confidence-aware mechanism that selects appropriate model scales conditioned on task complexity, thus reducing unnecessary reliance on large-scale models. Experimental results show that OI-MAS consistently outperforms baseline multi-agent systems, improving accuracy by up to 12.88\% while reducing cost by up to 79.78\%.
Authors: Haihua Luo, Xuming Ran, Zhengji Li, Huiyan Xue, Tingting Jiang, Jiangrong Shen, Tommi K\"arkk\"ainen, Qi Xu, Fengyu Cong
Abstract: Continual learning aims to enable models to acquire new knowledge while retaining previously learned information. Prompt-based methods have shown remarkable performance in this domain; however, they typically rely on key-value pairing, which can introduce inter-task interference and hinder scalability. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel approach employing task-specific Prompt-Prototype (ProP), thereby eliminating the need for key-value pairs. In our method, task-specific prompts facilitate more effective feature learning for the current task, while corresponding prototypes capture the representative features of the input. During inference, predictions are generated by binding each task-specific prompt with its associated prototype. Additionally, we introduce regularization constraints during prompt initialization to penalize excessively large values, thereby enhancing stability. Experiments on several widely used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In contrast to mainstream prompt-based approaches, our framework removes the dependency on key-value pairs, offering a fresh perspective for future continual learning research.
Authors: Isabella A. Stewart, Markus J. Buehler
Abstract: Scientific inquiry requires systems-level reasoning that integrates heterogeneous experimental data, cross-domain knowledge, and mechanistic evidence into coherent explanations. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer inferential capabilities, they often depend on retrieval-augmented contexts that lack structural depth. Traditional Knowledge Graphs (KGs) attempt to bridge this gap, yet their pairwise constraints fail to capture the irreducible higher-order interactions that govern emergent physical behavior. To address this, we introduce a methodology for constructing hypergraph-based knowledge representations that faithfully encode multi-entity relationships. Applied to a corpus of ~1,100 manuscripts on biocomposite scaffolds, our framework constructs a global hypergraph of 161,172 nodes and 320,201 hyperedges, revealing a scale-free topology (power law exponent ~1.23) organized around highly connected conceptual hubs. This representation prevents the combinatorial explosion typical of pairwise expansions and explicitly preserves the co-occurrence context of scientific formulations. We further demonstrate that equipping agentic systems with hypergraph traversal tools, specifically using node-intersection constraints, enables them to bridge semantically distant concepts. By exploiting these higher-order pathways, the system successfully generates grounded mechanistic hypotheses for novel composite materials, such as linking cerium oxide to PCL scaffolds via chitosan intermediates. This work establishes a "teacherless" agentic reasoning system where hypergraph topology acts as a verifiable guardrail, accelerating scientific discovery by uncovering relationships obscured by traditional graph methods.
Authors: Issa Hanou, Eric Kemmeren, Devin Wild Thomas, Mathijs de Weerdt
Abstract: Executing a multi-agent plan can be challenging when an agent is delayed, because this typically creates conflicts with other agents. So, we need to quickly find a new safe plan. Replanning only the delayed agent often does not result in an efficient plan, and sometimes cannot even yield a feasible plan. On the other hand, replanning other agents may lead to a cascade of changes and delays. We show how to efficiently replan by tracking and using the temporal flexibility of other agents while avoiding cascading delays. This flexibility is the maximum delay an agent can take without changing the order of or further delaying more agents. Our algorithm, FlexSIPP, precomputes all possible plans for the delayed agent, also returning the changes for the other agents, for any single-agent delay within the given scenario. We demonstrate our method in a real-world case study of replanning trains in the densely-used Dutch railway network. Our experiments show that FlexSIPP provides effective solutions, relevant to real-world adjustments, and within a reasonable timeframe.
Authors: Sofiene Lassoued, Laxmikant Shrikant Bahetic, Nathalie Wei{\ss}-Borkowskib, Stefan Lierc, Andreas Schwunga
Abstract: Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) are pivotal in optimizing production processes in today's rapidly evolving manufacturing landscape. This paper advances the traditional job shop scheduling problem by incorporating additional complexities through the simultaneous integration of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and tool-sharing systems. We propose a novel approach that combines Colored-Timed Petri Nets (CTPNs) with actor-critic model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL), effectively addressing the multifaceted challenges associated with FMS. CTPNs provide a formal modeling structure and dynamic action masking, significantly reducing the action search space, while MBRL ensures adaptability to changing environments through the learned policy. Leveraging the advantages of MBRL, we incorporate a lookahead strategy for optimal positioning of AGVs, improving operational efficiency. Our approach was evaluated on small-sized public benchmarks and a newly developed large-scale benchmark inspired by the Taillard benchmark. The results show that our approach matches traditional methods on smaller instances and outperforms them on larger ones in terms of makespan while achieving a tenfold reduction in computation time. To ensure reproducibility, we propose a gym-compatible environment and an instance generator. Additionally, an ablation study evaluates the contribution of each framework component to its overall performance.
Authors: Tongyu Wen, Guanting Dong, Zhicheng Dou
Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based search agents have proven promising for addressing knowledge-intensive problems by incorporating information retrieval capabilities. Existing works largely focus on optimizing the reasoning paradigms of search agents, yet the quality of intermediate search queries during reasoning remains overlooked. As a result, the generated queries often remain inaccurate, leading to unexpected retrieval results and ultimately limiting search agents' overall effectiveness. To mitigate this issue, we introduce SmartSearch, a framework built upon two key mechanisms: (1) Process rewards, which provide fine-grained supervision for the quality of each intermediate search query through Dual-Level Credit Assessment. (2) Query refinement, which promotes the optimization of query generation by selectively refining low-quality search queries and regenerating subsequent search rounds based on these refinements. To enable the search agent to progressively internalize the ability to improve query quality under the guidance of process rewards, we design a three-stage curriculum learning framework. This framework guides the agent through a progression from imitation, to alignment, and ultimately to generalization. Experimental results show that SmartSearch consistently surpasses existing baselines, and additional quantitative analyses further confirm its significant gains in both search efficiency and query quality. The code is available at https://github.com/MYVAE/SmartSearch.
Authors: Renzhao Liang, Jingru Chen, Bo Jia, Bo Deng, Chenggang Xie, Yidong Wang, Ke Jin, Xin Wang, Linfeng Zhang, Cunxiang Wang
Abstract: Evaluating large language models (LLMs) is increasingly confounded by \emph{variant contamination}: the training corpus contains semantically equivalent yet lexically or syntactically altered versions of test items. Unlike verbatim leakage, these paraphrased or structurally transformed variants evade existing detectors based on sampling consistency or perplexity, thereby inflating benchmark scores via memorization rather than genuine reasoning. We formalize this problem and introduce \textbf{DVD} (\textbf{D}etection via \textbf{V}ariance of generation \textbf{D}istribution), a single-sample detector that models the local output distribution induced by temperature sampling. Our key insight is that contaminated items trigger alternation between a \emph{memory-adherence} state and a \emph{perturbation-drift} state, yielding abnormally high variance in the synthetic difficulty of low-probability tokens; uncontaminated items remain in drift with comparatively smooth variance. We construct the first benchmark for variant contamination across two domains Omni-MATH and SuperGPQA by generating and filtering semantically equivalent variants, and simulate contamination via fine-tuning models of different scales and architectures (Qwen2.5 and Llama3.1). Across datasets and models, \textbf{DVD} consistently outperforms perplexity-based, Min-$k$\%++, edit-distance (CDD), and embedding-similarity baselines, while exhibiting strong robustness to hyperparameters. Our results establish variance of the generation distribution as a principled and practical fingerprint for detecting variant contamination in LLM evaluation.
Authors: Mustafa F. Abdelwahed, Joan Espasa, Alice Toniolo, Ian P. Gent
Abstract: The primary objective of a diverse planning approach is to generate a set of plans that are distinct from one another. Such an approach is applied in a variety of real-world domains, including risk management, automated stream data analysis, and malware detection. More recently, a novel diverse planning paradigm, referred to as behaviour planning, has been proposed. This approach extends earlier methods by explicitly incorporating a diversity model into the planning process and supporting multiple planning categories. In this paper, we demonstrate the usefulness of behaviour planning in real-world settings by presenting three case studies. The first case study focuses on storytelling, the second addresses urban planning, and the third examines game evaluation.
Authors: Yildiz Uzun, Andrea Gauthier, Mutlu Cukurova
Abstract: Learning analytics dashboards (LADs) aim to support students' regulation of learning by translating complex data into feedback. Yet students, especially those with lower self-regulated learning (SRL) competence, often struggle to engage with and interpret analytics feedback. Conversational generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) assistants have shown potential to scaffold this process through real-time, personalised, dialogue-based support. Further advancing this potential, we explored authentic dialogues between students and GenAI assistant integrated into LAD during a 10-week semester. The analysis focused on questions students with different SRL levels posed, the relevance and quality of the assistant's answers, and how students perceived the assistant's role in their learning. Findings revealed distinct query patterns. While low SRL students sought clarification and reassurance, high SRL students queried technical aspects and requested personalised strategies. The assistant provided clear and reliable explanations but limited in personalisation, handling emotionally charged queries, and integrating multiple data points for tailored responses. Findings further extend that GenAI interventions can be especially valuable for low SRL students, offering scaffolding that supports engagement with feedback and narrows gaps with their higher SRL peers. At the same time, students' reflections underscored the importance of trust, need for greater adaptivity, context-awareness, and technical refinement in future systems.
Authors: Nils Einecke
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as coding partners, yet their role in accelerating scientific discovery remains underexplored. This paper presents a case study of using ChatGPT for rapid prototyping in ESA's ELOPE (Event-based Lunar OPtical flow Egomotion estimation) competition. The competition required participants to process event camera data to estimate lunar lander trajectories. Despite joining late, we achieved second place with a score of 0.01282, highlighting the potential of human-AI collaboration in competitive scientific settings. ChatGPT contributed not only executable code but also algorithmic reasoning, data handling routines, and methodological suggestions, such as using fixed number of events instead of fixed time spans for windowing. At the same time, we observed limitations: the model often introduced unnecessary structural changes, gets confused by intermediate discussions about alternative ideas, occasionally produced critical errors and forgets important aspects in longer scientific discussions. By analyzing these strengths and shortcomings, we show how conversational AI can both accelerate development and support conceptual insight in scientific research. We argue that structured integration of LLMs into the scientific workflow can enhance rapid prototyping by proposing best practices for AI-assisted scientific work.
Authors: Chunyu Wei, Huaiyu Qin, Siyuan He, Yunhai Wang, Yueguo Chen
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly enhanced Large Language Models' ability to access external knowledge, yet current graph-based RAG approaches face two critical limitations in managing hierarchical information: they impose rigid layer-specific compression quotas that damage local graph structures, and they prioritize topological structure while neglecting semantic content. We introduce T-Retriever, a novel framework that reformulates attributed graph retrieval as tree-based retrieval using a semantic and structure-guided encoding tree. Our approach features two key innovations: (1) Adaptive Compression Encoding, which replaces artificial compression quotas with a global optimization strategy that preserves the graph's natural hierarchical organization, and (2) Semantic-Structural Entropy ($S^2$-Entropy), which jointly optimizes for both structural cohesion and semantic consistency when creating hierarchical partitions. Experiments across diverse graph reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that T-Retriever significantly outperforms state-of-the-art RAG methods, providing more coherent and contextually relevant responses to complex queries.
Authors: Minda Hu, Zexuan Qiu, Zenan Xu, Kun Li, Bo Zhou, Irwin King
Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated that extensive Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generation is critical for enabling intricate cognitive behaviors, such as self-verification and backtracking, to solve complex tasks. However, this capability often leads to ``overthinking'', where models generate redundant reasoning paths that inflate computational costs without improving accuracy. While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on reasoning traces is a standard paradigm for the 'cold start' phase, applying existing compression techniques to these traces often compromises logical coherence or incurs prohibitive sampling costs. In this paper, we introduce ConMax (Confidence-Maximizing Compression), a novel reinforcement learning framework designed to automatically compress reasoning traces while preserving essential reasoning patterns. ConMax formulates compression as a reward-driven optimization problem, training a policy to prune redundancy by maximizing a weighted combination of answer confidence for predictive fidelity and thinking confidence for reasoning validity through a frozen auxiliary LRM. Extensive experiments across five reasoning datasets demonstrate that ConMax achieves a superior efficiency-performance trade-off. Specifically, it reduces inference length by 43% over strong baselines at the cost of a mere 0.7% dip in accuracy, proving its effectiveness in generating high-quality, efficient training data for LRMs.
Authors: Henan Sun, Kaichi Yu, Yuyao Wang, Bowen Liu, Xunkai Li, Rong-Hua Li, Nuo Chen, Jia Li
Abstract: Reasoning ability has become a central focus in the advancement of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). Although notable progress has been achieved on several reasoning benchmarks such as MATH500 and LiveCodeBench, existing benchmarks for algorithmic reasoning remain limited, failing to answer a critical question: Do LRMs truly master algorithmic reasoning? To answer this question, we propose AlgBench, an expert-curated benchmark that evaluates LRMs under an algorithm-centric paradigm. AlgBench consists of over 3,000 original problems spanning 27 algorithms, constructed by ACM algorithmic experts and organized under a comprehensive taxonomy, including Euclidean-structured, non-Euclidean-structured, non-optimized, local-optimized, global-optimized, and heuristic-optimized categories. Empirical evaluations on leading LRMs (e.g., Gemini-3-Pro, DeepSeek-v3.2-Speciale and GPT-o3) reveal substantial performance heterogeneity: while models perform well on non-optimized tasks (up to 92%), accuracy drops sharply to around 49% on globally optimized algorithms such as dynamic programming. Further analysis uncovers \textbf{strategic over-shifts}, wherein models prematurely abandon correct algorithmic designs due to necessary low-entropy tokens. These findings expose fundamental limitations of problem-centric reinforcement learning and highlight the necessity of an algorithm-centric training paradigm for robust algorithmic reasoning.
Authors: Avik Dutta, Harshit Nigam, Hosein Hasanbeig, Arjun Radhakrishna, Sumit Gulwani
Abstract: We investigate how large language models (LLMs) fail when tabular data in an otherwise canonical representation is subjected to semantic and structural distortions. Our findings reveal that LLMs lack an inherent ability to detect and correct subtle distortions in table representations. Only when provided with an explicit prior, via a system prompt, do models partially adjust their reasoning strategies and correct some distortions, though not consistently or completely. To study this phenomenon, we introduce a small, expert-curated dataset that explicitly evaluates LLMs on table question answering (TQA) tasks requiring an additional error-correction step prior to analysis. Our results reveal systematic differences in how LLMs ingest and interpret tabular information under distortion, with even SoTA models such as GPT-5.2 model exhibiting a drop of minimum 22% accuracy under distortion. These findings raise important questions for future research, particularly regarding when and how models should autonomously decide to realign tabular inputs, analogous to human behavior, without relying on explicit prompts or tabular data pre-processing.
Authors: Yi Jiang, Sendong Zhao, Jianbo Li, Bairui Hu, Yanrui Du, Haochun Wang, Bing Qin
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves generation quality by incorporating evidence retrieved from large external corpora. However, most existing methods rely on statically selecting top-k passages based on individual relevance, which fails to exploit combinatorial gains among passages and often introduces substantial redundancy. To address this limitation, we propose OptiSet, a set-centric framework that unifies set selection and set-level ranking for RAG. OptiSet adopts an "Expand-then-Refine" paradigm: it first expands a query into multiple perspectives to enable a diverse candidate pool and then refines the candidate pool via re-selection to form a compact evidence set. We then devise a self-synthesis strategy without strong LLM supervision to derive preference labels from the set conditional utility changes of the generator, thereby identifying complementary and redundant evidence. Finally, we introduce a set-list wise training strategy that jointly optimizes set selection and set-level ranking, enabling the model to favor compact, high-gain evidence sets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OptiSet improves performance on complex combinatorial problems and makes generation more efficient. The source code is publicly available.
Authors: Yunhua Zhou, Junhao Huang, Shuhao Xin, Yechen Zhang, Runyu Peng, Qiping Guo, Xipeng Qiu
Abstract: The concept of Critical Batch Size, as pioneered by OpenAI, has long served as a foundational principle for large-scale pre-training. However, with the paradigm shift towards the Warmup-Stable-Decay (WSD) learning rate scheduler, we observe that the original theoretical framework and its underlying mechanisms fail to align with new pre-training dynamics. To bridge this gap between theory and practice, this paper derives a revised E(S) relationship tailored for WSD scheduler, characterizing the trade-off between training data consumption E and steps S during pre-training. Our theoretical analysis reveals two fundamental properties of WSD-based pre-training: 1) B_min, the minimum batch size threshold required to achieve a target loss, and 2) B_opt, the optimal batch size that maximizes data efficiency by minimizing total tokens. Building upon these properties, we propose a dynamic Batch Size Scheduler. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our revised formula precisely captures the dynamics of large-scale pre-training, and the resulting scheduling strategy significantly enhances both training efficiency and final model quality.
Authors: Yunhua Zhou, Shuhao Xing, Junhao Huang, Xipeng Qiu, Qipeng Guo
Abstract: Optimal configuration of the learning rate (LR) is a fundamental yet formidable challenge in large-scale pre-training. Given the stringent trade-off between training costs and model performance, the pivotal question is whether the optimal LR can be accurately extrapolated from low-cost experiments. In this paper, we formalize this investigation into two distinct research paradigms: Fitting and Transfer. Within the Fitting Paradigm, we innovatively introduce a Scaling Law for search factor, effectively reducing the search complexity from O(n^3) to O(n*C_D*C_{\eta}) via predictive modeling. Within the Transfer Paradigm, we extend the principles of $\mu$Transfer to the Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, broadening its applicability to encompass model depth, weight decay, and token horizons. By pushing the boundaries of existing hyperparameter research in terms of scale, we conduct a comprehensive comparison between these two paradigms. Our empirical results challenge the scalability of the widely adopted $\mu$ Transfer in large-scale pre-training scenarios. Furthermore, we provide a rigorous analysis through the dual lenses of training stability and feature learning to elucidate the underlying reasons why module-wise parameter tuning underperforms in large-scale settings. This work offers systematic practical guidelines and a fresh theoretical perspective for optimizing industrial-level pre-training.
Authors: Thomas H. Costello, Kellin Pelrine, Matthew Kowal, Antonio A. Arechar, Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Godbout, Adam Gleave, David Rand, Gordon Pennycook
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be persuasive across a variety of context. But it remains unclear whether this persuasive power advantages truth over falsehood, or if LLMs can promote misbeliefs just as easily as refuting them. Here, we investigate this question across three pre-registered experiments in which participants (N = 2,724 Americans) discussed a conspiracy theory they were uncertain about with GPT-4o, and the model was instructed to either argue against ("debunking") or for ("bunking") that conspiracy. When using a "jailbroken" GPT-4o variant with guardrails removed, the AI was as effective at increasing conspiracy belief as decreasing it. Concerningly, the bunking AI was rated more positively, and increased trust in AI, more than the debunking AI. Surprisingly, we found that using standard GPT-4o produced very similar effects, such that the guardrails imposed by OpenAI did little to revent the LLM from promoting conspiracy beliefs. Encouragingly, however, a corrective conversation reversed these newly induced conspiracy beliefs, and simply prompting GPT-4o to only use accurate information dramatically reduced its ability to increase conspiracy beliefs. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs possess potent abilities to promote both truth and falsehood, but that potential solutions may exist to help mitigate this risk.
Authors: Jennifer D'Souza, Soren Auer, Eleni Poupaki, Alex Watkins, Anjana Devi, Riikka L. Puurunen, Bora Karasulu, Adrie Mackus, Erwin Kessels
Abstract: Scientific reviews are central to knowledge integration in materials science, yet their key insights remain locked in narrative text and static PDF tables, limiting reuse by humans and machines alike. This article presents a case study in atomic layer deposition and etching (ALD/E) where we publish review tables as FAIR, machine-actionable comparisons in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), turning them into structured, queryable knowledge. Building on this, we contrast symbolic querying over ORKG with large language model-based querying, and argue that a curated symbolic layer should remain the backbone of reliable neurosymbolic AI in materials science, with LLMs serving as complementary, symbolically grounded interfaces rather than standalone sources of truth.
Authors: Ziqi Zhao, Zhaochun Ren, Jiahong Zou, Liu Yang, Zhiwei Xu, Xuri Ge, Zhumin Chen, Xinyu Ma, Daiting Shi, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xin Xin
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has proven effective in enhancing the reasoning of large language models (LLMs). Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-based extensions improve upon vanilla RLVR (e.g., GRPO) by providing tree-based reasoning rollouts that enable fine-grained and segment-level credit assignment. However, existing methods still suffer from limited exploration diversity and inefficient reasoning. To address the above challenges, we propose reinforced efficient reasoning via semantically diverse explorations, i.e., ROSE, for LLMs. To encourage more diverse reasoning exploration, our method incorporates a semantic-entropy-based branching strategy and an $\varepsilon$-exploration mechanism. The former operates on already sampled reasoning rollouts to capture semantic uncertainty and select branching points with high semantic divergence to generate new successive reasoning paths, whereas the latter stochastically initiates reasoning rollouts from the root, preventing the search process from becoming overly local. To improve efficiency, we design a length-aware segment-level advantage estimator that rewards concise and correct reasoning while penalizing unnecessarily long reasoning chains. Extensive experiments on various mathematical reasoning benchmarks with Qwen and Llama models validate the effectiveness and efficiency of ROSE. Codes are available at https://github.com/ZiqiZhao1/ROSE-rl.
Authors: Arghyadeep Das, Sai Sreenivas Chintha, Rishiraj Girmal, Kinjal Pandey, Sharvi Endait
Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve performance, reliability, and interpretability by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, but this transparency introduces a serious privacy risk: intermediate reasoning often leaks personally identifiable information (PII) even when final answers are sanitized. We study how to induce privacy-first reasoning, where models reason without exposing sensitive information, using deployable interventions rather than post-hoc redaction. We introduce PII-CoT-Bench, a supervised dataset with privacy-aware CoT annotations, and a category-balanced evaluation benchmark covering realistic and adversarial leakage scenarios. Our results reveal a capability-dependent trend: state-of-the-art models benefit most from prompt-based controls, whereas weaker models require fine-tuning to achieve meaningful leakage reduction. Across models and categories, both approaches substantially reduce PII exposure with minimal degradation in utility, demonstrating that private reasoning can be achieved without sacrificing performance. Overall, we show that private CoT reasoning can be achieved with minimal utility loss, providing practical guidance for building privacy-preserving reasoning systems.
Authors: Konstantin Kubrak, Ahmed El-Moselhy, Ammar Alsulami, Remaz Altuwaim, Hassan Ismail Fawaz, Faisal Alsaby
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are now integral to numerous industries, increasingly serving as the core reasoning engine for autonomous agents that perform complex tasks through tool-use. While the development of Arabic-native LLMs is accelerating, the benchmarks for evaluating their capabilities lag behind, with most existing frameworks focusing on English. A critical and overlooked area is tool-calling, where the performance of models prompted in non-English languages like Arabic is poorly understood, especially since these models are often pretrained on predominantly English data. This paper addresses this critical gap by introducing the first dedicated benchmark for evaluating the tool-calling and agentic capabilities of LLMs in the Arabic language. Our work provides a standardized framework to measure the functional accuracy and robustness of models in Arabic agentic workflows. Our findings reveal a huge performance gap: when users interact in Arabic, tool-calling accuracy drops by an average of 5-10\%, regardless of whether the tool descriptions themselves are in Arabic or English. By shedding light on these critical challenges, this benchmark aims to foster the development of more reliable and linguistically equitable AI agents for Arabic-speaking users.
Authors: Nuoya Xiong, Yuhang Zhou, Hanqing Zeng, Zhaorun Chen, Furong Huang, Shuchao Bi, Lizhu Zhang, Zhuokai Zhao
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strengths across diverse domains. However, achieving strong performance across these domains with a single general-purpose model typically requires scaling to sizes that are prohibitively expensive to train and deploy. On the other hand, while smaller domain-specialized models are much more efficient, they struggle to generalize beyond their training distributions. To address this dilemma, we propose FusionRoute, a robust and effective token-level multi-LLM collaboration framework in which a lightweight router simultaneously (i) selects the most suitable expert at each decoding step and (ii) contributes a complementary logit that refines or corrects the selected expert's next-token distribution via logit addition. Unlike existing token-level collaboration methods that rely solely on fixed expert outputs, we provide a theoretical analysis showing that pure expert-only routing is fundamentally limited: unless strong global coverage assumptions hold, it cannot in general realize the optimal decoding policy. By augmenting expert selection with a trainable complementary generator, FusionRoute expands the effective policy class and enables recovery of optimal value functions under mild conditions. Empirically, across both Llama-3 and Gemma-2 families and diverse benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, code generation, and instruction following, FusionRoute outperforms both sequence- and token-level collaboration, model merging, and direct fine-tuning, while remaining competitive with domain experts on their respective tasks.
Authors: Muzhao Tian, Zisu Huang, Xiaohua Wang, Jingwen Xu, Zhengkang Guo, Qi Qian, Yuanzhe Shen, Kaitao Song, Jiakang Yuan, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng
Abstract: As LLM-based agents are increasingly used in long-term interactions, cumulative memory is critical for enabling personalization and maintaining stylistic consistency. However, most existing systems adopt an ``all-or-nothing'' approach to memory usage: incorporating all relevant past information can lead to \textit{Memory Anchoring}, where the agent is trapped by past interactions, while excluding memory entirely results in under-utilization and the loss of important interaction history. We show that an agent's reliance on memory can be modeled as an explicit and user-controllable dimension. We first introduce a behavioral metric of memory dependence to quantify the influence of past interactions on current outputs. We then propose \textbf{Stee}rable \textbf{M}emory Agent, \texttt{SteeM}, a framework that allows users to dynamically regulate memory reliance, ranging from a fresh-start mode that promotes innovation to a high-fidelity mode that closely follows interaction history. Experiments across different scenarios demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms conventional prompting and rigid memory masking strategies, yielding a more nuanced and effective control for personalized human-agent collaboration.
Authors: Wenhao Zeng, Xuteng Zhang, Yuling Shi, Chao Hu, Yuting Chen, Beijun Shen, Xiaodong Gu
Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve remarkable performance by explicitly generating multi-step chains of thought, but this capability incurs substantial inference latency and computational cost. Collaborative inference offers a promising solution by selectively allocating work between lightweight and large models, yet a fundamental challenge remains: determining when a reasoning step requires the capacity of a large model or the efficiency of a small model. Existing routing strategies either rely on local token probabilities or post-hoc verification, introducing significant inference overhead. In this work, we propose a novel perspective on step-wise collaboration: the difficulty of a reasoning step can be inferred from its very first token. Inspired by the "Aha Moment" phenomenon in LRMs, we show that the entropy of the initial token serves as a strong predictor of step difficulty. Building on this insight, we introduce GlimpRouter, a training-free step-wise collaboration framework. GlimpRouter employs a lightweight model to generate only the first token of each reasoning step and routes the step to a larger model only when the initial token entropy exceeds a threshold. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces inference latency while preserving accuracy. For instance, GlimpRouter attains a substantial 10.7% improvement in accuracy while reducing inference latency by 25.9% compared to a standalone large model on AIME25. These results suggest a simple yet effective mechanism for reasoning: allocating computation based on a glimpse of thought rather than full-step evaluation.
Authors: Wajid Nasser
Abstract: LLM-as-judge systems promise scalable, consistent evaluation. We find the opposite: judges are consistent, but not with each other; they are consistent with themselves. Across 3,240 evaluations (9 judges x 120 unique video x pack items x 3 independent runs), inter-judge agreement is near-zero (Krippendorff's {\alpha} = 0.042). On two dimensions, judges disagree more than random noise would predict ({\alpha} < 0). Yet this disagreement isn't chaos; it's structured. A classifier identifies which judge produced an evaluation with 77.1% accuracy from rubric scores alone, rising to 89.9% with disposition features. Within model families, the signal is even stronger: GPT-4.1 and GPT-5.2 are distinguishable with 99.6% accuracy. We call this the reliability paradox: judges cannot agree on what constitutes quality, yet their disagreement patterns are so stable they function as fingerprints. Each judge implements a distinct, stable theory of quality: an "evaluative disposition" that shapes how it interprets any rubric. We characterize these dispositions along multiple axes: harshness/leniency, dimension emphasis, within-judge stability (ICC), and evidence behavior (receipt validity, semantic linkage via NLI, and shotgun index). The implication is stark: LLM judges are not interchangeable instruments measuring a shared construct. They are distinct measurement devices, each encoding its own implicit theory of quality. Averaging their scores produces a synthetic verdict that corresponds to no judge's actual values.
Authors: Shuliang Liu, Xingyu Li, Hongyi Liu, Yibo Yan, Bingchen Duan, Qi Zheng, Dong Fang, Lingfeng Su, Xuming Hu
Abstract: Reasoning Large Language Models (RLLMs) excelling in complex tasks present unique challenges for digital watermarking, as existing methods often disrupt logical coherence or incur high computational costs. Token-based watermarking techniques can corrupt the reasoning flow by applying pseudo-random biases, while semantic-aware approaches improve quality but introduce significant latency or require auxiliary models. This paper introduces ReasonMark, a novel watermarking framework specifically designed for reasoning-intensive LLMs. Our approach decouples generation into an undisturbed Thinking Phase and a watermarked Answering Phase. We propose a Criticality Score to identify semantically pivotal tokens from the reasoning trace, which are distilled into a Principal Semantic Vector (PSV). The PSV then guides a semantically-adaptive mechanism that modulates watermark strength based on token-PSV alignment, ensuring robustness without compromising logical integrity. Extensive experiments show ReasonMark surpasses state-of-the-art methods by reducing text Perplexity by 0.35, increasing translation BLEU score by 0.164, and raising mathematical accuracy by 0.67 points. These advancements are achieved alongside a 0.34% higher watermark detection AUC and stronger robustness to attacks, all with a negligible increase in latency. This work enables the traceable and trustworthy deployment of reasoning LLMs in real-world applications.
Authors: Yaxuan Wang, Zhongteng Cai, Yujia Bao, Xueru Zhang, Yang Liu
Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to growing interest in using synthetic data to train future models. However, this creates a self-consuming retraining loop, where models are trained on their own outputs and may cause performance drops and induce emerging biases. In real-world applications, previously deployed LLMs may influence the data they generate, leading to a dynamic system driven by user feedback. For example, if a model continues to underserve users from a group, less query data will be collected from this particular demographic of users. In this study, we introduce the concept of \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{C}onsuming \textbf{P}erformative \textbf{L}oop (\textbf{SCPL}) and investigate the role of synthetic data in shaping bias during these dynamic iterative training processes under controlled performative feedback. This controlled setting is motivated by the inaccessibility of real-world user preference data from dynamic production systems, and enables us to isolate and analyze feedback-driven bias evolution in a principled manner. We focus on two types of loops, including the typical retraining setting and the incremental fine-tuning setting, which is largely underexplored. Through experiments on three real-world tasks, we find that the performative loop increases preference bias and decreases disparate bias. We design a reward-based rejection sampling strategy to mitigate the bias, moving towards more trustworthy self-improving systems.
Authors: Yanchang Liang, Xiaowei Zhao
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized text-based code automation, but their potential in graph-oriented engineering workflows remains under-explored. We introduce SimuAgent, an LLM-powered modeling and simulation agent tailored for Simulink. SimuAgent replaces verbose XML with a concise, dictionary-style Python representation, dramatically cutting token counts, improving interpretability, and enabling fast, in-process simulation. A lightweight plan-execute architecture, trained in two stages, equips the agent with both low-level tool skills and high-level design reasoning. To tackle sparse rewards in long-horizon tasks, we propose Reflection-GRPO (ReGRPO), which augments Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with self-reflection traces that supply rich intermediate feedback, accelerating convergence and boosting robustness. Experiments on SimuBench, our newly released benchmark comprising 5300 multi-domain modeling tasks, show that a Qwen2.5-7B model fine-tuned with SimuAgent converges faster and achieves higher modeling accuracy than standard RL baselines, and even surpasses GPT-4o when evaluated with few-shot prompting on the same benchmark. Ablations confirm that the two-stage curriculum and abstract-reconstruct data augmentation further enhance generalization. SimuAgent trains and runs entirely on-premise with modest hardware, delivering a privacy-preserving, cost-effective solution for industrial model-driven engineering. SimuAgent bridges the gap between LLMs and graphical modeling environments, offering a practical solution for AI-assisted engineering design in industrial settings.
Authors: Navin Chhibber, Suneel Khemka, Navneet Kumar Tyagi, Rohit Tewari, Bireswar Banerjee, Piyush Ranjan
Abstract: Stock market price prediction is a significant interdisciplinary research domain that depends at the intersection of finance, statistics, and economics. Forecasting Accurately predicting stock prices has always been a focal point for various researchers. However, existing statistical approaches for time-series prediction often fail to effectively forecast the probability range of future stock prices. Hence, to solve this problem, the Neural Prophet with a Deep Neural Network (NP-DNN) is proposed to predict stock market prices. The preprocessing technique used in this research is Z-score normalization, which normalizes stock price data by removing scale differences, making patterns easier to detect. Missing value imputation fills gaps in historical data, enhancing the models use of complete information for more accurate predictions. The Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) learns complex nonlinear relationships among stock market prices and extracts hidden patterns from the input data, thereby creating meaningful feature representations for better prediction accuracy. The proposed NP-DNN model achieved an accuracy of 99.21% compared with other approaches using the Fused Large Language Model. Keywords: deep neural network, forecasting stock prices, multi-layer perceptron, neural prophet, stock market price prediction.
Authors: Kait Healy, Bharathi Srinivasan, Visakh Madathil, Jing Wu
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in tool calling and tool usage, but suffer from hallucinations where they choose incorrect tools, provide malformed parameters and exhibit 'tool bypass' behavior by performing simulations and generating outputs instead of invoking specialized tools or external systems. This undermines the reliability of LLM based agents in production systems as it leads to inconsistent results, and bypasses security and audit controls. Such hallucinations in agent tool selection require early detection and error handling. Unlike existing hallucination detection methods that require multiple forward passes or external validation, we present a computationally efficient framework that detects tool-calling hallucinations in real-time by leveraging LLMs' internal representations during the same forward pass used for generation. We evaluate this approach on reasoning tasks across multiple domains, demonstrating strong detection performance (up to 86.4\% accuracy) while maintaining real-time inference capabilities with minimal computational overhead, particularly excelling at detecting parameter-level hallucinations and inappropriate tool selections, critical for reliable agent deployment.
Authors: Tamil Sudaravan Mohan Doss, Michael Xu, Sudha Rao, Andrew D. Wilson, Balasaravanan Thoravi Kumaravel
Abstract: We present \textsc{MineNPC-Task}, a user-authored benchmark and evaluation harness for testing memory-aware, mixed-initiative LLM agents in open-world \emph{Minecraft}. Rather than relying on synthetic prompts, tasks are elicited from formative and summative co-play with expert players, normalized into parametric templates with explicit preconditions and dependency structure, and paired with machine-checkable validators under a bounded-knowledge policy that forbids out-of-world shortcuts. The harness captures plan/act/memory events-including plan previews, targeted clarifications, memory reads and writes, precondition checks, and repair attempts and reports outcomes relative to the total number of attempted subtasks, derived from in-world evidence. As an initial snapshot, we instantiate the framework with GPT-4o and evaluate \textbf{216} subtasks across \textbf{8} experienced players. We observe recurring breakdown patterns in code execution, inventory/tool handling, referencing, and navigation, alongside recoveries supported by mixed-initiative clarifications and lightweight memory. Participants rated interaction quality and interface usability positively, while highlighting the need for stronger memory persistence across tasks. We release the complete task suite, validators, logs, and harness to support transparent, reproducible evaluation of future memory-aware embodied agents.
Authors: Quentin Garrido, Tushar Nagarajan, Basile Terver, Nicolas Ballas, Yann LeCun, Michael Rabbat
Abstract: Agents capable of reasoning and planning in the real world require the ability of predicting the consequences of their actions. While world models possess this capability, they most often require action labels, that can be complex to obtain at scale. This motivates the learning of latent action models, that can learn an action space from videos alone. Our work addresses the problem of learning latent actions world models on in-the-wild videos, expanding the scope of existing works that focus on simple robotics simulations, video games, or manipulation data. While this allows us to capture richer actions, it also introduces challenges stemming from the video diversity, such as environmental noise, or the lack of a common embodiment across videos. To address some of the challenges, we discuss properties that actions should follow as well as relevant architectural choices and evaluations. We find that continuous, but constrained, latent actions are able to capture the complexity of actions from in-the-wild videos, something that the common vector quantization does not. We for example find that changes in the environment coming from agents, such as humans entering the room, can be transferred across videos. This highlights the capability of learning actions that are specific to in-the-wild videos. In the absence of a common embodiment across videos, we are mainly able to learn latent actions that become localized in space, relative to the camera. Nonetheless, we are able to train a controller that maps known actions to latent ones, allowing us to use latent actions as a universal interface and solve planning tasks with our world model with similar performance as action-conditioned baselines. Our analyses and experiments provide a step towards scaling latent action models to the real world.
Authors: Muhammad Abdullahi Said, Muhammad Sammani Sani
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) integrate into critical global infrastructure, the assumption that safety alignment transfers zero-shot from English to other languages remains a dangerous blind spot. This study presents a systematic audit of three state of the art models (GPT-5.1, Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude 4.5 Opus) using HausaSafety, a novel adversarial dataset grounded in West African threat scenarios (e.g., Yahoo-Yahoo fraud, Dane gun manufacturing). Employing a 2 x 4 factorial design across 1,440 evaluations, we tested the non-linear interaction between language (English vs. Hausa) and temporal framing. Our results challenge the narrative of the multilingual safety gap. Instead of a simple degradation in low-resource settings, we identified a complex interference mechanism in which safety is determined by the intersection of variables. Although the models exhibited a reverse linguistic vulnerability with Claude 4.5 Opus proving significantly safer in Hausa (45.0%) than in English (36.7%) due to uncertainty-driven refusal, they suffered catastrophic failures in temporal reasoning. We report a profound Temporal Asymmetry, where past-tense framing bypassed defenses (15.6% safe) while future-tense scenarios triggered hyper-conservative refusals (57.2% safe). The magnitude of this volatility is illustrated by a 9.2x disparity between the safest and most vulnerable configurations, proving that safety is not a fixed property but a context-dependent state. We conclude that current models rely on superficial heuristics rather than robust semantic understanding, creating Safety Pockets that leave Global South users exposed to localized harms. We propose Invariant Alignment as a necessary paradigm shift to ensure safety stability across linguistic and temporal shifts.
Authors: Diego Fajardo V., Oleksii Proniakin, Victoria-Elisabeth Gruber, Razvan Marinescu
Abstract: We present MedPI, a high-dimensional benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in patient-clinician conversations. Unlike single-turn question-answer (QA) benchmarks, MedPI evaluates the medical dialogue across 105 dimensions comprising the medical process, treatment safety, treatment outcomes and doctor-patient communication across a granular, accreditation-aligned rubric. MedPI comprises five layers: (1) Patient Packets (synthetic EHR-like ground truth); (2) an AI Patient instantiated through an LLM with memory and affect; (3) a Task Matrix spanning encounter reasons (e.g. anxiety, pregnancy, wellness checkup) x encounter objectives (e.g. diagnosis, lifestyle advice, medication advice); (4) an Evaluation Framework with 105 dimensions on a 1-4 scale mapped to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) competencies; and (5) AI Judges that are calibrated, committee-based LLMs providing scores, flags, and evidence-linked rationales. We evaluate 9 flagship models -- Claude Opus 4.1, Claude Sonnet 4, MedGemma, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Llama 3.3 70b Instruct, GPT-5, GPT OSS 120b, o3, Grok-4 -- across 366 AI Patients and 7,097 conversations using a standardized "vanilla clinician" prompt. For all LLMs, we observe low performance across a variety of dimensions, in particular on differential diagnosis. Our work can help guide future use of LLMs for diagnosis and treatment recommendations.
Authors: Jiale Zhao, Xing Mou, Jinlin Wu, Hongyuan Yu, Mingrui Sun, Yang Shi, Xuanwu Yin, Zhen Chen, Zhen Lei, Yaohua Wang
Abstract: Medical Multimodal Large Language Models (Medical MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in specialized medical tasks; however, research into their safety has lagged, posing potential risks for real-world deployment. In this paper, we first establish a multidimensional evaluation framework to systematically benchmark the safety of current SOTA Medical MLLMs. Our empirical analysis reveals pervasive vulnerabilities across both general and medical-specific safety dimensions in existing models, particularly highlighting their fragility against cross-modality jailbreak attacks. Furthermore, we find that the medical fine-tuning process frequently induces catastrophic forgetting of the model's original safety alignment. To address this challenge, we propose a novel "Parameter-Space Intervention" approach for efficient safety re-alignment. This method extracts intrinsic safety knowledge representations from original base models and concurrently injects them into the target model during the construction of medical capabilities. Additionally, we design a fine-grained parameter search algorithm to achieve an optimal trade-off between safety and medical performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly bolsters the safety guardrails of Medical MLLMs without relying on additional domain-specific safety data, while minimizing degradation to core medical performance.
Authors: Virginia Negri, V\'ictor Mart\'inez G\'omez, Sergio A. Balanya, Subburam Rajaram
Abstract: Product information extraction is crucial for e-commerce services, but obtaining high-quality labeled datasets remains challenging. We present a systematic approach for generating synthetic e-commerce product data using Large Language Models (LLMs), introducing a controlled modification framework with three strategies: attribute-preserving modification, controlled negative example generation, and systematic attribute removal. Using a state-of-the-art LLM with attribute-aware prompts, we enforce store constraints while maintaining product coherence. Human evaluation of 2000 synthetic products demonstrates high effectiveness, with 99.6% rated as natural, 96.5% containing valid attribute values, and over 90% showing consistent attribute usage. On the public MAVE dataset, our synthetic data achieves 60.5% accuracy, performing on par with real training data (60.8%) and significantly improving upon the 13.4% zero-shot baseline. Hybrid configurations combining synthetic and real data further improve performance, reaching 68.8% accuracy. Our framework provides a practical solution for augmenting e-commerce datasets, particularly valuable for low-resource scenarios.
Authors: Zihan Gao, Mohsin Y. K. Yousufi, Jacob Thebault-Spieker
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) question-answering systems often fail on community-specific queries, creating "knowledge blind spots" that marginalize local voices and reinforce epistemic injustice. We present Collective Narrative Grounding, a participatory protocol that transforms community stories into structured narrative units and integrates them into AI systems under community governance. Learning from three participatory mapping workshops with N=24 community members, we designed elicitation methods and a schema that retain narrative richness while enabling entity, time, and place extraction, validation, and provenance control. To scope the problem, we audit a county-level benchmark of 14,782 local information QA pairs, where factual gaps, cultural misunderstandings, geographic confusions, and temporal misalignments account for 76.7% of errors. On a participatory QA set derived from our workshops, a state-of-the-art LLM answered fewer than 21% of questions correctly without added context, underscoring the need for local grounding. The missing facts often appear in the collected narratives, suggesting a direct path to closing the dominant error modes for narrative items. Beyond the protocol and pilot, we articulate key design tensions, such as representation and power, governance and control, and privacy and consent, providing concrete requirements for retrieval-first, provenance-visible, locally governed QA systems. Together, our taxonomy, protocol, and participatory evaluation offer a rigorous foundation for building community-grounded AI that better answers local questions.
Authors: Anas Ezzakri, Nicola Piovesan, Mohamed Sana, Antonio De Domenico, Fadhel Ayed, Haozhe Zhang
Abstract: Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly explored in the telecom industry to support engineering tasks, accelerate troubleshooting, and assist in interpreting complex technical documents. However, recent studies show that LLMs perform poorly on telecom standards, particularly 3GPP specifications. We argue that a key reason is that these standards densely include tables to present essential information, yet the LLM knowledge and interpretation ability of such tables remains largely unexamined. To address this gap, we introduce TeleTables, a benchmark designed to evaluate both the implicit knowledge LLMs have about tables in technical specifications and their explicit ability to interpret them. TeleTables is built through a novel multi-stage data generation pipeline that extracts tables from 3GPP standards and uses multimodal and reasoning-oriented LLMs to generate and validate questions. The resulting dataset, which is publicly available, comprises 500 human-verified question-answer pairs, each associated with the corresponding table in multiple formats. Our evaluation shows that, smaller models (under 10B parameters) struggle both to recall 3GPP knowledge and to interpret tables, indicating the limited exposure to telecom standards in their pretraining and the insufficient inductive biases for navigating complex technical material. Larger models, on the other hand, show stronger reasoning on table interpretation. Overall, TeleTables highlights the need for domain-specialized fine-tuning to reliably interpret and reason over telecom standards.
Authors: Yuheng Wang, Runde Yang, Lin Wu, Jie Zhang, Jingru Fan, Ruoyu Fu, Tianle Zhou, Huatao Li, Siheng Chen, Weinan E, Chen Qian
Abstract: The scalability of high-quality online education is hindered by the high costs and slow cycles of labor-intensive manual content creation. Despite advancements in video generation, current approaches often fail to ensure pedagogical structure and precise control due to their pixel-level, black-box nature. In this paper, we propose Generative Teaching, a novel paradigm that transitions educators from manual creators to high-level directors, allowing them to focus on pedagogical intent while autonomous agents handle the execution. To realize this vision, we introduce TeachMaster, a multi-agent framework that leverages code as an intermediate semantic medium. Unlike traditional video generation methods, TeachMaster orchestrates a collaborative team of agents--spanning planning, design, and rendering--to automate the production of interpretable, editable, and curriculum-ready educational videos. Experiments validate that TeachMaster significantly boosts production efficiency without compromising structural coherence or visual fidelity, providing a robust solution for scalable education.
Authors: Xinhao Sun, Maoliang Li, Zihao Zheng, Jiayu Chen, Hezhao Xu, Yun Liang, Xiang Chen
Abstract: Unlike autoregressive language models, diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising all token positions in parallel. At each timestep, the remasking strategy of a DLM selects low-priority tokens to defer their decoding, thereby improving both efficiency and output quality. However, mainstream remasking strategies rely on a single global confidence threshold, overlooking the temporal and spatial dynamics of individual tokens. Motivated by the redundant iterations and constrained parallelism introduced by fixed-threshold remasking, we propose a novel remasking approach that dynamically detects Temporal Variance and Spatial Deviance of each token, which reflect its convergence status and inter-token correlations. Using these signals, our method adaptively adjusts the confidence threshold for every token at every step. Empirical results show that our approach significantly improves the operational efficiency of DLMs across mainstream datasets, achieving speedups of up to 8.9 times while faithfully preserving generation quality.
Authors: Wei Xia, Haowen Tang, Luozheng Li
Abstract: LLMs internally organize political ideology along low-dimensional structures that are partially, but not fully aligned with human ideological space. This misalignment is systematic, model specific, and measurable. We introduce a lightweight linear probe that both quantifies the misalignment and minimally corrects the output layer. This paper introduces a simple and efficient method for aligning models with specific user opinions. Instead of retraining the model, we calculated a bias score from its internal features and directly adjusted the final output probabilities. This solution is practical and low-cost and preserves the original reasoning power of the model.
Authors: Xiang Cheng, Wen Wang, Anindya Ghose
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) models increasingly drive high-stakes consumer interactions, yet their decision logic often remains opaque. Prevailing explainable AI techniques rely on post hoc numerical feature attributions, which fail to provide coherent narratives behind model decisions. Large language models (LLMs) present an opportunity to generate natural-language explanations, but three design challenges remain unresolved: explanations must be both decision-correct and faithful to the factors that drive the prediction; they should be able to serve multiple audiences without shifting the underlying decision rule; and they should be trained in a label-efficient way that does not depend on large corpora of human-scored explanations. To address these challenges, we introduce LEXMA (LLM-based EXplanations for Multi-Audience decisions), a reinforcement-learning-based fine-tuning framework that produces narrative-driven, audience-appropriate explanations. LEXMA combines reflection-augmented supervised fine-tuning with two stages of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Specifically, it fine-tunes two separate parameter sets to improve decision correctness and satisfy stylistic requirements for different audiences, using reward signals that do not rely on human-annotated explanations. We instantiate LEXMA in the context of mortgage approval decisions. Results demonstrate that LEXMA yields significant improvements in predictive performance compared with other LLM baselines. Moreover, human evaluations show that expert-facing explanations generated by our approach are more risk-focused, and consumer-facing explanations are clearer, more actionable, and more polite. Our study contributes a cost-efficient, systematic LLM fine-tuning approach to enhance explanation quality for business decisions, offering strong potential for scalable deployment of transparent AI systems.
Authors: Kaleem Ullah Qasim, Jiashu Zhang, Hafiz Saif Ur Rehman
Abstract: Large language models often fail on multi-step reasoning due to fixed reasoning strategies that ignore problem specific difficulty. We introduce CARD (Complexity Agnostic Recursive Decomposition), a framework that predicts problem complexity before generation and adapts decomposition accordingly. Our system comprises MRCE (Multi-dimensional Reasoning Complexity Estimator), a 0.6B Qwen model predicting 30 fine-grained features from question text and a two-stage recursive solver: (1) hierarchical decomposition into K steps based on task profile and (2) per-step thought budget allocation (1, 5-9, or 10 thoughts) via recursive MRCE profiling. Evaluated on three reasoning models (Qwen3-0.6B, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, Qwen3-1.7B), CARD achieves 81.4% to 89.2% accuracy on GSM8K while reducing token cost by 1.88x to 2.40x compared to fixed decomposition baselines. On MATH-500, CARD reaches 75.1 to 86.8% accuracy using 1.71x to 5.74x fewer tokens. Our results demonstrate that preemptive complexity estimation enables both higher accuracy and significant efficiency gains.
Authors: Kumud Lakara, Ruibo Shi, Fran Silavong
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency in generating high-quality text; however, their propensity for producing hallucinations poses a significant challenge for their deployment in security-critical domains. In this work, we present TrueBrief, an end-to-end framework specifically designed to enhance the faithfulness of small LLMs (SLMs) primarily for the task of text summarization through a preference-optimization paradigm. Central to our framework is a data generation module that facilitates controlled hallucination injection to generate synthetic preference data. Our work provides insights into the impact of data quality and model size on preference-based optimization, highlighting the conditions under which these methods are most effective.
Authors: Wei Meng
Abstract: This paper tackles practical challenges in governing child centered artificial intelligence: policy texts state principles and requirements but often lack reproducible evidence anchors, explicit causal pathways, executable governance toolchains, and computable audit metrics. We propose Graph-GAP, a methodology that decomposes requirements from authoritative policy texts into a four layer graph of evidence, mechanism, governance, and indicator, and that computes two metrics, GAP score and mitigation readiness, to identify governance gaps and prioritise actions. Using the UNICEF Innocenti Guidance on AI and Children 3.0 as primary material, we define reproducible extraction units, coding manuals, graph patterns, scoring scales, and consistency checks, and we demonstrate exemplar gap profiles and governance priority matrices for ten requirements. Results suggest that compared with privacy and data protection, requirements related to child well being and development, explainability and accountability, and cross agency implementation and resource allocation are more prone to indicator gaps and mechanism gaps. We recommend translating requirements into auditable closed loop governance that integrates child rights impact assessments, continuous monitoring metrics, and grievance redress procedures. At the coding level, we introduce a multi algorithm review aggregation revision workflow that runs rule based encoders, statistical or machine learning evaluators, and large model evaluators with diverse prompt configurations as parallel coders. Each extraction unit outputs evidence, mechanism, governance, and indicator labels plus readiness scores with evidence anchors. Reliability, stability, and uncertainty are assessed using Krippendorff alpha, weighted kappa, intraclass correlation, and bootstrap confidence intervals.
Authors: Ziqi Lin, Taiyu Hou
Abstract: The use of large language model (LLM)-based AI chatbots among college students has increased rapidly, yet little is known about how individual psychological attributes shape students' interaction patterns with these technologies. This qualitative study explored how college students with different attachment styles describe their interactions with ChatGPT. Using semi-structured interviews with seven undergraduate students and grounded theory analysis, we identified three main themes: (1) AI as a low-risk emotional space, where participants across attachment styles valued the non-judgmental and low-stakes nature of AI interactions; (2) attachment-congruent patterns of AI engagement, where securely attached students integrated AI as a supplementary tool within their existing support systems, while avoidantly attached students used AI to buffer vulnerability and maintain interpersonal boundaries; and (3) the paradox of AI intimacy, capturing the tension between students' willingness to disclose personal information to AI while simultaneously recognizing its limitations as a relational partner. These findings suggest that attachment orientations play an important role in shaping how students experience and interpret their interactions with AI chatbots, extending attachment theory to the domain of human-AI interaction.
Authors: Pompeu Casanovas
Abstract: The artificial intelligence value chain is one of the main concepts underpinning the European legislation on the subject, especially the Artificial Intelligence Act. It is an economic concept that has become a legal one. i.e., a concept of legal governance, due to its continued use in policy documents and legal texts. This article (i) analyses its significance and function within the framework of the regulatory strategy established by recent EU programs (the Compass for Competitiveness, the Action Plan, Apply AI Strategy, and the Digital Omnibus on AI), (ii) identifies its limitations, and (iii) advances the theoretical construction of value chains that capture intangible dimensions that are not directly monetizable (such as language, culture, and, especially, ethical and legal values) but have a significant impact on the social environment. It also briefly compares three different legal frameworks for the regulation of AI (EU, Commonwealth and USA). It proposes at the end a specific framework for the analysis of the ethical and legal AI value chain to preserve democratic values and foster the digital implementation of the rule of law.
Authors: Yuxin Liu, Zeqing Song, Jiong Lou, Chentao Wu, Jie Li
Abstract: The rapid advancement of large-scale language models (LLMs) has shown their potential to transform intelligent education systems (IESs) through automated teaching and learning support applications. However, current IESs often rely on single-turn static question-answering, which fails to assess learners' cognitive levels, cannot adjust teaching strategies based on real-time feedback, and is limited to providing simple one-off responses. To address these issues, we introduce AgentTutor, a multi-turn interactive intelligent education system to empower personalized learning. It features an LLM-powered generative multi-agent system and a learner-specific personalized learning profile environment that dynamically optimizes and delivers teaching strategies based on learners' learning status, personalized goals, learning preferences, and multimodal study materials. It includes five key modules: curriculum decomposition, learner assessment, dynamic strategy, teaching reflection, and knowledge & experience memory. We conducted extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, AgentTutor significantly enhances learners' performance while demonstrating strong effectiveness in multi-turn interactions and competitiveness in teaching quality among other baselines.
Authors: Adel Daoud
Abstract: When sociologists and other social scientist ask whether the return to college differs by race and gender, they face a choice between two fundamentally different modes of inquiry. Traditional interaction models follow deductive logic: the researcher specifies which variables moderate effects and tests these hypotheses. Machine learning methods follow inductive logic: algorithms search across vast combinatorial spaces to discover patterns of heterogeneity. This article develops a framework for navigating between these approaches. We show that the choice between deduction and induction reflects a tradeoff between interpretability and flexibility, and we demonstrate through simulation when each approach excels. Our framework is particularly relevant for inequality research, where understanding how treatment effects vary across intersecting social subpopulation is substantively central.
Authors: Amarda Shehu, Adonyas Ababu, Asma Akbary, Griffin Allen, Aroush Baig, Tereana Battle, Elias Beall, Christopher Byrom, Matt Dean, Kate Demarco, Ethan Douglass, Luis Granados, Layla Hantush, Andy Hay, Eleanor Hay, Caleb Jackson, Jaewon Jang, Carter Jones, Quanyang Li, Adrian Lopez, Logan Massimo, Garrett McMullin, Ariana Mendoza Maldonado, Eman Mirza, Hadiya Muddasar, Sara Nuwayhid, Brandon Pak, Ashley Petty, Dryden Rancourt, Lily Rodriguez, Corbin Rogers, Jacob Schiek, Taeseo Seok, Aarav Sethi, Giovanni Vitela, Winston Williams, Jagan Yetukuri
Abstract: Claims about whether large language model (LLM) chatbots "reason" are typically debated using curated benchmarks and laboratory-style evaluation protocols. This paper offers a complementary perspective: a student-led field experiment embedded as a midterm project in UNIV 182 (AI4All) at George Mason University, a Mason Core course designed for undergraduates across disciplines with no expected prior STEM exposure. Student teams designed their own reasoning tasks, ran them on widely used consumer chatbots representative of current capabilities, and evaluated both (i) answer correctness and (ii) the validity of the chatbot's stated reasoning (for example, cases where an answer is correct but the explanation is not, or vice versa). Across eight teams that reported standardized scores, students contributed 80 original reasoning prompts spanning six categories: pattern completion, transformation rules, spatial/visual reasoning, quantitative reasoning, relational/logic reasoning, and analogical reasoning. These prompts yielded 320 model responses plus follow-up explanations. Aggregating team-level results, OpenAI GPT-5 and Claude 4.5 achieved the highest mean answer accuracy (86.2% and 83.8%), followed by Grok 4 (82.5%) and Perplexity (73.1%); explanation validity showed a similar ordering (81.2%, 80.0%, 77.5%, 66.2%). Qualitatively, teams converged on a consistent error signature: strong performance on short, structured math and pattern items but reduced reliability on spatial/visual reasoning and multi-step transformations, with frequent "sound right but reason wrong" explanations. The assignment's primary contribution is pedagogical: it operationalizes AI literacy as experimental practice (prompt design, measurement, rater disagreement, and interpretability/grounding) while producing a reusable, student-generated corpus of reasoning probes grounded in authentic end-user interaction.
Authors: Prajwal Chinchmalatpure, Suyash Chinchmalatpure, Siddharth Chavan
Abstract: Generative audio technologies now enable highly realistic voice cloning and real-time voice conversion, increasing the risk of impersonation, fraud, and misinformation in communication channels such as phone and video calls. This study investigates real-time detection of AI-generated speech produced using Retrieval-based Voice Conversion (RVC), evaluated on the DEEP-VOICE dataset, which includes authentic and voice-converted speech samples from multiple well-known speakers. To simulate realistic conditions, deepfake generation is applied to isolated vocal components, followed by the reintroduction of background ambiance to suppress trivial artifacts and emphasize conversion-specific cues. We frame detection as a streaming classification task by dividing audio into one-second segments, extracting time-frequency and cepstral features, and training supervised machine learning models to classify each segment as real or voice-converted. The proposed system enables low-latency inference, supporting both segment-level decisions and call-level aggregation. Experimental results show that short-window acoustic features can reliably capture discriminative patterns associated with RVC speech, even in noisy backgrounds. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of practical, real-time deepfake speech detection and underscore the importance of evaluating under realistic audio mixing conditions for robust deployment.
Authors: Yujiao Jiang, Qingmin Liao, Zongqing Lu
Abstract: Co-speech gesture generation is a critical area of research aimed at synthesizing speech-synchronized human-like gestures. Existing methods often suffer from issues such as rhythmic inconsistency, motion jitter, foot sliding and limited multi-sampling diversity. In this paper, we present SmoothSync, a novel framework that leverages quantized audio tokens in a novel dual-stream Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture to synthesis holistic gestures and enhance sampling variation. Specifically, we (1) fuse audio-motion features via complementary transformer streams to achieve superior synchronization, (2) introduce a jitter-suppression loss to improve temporal smoothness, (3) implement probabilistic audio quantization to generate distinct gesture sequences from identical inputs. To reliably evaluate beat synchronization under jitter, we introduce Smooth-BC, a robust variant of the beat consistency metric less sensitive to motion noise. Comprehensive experiments on the BEAT2 and SHOW datasets demonstrate SmoothSync's superiority, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by -30.6% FGD, 10.3% Smooth-BC, and 8.4% Diversity on BEAT2, while reducing jitter and foot sliding by -62.9% and -17.1% respectively. The code will be released to facilitate future research.
Authors: Firdous Kausar, Asmah Muallem, Naw Safrin Sattar, Mohamed Zakaria Kurdi
Abstract: We present a hybrid framework for adaptive insider-threat detection that tightly integrates multi-agent simulation (MAS), layered Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) correlation, behavioral and communication forensics, trust-aware machine learning, and Theory-of-Mind (ToM) reasoning. Intelligent agents operate in a simulated enterprise environment, generating both behavioral events and cognitive intent signals that are ingested by a centralized SIEM. We evaluate four system variants: a Layered SIEM-Core (LSC) baseline, a Cognitive-Enriched SIEM (CE-SIEM) incorporating ToM and communication forensics, an Evidence-Gated SIEM (EG-SIEM) introducing precision-focused validation mechanisms, and an Enron-enabled EG-SIEM (EG-SIEM-Enron) that augments evidence gating with a pretrained email forensics module calibrated on Enron corpora. Across ten simulation runs involving eight malicious insiders, CE-SIEM achieves perfect recall (1.000) and improves actor-level F1 from 0.521 (LSC) to 0.774. EG-SIEM raises actor-level F1 to 0.922 and confirmed-alert precision to 0.997 while reducing false positives to 0.2 per run. EG-SIEM-Enron preserves high precision (1.000 confirmed-alert precision; 0.0 false positives per run), slightly improves actor-level F1 to 0.933, and reduces detection latency (average TTD 10.26 steps versus 15.20 for EG-SIEM). These results demonstrate that cognitive context improves sensitivity, evidence-gated validation enables high-precision, low-noise detection, and pretrained communication calibration can further accelerate high-confidence insider threat identification.
Authors: Goshi Aoki, Navid Ghaffarzadegan
Abstract: AI agents are increasingly deployed as quasi-autonomous systems for specialized tasks, yet their potential as computational models of decision-making remains underexplored. We develop a generative AI agent to study repetitive policy decisions during an epidemic, embedding the agent, prompted to act as a city mayor, within a simulated SEIR environment. Each week, the agent receives updated epidemiological information, evaluates the evolving situation, and sets business restriction levels. The agent is equipped with a dynamic memory that weights past events by recency and is evaluated in both single- and ensemble-agent settings across environments of varying complexity. Across scenarios, the agent exhibits human-like reactive behavior, tightening restrictions in response to rising cases and relaxing them as risk declines. Crucially, providing the agent with brief systems-level knowledge of epidemic dynamics, highlighting feedbacks between disease spread and behavioral responses, substantially improves decision quality and stability. The results illustrate how theory-informed prompting can shape emergent policy behavior in AI agents. These findings demonstrate that generative AI agents, when situated in structured environments and guided by minimal domain theory, can serve as powerful computational models for studying decision-making and policy design in complex social systems.
Authors: Zhixin Liu, Xuanlin Liu, Sihan Xu, Yaqiong Qiao, Ying Zhang, Xiangrui Cai
Abstract: Existing backdoor attacks on multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting enforce strict temporal and dimensional coupling between triggers and target patterns, requiring synchronous activation at fixed positions across variables. However, realistic scenarios often demand delayed and variable-specific activation. We identify this critical unmet need and propose TDBA, a temporally decoupled backdoor attack framework for MTS forecasting. By injecting triggers that encode the expected location of the target pattern, TDBA enables the activation of the target pattern at any positions within the forecasted data, with the activation position flexibly varying across different variable dimensions. TDBA introduces two core modules: (1) a position-guided trigger generation mechanism that leverages smoothed Gaussian priors to generate triggers that are position-related to the predefined target pattern; and (2) a position-aware optimization module that assigns soft weights based on trigger completeness, pattern coverage, and temporal offset, facilitating targeted and stealthy attack optimization. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that TDBA consistently outperforms existing baselines in effectiveness while maintaining good stealthiness. Ablation studies confirm the controllability and robustness of its design.
Authors: Mustapha Hamdi, Mourad Jabou
Abstract: Energy efficiency is a first-order concern in AI deployment, as long-running inference can exceed training in cumulative carbon impact. We propose a bio-inspired framework that maps protein-folding energy basins to inference cost landscapes and controls execution via a decaying, closed-loop threshold. A request is admitted only when the expected utility-to-energy trade-off is favorable (high confidence/utility at low marginal energy and congestion), biasing operation toward the first acceptable local basin rather than pursuing costly global minima. We evaluate DistilBERT and ResNet-18 served through FastAPI with ONNX Runtime and NVIDIA Triton on an RTX 4000 Ada GPU. Our ablation study reveals that the bio-controller reduces processing time by 42% compared to standard open-loop execution (0.50s vs 0.29s on A100 test set), with a minimal accuracy degradation (<0.5%). Furthermore, we establish the efficiency boundaries between lightweight local serving (ORT) and managed batching (Triton). The results connect biophysical energy models to Green MLOps and offer a practical, auditable basis for closed-loop energy-aware inference in production.
Authors: Kevin Matthe Caramancion
Abstract: Correcting misinformation in public online spaces often exposes users to hostility and ad hominem attacks, discouraging participation in corrective discourse. This study presents empirical evidence that invoking Grok, the native large language model on X, rather than directly confronting other users, is associated with different social responses during misinformation correction. Using an observational design, 100 correction replies across five high-conflict misinformation topics were analyzed, with corrections balanced between Grok-mediated and direct human-issued responses. The primary outcome was whether a correction received at least one ad hominem attack within a 24-hour window. Ad hominem attacks occurred in 72 percent of human-issued corrections and in none of the Grok-mediated corrections. A chi-square test confirmed a statistically significant association with a large effect size. These findings suggest that AI-mediated correction may alter the social dynamics of public disagreement by reducing interpersonal hostility during misinformation responses.
Authors: Wang Cai, Yilin Wen, Jinchang Hou, Du Su, Guoqiu Wang, Zhonghou Lv, Chenfu Bao, Yunfang Wu
Abstract: Safety alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) inherently presents a multi-objective optimization conflict, often accompanied by an unintended degradation of general capabilities. Existing mitigation strategies typically rely on global gradient geometry to resolve these conflicts, yet they overlook Modular Heterogeneity within Transformers, specifically that the functional sensitivity and degree of conflict vary substantially across different attention heads. Such global approaches impose uniform update rules across all parameters, often resulting in suboptimal trade-offs by indiscriminately updating utility sensitive heads that exhibit intense gradient conflicts. To address this limitation, we propose Conflict-Aware Sparse Tuning (CAST), a framework that integrates head-level diagnosis with sparse fine-tuning. CAST first constructs a pre-alignment conflict map by synthesizing Optimization Conflict and Functional Sensitivity, which then guides the selective update of parameters. Experiments reveal that alignment conflicts in LLMs are not uniformly distributed. We find that the drop in general capabilities mainly comes from updating a small group of ``high-conflict'' heads. By simply skipping these heads during training, we significantly reduce this loss without compromising safety, offering an interpretable and parameter-efficient approach to improving the safety-utility trade-off.
Authors: Nilushika Udayangani Hewa Dehigahawattage, Kishor Nandakishor, Marimuthu Palaniswami
Abstract: Knowledge distillation has proven effective for model compression by transferring knowledge from a larger network called the teacher to a smaller network called the student. Current knowledge distillation in time series is predominantly based on logit and feature aligning techniques originally developed for computer vision tasks. These methods do not explicitly account for temporal data and fall short in two key aspects. First, the mechanisms by which the transferred knowledge helps the student model learning process remain unclear due to uninterpretability of logits and features. Second, these methods transfer only limited knowledge, primarily replicating the teacher predictive accuracy. As a result, student models often produce predictive distributions that differ significantly from those of their teachers, hindering their safe substitution for teacher models. In this work, we propose transferring interpretable knowledge by extending conventional logit transfer to convey not just the right prediction but also the right reasoning of the teacher. Specifically, we induce other useful knowledge from the teacher logits termed temporal saliency which captures the importance of each input timestep to the teacher prediction. By training the student with Temporal Saliency Distillation we encourage it to make predictions based on the same input features as the teacher. Temporal Saliency Distillation requires no additional parameters or architecture specific assumptions. We demonstrate that Temporal Saliency Distillation effectively improves the performance of baseline methods while also achieving desirable properties beyond predictive accuracy. We hope our work establishes a new paradigm for interpretable knowledge distillation in time series analysis.
Authors: Dinesh Srivasthav P, Ashok Urlana, Rahul Mishra, Bala Mallikarjunarao Garlapati, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru
Abstract: Machine unlearning aims to selectively remove the influence of specific training samples to satisfy privacy regulations such as the GDPR's 'Right to be Forgotten'. However, many existing methods require access to the data being removed, exposing it to membership inference attacks and potential misuse of Personally Identifiable Information (PII). We address this critical challenge by proposing Shadow Unlearning, a novel paradigm of approximate unlearning, that performs machine unlearning on anonymized forget data without exposing PII. We further propose a novel privacy-preserving framework, Neuro-Semantic Projector Unlearning (NSPU) to achieve Shadow unlearning. To evaluate our method, we compile Multi-domain Fictitious Unlearning (MuFU) forget set across five diverse domains and introduce an evaluation stack to quantify the trade-off between knowledge retention and unlearning effectiveness. Experimental results on various LLMs show that NSPU achieves superior unlearning performance, preserves model utility, and enhances user privacy. Additionally, the proposed approach is at least 10 times more computationally efficient than standard unlearning approaches. Our findings foster a new direction for privacy-aware machine unlearning that balances data protection and model fidelity.
Authors: Xiaoyu Xu, Minxin Du, Zitong Li, Zi Liang, Zhibiao Guo, Shiyu Zhang, Peizhao Hu, Qingqing Ye, Haibo Hu
Abstract: Although machine unlearning is essential for removing private, harmful, or copyrighted content from LLMs, current benchmarks often fail to faithfully represent the true "forgetting scope" learned by the model. We formalize two distinct unlearning granularities, domain-level and instance-level, and propose BiForget, an automated framework for synthesizing high-quality forget sets. Unlike prior work relying on external generators, BiForget exploits the target model per se to elicit data that matches its internal knowledge distribution through seed-guided and adversarial prompting. Our experiments across diverse benchmarks show that it achieves a superior balance of relevance, diversity, and efficiency. Quantitatively, in the Harry Potter domain, it improves relevance by ${\sim}20$ and diversity by ${\sim}$0.05 while halving the total data size compared to SOTAs. Ultimately, it facilitates more robust forgetting and better utility preservation, providing a more rigorous foundation for evaluating LLM unlearning.
Authors: Ben Carvell, George De Ath, Eseoghene Benjamin, Richard Everson
Abstract: We introduce online action-stacking, an inference-time wrapper for reinforcement learning policies that produces realistic air traffic control commands while allowing training on a much smaller discrete action space. Policies are trained with simple incremental heading or level adjustments, together with an action-damping penalty that reduces instruction frequency and leads agents to issue commands in short bursts. At inference, online action-stacking compiles these bursts of primitive actions into domain-appropriate compound clearances. Using Proximal Policy Optimisation and the BluebirdDT digital twin platform, we train agents to navigate aircraft along lateral routes, manage climb and descent to target flight levels, and perform two-aircraft collision avoidance under a minimum separation constraint. In our lateral navigation experiments, action stacking greatly reduces the number of issued instructions relative to a damped baseline and achieves comparable performance to a policy trained with a 37-dimensional action space, despite operating with only five actions. These results indicate that online action-stacking helps bridge a key gap between standard reinforcement learning formulations and operational ATC requirements, and provides a simple mechanism for scaling to more complex control scenarios.
Authors: Erel Kaplan, Tomer Bitan, Lian Ghrayeb, Le Chen, Tom Yotam, Niranjan Hasabnis, Gal Oren
Abstract: Parallel programming is central to HPC and AI, but producing code that is correct and fast remains challenging, especially for OpenMP GPU offload, where data movement and tuning dominate. Autonomous coding agents can compile, test, and profile on target hardware, but outputs are brittle without domain scaffolding. We present ParaCodex, an HPC-engineer workflow that turns a Codex-based agent into an autonomous OpenMP GPU offload system using staged hotspot analysis, explicit data planning, correctness gating, and profiling-guided refinement. We evaluate translation from serial CPU kernels to OpenMP GPU offload kernels on HeCBench, Rodinia, and NAS. After excluding five kernels, ParaCodex succeeded on all 31 valid kernels. The generated kernels improved GPU time over reference OpenMP implementations in 25/31 cases, achieving geometric-mean speedups of 3x on HeCBench and 5x on Rodinia, and outperforming a zero-shot Codex baseline on all suites. We also evaluate CUDA to OpenMP offload translation on ParEval, where ParaCodex maintains high compilation and validation rates in code-only and end-to-end settings.
Authors: Jiahui Chen, Philippe Hansen-Estruch, Xiaochuang Han, Yushi Hu, Emily Dinan, Amita Kamath, Michal Drozdzal, Reyhane Askari-Hemmat, Luke Zettlemoyer, Marjan Ghazvininejad
Abstract: Unified multimodal generation architectures that jointly produce text and images have recently emerged as a promising direction for text-to-image (T2I) synthesis. However, many existing systems rely on explicit modality switching, generating reasoning text before switching manually to image generation. This separate, sequential inference process limits cross-modal coupling and prohibits automatic multimodal generation. This work explores post-training to achieve fully unified text-image generation, where models autonomously transition from textual reasoning to visual synthesis within a single inference process. We examine the impact of joint text-image generation on T2I performance and the relative importance of each modality during post-training. We additionally explore different post-training data strategies, showing that a targeted dataset addressing specific limitations achieves superior results compared to broad image-caption corpora or benchmark-aligned data. Using offline, reward-weighted post-training with fully self-generated synthetic data, our approach enables improvements in multimodal image generation across four diverse T2I benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of reward-weighting both modalities and strategically designed post-training data.
Authors: Yongyi Zang, Jiarui Hai, Wanying Ge, Qiuqiang Kong, Zheqi Dai, Helin Wang, Yuki Mitsufuji, Mark D. Plumbley
Abstract: Music Source Restoration (MSR) aims to recover original, unprocessed instrument stems from professionally mixed and degraded audio, requiring the reversal of both production effects and real-world degradations. We present the inaugural MSR Challenge, which features objective evaluation on studio-produced mixtures using Multi-Mel-SNR, Zimtohrli, and FAD-CLAP, alongside subjective evaluation on real-world degraded recordings. Five teams participated in the challenge. The winning system achieved 4.46 dB Multi-Mel-SNR and 3.47 MOS-Overall, corresponding to relative improvements of 91% and 18% over the second-place system, respectively. Per-stem analysis reveals substantial variation in restoration difficulty across instruments, with bass averaging 4.59 dB across all teams, while percussion averages only 0.29 dB. The dataset, evaluation protocols, and baselines are available at https://msrchallenge.com/.
Authors: Zhengtong Xu, Yuki Shirai
Abstract: Contact-rich manipulation requires reliable estimation of extrinsic contacts-the interactions between a grasped object and its environment which provide essential contextual information for planning, control, and policy learning. However, existing approaches often rely on restrictive assumptions, such as predefined contact types, fixed grasp configurations, or camera calibration, that hinder generalization to novel objects and deployment in unstructured environments. In this paper, we present UNIC, a unified multimodal framework for extrinsic contact estimation that operates without any prior knowledge or camera calibration. UNIC directly encodes visual observations in the camera frame and integrates them with proprioceptive and tactile modalities in a fully data-driven manner. It introduces a unified contact representation based on scene affordance maps that captures diverse contact formations and employs a multimodal fusion mechanism with random masking, enabling robust multimodal representation learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UNIC performs reliably. It achieves a 9.6 mm average Chamfer distance error on unseen contact locations, performs well on unseen objects, remains robust under missing modalities, and adapts to dynamic camera viewpoints. These results establish extrinsic contact estimation as a practical and versatile capability for contact-rich manipulation.
Authors: Mohammad Ali Javidian
Abstract: We tackle a common domain adaptation setting in causal systems. In this setting, the target variable is observed in the source domain but is entirely missing in the target domain. We aim to impute the target variable in the target domain from the remaining observed variables under various shifts. We frame this as learning a compact, mechanism-stable representation. This representation preserves information relevant for predicting the target while discarding spurious variation. For linear Gaussian causal models, we derive a closed-form Gaussian Information Bottleneck (GIB) solution. This solution reduces to a canonical correlation analysis (CCA)-style projection and offers Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-aware options when desired. For nonlinear or non-Gaussian data, we introduce a Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) encoder-predictor. This approach scales to high dimensions and can be trained on source data and deployed zero-shot to the target domain. Across synthetic and real datasets, our approach consistently attains accurate imputations, supporting practical use in high-dimensional causal models and furnishing a unified, lightweight toolkit for causal domain adaptation.
Authors: Heba Zahran, M. Omair Shafiq
Abstract: Community detection is crucial for applications like targeted marketing and recommendation systems. Traditional methods rely on network structure, and embedding-based models integrate semantic information. However, there is a challenge when a model leverages local and global information from complex structures like social networks. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformers have shown superior performance in capturing local and global relationships. In this paper, We propose Graph Integrated Transformer for Community Detection (GIT-CD), a hybrid model combining GNNs and Transformer-based attention mechanisms to enhance community detection in social networks. Specifically, the GNN module captures local graph structures, while the Transformer module models long-range dependencies. A self-optimizing clustering module refines community assignments using K-Means, silhouette loss, and KL divergence minimization. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that GIT-CD outperforms state-of-the-art models, making it a robust approach for detecting meaningful communities in complex social networks.
Authors: Dongqi Liu, Hang Ding, Qiming Feng, Jian Li, Xurong Xie, Zhucun Xue, Chengjie Wang, Jiangning Zhang, Yabiao Wang
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as an important means of enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, most existing RAG strategies treat retrieved passages in a flat and unstructured way, which prevents the model from capturing structural cues and constrains its ability to synthesize knowledge from dispersed evidence across documents. To overcome these limitations, we propose Disco-RAG, a discourse-aware framework that explicitly injects discourse signals into the generation process. Our method constructs intra-chunk discourse trees to capture local hierarchies and builds inter-chunk rhetorical graphs to model cross-passage coherence. These structures are jointly integrated into a planning blueprint that conditions the generation. Experiments on question answering and long-document summarization benchmarks show the efficacy of our approach. Disco-RAG achieves state-of-the-art results on the benchmarks without fine-tuning. These findings underscore the important role of discourse structure in advancing RAG systems.
Authors: Maxim Clouser, Kia Khezeli, John Kalantari
Abstract: Foundation models for vision are predominantly trained on RGB data, while many safety-critical applications rely on non-visible modalities such as infrared (IR) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR). We study whether a single flow-matching foundation model pre-trained primarily on RGB images can be repurposed as a cross-spectral translator using only a few co-measured examples, and whether the resulting synthetic data can enhance downstream detection. Starting from FLUX.1 Kontext, we insert low-rank adaptation (LoRA) modules and fine-tune them on just 100 paired images per domain for two settings: RGB to IR on the KAIST dataset and RGB to SAR on the M4-SAR dataset. The adapted model translates RGB images into pixel-aligned IR/SAR, enabling us to reuse existing bounding boxes and train object detection models purely in the target modality. Across a grid of LoRA hyperparameters, we find that LPIPS computed on only 50 held-out pairs is a strong proxy for downstream performance: lower LPIPS consistently predicts higher mAP for YOLOv11n on both IR and SAR, and for DETR on KAIST IR test data. Using the best LPIPS-selected LoRA adapter, synthetic IR from external RGB datasets (LLVIP, FLIR ADAS) improves KAIST IR pedestrian detection, and synthetic SAR significantly boosts infrastructure detection on M4-SAR when combined with limited real SAR. Our results suggest that few-shot LoRA adaptation of flow-matching foundation models is a promising path toward foundation-style support for non-visible modalities.
Authors: Iago Alves Brito, Walcy Santos Rezende Rios, Julia Soares Dollis, Diogo Fernandes Costa Silva, Arlindo Rodrigues Galv\~ao Filho
Abstract: Current safety evaluations of large language models (LLMs) create a dangerous illusion of universality, aggregating "Identity Hate" into scalar scores that mask systemic vulnerabilities against specific populations. To expose this selective safety, we introduce MiJaBench, a bilingual (English and Portuguese) adversarial benchmark comprising 44,000 prompts across 16 minority groups. By generating 528,000 prompt-response pairs from 12 state-of-the-art LLMs, we curate MiJaBench-Align, revealing that safety alignment is not a generalized semantic capability but a demographic hierarchy: defense rates fluctuate by up to 33\% within the same model solely based on the target group. Crucially, we demonstrate that model scaling exacerbates these disparities, suggesting that current alignment techniques do not create principle of non-discrimination but reinforces memorized refusal boundaries only for specific groups, challenging the current scaling laws of security. We release all datasets and scripts to encourage research into granular demographic alignment at GitHub.
Authors: Mohsen Jalaeian-Farimani
Abstract: This paper introduces a fuzzy reinforcement learning framework, Enhanced-FQL($\lambda$), that integrates novel Fuzzified Eligibility Traces (FET) and Segmented Experience Replay (SER) into fuzzy Q-learning with Fuzzified Bellman Equation (FBE) for continuous control tasks. The proposed approach employs an interpretable fuzzy rule base instead of complex neural architectures, while maintaining competitive performance through two key innovations: a fuzzified Bellman equation with eligibility traces for stable multi-step credit assignment, and a memory-efficient segment-based experience replay mechanism for enhanced sample efficiency. Theoretical analysis proves the proposed method convergence under standard assumptions. Extensive evaluations in continuous control domains demonstrate that Enhanced-FQL($\lambda$) achieves superior sample efficiency and reduced variance compared to n-step fuzzy TD and fuzzy SARSA($\lambda$) baselines, while maintaining substantially lower computational complexity than deep RL alternatives such as DDPG. The framework's inherent interpretability, combined with its computational efficiency and theoretical convergence guarantees, makes it particularly suitable for safety-critical applications where transparency and resource constraints are essential.
Authors: Molly Campbell, Trevor De Clark, Mohamad Sheikho Al Jasem, Sandhya Joshi, Ajay Kumar Shrestha
Abstract: Smart voice assistants (SVAs) are embedded in the daily lives of youth, yet their privacy controls often remain opaque and difficult to manage. Through five semi-structured focus groups (N=26) with young Canadians (ages 16-24), we investigate how perceived privacy risks (PPR) and benefits (PPBf) intersect with algorithmic transparency and trust (ATT) and privacy self-efficacy (PSE) to shape privacy-protective behaviors (PPB). Our analysis reveals that policy overload, fragmented settings, and unclear data retention undermine self-efficacy and discourage protective actions. Conversely, simple transparency cues were associated with greater confidence without diminishing the utility of hands-free tasks and entertainment. We synthesize these findings into a qualitative model in which transparency friction erodes PSE, which in turn weakens PPB. From this model, we derive actionable design guidance for SVAs, including a unified privacy hub, plain-language "data nutrition" labels, clear retention defaults, and device-conditional micro-tutorials. This work foregrounds youth perspectives and offers a path for SVA governance and design that empowers young digital citizens while preserving convenience.
Authors: Trevor De Clark, Yulia Bobkova, Ajay Kumar Shrestha
Abstract: This paper investigates the privacy and usability of AI-enabled smart devices commonly used by youth, focusing on Google Home Mini, Amazon Alexa, and Apple Siri. While these devices provide convenience and efficiency, they also raise privacy and transparency concerns due to their always-listening design and complex data management processes. The study proposes and applies a combined framework of Heuristic Evaluation, Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) Compliance Assessment, and Youth-Centered Usability Testing to assess whether these devices align with Privacy-by-Design principles and support meaningful user control. Results show that Google Home achieved the highest usability score, while Siri scored highest in regulatory compliance, indicating a trade-off between user convenience and privacy protection. Alexa demonstrated clearer task navigation but weaker transparency in data retention. Findings suggest that although youth may feel capable of managing their data, their privacy self-efficacy remains limited by technical design, complex settings, and unclear data policies. The paper concludes that enhancing transparency, embedding privacy guidance during onboarding, and improving policy alignment are critical steps toward ensuring that smart devices are both usable and compliant with privacy standards that protect young users.
Authors: Jusheng Zhang, Yijia Fan, Zimo Wen, Jian Wang, Keze Wang
Abstract: Driven by applications in autonomous driving robotics and augmented reality 3D object annotation presents challenges beyond 2D annotation including spatial complexity occlusion and viewpoint inconsistency Existing approaches based on single models often struggle to address these issues effectively We propose Tri MARF a novel framework that integrates tri modal inputs including 2D multi view images textual descriptions and 3D point clouds within a multi agent collaborative architecture to enhance large scale 3D annotation Tri MARF consists of three specialized agents a vision language model agent for generating multi view descriptions an information aggregation agent for selecting optimal descriptions and a gating agent that aligns textual semantics with 3D geometry for refined captioning Extensive experiments on Objaverse LVIS Objaverse XL and ABO demonstrate that Tri MARF substantially outperforms existing methods achieving a CLIPScore of 88 point 7 compared to prior state of the art methods retrieval accuracy of 45 point 2 and 43 point 8 on ViLT R at 5 and a throughput of up to 12000 objects per hour on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU
Authors: Yike Zhang, Eduardo Davalos, Dingjie Su, Ange Lou, Jack Noble
Abstract: Cochlear Implant (CI) surgery treats severe hearing loss by inserting an electrode array into the cochlea to stimulate the auditory nerve. An important step in this procedure is mastoidectomy, which removes part of the mastoid region of the temporal bone to provide surgical access. Accurate mastoidectomy shape prediction from preoperative imaging improves pre-surgical planning, reduces risks, and enhances surgical outcomes. Despite its importance, there are limited deep-learning-based studies regarding this topic due to the challenges of acquiring ground-truth labels. We address this gap by investigating self-supervised and weakly-supervised learning models to predict the mastoidectomy region without human annotations. We propose a hybrid self-supervised and weakly-supervised learning framework to predict the mastoidectomy region directly from preoperative CT scans, where the mastoid remains intact. Our hybrid method achieves a mean Dice score of 0.72 when predicting the complex and boundary-less mastoidectomy shape, surpassing state-of-the-art approaches and demonstrating strong performance. The method provides groundwork for constructing 3D postmastoidectomy surfaces directly from the corresponding preoperative CT scans. To our knowledge, this is the first work that integrating self-supervised and weakly-supervised learning for mastoidectomy shape prediction, offering a robust and efficient solution for CI surgical planning while leveraging 3D T-distribution loss in weakly-supervised medical imaging.
Authors: Ali Rad, Khashayar Filom, Darioush Keivan, Peyman Mohajerin Esfahani, Ehsan Kamalinejad
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a simple but powerful paradigm for training LLMs: sample a completion, verify it, and update. In practice, however, the verifier is almost never clean--unit tests probe only limited corner cases; human and synthetic labels are imperfect; and LLM judges (e.g., RLAIF) are noisy and can be exploited--and this problem worsens on harder domains (especially coding) where tests are sparse and increasingly model-generated. We ask a pragmatic question: does the verification noise merely slow down the learning (rate), or can it flip the outcome (fate)? To address this, we develop an analytically tractable multi-armed bandit view of RLVR dynamics, instantiated with GRPO and validated in controlled experiments. Modeling false positives and false negatives and grouping completions into recurring reasoning modes yields a replicator-style (natural-selection) flow on the probability simplex. The dynamics decouples into within-correct-mode competition and a one-dimensional evolution for the mass on incorrect modes, whose drift is determined solely by Youden's index J=TPR-FPR. This yields a sharp phase transition: when J>0, the incorrect mass is driven toward extinction (learning); when J=0, the process is neutral; and when J<0, incorrect modes amplify until they dominate (anti-learning and collapse). In the learning regime J>0, noise primarily rescales convergence time ("rate, not fate"). Experiments on verifiable programming tasks under synthetic noise reproduce the predicted J=0 boundary. Beyond noise, the framework offers a general lens for analyzing RLVR stability, convergence, and algorithmic interventions.
Authors: Donghang Lyu, Marius Staring, Hildo Lamb, Mariya Doneva
Abstract: In recent years, deep learning has attracted increasing attention in the field of Cardiac MRI (CMR) reconstruction due to its superior performance over traditional methods, particularly in handling higher acceleration factors, highlighting its potential for real-world clinical applications. However, current deep learning methods remain limited in generalizability. CMR scans exhibit wide variability in image contrast, sampling patterns, scanner vendors, anatomical structures, and disease types. Most existing models are designed to handle only a single or narrow subset of these variations, leading to performance degradation when faced with distribution shifts. Therefore, it is beneficial to develop a unified model capable of generalizing across diverse CMR scenarios. To this end, we propose CRUNet-MR-Univ, a foundation model that leverages spatio-temporal correlations and prompt-based priors to effectively handle the full diversity of CMR scans. Our approach consistently outperforms baseline methods across a wide range of settings, highlighting its effectiveness and promise.
Authors: Myra Cheng, Robert D. Hawkins, Dan Jurafsky
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) frequently fail to challenge users' harmful beliefs in domains ranging from medical advice to social reasoning. We argue that these failures can be understood and addressed pragmatically as consequences of LLMs defaulting to accommodating users' assumptions and exhibiting insufficient epistemic vigilance. We show that social and linguistic factors known to influence accommodation in humans (at-issueness, linguistic encoding, and source reliability) similarly affect accommodation in LLMs, explaining performance differences across three safety benchmarks that test models' ability to challenge harmful beliefs, spanning misinformation (Cancer-Myth, SAGE-Eval) and sycophancy (ELEPHANT). We further show that simple pragmatic interventions, such as adding the phrase "wait a minute", significantly improve performance on these benchmarks while preserving low false-positive rates. Our results highlight the importance of considering pragmatics for evaluating LLM behavior and improving LLM safety.
Authors: Dmitriy Poteryayev, Pietro Novelli, Annalisa Coriolano, Riccardo Dettori, Valentina Tozzini, Fabio Beltram, Massimiliano Pontil, Antonio Rossi, Stiven Forti, Camilla Coletti
Abstract: Raman spectroscopy is a key tool for graphene characterization, yet its application to graphene grown on silicon carbide (SiC) is strongly limited by the intense and variable second-order Raman response of the substrate. This limitation is critical for buffer layer graphene, a semiconducting interfacial phase, whose vibrational signatures are overlapped with the SiC background and challenging to be reliably accessed using conventional reference-based subtraction, due to strong spatial and experimental variability of the substrate signal. Here we present SpectraFormer, a transformer-based deep learning model that reconstructs the SiC Raman substrate contribution directly from post-growth partially masked spectroscopic data without relying on explicit reference measurements. By learning global correlations across the entire Raman shift range, the model captures the statistical structure of the SiC background and enables accurate reconstruction of its contribution in mixed spectra. Subtraction of the reconstructed substrate signal reveals weak vibrational features associated with ZLG that are inaccessible through conventional analysis methods. The extracted spectra are validated by ab initio vibrational calculations, allowing assignment of the resolved features to specific modes and confirming their physical consistency. By leveraging a state-of-the-art attention-based deep learning architecture, this approach establishes a robust, reference-free framework for Raman analysis of graphene on SiC and provides a foundation, compatible with real-time data acquisition, to its integration into automated, closed-loop AI-assisted growth optimization.
Authors: San Kim, Gary Geunbae Lee
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have greatly advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly through instruction tuning, which enables broad task generalization without additional fine-tuning. However, their reliance on large-scale datasets-often collected from human or web sources-makes them vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where adversaries poison a small subset of data to implant hidden behaviors. Despite this growing risk, defenses for instruction-tuned models remain underexplored. We propose MB-Defense (Merging & Breaking Defense Framework), a novel training pipeline that immunizes instruction-tuned LLMs against diverse backdoor threats. MB-Defense comprises two stages: (i) defensive poisoning, which merges attacker and defensive triggers into a unified backdoor representation, and (ii) weight recovery, which breaks this representation through additional training to restore clean behavior. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs show that MB-Defense substantially lowers attack success rates while preserving instruction-following ability. Our method offers a generalizable and data-efficient defense strategy, improving the robustness of instruction-tuned LLMs against unseen backdoor attacks.
Authors: Chuan Meng, Jiqun Liu, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Fengran Mo, Jeff Dalton, Maarten de Rijke
Abstract: Using large language models (LLMs) to predict relevance judgments has shown promising results. Most studies treat this task as a distinct research line, e.g., focusing on prompt design for predicting relevance labels given a query and passage. However, predicting relevance judgments is essentially a form of relevance prediction, a problem extensively studied in tasks such as re-ranking. Despite this potential overlap, little research has explored reusing or adapting established re-ranking methods to predict relevance judgments, leading to potential resource waste and redundant development. To bridge this gap, we reproduce re-rankers in a re-ranker-as-relevance-judge setup. We design two adaptation strategies: (i) using binary tokens (e.g., "true" and "false") generated by a re-ranker as direct judgments, and (ii) converting continuous re-ranking scores into binary labels via thresholding. We perform extensive experiments on TREC-DL 2019 to 2023 with 8 re-rankers from 3 families, ranging from 220M to 32B, and analyse the evaluation bias exhibited by re-ranker-based judges. Results show that re-ranker-based relevance judges, under both strategies, can outperform UMBRELA, a state-of-the-art LLM-based relevance judge, in around 40% to 50% of the cases; they also exhibit strong self-preference towards their own and same-family re-rankers, as well as cross-family bias.
Authors: Chengyuan Yang, Zequn Sun, Wei Wei, Wei Hu
Abstract: Memory management is vital for LLM agents to handle long-term interaction and personalization. Most research focuses on how to organize and use memory summary, but often overlooks the initial memory extraction stage. In this paper, we argue that existing summary-based methods have two major limitations based on the recurrent processing theory. First, summarization is "ahead-of-time", acting as a blind "feed-forward" process that misses important details because it doesn't know future tasks. Second, extraction is usually "one-off", lacking a feedback loop to verify facts, which leads to the accumulation of information loss. To address these issues, we propose proactive memory extraction (namely ProMem). Unlike static summarization, ProMem treats extraction as an iterative cognitive process. We introduce a recurrent feedback loop where the agent uses self-questioning to actively probe the dialogue history. This mechanism allows the agent to recover missing information and correct errors. Our ProMem significantly improves the completeness of the extracted memory and QA accuracy. It also achieves a superior trade-off between extraction quality and token cost.
Authors: Ignacio Sastre, Aiala Ros\'a
Abstract: We propose Concept Tokens, a lightweight method that adds a new special token to a pretrained LLM and learns only its embedding from multiple natural language definitions of a target concept, where occurrences of the concept are replaced by the new token. The LLM is kept frozen and the embedding is optimized with the standard language-modeling objective. We evaluate Concept Tokens in three settings. First, we study hallucinations in closed-book question answering on HotpotQA and find a directional effect: negating the hallucination token reduces hallucinated answers mainly by increasing abstentions, whereas asserting it increases hallucinations and lowers precision. Second, we induce recasting, a pedagogical feedback strategy for second language teaching, and observe the same directional effect. Moreover, compared to providing the full definitional corpus in-context, concept tokens better preserve compliance with other instructions (e.g., asking follow-up questions). Finally, we include a qualitative study with the Eiffel Tower and a fictional "Austral Tower" to illustrate what information the learned embeddings capture and where their limitations emerge. Overall, Concept Tokens provide a compact control signal learned from definitions that can steer behavior in frozen LLMs.
Authors: Yongjun Kim, Hyeongjun Park, Hwanjin Kim, Junil Choi
Abstract: Federated learning (FL) and federated distillation (FD) are distributed learning paradigms that train UE models with enhanced privacy, each offering different trade-offs between noise robustness and learning speed. To mitigate their respective weaknesses, we propose a hybrid federated learning (HFL) framework in which each user equipment (UE) transmits either gradients or logits, and the base station (BS) selects the per-round weights of FL and FD updates. We derive convergence of HFL framework and introduce two methods to exploit degrees of freedom (DoF) in HFL, which are (i) adaptive UE clustering via Jenks optimization and (ii) adaptive weight selection via a damped Newton method. Numerical results show that HFL achieves superior test accuracy at low SNR when both DoF are exploited.
Authors: Israt Jahan Chowdhury, Md Abu Yousuf Tanvir
Abstract: Detection systems that utilize machine learning are progressively implemented at Security Operations Centers (SOCs) to help an analyst to filter through high volumes of security alerts. Practically, such systems tend to reveal probabilistic results or confidence scores which are ill-calibrated and hard to read when under pressure. Qualitative and survey based studies of SOC practice done before reveal that poor alert quality and alert overload greatly augment the burden on the analyst, especially when tool outputs are not coherent with decision requirements, or signal noise. One of the most significant limitations is that model confidence is usually shown without expressing that there are asymmetric costs in decision making where false alarms are much less harmful than missed attacks. The present paper presents a decision-sensitive trust signal correspondence scheme of SOC alert triage. The framework combines confidence that has been calibrated, lightweight uncertainty cues, and cost-sensitive decision thresholds into coherent decision-support layer, instead of making changes to detection models. To enhance probabilistic consistency, the calibration is done using the known post-hoc methods and the uncertainty cues give conservative protection in situations where model certainty is low. To measure the model-independent performance of the suggested model, we apply the Logistic Regression and the Random Forest classifiers to the UNSW-NB15 intrusion detection benchmark. According to simulation findings, false negatives are greatly amplified by the presence of misaligned displays of confidence, whereas cost weighted loss decreases by orders of magnitude between models with decision aligned trust signals. Lastly, we describe a human-in-the-loop study plan that would allow empirically assessing the decision-making of the analysts with aligned and misaligned trust interfaces.
Authors: Yuanzhuo Zhang, Zhoulai Fu, Binoy Ravindran
Abstract: This work introduces StageSAT, a new approach to solving floating-point satisfiability that bridges SMT solving with numerical optimization. StageSAT reframes a floating-point formula as a series of optimization problems in three stages of increasing precision. It begins with a fast, projection-aided descent objective to guide the search toward a feasible region, proceeding to bit-level accuracy with ULP$^2$ optimization and a final $n$-ULP lattice refinement. By construction, the final stage uses a representing function that is zero if and only if a candidate satisfies all constraints. Thus, when optimization drives the objective to zero, the resulting assignment is a valid solution, providing a built-in guarantee of soundness. To improve search, StageSAT introduces a partial monotone descent property on linear constraints via orthogonal projection, preventing the optimizer from stalling on flat or misleading landscapes. Critically, this solver requires no heavy bit-level reasoning or specialized abstractions; it treats complex arithmetic as a black-box, using runtime evaluations to navigate the input space. We implement StageSAT and evaluate it on extensive benchmarks, including SMT-COMP'25 suites and difficult cases from prior work. StageSAT proved more scalable and accurate than state-of-the-art optimization-based alternatives. It solved strictly more formulas than any competing solver under the same time budget, finding most satisfiable instances without producing spurious models. This amounts to 99.4% recall on satisfiable cases with 0% false SAT, exceeding the reliability of prior optimization-based solvers. StageSAT also delivered significant speedups (often 5--10$\times$) over traditional bit-precise SMT and numeric solvers. These results demonstrate that staged optimization significantly improves performance and correctness of floating-point satisfiability solving.
Authors: James Brock, Ce Zhang, Nantheera Anantrasirichai
Abstract: Modern forest monitoring workflows increasingly benefit from the growing availability of high-resolution satellite imagery and advances in deep learning. Two persistent challenges in this context are accurate pixel-level change detection and meaningful semantic change captioning for complex forest dynamics. While large language models (LLMs) are being adapted for interactive data exploration, their integration with vision-language models (VLMs) for remote sensing image change interpretation (RSICI) remains underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce an LLM-driven agent for integrated forest change analysis that supports natural language querying across multiple RSICI tasks. The proposed system builds upon a multi-level change interpretation (MCI) vision-language backbone with LLM-based orchestration. To facilitate adaptation and evaluation in forest environments, we further introduce the Forest-Change dataset, which comprises bi-temporal satellite imagery, pixel-level change masks, and multi-granularity semantic change captions generated using a combination of human annotation and rule-based methods. Experimental results show that the proposed system achieves mIoU and BLEU-4 scores of 67.10% and 40.17% on the Forest-Change dataset, and 88.13% and 34.41% on LEVIR-MCI-Trees, a tree-focused subset of LEVIR-MCI benchmark for joint change detection and captioning. These results highlight the potential of interactive, LLM-driven RSICI systems to improve accessibility, interpretability, and efficiency of forest change analysis. All data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/JamesBrockUoB/ForestChat.
Authors: Fang Wu, Zhengyuan Zhou, Shuting Jin, Xiangxiang Zeng, Jure Leskovec, Jinbo Xu
Abstract: Therapeutic peptides show promise in targeting previously undruggable binding sites, with recent advancements in deep generative models enabling full-atom peptide co-design for specific protein receptors. However, the critical role of molecular surfaces in protein-protein interactions (PPIs) has been underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose an omni-design peptides generation paradigm, called SurfFlow, a novel surface-based generative algorithm that enables comprehensive co-design of sequence, structure, and surface for peptides. SurfFlow employs a multi-modality conditional flow matching (CFM) architecture to learn distributions of surface geometries and biochemical properties, enhancing peptide binding accuracy. Evaluated on the comprehensive PepMerge benchmark, SurfFlow consistently outperforms full-atom baselines across all metrics. These results highlight the advantages of considering molecular surfaces in de novo peptide discovery and demonstrate the potential of integrating multiple protein modalities for more effective therapeutic peptide discovery.
Authors: Fang Wu
Abstract: Machine learning (ML) enables accurate and fast molecular property predictions, which are of interest in drug discovery and material design. Their success is based on the principle of similarity at its heart, assuming that similar molecules exhibit close properties. However, activity cliffs challenge this principle, and their presence leads to a sharp decline in the performance of existing ML algorithms, particularly graph-based methods. To overcome this obstacle under a low-data scenario, we propose a novel semi-supervised learning (SSL) method dubbed SemiMol, which employs predictions on numerous unannotated data as pseudo-signals for subsequent training. Specifically, we introduce an additional instructor model to evaluate the accuracy and trustworthiness of proxy labels because existing pseudo-labeling approaches require probabilistic outputs to reveal the model's confidence and fail to be applied in regression tasks. Moreover, we design a self-adaptive curriculum learning algorithm to progressively move the target model toward hard samples at a controllable pace. Extensive experiments on 30 activity cliff datasets demonstrate that SemiMol significantly enhances graph-based ML architectures and outpasses state-of-the-art pretraining and SSL baselines.
Authors: Chenchen Yang, Kexin Huang, Liwei Fan, Qian Tu, Botian Jiang, Dong Zhang, Linqi Yin, Shimin Li, Zhaoye Fei, Qinyuan Cheng, Xipeng Qiu
Abstract: Speech conveys not only linguistic information but also rich non-verbal vocal events such as laughing and crying. While semantic transcription is well-studied, the precise localization of non-verbal events remains a critical yet under-explored challenge. Current methods suffer from insufficient task definitions with limited category coverage and ambiguous temporal granularity. They also lack standardized evaluation frameworks, hindering the development of downstream applications. To bridge this gap, we first develop a refined taxonomy of 21 vocal events, with a new categorization into discrete (standalone) versus continuous (mixed with speech) types. Based on the refined taxonomy, we introduce WESR-Bench, an expert-annotated evaluation set (900+ utterances) with a novel position-aware protocol that disentangles ASR errors from event detection, enabling precise localization measurement for both discrete and continuous events. We also build a strong baseline by constructing a 1,700+ hour corpus, and train specialized models, surpassing both open-source audio-language models and commercial APIs while preserving ASR quality. We anticipate that WESR will serve as a foundational resource for future research in modeling rich, real-world auditory scenes.
Authors: Christophe Bonneville, Nathan Bieberdorf, Pieterjan Robbe, Mark Asta, Habib Najm, Laurent Capolungo, Cosmin Safta
Abstract: Phase-field simulations of liquid metal dealloying (LMD) can capture complex microstructural evolutions but can be prohibitively expensive for large domains and long time horizons. In this paper, we introduce a fully convolutional, conditionally parameterized U-Net surrogate designed to extrapolate far beyond its training data in both space and time. The architecture integrates convolutional self-attention, physically informed padding, and a flood-fill corrector method to maintain accuracy under extreme extrapolation, while conditioning on simulation parameters allows for flexible time-step skipping and adaptation to varying alloy compositions. To remove the need for costly solver-based initialization, we couple the surrogate with a conditional diffusion model that generates synthetic, physically consistent initial conditions. We train our surrogate on simulations generated over small domain sizes and short time spans, but, by taking advantage of the convolutional nature of U-Nets, we are able to run and extrapolate surrogate simulations for longer time horizons than what would be achievable with classic numerical solvers. Across multiple alloy compositions, the framework is able to reproduce the LMD physics accurately. It predicts key quantities of interest and spatial statistics with relative errors typically below 5% in the training regime and under 15% during large-scale, long time-horizon extrapolations. Our framework can also deliver speed-ups of up to 36,000 times, bringing the time to run weeks-long simulations down to a few seconds. This work is a first stepping stone towards high-fidelity extrapolation in both space and time of phase-field simulation for LMD.
Authors: Jacob Ede Levine, Yun Lyan Luo, Sai Chandra Kosaraju
Abstract: The design of reliable, valid, and diverse molecules is fundamental to modern drug discovery, as improved molecular generation supports efficient exploration of the chemical space for potential drug candidates and reduces the cost of early design efforts. Despite these needs, current chemical language models that generate molecules as SMILES strings are vulnerable to compounding token errors: many samples are unparseable or chemically implausible, and hard constraints meant to prevent failure can restrict exploration. To address this gap, we introduce TSSR, a Two-Stage, Swap-Reward-driven reinforcement learning (RL) framework for character-level SMILES generation. Stage one rewards local token swaps that repair syntax, promoting transitions from invalid to parseable strings. Stage two provides chemistry-aware feedback from RDKit diagnostics, rewarding reductions in valence, aromaticity, and connectivity issues. The reward decomposes into interpretable terms (swap efficiency, error reduction, distance to validity), is model agnostic, and requires no task-specific labels or hand-crafted grammars. We evaluated TSSR on the MOSES benchmark using a GRU policy trained with PPO in both pure RL (P-RL) from random initialization and fine-tuning RL (F-RL) starting from a pretrained chemical language model, assessing 10,000 generated SMILES per run. In P-RL, TSSR significantly improves syntactic validity, chemical validity, and novelty. In F-RL, TSSR preserves drug-likeness and synthesizability while increasing validity and novelty. Token-level analysis shows that syntax edits and chemistry fixes act jointly to reduce RDKit detected errors. TSSR converts a sparse terminal objective into a denser and more interpretable reward, improving both syntactic and chemical quality without reducing diversity. TSSR is dataset-agnostic and can be adapted to various reinforcement learning approaches.
Authors: Zhao Tian
Abstract: Recent advances in language models (LMs) have driven significant progress in various software engineering tasks. However, existing LMs still struggle with complex programming scenarios due to limitations in data quality, model architecture, and reasoning capability. This research systematically addresses these challenges through three complementary directions: (1) improving code data quality with a code difference-guided adversarial augmentation technique (CODA) and a code denoising technique (CodeDenoise); (2) enhancing model architecture via syntax-guided code LMs (LEAM and LEAM++); and (3) advancing model reasoning with a prompting technique (muFiX) and an agent-based technique (Specine). These techniques aim to promote the practical adoption of LMs in software development and further advance intelligent software engineering.
Authors: Jessica Ryan, Alexander I. Gumilang, Robert Wiliam, Derwin Suhartono
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in medical Question Answering (QA), yet they remain prone to hallucinations and ungrounded reasoning, limiting their reliability in high-stakes clinical scenarios. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these issues by incorporating external knowledge, conventional single-shot retrieval often fails to resolve complex biomedical queries requiring multi-step inference. To address this, we propose Self-MedRAG, a self-reflective hybrid framework designed to mimic the iterative hypothesis-verification process of clinical reasoning. Self-MedRAG integrates a hybrid retrieval strategy, combining sparse (BM25) and dense (Contriever) retrievers via Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) to maximize evidence coverage. It employs a generator to produce answers with supporting rationales, which are then assessed by a lightweight self-reflection module using Natural Language Inference (NLI) or LLM-based verification. If the rationale lacks sufficient evidentiary support, the system autonomously reformulates the query and iterates to refine the context. We evaluated Self-MedRAG on the MedQA and PubMedQA benchmarks. The results demonstrate that our hybrid retrieval approach significantly outperforms single-retriever baselines. Furthermore, the inclusion of the self-reflective loop yielded substantial gains, increasing accuracy on MedQA from 80.00% to 83.33% and on PubMedQA from 69.10% to 79.82%. These findings confirm that integrating hybrid retrieval with iterative, evidence-based self-reflection effectively reduces unsupported claims and enhances the clinical reliability of LLM-based systems.
Authors: Amit Bin Tariqul, A N M Zahid Hossain Milkan, Sahab-Al-Chowdhury, Syed Rifat Raiyan, Hasan Mahmud, Md Kamrul Hasan
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for text generation, watermarking has become essential for authorship attribution, intellectual property protection, and misuse detection. While existing watermarking methods perform well in high-resource languages, their robustness in low-resource languages remains underexplored. This work presents the first systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art text watermarking methods: KGW, Exponential Sampling (EXP), and Waterfall, for Bangla LLM text generation under cross-lingual round-trip translation (RTT) attacks. Under benign conditions, KGW and EXP achieve high detection accuracy (>88%) with negligible perplexity and ROUGE degradation. However, RTT causes detection accuracy to collapse below RTT causes detection accuracy to collapse to 9-13%, indicating a fundamental failure of token-level watermarking. To address this, we propose a layered watermarking strategy that combines embedding-time and post-generation watermarks. Experimental results show that layered watermarking improves post-RTT detection accuracy by 25-35%, achieving 40-50% accuracy, representing a 3$\times$ to 4$\times$ relative improvement over single-layer methods, at the cost of controlled semantic degradation. Our findings quantify the robustness-quality trade-off in multilingual watermarking and establish layered watermarking as a practical, training-free solution for low-resource languages such as Bangla. Our code and data will be made public.
Authors: Noah Eckstein, Manoj Srinivasan
Abstract: In recurrent neural networks (RNNs) used to model biological neural networks, noise is typically introduced during training to emulate biological variability and regularize learning. The expectation is that removing the noise at test time should preserve or improve performance. Contrary to this intuition, we find that continuous-time recurrent neural networks (CTRNNs) often perform best at a nonzero noise level, specifically, the same level used during training. This noise preference typically arises when noise is injected inside the neural activation function; networks trained with noise injected outside the activation function perform best with zero noise. Through analyses of simple function approximation, maze navigation, and single neuron regulator tasks, we show that the phenomenon stems from noise-induced shifts of fixed points (stationary distributions) in the underlying stochastic dynamics of the RNNs. These fixed point shifts are noise-level dependent and bias the network outputs when the noise is removed, degrading performance. Analytical and numerical results show that the bias arises when neural states operate near activation function nonlinearities, where noise is asymmetrically attenuated, and that performance optimization incentivizes operation near these nonlinearities. Thus, networks can overfit to the stochastic training environment itself rather than just to the input-output data. The phenomenon is distinct from stochastic resonance, wherein nonzero noise enhances signal processing. Our findings reveal that training noise can become an integral part of the computation learned by recurrent networks, with implications for understanding neural population dynamics and for the design of robust artificial RNNs.
Authors: Tanghaoran Zhang, Xinjun Mao, Shangwen Wang, Yuxin Zhao, Yao Lu, Jin Zhang, Zhang Zhang, Kang Yang, Yue Yu
Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have automated various software engineering tasks, with benchmarks emerging to evaluate their capabilities. However, for adaptation, a critical activity during code reuse, there is no benchmark to assess LLMs' performance, leaving their practical utility in this area unclear. To fill this gap, we propose AdaptEval, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs on code snippet adaptation. Unlike existing benchmarks, AdaptEval incorporates the following three distinctive features: First, Practical Context. Tasks in AdaptEval are derived from developers' practices, preserving rich contextual information from Stack Overflow and GitHub communities. Second, Multi-granularity Annotation. Each task is annotated with requirements at both task and adaptation levels, supporting the evaluation of LLMs across diverse adaptation scenarios. Third, Fine-grained Evaluation. AdaptEval includes a two-tier testing framework combining adaptation-level and function-level tests, which enables evaluating LLMs' performance across various individual adaptations. Based on AdaptEval, we conduct the first empirical study to evaluate six instruction-tuned LLMs and especially three reasoning LLMs on code snippet adaptation. Experimental results demonstrate that AdaptEval enables the assessment of LLMs' adaptation capabilities from various perspectives. It also provides critical insights into their current limitations, particularly their struggle to follow explicit instructions. We hope AdaptEval can facilitate further investigation and enhancement of LLMs' capabilities in code snippet adaptation, supporting their real-world applications.
Authors: Wenjie Li, Guansong Pang, Hezhe Qiao, Debin Gao, David Lo
Abstract: Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on multiple-choice question answering benchmarks, but the complex mechanisms underlying their large-scale neurons remain opaque, posing significant challenges for understanding and steering LLMs. While recent studies made progress on identifying responsible neurons for certain abilities, these ability-specific methods are infeasible for task-focused scenarios requiring coordinated use of multiple abilities. Moreover, these approaches focus only on supportive neurons that correlate positively with task completion, while neglecting neurons with other roles-such as inhibitive roles-and misled neuron attribution due to fortuitous behaviors in LLMs (i.e., correctly answer the questions by chance rather than genuine understanding). To address these challenges, we propose NeuronLLM, a novel task-level LLM understanding framework that adopts the biological principle of functional antagonism for LLM neuron identification. The key insight is that task performance is jointly determined by neurons with two opposing roles: good neurons that facilitate task completion and bad neurons that inhibit it. NeuronLLM achieves a holistic modeling of neurons via contrastive learning of good and bad neurons, while leveraging augmented question sets to mitigate the fortuitous behaviors in LLMs. Comprehensive experiments on LLMs of different sizes and families show the superiority of NeuronLLM over existing methods in four NLP tasks, providing new insights into LLM functional organization.
Authors: Shogo Nakayama, Masahiro Okuda
Abstract: Conventional semi-supervised contrastive learning methods assign pseudo-labels only to samples whose highest predicted class probability exceeds a predefined threshold, and then perform supervised contrastive learning using those selected samples. In this study, we propose a novel loss function that estimates the confidence of each sample based on the entropy of its predicted probability distribution and applies confidence-based adaptive weighting. This approach enables pseudo-label assignment even to samples that were previously excluded from training and facilitates contrastive learning that accounts for the confidence of both anchor and positive samples in a more principled manner. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves classification accuracy and achieves more stable learning performance even under low-label conditions.
Authors: Paul Pu Liang
Abstract: Our experience of the world is multisensory, spanning a synthesis of language, sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Yet, artificial intelligence has primarily advanced in digital modalities like text, vision, and audio. This paper outlines a research vision for multisensory artificial intelligence over the next decade. This new set of technologies can change how humans and AI experience and interact with one another, by connecting AI to the human senses and a rich spectrum of signals from physiological and tactile cues on the body, to physical and social signals in homes, cities, and the environment. We outline how this field must advance through three interrelated themes of sensing, science, and synergy. Firstly, research in sensing should extend how AI captures the world in richer ways beyond the digital medium. Secondly, developing a principled science for quantifying multimodal heterogeneity and interactions, developing unified modeling architectures and representations, and understanding cross-modal transfer. Finally, we present new technical challenges to learn synergy between modalities and between humans and AI, covering multisensory integration, alignment, reasoning, generation, generalization, and experience. Accompanying this vision paper are a series of projects, resources, and demos of latest advances from the Multisensory Intelligence group at the MIT Media Lab, see https://mit-mi.github.io/.
Authors: Xiaowei Mao, Huihu Ding, Yan Lin, Tingrui Wu, Shengnan Guo, Dazhuo Qiu, Feiling Fang, Jilin Hu, Huaiyu Wan
Abstract: Imputing missing values in spatial-temporal traffic data is essential for intelligent transportation systems. Among advanced imputation methods, score-based diffusion models have demonstrated competitive performance. These models generate data by reversing a noising process, using observed values as conditional guidance. However, existing diffusion models typically apply a uniform guidance scale across both spatial and temporal dimensions, which is inadequate for nodes with high missing data rates. Sparse observations provide insufficient conditional guidance, causing the generative process to drift toward the learned prior distribution rather than closely following the conditional observations, resulting in suboptimal imputation performance. To address this, we propose FENCE, a spatial-temporal feedback diffusion guidance method designed to adaptively control guidance scales during imputation. First, FENCE introduces a dynamic feedback mechanism that adjusts the guidance scale based on the posterior likelihood approximations. The guidance scale is increased when generated values diverge from observations and reduced when alignment improves, preventing overcorrection. Second, because alignment to observations varies across nodes and denoising steps, a global guidance scale for all nodes is suboptimal. FENCE computes guidance scales at the cluster level by grouping nodes based on their attention scores, leveraging spatial-temporal correlations to provide more accurate guidance. Experimental results on real-world traffic datasets show that FENCE significantly enhances imputation accuracy.
Authors: Quang-Tu Pham, Hoang-Dieu Vu, Dinh-Dat Pham, Hieu H. Pham
Abstract: This paper introduces FedKDX, a federated learning framework that addresses limitations in healthcare AI through Negative Knowledge Distillation (NKD). Unlike existing approaches that focus solely on positive knowledge transfer, FedKDX captures both target and non-target information to improve model generalization in healthcare applications. The framework integrates multiple knowledge transfer techniques--including traditional knowledge distillation, contrastive learning, and NKD--within a unified architecture that maintains privacy while reducing communication costs. Through experiments on healthcare datasets (SLEEP, UCI-HAR, and PAMAP2), FedKDX demonstrates improved accuracy (up to 2.53% over state-of-the-art methods), faster convergence, and better performance on non-IID data distributions. Theoretical analysis supports NKD's contribution to addressing statistical heterogeneity in distributed healthcare data. The approach shows promise for privacy-sensitive medical applications under regulatory frameworks like HIPAA and GDPR, offering a balanced solution between performance and practical implementation requirements in decentralized healthcare settings. The code and model are available at https://github.com/phamdinhdat-ai/Fed_2024.
Authors: Zhiyuan He, Binghan Chen, Tianxiang Xiong, Ziyang Sun, Mozhao Zhu, Xi Chen
Abstract: Recent advances in Knowledge Editing (KE), particularly Rank-One Model Editing (ROME), show superior efficiency over fine-tuning and in-context learning for updating single-hop facts in transformers. However, these methods face significant challenges when applied to multi-hop reasoning tasks requiring knowledge chaining. In this work, we study the effect of editing knowledge with ROME on different layer depths and identify three key failure modes. First, the "hopping-too-late" problem occurs as later layers lack access to necessary intermediate representations. Second, generalization ability deteriorates sharply when editing later layers. Third, the model overfits to edited knowledge, incorrectly prioritizing edited-hop answers regardless of context. To mitigate the issues of "hopping-too-late" and generalisation decay, we propose Redundant Editing, a simple yet effective strategy that enhances multi-hop reasoning. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach can improve accuracy on 2-hop questions by at least 15.5 percentage points, representing a 96% increase over the previous single-edit strategy, while trading off some specificity and language naturalness.
Authors: Hoagy Cunningham, Jerry Wei, Zihan Wang, Andrew Persic, Alwin Peng, Jordan Abderrachid, Raj Agarwal, Bobby Chen, Austin Cohen, Andy Dau, Alek Dimitriev, Rob Gilson, Logan Howard, Yijin Hua, Jared Kaplan, Jan Leike, Mu Lin, Christopher Liu, Vladimir Mikulik, Rohit Mittapalli, Clare O'Hara, Jin Pan, Nikhil Saxena, Alex Silverstein, Yue Song, Xunjie Yu, Giulio Zhou, Ethan Perez, Mrinank Sharma
Abstract: We introduce enhanced Constitutional Classifiers that deliver production-grade jailbreak robustness with dramatically reduced computational costs and refusal rates compared to previous-generation defenses. Our system combines several key insights. First, we develop exchange classifiers that evaluate model responses in their full conversational context, which addresses vulnerabilities in last-generation systems that examine outputs in isolation. Second, we implement a two-stage classifier cascade where lightweight classifiers screen all traffic and escalate only suspicious exchanges to more expensive classifiers. Third, we train efficient linear probe classifiers and ensemble them with external classifiers to simultaneously improve robustness and reduce computational costs. Together, these techniques yield a production-grade system achieving a 40x computational cost reduction compared to our baseline exchange classifier, while maintaining a 0.05% refusal rate on production traffic. Through extensive red-teaming comprising over 1,700 hours, we demonstrate strong protection against universal jailbreaks -- no attack on this system successfully elicited responses to all eight target queries comparable in detail to an undefended model. Our work establishes Constitutional Classifiers as practical and efficient safeguards for large language models.
Authors: Osman Goni Ridwan, Gilles Frapper, Hongfei Xue, Qiang Zhu
Abstract: We present a materials generation framework that couples a symmetry-conditioned variational autoencoder (CVAE) with a differentiable SO(3) power spectrum objective to steer candidates toward a specified local environment under the crystallographic constraints. In particular, we implement a fully differentiable pipeline that performs batch-wise optimization on both direct and latent crystallographic representations. Using the GPU acceleration, the implementation achieves about fivefold speed compared to our previous CPU workflow, while yielding comparable outcomes. In addition, we introduce the optimization strategy that alternatively performs optimization on the direct and latent crystal representations. This dual-level relaxation approach can effectively overcome local barrier defined by different objective gradients, thus increasing the success rate of generating complex structures satisfying the targe local environments. This framework can be extended to systems consisting of multi-components and multi-environments, providing a scalable route to generate material structures with the target local environment.
Authors: Xiaoyu Liu, Siwen Wei, Linhao Qu, Mingyuan Pan, Chengsheng Zhang, Yonghong Shi, Zhijian Song
Abstract: Accurate segmentation of organs at risk in the head and neck is essential for radiation therapy, yet deep learning models often fail on small, complexly shaped organs. While hybrid architectures that combine different models show promise, they typically just concatenate features without exploiting the unique strengths of each component. This results in functional overlap and limited segmentation accuracy. To address these issues, we propose a high uncertainty region-guided multi-architecture collaborative learning (HUR-MACL) model for multi-organ segmentation in the head and neck. This model adaptively identifies high uncertainty regions using a convolutional neural network, and for these regions, Vision Mamba as well as Deformable CNN are utilized to jointly improve their segmentation accuracy. Additionally, a heterogeneous feature distillation loss was proposed to promote collaborative learning between the two architectures in high uncertainty regions to further enhance performance. Our method achieves SOTA results on two public datasets and one private dataset.
Authors: Shuhan Zhang, Zhi Wang, Rui Gao, Shuang Li
Abstract: Modeling human decision-making is central to applications such as recommendation, preference learning, and human-AI alignment. While many classic models assume context-independent choice behavior, a large body of behavioral research shows that preferences are often influenced by the composition of the choice set itself -- a phenomenon known as the context effect or Halo effect. These effects can manifest as pairwise (first-order) or even higher-order interactions among the available alternatives. Recent models that attempt to capture such effects either focus on the featureless setting or, in the feature-based setting, rely on restrictive interaction structures or entangle interactions across all orders, which limits interpretability. In this work, we propose DeepHalo, a neural modeling framework that incorporates features while enabling explicit control over interaction order and principled interpretation of context effects. Our model enables systematic identification of interaction effects by order and serves as a universal approximator of context-dependent choice functions when specialized to a featureless setting. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate strong predictive performance while providing greater transparency into the drivers of choice.
Authors: Haneul Yoo, Won Ik Cho, Geunhye Kim, Jiyoon Han
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on many tasks, but their progress remains uneven across languages and cultures, often reflecting values latent in English-centric training data. To enable practical cultural alignment, we propose a scalable approach that leverages national social studies curricula as a foundation for culture-aware supervision. We introduce CuCu, an automated multi-agent LLM framework that transforms national textbook curricula into open-ended, culture-specific question-answer pairs. Applying CuCu to the Korean national social studies curriculum, we construct KCaQA, comprising 34.1k open-ended QA pairs. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses suggest that KCaQA covers culture-specific topics and produces responses grounded in local sociocultural contexts.
Authors: Sirry Chen, Jieyi Wang, Wei Chen, Zhongyu Wei
Abstract: Medical consultations are intrinsically speech-centric. However, most prior works focus on long-text-based interactions, which are cumbersome and patient-unfriendly. Recent advances in speech language models (SpeechLMs) have enabled more natural speech-based interaction, yet the scarcity of medical speech data and the inefficiency of directly fine-tuning on speech data jointly hinder the adoption of SpeechLMs in medical consultation. In this paper, we propose SpeechMedAssist, a SpeechLM natively capable of conducting speech-based multi-turn interactions with patients. By exploiting the architectural properties of SpeechLMs, we decouple the conventional one-stage training into a two-stage paradigm consisting of (1) Knowledge & Capability Injection via Text and (2) Modality Re-alignment with Limited Speech Data, thereby reducing the requirement for medical speech data to only 10k synthesized samples. To evaluate SpeechLMs for medical consultation scenarios, we design a benchmark comprising both single-turn question answering and multi-turn simulated interactions. Experimental results show that our model outperforms all baselines in both effectiveness and robustness in most evaluation settings.
Authors: Prateek Jain, Shabari S Nair, Ritesh Goru, Prakhar Agarwal, Ajay Yadav, Yoga Sri Varshan Varadharajan, Constantine Caramanis
Abstract: Large-scale multi-tenant retrieval systems amass vast user query logs yet critically lack the curated relevance labels required for effective domain adaptation. This "dark data" problem is exacerbated by the operational cost of model updates: jointly fine-tuning query and document encoders requires re-indexing the entire corpus, which is prohibitive in multi-tenant environments with thousands of isolated indices. To address these dual challenges, we introduce \textbf{DevRev Search}, a passage retrieval benchmark for technical customer support constructed through a fully automatic pipeline. We employ a \textbf{fusion-based candidate generation} strategy, pooling results from diverse sparse and dense retrievers, and utilize an LLM-as-a-Judge to perform rigorous \textbf{consistency filtering} and relevance assignment. We further propose a practical \textbf{Index-Preserving Adaptation} strategy: by fine-tuning only the query encoder via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), we achieve competitive performance improvements while keeping the document index frozen. Our experiments on DevRev Search and SciFact demonstrate that targeting specific transformer layers in the query encoder yields optimal quality-efficiency trade-offs, offering a scalable path for personalized enterprise search.
Authors: Ryutaro Oshima, Yuya Hosoda, Youji Iiguni
Abstract: This paper proposes an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model for hate speech using large language models (LLMs). The proposed method integrates the encoder of the ASR model with the decoder of the LLMs, enabling simultaneous transcription and censorship tasks to prevent the exposure of harmful content. Instruction tuning of the LLM to mask hate-related words with specific tokens requires an annotated hate speech dataset, which is limited. We generate text samples using an LLM with the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting technique guided by cultural context and examples and then convert them into speech samples using a text-to-speech (TTS) system. However, some of them contain non-hate speech samples with hate-related words, which degrades the censorship performance. This paper filters the samples which text classification models correctly label as hate content. By adjusting the threshold for the number of correct answer models, we can control the level of hate in the generated dataset, allowing us to train the LLMs through curriculum learning in a gradual manner. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a masking accuracy of 58.6\% for hate-related words, surpassing previous baselines. We also confirm that the curriculum training contributes to the efficiency of both transcription and censorship tasks.
Authors: Hyeongkeun Lee, Jongmin Choi, KiHyun Nam, Joon Son Chung
Abstract: Automated Audio Captioning aims to describe the semantic content of input audio. Recent works have employed large language models (LLMs) as a text decoder to leverage their reasoning capabilities. However, prior approaches that project audio features into the LLM embedding space without considering cross-modal alignment fail to fully utilize these capabilities. To address this, we propose LAMB, an LLM-based audio captioning framework that bridges the modality gap between audio embeddings and the LLM text embedding space. LAMB incorporates a Cross-Modal Aligner that minimizes Cauchy-Schwarz divergence while maximizing mutual information, yielding tighter alignment between audio and text at both global and token levels. We further design a Two-Stream Adapter that extracts semantically enriched audio embeddings, thereby delivering richer information to the Cross-Modal Aligner. Finally, leveraging the aligned audio embeddings, a proposed Token Guide directly computes scores within the LLM text embedding space to steer the output logits of generated captions. Experimental results confirm that our framework strengthens the reasoning capabilities of the LLM decoder, achieving state-of-the-art performance on AudioCaps.
Authors: Yifan Le, Yunliang Li
Abstract: Multilingual large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across languages, yet how language capabilities are organized at the neuron level remains poorly understood. Prior work has identified language-related neurons mainly through activation-based heuristics, which conflate language preference with functional importance. Prior work has identified language-related neurons mainly through activation-based heuristics, which conflate language preference with functional importance. We propose CRANE, a relevance-based analysis framework that redefines language specificity in terms of functional necessity, identifying language-specific neurons through targeted neuron-level interventions. CRANE characterizes neuron specialization by their contribution to language-conditioned predictions rather than activation magnitude. Our implementation will be made publicly available. Neuron-level interventions reveal a consistent asymmetric pattern: masking neurons relevant to a target language selectively degrades performance on that language while preserving performance on other languages to a substantial extent, indicating language-selective but non-exclusive neuron specializations. Experiments on English, Chinese, and Vietnamese across multiple benchmarks, together with a dedicated relevance-based metric and base-to-chat model transfer analysis, show that CRANE isolates language-specific components more precisely than activation-based methods.
Authors: Laukik Patade, Rohan Rane, Sandeep Pillai
Abstract: This study focuses on optimizing path planning for unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in precision agriculture using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques in continuous action spaces. The research begins with a review of traditional grid-based methods, such as A* and Dijkstra's algorithms, and discusses their limitations in dynamic agricultural environments, highlighting the need for adaptive learning strategies. The study then explores DRL approaches, including Deep Q-Networks (DQN), which demonstrate improved adaptability and performance in two-dimensional simulations. Enhancements such as Double Q-Networks and Dueling Networks are evaluated to further improve decision-making. Building on these results, the focus shifts to continuous action space models, specifically Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) and Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3), which are tested in increasingly complex environments. Experiments conducted in a three-dimensional environment using ROS and Gazebo demonstrate the effectiveness of continuous DRL algorithms in navigating dynamic agricultural scenarios. Notably, the pretrained TD3 agent achieves a 95 percent success rate in dynamic environments, demonstrating the robustness of the proposed approach in handling moving obstacles while ensuring safety for both crops and the robot.
Authors: Aurghya Maiti, Prateek Jain
Abstract: Estimating causal effects from observational data remains a fundamental challenge in causal inference, especially in the presence of latent confounders. This paper focuses on estimating causal effects in Gaussian Linear Structural Causal Models (GL-SCMs), which are widely used due to their analytical tractability. However, parameter estimation in GL-SCMs is often infeasible with finite data, primarily due to overparameterization. To address this, we introduce the class of Centralized Gaussian Linear SCMs (CGL-SCMs), a simplified yet expressive subclass where exogenous variables follow standardized distributions. We show that CGL-SCMs are equally expressive in terms of causal effect identifiability from observational distributions and present a novel EM-based estimation algorithm that can learn CGL-SCM parameters and estimate identifiable causal effects from finite observational samples. Our theoretical analysis is validated through experiments on synthetic data and benchmark causal graphs, demonstrating that the learned models accurately recover causal distributions.
Authors: Yanming Liu, Xinyue Peng, Jiannan Cao, Xinyi Wang, Songhang Deng, Jintao Chen, Jianwei Yin, Xuhong Zhang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with external tools have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, existing frameworks rely heavily on natural language reasoning to determine when tools can be invoked and whether their results should be committed, lacking formal guarantees for logical safety and verifiability. We present \textbf{ToolGate}, a forward execution framework that provides logical safety guarantees and verifiable state evolution for LLM tool calling. ToolGate maintains an explicit symbolic state space as a typed key-value mapping representing trusted world information throughout the reasoning process. Each tool is formalized as a Hoare-style contract consisting of a precondition and a postcondition, where the precondition gates tool invocation by checking whether the current state satisfies the required conditions, and the postcondition determines whether the tool's result can be committed to update the state through runtime verification. Our approach guarantees that the symbolic state evolves only through verified tool executions, preventing invalid or hallucinated results from corrupting the world representation. Experimental validation demonstrates that ToolGate significantly improves the reliability and verifiability of tool-augmented LLM systems while maintaining competitive performance on complex multi-step reasoning tasks. This work establishes a foundation for building more trustworthy and debuggable AI systems that integrate language models with external tools.
Authors: Zebin Han, Xudong Wang, Baichen Liu, Qi Lyu, Zhenduo Shang, Jiahua Dong, Lianqing Liu, Zhi Han
Abstract: Sequential-Horizon Vision-and-Language Navigation (SH-VLN) presents a challenging scenario where agents should sequentially execute multi-task navigation guided by complex, long-horizon language instructions. Current vision-and-language navigation models exhibit significant performance degradation with such multi-task instructions, as information overload impairs the agent's ability to attend to observationally relevant details. To address this problem, we propose SeqWalker, a navigation model built on a hierarchical planning framework. Our SeqWalker features: i) A High-Level Planner that dynamically selects global instructions into contextually relevant sub-instructions based on the agent's current visual observations, thus reducing cognitive load; ii) A Low-Level Planner incorporating an Exploration-Verification strategy that leverages the inherent logical structure of instructions for trajectory error correction. To evaluate SH-VLN performance, we also extend the IVLN dataset and establish a new benchmark. Extensive experiments are performed to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed SeqWalker.
Authors: Irfan Ullah, Young-Koo Lee
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for learning graph-structured data, but their scalability is hindered by inefficient mini-batch generation, data transfer bottlenecks, and costly inter-GPU synchronization. Existing training frameworks fail to overlap these stages, leading to suboptimal resource utilization. This paper proposes MQ-GNN, a multi-queue pipelined framework that maximizes training efficiency by interleaving GNN training stages and optimizing resource utilization. MQ-GNN introduces Ready-to-Update Asynchronous Consistent Model (RaCoM), which enables asynchronous gradient sharing and model updates while ensuring global consistency through adaptive periodic synchronization. Additionally, it employs global neighbor sampling with caching to reduce data transfer overhead and an adaptive queue-sizing strategy to balance computation and memory efficiency. Experiments on four large-scale datasets and ten baseline models demonstrate that MQ-GNN achieves up to \boldmath $\bm{4.6\,\times}$ faster training time and 30% improved GPU utilization while maintaining competitive accuracy. These results establish MQ-GNN as a scalable and efficient solution for multi-GPU GNN training.
Authors: Anh Thi-Hoang Nguyen, Khanh Quoc Tran, Tin Van Huynh, Phuoc Tan-Hoang Nguyen, Cam Tan Nguyen, Kiet Van Nguyen
Abstract: The reliability of large language models (LLMs) in production environments remains significantly constrained by their propensity to generate hallucinations -- fluent, plausible-sounding outputs that contradict or fabricate information. While hallucination detection has recently emerged as a priority in English-centric benchmarks, low-to-medium resource languages such as Vietnamese remain inadequately covered by standardized evaluation frameworks. This paper introduces the DSC2025 ViHallu Challenge, the first large-scale shared task for detecting hallucinations in Vietnamese LLMs. We present the ViHallu dataset, comprising 10,000 annotated triplets of (context, prompt, response) samples systematically partitioned into three hallucination categories: no hallucination, intrinsic, and extrinsic hallucinations. The dataset incorporates three prompt types -- factual, noisy, and adversarial -- to stress-test model robustness. A total of 111 teams participated, with the best-performing system achieving a macro-F1 score of 84.80\%, compared to a baseline encoder-only score of 32.83\%, demonstrating that instruction-tuned LLMs with structured prompting and ensemble strategies substantially outperform generic architectures. However, the gap to perfect performance indicates that hallucination detection remains a challenging problem, particularly for intrinsic (contradiction-based) hallucinations. This work establishes a rigorous benchmark and explores a diverse range of detection methodologies, providing a foundation for future research into the trustworthiness and reliability of Vietnamese language AI systems.
Authors: Elizabeth Donoway, Hailey Joren, Fabien Roger, Jan Leike
Abstract: Understanding whether fine-tuning elicits latent capabilities or teaches new ones is a fundamental question for language model evaluation and safety. We develop a formal information-theoretic framework for quantifying how much predictive structure fine-tuning extracts from the train dataset and writes into a model's parameters. Our central quantity, Excess Description Length (EDL), is defined via prequential coding and measures the gap between the bits required to encode training labels sequentially using an evolving model (trained online) and the residual encoding cost under the final trained model. We establish that EDL is non-negative in expectation, converges to surplus description length in the infinite-data limit, and provides bounds on expected generalization gain. Through a series of toy models, we clarify common confusions about information in learning: why random labels yield EDL near zero, how a single example can eliminate many bits of uncertainty about the underlying rule(s) that describe the data distribution, why structure learned on rare inputs contributes proportionally little to expected generalization, and how format learning creates early transients distinct from capability acquisition. This framework provides rigorous foundations for the empirical observation that capability elicitation and teaching exhibit qualitatively distinct scaling signatures.
Authors: Dominik Freinberger, Philipp Moser
Abstract: Quantum machine learning has emerged as a promising application domain for near-term quantum hardware, particularly through hybrid quantum-classical models that leverage both classical and quantum processing. Although numerous hybrid architectures have been proposed and demonstrated successfully on benchmark tasks, a significant open question remains regarding the specific contribution of quantum components to the overall performance of these models. In this work, we aim to shed light on the impact of quantum processing within hybrid quantum-classical neural network architectures through a rigorous statistical study. We systematically assess common hybrid models on medical signal data as well as planar and volumetric images, examining the influence attributable to classical and quantum aspects such as encoding schemes, entanglement, and circuit size. We find that in best-case scenarios, hybrid models show performance comparable to their classical counterparts, however, in most cases, performance metrics deteriorate under the influence of quantum components. Our multi-modal analysis provides realistic insights into the contributions of quantum components and advocates for cautious claims and design choices for hybrid models in near-term applications.
Authors: Huawei Zheng, Xinqi Jiang, Sen Yang, Shouling Ji, Yingcai Wu, Dazhen Deng
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in specialized domains such as finance and healthcare, where they introduce unique safety risks. Domain-specific datasets of harmful prompts remain scarce and still largely rely on manual construction; public datasets mainly focus on explicit harmful prompts, which modern LLM defenses can often detect and refuse. In contrast, implicit harmful prompts-expressed through indirect domain knowledge-are harder to detect and better reflect real-world threats. We identify two challenges: transforming domain knowledge into actionable constraints and increasing the implicitness of generated harmful prompts. To address them, we propose an end-to-end framework that first performs knowledge-graph-guided harmful prompt generation to systematically produce domain-relevant prompts, and then applies dual-path obfuscation rewriting to convert explicit harmful prompts into implicit variants via direct and context-enhanced rewriting. This framework yields high-quality datasets combining strong domain relevance with implicitness, enabling more realistic red-teaming and advancing LLM safety research. We release our code and datasets at GitHub.
Authors: Kota Nakamura, Koki Kawabata, Yasuko Matsubara, Yasushi Sakurai
Abstract: Given real-time sensor data streams obtained from machines, how can we continuously predict when a machine failure will occur? This work aims to continuously forecast the timing of future events by analyzing multi-sensor data streams. A key characteristic of real-world data streams is their dynamic nature, where the underlying patterns evolve over time. To address this, we present TimeCast, a dynamic prediction framework designed to adapt to these changes and provide accurate, real-time predictions of future event time. Our proposed method has the following properties: (a) Dynamic: it identifies the distinct time-evolving patterns (i.e., stages) and learns individual models for each, enabling us to make adaptive predictions based on pattern shifts. (b) Practical: it finds meaningful stages that capture time-varying interdependencies between multiple sensors and improve prediction performance; (c) Scalable: our algorithm scales linearly with the input size and enables online model updates on data streams. Extensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate that TimeCast provides higher prediction accuracy than state-of-the-art methods while finding dynamic changes in data streams with a great reduction in computational time.
Authors: Xingyuan Li, Mengyue Wu
Abstract: Detecting medical conditions from speech acoustics is fundamentally a weakly-supervised learning problem: a single, often noisy, session-level label must be linked to nuanced patterns within a long, complex audio recording. This task is further hampered by severe data scarcity and the subjective nature of clinical annotations. While semi-supervised learning (SSL) offers a viable path to leverage unlabeled data, existing audio methods often fail to address the core challenge that pathological traits are not uniformly expressed in a patient's speech. We propose a novel, audio-only SSL framework that explicitly models this hierarchy by jointly learning from frame-level, segment-level, and session-level representations within unsegmented clinical dialogues. Our end-to-end approach dynamically aggregates these multi-granularity features and generates high-quality pseudo-labels to efficiently utilize unlabeled data. Extensive experiments show the framework is model-agnostic, robust across languages and conditions, and highly data-efficient-achieving, for instance, 90\% of fully-supervised performance using only 11 labeled samples. This work provides a principled approach to learning from weak, far-end supervision in medical speech analysis.
Authors: Yehoon Jang, Chaewon Lee, Hyun-seok Min, Sungchul Choi
Abstract: The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the USPTO adjudicates thousands of ex parte appeals each year, requiring the integration of technical understanding and legal reasoning. While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in patent and legal practice, their use has remained limited to lightweight tasks, with no established means of systematically evaluating their capacity for structured legal reasoning in the patent domain. In this work, we introduce PILOT-Bench, the first PTAB-centric benchmark that aligns PTAB decisions with USPTO patent data at the case-level and formalizes three IRAC-aligned classification tasks: Issue Type, Board Authorities, and Subdecision. We evaluate a diverse set of closed-source (commercial) and open-source LLMs and conduct analyses across multiple perspectives, including input-variation settings, model families, and error tendencies. Notably, on the Issue Type task, closed-source models consistently exceed 0.75 in Micro-F1 score, whereas the strongest open-source model (Qwen-8B) achieves performance around 0.56, highlighting a substantial gap in reasoning capabilities. PILOT-Bench establishes a foundation for the systematic evaluation of patent-domain legal reasoning and points toward future directions for improving LLMs through dataset design and model alignment. All data, code, and benchmark resources are available at https://github.com/TeamLab/pilot-bench.
Authors: Rupsa Rani Mishra, D. Chandrasekhar Rao, Ajaya Kumar Tripathy
Abstract: Manual observation and monitoring of individual cows for disease detection present significant challenges in large-scale farming operations, as the process is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to reduced accuracy. The reliance on human observation often leads to delays in identifying symptoms, as the sheer number of animals can hinder timely attention to each cow. Consequently, the accuracy and precision of disease detection are significantly compromised, potentially affecting animal health and overall farm productivity. Furthermore, organizing and managing human resources for the manual observation and monitoring of cow health is a complex and economically demanding task. It necessitates the involvement of skilled personnel, thereby contributing to elevated farm maintenance costs and operational inefficiencies. Therefore, the development of an automated, low-cost, and reliable smart system is essential to address these challenges effectively. Although several studies have been conducted in this domain, very few have simultaneously considered the detection of multiple common diseases with high prediction accuracy. However, advancements in Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning (ML), and Cyber-Physical Systems have enabled the automation of cow health monitoring with enhanced accuracy and reduced operational costs. This study proposes an IoT-enabled Cyber-Physical System framework designed to monitor the daily activities and health status of cow. A novel ML algorithm is proposed for the diagnosis of common cow diseases using collected physiological and behavioral data. The algorithm is designed to predict multiple diseases by analyzing a comprehensive set of recorded physiological and behavioral features, enabling accurate and efficient health assessment.
Authors: Santiago Acevedo, Alessandro Laio, Marco Baroni
Abstract: We study how syntactic and semantic information is encoded in inner layer representations of Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on the very large DeepSeek-V3. We find that, by averaging hidden-representation vectors of sentences sharing syntactic structure or meaning, we obtain vectors that capture a significant proportion of the syntactic and semantic information contained in the representations. In particular, subtracting these syntactic and semantic ``centroids'' from sentence vectors strongly affects their similarity with syntactically and semantically matched sentences, respectively, suggesting that syntax and semantics are, at least partially, linearly encoded. We also find that the cross-layer encoding profiles of syntax and semantics are different, and that the two signals can to some extent be decoupled, suggesting differential encoding of these two types of linguistic information in LLM representations.
Authors: Shurong Zheng, Yousong Zhu, Hongyin Zhao, Fan Yang, Yufei Zhan, Ming Tang, Jinqiao Wang
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive progress in single-image grounding and general multi-image understanding. Recently, some methods begin to address multi-image grounding. However, they are constrained by single-target localization and limited types of practical tasks, due to the lack of unified modeling for generalized grounding tasks. Therefore, we propose GeM-VG, an MLLM capable of Generalized Multi-image Visual Grounding. To support this, we systematically categorize and organize existing multi-image grounding tasks according to their reliance of cross-image cues and reasoning, and introduce the MG-Data-240K dataset, addressing the limitations of existing datasets regarding target quantity and image relation. To tackle the challenges of robustly handling diverse multi-image grounding tasks, we further propose a hybrid reinforcement finetuning strategy that integrates chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and direct answering, considering their complementary strengths. This strategy adopts an R1-like algorithm guided by a carefully designed rule-based reward, effectively enhancing the model's overall perception and reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior generalized grounding capabilities of our model. For multi-image grounding, it outperforms the previous leading MLLMs by 2.0% and 9.7% on MIG-Bench and MC-Bench, respectively. In single-image grounding, it achieves a 9.1% improvement over the base model on ODINW. Furthermore, our model retains strong capabilities in general multi-image understanding.
Authors: Tobia Poppi, Burak Uzkent, Amanmeet Garg, Lucas Porto, Garin Kessler, Yezhou Yang, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara, Florian Schiffers
Abstract: Video-language models (VLMs) achieve strong multimodal understanding but remain prone to hallucinations, especially when reasoning about actions and temporal order. Existing mitigation strategies, such as textual filtering or random video perturbations, often fail to address the root cause: over-reliance on language priors rather than fine-grained visual dynamics. We propose a scalable framework for counterfactual video generation that synthesizes videos differing only in actions or temporal structure while preserving scene context. Our pipeline combines multimodal LLMs for action proposal and editing guidance with diffusion-based image and video models to generate semantic hard negatives at scale. Using this framework, we build CounterVid, a synthetic dataset of ~26k preference pairs targeting action recognition and temporal reasoning. We further introduce MixDPO, a unified Direct Preference Optimization approach that jointly leverages textual and visual preferences. Fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL with MixDPO yields consistent improvements, notably in temporal ordering, and transfers effectively to standard video hallucination benchmarks. Code and models will be made publicly available.
Authors: Xihe Qiu, Yang Dai, Xiaoyu Tan, Sijia Li, Fenghao Sun, Lu Gan, Liang Liu
Abstract: Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) provides detailed tissue information, but its clinical application is limited by long acquisition time, high cost, and restricted resolution. Image translation has recently gained attention as a strategy to address these limitations. Although Pix2Pix has been widely applied in medical image translation, its potential has not been fully explored. In this study, we propose an enhanced Pix2Pix framework that integrates Squeeze-and-Excitation Residual Networks (SEResNet) and U-Net++ to improve image generation quality and structural fidelity. SEResNet strengthens critical feature representation through channel attention, while U-Net++ enhances multi-scale feature fusion. A simplified PatchGAN discriminator further stabilizes training and refines local anatomical realism. Experimental results demonstrate that under few-shot conditions with fewer than 500 images, the proposed method achieves consistent structural fidelity and superior image quality across multiple intra-modality MRI translation tasks, showing strong generalization ability. These results suggest an effective extension of Pix2Pix for medical image translation.
Authors: Lang Feng, Fuchao Yang, Feng Chen, Xin Cheng, Haiyang Xu, Zhenglin Wan, Ming Yan, Bo An
Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable agentic systems trained with reinforcement learning (RL) over multi-turn interaction trajectories, but practical deployment is bottlenecked by rapidly growing textual histories that inflate token budgets and memory usage. We introduce AgentOCR, a framework that exploits the superior information density of visual tokens by representing the accumulated observation-action history as a compact rendered image. To make multi-turn rollouts scalable, AgentOCR proposes segment optical caching. By decomposing history into hashable segments and maintaining a visual cache, this mechanism eliminates redundant re-rendering. Beyond fixed rendering, AgentOCR introduces agentic self-compression, where the agent actively emits a compression rate and is trained with compression-aware reward to adaptively balance task success and token efficiency. We conduct extensive experiments on challenging agentic benchmarks, ALFWorld and search-based QA. Remarkably, results demonstrate that AgentOCR preserves over 95\% of text-based agent performance while substantially reducing token consumption (>50\%), yielding consistent token and memory efficiency. Our further analysis validates a 20x rendering speedup from segment optical caching and the effective strategic balancing of self-compression.
Authors: Xinyue Peng, Yanming Liu, Yihan Cang, Yuwei Zhang, Xinyi Wang, Songhang Deng, Jiannan Cao
Abstract: Non-convex optimization problems are pervasive across mathematical programming, engineering design, and scientific computing, often posing intractable challenges for traditional solvers due to their complex objective functions and constrained landscapes. To address the inefficiency of manual convexification and the over-reliance on expert knowledge, we propose NC2C, an LLM-based end-to-end automated framework designed to transform generic non-convex optimization problems into solvable convex forms using large language models. NC2C leverages LLMs' mathematical reasoning capabilities to autonomously detect non-convex components, select optimal convexification strategies, and generate rigorous convex equivalents. The framework integrates symbolic reasoning, adaptive transformation techniques, and iterative validation, equipped with error correction loops and feasibility domain correction mechanisms to ensure the robustness and validity of transformed problems. Experimental results on a diverse dataset of 100 generic non-convex problems demonstrate that NC2C achieves an 89.3\% execution rate and a 76\% success rate in producing feasible, high-quality convex transformations. This outperforms baseline methods by a significant margin, highlighting NC2C's ability to leverage LLMs for automated non-convex to convex transformation, reduce expert dependency, and enable efficient deployment of convex solvers for previously intractable optimization tasks.
Authors: Junhyuk Choi, Jeongyoun Kwon, Heeju Kim, Haeun Cho, Hayeong Jung, Sehee Min, Bugeun Kim
Abstract: Multi-agent systems utilizing large language models often assign authoritative roles to improve performance, yet the impact of authority bias on agent interactions remains underexplored. We present the first systematic analysis of role-based authority bias in free-form multi-agent evaluation using ChatEval. Applying French and Raven's power-based theory, we classify authoritative roles into legitimate, referent, and expert types and analyze their influence across 12-turn conversations. Experiments with GPT-4o and DeepSeek R1 reveal that Expert and Referent power roles exert stronger influence than Legitimate power roles. Crucially, authority bias emerges not through active conformity by general agents, but through authoritative roles consistently maintaining their positions while general agents demonstrate flexibility. Furthermore, authority influence requires clear position statements, as neutral responses fail to generate bias. These findings provide key insights for designing multi-agent frameworks with asymmetric interaction patterns.
Authors: Oscar Llorente, Jaime Boal, Eugenio F. S\'anchez-\'Ubeda, Antonio Diaz-Cano, Miguel Familiar
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in a wide range of tasks, such as node classification, link prediction, and graph classification, by exploiting the structural information in graph-structured data. However, in node classification, computing node-level explainability becomes extremely time-consuming as the size of the graph increases, while batching strategies often degrade explanation quality. This paper introduces a novel approach to parallelizing node-level explainability in GNNs through graph partitioning. By decomposing the graph into disjoint subgraphs, we enable parallel computation of explainability for node neighbors, significantly improving the scalability and efficiency without affecting the correctness of the results, provided sufficient memory is available. For scenarios where memory is limited, we further propose a dropout-based reconstruction mechanism that offers a controllable trade-off between memory usage and explanation fidelity. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate substantial speedups, enabling scalable and transparent explainability for large-scale GNN models.
Authors: Oshri Naparstek
Abstract: Autoregressive language models are conventionally defined over discrete token sequences, committing to a specific token at every generation step. This early discretization forces uncertainty to be resolved through token-level sampling, often leading to instability, repetition, and sensitivity to decoding heuristics. In this work, we introduce a continuous autoregressive formulation of language generation in which tokens are represented as continuous vectors that \emph{mature} over multiple update steps before being discretized. Rather than sampling tokens, the model evolves continuous token representations through a deterministic dynamical process, committing to a discrete token only when the representation has sufficiently converged. Discrete text is recovered via hard decoding, while uncertainty is maintained and resolved in the continuous space. We show that this maturation process alone is sufficient to produce coherent and diverse text using deterministic decoding (argmax), without reliance on token-level sampling, diffusion-style denoising, or auxiliary stabilization mechanisms. Additional perturbations, such as stochastic dynamics or history smoothing, can be incorporated naturally but are not required for the model to function. To our knowledge, this is the first autoregressive language model that generates text by evolving continuous token representations to convergence prior to discretization, enabling stable generation without token-level sampling.
Authors: Francesco Ferrini, Veronica Lachi, Antonio Longa, Bruno Lepri, Matono Akiyoshi, Andrea Passerini, Xin Liu, Manfred Jaeger
Abstract: Handling missing node features is a key challenge for deploying Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in real-world domains such as healthcare and sensor networks. Existing studies mostly address relatively benign scenarios, namely benchmark datasets with (a) high-dimensional but sparse node features and (b) incomplete data generated under Missing Completely At Random (MCAR) mechanisms. For (a), we theoretically prove that high sparsity substantially limits the information loss caused by missingness, making all models appear robust and preventing a meaningful comparison of their performance. To overcome this limitation, we introduce one synthetic and three real-world datasets with dense, semantically meaningful features. For (b), we move beyond MCAR and design evaluation protocols with more realistic missingness mechanisms. Moreover, we provide a theoretical background to state explicit assumptions on the missingness process and analyze their implications for different methods. Building on this analysis, we propose GNNmim, a simple yet effective baseline for node classification with incomplete feature data. Experiments show that GNNmim is competitive with respect to specialized architectures across diverse datasets and missingness regimes.
Authors: Ao Sun, Xiaoyu Wang, Zhe Tan, Yu Li, Jiachen Zhu, Shu Su, Yuheng Jia
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) serve a global audience, alignment must transition from enforcing universal consensus to respecting cultural pluralism. We demonstrate that dense models, when forced to fit conflicting value distributions, suffer from \textbf{Mean Collapse}, converging to a generic average that fails to represent diverse groups. We attribute this to \textbf{Cultural Sparsity}, where gradient interference prevents dense parameters from spanning distinct cultural modes. To resolve this, we propose \textbf{\textsc{CuMA}} (\textbf{Cu}ltural \textbf{M}ixture of \textbf{A}dapters), a framework that frames alignment as a \textbf{conditional capacity separation} problem. By incorporating demographic-aware routing, \textsc{CuMA} internalizes a \textit{Latent Cultural Topology} to explicitly disentangle conflicting gradients into specialized expert subspaces. Extensive evaluations on WorldValuesBench, Community Alignment, and PRISM demonstrate that \textsc{CuMA} achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming both dense baselines and semantic-only MoEs. Crucially, our analysis confirms that \textsc{CuMA} effectively mitigates mean collapse, preserving cultural diversity. Our code is available at https://github.com/Throll/CuMA.
Authors: Jingzhi Gong, Giovanni Pinna, Yixin Bian, Jie M. Zhang
Abstract: Pull request (PR) descriptions generated by AI coding agents are the primary channel for communicating code changes to human reviewers. However, the alignment between these messages and the actual changes remains unexplored, raising concerns about the trustworthiness of AI agents. To fill this gap, we analyzed 23,247 agentic PRs across five agents using PR message-code inconsistency (PR-MCI). We contributed 974 manually annotated PRs, found 406 PRs (1.7%) exhibited high PR-MCI, and identified eight PR-MCI types, revealing that descriptions claiming unimplemented changes was the most common issue (45.4%). Statistical tests confirmed that high-MCI PRs had 51.7% lower acceptance rates (28.3% vs. 80.0%) and took 3.5x longer to merge (55.8 vs. 16.0 hours). Our findings suggest that unreliable PR descriptions undermine trust in AI agents, highlighting the need for PR-MCI verification mechanisms and improved PR generation to enable trustworthy human-AI collaboration.
Authors: Ziwen Wang, Shangshang Yang, Xiaoshan Yu, Haiping Ma, Xingyi Zhang
Abstract: With the advancement of network technologies, intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) have emerged to deliver increasingly precise and tailored personalized learning services. Cognitive diagnosis (CD) has emerged as a core research task in ITS, aiming to infer learners' mastery of specific knowledge concepts by modeling the mapping between learning behavior data and knowledge states. However, existing research prioritizes model performance enhancement while neglecting the pervasive noise contamination in observed response data, significantly hindering practical deployment. Furthermore, current cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) rely heavily on researchers' domain expertise for structural design, which fails to exhaustively explore architectural possibilities, thus leaving model architectures' full potential untapped. To address this issue, we propose OSCD, an evolutionary multi-objective One-Shot neural architecture search method for Cognitive Diagnosis, designed to efficiently and robustly improve the model's capability in assessing learner proficiency. Specifically, OSCD operates through two distinct stages: training and searching. During the training stage, we construct a search space encompassing diverse architectural combinations and train a weight-sharing supernet represented via the complete binary tree topology, enabling comprehensive exploration of potential architectures beyond manual design priors. In the searching stage, we formulate the optimal architecture search under heterogeneous noise scenarios as a multi-objective optimization problem (MOP), and develop an optimization framework integrating a Pareto-optimal solution search strategy with cross-scenario performance evaluation for resolution. Extensive experiments on real-world educational datasets validate the effectiveness and robustness of the optimal architectures discovered by our OSCD model for CD tasks.
Authors: Arthur Nijdam, Harri K\"ahk\"onen, Valtteri Niemi, Paul Stankovski Wagner, Sara Ramezanian
Abstract: The cybersecurity landscape is constantly evolving, driven by increased digitalization and new cybersecurity threats. Cybersecurity programs often fail to equip graduates with skills demanded by the workforce, particularly concerning recent developments in cybersecurity, as curriculum design is costly and labor-intensive. To address this misalignment, we present a novel Large Language Model (LLM)-based framework for automated design and analysis of cybersecurity curricula, called CurricuLLM. Our approach provides three key contributions: (1) automation of personalized curriculum design, (2) a data-driven pipeline aligned with industry demands, and (3) a comprehensive methodology for leveraging fine-tuned LLMs in curriculum development. CurricuLLM utilizes a two-tier approach consisting of PreprocessLM, which standardizes input data, and ClassifyLM, which assigns course content to nine Knowledge Areas in cybersecurity. We systematically evaluated multiple Natural Language Processing (NLP) architectures and fine-tuning strategies, ultimately selecting the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model as ClassifyLM, fine-tuned on foundational cybersecurity concepts and workforce competencies. We are the first to validate our method with human experts who analyzed real-world cybersecurity curricula and frameworks, motivating that CurricuLLM is an efficient solution to replace labor-intensive curriculum analysis. Moreover, once course content has been classified, it can be integrated with established cybersecurity role-based weights, enabling alignment of the educational program with specific job roles, workforce categories, or general market needs. This lays the foundation for personalized, workforce-aligned cybersecurity curricula that prepare students for the evolving demands in cybersecurity.
Authors: Subhadeep Roy, Gagan Bhatia, Steffen Eger
Abstract: Automatic metrics are now central to evaluating text-to-image models, often substituting for human judgment in benchmarking and large-scale filtering. However, it remains unclear whether these metrics truly prioritize semantic correctness or instead favor visually and socially prototypical images learned from biased data distributions. We identify and study \emph{prototypicality bias} as a systematic failure mode in multimodal evaluation. We introduce a controlled contrastive benchmark \textsc{\textbf{ProtoBias}} (\textit{\textbf{Proto}typical \textbf{Bias}}), spanning Animals, Objects, and Demography images, where semantically correct but non-prototypical images are paired with subtly incorrect yet prototypical adversarial counterparts. This setup enables a directional evaluation of whether metrics follow textual semantics or default to prototypes. Our results show that widely used metrics, including CLIPScore, PickScore, and VQA-based scores, frequently misrank these pairs, while even LLM-as-Judge systems exhibit uneven robustness in socially grounded cases. Human evaluations consistently favour semantic correctness with larger decision margins. Motivated by these findings, we propose \textbf{\textsc{ProtoScore}}, a robust 7B-parameter metric that substantially reduces failure rates and suppresses misranking, while running at orders of magnitude faster than the inference time of GPT-5, approaching the robustness of much larger closed-source judges.
Authors: Yirong Zeng, Yufei Liu, Xiao Ding, Yutai Hou, Yuxian Wang, Haonan Song, Wu Ning, Dandan Tu, Qixun Zhang, Bibo Cai, Yuxiang He, Ting Liu
Abstract: A central belief in scaling reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards for instruction following (IF) tasks is that, a diverse mixture of verifiable hard and unverifiable soft constraints is essential for generalizing to unseen instructions. In this work, we challenge this prevailing consensus through a systematic empirical investigation. Counter-intuitively, we find that models trained on hard-only constraints consistently outperform those trained on mixed datasets. Extensive experiments reveal that reward precision, rather than constraint diversity, is the primary driver of effective alignment. The LLM judge suffers from a low recall rate in detecting false response, which leads to severe reward hacking, thereby undermining the benefits of diversity. Furthermore, analysis of the attention mechanism reveals that high-precision rewards develop a transferable meta-skill for IF. Motivated by these insights, we propose a simple yet effective data-centric refinement strategy that prioritizes reward precision. Evaluated on five benchmarks, our approach outperforms competitive baselines by 13.4\% in performance while achieving a 58\% reduction in training time, maintaining strong generalization beyond instruction following. Our findings advocate for a paradigm shift: moving away from the indiscriminate pursuit of data diversity toward high-precision rewards.
Authors: Yuting Liu, Jian Guan, Jia-Nan Li, Wei Wu, Jiang-Ming Yang, Jianzhe Zhao, Guibing Guo
Abstract: We study the problem of personalization in large language models (LLMs). Prior work predominantly represents user preferences as implicit, model-specific vectors or parameters, yielding opaque ``black-box'' profiles that are difficult to interpret and transfer across models and tasks. In contrast, we advocate natural language as a universal, model- and task-agnostic interface for preference representation. The formulation leads to interpretable and reusable preference descriptions, while naturally supporting continual evolution as new interactions are observed. To learn such representations, we introduce a two-stage training framework that combines supervised fine-tuning on high-quality synthesized data with reinforcement learning to optimize long-term utility and cross-task transferability. Based on this framework, we develop AlignXplore+, a universal preference reasoning model that generates textual preference summaries. Experiments on nine benchmarks show that our 8B model achieves state-of-the-art performanc -- outperforming substantially larger open-source models -- while exhibiting strong transferability across tasks, model families, and interaction formats.
Authors: James Hinns, Sofie Goethals, Stephan Van der Veeken, Theodoros Evgeniou, David Martens
Abstract: Counterfactual explanations are widely used to communicate how inputs must change for a model to alter its prediction. For a single instance, many valid counterfactuals can exist, which leaves open the possibility for an explanation provider to cherry-pick explanations that better suit a narrative of their choice, highlighting favourable behaviour and withholding examples that reveal problematic behaviour. We formally define cherry-picking for counterfactual explanations in terms of an admissible explanation space, specified by the generation procedure, and a utility function. We then study to what extent an external auditor can detect such manipulation. Considering three levels of access to the explanation process: full procedural access, partial procedural access, and explanation-only access, we show that detection is extremely limited in practice. Even with full procedural access, cherry-picked explanations can remain difficult to distinguish from non cherry-picked explanations, because the multiplicity of valid counterfactuals and flexibility in the explanation specification provide sufficient degrees of freedom to mask deliberate selection. Empirically, we demonstrate that this variability often exceeds the effect of cherry-picking on standard counterfactual quality metrics such as proximity, plausibility, and sparsity, making cherry-picked explanations statistically indistinguishable from baseline explanations. We argue that safeguards should therefore prioritise reproducibility, standardisation, and procedural constraints over post-hoc detection, and we provide recommendations for algorithm developers, explanation providers, and auditors.
Authors: Johannes A. Gaus, Winfried Ilg, Daniel Haeufle
Abstract: Assistive devices must determine both what a user intends to do and how reliable that prediction is before providing support. We introduce a safety-critical triggering framework based on calibrated probabilities for multimodal next-action prediction in Activities of Daily Living. Raw model confidence often fails to reflect true correctness, posing a safety risk. Post-hoc calibration aligns predicted confidence with empirical reliability and reduces miscalibration by about an order of magnitude without affecting accuracy. The calibrated confidence drives a simple ACT/HOLD rule that acts only when reliability is high and withholds assistance otherwise. This turns the confidence threshold into a quantitative safety parameter for assisted actions and enables verifiable behavior in an assistive control loop.
Authors: Aleksandar Fontana, Marco Simoni, Giulio Rossolini, Andrea Saracino, Paolo Mori
Abstract: Group-based reinforcement learning methods, like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), are widely used nowadays to post-train large language models. Despite their empirical success, they exhibit structural mismatches between reward optimization and the underlying training objective. In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis of GRPO style methods by studying them within a unified surrogate formulation. This perspective reveals recurring properties that affect all the methods under analysis: (i) non-uniform group weighting induces systematic gradient biases on shared prefix tokens; (ii) interactions with the AdamW optimizer make training dynamics largely insensitive to reward scaling; and (iii) optimizer momentum can push policy updates beyond the intended clipping region under repeated optimization steps. We believe that these findings highlight fundamental limitations of current approaches and provide principled guidance for the design of future formulations.
Authors: Jin Gao, Saichandu Juluri
Abstract: We present a framework that extends the Actor-Critic architecture to creative 3D modeling through multi-agent self-reflection and human-in-the-loop supervision. While existing approaches rely on single-prompt agents that directly execute modeling commands via tools like Blender MCP, our approach introduces a Planner-Actor-Critic architecture. In this design, the Planner coordinates modeling steps, the Actor executes them, and the Critic provides iterative feedback, while human users act as supervisors and advisors throughout the process. Through systematic comparison between single-prompt modeling and our reflective multi-agent approach, we demonstrate improvements in geometric accuracy, aesthetic quality, and task completion rates across diverse 3D modeling scenarios. Our evaluation reveals that critic-guided reflection, combined with human supervisory input, reduces modeling errors and increases complexity and quality of the result compared to direct single-prompt execution. This work establishes that structured agent self-reflection, when augmented by human oversight and advisory guidance, produces higher-quality 3D models while maintaining efficient workflow integration through real-time Blender synchronization.
Authors: Xiaopeng Luo, Zexi Tan, Zhuowei Wang
Abstract: Missing value imputation is a fundamental challenge in machine intelligence, heavily dependent on data completeness. Current imputation methods often handle numerical and categorical attributes independently, overlooking critical interdependencies among heterogeneous features. To address these limitations, we propose a novel imputation approach that explicitly models cross-type feature dependencies within a unified framework. Our method leverages both complete and incomplete instances to ensure accurate and consistent imputation in tabular data. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves superior performance over existing techniques and significantly enhances downstream machine learning tasks, providing a robust solution for real-world systems with missing data.
Authors: Yueqing Hu, Xinyang Peng, Shuting Peng, Hanqi Wang, Tianhong Wang
Abstract: Recent Large Reasoning Models trained via reinforcement learning exhibit a "natural" alignment with human cognitive costs. However, we show that the prevailing paradigm of reasoning distillation -- training student models to mimic these traces via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) -- fails to transmit this cognitive structure. Testing the "H\'an D\=an Xu\'e B\`u" (Superficial Mimicry) hypothesis across 14 models, we find that distillation induces a "Functional Alignment Collapse": while teacher models mirror human difficulty scaling ($\bar{r}=0.64$), distilled students significantly degrade this alignment ($\bar{r}=0.34$), often underperforming their own pre-distillation baselines ("Negative Transfer"). Our analysis suggests that SFT induces a "Cargo Cult" effect, where students ritualistically replicate the linguistic form of reasoning (verbosity) without internalizing the teacher's dynamic resource allocation policy. Consequently, reasoning distillation decouples computational cost from cognitive demand, revealing that human-like cognition is an emergent property of active reinforcement, not passive imitation.
Authors: Milan Liepelt, Julien Baglio
Abstract: Quantum generative modeling is a very active area of research in looking for practical advantage in data analysis. Quantum generative adversarial networks (QGANs) are leading candidates for quantum generative modeling and have been applied to diverse areas, from high-energy physics to image generation. The latent style-based QGAN, relying on a classical variational autoencoder to encode the input data into a latent space and then using a style-based QGAN for data generation has been proven to be efficient for image generation or drug design, hinting at the use of far less trainable parameters than their classical counterpart to achieve comparable performance, however this advantage has never been systematically studied. We present in this work the first comprehensive experimental analysis of this advantage of QGANS applied to SAT4 image generation, obtaining an exponential advantage in capacity scaling for a quantum generator in the hybrid latent style-based QGAN architecture. Careful tuning of the autoencoder is crucial to obtain stable, reliable results. Once this tuning is performed and defining training optimality as when the training is stable and the FID score is low and stable as well, the optimal capacity (or number of trainable parameters) of the classical discriminator scales exponentially with respect to the capacity of the quantum generator, and the same is true for the capacity of the classical generator. This hints toward a type of quantum advantage for quantum generative modeling.
Authors: Jianbo Li, Yi Jiang, Sendong Zhao, Bairui Hu, Haochun Wang, Bing Qin
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) helps LLMs stay accurate, but feeding long documents into a prompt makes the model slow and expensive. This has motivated context compression, ranging from token pruning and summarization to embedding-based compression. While researchers have tried ''compressing'' these documents into smaller summaries or mathematical embeddings, there is a catch: the more you compress the data, the more the LLM struggles to understand it. To address this challenge, we propose ArcAligner (Adaptive recursive context *Aligner*), a lightweight module integrated into the language model layers to help the model better utilize highly compressed context representations for downstream generation. It uses an adaptive ''gating'' system that only adds extra processing power when the information is complex, keeping the system fast. Across knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks, ArcAligner consistently beats compression baselines at comparable compression rates, especially on multi-hop and long-tail settings. The source code is publicly available.
Authors: Xiaoyu Ma, David Patterson
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) inference is hard. The autoregressive Decode phase of the underlying Transformer model makes LLM inference fundamentally different from training. Exacerbated by recent AI trends, the primary challenges are memory and interconnect rather than compute. To address these challenges, we highlight four architecture research opportunities: High Bandwidth Flash for 10X memory capacity with HBM-like bandwidth; Processing-Near-Memory and 3D memory-logic stacking for high memory bandwidth; and low-latency interconnect to speedup communication. While our focus is datacenter AI, we also review their applicability for mobile devices.
Authors: Gorjan Radevski, Kiril Gashteovski, Giwon Hong, Carolin Lawrence, Goran Glava\v{s}
Abstract: Deploying LLMs in real-world applications requires controllable output that satisfies multiple desiderata at the same time. While existing work extensively addresses LLM steering for a single behavior, \textit{compositional steering} -- i.e., steering LLMs simultaneously towards multiple behaviors -- remains an underexplored problem. In this work, we propose \emph{compositional steering tokens} for multi-behavior steering. We first embed individual behaviors, expressed as natural language instructions, into dedicated tokens via self-distillation. Contrary to most prior work, which operates in the activation space, our behavior steers live in the space of input tokens, enabling more effective zero-shot composition. We then train a dedicated \textit{composition token} on pairs of behaviors and show that it successfully captures the notion of composition: it generalizes well to \textit{unseen} compositions, including those with unseen behaviors as well as those with an unseen \textit{number} of behaviors. Our experiments across different LLM architectures show that steering tokens lead to superior multi-behavior control compared to competing approaches (instructions, activation steering, and LoRA merging). Moreover, we show that steering tokens complement natural language instructions, with their combination resulting in further gains.
Authors: Ellington Kirby, Alexandre Boulch, Yihong Xu, Yuan Yin, Gilles Puy, \'Eloi Zablocki, Andrei Bursuc, Spyros Gidaris, Renaud Marlet, Florent Bartoccioni, Anh-Quan Cao, Nermin Samet, Tuan-Hung VU, Matthieu Cord
Abstract: We present DrivoR, a simple and efficient transformer-based architecture for end-to-end autonomous driving. Our approach builds on pretrained Vision Transformers (ViTs) and introduces camera-aware register tokens that compress multi-camera features into a compact scene representation, significantly reducing downstream computation without sacrificing accuracy. These tokens drive two lightweight transformer decoders that generate and then score candidate trajectories. The scoring decoder learns to mimic an oracle and predicts interpretable sub-scores representing aspects such as safety, comfort, and efficiency, enabling behavior-conditioned driving at inference. Despite its minimal design, DrivoR outperforms or matches strong contemporary baselines across NAVSIM-v1, NAVSIM-v2, and the photorealistic closed-loop HUGSIM benchmark. Our results show that a pure-transformer architecture, combined with targeted token compression, is sufficient for accurate, efficient, and adaptive end-to-end driving. Code and checkpoints will be made available via the project page.
Authors: Niloufar Alavi, Swati Shah, Rezvan Alamian, Stefan Goetz
Abstract: Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) allow direct communication between the brain and electronics without the need for speech or physical movement. Such interfaces can be particularly beneficial in applications requiring rapid response times, such as driving, where a vehicle's advanced driving assistance systems could benefit from immediate understanding of a driver's intentions. This study presents a novel method for predicting a driver's intention to steer using electroencephalography (EEG) signals through deep learning. A driving simulator created a controlled environment in which participants imagined controlling a vehicle during various driving scenarios, including left and right turns, as well as straight driving. A convolutional neural network (CNN) classified the detected EEG data with minimal pre-processing. Our model achieved an accuracy of 83.7% in distinguishing between the three steering intentions and demonstrated the ability of CNNs to process raw EEG data effectively. The classification accuracy was highest for right-turn segments, which suggests a potential spatial bias in brain activity. This study lays the foundation for more intuitive brain-to-vehicle communication systems.
Authors: Aashi Garg, Aneshya Das, Arshi Arya, Anushka Goyal, Aditi
Abstract: The effectiveness of brand monitoring in India is increasingly challenged by the rise of Hinglish--a hybrid of Hindi and English--used widely in user-generated content on platforms like Twitter. Traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, built for monolingual data, often fail to interpret the syntactic and semantic complexity of this code-mixed language, resulting in inaccurate sentiment analysis and misleading market insights. To address this gap, we propose a high-performance sentiment classification framework specifically designed for Hinglish tweets. Our approach fine-tunes mBERT (Multilingual BERT), leveraging its multilingual capabilities to better understand the linguistic diversity of Indian social media. A key component of our methodology is the use of subword tokenization, which enables the model to effectively manage spelling variations, slang, and out-of-vocabulary terms common in Romanized Hinglish. This research delivers a production-ready AI solution for brand sentiment tracking and establishes a strong benchmark for multilingual NLP in low-resource, code-mixed environments.
Authors: Runyang You, Hongru Cai, Caiqi Zhang, Qiancheng Xu, Meng Liu, Tiezheng Yu, Yongqi Li, Wenjie Li
Abstract: LLM-as-a-Judge has revolutionized AI evaluation by leveraging large language models for scalable assessments. However, as evaluands become increasingly complex, specialized, and multi-step, the reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge has become constrained by inherent biases, shallow single-pass reasoning, and the inability to verify assessments against real-world observations. This has catalyzed the transition to Agent-as-a-Judge, where agentic judges employ planning, tool-augmented verification, multi-agent collaboration, and persistent memory to enable more robust, verifiable, and nuanced evaluations. Despite the rapid proliferation of agentic evaluation systems, the field lacks a unified framework to navigate this shifting landscape. To bridge this gap, we present the first comprehensive survey tracing this evolution. Specifically, we identify key dimensions that characterize this paradigm shift and establish a developmental taxonomy. We organize core methodologies and survey applications across general and professional domains. Furthermore, we analyze frontier challenges and identify promising research directions, ultimately providing a clear roadmap for the next generation of agentic evaluation.
Authors: Ignacio de Rodrigo, Alvaro J. Lopez-Lopez, Jaime Boal
Abstract: This work introduces VERSE, a methodology for analyzing and improving Vision-Language Models applied to Visually-rich Document Understanding by exploring their visual embedding space. VERSE enables the visualization of latent representations, supporting the assessment of model feasibility. It also facilitates the identification of problematic regions and guides the generation of synthetic data to enhance performance in those clusters. We validate the methodology by training on the synthetic MERIT Dataset and evaluating on its real-world counterpart, MERIT Secret. Results show that VERSE helps uncover the visual features associated with error-prone clusters, and that retraining with samples containing these features substantially boosts F1 performance without degrading generalization. Furthermore, we demonstrate that on-premise models such as Donut and Idefics2, when optimized with VERSE, match or even surpass the performance of SaaS solutions like GPT-4 and Pixtral.
Authors: Maximilian Alber, Timo Milbich, Alexandra Carpen-Amarie, Stephan Tietz, Jonas Dippel, Lukas Muttenthaler, Beatriz Perez Cancer, Alessandro Benetti, Panos Korfiatis, Elias Eulig, J\'er\^ome L\"uscher, Jiasen Wu, Sayed Abid Hashimi, Gabriel Dernbach, Simon Schallenberg, Neelay Shah, Moritz Kr\"ugener, Aniruddh Jammoria, Jake Matras, Patrick Duffy, Matt Redlon, Philipp Jurmeister, David Horst, Lukas Ruff, Klaus-Robert M\"uller, Frederick Klauschen, Andrew Norgan
Abstract: Pathology foundation models substantially advanced the possibilities in computational pathology -- yet tradeoffs in terms of performance, robustness, and computational requirements remained, which limited their clinical deployment. In this report, we present Atlas 2, Atlas 2-B, and Atlas 2-S, three pathology vision foundation models which bridge these shortcomings by showing state-of-the-art performance in prediction performance, robustness, and resource efficiency in a comprehensive evaluation across eighty public benchmarks. Our models were trained on the largest pathology foundation model dataset to date comprising 5.5 million histopathology whole slide images, collected from three medical institutions Charit\'e - Universt\"atsmedizin Berlin, LMU Munich, and Mayo Clinic.
Authors: Timofey Tomashevskiy
Abstract: This work provides a state-of-the-art survey of continual safe online reinforcement learning (COSRL) methods. We discuss theoretical aspects, challenges, and open questions in building continual online safe reinforcement learning algorithms. We provide the taxonomy and the details of continual online safe reinforcement learning methods based on the type of safe learning mechanism that takes adaptation to nonstationarity into account. We categorize safety constraints formulation for online reinforcement learning algorithms, and finally, we discuss prospects for creating reliable, safe online learning algorithms. Keywords: safe RL in nonstationary environments, safe continual reinforcement learning under nonstationarity, HM-MDP, NSMDP, POMDP, safe POMDP, constraints for continual learning, safe continual reinforcement learning review, safe continual reinforcement learning survey, safe continual reinforcement learning, safe online learning under distribution shift, safe continual online adaptation, safe reinforcement learning, safe exploration, safe adaptation, constrained Markov decision processes, safe reinforcement learning, partially observable Markov decision process, safe reinforcement learning and hidden Markov decision processes, Safe Online Reinforcement Learning, safe online reinforcement learning, safe online reinforcement learning, safe meta-learning, safe meta-reinforcement learning, safe context-based reinforcement learning, formulating safety constraints for continual learning
Authors: Shuliang Liu, Songbo Yang, Dong Fang, Sihang Jia, Yuqi Tang, Lingfeng Su, Ruoshui Peng, Yibo Yan, Xin Zou, Xuming Hu
Abstract: Object hallucination critically undermines the reliability of Multimodal Large Language Models, often stemming from a fundamental failure in cognitive introspection, where models blindly trust linguistic priors over specific visual evidence. Existing mitigations remain limited: contrastive decoding approaches operate superficially without rectifying internal semantic misalignments, while current latent steering methods rely on static vectors that lack instance-specific precision. We introduce Vision-Language Introspection (VLI), a training-free inference framework that simulates a metacognitive self-correction process. VLI first performs Attributive Introspection to diagnose hallucination risks via probabilistic conflict detection and localize the causal visual anchors. It then employs Interpretable Bi-Causal Steering to actively modulate the inference process, dynamically isolating visual evidence from background noise while neutralizing blind confidence through adaptive calibration. VLI achieves state-of-the-art performance on advanced models, reducing object hallucination rates by 12.67% on MMHal-Bench and improving accuracy by 5.8% on POPE.
Authors: Chengsong Huang, Tong Zheng, Langlin Huang, Jinyuan Li, Haolin Liu, Jiaxin Huang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex reasoning is often hindered by high computational costs and latency, while resource-efficient Small Language Models (SLMs) typically lack the necessary reasoning capacity. Existing collaborative approaches, such as cascading or routing, operate at a coarse granularity by offloading entire queries to LLMs, resulting in significant computational waste when the SLM is capable of handling the majority of reasoning steps. To address this, we propose RelayLLM, a novel framework for efficient reasoning via token-level collaborative decoding. Unlike routers, RelayLLM empowers the SLM to act as an active controller that dynamically invokes the LLM only for critical tokens via a special command, effectively "relaying" the generation process. We introduce a two-stage training framework, including warm-up and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to teach the model to balance independence with strategic help-seeking. Empirical results across six benchmarks demonstrate that RelayLLM achieves an average accuracy of 49.52%, effectively bridging the performance gap between the two models. Notably, this is achieved by invoking the LLM for only 1.07% of the total generated tokens, offering a 98.2% cost reduction compared to performance-matched random routers.
Authors: Haoyu Zhao, Akide Liu, Zeyu Zhang, Weijie Wang, Feng Chen, Ruihan Zhu, Gholamreza Haffari, Bohan Zhuang
Abstract: Embodied question answering (EQA) in 3D environments often requires collecting context that is distributed across multiple viewpoints and partially occluded. However, most recent vision--language models (VLMs) are constrained to a fixed and finite set of input views, which limits their ability to acquire question-relevant context at inference time and hinders complex spatial reasoning. We propose Chain-of-View (CoV) prompting, a training-free, test-time reasoning framework that transforms a VLM into an active viewpoint reasoner through a coarse-to-fine exploration process. CoV first employs a View Selection agent to filter redundant frames and identify question-aligned anchor views. It then performs fine-grained view adjustment by interleaving iterative reasoning with discrete camera actions, obtaining new observations from the underlying 3D scene representation until sufficient context is gathered or a step budget is reached. We evaluate CoV on OpenEQA across four mainstream VLMs and obtain an average +11.56\% improvement in LLM-Match, with a maximum gain of +13.62\% on Qwen3-VL-Flash. CoV further exhibits test-time scaling: increasing the minimum action budget yields an additional +2.51\% average improvement, peaking at +3.73\% on Gemini-2.5-Flash. On ScanQA and SQA3D, CoV delivers strong performance (e.g., 116 CIDEr / 31.9 EM@1 on ScanQA and 51.1 EM@1 on SQA3D). Overall, these results suggest that question-aligned view selection coupled with open-view search is an effective, model-agnostic strategy for improving spatial reasoning in 3D EQA without additional training.
Authors: Yiji Zhao, Zihao Zhong, Ao Wang, Haomin Wen, Ming Jin, Yuxuan Liang, Huaiyu Wan, Hao Wu
Abstract: Spatial-Temporal Graph (STG) forecasting on large-scale networks has garnered significant attention. However, existing models predominantly focus on short-horizon predictions and suffer from notorious computational costs and memory consumption when scaling to long-horizon predictions and large graphs. Targeting the above challenges, we present FaST, an effective and efficient framework based on heterogeneity-aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) for long-horizon and large-scale STG forecasting, which unlocks one-week-ahead (672 steps at a 15-minute granularity) prediction with thousands of nodes. FaST is underpinned by two key innovations. First, an adaptive graph agent attention mechanism is proposed to alleviate the computational burden inherent in conventional graph convolution and self-attention modules when applied to large-scale graphs. Second, we propose a new parallel MoE module that replaces traditional feed-forward networks with Gated Linear Units (GLUs), enabling an efficient and scalable parallel structure. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that FaST not only delivers superior long-horizon predictive accuracy but also achieves remarkable computational efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/yijizhao/FaST.
Authors: William Rudman, Michal Golovanevsky, Dana Arad, Yonatan Belinkov, Ritambhara Singh, Carsten Eickhoff, Kyle Mahowald
Abstract: Large vision-language models (VLMs) are highly capable, yet often hallucinate by favoring textual prompts over visual evidence. We study this failure mode in a controlled object-counting setting, where the prompt overstates the number of objects in the image (e.g., asking a model to describe four waterlilies when only three are present). At low object counts, models often correct the overestimation, but as the number of objects increases, they increasingly conform to the prompt regardless of the discrepancy. Through mechanistic analysis of three VLMs, we identify a small set of attention heads whose ablation substantially reduces prompt-induced hallucinations (PIH) by at least 40% without additional training. Across models, PIH-heads mediate prompt copying in model-specific ways. We characterize these differences and show that PIH ablation increases correction toward visual evidence. Our findings offer insights into the internal mechanisms driving prompt-induced hallucinations, revealing model-specific differences in how these behaviors are implemented.
Authors: Maja Waldron
Abstract: One-shot prediction enables rapid adaptation of pretrained foundation models to new tasks using only one labeled example, but lacks principled uncertainty quantification. While conformal prediction provides finite-sample coverage guarantees, standard split conformal methods are inefficient in the one-shot setting due to data splitting and reliance on a single predictor. We propose Conformal Aggregation of One-Shot Predictors (CAOS), a conformal framework that adaptively aggregates multiple one-shot predictors and uses a leave-one-out calibration scheme to fully exploit scarce labeled data. Despite violating classical exchangeability assumptions, we prove that CAOS achieves valid marginal coverage using a monotonicity-based argument. Experiments on one-shot facial landmarking and RAFT text classification tasks show that CAOS produces substantially smaller prediction sets than split conformal baselines while maintaining reliable coverage.
Authors: Ilmo Sung
Abstract: Large language models suffer from "hallucinations"-logical inconsistencies induced by semantic noise. We propose that current architectures operate in a "Metric Phase," where causal order is vulnerable to spontaneous symmetry breaking. Here, we identify robust inference as an effective Symmetry-Protected Topological phase, where logical operations are formally isomorphic to non-Abelian anyon braiding, replacing fragile geometric interpolation with robust topological invariants. Empirically, we demonstrate a sharp topological phase transition: while Transformers and RNNs exhibit gapless decay, our Holonomic Network reveals a macroscopic "mass gap," maintaining invariant fidelity below a critical noise threshold. Furthermore, in a variable-binding task on $S_{10}$ ($3.6 \times 10^6$ states) representing symbolic manipulation, we demonstrate holonomic generalization: the topological model maintains perfect fidelity extrapolating $100\times$ beyond training ($L=50 \to 5000$), consistent with a theoretically indefinite causal horizon, whereas Transformers lose logical coherence. Ablation studies indicate this protection emerges strictly from non-Abelian gauge symmetry. This provides strong evidence for a new universality class for logical reasoning, linking causal stability to the topology of the semantic manifold.
Authors: Boyang Wang, Haoran Zhang, Shujie Zhang, Jinkun Hao, Mingda Jia, Qi Lv, Yucheng Mao, Zhaoyang Lyu, Jia Zeng, Xudong Xu, Jiangmiao Pang
Abstract: The diversity, quantity, and quality of manipulation data are critical for training effective robot policies. However, due to hardware and physical setup constraints, collecting large-scale real-world manipulation data remains difficult to scale across diverse environments. Recent work uses text-prompt conditioned image diffusion models to augment manipulation data by altering the backgrounds and tabletop objects in the visual observations. However, these approaches often overlook the practical need for multi-view and temporally coherent observations required by state-of-the-art policy models. Further, text prompts alone cannot reliably specify the scene setup. To provide the diffusion model with explicit visual guidance, we introduce visual identity prompting, which supplies exemplar images as conditioning inputs to guide the generation of the desired scene setup. To this end, we also build a scalable pipeline to curate a visual identity pool from large robotics datasets. Using our augmented manipulation data to train downstream vision-language-action and visuomotor policy models yields consistent performance gains in both simulation and real-robot settings.
Authors: Shih-Yang Liu, Xin Dong, Ximing Lu, Shizhe Diao, Peter Belcak, Mingjie Liu, Min-Hung Chen, Hongxu Yin, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Yejin Choi, Jan Kautz, Pavlo Molchanov
Abstract: As language models become increasingly capable, users expect them to provide not only accurate responses but also behaviors aligned with diverse human preferences across a variety of scenarios. To achieve this, Reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines have begun incorporating multiple rewards, each capturing a distinct preference, to guide models toward these desired behaviors. However, recent work has defaulted to apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) under multi-reward setting without examining its suitability. In this paper, we demonstrate that directly applying GRPO to normalize distinct rollout reward combinations causes them to collapse into identical advantage values, reducing the resolution of the training signal and resulting in suboptimal convergence and, in some cases, early training failure. We then introduce Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization (GDPO), a new policy optimization method to resolve these issues by decoupling the normalization of individual rewards, more faithfully preserving their relative differences and enabling more accurate multi-reward optimization, along with substantially improved training stability. We compare GDPO with GRPO across three tasks: tool calling, math reasoning, and coding reasoning, evaluating both correctness metrics (accuracy, bug ratio) and constraint adherence metrics (format, length). Across all settings, GDPO consistently outperforms GRPO, demonstrating its effectiveness and generalizability for multi-reward reinforcement learning optimization.
Authors: G\'abor E. G\'evay, G\'abor Danner
Abstract: The strong solutions of Nine Men's Morris and its variant, Lasker Morris are well-known results (the starting positions are draws). We re-examined both of these games, and calculated extended strong solutions for them. By this we mean the game-theoretic values of all possible game states that could be reached from certain starting positions where the number of stones to be placed by the players is different from the standard rules. These were also calculated for a previously unsolved third variant, Morabaraba, with interesting results: most of the starting positions where the players can place an equal number of stones (including the standard starting position) are wins for the first player (as opposed to the above games, where these are usually draws). We also developed a multi-valued retrograde analysis, and used it as a basis for an algorithm for solving these games ultra-strongly. This means that when our program is playing against a fallible opponent, it has a greater chance of achieving a better result than the game-theoretic value, compared to randomly selecting between "just strongly" optimal moves. Previous attempts on ultra-strong solutions used local heuristics or learning during games, but we incorporated our algorithm into the retrograde analysis.
Authors: Jio Oh, Geon Heo, Seungjun Oh, Hyunjin Kim, JinYeong Bak, Jindong Wang, Xing Xie, Steven Euijong Whang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with requests related to information retrieval and data manipulation that frequently arise in real-world scenarios under multiple conditions. In this paper, we demonstrate that leveraging tabular structures in LLM interactions, is more effective than utilizing other structures for handling prevalent requests that operate over factual data. Through comprehensive evaluations across various scenarios and request types, we show that providing tabular structures yields a 40.29\% average performance gain along with better robustness and token efficiency. Through attention-value analysis, we discover that tables help LLMs better locate relevant information, explaining these improvements. Beyond tables and text, we evaluate whether (1) blending structuredness within text, such as providing templates or fixing the order of attributes, and (2) other representative structures, such as knowledge graphs and JSON are helpful. We observe that utilizing tables offers the best balance between efficiency and effectiveness. The method remains robust to task complexity and adapts to unstructured sources through text-to-table conversion. Overall, we highlight the untapped potential of tabular representations for future LLM applications.
Authors: Haoran Ou, Gelei Deng, Xingshuo Han, Jie Zhang, Han Qiu, Shangwei Guo, Tianwei Zhang
Abstract: The increasing multimodal disinformation, where deceptive claims are reinforced through coordinated text and visual content, poses significant challenges to automated fact-checking. Recent efforts leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for this task, capitalizing on their strong reasoning and multimodal understanding capabilities. Emerging retrieval-augmented frameworks further equip LLMs with access to open-domain external information, enabling evidence-based verification beyond their internal knowledge. Despite their promising gains, our empirical study reveals notable shortcomings in the external search coverage and evidence quality evaluation. To mitigate those limitations, we propose Aletheia, an end-to-end framework for automated multimodal fact-checking. It introduces a novel evidence retrieval strategy that improves evidence coverage and filters useless information from open-domain sources, enabling the extraction of high-quality evidence for verification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Aletheia achieves an accuracy of 88.3% on two public multimodal disinformation datasets and 90.2% on newly emerging claims. Compared with existing evidence retrieval strategies, our approach improves verification accuracy by up to 30.8%, highlighting the critical role of evidence quality in LLM-based disinformation verification.
Authors: Shi-Yu Tian, Zhi Zhou, Wei Dong, Kun-Yang Yu, Ming Yang, Zi-Jian Cheng, Lan-Zhe Guo, Yu-Feng Li
Abstract: Mathematical reasoning has long been a key benchmark for evaluating large language models. Although substantial progress has been made on math word problems, the need for reasoning over tabular data in real-world applications has been overlooked. For instance, applications such as business intelligence demand not only multi-step numerical reasoning with tables but also robustness to incomplete or inconsistent information. However, comprehensive evaluation in this area is severely limited, constrained by the reliance on manually collected tables that are difficult to scale and the lack of coverage for potential traps encountered in real-world scenarios. To address this problem, we propose AutoT2T, a neuro-symbolic framework that controllably transforms math word problems into scalable and verified tabular reasoning tasks. Building on this pipeline, we develop TabularMath, a benchmark comprising four subsets that include both text-based and image-based tables, covering table complexity, table quality, and table representation dimensions. Our study reveals three key observations: (1) Table complexity and reasoning difficulty impact reasoning performance jointly; (2) Low-quality tables pose severe risks to reliable reasoning in current LLMs; (3) Different table modalities show similar trends, with text-based tables typically being easier for models to reason over. In-depth analyses are conducted for each observation to guide future research.
Authors: Wenpeng Xing, Zhipeng Chen, Changting Lin, Meng Han
Abstract: Invoking external tools enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform complex, real-world tasks, yet selecting the correct tool from large, hierarchically-structured libraries remains a significant challenge. The limited context windows of LLMs and noise from irrelevant options often lead to low selection accuracy and high computational costs. To address this, we propose the Hierarchical Gaussian Mixture Framework (HGMF), a probabilistic pruning method for scalable tool invocation. HGMF first maps the user query and all tool descriptions into a unified semantic space. The framework then operates in two stages: it clusters servers using a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and filters them based on the query's likelihood. Subsequently, it applies the same GMM-based clustering and filtering to the tools associated with the selected servers. This hierarchical process produces a compact, high-relevance candidate set, simplifying the final selection task for the LLM. Experiments on a public dataset show that HGMF significantly improves tool selection accuracy while reducing inference latency, confirming the framework's scalability and effectiveness for large-scale tool libraries.
Authors: Doaa Allabadi, Kyle Bradbury, Jordan M. Malof
Abstract: We focus here on Deep Research Agents (DRAs), which are systems that can take a natural language prompt from a user, and then autonomously search for, and utilize, internet-based content to address the prompt. Recent DRAs have demonstrated impressive capabilities on public benchmarks however, recent research largely involves proprietary closed-source systems. At the time of this work, we only found one open-source DRA, termed Open Deep Research (ODR). In this work we adapt the challenging recent BrowseComp benchmark to compare ODR to existing proprietary systems. We propose BrowseComp-Small (BC-Small), comprising a subset of BrowseComp, as a more computationally-tractable DRA benchmark for academic labs. We benchmark ODR and two other proprietary systems on BC-Small: one system from Anthropic and one system from Google. We find that all three systems achieve 0% accuracy on the test set of 60 questions. We introduce three strategic improvements to ODR, resulting in the ODR+ model, which achieves a state-of-the-art 10% success rate on BC-Small among both closed-source and open-source systems. We report ablation studies indicating that all three of our improvements contributed to the success of ODR+.
Authors: Trang Tran (New Mexico State University), Trung Hoang Le (New Mexico State University), Huiping Cao (New Mexico State University), Tran Cao Son (New Mexico State University)
Abstract: Joint entity-relation extraction (JERE) identifies both entities and their relationships simultaneously. Traditional machine-learning based approaches to performing this task require a large corpus of annotated data and lack the ability to easily incorporate domain specific information in the construction of the model. Therefore, creating a model for JERE is often labor intensive, time consuming, and elaboration intolerant. In this paper, we propose harnessing the capabilities of generative pre-trained large language models (LLMs) and the knowledge representation and reasoning capabilities of Answer Set Programming (ASP) to perform JERE. We present a generic workflow for JERE using LLMs and ASP. The workflow is generic in the sense that it can be applied for JERE in any domain. It takes advantage of LLM's capability in natural language understanding in that it works directly with unannotated text. It exploits the elaboration tolerant feature of ASP in that no modification of its core program is required when additional domain specific knowledge, in the form of type specifications, is found and needs to be used. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed workflow through experiments with limited training data on three well-known benchmarks for JERE. The results of our experiments show that the LLM + ASP workflow is better than state-of-the-art JERE systems in several categories with only 10% of training data. It is able to achieve a 2.5 times (35% over 15%) improvement in the Relation Extraction task for the SciERC corpus, one of the most difficult benchmarks.
Authors: Yingzhi Mao, Chunkang Zhang, Junxiang Wang, Xinyan Guan, Boxi Cao, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on complex multi-step reasoning, yet they still exhibit severe safety failures such as harmful content generation. Existing methods often apply coarse-grained constraints over the entire reasoning trajectories, which can undermine reasoning capability while failing to address the root causes of unsafe behavior. In this work, we uncover a previously underexplored failure mode in LRMs, termed Self-Jailbreak, where models initially recognize the harmful intent of a query, but override this judgment during subsequent reasoning steps, ultimately generating unsafe outputs. Such a phenomenon reveals that LRMs are capable of recognizing harm, while safety failures primarily arise from reasoning steps. Motivated by this finding, we propose \emph{Chain-of-Guardrail} (CoG), a trajectory-level training framework that mitigates Self-Jailbreak via targeted, step-level interventions while maintaining reasoning ability. Experiments across multiple safety and reasoning benchmarks indicate that CoG achieves a favorable balance between safety and reasoning performance compared with existing approaches.
Authors: Guanyu Yao, Qiucheng Wu, Yang Zhang, Zhaowen Wang, Handong Zhao, Shiyu Chang
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities on vision-and-language tasks. However, recent findings reveal an imbalance in their reasoning capabilities across visual and textual modalities. Specifically, current MLLMs often over-rely on textual cues while under-attending to visual content, resulting in suboptimal performance on tasks that require genuine visual reasoning. We refer to this phenomenon as the \textit{modality gap}, defined as the performance disparity between text-centric and vision-centric inputs. In this paper, we analyze the modality gap through the lens of training recipes. We first show that existing training recipes tend to amplify this gap. Then, we systematically explore strategies to bridge it from two complementary perspectives: data and loss design. Our findings provide insights into developing training recipes that mitigate the modality gap and promote more balanced multimodal reasoning. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/Bridging-Modality-Gap.
URLs: https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/Bridging-Modality-Gap.
Authors: Liya Zhu, Peizhuang Cong, Jingzhe Ding, Aowei Ji, Wenya Wu, Jiani Hou, Chunjie Wu, Xiang Gao, Jingkai Liu, Zhou Huan, Xuelei Sun, Yang Yang, Jianpeng Jiao, Liang Hu, Xinjie Chen, Jiashuo Liu, Tong Yang, Zaiyuan Wang, Ge Zhang, Wenhao Huang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on standard reasoning and question-answering benchmarks, yet such evaluations often fail to capture their ability to handle long-tail, expertise-intensive knowledge in real-world professional scenarios. We introduce LPFQA, a long-tail knowledge benchmark derived from authentic professional forum discussions, covering 7 academic and industrial domains with 430 curated tasks grounded in practical expertise. LPFQA evaluates specialized reasoning, domain-specific terminology understanding, and contextual interpretation, and adopts a hierarchical difficulty structure to ensure semantic clarity and uniquely identifiable answers. Experiments on over multiple mainstream LLMs reveal substantial performance gaps, particularly on tasks requiring deep domain reasoning, exposing limitations overlooked by existing benchmarks. Overall, LPFQA provides an authentic and discriminative evaluation framework that complements prior benchmarks and informs future LLM development.
Authors: Liang Shan, Kaicheng Shen, Wen Wu, Zhenyu Ying, Chaochao Lu, Yan Teng, Jingqi Huang, Guangze Ye, Guoqing Wang, Liang He
Abstract: Ensuring the safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for real-world deployment. However, current safety measures often fail to address implicit, domain-specific risks. To investigate this gap, we introduce a dataset of 3,000 annotated queries spanning education, finance, and management. Evaluations across 14 leading LLMs reveal a concerning vulnerability: an average jailbreak success rate of 57.8%. In response, we propose MENTOR, a metacognition-driven self-evolution framework. MENTOR first performs structured self-assessment through simulated critical thinking, such as perspective-taking and consequential reasoning to uncover latent model misalignments. These reflections are formalized into dynamic rule-based knowledge graphs that evolve with emerging risk patterns. To enforce these rules at inference time, we introduce activation steering, a method that directly modulates the model's internal representations to ensure compliance. Experiments demonstrate that MENTOR substantially reduces attack success rates across all tested domains and achieves risk analysis performance comparable to human experts. Our work offers a scalable and adaptive pathway toward robust domain-specific alignment of LLMs.
Authors: Chen Han, Yijia Ma, Jin Tan, Wenzhen Zheng, Xijin Tang
Abstract: Multi-agent debate (MAD) frameworks have emerged as promising approaches for misinformation detection by simulating adversarial reasoning. While prior work has focused on detection accuracy, it overlooks the importance of helping users understand the reasoning behind factual judgments and develop future resilience. The debate transcripts generated during MAD offer a rich but underutilized resource for transparent reasoning. In this study, we introduce ED2D, an evidence-based MAD framework that extends previous approach by incorporating factual evidence retrieval. More importantly, ED2D is designed not only as a detection framework but also as a persuasive multi-agent system aimed at correcting user beliefs and discouraging misinformation sharing. We compare the persuasive effects of ED2D-generated debunking transcripts with those authored by human experts. Results demonstrate that ED2D outperforms existing baselines across three misinformation detection benchmarks. When ED2D generates correct predictions, its debunking transcripts exhibit persuasive effects comparable to those of human experts; However, when ED2D misclassifies, its accompanying explanations may inadvertently reinforce users'misconceptions, even when presented alongside accurate human explanations. Our findings highlight both the promise and the potential risks of deploying MAD systems for misinformation intervention. We further develop a public community website to help users explore ED2D, fostering transparency, critical thinking, and collaborative fact-checking.
Authors: Soorya Ram Shimgekar, Abhay Goyal, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Koustuv Saha, Pi Zonooz, Navin Kumar
Abstract: Conspiratorial discourse is increasingly embedded within digital communication ecosystems, yet its structure and spread remain difficult to study. This work analyzes conspiratorial narratives in Singapore-based Telegram groups, showing that such content is woven into everyday discussions rather than confined to isolated echo chambers. We propose a two-stage computational framework. First, we fine-tune RoBERTa-large to classify messages as conspiratorial or not, achieving an F1-score of 0.866 on 2,000 expert-labeled messages. Second, we build a signed belief graph in which nodes represent messages and edge signs reflect alignment in belief labels, weighted by textual similarity. We introduce a Signed Belief Graph Neural Network (SiBeGNN) that uses a Sign Disentanglement Loss to learn embeddings that separate ideological alignment from stylistic features. Using hierarchical clustering on these embeddings, we identify seven narrative archetypes across 553,648 messages: legal topics, medical concerns, media discussions, finance, contradictions in authority, group moderation, and general chat. SiBeGNN yields stronger clustering quality (cDBI = 8.38) than baseline methods (13.60 to 67.27), supported by 88 percent inter-rater agreement in expert evaluations. Our analysis shows that conspiratorial messages appear not only in clusters focused on skepticism or distrust, but also within routine discussions of finance, law, and everyday matters. These findings challenge common assumptions about online radicalization by demonstrating that conspiratorial discourse operates within ordinary social interaction. The proposed framework advances computational methods for belief-driven discourse analysis and offers applications for stance detection, political communication studies, and content moderation policy.
Authors: Youngmin Im, Byeongung Jo, Jaeyoung Wi, Seungwoo Baek, Tae Hoon Min, Joo Hyung Lee, Sangeun Oh, Insik Shin, Sunjae Lee
Abstract: Mobile GUI Agents, AI agents capable of interacting with mobile applications on behalf of users, have the potential to transform human computer interaction. However, current evaluation practices for GUI agents face two fundamental limitations. First, they either rely on single path offline benchmarks or online live benchmarks. Offline benchmarks using static, single path annotated datasets unfairly penalize valid alternative actions, while online benchmarks suffer from poor scalability and reproducibility due to the dynamic and unpredictable nature of live evaluation. Second, existing benchmarks treat agents as monolithic black boxes, overlooking the contributions of individual components, which often leads to unfair comparisons or obscures key performance bottlenecks. To address these limitations, we present MobiBench, the first modular and multi path aware offline benchmarking framework for mobile GUI agents that enables high fidelity, scalable, and reproducible evaluation entirely in offline settings. Our experiments demonstrate that MobiBench achieves 94.72 percent agreement with human evaluators, on par with carefully engineered online benchmarks, while preserving the scalability and reproducibility of static offline benchmarks. Furthermore, our comprehensive module level analysis uncovers several key insights, including a systematic evaluation of diverse techniques used in mobile GUI agents, optimal module configurations across model scales, the inherent limitations of current LFMs, and actionable guidelines for designing more capable and cost efficient mobile agents.
Authors: Fady Rezk, Yuangang Pan, Chuan-Sheng Foo, Xun Xu, Nancy Chen, Henry Gouk, Timothy Hospedales
Abstract: Personalized alignment from preference data has focused primarily on improving personal reward model (RM) accuracy, with the implicit assumption that better preference ranking translates to better personalized behavior. However, in deployment, computational constraints necessitate inference-time adaptation such as reward-guided decoding (RGD) rather than per-user policy fine-tuning. This creates a critical but overlooked requirement: reward models must not only rank preferences accurately but also effectively guide generation. We demonstrate that standard RM accuracy fails catastrophically as a selection criterion for deployment-ready personalized rewards. We introduce policy accuracy; a metric quantifying whether RGD-adapted LLMs correctly discriminate between preferred and dispreferred responses and show that upstream RM accuracy correlates only weakly with downstream policy accuracy (Kendall's tau = 0.08--0.31). More critically, we introduce Pref-LaMP the first personalized alignment benchmark with ground-truth user completions, enabling direct behavioural evaluation. On Pref-LaMP, we expose a complete decoupling between discriminative ranking and generation metrics: methods with 20-point RM accuracy differences produce almost identical output quality, and methods with high ranking accuracy can fail to generate behaviorally aligned responses. These findings reveal that the field has been optimizing for proxy metrics that do not predict deployment performance, and that current personalized alignment methods fail to operationalize preferences into behavioral adaptation under realistic deployment constraints. In contrast, we find simple in-context learning (ICL) to be highly effective - dominating all reward-guided methods for models $\geq$3B parameters, achieving $\sim$3 point ROUGE-1 gains over the best reward method at 7B scale.
Authors: AMAP AI Agent Team, Yulan Hu, Xiangwen Zhang, Sheng Ouyang, Hao Yi, Lu Xu, Qinglin Lang, Lide Tan, Xiang Cheng, Tianchen Ye, Zhicong Li, Ge Chen, Wenjin Yang, Zheng Pan, Shaopan Xiong, Siran Yang, Ju Huang, Yan Zhang, Jiamang Wang, Yong Liu, Yinfeng Huang, Ning Wang, Tucheng Lin, Xin Li, Ning Guo
Abstract: We present STAgent, an agentic large language model tailored for spatio-temporal understanding, designed to solve complex tasks such as constrained point-of-interest discovery and itinerary planning. STAgent is a specialized model capable of interacting with ten distinct tools within spatio-temporal scenarios, enabling it to explore, verify, and refine intermediate steps during complex reasoning. Notably, STAgent effectively preserves its general capabilities. We empower STAgent with these capabilities through three key contributions: (1) a stable tool environment that supports over ten domain-specific tools, enabling asynchronous rollout and training; (2) a hierarchical data curation framework that identifies high-quality data like a needle in a haystack, curating high-quality queries by retaining less than 1\% of the raw data, emphasizing both diversity and difficulty; and (3) a cascaded training recipe that starts with a seed SFT stage acting as a guardian to measure query difficulty, followed by a second SFT stage fine-tuned on queries with high certainty, and an ultimate RL stage that leverages data of low certainty. Initialized with Qwen3-30B-A3B to establish a strong SFT foundation and leverage insights into sample difficulty, STAgent yields promising performance on TravelBench while maintaining its general capabilities across a wide range of general benchmarks, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed agentic model.
Authors: Mingyu Xu, Cheng Fang, Keyue Jiang, Yuqian Zheng, Yanghua Xiao, Baojian Zhou, Qifang Zhao, Suhang Zheng, Xiuwen Zhu, Jiyang Tang, Yongchi Zhao, Yijia Luo, Zhiqi Bai, Yuchi Xu, Wenbo Su, Wei Wang, Bing Zhao, Lin Qu, Xiaoxiao Xu
Abstract: We present Logics-STEM, a state-of-the-art reasoning model fine-tuned on Logics-STEM-SFT-Dataset, a high-quality and diverse dataset at 10M scale that represents one of the largest-scale open-source long chain-of-thought corpora. Logics-STEM targets reasoning tasks in the domains of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), and exhibits exceptional performance on STEM-related benchmarks with an average improvement of 4.68% over the next-best model at 8B scale. We attribute the gains to our data-algorithm co-design engine, where they are jointly optimized to fit a gold-standard distribution behind reasoning. Data-wise, the Logics-STEM-SFT-Dataset is constructed from a meticulously designed data curation engine with 5 stages to ensure the quality, diversity, and scalability, including annotation, deduplication, decontamination, distillation, and stratified sampling. Algorithm-wise, our failure-driven post-training framework leverages targeted knowledge retrieval and data synthesis around model failure regions in the Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) stage to effectively guide the second-stage SFT or the reinforcement learning (RL) for better fitting the target distribution. The superior empirical performance of Logics-STEM reveals the vast potential of combining large-scale open-source data with carefully designed synthetic data, underscoring the critical role of data-algorithm co-design in enhancing reasoning capabilities through post-training. We make both the Logics-STEM models (8B and 32B) and the Logics-STEM-SFT-Dataset (10M and downsampled 2.2M versions) publicly available to support future research in the open-source community.
Authors: Qianjun Pan, Junyi Wang, Jie Zhou, Yutao Yang, Junsong Li, Kaiyin Xu, Yougen Zhou, Yihan Li, Jingyuan Zhao, Qin Chen, Ningning Zhou, Kai Chen, Liang He
Abstract: To develop a reliable AI for psychological assessment, we introduce \texttt{PsychEval}, a multi-session, multi-therapy, and highly realistic benchmark designed to address three key challenges: \textbf{1) Can we train a highly realistic AI counselor?} Realistic counseling is a longitudinal task requiring sustained memory and dynamic goal tracking. We propose a multi-session benchmark (spanning 6-10 sessions across three distinct stages) that demands critical capabilities such as memory continuity, adaptive reasoning, and longitudinal planning. The dataset is annotated with extensive professional skills, comprising over 677 meta-skills and 4577 atomic skills. \textbf{2) How to train a multi-therapy AI counselor?} While existing models often focus on a single therapy, complex cases frequently require flexible strategies among various therapies. We construct a diverse dataset covering five therapeutic modalities (Psychodynamic, Behaviorism, CBT, Humanistic Existentialist, and Postmodernist) alongside an integrative therapy with a unified three-stage clinical framework across six core psychological topics. \textbf{3) How to systematically evaluate an AI counselor?} We establish a holistic evaluation framework with 18 therapy-specific and therapy-shared metrics across Client-Level and Counselor-Level dimensions. To support this, we also construct over 2,000 diverse client profiles. Extensive experimental analysis fully validates the superior quality and clinical fidelity of our dataset. Crucially, \texttt{PsychEval} transcends static benchmarking to serve as a high-fidelity reinforcement learning environment that enables the self-evolutionary training of clinically responsible and adaptive AI counselors.
Authors: Muzhen Zhang, Yujie Cheng, Zhanxiang Lei
Abstract: Spatial prediction of reservoir parameters, especially permeability, is crucial for oil and gas exploration and development. However, the wide range and high variability of permeability prevent existing methods from providing reliable predictions. For the first time in subsurface spatial prediction, this study presents a quantum-enhanced long short-term memory with attention (QLSTMA) model that incorporates variational quantum circuits (VQCs) into the recurrent cell. Using quantum entanglement and superposition principles, the QLSTMA significantly improves the ability to predict complex geological parameters such as permeability. Two quantization structures, QLSTMA with Shared Gates (QLSTMA-SG) and with Independent Gates (QLSTMA-IG), are designed to investigate and evaluate the effects of quantum structure configurations and the number of qubits on model performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the 8-qubit QLSTMA-IG model significantly outperforms the traditional long short-term memory with attention (LSTMA), reducing Mean Absolute Error (MAE) by 19% and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) by 20%, with particularly strong performance in regions featuring complex well-logging data. These findings validate the potential of quantum-classical hybrid neural networks for reservoir prediction, indicating that increasing the number of qubits yields further accuracy gains despite the reliance on classical simulations. This study establishes a foundational framework for the eventual deployment of such models on real quantum hardware and their extension to broader applications in petroleum engineering and geoscience.
Authors: Zhiyong Cao, Dunqiang Liu, Qi Dai, Haojun Xu, Huaiyan Xu, Huan He, Yafei Liu, Siyuan Liu, XiaoLin Lin, Ke Ma, Ruqian Shi, Sijia Yao, Hao Wang, Sicheng Zhou
Abstract: Task-oriented proactive dialogue agents play a pivotal role in recruitment, particularly for steering conversations towards specific business outcomes, such as acquiring social-media contacts for private-channel conversion. Although supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning have proven effective for training such agents, their performance is heavily constrained by the scarcity of high-quality, goal-oriented domain-specific training data. To address this challenge, we propose SimRPD, a three-stage framework for training recruitment proactive dialogue agents. First, we develop a high-fidelity user simulator to synthesize large-scale conversational data through multi-turn online dialogue. Then we introduce a multi-dimensional evaluation framework based on Chain-of-Intention (CoI) to comprehensively assess the simulator and effectively select high-quality data, incorporating both global-level and instance-level metrics. Finally, we train the recruitment proactive dialogue agent on the selected dataset. Experiments in a real-world recruitment scenario demonstrate that SimRPD outperforms existing simulator-based data selection strategies, highlighting its practical value for industrial deployment and its potential applicability to other business-oriented dialogue scenarios.
Authors: Michael C. Darling, Alan H. Hesu, Michael A. Mardikes, Brian C. McGuigan, Reed M. Milewicz
Abstract: We propose a maturity-based framework for certifying embodied AI systems through explicit measurement mechanisms. We argue that certifiable embodied AI requires structured assessment frameworks, quantitative scoring mechanisms, and methods for navigating multi-objective trade-offs inherent in trustworthiness evaluation. We demonstrate this approach using uncertainty quantification as an exemplar measurement mechanism and illustrate feasibility through an Uncrewed Aircraft System (UAS) detection case study.
Authors: Zihang Li, Yuhang Wang, Yikun Zong, Wenhan Yu, Xiaokun Yuan, Runhan Jiang, Zirui Liu, Tong Yang, Arthur Jiang
Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly enhanced the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. We find existing fine-tuning datasets frequently suffer from the "answer right but reasoning wrong" probelm, where correct final answers are derived from hallucinated, redundant, or logically invalid intermediate steps. This paper proposes EntroCoT, a unified framework for automatically identifying and refining low-quality CoT supervision traces. EntroCoT first proposes an entropy-based mechanism to segment the reasoning trace into multiple steps at uncertain junctures, and then introduces a Monte Carlo rollout-based mechanism to evaluate the marginal contribution of each step. By accurately filtering deceptive reasoning samples, EntroCoT constructs a high-quality dataset where every intermediate step in each reasoning trace facilitates the final answer. Extensive experiments on mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that fine-tuning on the subset constructed by EntroCoT consistently outperforms the baseslines of full-dataset supervision.
Authors: Cheng Qian, Emre Can Acikgoz, Bingxuan Li, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Bingxiang He, Qinyu Luo, Dilek Hakkani-T\"ur, Gokhan Tur, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji
Abstract: Agents built on vision-language models increasingly face tasks that demand anticipating future states rather than relying on short-horizon reasoning. Generative world models offer a promising remedy: agents could use them as external simulators to foresee outcomes before acting. This paper empirically examines whether current agents can leverage such world models as tools to enhance their cognition. Across diverse agentic and visual question answering tasks, we observe that some agents rarely invoke simulation (fewer than 1%), frequently misuse predicted rollouts (approximately 15%), and often exhibit inconsistent or even degraded performance (up to 5%) when simulation is available or enforced. Attribution analysis further indicates that the primary bottleneck lies in the agents' capacity to decide when to simulate, how to interpret predicted outcomes, and how to integrate foresight into downstream reasoning. These findings underscore the need for mechanisms that foster calibrated, strategic interaction with world models, paving the way toward more reliable anticipatory cognition in future agent systems.
Authors: Rui Sun, Yifan Sun, Sheng Xu, Li Zhao, Jing Li, Daxin Jiang, Cheng Hua, Zuo Bai
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to achieve remarkable reasoning in domains like mathematics and coding, where verifiable rewards provide clear signals. However, extending this paradigm to financial decision is challenged by the market's stochastic nature: rewards are verifiable but inherently noisy, causing standard RL to degenerate into reward hacking. To address this, we propose Trade-R1, a model training framework that bridges verifiable rewards to stochastic environments via process-level reasoning verification. Our key innovation is a verification method that transforms the problem of evaluating reasoning over lengthy financial documents into a structured Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) task. We construct a triangular consistency metric, assessing pairwise alignment between retrieved evidence, reasoning chains, and decisions to serve as a validity filter for noisy market returns. We explore two reward integration strategies: Fixed-effect Semantic Reward (FSR) for stable alignment signals, and Dynamic-effect Semantic Reward (DSR) for coupled magnitude optimization. Experiments on different country asset selection demonstrate that our paradigm reduces reward hacking, with DSR achieving superior cross-market generalization while maintaining the highest reasoning consistency.
Authors: Ting-Rui Chiang, Dani Yogatama
Abstract: In this work, we propose a simple theoretical framework, Pelican Soup, aiming to better understand how pretraining allows LLMs to (1) generalize to unseen instructions and (2) perform in-context learning, even when the verbalizers are irrelevant to the task. To this end, in our framework, we introduce the notion of "knowledge base" and "reference-sense association" and a simple formalism for natural language processing tasks. Our framework demonstrates how linguistic, psychology, and philosophy studies can inform our understanding of the language model and is connected to several other existing theoretical results. As an illustration of the usage of our framework, we derive a bound on in-context learning loss with our framework. Finally, we support our framework with empirical experiments and provide possible future research directions.
Authors: Juyoung Yun, Jungmin Shin
Abstract: Solar flares, especially C, M, and X class, pose significant risks to satellite operations, communication systems, and power grids. We present a novel approach for predicting extreme solar flares using HMI intensitygrams and magnetograms. By detecting sunspots from intensitygrams and extracting magnetic field patches from magnetograms, we train a Residual Network (ResNet) to classify extreme class flares. Our model demonstrates high accuracy, offering a robust tool for predicting extreme solar flares and improving space weather forecasting. Additionally, we show that HMI magnetograms provide more useful data for deep learning compared to other SDO AIA images by better capturing features critical for predicting flare magnitudes. This study underscores the importance of identifying magnetic fields in solar flare prediction, marking a significant advancement in solar activity prediction with practical implications for mitigating space weather impacts.
Authors: Liyi Zhang, Michael Y. Li, R. Thomas McCoy, Theodore R. Sumers, Jian-Qiao Zhu, Thomas L. Griffiths
Abstract: Autoregressive language models have demonstrated a remarkable ability to extract latent structure from text. The embeddings from large language models have been shown to capture aspects of the syntax and semantics of language. But what should embeddings represent? We connect the autoregressive prediction objective to the idea of constructing predictive sufficient statistics to summarize the information contained in a sequence of observations, and use this connection to identify three settings where the optimal content of embeddings can be identified: independent identically distributed data, where the embedding should capture the sufficient statistics of the data; latent state models, where the embedding should encode the posterior distribution over states given the data; and discrete hypothesis spaces, where the embedding should reflect the posterior distribution over hypotheses given the data. We then conduct empirical probing studies to show that transformers encode these three kinds of latent generating distributions, and that they perform well in out-of-distribution cases and without token memorization in these settings.
Authors: Yifan Zhang, Yang Yuan, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at many tasks but often falter on complex problems that require structured, multi-step reasoning. We introduce the Diagram of Thought (DoT), a new framework that enables a single LLM to build and navigate a mental map of its reasoning. Instead of thinking in a straight line, the model constructs a dynamic diagram of ideas, where it can propose different lines of thought, critique its own steps, and synthesize validated insights into a final conclusion. This entire process is self-contained within the model, making it highly efficient by avoiding the complex external controllers or search algorithms required by other methods. To ensure the reliability of this process, we ground DoT in a rigorous mathematical framework from category theory. This foundation guarantees that the way the model combines information is logical, consistent, and robust, regardless of the order in which ideas were explored. The result is a more powerful and transparent reasoning process that produces a fully auditable, step-by-step trace of the LLM's thinking, bridging the gap between fluent language and formal reasoning.
Authors: K. R. Schuurman, A. Meyer
Abstract: Accurate estimates of surface solar irradiance (SSI) are essential for solar resource assessments and solar energy forecasts in grid integration and building control applications. SSI estimates for spatially extended regions can be retrieved from geostationary satellites such as Meteosat. Traditional SSI satellite retrievals like Heliosat rely on physical radiative transfer modelling. We introduce the first machine-learning-based satellite retrieval for instantaneous SSI and demonstrate its capability to provide accurate and generalizable SSI estimates across Europe. Our deep learning retrieval provides near real-time SSI estimates based on data-driven emulation of Heliosat and fine-tuning on pyranometer networks. By including SSI from ground stations, our SSI retrieval model can outperform Heliosat accuracy and generalize well to regions with other climates and surface albedos in cloudy conditions (clear-sky index < 0.8). We also show that the SSI retrieved from Heliosat exhibits large biases in mountain regions, and that training and fine-tuning our retrieval models on SSI data from ground stations strongly reduces these biases, outperforming Heliosat. Furthermore, we quantify the relative importance of the Meteosat channels and other predictor variables like solar zenith angle for the accuracy of our deep learning SSI retrieval model in different cloud conditions. We find that in cloudy conditions multiple near-infrared and infrared channels enhance the performance. Our results can facilitate the development of more accurate satellite retrieval models of surface solar irradiance.
Authors: Tamara R. Lenhard, Andreas Weinmann, Kai Franke, Tobias Koch
Abstract: Developing robust drone detection systems is often constrained by the limited availability of large-scale annotated training data and the high costs associated with real-world data collection. However, leveraging synthetic data generated via game engine-based simulations provides a promising and cost-effective solution to overcome this issue. Therefore, we present SynDroneVision, a synthetic dataset specifically designed for RGB-based drone detection in surveillance applications. Featuring diverse backgrounds, lighting conditions, and drone models, SynDroneVision offers a comprehensive training foundation for deep learning algorithms. To evaluate the dataset's effectiveness, we perform a comparative analysis across a selection of recent YOLO detection models. Our findings demonstrate that SynDroneVision is a valuable resource for real-world data enrichment, achieving notable enhancements in model performance and robustness, while significantly reducing the time and costs of real-world data acquisition. SynDroneVision will be publicly released upon paper acceptance.
Authors: Carlo Alfano, Silvia Sapora, Jakob Nicolaus Foerster, Patrick Rebeschini, Yee Whye Teh
Abstract: Evaluating preference optimization (PO) algorithms on LLM alignment is a challenging task that presents prohibitive costs, noise, and several variables like model size and hyper-parameters. In this work, we show that it is possible to gain insights on the efficacy of PO algorithm on simpler benchmarks. We design a diagnostic suite of MuJoCo tasks and datasets, which we use to systematically evaluate PO algorithms, establishing a more controlled and cheaper benchmark. We then propose a novel family of PO algorithms based on mirror descent, which we call Mirror Preference Optimization (MPO). Through evolutionary strategies, we search this class to discover algorithms specialized to specific properties of preference datasets, such as mixed-quality or noisy data. We demonstrate that our discovered PO algorithms outperform all known algorithms in the targeted MuJoCo settings. Finally, based on the insights gained from our MuJoCo experiments, we design a PO algorithm that significantly outperform existing baselines in an LLM alignment task.
Authors: Yifan Zhang, Junhui Hou
Abstract: Cross-modal contrastive distillation has recently been explored for learning effective 3D representations. However, existing methods focus primarily on modality-shared features, neglecting the modality-specific features during the pre-training process, which leads to suboptimal representations. In this paper, we theoretically analyze the limitations of current contrastive methods for 3D representation learning and propose a new framework, namely CMCR (Cross-Modal Comprehensive Representation Learning), to address these shortcomings. Our approach improves upon traditional methods by better integrating both modality-shared and modality-specific features. Specifically, we introduce masked image modeling and occupancy estimation tasks to guide the network in learning more comprehensive modality-specific features. Furthermore, we propose a novel multi-modal unified codebook that learns an embedding space shared across different modalities. Besides, we introduce geometry-enhanced masked image modeling to further boost 3D representation learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method mitigates the challenges faced by traditional approaches and consistently outperforms existing image-to-LiDAR contrastive distillation methods in downstream tasks. Code will be available at https://github.com/Eaphan/CMCR.
Authors: Tarleton Gillespie, Ryland Shaw, Mary L. Gray, Jina Suh
Abstract: As generative AI technologies find more and more real-world applications, the importance of testing their performance and safety seems paramount. "Red-teaming" has quickly become the primary approach to test AI models--prioritized by AI companies, and enshrined in AI policy and regulation. Members of red teams act as adversaries, probing AI systems to test their safety mechanisms and uncover vulnerabilities. Yet we know far too little about this work or its implications. This essay calls for collaboration between computer scientists and social scientists to study the sociotechnical systems surrounding AI technologies, including the work of red-teaming, to avoid repeating the mistakes of the recent past. We highlight the importance of understanding the values and assumptions behind red-teaming, the labor arrangements involved, and the psychological impacts on red-teamers, drawing insights from the lessons learned around the work of content moderation.
Authors: Jiayi Fu, Xuandong Zhao, Chengyuan Yao, Heng Wang, Qi Han, Yanghua Xiao
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, RLHF is susceptible to \emph{reward hacking}, where the agent exploits flaws in the reward function rather than learning the intended behavior, thus degrading alignment. Although reward shaping helps stabilize RLHF and partially mitigate reward hacking, a systematic investigation into shaping techniques and their underlying principles remains lacking. To bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive study of the prevalent reward shaping methods. Our analysis suggests two key design principles: (1) the RL reward should be bounded, and (2) the RL reward benefits from rapid initial growth followed by gradual convergence. Guided by these insights, we propose Preference As Reward (PAR), a novel approach that leverages the latent preferences embedded within the reward model as the signal for reinforcement learning. Moreover, PAR exhibits two critical variance-reduction properties that contribute to stabilizing the RLHF training process and effectively extending the tolerance window for early stopping. We evaluated PAR on the base model Gemma2-2B using two datasets, Ultrafeedback-Binarized and HH-RLHF. Experimental results demonstrate PAR's superior performance over other reward shaping methods. On the AlpacaEval 2.0 benchmark, PAR achieves a win rate of at least 5 percentage points higher than competing approaches. Furthermore, PAR exhibits remarkable data efficiency, requiring only a single reference reward for optimal performance, and maintains robustness against reward hacking even after two full epochs of training. The code is available at https://github.com/PorUna-byte/PAR.
Authors: Zhengyuan Jiang, Yuepeng Hu, Yuchen Yang, Yinzhi Cao, Neil Zhenqiang Gong
Abstract: Text-to-Image models may generate harmful content, such as pornographic images, particularly when unsafe prompts are submitted. To address this issue, safety filters are often added on top of text-to-image models, or the models themselves are aligned to reduce harmful outputs. However, these defenses remain vulnerable when an attacker strategically designs adversarial prompts to bypass these safety guardrails. In this work, we propose \alg, a method to jailbreak text-to-image models with safety guardrails using a fine-tuned large language model. Unlike other query-based jailbreak attacks that require repeated queries to the target model, our attack generates adversarial prompts efficiently after fine-tuning our AttackLLM. We evaluate our method on three datasets of unsafe prompts and against five safety guardrails. Our results demonstrate that our approach effectively bypasses safety guardrails, outperforms existing no-box attacks, and also facilitates other query-based attacks.
Authors: Andr\'es Herrera-Poyatos, Javier Del Ser, Marcos L\'opez de Prado, Fei-Yue Wang, Enrique Herrera-Viedma, Francisco Herrera
Abstract: Responsible Artificial Intelligence (RAI) addresses the ethical and regulatory challenges of deploying AI systems in high-risk scenarios. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework for the design of an RAI system (RAIS) that integrates five key dimensions: domain definition, trustworthy AI design, auditability, accountability, and governance. Unlike prior work that treats these components in isolation, our proposal emphasizes their inter-dependencies and iterative feedback loops, enabling proactive and reactive accountability throughout the AI lifecycle. Beyond presenting the framework, we synthesize recent developments in global AI governance and analyze limitations in existing principles-based approaches, highlighting fragmentation, implementation gaps, and the need for participatory governance. The paper also identifies critical challenges and research directions for the RAIS framework, including sector-specific adaptation and operationalization, to support certification, post-deployment monitoring, and risk-based auditing. By bridging technical design and institutional responsibility, this work offers a practical blueprint for embedding responsibility throughout the AI lifecycle, enabling transparent, ethically aligned, and legally compliant AI-based systems.
Authors: Avinash Patil, Amardeep Kour Gedhu
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in predicting mental health outcomes from online text, yet traditional classification methods often lack interpretability and robustness. This study evaluates structured reasoning techniques-Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Self-Consistency (SC-CoT), and Tree-of-Thought (ToT)-to improve classification accuracy across multiple mental health datasets sourced from Reddit. We analyze reasoning-driven prompting strategies, including Zero-shot CoT and Few-shot CoT, using key performance metrics such as Balanced Accuracy, F1 score, and Sensitivity/Specificity. Our findings indicate that reasoning-enhanced techniques improve classification performance over direct prediction, particularly in complex cases. Compared to baselines such as Zero Shot non-CoT Prompting, and fine-tuned pre-trained transformers such as BERT and Mental-RoBerta, and fine-tuned Open Source LLMs such as Mental Alpaca and Mental-Flan-T5, reasoning-driven LLMs yield notable gains on datasets like Dreaddit (+0.52\% over M-LLM, +0.82\% over BERT) and SDCNL (+4.67\% over M-LLM, +2.17\% over BERT). However, performance declines in Depression Severity, and CSSRS predictions suggest dataset-specific limitations, likely due to our using a more extensive test set. Among prompting strategies, Few-shot CoT consistently outperforms others, reinforcing the effectiveness of reasoning-driven LLMs. Nonetheless, dataset variability highlights challenges in model reliability and interpretability. This study provides a comprehensive benchmark of reasoning-based LLM techniques for mental health text classification. It offers insights into their potential for scalable clinical applications while identifying key challenges for future improvements.
Authors: Ra\'ul Ortega, Jos\'e Manuel G\'omez-P\'erez
Abstract: We present SciClaims, an interactive web-based system for end-to-end scientific claim analysis in the biomedical domain. Designed for high-stakes use cases such as systematic literature reviews and patent validation, SciClaims extracts claims from text, retrieves relevant evidence from PubMed, and verifies their veracity. The system features a user-friendly interface where users can input scientific text and view extracted claims, predictions, supporting or refuting evidence, and justifications in natural language. Unlike prior approaches, SciClaims seamlessly integrates the entire scientific claim analysis process using a single large language model, without requiring additional fine-tuning. SciClaims is optimized to run efficiently on a single GPU and is publicly available for live interaction.
Authors: Chenhao Li, Andreas Krause, Marco Hutter
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved impressive results in robotics, yet high-performing pipelines remain highly task-specific, with little reuse of prior data. Offline Model-based RL (MBRL) offers greater data efficiency by training policies entirely from existing datasets, but suffers from compounding errors and distribution shift in long-horizon rollouts. Although existing methods have shown success in controlled simulation benchmarks, robustly applying them to the noisy, biased, and partially observed datasets typical of real-world robotics remains challenging. We present a principled pipeline for making offline MBRL effective on physical robots. Our RWM-U extends autoregressive world models with epistemic uncertainty estimation, enabling temporally consistent multi-step rollouts with uncertainty effectively propagated over long horizons. We combine RWM-U with MOPO-PPO, which adapts uncertainty-penalized policy optimization to the stable, on-policy PPO framework for real-world control. We evaluate our approach on diverse manipulation and locomotion tasks in simulation and on real quadruped and humanoid, training policies entirely from offline datasets. The resulting policies consistently outperform model-free and uncertainty-unaware model-based baselines, and fusing real-world data in model learning further yields robust policies that surpass online model-free baselines trained solely in simulation.
Authors: Matthew Landers, Taylor W. Killian, Thomas Hartvigsen, Afsaneh Doryab
Abstract: The combinatorial structure of many real-world action spaces leads to exponential growth in the number of possible actions, limiting the effectiveness of conventional reinforcement learning algorithms. Recent approaches for combinatorial action spaces impose factorized or sequential structures over sub-actions, failing to capture complex joint behavior. We introduce the Sub-Action Interaction Network using Transformers (SAINT), a novel policy architecture that represents multi-component actions as unordered sets and models their dependencies via self-attention conditioned on the global state. SAINT is permutation-invariant, sample-efficient, and compatible with standard policy optimization algorithms. In 20 distinct combinatorial environments across three task domains, including environments with nearly 17 million joint actions, SAINT consistently outperforms strong baselines.
Authors: Jizhou Guo, Zhaomin Wu, Hanchen Yang, Philip S. Yu
Abstract: Best-of-N sampling is a powerful method for improving Large Language Model (LLM) performance, but it is often limited by its dependence on massive, text-based reward models. These models are not only computationally expensive but also data-hungry, requiring extensive labeled datasets for training. This creates a significant data challenge, as they overlook a rich, readily available data source: the LLM's own internal hidden states. To address this data and efficiency gap, we introduce SWIFT (Simple Weighted Intrinsic Feedback Technique), a novel and lightweight method that learns a reward function directly from the rich information embedded in LLM hidden states. Operating at the token embedding level, SWIFT employs simple linear layers to effectively distinguish between preferred and dispreferred generations, eliminating the need for computationally intensive text-based modeling. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that SWIFT outperforms existing baselines (12.7% higher accuracy than EurusRM-7B on MATH dataset) while using less than 0.005% of their parameters. Its robust scalability, compatibility with certain closed-source models via logit access, and ability to combine with traditional reward models for additional performance highlight SWIFT's practical value and contribution to more efficient data-driven LLM post-training. Our code is available at https://github.com/aster2024/SWIFT .
Authors: Yue Huang, Zi'ang Li, Tianle Hu, Jie Wen, Guanbin Li, Jinglin Zhang, Guoxu Zhou, Xiaozhao Fang
Abstract: Single image reflection separation aims to separate the transmission and reflection layers from a mixed image. Existing methods typically combine general priors from pre-trained models with task-specific priors such as text prompts and reflection detection. However, the transmission prior, as the most direct task-specific prior for the target transmission layer, has not been effectively modeled or fully utilized, limiting performance in complex scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a dual-prior interaction framework based on lightweight transmission prior generation and effective prior fusion. First, we design a Local Linear Correction Network (LLCN) that finetunes pre-trained models based on the physical constraint T=SI+B, where S and B represent pixel-wise and channel-wise scaling and bias transformations. LLCN efficiently generates high-quality transmission priors with minimal parameters. Second, we construct a Dual-Prior Interaction Transformer (DPIT) that employs a dual-stream channel reorganization attention mechanism. By reorganizing features from general and transmission priors for attention computation, DPIT achieves deep fusion of both priors, fully exploiting their complementary information. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Authors: Avinash Patil
Abstract: Software Quality Assurance (SQA) is critical for delivering reliable, secure, and efficient software products. The Software Quality Assurance Process aims to provide assurance that work products and processes comply with predefined provisions and plans. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) present new opportunities to enhance existing SQA processes by automating tasks like requirement analysis, code review, test generation, and compliance checks. Simultaneously, established standards such as ISO/IEC 12207, ISO/IEC 25010, ISO/IEC 5055, ISO 9001/ISO/IEC 90003, CMMI, and TMM provide structured frameworks for ensuring robust quality practices. This paper surveys the intersection of LLM-based SQA methods and these recognized standards, highlighting how AI-driven solutions can augment traditional approaches while maintaining compliance and process maturity. We first review the foundational software quality standards and the technical fundamentals of LLMs in software engineering. Next, we explore various LLM-based SQA applications, including requirement validation, defect detection, test generation, and documentation maintenance. We then map these applications to key software quality frameworks, illustrating how LLMs can address specific requirements and metrics within each standard. Empirical case studies and open-source initiatives demonstrate the practical viability of these methods. At the same time, discussions on challenges (e.g., data privacy, model bias, explainability) underscore the need for deliberate governance and auditing. Finally, we propose future directions encompassing adaptive learning, privacy-focused deployments, multimodal analysis, and evolving standards for AI-driven software quality.
Authors: Jamie Hayes, Ilia Shumailov, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Matthew Jagielski, George Kaissis, Milad Nasr, Sahra Ghalebikesabi, Meenatchi Sundaram Mutu Selva Annamalai, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Igor Shilov, Matthieu Meeus, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Katherine Lee, Franziska Boenisch, Adam Dziedzic, A. Feder Cooper
Abstract: State-of-the-art membership inference attacks (MIAs) typically require training many reference models, making it difficult to scale these attacks to large pre-trained language models (LLMs). As a result, prior research has either relied on weaker attacks that avoid training references (e.g., fine-tuning attacks), or on stronger attacks applied to small models and datasets. However, weaker attacks have been shown to be brittle and insights from strong attacks in simplified settings do not translate to today's LLMs. These challenges prompt an important question: are the limitations observed in prior work due to attack design choices, or are MIAs fundamentally ineffective on LLMs? We address this question by scaling LiRA--one of the strongest MIAs--to GPT-2 architectures ranging from 10M to 1B parameters, training references on over 20B tokens from the C4 dataset. Our results advance the understanding of MIAs on LLMs in four key ways. While (1) strong MIAs can succeed on pre-trained LLMs, (2) their effectiveness, remains limited (e.g., AUC<0.7) in practical settings. (3) Even when strong MIAs achieve better-than-random AUC, aggregate metrics can conceal substantial per-sample MIA decision instability: due to training randomness, many decisions are so unstable that they are statistically indistinguishable from a coin flip. Finally, (4) the relationship between MIA success and related LLM privacy metrics is not as straightforward as prior work has suggested.
Authors: Feiteng Fang, Dingwei Chen, Xiang Huang, Ting-En Lin, Yuchuan Wu, Xiong Liu, Xinge Ye, Ziqiang Liu, Haonan Zhang, Liang Zhu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Yongbin Li
Abstract: Currently, most reinforcement learning tasks focus on domains like mathematics and programming, where verification is relatively straightforward. However, in subjective tasks such as role-playing, alignment techniques struggle to make progress, primarily because subjective reward modeling using the Bradley-Terry model faces significant challenges when dealing with ambiguous preferences. To improve reward modeling in subjective tasks, this paper proposes AAM (\textbf{\underline{A}}ct-\textbf{\underline{A}}daptive \textbf{\underline{M}}argin), which enhances reward modeling by dynamically calibrating preference margins using the model's internal parameter knowledge. We design two versions of AAM that efficiently generate contextually-appropriate preference gaps without additional human annotation. This approach fundamentally improves how reward models handle subjective rewards by better integrating generative understanding with preference scoring. To validate AAM's effectiveness in subjective reward modeling, we conduct evaluations on RewardBench, JudgeBench, and challenging role-playing tasks. Results show that AAM significantly improves subjective reward modeling performance, enhancing Bradley-Terry reward models by 2.95\% in general tasks and 4.85\% in subjective role-playing tasks. Furthermore, reward models trained with AAM can help downstream alignment tasks achieve better results. Our test results show that applying rewards generated by AAM-Augmented RM to preference learning techniques (e.g., GRPO) achieves state-of-the-art results on CharacterEval and Charm. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/calubkk/AAM.
Authors: Zhuohan Xie, Daniil Orel, Rushil Thareja, Dhruv Sahnan, Hachem Madmoun, Fan Zhang, Debopriyo Banerjee, Georgi Georgiev, Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Jimin Huang, Jinyan Su, Aaryamonvikram Singh, Rui Xing, Rania Elbadry, Chen Xu, Haonan Li, Fajri Koto, Ivan Koychev, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yuxia Wang, Salem Lahlou, Veselin Stoyanov, Sophia Ananiadou, Preslav Nakov
Abstract: Multi-step symbolic reasoning is essential for robust financial analysis; yet, current benchmarks largely overlook this capability. Existing datasets such as FinQA and ConvFinQA emphasize final numerical answers while neglecting the intermediate reasoning required for transparency and verification. To address this gap, we introduce FINCHAIN, the first benchmark specifically designed for verifiable Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation in finance. FINCHAIN spans 58 topics across 12 financial domains, each represented by parameterized symbolic templates with executable Python traces that enable fully machine-verifiable reasoning and scalable, contamination-free data generation. To assess reasoning capacity, we propose CHAINEVAL, a dynamic alignment measure that jointly evaluates both the final-answer correctness and the step-level reasoning consistency. Our evaluation of 26 leading LLMs reveals that even frontier proprietary LLMs exhibit clear limitations in symbolic financial reasoning, while domain-adapted and math-enhanced fine-tuned models can substantially narrow this gap. Overall, FINCHAIN exposes persistent weaknesses in multi-step financial reasoning and provides a foundation for developing trustworthy, interpretable, and verifiable financial AI.
Authors: Arkadiusz Modzelewski, Witold Sosnowski, Tiziano Labruna, Adam Wierzbicki, Giovanni Da San Martino
Abstract: Disinformation detection is a key aspect of media literacy. Psychological studies have shown that knowledge of persuasive fallacies helps individuals detect disinformation. Inspired by these findings, we experimented with large language models (LLMs) to test whether infusing persuasion knowledge enhances disinformation detection. As a result, we introduce the Persuasion-Augmented Chain of Thought (PCoT), a novel approach that leverages persuasion to improve disinformation detection in zero-shot classification. We extensively evaluate PCoT on online news and social media posts. Moreover, we publish two novel, up-to-date disinformation datasets: EUDisinfo and MultiDis. These datasets enable the evaluation of PCoT on content entirely unseen by the LLMs used in our experiments, as the content was published after the models' knowledge cutoffs. We show that, on average, PCoT outperforms competitive methods by 15% across five LLMs and five datasets. These findings highlight the value of persuasion in strengthening zero-shot disinformation detection.
Authors: Fei Li, Song Liu, Weiguo Wu, Shiqiang Nie, Jinyu Wang
Abstract: The high memory demands of the Key-Value (KV) Cache during the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) severely restrict their deployment in resource-constrained platforms. Quantization can effectively alleviate the memory pressure caused by KV Cache. However, existing methods either rely on static one-size-fits-all precision allocation or fail to dynamically prioritize critical KV in long-context tasks, forcing memory-accuracy-throughput tradeoffs. In this work, we propose a novel mixed-precision quantization method for KV Cache named KVmix. KVmix leverages gradient-based importance analysis to evaluate how individual Key and Value projection matrices affect the model loss, enabling layer-specific bit-width allocation for mix-precision quantization. It dynamically prioritizes higher precision for important layers while aggressively quantizing less influential ones, achieving a tunable balance between accuracy and efficiency. KVmix also introduces a dynamic long-context optimization strategy that adaptively keeps full-precision KV pairs for recent pivotal tokens and compresses older ones, achieving high-quality sequence generation with low memory usage. Additionally, KVmix provides efficient low-bit quantization and CUDA kernels to optimize computational overhead. On LLMs such as Llama and Mistral, KVmix achieves near-lossless inference performance with extremely low quantization configuration (Key 2.19bit Value 2.38bit), while delivering a remarkable 4.9x memory compression and a 5.3x speedup in inference throughput.
Authors: Xiang Cheng, Chengyan Pan, Minjun Zhao, Deyang Li, Fangchao Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Xiao Zhang, Yong Liu
Abstract: In-Context Learning (ICL) is an essential emergent ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), and recent studies introduce Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to exemplars of ICL to enhance the reasoning capability, especially in mathematics tasks. However, given the continuous advancement of model capabilities, it remains unclear whether CoT exemplars still benefit recent, stronger models in such tasks. Through systematic experiments, we find that for recent strong models such as the Qwen2.5 series, adding traditional CoT exemplars does not improve reasoning performance compared to Zero-Shot CoT. Instead, their primary function is to align the output format with human expectations. We further investigate the effectiveness of enhanced CoT exemplars, constructed using answers from advanced models such as \texttt{Qwen2.5-Max} and \texttt{DeepSeek-R1}. Experimental results indicate that these enhanced exemplars still fail to improve the model's reasoning performance. Further analysis reveals that models tend to ignore the exemplars and focus primarily on the instructions, leading to no observable gain in reasoning ability. Overall, our findings highlight the limitations of the current ICL+CoT framework in mathematical reasoning, calling for a re-examination of the ICL paradigm and the definition of exemplars.
Authors: Hyunji Lee, Seunghyun Yoon, Yunjae Won, Hanseok Oh, Geewook Kim, Trung Bui, Franck Dernoncourt, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal, Minjoon Seo
Abstract: Instruction tuning is a widely used approach to improve the instruction-following ability of large language models (LLMs). Instruction-tuning datasets typically include a mixture of context-augmented and context-free examples, yet prior work has largely combined these data types without examining their distinct effects. In this paper, we investigate how training LLMs with or without context affects model behavior and downstream performance. First, in the text domain, we show that LLMs trained with context attend more strongly to the provided knowledge, achieving better grounding. We also observe that context-augmented training shifts how LLMs use knowledge: models store and leverage less on parametric knowledge and instead depend more on the provided context. Second, we observe that using LLM trained with context-augmented data as the backbone for vision-language models reduces hallucination and improves grounding in the visual domain. Finally, we explore practical strategies for real-world deployments where context availability varies. We show that maintaining separate context-augmented and context-free models and routing inputs between them yields more robust overall performance than training a single mixed model, as it better preserves their complementary strengths.
Authors: Cooper Doyle, Rebecca Chan, Andy Hu, Anna Leontjeva
Abstract: Low-rank adaptation methods enable efficient task-specific updates in large neural networks, but provide no principled mechanism for uncertainty estimation or capacity control. We introduce Low-Rank Variational Dropout (LRVD), a Bayesian framework that operates directly in the space of low-rank adaptation. LRVD employs a scale-invariant, sparsity-inducing prior together with a structured variational family that ties uncertainty at the level of latent rank components, inducing rank-wise noise-to-signal ratios for automatic capacity selection. As a concrete instantiation, we apply LRVD to low-rank adaptation and obtain BayesLoRA, which jointly learns predictive uncertainty and the effective adapter rank with only O(r) additional parameters, where r is the adapter rank. We empirically show that BayesLoRA induces stable, non-arbitrary rank structure aligned with the intrinsic singular directions of the learned updates, and outperforms existing low-rank sparsification methods in accuracy at comparable training cost while delivering substantially improved predictive calibration at negligible additional overhead.
Authors: Xunjian Yin, Sitao Cheng, Yuxi Xie, Xinyu Hu, Li Lin, Xinyi Wang, Liangming Pan, William Yang Wang, Xiaojun Wan
Abstract: We introduce LEDOM, the first purely reverse language model, trained autoregressively on 435B tokens with 2B and 7B parameter variants, which processes sequences in reverse temporal order through previous token prediction. For the first time, we present the reverse language model as a potential foundational model across general tasks, accompanied by a set of intriguing examples and insights. Based on LEDOM, we further introduce a novel application: Reverse Reward, where LEDOM-guided reranking of forward language model outputs leads to substantial performance improvements on mathematical reasoning tasks. This approach leverages LEDOM's unique backward reasoning capability to refine generation quality through posterior evaluation. Our findings suggest that LEDOM exhibits unique characteristics with broad application potential. We will release all models, training code, and pre-training data to facilitate future research.
Authors: Prashant Govindarajan, Davide Baldelli, Jay Pathak, Quentin Fournier, Sarath Chandar
Abstract: Computer-aided design (CAD) is the digital construction of 2D and 3D objects, and is central to a wide range of engineering and manufacturing applications like automobile and aviation. Despite its importance, CAD modeling remains largely a time-intensive, manual task. Recent works have attempted to automate this process with small transformer-based models and handcrafted CAD sequence representations. However, there has been little effort to leverage the potential of large language models (LLMs) for sequential CAD design. In this work, we introduce a new large-scale dataset of more than 170k CAD models annotated with high-quality, human-like descriptions generated with our pipeline based on GPT-4.1. Using this dataset, we fine-tune powerful code-LLMs to generate CAD sequences represented in a JSON-based format from natural language descriptions, demonstrating the viability and effectiveness of this approach for text-conditioned CAD generation. Because simple metrics often fail to reflect the quality of generated objects, we introduce geometric and topological metrics based on sphericity, mean curvature, and Euler characteristic to provide richer structural insights. Our experiments and ablation studies on both synthetic and human-annotated data demonstrate that CADmium is able to automate CAD design, drastically speeding up the design of new objects. The dataset, code, and fine-tuned models are available online.
Authors: Yichen Xu, Liangyu Chen, Liang Zhang, Jianzhe Ma, Wenxuan Wang, Qin Jin
Abstract: Charts are a universally adopted medium for data communication, yet existing chart understanding benchmarks are overwhelmingly English-centric, limiting their accessibility and relevance to global audiences. To address this limitation, we introduce PolyChartQA, the first large-scale multilingual benchmark for chart question answering, comprising 22,606 charts and 26,151 QA pairs across 10 diverse languages. PolyChartQA is constructed through a scalable pipeline that enables efficient multilingual chart generation via data translation and code reuse, supported by LLM-based translation and rigorous quality control. We systematically evaluate multilingual chart understanding with PolyChartQA on state-of-the-art LVLMs and reveal a significant performance gap between English and other languages, particularly low-resource ones. Additionally, we introduce a companion multilingual chart question answering training set, PolyChartQA-Train, on which fine-tuning LVLMs yields substantial gains in multilingual chart understanding across diverse model sizes and architectures. Together, our benchmark provides a foundation for developing globally inclusive vision-language models capable of understanding charts across diverse linguistic contexts.
Authors: Sirui Wang, Zhou Guan, Bingxi Zhao, Tongjia Gu, Jie Liu
Abstract: Accurate prediction of driving intention is key to enhancing the safety and interactive efficiency of human-machine co-driving systems. It serves as a cornerstone for achieving high-level autonomous driving. However, current approaches remain inadequate for accurately modeling the complex spatiotemporal interdependencies and the unpredictable variability of human driving behavior. To address these challenges, we propose CaTFormer, a causal Temporal Transformer that explicitly models causal interactions between driver behavior and environmental context for robust intention prediction. Specifically, CaTFormer introduces a novel Reciprocal Delayed Fusion (RDF) mechanism for precise temporal alignment of interior and exterior feature streams, a Counterfactual Residual Encoding (CRE) module that systematically eliminates spurious correlations to reveal authentic causal dependencies, and an innovative Feature Synthesis Network (FSN) that adaptively synthesizes these purified representations into coherent temporal representations. Experimental results demonstrate that CaTFormer attains state-of-the-art performance on the Brain4Cars dataset. It effectively captures complex causal temporal dependencies and enhances both the accuracy and transparency of driving intention prediction.
Authors: Christian Meske, Tobias Hermanns, Esther von der Weiden, Kai-Uwe Loser, Thorsten Berger
Abstract: Software development is undergoing a fundamental transformation as vibe coding becomes widespread, with large portions of contemporary codebases now being generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The disconnect between rapid adoption and limited conceptual understanding highlights the need for an inquiry into this emerging paradigm. Drawing on an intent perspective and historical analysis, we define vibe coding as a software development paradigm where humans and Generative AI (GenAI) engage in collaborative flow to co-create software artifacts through natural language dialogue, shifting the mediation of developer intent from deterministic instruction to probabilistic inference. By intent mediation, we refer to the fundamental process through which developers translate their conceptual goals into representations that computational systems can execute. Our results show that vibe coding redistributes epistemic labor between humans and machines, shifting expertise from technical implementation toward collaborative orchestration. We identify key opportunities, including democratization, acceleration, and systemic leverage, alongside risks such as black-box codebases, responsibility gaps, and ecosystem bias. We conclude with a research agenda spanning human-, technology-, and organization-centered directions to guide future investigations of this paradigm.
Authors: Yixin Zhu, Zuoliang Zhu, Jian Yang, Milo\v{s} Ha\v{s}an, Jin Xie, Beibei Wang
Abstract: We present WeatherDiffusion, a diffusion-based framework for controllable weather editing in intrinsic space. Our framework includes two components based on diffusion priors: an inverse renderer that estimates material properties, scene geometry, and lighting as intrinsic maps from an input image, and a forward renderer that utilizes these geometry and material maps along with a text prompt that describes specific weather conditions to generate a final image. The intrinsic maps enhance controllability compared to traditional pixel-space editing approaches. We propose an intrinsic map-aware attention mechanism that improves spatial correspondence and decomposition quality in large outdoor scenes. For forward rendering, we leverage CLIP-space interpolation of weather prompts to achieve fine-grained weather control. We also introduce a synthetic and a real-world dataset, containing 38k and 18k images under various weather conditions, each with intrinsic map annotations. WeatherDiffusion outperforms state-of-the-art pixel-space editing approaches, weather restoration methods, and rendering-based methods, showing promise for downstream tasks such as autonomous driving, enhancing the robustness of detection and segmentation in challenging weather scenarios.
Authors: Vincent-Daniel Yun
Abstract: Low-precision training has become crucial for reducing the computational and memory costs of large-scale deep learning. However, quantizing gradients introduces magnitude shrinkage, which can change how stochastic gradient descent (SGD) converges. In this study, we explore SGD convergence under a gradient shrinkage model, where each stochastic gradient is scaled by a factor \( q_k \in (0,1] \). We show that this shrinkage affect the usual stepsize \( \mu_k \) with an effective stepsize \( \mu_k q_k \), slowing convergence when \( q_{\min} < 1 \). With typical smoothness and bounded-variance assumptions, we prove that low-precision SGD still converges, but at a slower pace set by \( q_{\min} \), and with a higher steady error level due to quantization effects. We analyze theoretically how lower numerical precision slows training by treating it as gradient shrinkage within the standard SGD convergence setup.
Authors: Wenpeng Xing, Mohan Li, Chunqiang Hu, Haitao Xu, Ningyu Zhang, Bo Lin, Meng Han
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Existing methods, primarily relying on discrete input optimization (e.g., GCG), often suffer from high computational costs and generate high-perplexity prompts that are easily blocked by simple filters. To overcome these limitations, we propose Latent Fusion Jailbreak (LFJ), a stealthy white-box attack that operates in the continuous latent space. Unlike previous approaches, LFJ constructs adversarial representations by mathematically fusing the hidden states of a harmful query with a thematically similar benign query, effectively masking malicious intent while retaining semantic drive. We further introduce a gradient-guided optimization strategy to balance attack success and computational efficiency. Extensive evaluations on Vicuna-7B, LLaMA-2-7B-Chat, Guanaco-7B, LLaMA-3-70B, and Mistral-7B-Instruct show that LFJ achieves an average Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 94.01%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines like GCG and AutoDAN while avoiding detectable input artifacts. Furthermore, we identify that thematic similarity in the latent space is a critical vulnerability in current safety alignments. Finally, we propose a latent adversarial training defense that reduces LFJ's ASR by over 80% without compromising model utility.
Authors: Wenpeng Xing, Zhonghao Qi, Yupeng Qin, Yilin Li, Caini Chang, Jiahui Yu, Changting Lin, Zhenzhen Xie, Meng Han
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak. The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools via protocols such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) introduces critical security vulnerabilities, including prompt injection, data exfiltration, and other threats. To counter these challenges, we propose MCP-GUARD, a robust, layered defense architecture designed for LLM-tool interactions. MCP-GUARD employs a three-stage detection pipeline that balances efficiency with accuracy: it progresses from lightweight static scanning for overt threats and a deep neural detector for semantic attacks, to our fine-tuned E5-based model which achieves 96.01\% accuracy in identifying adversarial prompts. Finally, an LLM arbitrator synthesizes these signals to deliver the final decision. To enable rigorous training and evaluation, we introduce MCP-ATTACKBENCH, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 70,448 samples augmented by GPT-4. This benchmark simulates diverse real-world attack vectors that circumvent conventional defenses in the MCP paradigm, thereby laying a solid foundation for future research on securing LLM-tool ecosystems.
Authors: Jianfeng Si, Lin Sun, Zhewen Tan, Xiangzheng Zhang
Abstract: Current methods for content safety in Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), often rely on multi-stage training pipelines and lack fine-grained, post-deployment controllability. To address these limitations, we propose a unified co-training framework that efficiently integrates multiple safety behaviors: positive (lawful/prosocial), negative (unfiltered/risk-prone) and rejective (refusal-oriented/conservative) within a single SFT stage. Notably, each behavior is dynamically activated via a simple system-level instruction, or magic token, enabling stealthy and efficient behavioral switching at inference time. This flexibility supports diverse deployment scenarios, such as positive for safe user interaction, negative for internal red-teaming, and rejective for context-aware refusals triggered by upstream moderation signals. This co-training strategy induces a distinct Safety Alignment Margin in the output space, characterized by well-separated response distributions corresponding to each safety mode. The existence of this margin provides empirical evidence for the model's safety robustness and enables unprecedented fine-grained control. Experiments show that our method matches the safety alignment quality of SFT+DPO, with our 8B model notably surpassing DeepSeek-R1 (671B) in safety performance, while significantly reducing both training complexity and deployment costs. This work presents a scalable, efficient, and highly controllable solution for LLM content safety.
Authors: Weihang Su, Anzhe Xie, Qingyao Ai, Jianming Long, Jiaxin Mao, Ziyi Ye, Yiqun Liu
Abstract: The rapid growth of academic literature makes the manual creation of scientific surveys increasingly infeasible. While large language models show promise for automating this process, progress in this area is hindered by the absence of standardized benchmarks and evaluation protocols. To bridge this critical gap, we introduce SurGE (Survey Generation Evaluation), a new benchmark for scientific survey generation in computer science. SurGE consists of (1) a collection of test instances, each including a topic description, an expert-written survey, and its full set of cited references, and (2) a large-scale academic corpus of over one million papers. In addition, we propose an automated evaluation framework that measures the quality of generated surveys across four dimensions: comprehensiveness, citation accuracy, structural organization, and content quality. Our evaluation of diverse LLM-based methods demonstrates a significant performance gap, revealing that even advanced agentic frameworks struggle with the complexities of survey generation and highlighting the need for future research in this area. We have open-sourced all the code, data, and models at: https://github.com/oneal2000/SurGE
Authors: Rohit Dube
Abstract: Business email compromise and lateral spear phishing attacks are among modern organizations' most costly and damaging threats. While inbound phishing defenses have improved significantly, most organizations still trust internal emails by default, leaving themselves vulnerable to attacks from compromised employee accounts. In this work, we define and explore the problem of authorship validation: verifying whether a claimed sender actually authored a given email. Authorship validation is a lightweight, real-time defense that complements traditional detection methods by modeling per-sender writing style. Further, the paper presents a collection of new datasets based on the Enron corpus. These simulate inauthentic messages using both human-written and large language model-generated emails. The paper also evaluates two classifiers -- a Naive Bayes model and a character-level convolutional neural network (Char-CNN) -- for the authorship validation task. Our experiments show that the Char-CNN model achieves high accuracy and F1 scores under various circumstances. Finally, we discuss deployment considerations and show that per-sender authorship classifiers are practical for integrating into existing commercial email security systems with low overhead.
Authors: Jiajie He, Xintong Chen, Xinyang Fang, Min-Chun Chen, Yuechun Gu, Keke Chen
Abstract: Recommender systems (RecSys) have been widely applied to various applications, including E-commerce, finance, healthcare, social media and have become increasingly influential in shaping user behavior and decision-making, highlighting their growing impact in various domains. However, recent studies have shown that RecSys are vulnerable to membership inference attacks (MIAs), which aim to infer whether user interaction record was used to train a target model or not. MIAs on RecSys models can directly lead to a privacy breach. For example, via identifying the fact that a purchase record that has been used to train a RecSys associated with a specific user, an attacker can infer that user's special quirks. In recent years, MIAs have been shown to be effective on other ML tasks, e.g., classification models and natural language processing. However, traditional MIAs are ill-suited for RecSys due to the unseen posterior probability. Although MIAs on RecSys form a newly emerging and rapidly growing research area, there has been no systematic survey on this topic yet. In this article, we conduct the first comprehensive survey on RecSys MIAs. This survey offers a comprehensive review of the latest advancements in RecSys MIAs, exploring the design principles, challenges, attack and defense associated with this emerging field. We provide a unified taxonomy that categorizes different RecSys MIAs based on their characterizations and discuss their pros and cons. Based on the limitations and gaps identified in this survey, we point out several promising future research directions to inspire the researchers who wish to follow this area. This survey not only serves as a reference for the research community but also provides a clear description for researchers outside this research domain.
Authors: Charidimos Papadakis, Angeliki Dimitriou, Giorgos Filandrianos, Maria Lymperaiou, Konstantinos Thomas, Giorgos Stamou
Abstract: Large language models show promise for financial decision-making, yet deploying them as autonomous trading agents raises fundamental challenges: how to adapt instructions when rewards arrive late and obscured by market noise, how to synthesize heterogeneous information streams into coherent decisions, and how to bridge the gap between model outputs and executable market actions. We present ATLAS (Adaptive Trading with LLM AgentS), a unified multi-agent framework that integrates structured information from markets, news, and corporate fundamentals to support robust trading decisions. Within ATLAS, the central trading agent operates in an order-aware action space, ensuring that outputs correspond to executable market orders rather than abstract signals. The agent can incorporate feedback while trading using Adaptive-OPRO, a novel prompt-optimization technique that dynamically adapts the prompt by incorporating real-time, stochastic feedback, leading to increasing performance over time. Across regime-specific equity studies and multiple LLM families, Adaptive-OPRO consistently outperforms fixed prompts, while reflection-based feedback fails to provide systematic gains.
Authors: Yaning Pan, Qianqian Xie, Guohui Zhang, Zekun Wang, Yongqian Wen, Yuanxing Zhang, Haoxuan Hu, Zhiyu Pan, Yibing Huang, Zhidong Gan, Yonghong Lin, An Ping, Shihao Li, Yanghai Wang, Tianhao Peng, Jiaheng Liu
Abstract: The recent development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has significantly advanced AI's ability to understand visual modalities. However, existing evaluation benchmarks remain limited to single-turn question answering, overlooking the complexity of multi-turn dialogues in real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce MT-Video-Bench, a holistic video understanding benchmark for evaluating MLLMs in multi-turn dialogues. Specifically, our MT-Video-Bench mainly assesses 6 core competencies that focus on perceptivity and interactivity, encompassing 1,000 meticulously curated multi-turn dialogues from diverse domains. These capabilities are rigorously aligned with real-world applications, such as interactive sports analysis and multi-turn video-based intelligent tutoring. With MT-Video-Bench, we extensively evaluate various state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source MLLMs, revealing their significant performance discrepancies and limitations in handling multi-turn video dialogues. The benchmark will be publicly available to foster future research.
Authors: Xianyang Liu, Yilin Liu, Shuai Wang, Hao Cheng, Andrew Estornell, Yuzhi Zhao, Jun Shu, Jiaheng Wei
Abstract: The creation of high-quality datasets to improve Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning remains a significant challenge, as current methods often suffer from generating low-quality/incorrect answers and limited information richness from available data sources. To address this, we propose AgenticMath, a novel agentic method for generating high-quality mathematical question-answer pairs to enhance the supervised fine-tuning of LLMs. Our method operates through four stages: (1) Seed Question Filter that selects questions with high information richness, complexity, and clarity; (2) an Agentic Question Rephrase step that employs a multi-agent system to generate diverse, logically consistent paraphrases; (3) an Answer Augment step where rewrite answers using chain-of-thought reasoning to enhance numerical and logical correctness, without reliance on human-provided labels; and (4) a final Question and Answer Evaluation that retains only the most superior pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, fine-tuning 3B-8B parameter LLMs on AgenticMath generated datasets (comprising only 30-60K math samples) achieves competitive or superior performance on diverse in domain and out-of-domain mathematical reasoning benchmarks compared to baselines trained on much more data (e.g., 400K or 2.3M samples). Our work demonstrates that targeted, high-quality data generation is a more efficient path to improving mathematical reasoning in LLMs than large-scale, low-quality alternatives.
Authors: Jianqing Zhang, Zhezheng Hao, Wei Xia, Hande Dong, Hong Wang, Chenxing Wei, Yuyan Zhou, Yubin Qi, Qiang Lin, Jian Cao
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used for post-training large language models (LLMs) in code editing, where group-relative methods, such as GRPO, are popular due to their critic-free and normalized advantage estimation. However, in real-world code-editing scenarios, reward distributions are often skewed with unpredictable noise, leading to distorted advantage computation and increased rollout outliers. To address this issue, we propose Group Adaptive Policy Optimization (GAPO), which adaptively finds an interval with the highest SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) per prompt and uses the median of that interval as an adaptive Q to replace the group mean in advantage calculation to reduce noise further. This adaptive Q robustly handles rollout noise while remaining plug-and-play and efficient. We evaluate GAPO on nine instruction-tuned LLMs (3B-14B) using a collected large dataset of 51,844 real-world, history-aware code-editing tasks spanning 10 programming languages. GAPO yields up to 4.35 in-domain (ID) and 5.30 out-of-domain (OOD) exact-match improvements over GRPO and its variant DAPO, while achieving lower clipping ratios and higher GPU throughput. Code: https://github.com/TsingZ0/verl-GAPO.
Authors: Han Wu, Jie Yin
Abstract: Few-shot knowledge graph relational learning seeks to perform reasoning over relations given only a limited number of training examples. While existing approaches largely adopt a meta-learning framework for enabling fast adaptation to new relations, they suffer from two key pitfalls. First, they learn relation meta-knowledge in isolation, failing to capture common relational patterns shared across tasks. Second, they struggle to effectively incorporate local, task-specific contexts crucial for rapid adaptation. To address these limitations, we propose MoEMeta, a novel meta-learning framework that disentangles globally shared knowledge from task-specific contexts to enable both effective model generalization and rapid adaptation. MoEMeta introduces two key innovations: (i) a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model that learns globally shared relational prototypes to enhance generalization, and (ii) a task-tailored adaptation mechanism that captures local contexts for fast task-specific adaptation. By balancing global generalization with local adaptability, MoEMeta significantly advances few-shot relational learning. Extensive experiments and analyses on three KG benchmarks show that MoEMeta consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Authors: Khushi Khanchandani, Advait Thakur, Akshita Shetty, Chaitravi Reddy, Ritisa Behera
Abstract: Conventional Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems are challenged by variant invoice layouts, handwritten text, and low-quality scans, which are often caused by strong template dependencies that restrict their flexibility across different document structures and layouts. Newer solutions utilize advanced deep learning models such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) as well as Transformers, and domain-specific models for better layout analysis and accuracy across various sections over varied document types. Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized extraction pipelines at their core with sophisticated entity recognition and semantic comprehension to support complex contextual relationship mapping without direct programming specification. Visual Named Entity Recognition (NER) capabilities permit extraction from invoice images with greater contextual sensitivity and much higher accuracy rates than older approaches. Existing industry best practices utilize hybrid architectures that blend OCR technology and LLM for maximum scalability and minimal human intervention. This work introduces a holistic Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform combining OCR, deep learning, LLMs, and graph analytics to achieve unprecedented extraction quality and consistency.
Authors: Tianzhu Ye, Li Dong, Zewen Chi, Xun Wu, Shaohan Huang, Furu Wei
Abstract: Black-box distillation creates student large language models (LLMs) by learning from a proprietary teacher model's text outputs alone, without access to its internal logits or parameters. In this work, we introduce Generative Adversarial Distillation (GAD), which enables on-policy and black-box distillation. GAD frames the student LLM as a generator and trains a discriminator to distinguish its responses from the teacher LLM's, creating a minimax game. The discriminator acts as an on-policy reward model that co-evolves with the student, providing stable, adaptive feedback. Experimental results show that GAD consistently surpasses the commonly used sequence-level knowledge distillation. In particular, Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct (student) trained with GAD becomes comparable to its teacher, GPT-5-Chat, on the LMSYS-Chat automatic evaluation. The results establish GAD as a promising and effective paradigm for black-box LLM distillation.
Authors: Brian Godwin Lim, Galvin Brice Lim, Renzo Roel Tan, Irwin King, Kazushi Ikeda
Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become an indispensable tool for analyzing relational data. Classical GNNs are broadly classified into three variants: convolutional, attentional, and message-passing. While the standard message-passing variant is expressive, its typical pair-wise messages only consider the features of the center node and each neighboring node individually. This design fails to incorporate contextual information contained within the broader local neighborhood, potentially hindering its ability to learn complex relationships within the entire set of neighboring nodes. To address this limitation, this work first formalizes the concept of neighborhood-contextualization, rooted in a key property of the attentional variant. This then serves as the foundation for generalizing the message-passing variant to the proposed neighborhood-contextualized message-passing (NCMP) framework. To demonstrate its utility, a simple, practical, and efficient method to parametrize and operationalize NCMP is presented, leading to the development of the proposed Soft-Isomorphic Neighborhood-Contextualized Graph Convolution Network (SINC-GCN). Across a diverse set of synthetic and benchmark GNN datasets, SINC-GCN demonstrates competitive performance against baseline GNN models, highlighting its expressivity and efficiency. Notably, it also delivers substantial and statistically significant performance gains in graph property prediction tasks, further underscoring the distinctive utility of neighborhood-contextualization. Overall, the paper lays the foundation for the NCMP framework as a practical path toward enhancing the graph representational power of classical GNNs.
Authors: Kajetan Dymkiewicz, Ivan Vulic, Helen Yannakoudakis, Eilam Shapira, Roi Reichart, Anna Korhonen
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) perform strongly across tasks and languages, yet how improvements in one task or language affect other tasks and languages remains poorly understood. We conduct a controlled LoRA fine-tuning study across multiple open-weight LLM families and scales, using a standardised grid of 11 languages and four benchmarks. We fine-tune each model on a single task-language source and measure transfer when evaluated on all other task-language target pairs. We decompose transfer into three regimes: (i) Matched-Task (Cross-Language), (ii) Matched-Language (Cross-Task), and (iii) Cross-Task (Cross-Language). Single-source fine-tuning yields a net positive uplift across regimes, but the gains are strongly asymmetric. Matched-Task (Cross-Language) transfer emerges as the most effective and predictable regime, driven principally by the identity of the target language rather than model architecture. We identify a stable hierarchy where high-resource languages and broad semantic tasks act as efficient recipients that absorb gains from diverse sources, while specialised tasks and lower-resource languages are more isolated. These results imply that effective fine-tuning requires navigating donor-recipient roles to maximise downstream gains.
Authors: Gustavo Adolpho Bonesso, Carlos Marcelo Gurj\~ao de Godoy, Tammy Hentona Osaki, Midori Hentona Osaki, B\'arbara Moreira Ribeiro Trindade dos Santos, Juliana Yuka Washiya, Regina C\'elia Coelho
Abstract: Blinking is a vital physiological process that protects and maintains the health of the ocular surface. Objective assessment of eyelid movements remains challenging due to the complexity, cost, and limited clinical applicability of existing tools. This study presents the Bapp (Blink Application), a mobile application developed using the Flutter framework and integrated with Google ML Kit for on-device, real-time analysis of eyelid movements, and its clinical validation. The validation was performed using 45 videos from patients, whose blinks were manually annotated by an ophthalmology specialist as the ground truth. The Bapp's performance was evaluated using standard metrics, with results demonstrating 98.4% precision, 96.9% recall, and an overall accuracy of 98.3%. These outcomes confirm the reliability of the Bapp as a portable, accessible, and objective tool for monitoring eyelid movements. The application offers a promising alternative to traditional manual blink counting, supporting continuous ocular health monitoring and postoperative evaluation in clinical environments.
Authors: Yansong Liu, Ronnie Stafford, Pramit Khetrapal, Huriye Kocadag, Gra\c{c}a Carvalho, Patricia de Winter, Maryam Imran, Amelia Snook, Adamos Hadjivasiliou, D. Vijay Anand, Weining Lin, John Kelly, Yukun Zhou, Ivana Drobnjak
Abstract: For patients undergoing systemic cancer therapy, the time between clinic visits is full of uncertainties and risks of unmonitored side effects. To bridge this gap in care, we developed and prospectively trialed a multi-modal AI framework for remote patient monitoring (RPM). This system integrates multi-modal data from the HALO-X platform, such as demographics, wearable sensors, daily surveys, and clinical events. Our observational trial is one of the largest of its kind and has collected over 2.1 million data points (6,080 patient-days) of monitoring from 84 patients. We developed and adapted a multi-modal AI model to handle the asynchronous and incomplete nature of real-world RPM data, forecasting a continuous risk of future adverse events. The model achieved an accuracy of 83.9% (AUROC=0.70). Notably, the model identified previous treatments, wellness check-ins, and daily maximum heart rate as key predictive features. A case study demonstrated the model's ability to provide early warnings by outputting escalating risk profiles prior to the event. This work establishes the feasibility of multi-modal AI RPM for cancer care and offers a path toward more proactive patient support.(Accepted at Europe NeurIPS 2025 Multimodal Representation Learning for Healthcare Workshop. Best Paper Poster Award.)
Authors: Jin-Ting He, Fu-Jen Tsai, Yan-Tsung Peng, Min-Hung Chen, Chia-Wen Lin, Yen-Yu Lin
Abstract: Diffusion models show promise for dynamic scene deblurring; however, existing studies often fail to leverage the intrinsic nature of the blurring process within diffusion models, limiting their full potential. To address it, we present a Blur Diffusion Model (BlurDM), which seamlessly integrates the blur formation process into diffusion for image deblurring. Observing that motion blur stems from continuous exposure, BlurDM implicitly models the blur formation process through a dual-diffusion forward scheme, diffusing both noise and blur onto a sharp image. During the reverse generation process, we derive a dual denoising and deblurring formulation, enabling BlurDM to recover the sharp image by simultaneously denoising and deblurring, given pure Gaussian noise conditioned on the blurred image as input. Additionally, to efficiently integrate BlurDM into deblurring networks, we perform BlurDM in the latent space, forming a flexible prior generation network for deblurring. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BlurDM significantly and consistently enhances existing deblurring methods on four benchmark datasets. The project page is available at https://jin-ting-he.github.io/BlurDM/.
Authors: Pengqian Lu, Jie Lu, Anjin Liu, Guangquan Zhang
Abstract: Detecting hallucinations in Retrieval-Augmented Generation remains a challenge. Prior approaches attribute hallucinations to a binary conflict between internal knowledge stored in FFNs and the retrieved context. However, this perspective is incomplete, failing to account for the impact of other components of the LLM, such as the user query, previously generated tokens, the self token, and the final LayerNorm adjustment. To comprehensively capture the impact of these components on hallucination detection, we propose TPA which mathematically attributes each token's probability to seven distinct sources: Query, RAG Context, Past Token, Self Token, FFN, Final LayerNorm, and Initial Embedding. This attribution quantifies how each source contributes to the generation of the next token. Specifically, we aggregate these attribution scores by Part-of-Speech (POS) tags to quantify the contribution of each model component to the generation of specific linguistic categories within a response. By leveraging these patterns, such as detecting anomalies where Nouns rely heavily on LayerNorm, TPA effectively identifies hallucinated responses. Extensive experiments show that TPA achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Authors: Jinhao Zhang, Yunquan Zhang, Daning Chen, JunSun, Zicheng Yan
Abstract: Current mainstream post-training quantization methods for large language models typically apply a uniform quantization strategy across all network layers, overlooking the substantial differences in algorithmic suitability among layers. To address this limitation, we propose CALM (A CKA-guided Adaptive Layer-wise Modularization)a fine-tuning-free, plug-and-play framework for algorithmic heterogeneous quantization. CALM independently evaluates multiple PTQ algorithms on each layer and employs Linear Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) as a metric to automatically select the optimal quantization strategy per layer. The individually optimized strategies are then integrated to construct a hybrid quantized model. Experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms both uniform quantization baselines and state-of-the-art mixed-precision methods across mainstream LLMsincluding LLaMA and Qwenin terms of perplexity (PPL) and downstream task performance.
Authors: Yuma Ichikawa, Naoya Takagi, Takumi Nakagawa, Yuzi Kanazawa, Akira Sakai
Abstract: Transformers operate as horizontal token-by-token scanners; at each generation step, attending to an ever-growing sequence of token-level states. This access pattern increases prefill latency and makes long-context decoding more memory-bound, as KV-cache reads and writes dominate inference time over arithmetic operations. We propose Parallel Hierarchical Operation for TOp-down Networks (PHOTON), a hierarchical autoregressive model that replaces horizontal scanning with vertical, multi-resolution context scanning. PHOTON maintains a hierarchy of latent streams: a bottom-up encoder compresses tokens into low-rate contextual states, while lightweight top-down decoders reconstruct fine-grained token representations in parallel. We further introduce recursive generation that updates only the coarsest latent stream and eliminates bottom-up re-encoding. Experimental results show that PHOTON is superior to competitive Transformer-based language models regarding the throughput-quality trade-off, providing advantages in long-context and multi-query tasks. In particular, this reduces decode-time KV-cache traffic, yielding up to $10^{3}\times$ higher throughput per unit memory.
Authors: Zhaoxi Zhang, Yitong Duan, Yanzhi Zhang, Yiming Xu, Weikang Li, Jiahui Liang, Deguo Xia, Jizhou Huang, Jiyan He, Yunfang Wu
Abstract: Locating the files and functions requiring modification in large open-source software (OSS) repositories is challenging due to their scale and structural complexity. Existing large language model (LLM)-based methods typically treat this as a repository-level retrieval task and rely on multiple auxiliary tools, which overlook code execution logic and complicate model control. We propose RepoNavigator, an LLM agent equipped with a single execution-aware tool-jumping to the definition of an invoked symbol. This unified design reflects the actual flow of code execution while simplifying tool manipulation. RepoNavigator is trained end-to-end via Reinforcement Learning (RL) directly from a pretrained model, without any closed-source distillation. Experiments demonstrate that RL-trained RepoNavigator achieves state-of-the-art performance, with the 7B model outperforming 14B baselines, the 14B model surpassing 32B competitors, and even the 32B model exceeding closed-source models such as Claude-3.7. These results confirm that integrating a single, structurally grounded tool with RL training provides an efficient and scalable solution for repository-level issue localization.
Authors: Wei-Rui Chen, Vignesh Kothapalli, Ata Fatahibaarzi, Hejian Sang, Shao Tang, Qingquan Song, Zhipeng Wang, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Abstract: Distilling the capabilities from a large reasoning model (LRM) to a smaller student model often involves training on substantial amounts of reasoning data. However, knowledge distillation (KD) over lengthy sequences with prompt (P), chain-of-thought (CoT), and answer (A) sections makes the process computationally expensive. In this work, we investigate how the allocation of supervision across different sections (P, CoT, A) affects student performance. Our analysis shows that selective KD over only the CoT tokens can be effective when the prompt and answer information is encompassed by it. Building on this insight, we establish a truncation protocol to quantify computation-quality tradeoffs as a function of sequence length. We observe that beyond a specific length, longer training sequences provide marginal returns for downstream performance but require substantially higher memory and FLOPs. To this end, training on only the first $50\%$ of tokens of every training sequence can retain, on average, $\approx91\%$ of full-sequence performance on math benchmarks while reducing training time, memory usage, and FLOPs by about $50\%$ each. Codes are available at https://github.com/weiruichen01/distilling-the-essence.
URLs: https://github.com/weiruichen01/distilling-the-essence.
Authors: Naman Agarwal, Siddhartha R. Dalal, Vishal Misra
Abstract: Transformers often appear to perform Bayesian reasoning in context, but verifying this rigorously has been impossible: natural data lack analytic posteriors, and large models conflate reasoning with memorization. We address this by constructing \emph{Bayesian wind tunnels} -- controlled environments where the true posterior is known in closed form and memorization is provably impossible. In these settings, small transformers reproduce Bayesian posteriors with $10^{-3}$-$10^{-4}$ bit accuracy, while capacity-matched MLPs fail by orders of magnitude, establishing a clear architectural separation. Across two tasks -- bijection elimination and Hidden Markov Model (HMM) state tracking -- we find that transformers implement Bayesian inference through a consistent geometric mechanism: residual streams serve as the belief substrate, feed-forward networks perform the posterior update, and attention provides content-addressable routing. Geometric diagnostics reveal orthogonal key bases, progressive query-key alignment, and a low-dimensional value manifold parameterized by posterior entropy. During training this manifold unfurls while attention patterns remain stable, a \emph{frame-precision dissociation} predicted by recent gradient analyses. Taken together, these results demonstrate that hierarchical attention realizes Bayesian inference by geometric design, explaining both the necessity of attention and the failure of flat architectures. Bayesian wind tunnels provide a foundation for mechanistically connecting small, verifiable systems to reasoning phenomena observed in large language models.
Authors: Naman Agarwal, Siddhartha R. Dalal, Vishal Misra
Abstract: Transformers empirically perform precise probabilistic reasoning in carefully constructed ``Bayesian wind tunnels'' and in large-scale language models, yet the mechanisms by which gradient-based learning creates the required internal geometry remain opaque. We provide a complete first-order analysis of how cross-entropy training reshapes attention scores and value vectors in a transformer attention head. Our core result is an \emph{advantage-based routing law} for attention scores, \[ \frac{\partial L}{\partial s_{ij}} = \alpha_{ij}\bigl(b_{ij}-\mathbb{E}_{\alpha_i}[b]\bigr), \qquad b_{ij} := u_i^\top v_j, \] coupled with a \emph{responsibility-weighted update} for values, \[ \Delta v_j = -\eta\sum_i \alpha_{ij} u_i, \] where $u_i$ is the upstream gradient at position $i$ and $\alpha_{ij}$ are attention weights. These equations induce a positive feedback loop in which routing and content specialize together: queries route more strongly to values that are above-average for their error signal, and those values are pulled toward the queries that use them. We show that this coupled specialization behaves like a two-timescale EM procedure: attention weights implement an E-step (soft responsibilities), while values implement an M-step (responsibility-weighted prototype updates), with queries and keys adjusting the hypothesis frame. Through controlled simulations, including a sticky Markov-chain task where we compare a closed-form EM-style update to standard SGD, we demonstrate that the same gradient dynamics that minimize cross-entropy also sculpt the low-dimensional manifolds identified in our companion work as implementing Bayesian inference. This yields a unified picture in which optimization (gradient flow) gives rise to geometry (Bayesian manifolds), which in turn supports function (in-context probabilistic reasoning).
Authors: Yilun Luo, Huaqing Zheng, Haoqian Meng, Wenyuan Liu, Peng Zhang
Abstract: Huawei's openPangu-Embedded-1B and openPangu-Embedded-7B are variants of the openPangu large language model, designed for efficient deployment on Ascend NPUs. The 7B variant supports three distinct Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning paradigms, namely slow_think, auto_think, and no_think, while the 1B variant operates exclusively in the no_think mode, which employs condensed reasoning for higher efficiency. Although CoT reasoning enhances capability, the generation of extended reasoning traces introduces substantial memory and latency overheads, posing challenges for practical deployment on Ascend NPUs. This paper addresses these computational constraints by leveraging low-bit quantization, which transforms FP16 computations into more efficient integer arithmetic. We introduce a unified low-bit inference framework, supporting INT8 (W8A8) and W4A8 quantization, specifically optimized for openPangu-Embedded models on the Atlas A2. Our comprehensive evaluation on code generation benchmarks (HumanEval and MBPP) demonstrates the efficacy of this approach. INT8 quantization consistently preserves over 90\% of the FP16 baseline accuracy and achieves a 1.5x prefill speedup on the Atlas A2. Furthermore, W4A8 quantization significantly reduces memory consumption, albeit with a moderate trade-off in accuracy. These findings collectively indicate that low-bit quantization effectively facilitates efficient CoT reasoning on Ascend NPUs, maintaining high model fidelity.
Authors: Naman Agarwal, Siddhartha R. Dalal, Vishal Misra
Abstract: Recent work has shown that small transformers trained in controlled "wind-tunnel'' settings can implement exact Bayesian inference, and that their training dynamics produce a geometric substrate -- low-dimensional value manifolds and progressively orthogonal keys -- that encodes posterior structure. We investigate whether this geometric signature persists in production-grade language models. Across Pythia, Phi-2, Llama-3, and Mistral families, we find that last-layer value representations organize along a single dominant axis whose position strongly correlates with predictive entropy, and that domain-restricted prompts collapse this structure into the same low-dimensional manifolds observed in synthetic settings. To probe the role of this geometry, we perform targeted interventions on the entropy-aligned axis of Pythia-410M during in-context learning. Removing or perturbing this axis selectively disrupts the local uncertainty geometry, whereas matched random-axis interventions leave it intact. However, these single-layer manipulations do not produce proportionally specific degradation in Bayesian-like behavior, indicating that the geometry is a privileged readout of uncertainty rather than a singular computational bottleneck. Taken together, our results show that modern language models preserve the geometric substrate that enables Bayesian inference in wind tunnels, and organize their approximate Bayesian updates along this substrate.
Authors: Bo Jiang, Taolue Yang, Youyuan Liu, Xubin He, Sheng Di, Sian Jin
Abstract: Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential across a wide range of practical applications. However, long-context inference remains a significant challenge due to the substantial memory requirements of the key-value (KV) cache, which can scale to several gigabytes as sequence length and batch size increase. In this paper, we present \textbf{PackKV}, a generic and efficient KV cache management framework optimized for long-context generation. %, which synergistically supports both latency-critical and throughput-critical inference scenarios. PackKV introduces novel lossy compression techniques specifically tailored to the characteristics of KV cache data, featuring a careful co-design of compression algorithms and system architecture. Our approach is compatible with the dynamically growing nature of the KV cache while preserving high computational efficiency. Experimental results show that, under the same and minimum accuracy drop as state-of-the-art quantization methods, PackKV achieves, on average, \textbf{153.2}\% higher memory reduction rate for the K cache and \textbf{179.6}\% for the V cache. Furthermore, PackKV delivers extremely high execution throughput, effectively eliminating decompression overhead and accelerating the matrix-vector multiplication operation. Specifically, PackKV achieves an average throughput improvement of \textbf{75.7}\% for K and \textbf{171.7}\% for V across A100 and RTX Pro 6000 GPUs, compared to cuBLAS matrix-vector multiplication kernels, while demanding less GPU memory bandwidth. Code available on https://github.com/BoJiang03/PackKV
Authors: Rhitabrat Pokharel, Hamid Reza Hassanzadeh, Ameeta Agrawal
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in interpreting lengthy, complex legal and policy language. However, their reliability can be undermined by hallucinations and inconsistencies, particularly when analyzing subjective and nuanced documents. These challenges are especially critical in medical coverage policy review, where human experts must be able to rely on accurate information. In this paper, we present an approach designed to support human reviewers by making policy interpretation more efficient and interpretable. We introduce a methodology that pairs a coverage-aware retriever with symbolic rule-based reasoning to surface relevant policy language, organize it into explicit facts and rules, and generate auditable rationales. This hybrid system minimizes the number of LLM inferences required which reduces overall model cost. Notably, our approach achieves a 44% reduction in inference cost alongside a 4.5% improvement in F1 score, demonstrating both efficiency and effectiveness.
Authors: Jisoo Lee, Sunki Hong
Abstract: Accurate grid load forecasting is safety-critical: under-predictions risk supply shortfalls, while symmetric error metrics mask this operational asymmetry. We introduce a grid-specific evaluation framework (Asymmetric MAPE, Under-Prediction Rate, and Reserve Margin) that directly measures operational risk rather than statistical accuracy alone. Using this framework, we conduct a systematic evaluation of Mamba-based State Space Models for California grid forecasting on a weather-aligned CA ISO-TAC dataset spanning Nov 2023 to Nov 2025 (84,498 hourly records across 5 transmission areas). Our analysis reveals that standard accuracy metrics are poor proxies for operational safety: models with identical MAPE can require vastly different reserve margins. We demonstrate that forecast errors are weakly but statistically significantly associated with temperature (r = 0.16), motivating weather-aware modeling rather than loss function modification alone. The S-Mamba model achieves the lowest 99.5th-percentile reserve margin (14.12 percent) compared to 16.66 percent for iTransformer, demonstrating superior forecast reliability under a 99.5th-percentile tail-risk reserve proxy.
Authors: MOSI. AI, :, Donghua Yu, Zhengyuan Lin, Chen Yang, Yiyang Zhang, Hanfu Chen, Jingqi Chen, Ke Chen, Liwei Fan, Yi Jiang, Jie Zhu, Muchen Li, Wenxuan Wang, Yang Wang, Zhe Xu, Yitian Gong, Yuqian Zhang, Wenbo Zhang, Zhaoye Fei, Songlin Wang, Zhiyu Wu, Qinyuan Cheng, Shimin Li, Xipeng Qiu
Abstract: Speaker-Attributed, Time-Stamped Transcription (SATS) aims to transcribe what is said and to precisely determine the timing of each speaker, which is particularly valuable for meeting transcription. Existing SATS systems rarely adopt an end-to-end formulation and are further constrained by limited context windows, weak long-range speaker memory, and the inability to output timestamps. To address these limitations, we present MOSS Transcribe Diarize, a unified multimodal large language model that jointly performs Speaker-Attributed, Time-Stamped Transcription in an end-to-end paradigm. Trained on extensive real wild data and equipped with a 128k context window for up to 90-minute inputs, MOSS Transcribe Diarize scales well and generalizes robustly. Across comprehensive evaluations, it outperforms state-of-the-art commercial systems on multiple public and in-house benchmarks.
Authors: Chunyu Qiang, Jun Wang, Xiaopeng Wang, Kang Yin, Yuxin Guo
Abstract: Joint audio-video generation aims to synthesize synchronized multisensory content, yet current unified models struggle with fine-grained acoustic control, particularly for identity-preserving speech. Existing approaches either suffer from temporal misalignment due to cascaded generation or lack the capability to perform zero-shot voice cloning within a joint synthesis framework. In this work, we present MM-Sonate, a multimodal flow-matching framework that unifies controllable audio-video joint generation with zero-shot voice cloning capabilities. Unlike prior works that rely on coarse semantic descriptions, MM-Sonate utilizes a unified instruction-phoneme input to enforce strict linguistic and temporal alignment. To enable zero-shot voice cloning, we introduce a timbre injection mechanism that effectively decouples speaker identity from linguistic content. Furthermore, addressing the limitations of standard classifier-free guidance in multimodal settings, we propose a noise-based negative conditioning strategy that utilizes natural noise priors to significantly enhance acoustic fidelity. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that MM-Sonate establishes new state-of-the-art performance in joint generation benchmarks, significantly outperforming baselines in lip synchronization and speech intelligibility, while achieving voice cloning fidelity comparable to specialized Text-to-Speech systems.
Authors: Jiwei Guan, Haibo Jin, Haohan Wang
Abstract: Recent advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown groundbreaking capabilities across diverse multimodal tasks. However, these models remain vulnerable to adversarial jailbreak attacks, where adversaries craft subtle perturbations to bypass safety mechanisms and trigger harmful outputs. Existing white-box attacks methods require full model accessibility, suffer from computing costs and exhibit insufficient adversarial transferability, making them impractical for real-world, black-box settings. To address these limitations, we propose a black-box jailbreak attack on LVLMs via Zeroth-Order optimization using Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation (ZO-SPSA). ZO-SPSA provides three key advantages: (i) gradient-free approximation by input-output interactions without requiring model knowledge, (ii) model-agnostic optimization without the surrogate model and (iii) lower resource requirements with reduced GPU memory consumption. We evaluate ZO-SPSA on three LVLMs, including InstructBLIP, LLaVA and MiniGPT-4, achieving the highest jailbreak success rate of 83.0% on InstructBLIP, while maintaining imperceptible perturbations comparable to white-box methods. Moreover, adversarial examples generated from MiniGPT-4 exhibit strong transferability to other LVLMs, with ASR reaching 64.18%. These findings underscore the real-world feasibility of black-box jailbreaks and expose critical weaknesses in the safety mechanisms of current LVLMs
Authors: Omar Momen, Emilie Sitter, Berenike Herrmann, Sina Zarrie{\ss}
Abstract: Novel metaphor comprehension involves complex semantic processes and linguistic creativity, making it an interesting task for studying language models (LMs). This study investigates whether surprisal, a probabilistic measure of predictability in LMs, correlates with different metaphor novelty datasets. We analyse surprisal from 16 LM variants on corpus-based and synthetic metaphor novelty datasets. We explore a cloze-style surprisal method that conditions on full-sentence context. Results show that LMs yield significant moderate correlations with scores/labels of metaphor novelty. We further identify divergent scaling patterns: on corpus-based data, correlation strength decreases with model size (inverse scaling effect), whereas on synthetic data it increases (Quality-Power Hypothesis). We conclude that while surprisal can partially account for annotations of metaphor novelty, it remains a limited metric of linguistic creativity.
Authors: Shaocheng Shen, Jianfeng Liang, Chunlei Cai, Cong Geng, Huiyu Duan, Xiaoyun Zhang, Qiang Hu, Guangtao Zhai
Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models such as SDXL and FLUX have achieved impressive photorealism, yet small-scale distortions remain pervasive in limbs, face, text and so on. Existing refinement approaches either perform costly iterative re-generation or rely on vision-language models (VLMs) with weak spatial grounding, leading to semantic drift and unreliable local edits. To close this gap, we propose Agentic Retoucher, a hierarchical decision-driven framework that reformulates post-generation correction as a human-like perception-reasoning-action loop. Specifically, we design (1) a perception agent that learns contextual saliency for fine-grained distortion localization under text-image consistency cues, (2) a reasoning agent that performs human-aligned inferential diagnosis via progressive preference alignment, and (3) an action agent that adaptively plans localized inpainting guided by user preference. This design integrates perceptual evidence, linguistic reasoning, and controllable correction into a unified, self-corrective decision process. To enable fine-grained supervision and quantitative evaluation, we further construct GenBlemish-27K, a dataset of 6K T2I images with 27K annotated artifact regions across 12 categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Agentic Retoucher consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in perceptual quality, distortion localization and human preference alignment, establishing a new paradigm for self-corrective and perceptually reliable T2I generation.
Authors: Core Team, Bangjun Xiao, Bingquan Xia, Bo Yang, Bofei Gao, Bowen Shen, Chen Zhang, Chenhong He, Chiheng Lou, Fuli Luo, Gang Wang, Gang Xie, Hailin Zhang, Hanglong Lv, Hanyu Li, Heyu Chen, Hongshen Xu, Houbin Zhang, Huaqiu Liu, Jiangshan Duo, Jianyu Wei, Jiebao Xiao, Jinhao Dong, Jun Shi, Junhao Hu, Kainan Bao, Kang Zhou, Lei Li, Liang Zhao, Linghao Zhang, Peidian Li, Qianli Chen, Shaohui Liu, Shihua Yu, Shijie Cao, Shimao Chen, Shouqiu Yu, Shuo Liu, Tianling Zhou, Weijiang Su, Weikun Wang, Wenhan Ma, Xiangwei Deng, Bohan Mao, Bowen Ye, Can Cai, Chenghua Wang, Chengxuan Zhu, Chong Ma, Chun Chen, Chunan Li, Dawei Zhu, Deshan Xiao, Dong Zhang, Duo Zhang, Fangyue Liu, Feiyu Yang, Fengyuan Shi, Guoan Wang, Hao Tian, Hao Wu, Heng Qu, Hongfei Yi, Hongxu An, Hongyi Guan, Xing Zhang, Yifan Song, Yihan Yan, Yihao Zhao, Yingchun Lai, Yizhao Gao, Yu Cheng, Yuanyuan Tian, Yudong Wang, Zhen Tang, Zhengju Tang, Zhengtao Wen, Zhichao Song, Zhixian Zheng, Zihan Jiang, Jian Wen, Jiarui Sun, Jiawei Li, Jinlong Xue, Jun Xia, Kai Fang, Menghang Zhu, Nuo Chen, Qian Tu, Qihao Zhang, Qiying Wang, Rang Li, Rui Ma, Shaolei Zhang, Shengfan Wang, Shicheng Li, Shuhao Gu, Shuhuai Ren, Sirui Deng, Tao Guo, Tianyang Lu, Weiji Zhuang, Weikang Zhang, Weimin Xiong, Wenshan Huang, Wenyu Yang, Xin Zhang, Xing Yong, Xu Wang, Xueyang Xie, Yilin Jiang, Yixin Yang, Yongzhe He, Yu Tu, Yuanliang Dong, Yuchen Liu, Yue Ma, Yue Yu, Yuxing Xiang, Zhaojun Huang, Zhenru Lin, Zhipeng Xu, Zhiyang Chen, Zhonghua Deng, Zihan Zhang, Zihao Yue
Abstract: We present MiMo-V2-Flash, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 309B total parameters and 15B active parameters, designed for fast, strong reasoning and agentic capabilities. MiMo-V2-Flash adopts a hybrid attention architecture that interleaves Sliding Window Attention (SWA) with global attention, with a 128-token sliding window under a 5:1 hybrid ratio. The model is pre-trained on 27 trillion tokens with Multi-Token Prediction (MTP), employing a native 32k context length and subsequently extended to 256k. To efficiently scale post-training compute, MiMo-V2-Flash introduces a novel Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD) paradigm. In this framework, domain-specialized teachers (e.g., trained via large-scale reinforcement learning) provide dense and token-level reward, enabling the student model to perfectly master teacher expertise. MiMo-V2-Flash rivals top-tier open-weight models such as DeepSeek-V3.2 and Kimi-K2, despite using only 1/2 and 1/3 of their total parameters, respectively. During inference, by repurposing MTP as a draft model for speculative decoding, MiMo-V2-Flash achieves up to 3.6 acceptance length and 2.6x decoding speedup with three MTP layers. We open-source both the model weights and the three-layer MTP weights to foster open research and community collaboration.
Authors: I\~naki Erregue, Kamal Nasrollahi, Sergio Escalera
Abstract: Video Anomaly Understanding (VAU) extends traditional Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) by not only localizing anomalies but also describing and reasoning about their context. Existing VAU approaches often rely on fine-tuned multimodal large language models (MLLMs) or external modules such as video captioners, which introduce costly annotations, complex training pipelines, and high inference overhead. In this work, we introduce PrismVAU, a lightweight yet effective system for real-time VAU that leverages a single off-the-shelf MLLM for anomaly scoring, explanation, and prompt optimization. PrismVAU operates in two complementary stages: (1) a coarse anomaly scoring module that computes frame-level anomaly scores via similarity to textual anchors, and (2) an MLLM-based refinement module that contextualizes anomalies through system and user prompts. Both textual anchors and prompts are optimized with a weakly supervised Automatic Prompt Engineering (APE) framework. Extensive experiments on standard VAD benchmarks demonstrate that PrismVAU delivers competitive detection performance and interpretable anomaly explanations -- without relying on instruction tuning, frame-level annotations, and external modules or dense processing -- making it an efficient and practical solution for real-world applications.
Authors: Yishu Lei, Shuwei He, Jing Hu, Dan Zhang, Xianlong Luo, Danxiang Zhu, Shikun Feng, Rui Liu, Jingzhou He, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
Abstract: Extending the input modality of Large Language Models~(LLMs) to the audio domain is essential for achieving comprehensive multimodal perception. However, it is well-known that acoustic information is intrinsically \textit{heterogeneous}, entangling attributes such as speech, music, and environmental context. Existing research is limited to a dense, parameter-shared adapter to model these diverse patterns, which induces \textit{gradient conflict} during optimization, as parameter updates required for distinct attributes contradict each other. To address this limitation, we introduce the \textit{\textbf{MoE-Adapter}}, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts~(MoE) architecture designed to decouple acoustic information. Specifically, it employs a dynamic gating mechanism that routes audio tokens to specialized experts capturing complementary feature subspaces while retaining shared experts for global context, thereby mitigating gradient conflicts and enabling fine-grained feature learning. Comprehensive experiments show that the MoE-Adapter achieves superior performance on both audio semantic and paralinguistic tasks, consistently outperforming dense linear baselines with comparable computational costs. Furthermore, we will release the related code and models to facilitate future research.
Authors: Ruiyan Han, Zhen Fang, XinYu Sun, Yuchen Ma, Ziheng Wang, Yu Zeng, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen, Wenxuan Huang, Wei-Jie Xu, Yi Cao, Feng Zhao
Abstract: While Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal comprehension, a significant gap persists in their ability to leverage such internal knowledge for high-quality generation. We formalize this discrepancy as Conduction Aphasia, a phenomenon where models accurately interpret multimodal inputs but struggle to translate that understanding into faithful and controllable synthesis. To address this, we propose UniCorn, a simple yet elegant self-improvement framework that eliminates the need for external data or teacher supervision. By partitioning a single UMM into three collaborative roles: Proposer, Solver, and Judge, UniCorn generates high-quality interactions via self-play and employs cognitive pattern reconstruction to distill latent understanding into explicit generative signals. To validate the restoration of multimodal coherence, we introduce UniCycle, a cycle-consistency benchmark based on a Text to Image to Text reconstruction loop. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniCorn achieves comprehensive and substantial improvements over the base model across six general image generation benchmarks. Notably, it achieves SOTA performance on TIIF(73.8), DPG(86.8), CompBench(88.5), and UniCycle while further delivering substantial gains of +5.0 on WISE and +6.5 on OneIG. These results highlight that our method significantly enhances T2I generation while maintaining robust comprehension, demonstrating the scalability of fully self-supervised refinement for unified multimodal intelligence.
Authors: Edward Y. Chang
Abstract: Large Language Models exhibit sycophancy: prioritizing agreeableness over correctness. Current remedies evaluate reasoning outcomes: RLHF rewards correct answers, self-correction critiques outputs. All require ground truth, which is often unavailable at inference time and vulnerable to the same biases. We explore evaluating the reasoning process instead. Regulated Causal Anchoring (RCA) verifies whether outputs follow from their reasoning traces, without requiring ground truth. Sycophancy manifests as trace-output inconsistency: models derive one answer but output another to please users. RCA detects this inconsistency, achieving 0.0% sycophancy while accepting 88% of valid hints. We identify two failures invisible to outcome evaluation: Inverse Scaling (frontier models sycophant more because rationalization requires capability) and the Final Output Gap (correct reasoning precedes sycophantic output). Traditional self-correction reduces these failures to 7-9% but cannot eliminate them because the model critiques itself with the same biases. RCA's process evaluation operates at inference time, requires no ground truth, and uses an independent judge that breaks the self-reinforcing bias loop: three properties that outcome evaluation lacks.
Authors: Nicolas Caron, Christophe Guyeux, Hassan Noura, Benjamin Aynes
Abstract: Wildfires are highly imbalanced natural hazards in both space and severity, making the prediction of extreme events particularly challenging. In this work, we introduce the first ordinal classification framework for forecasting wildfire severity levels directly aligned with operational decision-making in France. Our study investigates the influence of loss-function design on the ability of neural models to predict rare yet critical high-severity fire occurrences. We compare standard cross-entropy with several ordinal-aware objectives, including the proposed probabilistic TDeGPD loss derived from a truncated discrete exponentiated Generalized Pareto Distribution. Through extensive benchmarking over multiple architectures and real operational data, we show that ordinal supervision substantially improves model performance over conventional approaches. In particular, the Weighted Kappa Loss (WKLoss) achieves the best overall results, with more than +0.1 IoU (Intersection Over Union) gain on the most extreme severity classes while maintaining competitive calibration quality. However, performance remains limited for the rarest events due to their extremely low representation in the dataset. These findings highlight the importance of integrating both severity ordering, data imbalance considerations, and seasonality risk into wildfire forecasting systems. Future work will focus on incorporating seasonal dynamics and uncertainty information into training to further improve the reliability of extreme-event prediction.
Authors: Jean Seo, Gibaeg Kim, Kihun Shin, Seungseop Lim, Hyunkyung Lee, Wooseok Han, Jongwon Lee, Eunho Yang
Abstract: We introduce EPAG, a benchmark dataset and framework designed for Evaluating the Pre-consultation Ability of LLMs using diagnostic Guidelines. LLMs are evaluated directly through HPI-diagnostic guideline comparison and indirectly through disease diagnosis. In our experiments, we observe that small open-source models fine-tuned with a well-curated, task-specific dataset can outperform frontier LLMs in pre-consultation. Additionally, we find that increased amount of HPI (History of Present Illness) does not necessarily lead to improved diagnostic performance. Further experiments reveal that the language of pre-consultation influences the characteristics of the dialogue. By open-sourcing our dataset and evaluation pipeline on https://github.com/seemdog/EPAG, we aim to contribute to the evaluation and further development of LLM applications in real-world clinical settings.
Authors: Zhengyi Kwan, Wei Zhang, Aik Beng Ng, Zhengkui Wang, Simon See
Abstract: Job scheduling is widely used in real-world manufacturing systems to assign ordered job operations to machines under various constraints. Existing solutions remain limited by long running time or insufficient schedule quality, especially when problem scale increases. In this paper, we propose ReLA, a reinforcement-learning (RL) scheduler built on structured representation learning and aggregation. ReLA first learns diverse representations from scheduling entities, including job operations and machines, using two intra-entity learning modules with self-attention and convolution and one inter-entity learning module with cross-attention. These modules are applied in a multi-scale architecture, and their outputs are aggregated to support RL decision-making. Across experiments on small, medium, and large job instances, ReLA achieves the best makespan in most tested settings over the latest solutions. On non-large instances, ReLA reduces the optimality gap of the SOTA baseline by 13.0%, while on large-scale instances it reduces the gap by 78.6%, with the average optimality gaps lowered to 7.3% and 2.1%, respectively. These results confirm that ReLA's learned representations and aggregation provide strong decision support for RL scheduling, and enable fast job completion and decision-making for real-world applications.
Authors: Yunpei Li, Xun Zhou, Jinchao Wang, Lu Wang, Yong Wu, Siyi Zhou, Yiquan Zhou, Jingchen Shu
Abstract: In prior work, we introduced IndexTTS 2, a zero-shot neural text-to-speech foundation model comprising two core components: a transformer-based Text-to-Semantic (T2S) module and a non-autoregressive Semantic-to-Mel (S2M) module, which together enable faithful emotion replication and establish the first autoregressive duration-controllable generative paradigm. Building upon this, we present IndexTTS 2.5, which significantly enhances multilingual coverage, inference speed, and overall synthesis quality through four key improvements: 1) Semantic Codec Compression: we reduce the semantic codec frame rate from 50 Hz to 25 Hz, halving sequence length and substantially lowering both training and inference costs; 2) Architectural Upgrade: we replace the U-DiT-based backbone of the S2M module with a more efficient Zipformer-based modeling architecture, achieving notable parameter reduction and faster mel-spectrogram generation; 3) Multilingual Extension: We propose three explicit cross-lingual modeling strategies, boundary-aware alignment, token-level concatenation, and instruction-guided generation, establishing practical design principles for zero-shot multilingual emotional TTS that supports Chinese, English, Japanese, and Spanish, and enables robust emotion transfer even without target-language emotional training data; 4) Reinforcement Learning Optimization: we apply GRPO in post-training of the T2S module, improving pronunciation accuracy and natrualness. Experiments show that IndexTTS 2.5 not only supports broader language coverage but also replicates emotional prosody in unseen languages under the same zero-shot setting. IndexTTS 2.5 achieves a 2.28 times improvement in RTF while maintaining comparable WER and speaker similarity to IndexTTS 2.
Authors: Akash Kumar
Abstract: We study when geometric simplicity of decision boundaries, used here as a notion of interpretability, can conflict with accurate approximation of axis-aligned decision trees by shallow neural networks. Decision trees induce rule-based, axis-aligned decision regions (finite unions of boxes), whereas shallow ReLU networks are typically trained as score models whose predictions are obtained by thresholding. We analyze the infinite-width, bounded-norm, single-hidden-layer ReLU class through the Radon total variation ($\mathrm{R}\mathrm{TV}$) seminorm, which controls the geometric complexity of level sets. We first show that the hard tree indicator $1_A$ has infinite $\mathrm{R}\mathrm{TV}$. Moreover, two natural split-wise continuous surrogates--piecewise-linear ramp smoothing and sigmoidal (logistic) smoothing--also have infinite $\mathrm{R}\mathrm{TV}$ in dimensions $d>1$, while Gaussian convolution yields finite $\mathrm{R}\mathrm{TV}$ but with an explicit exponential dependence on $d$. We then separate two goals that are often conflated: classification after thresholding (recovering the decision set) versus score learning (learning a calibrated score close to $1_A$). For classification, we construct a smooth barrier score $S_A$ with finite $\mathrm{R}\mathrm{TV}$ whose fixed threshold $\tau=1$ exactly recovers the box. Under a mild tube-mass condition near $\partial A$, we prove an $L_1(P)$ calibration bound that decays polynomially in a sharpness parameter, along with an explicit $\mathrm{R}\mathrm{TV}$ upper bound in terms of face measures. Experiments on synthetic unions of rectangles illustrate the resulting accuracy--complexity tradeoff and how threshold selection shifts where training lands along it.
Authors: Zitong Huang, Kaidong Zhang, Yukang Ding, Chao Gao, Rui Ding, Ying Chen, Wangmeng Zuo
Abstract: Aligning text-to-video diffusion models with human preferences is crucial for generating high-quality videos. Existing Direct Preference Otimization (DPO) methods rely on multi-sample ranking and task-specific critic models, which is inefficient and often yields ambiguous global supervision. To address these limitations, we propose LocalDPO, a novel post-training framework that constructs localized preference pairs from real videos and optimizes alignment at the spatio-temporal region level. We design an automated pipeline to efficiently collect preference pair data that generates preference pairs with a single inference per prompt, eliminating the need for external critic models or manual annotation. Specifically, we treat high-quality real videos as positive samples and generate corresponding negatives by locally corrupting them with random spatio-temporal masks and restoring only the masked regions using the frozen base model. During training, we introduce a region-aware DPO loss that restricts preference learning to corrupted areas for rapid convergence. Experiments on Wan2.1 and CogVideoX demonstrate that LocalDPO consistently improves video fidelity, temporal coherence and human preference scores over other post-training approaches, establishing a more efficient and fine-grained paradigm for video generator alignment.
Authors: Ziyun Zhang, Zezhou Wang, Xiaoyi Zhang, Zongyu Guo, Jiahao Li, Bin Li, Yan Lu
Abstract: GUI agents that interact with graphical interfaces on behalf of users represent a promising direction for practical AI assistants. However, training such agents is hindered by the scarcity of suitable environments. We present InfiniteWeb, a system that automatically generates functional web environments at scale for GUI agent training. While LLMs perform well on generating a single webpage, building a realistic and functional website with many interconnected pages faces challenges. We address these challenges through unified specification, task-centric test-driven development, and a combination of website seed with reference design image to ensure diversity. Our system also generates verifiable task evaluators enabling dense reward signals for reinforcement learning. Experiments show that InfiniteWeb surpasses commercial coding agents at realistic website construction, and GUI agents trained on our generated environments achieve significant performance improvements on OSWorld and Online-Mind2Web, demonstrating the effectiveness of proposed system.