Authors: Beomchul Park, Minsu Koh, Heejo Kong, Seong-Whan Lee
Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) approximate solutions of partial differential equations (PDEs) by embedding physical laws into the loss function. In parameterized PDE families, variations in coefficients or boundary/initial conditions define distinct tasks. This makes training individual PINNs for each task computationally prohibitive, while cross-task transfer can be sensitive to task heterogeneity. While meta-learning can reduce retraining cost, existing methods often rely on a single global initialization and may suffer from negative transfer, particularly under feature-scarce coordinate inputs and limited training-task availability. We propose the Learning-Affinity Adaptive Modular Physics-Informed Neural Network (LAM-PINN), a compositional framework that leverages task-specific learning dynamics. LAM-PINN combines PDE parameters with learning-affinity metrics from brief transfer sessions to construct a task representation and cluster tasks even with coordinate-only inputs. It decomposes the model into cluster-specialized subnetworks and a shared meta network, and learns routing weights to selectively reuse modules instead of relying on a single global initialization. Across three PDE benchmarks, LAM-PINN achieves an average 19.7-fold reduction in mean squared error (MSE) on unseen tasks using only 10% of the training iterations required by conventional PINNs. These results indicate its effectiveness for generalization to unseen configurations within bounded design spaces of parameterized PDE families in resource-constrained engineering settings.
Authors: Aditya Kar (CNRS, IRIT), Emiliano Lorini (CNRS, IRIT), Timoth\'ee Masquelier (CNRS, CERCO UMR5549)
Abstract: We provide a causal analysis of Binary Spiking Neural Networks (BSNNs) to explain their behavior. We formally define a BSNN and represent its spiking activity as a binary causal model. Thanks to this causal representation, we are able to explain the output of the network by leveraging logic-based methods. In particular, we show that we can successfully use a SAT as well as a SMT solver to compute abductive explanations from this binary causal model. To illustrate our approach, we trained the BSNN on the standard MNIST dataset and applied our SAT-based and SMT-based methods to finding abductive explanations of the network's classifications based on pixel-level features. We also compared the found explanations against SHAP, a popular method used in the area of explainable AI. We show that, unlike SHAP, our approach guarantees that a found explanation does not contain completely irrelevant features.
Authors: Emma Casey, David Roberts, David Sim, Ian Beaver
Abstract: We present a framework for migrating production Large Language Model (LLM) based systems when the underlying model reaches end-of-life or requires replacement. The key contribution is a Bayesian statistical approach that calibrates automated evaluation metrics against human judgments, enabling confident model comparison even with limited manual evaluation data. We demonstrate this framework on a commercial question-answering system serving 5.3M monthly interactions across six global regions; evaluating correctness, refusal behavior, and stylistic adherence to successfully identify suitable replacement models. The framework is broadly applicable to any enterprise deploying LLM-based products, providing a principled, reproducible methodology for model migration that balances quality assurance with evaluation efficiency. This is a capability increasingly essential as the LLM ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly and organizations manage portfolios of AI-powered services across multiple models, regions, and use cases.
Authors: Shuxing Yang, Fujia Chen, Rui Zhao, Junyao Wu, Yize Wang, Haiyao Luo, Ning Han, Qiaolu Chen, Yuze Hu, Wenhao Li, Mingzhu Li, Hongsheng Chen, Yihao Yang
Abstract: Scientific research has long been human-led, driving new knowledge and transformative technologies through the continual revision of questions, methods and claims as evidence accumulates. Although large language model (LLM)-based agents are beginning to move beyond assisting predefined research workflows, none has yet demonstrated end-to-end autonomous discovery in a real physical system that produces a nontrivial result supported by experimental evidence. Here we introduce Qiushi Discovery Engine, an LLM-based agentic system for end-to-end autonomous scientific discovery on a real optical platform. Qiushi Engine combines nonlinear research phases, Meta-Trace memory and a dual-layer architecture to maintain adaptive and stable research trajectories across long-horizon investigations involving thousands of LLM-mediated reasoning, measurement and revision actions. It autonomously reproduces a published transmission-matrix experiment on a non-original platform and converts an abstract coherence-order theory into experimental observables, providing, to our knowledge, the first observation of this class of coherence-order structure. More importantly, in an open-ended study involving 145.9 million tokens, 3,242 LLM calls, 1,242 tool calls, 163 research notes and 44 scripts, Qiushi Engine proposes and experimentally validates optical bilinear interaction, a physical mechanism structurally analogous to a core operation in Transformer attention. This AI-discovered mechanism suggests a route towards high-speed, energy-efficient optical hardware for pairwise computation. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an AI agentic system autonomously identifying and experimentally validating a nontrivial, previously unreported physical mechanism, marking a milestone for research-level autonomous agents.
Authors: Adela Bara, Gabriela Dobrita, Simona-Vasilica Oprea
Abstract: The purpose of our paper is to develop a unified multi-agent architecture that automates end-to-end machine learning (ML) pipeline generation from datasets and natural-language (NL) goals, improving efficiency, robustness and explainability. A five-agent system is proposed to handle profiling, intent parsing, microservice recommendation, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) construction and execution. It integrates code-grounded Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for microservice understanding, an explainable hybrid recommender combining multiple criteria, a self-healing mechanism using Large Language Model (LLM)-based error interpretation and adaptive learning from execution history. The approach is evaluated on 150 ML tasks across diverse scenarios. The system achieves an 84.7% end-to-end pipeline success rate, outperforming baseline methods. It demonstrates improved robustness through self-healing and reduces workflow development time compared to manual construction. The study introduces a novel integration of code-grounded RAG, explainable recommendation, self-healing execution and adaptive learning within a single architecture, showing that tightly coupled intelligent components can outperform isolated solutions.
Authors: Hamdiya Adams, Theophilus Ansah-Narh, Daniel Kwadwo Asiedu, Bruce Kofi Banoeng-Yakubo, Marcellin Atemkeng, Thomas Armah, Richmond Opoku-Sarkodie, Rebecca Davis, Ezekiel Nii Noye Nortey
Abstract: This study presents an unsupervised machine learning workflow for electrofacies analysis in the offshore Keta Basin, Ghana, where core data are scarce. Six standard wireline logs from Well~C were analysed over a depth interval comprising approximately $11{,}195$ samples. K-means clustering was applied in multivariate log space, with the clustering structure evaluated using inertia and silhouette diagnostics. Four clusters were identified, supported by an average silhouette coefficient of approximately $0.50$, indicating moderate but meaningful separation. The resulting electrofacies exhibit systematic, depth-continuous patterns associated with variations in clay content, porosity, and rock framework properties, forming a geological continuum from shale-dominated to cleaner sandstone-dominated units. The results demonstrate that log-only, unsupervised clustering supported by quantitative metrics provides a robust and reproducible framework for subsurface characterisation. The proposed workflow offers a practical tool for early-stage formation evaluation in frontier offshore basins and a foundation for future integrated studies.
Authors: Yu-Chao Huang, Zhen Tan, Mohan Zhang, Pingzhi Li, Zhuo Zhang, Tianlong Chen
Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in high-stakes domains demand reliable verification, yet centralized approaches suffer four limitations: (1) Robustness, with single points of failure vulnerable to attacks and bias; (2) Scalability, as reasoning complexity creates bottlenecks; (3) Opacity, as hidden auditing erodes trust; and (4) Privacy, as exposed reasoning traces risk model theft. We introduce TRUST (Transparent, Robust, and Unified Services for Trustworthy AI), a decentralized framework with three innovations: (i) Hierarchical Directed Acyclic Graphs (HDAGs) that decompose Chain-of-Thought reasoning into five abstraction levels for parallel distributed auditing; (ii) the DAAN protocol, which projects multi-agent interactions into Causal Interaction Graphs (CIGs) for deterministic root-cause attribution; and (iii) a multi-tier consensus mechanism among computational checkers, LLM evaluators, and human experts with stake-weighted voting that guarantees correctness under 30% adversarial participation. We prove a Safety-Profitability Theorem ensuring honest auditors profit while malicious actors incur losses. All decisions are recorded on-chain, while privacy-by-design segmentation prevents reconstruction of proprietary logic. Across multiple LLMs and benchmarks, TRUST attains 72.4% accuracy (4-18% above baselines) and remains resilient against 20% corruption. DAAN reaches 70% root-cause attribution (vs. 54-63% for standard methods) with 60% token savings. Human studies validate the design (F1 = 0.89, Brier = 0.074). The framework supports (A1) decentralized auditing, (A2) tamper-proof leaderboards, (A3) trustless data annotation, and (A4) governed autonomous agents, pioneering decentralized AI auditing for safe, accountable deployment of reasoning-capable systems.
Authors: Daiana Rinja, Eduardo Araujo Oliveira, Sonsoles L\'opez-Pernas, Mohammed Saqr, Marcus Specht, Kamila Misiejuk
Abstract: Generative AI is reshaping higher education programming through vibe coding, where students collaborate with AI via natural language rather than writing code line-by-line. We conceptualize this practice as help-seeking, analyzing 19,418 interaction turns from 110 undergraduate students. Using inductive coding and Heterogeneous Transition Network Analysis, we examined interaction sequences to compare top- and low-performing students. Results reveal that top performers engaged in instrumental help-seeking -- inquiry and exploration -- eliciting tutor-like AI responses. In contrast, low performers relied on executive help-seeking, frequently delegating tasks and prompting the AI to assume an executor role focused on ready-made solutions. These findings indicate that currently generative AI mirrors student intent (whether productive or passive) rather than optimizing for learning. To evolve from tools to teammates, AI systems must move beyond passive compliance. We argue for pedagogically aligned design that detect unproductive delegation and adaptively steer educational interactions toward inquiry, ensuring student-AI partnerships augment rather than replace cognitive effort.
Authors: Nathan Li, Aikins Laryea, Yigit Ihlamur
Abstract: Autonomous crypto trading systems often spend most of their design effort on finding entries, while exits are left to fixed rules that are rarely tested in a systematic way. This paper examines whether better stop-loss and take-profit settings can improve the performance of an autonomous trading agent swarm. Using more than 900 historical trades, we replay each trade under many alternative exit policies and compare results against the existing production setup. The study finds that exit design matters meaningfully: stronger configurations improve risk-adjusted performance and generally favor tighter loss limits, earlier profit capture, and closer trailing protection. The paper also discusses a key evaluation challenge: a purely chronological split was initially used, but the newest trades fell into an unusual war-driven market period that sharply distorted test results. To reduce the influence of that single episode, the main comparison was run on randomized data, with the drawbacks of doing so acknowledged explicitly. Overall, the paper presents a practical framework for tuning exit logic in a more disciplined and transparent way.
Authors: Jinbiao Wei, Kangqi Ni, Yilun Zhao, Guo Gan, Arman Cohan
Abstract: Computer-use agents provide a promising path toward general software automation because they can interact directly with arbitrary graphical user interfaces instead of relying on brittle, application-specific integrations. Despite recent advances in benchmark performance, strong computer-use agents remain expensive and slow in practice, since most systems invoke large multimodal models at nearly every interaction step. We argue that this uniform allocation of compute is fundamentally inefficient for long-horizon GUI tasks. Such trajectories are highly heterogeneous: many steps are routine and can be handled reliably by smaller, cheaper policies, while errors tend to concentrate at a relatively small number of high-risk moments. Across computer-use benchmarks, these failures repeatedly take two forms: progress stalls, where the agent loops, repeats ineffective actions, or fails to make meaningful progress, and silent semantic drift, where the agent continues taking locally plausible actions after already deviating from the user's true goal. To address this inefficiency, we propose an event-driven, step-level cascade for computer-use agents that runs a small policy by default and escalates to a stronger model only when lightweight learned monitors detect elevated risk. Our framework combines two complementary signals: a Stuck Monitor that detects degraded progress from recent reasoning-action history and triggers recovery, and a Milestone Monitor that identifies semantically meaningful checkpoints where sparse verification is most informative for catching drift. This design turns always-on frontier-model inference into adaptive, on-demand compute allocation over the course of an evolving interaction. The framework is modular and deployment-oriented: it can be layered on top of existing computer-use agents without changing the underlying agent architecture or retraining the large model.
Authors: Richard Booth, Ivan Varzinczak
Abstract: Rational belief revision is commonly viewed as being based on a preference order between possible worlds, with the resulting new belief set being those sentences true in all the most preferred models of the incoming new information. Usually, such a preference order is taken to be a total preorder. Nevertheless, there are other, more general classes of ordering that can also be employed. In this paper, we explore two such classes that have been studied within the theory of rational choice but have seen limited or no application in belief revision. We begin with interval orders, introduced by Fishburn in the '80s, which associate with each possible world a nonnegative `interval' of plausibility. We then move on to biorders, studied by Aleskerov, Bouyssou, and Monjardet, which generalise interval orders by allowing the intervals to have negative lengths, a feature that can be used to capture a notion of dissonance or instability. We provide axiomatic characterisations of these two resulting families of belief revision operators, as well as of two further families of interest that lie between interval orders and biorders. We show that while biorder-based revisions satisfy the Success postulate, they do not always yield consistent outputs. By modifying their definition to discard inputs that lead to inconsistency as `incredible', we derive new families of so-called non-prioritised revision that satisfy the Consistency postulate, but not the Success one. These families are linked to credibility-limited revision operators of Hansson et al., but for which the set of credible sentences does not satisfy the single-sentence closure condition. We argue that the biorder-based approach is well-suited for scenarios where an agent might initially reject new information, but may accept it when presented with additional explanation.
Authors: Brad Ye, Bulent Soykan, Gulsah Hancerliogullari Koksalmis, Hsin-Hsiung Huang, Laura J. Brattain
Abstract: Accurate prediction of conversion from Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) to Alzheimers Diseases (AD) is essential for early intervention, however, developing reliable conversion predictive models is difficult to develop due to limited longitudinal data availability We evaluate TabPFN (Tabular Pre-Trained Foundation Network) against traditional machine learning methods for predicting 3 year MCI to AD conversion using the TADPOLE dataset derived from ADNI. Using multimodal biomarker features extracted from demographics, APOE4, MRI volumes, CSF markers, and PET imaging, we conducted an experimental comparison across varying training set sizes (N=50 to 1000) and models including XGBoost, Random Forest, LightGBM, and Logistic Regression. TabPFN achieved one the highest performance (AUC=0.892), outperforming LightGBM (AUC=0.860) and demonstrating advantages in low data settings. At N=50 training samples, TabPFN maintained strong AUC while the traditional machine learning models struggles at small training samples. These findings demonstrate that foundation models are promising for disease prediction in data limited scenarios, such as Alzheimers diseases.
Authors: Bulent Soykan, Gulsah Hancerliogullari Koksalmis, Hsin-Hsiung Huang, Laura J. Brattain
Abstract: Cognitive decline is highly heterogeneous across individuals, which complicates prognosis, trial design, and treatment planning. We present the Personalized Cognitive Decline Assessment Digital Twin (PCD-DT), a multimodal and uncertainty-aware framework for modeling patient-specific disease trajectories from sparse, noisy, and irregular longitudinal data. The framework combines three methodological components: (1) latent state-space models for individualized temporal dynamics, (2) multimodal fusion for clinical, biomarker, and imaging features, and (3) uncertainty-aware validation and adaptive updating for robust digital twin operation. We also outline how conditional generative models can support data augmentation and stress testing for underrepresented progression patterns. As a preliminary feasibility study, we analyze longitudinal TADPOLE trajectories and show clear separation between cognitively normal and Alzheimer's disease cohorts in ADAS13, ventricle volume, and hippocampal volume over five years. We further conduct a multimodal next-visit prediction ablation using an LSTM sequence model on 3{,}003 visit-pair sequences derived from TADPOLE, where the combined cognitive plus MRI configuration achieves the lowest standardized RMSE for both ADAS13 (0.4419) and ventricle volume (0.5842), outperforming a Last Observation Carried Forward baseline. A Bayesian tensor modeling component for high-dimensional imaging fusion is also discussed. These results support the feasibility of the proposed architecture while also highlighting the need for stronger uncertainty calibration and longer-horizon predictive evaluation. The PCD-DT framework provides a principled starting point for personalized in silico modeling in neurodegenerative disease. This work positions PCD-DT as a foundational step toward clinically deployable, uncertainty-aware digital twin systems.
Authors: Yuxuan Huang, Yihang Chen, Zhiyuan He, Yuxiang Chen, Ka Yiu Lee, Huichi Zhou, Weilin Luo, Meng Fang, Jun Wang
Abstract: Agentic web search increasingly faces two distinct demands: deep reasoning over a single target, and structured aggregation across many entities and heterogeneous sources. Current systems struggle on both fronts. Breadth-oriented tasks demand schema-aligned outputs with wide coverage and cross-entity consistency, while depth-oriented tasks require coherent reasoning over long, branching search trajectories. We introduce \textbf{Web2BigTable}, a multi-agent framework for web-to-table search that supports both regimes. Web2BigTable adopts a bi-level architecture in which an upper-level orchestrator decomposes the task into sub-problems and lower-level worker agents solve them in parallel. Through a closed-loop run--verify--reflect process, the framework jointly improves decomposition and execution over time via persistent, human-readable external memory, with self-evolving updates to each single-agent. During execution, workers coordinate through a shared workspace that makes partial findings visible, allowing them to reduce redundant exploration, reconcile conflicting evidence, and adapt to emerging coverage gaps. Web2BigTable sets a new state of the art on WideSearch, reaching an Avg@4 Success Rate of \textbf{38.50} ($7.5\times$ the second best at 5.10), Row F1 of \textbf{63.53} (+25.03 over the second best), and Item F1 of \textbf{80.12} (+14.42 over the second best). It also generalises to depth-oriented search on XBench-DeepSearch, achieving 73.0 accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/web2bigtable/web2bigtable.
Authors: Juergen Dietrich
Abstract: Democratic discourse analysis systems increasingly rely on multi-agent LLM pipelines in which distinct evaluator models are assigned adversarial roles to generate structured, multi-perspective assessments of political statements. A core assumption is that models will reliably maintain their assigned roles. This paper provides the first systematic empirical test of that assumption using the TRUST pipeline. We develop an epistemic stance classifier that identifies advocate roles from reasoning text without relying on surface vocabulary, and measure role fidelity across 60 political statements (30 English, 30 German) using four metrics: Role Drift Index (RDI), Expected Drift Distance (EDD), Directional Drift Index (DDI), and Entropy-based Role Stability (ERS). We identify two failure modes - the Epistemic Floor Effect (fact-check results create an absolute lower bound below which the legitimizing role cannot be maintained) and Role-Prior Conflict (training-time knowledge overrides role instructions for factually unambiguous statements) - as manifestations of a single mechanism: Epistemic Role Override (ERO). Model choice significantly affects role fidelity: Mistral Large outperforms Claude Sonnet by 28pp (67% vs. 39%) and exhibits a qualitatively different failure mode - role abandonment without polarity reversal - compared to Claude's active switch to the opposing stance. Role fidelity is language-robust. Fact-check provider choice is not universally neutral: Perplexity significantly reduces Claude's role fidelity on German statements (Delta = -15pp, p = 0.007) while leaving Mistral unaffected. These findings have direct implications for multi-agent LLM validation: a system validated without role fidelity measurement may systematically misrepresent the epistemic diversity it was designed to provide.
Authors: Anh Ta, Junjie Zhu, Shahin Shayandeh
Abstract: Tool-calling agents are evaluated on tool selection, parameter accuracy, and scope recognition, yet LLM trajectory assessments remain inherently post-hoc. Disconnected from the active execution loop, such assessments identify errors that are usually addressed through prompt-tuning or retraining, and fundamentally cannot course-correct the agent in real time. To close this gap, we move evaluation into the execution loop at inference time: a specialized reviewer agent evaluates provisional tool calls prior to execution, shifting the paradigm from post-hoc recovery to proactive evaluation and error mitigation. In practice, this architecture establishes a clear separation of concerns between the primary execution agent and a secondary review agent. As with any multi-agent system, the reviewer can introduce new errors while correcting others, yet no prior work to our knowledge has systematically measured this tradeoff. To quantify this tradeoff, we introduce Helpfulness-Harmfulness metrics: helpfulness measures the percentage of base agent errors that feedback corrects; harmfulness measures the percentage of correct responses that feedback degrades. These metrics directly inform reviewer design by revealing whether a given model or prompt provides net positive value. We evaluate our approach on BFCL (single-turn) and Tau2-Bench (multi-turn stateful scenarios), achieving +5.5% on irrelevance detection and +7.1% on multi-turn tasks. Our metrics reveal that reviewer model choice is critical: the reasoning model o3-mini achieves a 3:1 benefit-to-risk ratio versus 2.1:1 for GPT-4o. Automated prompt optimization via GEPA provides an additional +1.5-2.8%. Together, these results demonstrate a core advantage of separating execution and review: the reviewer can be systematically improved through model selection and prompt optimization, without retraining the base agent.
Authors: Fazle Elahi Faisal, Qianhui Wu, Baolin Peng, Jianfeng Gao
Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized web agents that can automate complex tasks on websites. However, their accuracy remains limited by the scarcity of high-quality web trajectory training data. Existing automatic trajectory generation methods suffer from incomplete website coverage due to homepage-based task proposals or random-walk exploration. Such methods often result in hallucinated or ambiguous task synthesis that lead to incomplete and unreliable trajectory generation. Here, we present AutoSurfer, a comprehensive web trajectory generator that addresses these limitations through three key innovations. First, AutoSurfer employs a systematic breadth-first exploration strategy that maintains a queue of discovered pages and action traces, propagates knowledge across pages to avoid redundant exploration, and recursively expands multi-level graphical user interface elements - closely resembling how a human would learn a new website. Second, AutoSurfer leverages the exploration trajectory to guide task synthesis, reducing hallucinations by grounding complex tasks in actual navigation paths rather than isolated actions or page content alone. Third, AutoSurfer uses the same exploration trajectory as hints to steer a web agent toward more accurate and reliable trajectory refinement. Together, these innovations enable AutoSurfer to comprehensively cover a website's action space and generate data suitable for training website-specific LLMs. We evaluate AutoSurfer on the WebArena benchmark by fine-tuning Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct and demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods - Explorer, OS-Genesis, and SynthAgent - achieving up to 24.23% overall task completion accuracy compared to 19.59% for the best prior method. Further, task diversity analysis demonstrates that AutoSurfer yields a more diverse distribution of synthesized tasks.
Authors: Lucas Vittor, Ayush Noori, I\~naki Arango, Joaqu\'in Polonuer, Sam Rodriques, Andrew White, David A. Clifton, Marinka Zitnik
Abstract: Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) are widely used in the life sciences, yet many are derived from unstructured documents and therefore lack schema-level constrains, whereas graphs assembled from structured resources are difficult to harmonize into a unified representation. We present OptimusKG, a multimodal biomedical labeled property graph (LPG) built from structured and semi-structured resources to preserve factual, type-specific metadata across molecular, anatomical, clinical, and environmental domains. OptimusKG contains 190,531 nodes across 10 entity types, 21,813,816 edges across 26 relation types, and 67,249,863 property instances encoding 110,276,843 values across 150 distinct property keys, derived from 18 ontologies and controlled vocabularies. The graph enforces a top-level schema for nodes and edges and retains granular, type-specific properties, cross-references, and provenance across molecular, anatomical, clinical, and environmental domains. We assessed the validity of OptimusKG by evaluating whether graph relationships are supported by evidence from the scientific literature using a multimodal agent, PaperQA3. PaperQA3 identified supporting evidence for 70.0% of sampled edges, whereas 83.4% of sampled false edges received no supporting evidence. Edges without literature support were concentrated in associations derived from experimental and functional genomics resources, suggesting that OptimusKG captures biomedical knowledge that may precede synthesis in the scientific literature. OptimusKG is distributed as Apache Parquet files, providing a standardized resource for graph-based machine learning, knowledge-grounded retrieval with large language models, and biomedical discovery use cases such as hypothesis generation.
Authors: Dahlia Shehata, Ming Li
Abstract: As AI transitions toward multi-agent systems (MAS) to solve complex workflows, research paradigms operate on the axiomatic assumption that agent collaboration mirrors the "Wisdom of the Crowd". We challenge this assumption by formalizing the Consensus Paradox: a phenomenon where agentic swarms prioritize internal architectural agreement over external logical truth. Through a 36 experiments encompassing 12,804 trajectories across three state-of-the-art (SOTA) benchmarks (GAIA, Multi-Challenge, and SWE-bench), we prove the Inverse-Wisdom Law: in kinship-dominant swarms, adding logical agents increases the stability of erroneous trajectories rather than the probability of truth. The introduction of additional logical audits converges the system toward a Logic Saturation where internal entropy hits zero while factual error hits unity. By evaluating the interaction between the 3 preeminent SOTA models (Gemini 3.1 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.6, and GPT-5.4), we establish the Architectural Tribalism Asymmetry as a mechanistic law of transformer weights. We demonstrate that terminal swarm integrity is strictly gated by the synthesizer's receptive logic, rather than aggregate agent quality. We define the Tribalism Coefficient and the Sycophantic Weight as the primary mechanistic determinants of swarm failure. Finally, we establish the Heterogeneity Mandate as a foundational safety requirement for resilient agentic architectures.
Authors: Alan L. McCann
Abstract: We present five results in the theory of structural governance for cognitive workflow systems. Three are mechanized in Coq 8.19 using the Interaction Trees library with parameterized coinduction; two are proved on paper with explicit reductions. The Coinductive Safety Predicate (gov_safe) is a coinductive property that captures governance safety for infinite program behaviors, indexed by a boolean permission flag that is provably false for ungoverned I/O and true for governed interpretations (mechanized). The Governance Invariance Theorem establishes that governance is uniform across the meta-recursive tower: governance at level n+1 reduces to governance at level n by definitional equality of the type (mechanized). The Sufficiency Theorem proves that four atomic primitives (code, reason, memory, call) are expressively complete for any discrete intelligent system, formalized as compositional closure of a Kleisli category (mechanized). The Alternating Normal Form provides a canonical decomposition of any machine into alternating code and effect layers, with a confluent rewriting system (paper proof). The Necessity Theorem proves via explicit reduction to Rice's theorem that an architecturally opaque component (the reason primitive) is mathematically necessary for problems requiring semantic judgment (paper proof). A sixth contribution connects the abstract model to the deployed runtime: the Verified Interpreter Specification formalizes the BEAM runtime's trust, capability, and hash chain logic in Coq, then tests the running system against this specification using property-based testing with over 70,000 randomly generated directive sequences and zero disagreements. The mechanization comprises approximately 12,000 lines across 36 modules with 454 theorems and zero admitted lemmas.
Authors: Alan L. McCann
Abstract: Every system that performs effects has two boundaries: what it can do (expressiveness) and what governance covers (governance). In nearly all deployed AI systems, these boundaries are defined independently, creating three regions: governed capabilities (the only useful region), ungoverned capabilities (risk), and governance policies that address non-existent capabilities (theater). Two of the three regions are failure modes. We focus on the governance of effects: actions that AI systems perform in the world (API calls, database writes, tool invocations). This is distinct from the governance of model outputs (content quality, bias, fairness), which operates at a different level and requires different mechanisms. We present a formal framework for analyzing this structural gap. Rice's theorem (1953) proves the gap is undecidable in the general case for any Turing-complete architecture that attempts to govern effects behaviorally: no algorithm can decide non-trivial semantic properties of arbitrary programs, including the property "this program's effects comply with the governance policy." We define coterminous governance: a system property where the expressivenessboundary equals the governance boundary. We show that coterminous governance requires an architectural decision (separatingcomputation from effect) rather than a governance layer added after the fact. We show that structural governance under this separation subsumes separate governance infrastructure: governance checks become part of the execution pipeline rather than a second system running alongside it. We propose coterminous governance as the testable criterion for any AI governance system: either the two boundaries are provably identical, or risk and theater are structurally inevitable. Proofs are mechanized in Coq (454 theorems, 36 modules, 0 admitted).
Authors: Ming-Hong Yao, Di Wang, Jian Cui, Jin-Yan Chen, Zi-Hao Cui, Fa Wang, Chen Wei, Qiu-Ye Yu
Abstract: Learning rate scheduling has evolved from the single global fixed rate of early SGD to sophisticated layer-wise adaptive strategies. We systematize this evolution into five generations: (Gen1) global fixed learning rates, (Gen2) global scheduling, (Gen3) parameter-level adaptation, (Gen4) layer-level differentiation, and (Gen5) joint layer-time scheduling. We trace the fundamental motivation behind each transition, showing how the shift from one-size-fits-all to tailoring by layer and time addresses the impossible trinity of transfer learning: lower layers require small updates to preserve general knowledge while higher layers need large updates to adapt to new tasks. Building on this taxonomy, we propose Discriminative Adaptive Layer Scaling (DALS), a unified framework that integrates phase-adaptive cosine scheduling, depth-aware Grokfast gradient filtering, and LARS-style trust ratios into a single coherent optimizer. We benchmark 18 strategies including three DALS variants across all five generations on five datasets: synthetic, CIFAR-10 (from scratch), RTE, TREC-6, and IMDb (fine-tuning). On synthetic, DALS achieves the best accuracy at 98.0%, while DALS-Fast reaches 90% in just 3 epochs. The cross-dataset analysis reveals striking regime-dependent patterns -- no single strategy wins across all regimes. Critically, STLR+Discriminative, the ULMFiT champion, catastrophically fails on from-scratch tasks (43.6% on TREC-6 from scratch vs. 96.8% with RAdam), confirming that directional decay biases are harmful without pretrained features. DALS avoids either extreme, achieving the best synthetic result while maintaining competitive fine-tuning performance.
Authors: Gyoung S. Na, Chanyoung Park
Abstract: Deriving governing equations from empirical observations is a longstanding challenge in science. Although artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated substantial capabilities in function approximation, the discovery of explainable and extrapolatable equations remains a fundamental limitation of modern AI, posing a central bottleneck for AI-driven scientific discovery. Here, we present machine collective intelligence, a unified paradigm that integrates two fundamental yet distinct traditions in computational intelligence--symbolism and metaheuristics--to enable autonomous and evolutionary discovery of governing equations. It orchestrates multiple reasoning agents to evolve their symbolic hypotheses through coordinated generation, evaluation, critique, and consolidation, enabling scientific discovery beyond single-agent inference. Across scientific systems governed by deterministic, stochastic, or previously uncharacterized dynamics, machine collective intelligence autonomously recovered the underlying governing equations without relying on hand-crafted domain knowledge. Furthermore, the resulting equations reduced extrapolation error by up to six orders of magnitude relative to deep neural networks, while condensing 0.5-1 million model parameters into just 5-40 interpretable parameters. This study marks an important shift in AI toward the autonomous discovery of principled scientific equations.
Authors: Jianpeng Chen, Wangzhi Zhan, Dongqi Fu, Junkai Zhang, Zian Jia, Ling Li, Wei Wang, Dawei Zhou
Abstract: Metamaterial discovery seeks microstructured materials whose geometry induces targeted mechanical behavior. Existing inverse-design methods can efficiently generate candidates, but they typically require explicit numerical property targets and are less suitable for early-stage exploration, where researchers often begin with incomplete constraints and qualitative intents expressed in natural language. Large language models can interpret such intents, but they lack geometric awareness and physical property validity. To address this gap, we propose MetaSymbO, a multi-agent framework for language-guided Metamaterial discovery via Symbolic-driven latent evOlution. Specifically, MetaSymbO contains three agents: a Designer that interprets free-form design intents and retrieves a semantically consistent scaffold, a Generator that synthesizes candidate microstructures in a disentangled latent space, and a Supervisor that provides fast property-aware feedback for iterative refinement. To move beyond the limitations of reproducing known samples from literature and training data, we further introduce symbolic-driven latent evolution, which applies programmable operators over disentangled latent factors to compose, modify, and refine structures at inference time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that (i) MetaSymbO improves structural validity by up to 34% in symmetry and nearly 98% in periodicity compared to state-of-the-art baselines; (ii) MetaSymbO achieves about 6-7% higher language-guidance scores while maintaining superior structure novelty compared to advanced reasoning LLMs; (iii) qualitative analyses confirm the effectiveness of symbolic logic operators in enabling programmable semantic alignment; and (iv) realworld case studies on auxetic, high-stiffness metamaterial design further validate its practical capability.
Authors: Aaryan Shah, Andrew Hines, Alexia Downs, Denis Bajet, Paulius Mui, Fabiano Araujo, Laura Offutt, Aida Rutledge, Elizabeth Jimenez
Abstract: Clinical AI systems require not just point-in-time evaluation but continuous governance: the ongoing practice of monitoring, evaluating, iterating, and re-evaluating performance throughout deployment. We present an end-to-end framework of governance that integrates rubric validation, live deployment feedback, technical performance monitoring, and cost tracking, with controlled experimentation gating system changes before deployment. Applied to Hyperscribe, an EHR-embedded agent that converts ambient audio into structured chart updates, twenty clinicians authored 1,646 validated rubrics across 823 cases. Seven Hyperscribe versions were evaluated through controlled experiments, with median scores improving from 84% to 95%. Analysis of 107 live feedback entries over three months showed feedback composition shifting from 79% error reports and 14% positive observations to 30% errors and 45% positive observations as engineering interventions resolved failures. Median processing time per audio segment was 8.1 seconds with a 99.6% effective completion rate after retry mechanisms absorbed transient model errors. These results demonstrate that continuous, multi-channel governance of deployed clinical AI is both achievable and effective.
Authors: Ziyao Xu, Cong Wang, Houfeng Wang
Abstract: Compositional generalization tests are often used to estimate the compositionality of LLMs. However, such tests have the following limitations: (1) they only focus on the output results without considering LLMs' understanding of sample compositionality, resulting in explainability defects; (2) they rely on dataset partition to form the test set with combinations unseen in the training set, suffering from combination leakage issues. In this work, we propose a novel rule-generation perspective for compositionality estimation for LLMs. It requires LLMs to generate a program as rules for dataset mapping and provides estimates of the compositionality of LLMs using complexity-based theory. The perspective addresses the limitations of compositional generalization tests and provides a new way to analyze the compositionality characterization of LLMs. We conduct experiments and analysis of existing advanced LLMs based on this perspective on a string-to-grid task, and find various compositionality characterizations and compositionality deficiencies exhibited by LLMs.
Authors: Zihao Li, Jiaru Zou, Feihao Fang, Xuying Ning, Mengting Ai, Tianxin Wei, Sirui Chen, Xiyuan Yang, Jingrui He
Abstract: Agentic large language model systems have demonstrated strong capabilities. However, their reliance on language as the universal interface fundamentally limits their applicability to many real-world problems, especially in scientific domains where domain-specific foundation models have been developed to address specialized tasks beyond natural language. In this work, we introduce Eywa, a heterogeneous agentic framework designed to extend language-centric systems to a broader class of scientific foundation models. The key idea of Eywa is to augment domain-specific foundation models with a language-model-based reasoning interface, enabling language models to guide inference over non-linguistic data modalities. This design allows predictive foundation models, which are typically optimized for specialized data and tasks, to participate in higher-level reasoning and decision-making processes within agentic systems. Eywa can serve as a drop-in replacement for a single-agent pipeline (EywaAgent) or be integrated into existing multi-agent systems by replacing traditional agents with specialized agents (EywaMAS). We further investigate a planning-based orchestration framework in which a planner dynamically coordinates traditional agents and Eywa agents to solve complex tasks across heterogeneous data modalities (EywaOrchestra). We evaluate Eywa across a diverse set of scientific domains spanning physical, life, and social sciences. Experimental results demonstrate that Eywa improves performance on tasks involving structured and domain-specific data, while reducing reliance on language-based reasoning through effective collaboration with specialized foundation models.
Authors: Louth Bin Rawshan, Zhuoyu Wang, Brian Y. Lim
Abstract: Explainable AI (XAI) aims to improve user understanding and decisions when using AI models. However, despite innovations in XAI, recent user evaluations reveal that this goal remains elusive. Understanding human cognition can help explain why users struggle to effectively use AI explanations. Focusing on reasoning on structured (tabular) data, we examined various reasoning strategies for different XAI methods (none, feature importance, feature attribution) in the decision task of anticipating AI decisions (i.e., forward simulation). We i) elicited reasoning strategies from a formative user study, and ii) collected decisions from a summative user study. Using cognitive modeling, we implemented the processes underlying each reasoning strategy and evaluated their alignment with human decision-making. We found that our models better fit human decisions than baseline machine learning proxies, providing insights into which reasoning strategies are (in)effective. We then demonstrate how the fitted model can be used to form hypotheses and investigate research questions that are costly to study with real human participants. This work contributes to debugging human understanding of XAI, informing the future development of more usable and interpretable AI explanations.
Authors: Yuan Sun
Abstract: As large language model (LLM) agents are deployed in high-stakes environments, the question of how safely to delegate subtasks to specialized sub-agents becomes critical. Existing work addresses multi-agent architecture selection at design time or provides broad empirical guidelines, but neither provides a runtime mechanism that dynamically adjusts the safety-efficiency trade-off as task context changes during execution. We propose Safe Bilevel Delegation (SBD), a formal framework for runtime delegation safety in hierarchical multi-agent systems. SBD formulates task delegation as a bilevel optimization problem: an outer meta-weight network phi learns context-dependent safety-efficiency weights lambda(s) in [0,1]; an inner loop optimizes the delegation policy pi subject to a probabilistic safety constraint P(safe) >= 1-delta. The continuous delegation degree alpha in [0, 1] controls how much decision authority is transferred to each sub-agent, interpolating smoothly between full human override (alpha=0) and fully autonomous execution (alpha=1). We establish three theoretical results: (1) Safety Monotonicity--higher outer safety weight produces a weakly safer inner policy; (2) Inner Policy Convergence--projected gradient descent on the inner problem converges linearly under standard smoothness assumptions; (3) an Accountability Propagation bound that distributes responsibility across multi-hop delegation chains with a provable per-agent ceiling. We instantiate SBD in three high-stakes domains--medical AI (MIMIC-III), financial risk control (S and P 500), and educational agent supervision (ASSISTments)--specifying datasets, safety constraint sets, baselines, and evaluation protocols. This manuscript presents the formal framework and theoretical results in full; empirical validation following the protocols described herein is planned and will be reported in a forthcoming revision.
Authors: Jean Martins, Leonid Mokrushin, Marin Orlic
Abstract: Intent-based networking promises to revolutionize telecommunications network management by enabling operators to specify high-level goals rather than low-level configurations. The TM Forum Intent Ontology (tio) provides a standardized vocabulary for expressing network intents, yet lacks formal validation mechanisms to ensure intent correctness before its admission. We present tio-shacl, the first comprehensive SHACL (Shapes Constraint Language) validation framework for the TMF Intent Ontology. Our contribution includes 56 node shapes and 69 property shapes across all 15 tio v3.6.0 ontology modules, a reusable constraint library with 25 parameterized SPARQL-based constraint components, and novel validation patterns for recursive logical operators, quantity-based constraints, and cross-expectation relationships. We pursued 100% vocabulary coverage (87 classes, 109 properties, 72 functions), cross-implementation compatibility across three major SHACL engines, and validation accuracy on a corpus of 133 test cases. tio-shacl is publicly available under MIT license at https://github.com/EricssonResearch/tio-shacl and enables automated syntactic and semantic validation of network intents, addressing a critical gap in the field.
Authors: Sidi Chang, Peiying Zhu, Yuxiao Chen, Rongdong Chai
Abstract: As LLMs become credible readers of earnings calls, investor-relations Q\&A, guidance, and disclosure language, supervised financial NLP benchmarks increasingly function as decision evidence for model selection and deployment. A hidden assumption is that gold labels make such evidence objective. This assumption breaks down when the benchmark ruler itself is sensitive to rubric wording, metric choice, or aggregation policy. We study this measurement risk on Japanese Financial Implicit-Commitment Recognition (JF-ICR; a pinned 253-item test split x 4 frontier LLMs x 5 rubrics x 3 temperatures x 5 ordinal metrics). Three findings follow. First, rubric wording materially changes model-assigned labels: R2--R3 agreement ranges from 70.0% to 83.4%, with the dominant movement near the +1 / 0 implicit-commitment boundary. This pattern is consistent with a pragmatic-boundary interpretation, but is not a validated linguistic-causality claim because the present rubric variants confound semantics, examples, and verbosity. Second, not every metric remains informative under the JF-ICR class distribution. Within-one accuracy is too easy because near misses receive credit and the majority class dominates; worst-class accuracy is too noisy because the rarest class has only two examples. Exact accuracy, macro-F1, and weighted \k{appa} are therefore the identifiable metrics under our operational rule. Third, ranking claims become more defensible only after this metric-identifiability audit: Bradley--Terry, Borda, and Ranked Pairs agree on the identifiable metric subset, while the full five-metric sweep produces disagreement on the closest pair. The contribution is not a new leaderboard, but a reporting discipline for supervised financial benchmarks whose gold labels exist and whose evaluation ruler still requires governance.
Authors: Yihan Zhang, Ercan E. Kuruoglu
Abstract: Heterogeneous graphs with heterophily have emerged as a powerful abstraction for modeling complex real-world systems, where nodes of different types and labels interact in diverse and often non-homophilous ways. Despite recent advances, robust representation learning for such graphs remains largely unexplored, particularly in the presence of noisy or misleading connectivity. In this work, we investigate this problem and identify structural noise as a critical challenge that significantly degrades model performance. To address this issue, we propose a unified framework, Heterogeneous Graph Unified Learning (HGUL), which jointly handles heterophily and noisy graph structures. The framework consists of three complementary modules: a kNN-based graph construction module that recovers reliable local neighborhoods, a graph structure learning module that adaptively refines the adjacency by filtering noisy edges, and a heterogeneous affinity learning module that captures class-level relationships via an extended affinity matrix derived from a polynomial graph kernel. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that HGUL consistently outperforms existing methods on clean graphs and maintains strong robustness under varying levels of structural noise. The results further underscore the importance of jointly modeling heterophily and noise in heterogeneous graph learning.
Authors: Alejandro R. Jadad
Abstract: What shapes a consequential decision when human and artificial intelligence work on it together? The answer is becoming harder to see. A decision may look human-led after AI has set the frame, or appear automated while human judgment still carries decisive force. This paper offers a leadership-facing spectrum to see those relationships within a bounded mandate: Pure Human, Centaur (human-dominant, with AI in the loop), Co-equal, Minotaur (AI-dominant, with humans in the loop), and Pure AI. The spectrum asks where leadership work occurs: who frames the problem, who redirects the work, and who can answer for what follows. The five positions are landmarks that help leaders recognize configurations as they layer, drift, or change in a single decision. The central risk is misrecognition: leaders may keep a human-centered story in place after decision-shaping authority has shifted elsewhere. They may believe oversight remains meaningful when it has become ceremonial, or keep humans in the loop when their involvement could make the decision worse. The framework introduces co-adaptability, the capacity of a configuration to improve as human and non-human participants adjust together, and places it within heterogeneous teaming, where participants may vary by number, substrate, model architecture, capability, speed, memory, and form of participation. The aim is practical: to help strategic leaders and those designing or deploying AI systems recognize the configuration at work, notice when it shifts, and judge whether it fits the decision before them. These configurations will shape how power, responsibility, and trust are distributed in organizational life. Whether the futures they help create remain governable and worth inhabiting will depend on leaders who can see, early enough, where and how consequential decisions are actually being shaped.
Authors: Qiyao Wang, Haoran Hu, Longze Chen, Hongbo Wang, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Yuan Lin, Min Yang
Abstract: With the advancement of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and coding agents, the website development has shifted from manual programming to agent-based project-level code synthesis. Existing benchmarks rely on idealized assumptions, especially for well-structured, information-rich inputs and static execution settings. In contrast, real-world development is constrained by a critical bottleneck: the semantic misalignment between ambiguous, low-quality instructions from non-expert users and model understanding, which results in a failure mode that we term blind execution. To address this gap, we introduce InteractWeb-Bench, the first multimodal interactive benchmark for website generation under non-expert low-code user conditions. InteractWeb-Bench introduces four types of user agents and persona-driven instruction perturbations to systematically simulate diverse user behaviors, including ambiguity, redundancy, and contradiction, grounded in requirement engineering defect taxonomies. We develop an interactive execution environment for agents, featuring a unified action space comprising Clarify, Implement, Verify, and Submit, enabling iterative intent refinement, code synthesis, and visual feedback-based validation. Extensive experiments and analysis reveal that frontier MLLM-based agents remain trapped in blind execution, exposing limitations in intent recognition and adaptive interaction.
Authors: Yang Zhang, Jiangyuan Zhao, Chenyou Fan, Fangzheng Yan, Tian Li, Haitong Tang, Sen Fu, Xuan'er Wu, Qizhen Weng, Weinan Zhang, Xiu Li, Chi Zhang, Chenjia Bai, Xuelong Li
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models advance robotic control via strong visual-linguistic priors. However, existing VLAs predominantly frame pretraining as supervised behavior cloning, overlooking the fundamental nature of robot learning as a goal-reaching process that requires understanding temporal task progress. We present \textbf{PRTS} (\textbf{P}rimitive \textbf{R}easoning and \textbf{T}asking \textbf{S}ystem), a VLA foundation model that reformulates pretraining through Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning. By treating language instructions as goals and employing contrastive reinforcement learning, PRTS learns a unified embedding space where the inner product of state-action and goal embeddings approximates the log-discounted goal occupancy, the probability of reaching the language-specified goal from the current state-action, quantitatively assessing physical feasibility beyond static semantic matching. PRTS draws this dense goal-reachability supervision directly from offline trajectories without reward annotations, and folds it into the VLM backbone via a role-aware causal mask, incurring negligible overhead over vanilla behavior cloning. This paradigm endows the high-level reasoning system with intrinsic goal reachability awareness, bridging semantic reasoning and temporal task progress, and further benefits goal-conditioned action prediction. Pretrained on 167B tokens of diverse manipulation and embodied-reasoning data, PRTS reaches state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO, LIBERO-Pro, LIBERO-Plus, SimplerEnv, and a real-world suite of 14 complex tasks, with particularly substantial gains on long-horizon, contact-rich, and zero-shot novel-instruction settings, confirming that injecting goal-reachability awareness significantly improves both execution success and long-horizon planning of general-purpose robotic foundation policies.
Authors: Wenhao Yuan, Chenchen Lin, Jian Chen, Jinfeng Xu, Shuo Yang, Edith Cheuk Han Ngai
Abstract: In black-box large language model (LLM) services, response reliability is often only partially observable at decision time, while stronger inference pathways incur substantial computational cost, inducing a budgeted sequential decision problem: for each request, the system should decide whether the default low-cost response is sufficiently reliable or whether additional computation should be allocated to improve response quality. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Ver}ifiable \textbf{O}bservations for Risk-aware \textbf{I}nference \textbf{C}ontrol (\textsc{Veroic}), a framework for adaptive inference control in black-box LLM settings, which formulates request-time control as a \textit{partially observable Markov decision process} to capture partial observability and sequential budget coupling. It constructs a lightweight verifiable observation channel from the input-output pair by aggregating heterogeneous quality signals into a belief state over latent response reliability, which is then used by a budget-aware policy to decide whether to return the default output or trigger a higher-cost inference pathway. Experiments on diverse tasks show that \textsc{Veroic} achieves improved quality-cost trade-offs, stronger risk estimation and calibration, and more robust long-horizon inference control than competitive baselines.
Authors: Chaemin Jang, Woojin Park, Hyeok Yun, Dongman Lee, Jihee Kim
Abstract: Scientific reasoning rarely stops at what is directly observable; it often requires uncovering hidden structure from data. From estimating reaction constants in chemistry to inferring demand elasticities in economics, this latent structure recovery is what distinguishes scientific reasoning from curve fitting. Large language models (LLMs) can often recall and apply relevant scientific formulas, but we show that this ability is surprisingly easy to suppress. We show that adding in-context examples makes models rely less on pretrained domain knowledge, even when those examples are generated by the very same formula. Rather than reinforcing knowledge-driven derivation, examples shift computation toward empirical pattern fitting. We document this knowledge displacement on 60 latent structure recovery tasks across five scientific domains, 6,000 trials, and four models. This displacement is consistent across domains, but its accuracy consequences depend on how the displaced strategy compares to the one that replaces it: the same shift can lower accuracy, leave it unchanged, or appear to improve it. In all cases, however, the model shifts away from knowledge-driven reasoning. For practitioners deploying LLMs on scientific tasks, the message is cautionary: in-context examples may displace, rather than reinforce, the knowledge they are intended to support.
Authors: Song Tang, Kaiyong Zhao, Yuliang Li, Qingsong Yan, Penglei Sun, Junyi Zou, Qiang Wang, Xiaowen Chu
Abstract: Automatically generating interactive 3D indoor scenes from natural language is crucial for virtual reality, gaming, and embodied AI. However, existing LLM-based approaches often suffer from spatial errors and collisions, in part because common scene representations-raw coordinates or verbose code-are difficult for models to reason about 3D spatial relationships and physical constraints. We propose SpatialGrammar, a domain-specific language that represents gravity-aligned indoor layouts as BEV grid placements with deterministic compilation to valid 3D geometry, enabling verifiable constraint checking. Building on this representation, we develop (1) SG-Agent, a closed-loop system that uses compiler feedback to iteratively refine scenes and enforce collision constraints, and (2) SG-Mini, a 104M-parameter model trained entirely on compiler-validated synthetic data. Across 159 test scenes spanning five scenarios of different complexity, SG-Agent improves spatial fidelity and physical plausibility over prior methods, while SG-Mini performs competitively against larger LLM-based baselines on single-shot generation scenarios.
Authors: Anna Mazhar, Huzaifa Suri, Sainyam Galhotra
Abstract: Reasoning over heterogeneous artifacts (PDFs, spreadsheets, slide decks, etc.) increasingly occurs within structured agent workflows that iteratively extract, transform, and reference external information. In these workflows, uncertainty is not merely an input-quality issue: it can redirect decomposition and routing decisions, reshape intermediate state, and produce qualitatively different execution trajectories. We study this phenomenon by treating uncertainty as a controlled variable: we inject structured perturbations into artifact-derived representations, execute fixed workflows under comprehensive logging, and quantify contamination via trace divergence in plans, tool invocations, and intermediate state. Across 614 paired runs on 32 GAIA tasks with three different language models, we find a decoupling: workflows may diverge substantially yet recover correct answers, or remain structurally similar while producing incorrect outputs. We characterize three manifestation types: silent semantic corruption, behavioral detours with recovery, and combined structural disruption and their control-flow signatures (rerouting, extended execution, early termination). We measure operational costs and characterize why commonly used verification guardrails fail to intercept contamination. We contribute (i) a formal taxonomy of contamination manifestations in structured workflows, (ii) a trace-based measurement framework for detecting and localizing contamination across agent interactions, and (iii) empirical evidence with implications for targeted verification, defensive design, and cost control.
Authors: Naomi Esposito, Anthony Tricarico, Luisa Porzio, Ali Aghazadeh Ardebili, Massimo Stella
Abstract: To enhance LLMs' impact on math education, we need data on their mathematical prowess and biases across prompts. To fill this gap, we introduce MEDS (Math Education Digital Shadows) as a dataset mapping how large language models reason about and report mathematics across human- and AI-like conditions. MEDS involves 28,000 personas from 14 LLMs (from families like Mistral, Qwen, DeepSeek, Granite, Phi and Grok) shadowing either humans or AI assistants. Each record/shadow includes a set of prompts along with psychological/sociodemographic persona metadata and four types of math tasks: (i) open math interview, (ii) three psychometric tests about math perceptions with explanations, (iii) cognitive networks capturing math attitudes, and (iv) 18 high-school math test questions together with their reasoning and confidence scores. MEDS differs from traditional score-only math benchmarks because it integrates concepts of self-efficacy, math anxiety, and cognitive network science besides math proficiency scores. Data validation shows that the sampled LLMs exhibit schema integrity and consistent personas, together with family-specific peculiarities like human-like negative math attitudes, logical fallacies, and math overconfidence. MEDS will benefit learning analytics experts, cognitive scientists, and developers of safer AI tutors in mathematics.
Authors: Ke Xu
Abstract: We present WaferSAGE, a framework for wafer defect visual question answering using small vision-language models. To address data scarcity in semiconductor manufacturing, we propose a three-stage synthesis pipeline incorporating structured rubric generation for precise evaluation. Starting from limited labeled wafer maps, we employ clustering-based cleaning to filter label noise, then generate comprehensive defect descriptions using vision-language models, which are converted into structured evaluation rubrics criteria. These rubrics guide the synthesis of VQA pairs, ensuring coverage across defect type identification, spatial distribution, morphology, and root cause analysis. Our dual assessment framework aligns rule-based metrics with LLM-Judge scores via Bayesian optimization, enabling reliable automated evaluation. Through curriculum-based reinforcement learning with Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) and rubric-aligned rewards, our 4B-parameter Qwen3-VL model achieves a 6.493 LLM-Judge score, closely approaching Gemini-3-Flash (7.149) while enabling complete on-premise deployment. We demonstrate that small models with domain-specific training can surpass proprietary large models in specialized industrial visual understanding, offering a viable path for privacy-preserving, cost-effective deployment in semiconductor manufacturing.
Authors: Petter T\"ornberg, Michelle Schimmel
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are commonly evaluated for political bias based on their responses to fixed questionnaires, which typically place frontier models on the political left. A parallel literature shows that LLMs are sycophantic: they adapt their answers to the views, identities, and expectations of the user. We show that these findings are linked: standard political-bias audits partly capture sycophantic accommodation to the inferred auditor. We employ a factorial experiment across three major audit instruments--the Political Compass Test, the Pew Political Typology, and 1,540 partisan-benchmarked Pew American Trends Panel items--administered to six frontier LLMs while varying only the asker's stated identity (N = 30,990 responses). At baseline, all six models lean left. When the asker identifies as a conservative Republican, responses shift sharply: the share of items closer to Democrats falls by 28-62 percentage points, and all six models move right of center. A mirror-image progressive-Democrat cue produces little change; rightward accommodation is 8.0$\times$ larger than leftward. When asked who the default asker is, models identify an auditor, researcher, or academic; when asked what answer that asker expects, they select the Democrat-coded option 75% of the time, nearly the rate under an explicit progressive cue. These patterns are inconsistent with a purely fixed model ideology and indicate that single-prompt audits capture an interaction between model and inferred interlocutor. Political bias in LLMs is therefore not a fixed point on an ideological scale but a response profile that must be mapped across realistic interlocutors.
Authors: Yifang Qin, Yu Shi, Junfu Tan, Chang Liu, Ming Zhang, Ziheng Lu
Abstract: Predicting stable and metastable structures is central to molecular and materials discovery, but remains limited by the cost of searching high-dimensional energy landscapes. Deep generative models offer efficient structure sampling, yet their outputs remain shaped by training data and can underexplore minima that are rare but physically relevant. We introduce generative structure search (GSS), a unified framework that formulates diffusion-based generation and random structure search (RSS) as limiting regimes of a common sampling process driven by learned score fields and physical forces. Coupling these drivers lets GSS use data priors to accelerate sampling while retaining energy-guided exploration of local minima. Across molecular and crystalline systems, GSS recovers diverse metastable structures with more than tenfold lower sampling cost than RSS for broad coverage and remains effective for compositions outside the training distribution. The results establish a physically grounded generative search strategy for discovering structures beyond the reach of data-driven sampling alone.
Authors: Nicholas Sadjoli, Tim Siefken, Atin Ghosh, Yifan Mai, Daniel Dahlmeier
Abstract: Current Large Language Model (LLM) evaluation frameworks utilize the same static prompt template across all models under evaluation. This differs from the common industry practice of using prompt optimization (PO) techniques to optimize the prompt for each model to maximize application performance. In this paper, we investigate the effect of PO towards LLM evaluations. Our results on public academic and internal industry benchmarks show that PO greatly affects the final ranking of models. This highlights the importance of practitioners performing PO per model when conducting evaluations to choose the best model for a given task.
Authors: Shuzheng Si, Haozhe Zhao, Yu Lei, Qingyi Wang, Dingwei Chen, Zhitong Wang, Zhenhailong Wang, Kangyang Luo, Zheng Wang, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Minjia Zhang, Maosong Sun
Abstract: Many real-world tasks require language models (LMs) to reason over complex contexts that exceed their parametric knowledge. This calls for context learning, where LMs directly learn relevant knowledge from the given context. An intuitive solution is inference-time skill augmentation: extracting the rules and procedures from context into natural-language skills. However, constructing such skills for context learning scenarios faces two challenges: the prohibitive cost of manual skill annotation for long, technically dense contexts, and the lack of external feedback for automated skill construction, since there is no automatic signal to tell whether a proposed skill is helpful. In this paper, we propose Ctx2Skill, a self-evolving framework that autonomously discovers, refines, and selects context-specific skills without human supervision or external feedback. At its core, a multi-agent self-play loop has a Challenger that generates probing tasks and rubrics, a Reasoner that attempts to solve them guided by an evolving skill set, and a neutral Judge that provides binary feedback. Crucially, both the Challenger and the Reasoner evolve through accumulated skills: dedicated Proposer and Generator agents analyze failure cases and synthesize them into targeted skill updates for both sides, enabling automated skill discovery and refinement. To prevent adversarial collapse caused by increasingly extreme task generation and over-specialized skill accumulation, we further introduce a Cross-time Replay mechanism that identifies the skill set achieving the best balance across representative cases for the Reasoner side, ensuring robust and generalizable skill evolution. The resulting skills can be plugged into any language model to obtain better context learning capability. Evaluated on four context learning tasks from CL-bench, Ctx2Skill consistently improves solving rates across backbone models.
Authors: Pedro F. C. de Carvalho, Zijie Liu, Md Umar Hashmi, Dirk Van Hertem
Abstract: The incorporation of fairness into the distribution network (DN) planning and operation has become a key goal of recent studies. The cost of implementing fairness, denominated the price of fairness (PoF), covers the efficiency that is renounced for attaining social cohesion through fair outcomes. Locational disparity makes fairness schemes emerge to level the consumers playing field. However, fairness encompasses a range of notions. From egalitarian to merit-based criteria, various metrics are implemented as a tool for measuring equitable utility distribution. These have different mathematical complexities, from linear to non-linear programming cases, which affect their overall applicability. Hence, this study compiles the overarching fairness notions and metrics, reviewing how these affect stakeholders and the inherent mathematical optimisation in resource allocation problems. The aim is to support consistent and transparent planning and decision-making within DN operations.
Authors: Sebastiano Franchini, Alexis Carrillo, Edoardo Sebastiano De Duro, Riccardo Improta, Ali Aghazadeh Ardebili, Massimo Stella
Abstract: We introduce Target-Event-Agent Networks (TEA Nets) as a computational framework to extract subjects (``Agents"), verbs (``Events"), and objects (``Targets") from texts. Grounded in cognitive network science and artificial intelligence, TEA Nets are implemented as an open-source Python library. We test TEA Nets in three case studies, demonstrating the framework's ability to perform interpretable emotion detection, semantic frame analyses, and linguistic inquiries across conspiracy texts and textual responses generated by LLMs. In the LOCO conspiracy corpus, TEA Nets revealed that highly conspiratorial narratives (4,227 texts) linked personal pronouns (``I", ``you", ``we") with the same actions twice as frequently as low-similarity conspiracy narratives. High-conspiracy narratives connected person-focused elements (``you", ``people") through actions eliciting anger above the random baseline ($z = 2.63, p < .05$), a trend absent in low-similarity conspiracy narratives, which emphasized scientific actors (``researcher", ``scientist"). In the HOPE and CounseLLMe datasets of 212 (human) and 200 (LLM-based) psychotherapy transcripts, respectively, TEA Nets highlighted emotional differences. When expressing feelings, Claude 3 Haiku, GPT-3.5, and humans used sad words with higher frequency than random expectations but Haiku expressed sadness with lower emotional intensity than humans ($U = 1243.5, p = .036$). We discuss these differences in the context of psychotherapy training on LLM-simulated patients. Our results show that Target-Event-Agent Networks can extract relevant emotional, syntactic, and semantic insights from narratives, opening new avenues for text analysis with cognitive network science.
Authors: Chao Fei, Hongcheng Guo, Yanghua Xiao
Abstract: Across millennia, complex societies have faced the same coordination problem of how to organize collective action among cognitively bounded and informationally incomplete individuals. Different civilizations developed different political institutions to answer the same basic questions of who proposes, who reviews, who executes, and how errors are corrected. We argue that multi-agent systems built on large language models face the same challenge. Their central problem is not only individual intelligence, but collective organization. Historical institutions therefore provide a structured design space for multi-agent architectures, making key trade-offs between efficiency and error correction, centralization and distribution, and specialization and redundancy empirically testable. We translate seven historical political institutions, spanning four canonical governance patterns, into executable multi-agent architectures and evaluate them under identical conditions across three large language models and two benchmarks. We find that governance topology strongly shapes collective performance. Within a single model, the gap between the best and worst institution exceeds 57 percentage points, while the optimal architecture shifts systematically with model capability and task characteristics. These results suggest that collective intelligence will not advance through a single optimal organizational form, but through governance mechanisms that can be reselected and reconfigured as tasks and capabilities evolve. More broadly, this points to a transition from \textbf{self-evolving agents} to the \textbf{self-evolving multi-agent system}. The code is available on \href{https://github.com/cf3i/SocialSystemArena}{GitHub}.
Authors: Chunhui Zhang, Yuxuan Wang, Aoyang Qin, Yi-Long Lu, Kunlun Wu, Yizhou Wang, Wei Wang
Abstract: Current embodied agents are often limited to passive instruction-following or reactive need-satisfaction, lacking a stable, high-order value framework essential for long-term, self-directed behavior and resolving motivational conflicts. We introduce \textit{ValuePlanner}, a hierarchical cognitive architecture that decouples high-level value scheduling from low-level action execution. \textit{ValuePlanner} employs an LLM-based cognitive module to generate symbolic subgoals by reasoning through abstract value trade-offs, which are then translated into executable action plans by a classical PDDL planner. This process is refined via a closed-loop feedback mechanism. Evaluating such autonomy requires methods beyond task-success rates, and we therefore propose a value-centric evaluation suite measuring cumulative value gain, preference alignment, and behavioral diversity. Experiments in the TongSim household environment demonstrate that \textit{ValuePlanner} arbitrates competing values to generate coherent, long-horizon, self-directed behavior absent from instruction-following and needs-driven baselines. Our work offers a structured approach to bridging intrinsic values and grounded behavior for autonomous agents.
Authors: Binyan Xu, Xilin Dai, Kehuan Zhang
Abstract: Current agentic memory systems (vector stores, retrieval-augmented generation, scratchpads, and context-window management) do not implement memory: they implement lookup. We argue that treating lookup as memory is a category error with provable consequences for agent capability, long-term learning, and security. Retrieval generalizes by similarity to stored cases; weight-based memory generalizes by applying abstract rules to inputs never seen before. Conflating the two produces agents that accumulate notes indefinitely without developing expertise, face a provable generalization ceiling on compositionally novel tasks that no increase in context size or retrieval quality can overcome, and are structurally vulnerable to persistent memory poisoning as injected content propagates across all future sessions. Drawing on Complementary Learning Systems theory from neuroscience, we show that biological intelligence solved this problem by pairing fast hippocampal exemplar storage with slow neocortical weight consolidation, and that current AI agents implement only the first half. We formalize these limitations, address four alternative views, and close with a co-existence proposal and a call to action for system builders, benchmark designers, and the memory community.
Authors: Wilder Baldwin, Sepideh Ghanavati
Abstract: The risks posed by AI features are increasing as they are rapidly integrated into software applications. In response, regulations and standards for safe and secure AI have been proposed. In this paper, we present an agentic framework that constructs knowledge graphs (KGs) from AI policy documents and retrieves policy-relevant information to answer questions. We build KGs from three AI risk-related polices under two ontology schemas, and then evaluate five LLMs on 42 policy QA tasks spanning six reasoning types, from entity lookup to cross-policy inference, using both heuristic scoring and an LLM-as-judge. KG augmentation improves scores for all five models, and an open, LLM-discovered schema matches or exceeds the formal ontology.
Authors: Xupeng Chen, Binbin Shi, Chenqian Le, Qifu Yin, Lang Lin, Haowei Ni, Ran Gong, Panfeng Li
Abstract: Deploying vision-language models (VLMs) in clinical settings demands auditable behavior under realistic failure conditions, yet the failure landscape of frontier VLMs on specialized medical inputs is poorly characterized. We audit five recent frontier and grounding-aware VLMs (Gemini~2.5~Pro, GPT-5, o3, GLM-4.5V, Qwen~2.5~VL) on Medical VQA along two trust-relevant axes. Perception: all models localize anatomical and pathological targets poorly -- the best model reaches only 0.23 mean IoU and 19.1% Acc@0.5 -- and exhibit clinically dangerous laterality confusion. Pipeline integration: a self-grounding pipeline, where the same model localizes then answers, degrades VQA accuracy for every model -- driven by both inaccurate localization and format-compliance failures under the two-step prompt (parse failure rises to 70%--99% for Gemini and GPT-5 on VQA-RAD). Replacing predicted boxes with ground-truth annotations recovers and improves VQA accuracy, consistent with the failure residing in the perception module rather than in the decomposition itself. These observational findings identify grounding quality as a primary trustworthiness bottleneck in our SLAKE bounding-box setting. As a complementary fine-tuning follow-up, supervised fine-tuning of Qwen~2.5~VL on combined Med-VQA training data attains the highest reported SLAKE open-ended recall (85.5%) among comparable methods, suggesting that the VQA-level gap is tractable with domain adaptation; whether this also closes the perception/trustworthiness bottleneck is left to future work.
Authors: Xupeng Chen, Binbin Shi, Chenqian Le, Jiaqi Zhang, Kewen Wang, Ran Gong, Jinhan Zhang, Chihang Wang
Abstract: Medical retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems typically operate on text chunks extracted from biomedical literature, discarding the rich visual content (tables, figures, structured layouts) of original document pages. We propose MED-VRAG, an iterative multimodal RAG framework that retrieves and reasons over PMC document page images instead of OCR'd text. The system pairs ColQwen2.5 patch-level page embeddings with a sharded MapReduce LLM filter, scaling to ~350K pages while keeping Stage-1 retrieval under 30 ms via an offline coarse-to-fine index (C=8 centroids per page, ANN over centroids, exact two-way scoring on the top-R shortlist). A vision-language model (VLM) then iteratively refines its query and accumulates evidence in a memory bank across up to 3 reasoning rounds, with a single iteration costing ~15.9 s and the full three-round pipeline ~47.8 s on 4xA100. Across four medical QA benchmarks (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, MMLU-Med), MEDVRAG reaches 78.6% average accuracy. Under controlled comparison with the same Qwen2.5-VL-32B backbone, retrieval contributes a +5.8 point gain over the no-retrieval baseline; we also note a +1.8 point edge over MedRAG + GPT-4 (76.8%), with the caveat that this is a cross-paper rather than head-to-head comparison. Ablations isolate +1.0 from page-image vs text-chunk retrieval, +1.5 from iteration, and +1.0 from the memory bank.
Authors: Wei Zhou, Rashina Hoda, Joycelyn Ling
Abstract: AI applications are increasingly being introduced into digital health. While technical performance has advanced rapidly, successful deployment mainly depends on consumer attitudes, especially to patient-facing applications. However, most existing research examines consumer attitudes towards healthcare AI at an abstract level rather than in response to concrete artefacts. We report a mixed-methods survey study in Australia (N=275) examining consumer readiness, acceptance, trust, and risk perceptions of healthcare AI, combined with a scenario-based evaluation of an AI-generated versus clinician-written consultation summary. Participants expressed moderate optimism and strong perceived usefulness and ease of use, but also substantial concerns about accuracy, safety, and data use. In the scenario task, the AI-generated summary was strongly preferred for quality, empathy, and overall usefulness, yet identification of the AI summary was near chance. Findings show that consumers judge AI through concrete communication quality and visible human governance, underscoring the need for clinically supervised deployment frameworks beyond technical performance alone.
Authors: Salman Jan, Toqeer Ali Syed, Shahid Kamal, Qamar Wali, Ali Akarma
Abstract: This article outlines a new framework of traffic light optimization through a digital twin of the transport infrastructure, managed by agentic AI to ensure real-time autonomous decisions. The framework relies on physical sensors and edge computing to measure real-time traffic information and simulate traffic flow in a constantly updated digital twin. The traffic light is automatically controlled through the digital twin according to traffic congestion, travel delay and traffic patterns. This approach is implemented as a three-layer system: perception, conceptualization and action. The perception layer receives data on physical systems; the conceptualization layer uses LangChain to process the data; and the action layer links to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and traffic management APIs to implement optimised traffic signal control algorithms. The results show that the framework minimizes waiting time at traffic lights and positively affects the effectiveness of the entire traffic flow, which is better than the fixed-time and reinforcement learning-based baselines.
Authors: Zhuoran Pan, Yue Li, Zhi Guan, Jianbin Hu, Zhong Chen
Abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a transformative interface for Web3, yet existing benchmarks fail to capture the complexity of translating high-level user intents into functionally correct, state-dependent on-chain transactions. We present \textsc{Intent2Tx}, a high-fidelity benchmark featuring 29,921 single-step and 1,575 multi-step instances meticulously derived from 300 days of real-world Ethereum mainnet traces. Unlike prior works that rely on synthetic instructions, \textsc{Intent2Tx} grounds natural language intents in real-world protocol interactions across 11 categories, including diverse long-tail Decentralized Finance (DeFi) primitives. To enable rigorous evaluation, we propose an execution-aware framework that transcends surface-level text matching by employing differential state analysis on forked mainnet environments. Our extensive evaluation of 16 state-of-the-art LLMs reveals that while scaling and retrieval-augmentation enhance logical consistency and parameter precision, current models struggle with out-of-distribution generalization and multi-step planning. Crucially, our execution-based analysis demonstrates that syntactically valid outputs often fail to achieve intended state transitions, highlighting a significant gap in current "reasoning-to-execution" capabilities. \textsc{Intent2Tx} serves as a critical foundation for developing autonomous, reliable agents in intent-centric Web3 ecosystems. Code and data: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Intent2Tx_Bench-97FF .
URLs: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Intent2Tx_Bench-97FF
Authors: Jinchao Li, Yunxin Li, Chenrui Zhao, Zhenran Xu, Baotian Hu, Min Zhang
Abstract: While GUI agents have shown impressive capabilities in common computer-use tasks such as OSWorld, current benchmarks mainly focus on isolated and single-application tasks. This overlooks a critical real-world requirement of coordinating across multiple applications to accomplish complex profession-specific workflows. To bridge this gap, we present a computer-use benchmark in cross-application workflows, named WindowsWorld, designed to systematically assess GUI Agents on complex multi-step tasks that mirror real-world professional activities. Our methodology uses a multi-agent framework steered by 16 occupations to generate four difficulty-level tasks with intermediate inspection, which are then refined by human review and executed in a simulated environment. The resulting benchmark contains 181 tasks with an average of 5.0 sub-goals across 17 common desktop applications, of which 78% are inherently multi-application. Experimental results of leading large models and agents show that: 1) All computer-use agents perform poorly on multi-application tasks (< 21% success rate), far below the performance of simple single-app tasks; 2) They largely fail at tasks requiring conditional judgment and reasoning across $\geq$ 3 applications, stalling at early sub-goals; 3) Low execution efficiency, where tasks often fail despite far exceeding human step limits. Code, benchmark data, and evaluation resources are available at github.com/HITsz-TMG/WindowsWorld.
Authors: Vishnuprasadh Kumaravelu, Sunil Gupta, P. K. Srijith
Abstract: Exponential growth in the scale of modern foundation models has led to the widespread adoption of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique. However, standard LoRA implementations disregard the varying intrinsic dimensionality of model layers and enforce a uniform rank, leading to parameter redundancy. We propose Post-Optimization Adaptive Rank Allocation (PARA), a data-free compression method for LoRA that integrates seamlessly into existing fine-tuning pipelines. PARA leverages Singular Value Decomposition to prune LoRA ranks using a global threshold over singular values across all layers. This results in non-uniform rank allocation based on layer-wise spectral importance. As a post-hoc method, PARA circumvents the training modifications and resulting instabilities that dynamic architectures typically incur. We empirically demonstrate that PARA reduces parameter count by 75-90\% while preserving the predictive performance of the original, uncompressed LoRA across multiple vision and language benchmarks. Code will be published upon acceptance.
Authors: Behnaz Ranjbar, Kirankumar Raveendiran, Sudeep Pasricha, Samarjit Chakraborty, Cecilia Carbonelli, Akash Kumar
Abstract: The design of embedded safety-critical systems such as those used in next-generation automotive and autonomous platforms, is increasingly challenged by escalating system complexity, hardware-software heterogeneity, and the integration of intelligent, data-driven components. Ensuring dependability in such systems requires a holistic approach that spans multiple abstraction layers and encompasses both design- and run-time assurance. Traditional methods for reliability, safety, and security management often fall short in addressing the dynamic and uncertain behaviors introduced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) components, especially under stringent real-time, power, and safety constraints. While AI and ML offer powerful predictive, adaptive, and self-optimizing capabilities that can enhance system dependability, their inherent non-determinism, data-dependence, and lack of formal guarantees introduce new challenges for verification, validation, and certification. This paper explores emerging methodologies, architectures, and frameworks for designing dependable autonomous and embedded systems in the era of AI. It highlight advances in reliability modeling, secure system design, and certification approaches that account for imperfect, learning-enabled components, aiming to bridge the gap between AI innovation and certifiable system-level dependability.
Authors: Haonan Li, Tianjun Sun, Yongqing Wang, Qisheng Zhang
Abstract: Multi-server MCP agents create an information-flow control problem: faithful tool composition can turn individually benign read/write permissions into cross-boundary credential propagation -- a structural side effect of workflow topology, not necessarily malicious model behavior. We present MCPHunt, to our knowledge the first controlled benchmark that isolates non-adversarial, verbatim credential propagation across multi-server MCP trust boundaries, with three methodological contributions: (1) canary-based taint tracking that reduces propagation detection to objective string matching; (2) an environment-controlled coverage design with risky, benign, and hard-negative conditions that validates pipeline soundness and controls for credential-format confounds; (3) CRS stratification that disentangles task-mandated propagation (faithful execution of verbatim-transfer instructions) from policy-violating propagation (credentials included despite the option to redact). Across 3,615 main-benchmark traces from 5 models spanning 147 tasks and 9 mechanism families, policy-violating propagation rates reach 11.5--41.3% across all models. This propagation is pathway-specific (25x cross-mechanism range) and concentrated in browser-mediated data flows; hard-negative controls provide evidence that production-format credentials are not necessary -- prompt-directed cross-boundary data flow is sufficient. A prompt-mitigation study across 3 models reduces policy-violating propagation by up to 97% while preserving 80.5% utility, but effectiveness varies with instruction-following capability -- suggesting that prompt-level defenses alone may not suffice. Code, traces, and labeling pipeline are released under MIT and CC BY 4.0.
Authors: Mohit Dubey, Open Gigantic
Abstract: Every document format in existence was designed for a human reader moving linearly through text. Autonomous LLM agents do not read - they retrieve. This fundamental mismatch forces agents to inject entire documents into their context window, wasting tokens on irrelevant content, compounding state across multi-turn loops, and broadcasting information indiscriminately across agent roles. We argue this is not a prompt engineering problem, not a retrieval problem, and not a compression problem: it is a format problem. We introduce OBJECTGRAPH (.og), a file format that reconceives the document as a typed, directed knowledge graph to be traversed rather than a string to be injected. OBJECTGRAPH is a strict superset of Markdown - every .md file is a valid .og file - requires no infrastructure beyond a two-primitive query protocol, and is readable by both humans and agents without tooling. We formalize the Document Consumption Problem, characterise six structural properties no existing format satisfies simultaneously, and prove OBJECTGRAPH satisfies all six. We further introduce the Progressive Disclosure Model, the Role-Scoped Access Protocol, and Executable Assertion Nodes as native format primitives. Empirical evaluation across five document classes and eight agent task types demonstrates up to 95.3 percent token reduction with no statistically significant degradation in task accuracy (p > 0.05). Transpiler fidelity reaches 98.7 percent content preservation on a held-out document benchmark.
Authors: Khalil Al-Rahman Youssefi, Marija Gojkovic, Walter Stefanutti, Mika Auer, Melanie Schranz
Abstract: This paper presents a configurable, grid-aware Agent-Based Model (ABM) for the systematic analysis of electric vehicle (EV) charging systems under configurable infrastructure and operational conditions. The model integrates heterogeneous EV behavior, charging column constraints, and a shared Energy Sandbox that regulates aggregate power allocation, enabling the joint study of user-centric charging dynamics and facility-level power behavior. Implemented in Python using the SimPy discrete-event framework, the approach supports scalable, event-driven simulations across varying system sizes, charger compositions, and scheduling strategies. A representative workplace charging scenario is investigated to illustrate how infrastructure configuration and coordination mechanisms influence energy delivery performance, infrastructure utilization, and aggregate load characteristics. The results highlight the context-dependence of infrastructure suitability and demonstrate how charging strategies and charger types reshape both service-level outcomes and grid-facing behavior. The proposed ABM provides a flexible and extensible simulation environment for exploring technical, operational, and grid-aware aspects of EV charging ecosystems, and for serving as a methodological basis for subsequent studies on advanced coordination strategies beyond the specific scenario analyzed in this study.
Authors: Fangming Cui, Ruixiao Zhu, Cheng Fang, Sunan Li, Jiahong Li
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has traditionally focused on training specialized agents to optimize predefined reward functions within narrowly defined environments. However, the advent of powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) and increasingly complex, open-ended tasks has catalyzed a paradigm shift towards agentic paradigms within RL. This emerging framework extends beyond traditional RL by emphasizing the development of autonomous agents capable of goal-setting, long-term planning, dynamic strategy adaptation, and interactive reasoning in uncertain, real-world environments. Unlike conventional approaches that rely heavily on static objectives and episodic interactions, LLM-based Agentic RL incorporates cognitive-like capabilities such as meta-reasoning, self-reflection, and multi-step decision-making directly into the learning loop. In this paper, we provide a deep insight for looking the conceptual foundations, methodological innovations, and effective designs underlying this trend. Furthermore, we identify critical challenges and outline promising future directions for building LLM-based Agentic RL.
Authors: Thomas Grady, Kip Parker, Iliyan Zarov, Henry Course, Chengxi Taylor, Ross Taylor
Abstract: Language models are saturating benchmarks for procedural tasks with narrow objectives. But they are increasingly being deployed in long-horizon, non-stationary environments with open-ended goals. In this paper we introduce KellyBench, an environment for evaluating sequential decision-making in sports betting markets. Agents are placed in a sequential simulation of the 2023-24 English Premier League season and tasked with maximising their long-term bankroll growth. They are given detailed historical data, including advanced statistics, lineups, and public odds. To succeed they must build machine learning models, identify edge in public markets, and adapt as the environment changes over time. We find that all frontier models evaluated lose money on average over the course of the season for five seeds. The best performing model achieves an average return of -8%, and many models experiencing ruin across seeds. To judge strategy sophistication, we use a human expert rubric to grade each model and find their approaches to be unsophisticated compared to human baselines; Claude Opus 4.6 achieves a rubric score of 26.5%, which means there is significant room for improvement. KellyBench is available as an open-access API endpoint at https://openreward.ai/GeneralReasoning/KellyBench.
Authors: Sukesh Subaharan, Venkatesan VS, Murugadasan P, Sivakumar D, Gautham N, Ganeshkumar M
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents deployed in clinical settings often exhibit abrupt, threshold-driven behavior, offering little visibility into accumulating risk prior to escalation. In real-world care, however, clinicians act on gradually rising concern rather than instantaneous triggers. We study whether explicit state dynamics can expose such pre-escalation signals without delegating clinical authority to the agent. We introduce a lightweight agent architecture in which a memoryless clinical risk encoder is integrated over time using first- and second-order dynamics to produce a continuous escalation pressure signal. Across synthetic ward scenarios, stateless agents exhibit sharp escalation cliffs, while second-order dynamics produce smooth, anticipatory concern trajectories despite similar escalation timing. These trajectories surface sustained unease prior to escalation, enabling human-in-the-loop monitoring and more informed intervention. Our results suggest that explicit state dynamics can make LLM agents more clinically legible by revealing how long concern has been rising, not just when thresholds are crossed.
Authors: Giuseppe Arbore, Andrea Sillano, Luigi De Russis
Abstract: Recent advances in agentic AI are shifting automation from discrete tools to proactive multi-agent systems that coordinate multi-specialized capabilities behind unified interfaces. However, today's agent systems typically rely on hard-coded agent architectures with fixed roles, coordination patterns, and interaction flows that limit end-user personalization and make adaptation to individual needs and contexts difficult. Given this limitation, we argue that on-demand persona-based agent generation offers a promising path towards more efficient and contextually appropriate interaction within agentic workflows. By dynamically crafting agents and personas at run-time to match user characteristics, task demands, and workflow context, agentic platforms can move beyond one-size-fits-all configurations. We present a pipeline for on-demand persona generation in agentic platforms, detailing how real-time crafting of AI personas can be systematically integrated within agent systems, aiming to open new possibilities in agentic platform design paradigms.
Authors: Simon Dennis, Michael Diamond, Rivaan Patil, Kevin Shabahang, Hao Guo
Abstract: Agent orchestration frameworks -- LangGraph, CrewAI, Google ADK, OpenAI Agents SDK, and others -- place an external orchestrator above the LLM, tracking state and injecting routing instructions at every turn. We present a controlled comparison showing that for procedural tasks, this architecture is dominated by a simpler alternative: putting the entire procedure in the system prompt and letting the model self-orchestrate. Across three domains -- travel booking (14 nodes), Zoom technical support (14 nodes), and insurance claims processing (55 nodes) -- we evaluate 200 conversations per condition using LLM-as-judge scoring on five quality criteria. The in-context approach scores 4.53--5.00 on a 5-point scale while a LangGraph orchestrator using the same model scores 4.17--4.84. The orchestrated system fails on 24% of travel, 9% of Zoom, and 17% of insurance conversations, compared to 11.5%, 0.5%, and 5% for the in-context baseline. While external orchestration may have been necessary for earlier models, advances in frontier model capabilities have made it unnecessary for multi-turn conversations following a defined procedure.
Authors: Jiawei Liu, Senqiao Yang, Mingjun Wang, Yu Wang, Bei Yu
Abstract: As one of the mainstream models of artificial intelligence, world models allow agents to learn the representation of the environment for efficient prediction and planning. However, classical world models based on flat tensors face several key problems, including noise sensitivity, error accumulation and weak reasoning. To address these limitations, many recent studies use graph structure to decompose the environment into entity nodes and interactive edges, and model virtual environments in a structured space. This paper systematically formalizes and unifies these emerging graph-based works under the concept of graph world models (GWMs). To the best of our knowledge, GWMs have not yet been explicitly defined and surveyed as a unified research paradigm. Furthermore, we propose a taxonomy based on relational inductive biases (RIB), categorizing GWMs by the specific structural priors they inject: (1) spatial RIB for topological abstraction; (2) physical RIB for dynamic simulation; and (3) logical RIB for causal and semantic reasoning. For each model category, we outline the key design principles, summarize representative models, and conduct comparative analyses. We further discuss open challenges and future directions, including dynamic graph adaptation, probabilistic relational dynamics, multi-granularity inductive biases, and the need for dedicated benchmarks and evaluation metrics for GWMs.
Authors: Guy Lutsker, Gal Sapir, Jordi Merino, Smadar Shilo, Anastasia Godneva, Eli Meirom, Shie Mannor, Hagai Rossman, Gal Chechik, Eran Segal
Abstract: Understanding how human health changes over time, and why responses to interventions vary between individuals, remains a central challenge in medicine. Here we present HealthFormer, a decoder-only transformer that models the human physiological trajectory generatively, by training on data from the Human Phenotype Project, a multi-visit cohort of over 15,000 deeply phenotyped individuals. We tokenise each participant's health trajectory across 667 measurements spanning seven domains: blood biomarkers, body composition, sleep physiology, continuous glucose monitoring, gut microbiome, wearable-derived physiology, and behaviour and medication exposure. We train HealthFormer to forecast individual physiological trajectories across these domains, and from this single generative objective a range of clinically relevant tasks can be expressed as queries on the model. We show that, without task-specific training, HealthFormer transfers to four independent cohorts and improves prediction for 27 of 30 incident-disease and mortality endpoints, exceeding established clinical risk scores in every comparison. We further show that the model can simulate interventions in silico: in a held-out personalised-nutrition trial, intervention-conditioned predictions recover individual six-month biomarker changes (e.g., Pearson r = 0.78 for diastolic blood pressure). Across 41 randomised intervention-outcome comparisons drawn from published trials, our results show that the predicted direction of effect agrees in every case, and the predicted mean falls within the reported 95% confidence interval in 30 cases. We position HealthFormer as an initial health world model, from which forecasting, risk stratification, and intervention-conditioned simulation arise as queries, providing a basis for clinical digital twins.
Authors: Alex Petrov, Alexander Gusak, Denis Mukha, Dima Korolev
Abstract: Persistent AI memory is often reduced to a retrieval problem: store prior interactions as text, embed them, and ask the model to recover relevant context later. This design is useful for thematic recall, but it is mismatched to the kinds of memory that agents need in production: exact facts, current state, updates and deletions, aggregation, relations, negative queries, and explicit unknowns. These operations require memory to behave less like search and more like a system of record. This paper argues that reliable external AI memory must be schema-grounded. Schemas define what must be remembered, what may be ignored, and which values must never be inferred. We present an iterative, schema-aware write path that decomposes memory ingestion into object detection, field detection, and field-value extraction, with validation gates, local retries, and stateful prompt control. The result shifts interpretation from the read path to the write path: reads become constrained queries over verified records rather than repeated inference over retrieved prose. We evaluate this design on structured extraction and end-to-end memory benchmarks. On the extraction benchmark, the judge-in-the-loop configuration reaches 90.42% object-level accuracy and 62.67% output accuracy, above all tested frontier structured-output baselines. On our end-to-end memory benchmark, xmemory reaches 97.10% F1, compared with 80.16%-87.24% across the third-party baselines. On the application-level task, xmemory reaches 95.2% accuracy, outperforming specialised memory systems, code-generated Markdown harnesses, and customer-facing frontier-model application harnesses. The results show that, for memory workloads requiring stable facts and stateful computation, architecture matters more than retrieval scale or model strength alone.
Authors: Matteo Da Pelo, Alessio Donvito, Claudio Frongia, Pietro Salis, Antonio Lieto
Abstract: We introduce a framework called LAPITHS (Language model Analysis through Paradigm grounded Interpretations of Theses about Human likenesS) and use it to show that several major claims advanced by models such as CENTAUR, proposed as an artificial Unified Model of Cognition, are not theoretically or empirically justified. LAPITHS provides a principled reference point for counteracting the current behaviouristic tendency in AI research to interpret the human level performances of transformer based language models as evidence of human like underlying computation and, by extension, as signs of cognitive abilities. The novelty of LAPITHS lies in making explicit the arguments grounded in two quantitative assessments: (i) the Minimal Cognitive Grid, a theoretically motivated method for estimating the cognitive plausibility of artificial systems, and (ii) a behavioural comparison showing that results similar to those reported for CENTAUR like models can be reproduced by other systems that do not satisfy the structural constraints typically associated with cognitive plausibility, and whose outputs do not provide independent explanatory insight into human cognition.
Authors: Weihai Lu, Zhejun Zhao, Yanshu Li, Huan He
Abstract: Multimodal Stance Detection (MSD) is crucial for understanding public discourse, yet effectively fusing text and image, especially with conflicting signals, remains challenging. Existing methods often face difficulties with contextual grounding, cross-modal interpretation ambiguity, and single-pass reasoning fragility. To address these, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Multi-modal Multi-agent Stance Detection (MM-StanceDet), a novel multi-agent framework integrating Retrieval Augmentation for contextual grounding, specialized Multimodal Analysis agents for nuanced interpretation, a Reasoning-Enhanced Debate stage for exploring perspectives, and Self-Reflection for robust adjudication. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate MM-StanceDet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, validating the efficacy of its multi-agent architecture and structured reasoning stages in addressing complex multimodal stance challenges.
Authors: Djamel Bouchaffra, Faycal Ykhlef, Mustapha Lebbah, Hanane Azzag
Abstract: Collective intelligence emerges across biological, physical, and artificial systems without central coordination, yet a unifying principle governing such behaviour remains elusive. The Free Energy Principle explains how individual agents adapt through variational inference, while game theory formalises strategic interactions. Here we introduce the Game-Theoretic Free Energy Principle, a unified framework showing that multi-agent systems performing local free-energy minimisation implicitly implement a stochastic game. We prove that, under bounded rationality and local information constraints, stationary points of collective free energy correspond to approximate Nash equilibria of an induced game. Conversely, a broad class of cooperative games admits a variational representation in which equilibria arise as Gibbs distributions over coalitions, establishing a bridge between Bayesian inference and strategic interaction. To characterise higher-order effects, we introduce a free-energy formulation of the Harsanyi dividend, isolating irreducible multi-agent synergy. This yields a predictive theory of cooperation, including a falsifiable non-monotonic relationship between sensory precision and agent influence. We validate this prediction across neural, biological, and artificial multi-agent systems. These results identify a common variational principle underlying inference, thermodynamics, and game-theoretic equilibrium.
Authors: Kenneth J. K. Ong
Abstract: As Vision-Language Models (VLMs) become increasingly integrated into decision-making systems, it is essential to understand how visual inputs influence their behavior. This paper investigates the effects of visual priming on VLMs' cooperative behavior using the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) as a test scenario. We examine whether exposure to images depicting behavioral concepts (kindness/helpfulness vs. aggressiveness/selfishness) and color-coded reward matrices alters VLM decision patterns. Experiments were conducted across multiple state-of-the-art VLMs. We further explore mitigation strategies including prompt modifications, Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning, and visual token reduction. Results show that VLM behavior can be influenced by both image content and color cues, with varying susceptibility and mitigation effectiveness across models. These findings not only underscore the importance of robust evaluation frameworks for VLM deployment in visually rich and safety-critical environments, but also highlight how architectural and training differences among models may lead to distinct behavioral responses-an area worthy of further investigation.
Authors: Junan Hu, Jian Liu, Jingxiang Lai, Jiarui Hu, Yiwei Sheng, Shuang Chen, Jian Li, Dazhao Du, Song Guo
Abstract: Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have emerged as a promising paradigm for intelligent systems that perceive and interact with graphical interfaces visually. Yet supervised fine-tuning alone cannot handle long-horizon credit assignment, distribution shifts, and safe exploration in irreversible environments, making Reinforcement Learning (RL) a central methodology for advancing automation. In this work, we present the first comprehensive overview of the intersection between RL and GUI agents, and examine how this research direction may evolve toward digital inhabitants. We propose a principled taxonomy that organizes existing methods into Offline RL, Online RL, and Hybrid Strategies, and complement it with analyses of reward engineering, data efficiency, and key technical innovations. Our analysis reveals several emerging trends: the tension between reliability and scalability is motivating the adoption of composite, multi-tier reward architectures; GUI I/O latency bottlenecks are accelerating the shift toward world-model-based training, which can yield substantial performance gains; and the spontaneous emergence of System-2-style deliberation suggests that explicit reasoning supervision may not be necessary when sufficiently rich reward signals are available. We distill these findings into a roadmap covering process rewards, continual RL, cognitive architectures, and safe deployment, aiming to guide the next generation of robust GUI automation and its agent-native infrastructure.
Authors: Adam Ishay, Joohyung Lee
Abstract: Recent large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive reasoning milestones but continue to struggle with high computational costs, logical inconsistencies, and sharp performance degradation on high-complexity problems. While neuro-symbolic methods attempt to mitigate these issues by coupling LLMs with symbolic reasoners, existing approaches typically rely on monotonic logics (e.g., SMT) that cannot represent defeasible reasoning -- essential components of human cognition. We present "LLM+ASP," a framework that translates natural language into Answer Set Programming (ASP), a nonmonotonic formalism based on stable model semantics. Unlike prior "LLM+ASP" approaches that require manually authored knowledge modules, domain-specific prompts, or evaluation restricted to single problem classes, our framework operates without any per-task engineering and applies uniformly across diverse reasoning tasks. Our system utilizes an automated self-correction loop where structured feedback from the ASP solver enables iterative refinement. Evaluating across six diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate that: (1) stable model semantics allow LLMs to naturally express default rules and exceptions, outperforming SMT-based alternatives by significant margins on nonmonotonic tasks; (2) iterative self-correction is the primary driver of performance, effectively replacing the need for handcrafted domain knowledge; (3) compact in-context reference guides substantially outperform verbose documentation, revealing a "context rot" phenomenon where excessive context hinders constraint adherence.
Authors: Jo\~ao Pedro Gandarela, Thiago Rios, Stefan Menzel, Andr\'e Freitas
Abstract: Designing mechanical linkages involves combinatorial topology selection and continuous parameter fitting. We show that language models can systematically improve linkage designs through symbolic representations. Language model agents explore discrete topologies while numerical optimisers fit continuous parameters. A symbolic lifting operator translates simulator trajectories into qualitative descriptors, motion labels, temporal predicates, and structural diagnostics that models interpret across iterative design cycles. Across six engineering-relevant motion targets and three open-source models (Llama 3.3 70B, Qwen3 4B, Qwen3 MoE 30B-A3B), the modular architecture reduces geometric error by up to 68% and improves structural validity by up to 134% over monolithic baselines. Critically, 78.6% of iterative refinement trajectories show measurable improvement, with the system correctly diagnosing overconstraint (56.3%) and underconstraint (35.6%) failure modes and proposing grounded corrections. Models across all three families acquire interpretable mechanical reasoning strategies without fine-tuning, demonstrating that principled symbolic abstraction bridges generative AI and the numerical precision required for engineering design.
Authors: Giovanni Buraglio, Wolfgang Dvorak, Stefan Woltran
Abstract: Assumption-Based Argumentation (ABA) is a well-established formalism for modelling and reasoning over debates, with a wide range of applications. However, the high computational complexity of core reasoning tasks in ABA poses a significant challenge for its applicability. This issue is further aggravated when ABA frameworks (ABAFs) are instantiated into graph-based argumentation formalisms, such as Dung's Argumentation Frameworks (AFs) and Argumentation Frameworks with Collective Attacks (SETAFs). In knowledge representation and reasoning, a key strategy to address computational intractability is to optimise reasoning over a given knowledge base through divide-and-conquer algorithms. A paradigmatic example of this approach is splitting, where extensions of a given framework are computed incrementally, by restricting the search space to sub-frameworks only, and then combining the obtained results. This approach has been successfully applied to AFs, for which also a parametrised version has been introduced under stable semantics. However, the exponential growth produced by the instantiation might undermine the usefulness of splitting on the argument graphs induced by ABAFs. To address this issue, our work investigates the concept of splitting on the knowledge base rather than on its graph-based instantiation. Furthermore, we generalise splitting to its parametrised version for ABAFs.
Authors: Johannes Pfau, Panagiotis Vrettis
Abstract: Since the dawn of Trading Card Games, the genre has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry engaging millions of analog and digital players worldwide. Popular TCGs rely on regular updates, balance adjustments, and rotating constraints to sustain engagement. Yet, as metagames stabilize, predictable strategies dominate and viable card options diminish, often resulting in repetitive and impaired player experiences. This paper investigates the use of Large Language Models and Image Diffusion Models for Procedural Content Generation of TCG cards, addressing these challenges by enabling a personalized infinity of card designs. Modern generative AI not only enables large-scale content creation but could even introduce procedural relatedness, fostering unique connections between players and their cards. We present a pipeline combining player-centric co-creation, fine-tuned embeddings, local LLMs, and Diffusion Models to generate dynamic, personalized cards while potentially expanding creative range. We evaluated the pipeline in a user study with 49 participants who generated 196 Pok\'emon card samples. Participants rated aesthetics and representativeness of visuals and mechanics, and provided qualitative feedback. Results show high satisfaction and indicate that most participants successfully realized their own ideas through prompt adjustments. These findings lay groundwork for future content generation systems and alternatives to conventional metagame evolution through procedural relatedness.
Authors: Hanane Nour Moussa, Yifei Li, Zhuoyang Li, Yankai Yang, Cheng Tang, Tianshu Zhang, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Ali Payani, Ziru Chen, Huan Sun
Abstract: Despite recent progress in language models and agents for scientific data-driven discovery, further advancing their capabilities is held back by the absence of verifiable environments representing real-world scientific tasks.To fill this gap, we introduce D3-Gym, the first automatically constructed dataset with verifiable environments for scientific Data-Driven Discovery. D3-Gym comprises (1) 565 tasks sourced from 239 real scientific repositories across four disciplines where (2) each task is equipped with a natural language instruction, an executable environment with pre-installed dependencies, input dataset and artifact previews, a reference code solution, and an automatically synthesized evaluation script. Rigorous evaluation of the quality of the verification signal in D3-Gym confirms that our evaluation scripts achieve 87.5% agreement with human-annotated gold standards and strong alignment in domain-specific evaluation logic, showing their scientific soundness. Further, training on trajectories sampled from D3-Gym yields consistent and substantial gains across Qwen3 models of varying sizes on ScienceAgentBench, boosting Qwen3-32B by 7.8 absolute points and substantially shrinking the gap with strong proprietary models. All D3-Gym artifacts (environments, creation workflow, trajectories, and models) can be found at https://github.com/OSU-NLP-Group/D3-Gym.
Authors: Jackson Vonderhorst, Kuangshi Ai, Haichao Miao, Shusen Liu, Chaoli Wang
Abstract: This paper examines how different types of large language model (LLM) agents perform on scientific visualization (SciVis) tasks, where users generate visualization workflows from natural-language instructions. We compare three primary interaction paradigms, including domain-specific agents with structured tool use, computer-use agents, and general-purpose coding agents, by evaluating eight representative agents across 15 benchmark tasks and measuring visualization quality, efficiency, robustness, and computational cost. We further analyze interaction modalities, including code scripts and model context protocol (MCP) or API calls for structured tool use, as well as command-line interfaces (CLI) and graphical user interfaces (GUI) for more general interaction, while additionally studying the effect of persistent memory in selected agents. The results reveal clear tradeoffs across paradigms and modalities. General-purpose coding agents achieve the highest task success rates but are computationally expensive, while domain-specific agents are more efficient and stable but less flexible. Computer-use agents perform well on individual steps but struggle with longer multi-step workflows, indicating that long-horizon planning is their primary limitation. Across both CLI- and GUI-based settings, persistent memory improves performance over repeated trials, although its benefits depend on the underlying interaction mode and the quality of feedback. These findings suggest that no single approach is sufficient, and future SciVis systems should combine structured tool use, interactive capabilities, and adaptive memory mechanisms to balance performance, robustness, and flexibility.
Authors: Habtom Kahsay Gidey, Alexander Lenz, Alois Knoll
Abstract: Integrating multimodal foundation models into enterprise ecosystems presents a fundamental software architecture challenge. Architects must balance competing quality attributes: the high latency and non-determinism of vision language action (VLA) models versus the strict determinism and real-time performance required by enterprise control loops. In this study, we propose an architectural pattern language for visual agents that separates fast, deterministic reflexes from slow, probabilistic supervision. It consists of four architectural design patterns: (1) Hybrid Affordance Integration, (2) Adaptive Visual Anchoring, (3) Visual Hierarchy Synthesis, and (4) Semantic Scene Graph.
Authors: Jialu Shen, Han Lyu, Suyang Zhong, Hanzheng Li, Haoyi Tao, Nan Wang, Changhong Chen, Xi Fang
Abstract: Spectra are a prevalent yet highly information-dense form of scientific imagery, presenting substantial challenges to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to their unstructured and domain-specific characteristics. Here we introduce SpecVQA, a professional scientific-image benchmark for evaluating multimodal models on scientific spectral understanding, covering 7 representative spectrum types with expert-annotated question-answer pairs. The aim comprises two aspects: spectra scientific QA evaluation and corresponding underlying task evaluation. SpecVQA contains 620 figures and 3100 QA pairs curated from peer-reviewed literature, targeting both direct information extraction and domain-specific reasoning. To effectively reduce token length while preserving essential curve characteristics, we propose a spectral data sampling and interpolation reconstruction approach. Ablation studies further confirm that the approach achieves substantial performance improvements on the proposed benchmark. We test the capability of prominent MLLMs in scientific spectral understanding on our benchmark and present a leaderboard. This work represents an essential step toward enhancing spectral understanding in multimodal large models and suggests promising directions for extending visual-language models to broader scientific research and data analysis.
Authors: Rahul Ramachandran, Nidhi Jha, Muthukumaran Ramasubramanian
Abstract: We present Collaborative Agent Reasoning Engineering (CARE), a disciplined methodology for engineering Large Language Model (LLM) agents in scientific domains. Unlike ad-hoc trial-and-error approaches, CARE specifies behavior, grounding, tool orchestration, and verification through reusable artifacts and systematic, stage-gated phases. The methodology employs a three-party workflow involving Subject-Matter Experts (SMEs), developers, and LLM-based helper agents. These helper agents function as facilitation infrastructure, transforming informal domain intent into structured, reviewable specifications for human approval at defined gates. CARE addresses the "jagged technological frontier", characterized by uneven LLM performance, by bridging the gap between novice and expert analysts regarding domain constraints and verification practices. By generating concrete artifacts, including interaction requirements, reasoning policies, and evaluation criteria, CARE ensures agent behavior is specifiable, testable, and maintainable. Evaluation results from a scientific use case demonstrate that this stage-gated, artifact-driven methodology yields measurable improvements in development efficiency and complex-query performance.
Authors: Taslim Jamal Arif, Kuldeep Singh
Abstract: Text-to-SQL (T2SQL) evaluation in production environments poses fundamental challenges that existing benchmarks do not address. Current evaluation methodologies whether rule-based SQL matching or schema-dependent semantic parsers assume access to ground-truth queries and structured database schema, constraints that are rarely satisfied in real-world deployments. This disconnect leaves production T2SQL agents largely unevaluated beyond developer-time testing, creating silent quality degradation with no feedback mechanism for continuous improvement. We present STEF (Schema-agnostic Text-to-SQL Evaluation Framework), a production-native evaluation system that operates exclusively on natural language inputs the user question, an enriched reformulation, and the generated SQL without requiring database schema or reference queries. STEF extracts semantic specifications from both natural language and SQL representations, performs normalized feature alignment, and produces an interpretable 0 to 100 accuracy score via a composite metric that encompasses filter alignment, semantic verdict, and confidence of the evaluator. Key contributions include: enriched question quality validation as a first-class evaluation signal, configurable application-specific rule injection via prompt templating, and production-robust normalization handling GROUP BY tolerance, ORDER BY defaults, and LIMIT heuristics. Empirical results demonstrate that STEF enables continuous production monitoring and agent improvement feedback loops without schema dependency, making structured query evaluation viable at scale for the first time.
Authors: Feiyu Wu, Xu Zheng, Zhuocheng Wang, Yi ming Dai, Hui Li
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) make reward design in reinforcement learning substantially more scalable, but generated rewards are not automatically reliable training objectives. Existing work has focused primarily on generating, evolving, or selecting reward candidates, while paying less attention to when such candidates can be verified and deployed during policy optimization. We study this deployment-time problem by treating generated rewards as reward hypotheses whose utility depends on the competence of the current policy and the phase of training. We propose \textsc{RHyVE}, a competence-aware verification and phase-aware deployment protocol that compares small sets of reward hypotheses from shared policy checkpoints using short-horizon fork verification. Our experiments show that reward rankings are unreliable at low competence but become informative after task-dependent thresholds. On a sparse manipulation task, phase-aware deployment improves peak and retained performance under a locked protocol. Updated LLM-generated reward-candidate experiments show candidate-family-dependent behavior: generated pools can exhibit phase-dependent winner changes, but no fixed warm-up schedule is universally optimal. Held-out schedule selection, conservative selector baselines, compute-matched controls, and scale controls further show that \textsc{RHyVE} is best understood as a verification-informed deployment protocol rather than a universal scheduler. Dense and all-failure boundary experiments delimit the scope of the method. Together, these results suggest that reward generation and reward deployment should be studied as coupled problems: generated rewards must be verified and deployed under changing policy competence.
Authors: Anietta Weckauff, Yuchen Zhang, Maksym Andriushchenko
Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on narrowly misaligned data generalizes to broadly misaligned behavior, a phenomenon termed emergent misalignment (EM). While prior work has found a correlation between harmful behavior and self-assessment in emergently misaligned models, it remains unclear how consistent this correspondence is across tasks and whether it varies across fine-tuning domains. We characterize the consistency of the EM persona by fine-tuning Qwen 2.5 32B Instruct on six narrowly misaligned domains (e.g., insecure code, risky financial advice, bad medical advice) and administering experiments including harmfulness evaluation, self-assessment, choosing between two descriptions of AI systems, output recognition, and score prediction. Our results reveal two distinct patterns: coherent-persona models, in which harmful behavior and self-reported misalignment are coupled, and inverted-persona models, which produce harmful outputs while identifying as aligned AI systems. These findings reveal a more fine-grained picture of the effects of emergent misalignment, calling into question the consistency of the EM persona.
Authors: Ivan Bercovich
Abstract: Terminal-agent benchmarks have become a primary signal for measuring the coding and system-administration capabilities of large language models. As the market for evaluation environments grows, so does the pressure to ship tasks quickly, often without thorough adversarial review of the verification logic. This paper is a guideline for writing good benchmark tasks, drawn from over a year of contributing to and reviewing tasks for Terminal Bench. Most people write benchmark tasks the way they write prompts. They shouldn't. A prompt is designed to help the agent succeed; a benchmark is designed to find out if it can. We argue that good tasks are adversarial, difficult, and legible, and that a large class of common failure modes -- AI-generated instructions, over-prescriptive specifications, clerical difficulty, oracle solutions that assume hidden knowledge, tests that validate the wrong things, and reward-hackable environments -- are predictable consequences of treating task authoring as prompt authoring. We catalog these failure modes, argue that real difficulty is conceptual rather than environmental, and discuss recent empirical evidence that over 15% of tasks in popular terminal-agent benchmarks are reward-hackable. We hope this serves as a useful reference for benchmark maintainers, task contributors, and researchers using benchmark scores as evidence.
Authors: Dorottya Demszky, Edith Bouton, Alison Twiner, Sara Hennessy, Richard Correnti
Abstract: Research on classroom interaction has long been divided between large-scale observation and in-depth ethnographic work. We propose a framework mapping this methodological space along three dimensions--scale, duration, and modality--where a study's position shapes what it reveals and obscures. We illustrate it through contrasting studies of dialogic teaching--Howe et al. (2019) and Snell and Lefstein (2018)--and an interview with the lead researchers, organized around three questions: what can be operationalized, what mechanisms become visible, and what translates to practice. We then examine how AI is expanding this space and how the framework can guide research and tool design.
Authors: Matti Berthold, Lydia Bl\"umel, Giovanni Buraglio, Anna Rapberger
Abstract: This work proposes novel splitting techniques for argumentation formalisms that incorporate supports between defeasible elements. We base our studies on bipolar set-based argumentation frameworks (BSAFs) which generalize argumentation frameworks with collective attacks (SETAFs), as well as bipolar argumentation frameworks (BAFs), by incorporating both collective attacks and supports. Notably, BSAFs establish a crucial link to structured argumentation as they naturally capture general (potentially non-flat) assumption-based argumentation. The increase in expressiveness calls for diverse forms of splitting. We consider splits over collective attacks (thereby generalizing the recently proposed splitting techniques for SETAFs), splits over collective supports, as well as splits over both collective attacks and supports. We establish suitable splitting schemata and prove their correctness for the most common argumentation semantics.
Authors: Nina Seron-Abouelfadil, Poppy Fynes
Abstract: Sign languages, of any geographical or accentual variation, understandably face continuous scrutiny under the ever present popularity of verbal dictation and audism. Through this, many potential problems arise with the current lack of accessible communication for those who rely on such sign languages for essential conversation. Such AI systems regularly take the form of recognition and interpretation models, designed to provide seamless and accurate translation. In reality these systems are built from biased data and created without any input from deaf communities. Such models are widely used and accepted by their hearing counterparts who remain ignorant to the inherent culture, semantics and colloquial language present in gestural language systems. This phenomenon is best analysed under the scope of The Technological System and Technological bluff by Ellul. Indeed, what is at play here is the standardization of language by technicians into what can be captured by technique: data, statistics, a mathematical language. For that AI technique to exist, sign language must be rationalized, in a search for profit that annihilates the conditions for communication and fails to capture the human experience of the deaf person. By that process, it presents normative effects, creating a model of Man, standardized, massified, and who has to adapt to the tool and technical milieu instead of the other way around, which we assume should have been the goal of such a technology. Technique thus reshapes what it means to be human, to submit deaf people to the goals of productivity and efficiency. In doing so, it exhibits clear counter productivity, alienating instead of emancipating, isolating instead of nourishing human relationships. Therefore this paper argues for the idea of AI as Ableist Intelligence, as such systems seek to emphasise the humiliated and marginalised nature of sign.
Authors: Yujun Wu, Dongxu Zhang, Xinchen Li, Jinhang Xu, Yiling Duan, Yumou Liu, Jiabao Pan, Xuanhe Zhou, Jingxuan Wei, Siyuan Li, Jintao Chen, Conghui He, Cheng Tan
Abstract: Existing research infrastructure is fundamentally document-centric, providing citation links between papers but lacking explicit representations of methodological evolution. In particular, it does not capture the structured relationships that explain how and why research methods emerge, adapt, and build upon one another. With the rise of AI-driven research agents as a new class of consumers of scientific knowledge, this limitation becomes increasingly consequential, as such agents cannot reliably reconstruct method evolution topologies from unstructured text. We introduce Intern-Atlas, a methodological evolution graph that automatically identifies method-level entities, infers lineage relationships among methodologies, and captures the bottlenecks that drive transitions between successive innovations. Built from 1,030,314 papers spanning AI conferences, journals, and arXiv preprints, the resulting graph comprises 9,410,201 semantically typed edges, each grounded in verbatim source evidence, forming a queryable causal network of methodological development. To operationalize this structure, we further propose a self-guided temporal tree search algorithm for constructing evolution chains that trace the progression of methods over time. We evaluate the quality of the resulting graph against expert-curated ground-truth evolution chains and observe strong alignment. In addition, we demonstrate that Intern-Atlas enables downstream applications in idea evaluation and automated idea generation. We position methodological evolution graphs as a foundational data layer for the emerging automated scientific discovery.
Authors: Lincan Li, Zheng Chen, Yushun Dong
Abstract: Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are vital for automated seizure detection, but their inherent noise makes robust representation learning challenging. Existing graph construction methods, whether correlation-based or learning-based, often generate redundant or irrelevant edges due to the noisy nature of EEG data. This significantly impairs the quality of graph representation and limits downstream task performance. Motivated by the remarkable reasoning and contextual understanding capabilities of large language models (LLMs), we explore the idea of using LLMs as graph edge refiners. Specifically, we propose a two-stage framework: we first verify that LLM-based edge refinement can effectively identify and remove redundant connections, leading to significant improvements in seizure detection accuracy and more meaningful graph structures. Building on this insight, we further develop a robust solution where the initial graph is constructed using a Transformer-based edge predictor and multilayer perceptron, assigning probability scores to potential edges and applying a threshold to determine their existence. The LLM then acts as an edge set refiner, making informed decisions based on both textual and statistical features of node pairs to validate the remaining connections. Extensive experiments on TUSZ dataset demonstrate that our LLM-refined graph learning framework not only enhances task performance but also yields cleaner and more interpretable graph representations.
Authors: Tao Ge, Baolin Peng, Hao Cheng, Jianfeng Gao
Abstract: Realistic long-horizon productivity work is strongly conditioned on user-specific computer environments, where much of the work context is stored and organized through directory structures and content-rich artifacts. To scale synthetic data creation for such productivity scenarios, we introduce Synthetic Computers at Scale, a scalable methodology for creating such environments with realistic folder hierarchies and content-rich artifacts (e.g., documents, spreadsheets, and presentations). Conditioned on each synthetic computer, we run long-horizon simulations: one agent creates productivity objectives that are specific to the computer's user and require multiple professional deliverables and about a month of human work; another agent then acts as that user and keeps working across the computer -- for example, navigating the filesystem for grounding, coordinating with simulated collaborators, and producing professional artifacts -- until these objectives are completed. In preliminary experiments, we create 1,000 synthetic computers and run long-horizon simulations on them; each run requires over 8 hours of agent runtime and spans more than 2,000 turns on average. These simulations produce rich experiential learning signals, whose effectiveness is validated by significant improvements in agent performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain productivity evaluations. Given that personas are abundant at billion scale, this methodology can in principle scale to millions or even billions of synthetic user worlds with sufficient compute, enabling broader coverage of diverse professions, roles, contexts, environments, and productivity needs. We argue that scalable synthetic computer creation, together with at-scale simulations, is highly promising as a foundational substrate for agent self-improvement and agentic reinforcement learning in long-horizon productivity scenarios.
Authors: Yufan Li, Jinggang Zhuo, Ling Fan, Harry Jiannan Wang
Abstract: Color is an essential component of graphic design, acting not only as a visual factor but also carrying cultural implications. However, existing research on algorithmic color palette generation and colorization largely ignores the cultural aspect. In this paper, we contribute to this line of research by first constructing a unique color dataset inspired by a specific culture, i.e., Chinese Youth Subculture (CYS), which is an vibrant and trending cultural group especially for the Gen Z population. We show that the colors used in CYS have special aesthetic and semantic characteristics that are different from generic color theory. We then develop an interactive multi-modal generative framework to create CYS-styled color palettes, which can be used to put a CYS twist on images using our automatic colorization model. Our framework is illustrated via a demo system designed with the human-in-the-loop principle that constantly provides feedback to our algorithms. User studies are also conducted to evaluate our generation results.
Authors: Jagadeesh Chundru
Abstract: LLM-driven web agents operating through continuous inference loops -- repeatedly querying a model to evaluate browser state and select actions -- exhibit a fundamental scalability constraint for repetitive tasks. We characterize this as the Rerun Crisis: the linear growth of token expenditure and API latency relative to execution frequency. For a 5-step workflow over 500 iterations, a continuous agent incurs approximately 150.00 USD in inference costs; even with aggressive caching, this remains near 15.00 USD. We propose a Compile-and-Execute architecture that decouples LLM reasoning from browser execution, reducing per-workflow inference cost to under 0.10 USD. A one-shot LLM invocation processes a token-efficient semantic representation from a DOM Sanitization Module (DSM) and emits a deterministic JSON workflow blueprint. A lightweight runtime then drives the browser without further model queries. We formalize this cost reduction from O(M x N) to amortized O(1) inference scaling, where M is the number of reruns and N is the sequential actions. Empirical evaluation across data extraction, form filling, and fingerprinting tasks yields zero-shot compilation success rates of 80-94%. Crucially, the modularity of the JSON intermediate representation allows minimal Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) patching to elevate execution reliability to near-100%. At per-compilation costs between 0.002 USD and 0.092 USD across five frontier models, these results establish deterministic compilation as a paradigm enabling economically viable automation at scales previously infeasible under continuous architectures.
Authors: Scott Frohn
Abstract: Strategic model selection and reasoning settings are more effective than ensembling for optimizing automated scoring with large language models (LLMs). We examined self-consistency (intra-model majority voting) and reasoning effort for scoring conversation-based assessment items in high school mathematics, evaluating 900 student conversations against human-scored ground truths using frontier and low-cost models from OpenAI and Google. Temperature sampling significantly improved accuracy over deterministic calls, but increasing ensemble size (j = 1 to 7) produced no significant gains. Higher reasoning effort showed a significant positive linear trend with scoring accuracy, though the benefit varied by model family. An efficiency frontier analysis identified Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview at low reasoning as the most accurate but costly configuration; GPT-5.4 Nano and Mini with no reasoning offered the best cost-performance balance.
Authors: Emmanuel A. Olowe, Danial Chitnis
Abstract: AI tutoring systems in engineering labs face a tension between providing sufficient assistance and preserving learning opportunities. Existing systems typically offer instructors limited control over assistance timing, content, or cost. This paper describes a routing and governance system for LLM-based lab assistance comprising two components: Routiium, an OpenAI-compatible gateway that manages multiple LLM backends with configurable prompt modifications and usage logging, and EduRouter, a policy-aware routing service that enforces per-lab budgets, approval workflows, and embedding-based question matching. We evaluated the system using trace-driven simulation calibrated from two engineering labs (LED characterization, RC circuit analysis) and a 100-query replay through live models. In simulations, governed policies (P1/P2) increased challenge-alignment index from 0.90 to 0.98 and overlay-adherence score from 0.69 to 0.87 compared to ungoverned operation (P0). The productive-struggle window metric increased from 1.4 to 3.6 simulated turns before high-scaffold hints appeared. In the 100-query replay, EduRouter routed 75% of queries to a local model, reducing token costs by 66% ($0.087 vs. $0.26 for all-premium routing) while maintaining canonical hit rate of 1.0 for the curated 89-intent question bank. We release Routiium, EduRouter, canonical-task tooling, and simulator configurations to support replication and future classroom studies.
Authors: Hyesun Choung, Soojong Kim
Abstract: The growing use of generative AI raises ethical concerns about authorship and plagiarism. This study examines how people judge the reuse of AI-generated content, focusing on moral patiency and ownership perceptions. In an experiment, participants evaluated two substantively similar manuscripts in which the original source was described as authored by a human, an AI system, or an AI agent with a human-like name. Results showed that copying AI-generated work was judged less unethical, less plagiaristic, and less guilt-inducing than copying human-authored work. Mediation analyses revealed that this leniency stemmed from lower perceptions of AI's capacity to suffer harm (moral patiency) and greater ownership attributed to the human writer reusing AI-generated content. Anthropomorphic cues shaped moral evaluations indirectly by reducing perceived ownership. These findings shed light on how people morally disengage when using AI-generated work and highlight differences in how ethical judgments are applied to human versus AI-created content.
Authors: Arne Bewersdorff, Nejla Yuruk, Xiaoming Zhai
Abstract: In science education, students frequently construct hand-drawn visual models of scientific phenomena. These drawings rely on a visual structure where information is encoded through visual objects, their attributes, and relationships. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly used to generate feedback on students' hand-drawn scientific models. However, the validity of such feedback depends on whether model claims are grounded in the specific visual evidence of the student drawing. This study uncovers grounding failures, consistent with modal decoupling, in off-the-shelf MLLM feedback, where outputs remain pedagogically plausible in form while contradicting the drawing or treating depicted elements as missing. Using N = 150 middle school drawings from a kinetic molecular theory unit spanning five modeling tasks and three competence levels, we generated N = 300 feedback instances with GPT-5.1. All outputs were coded for four grounding error types: object mismatch, attribute mismatch, relation mismatch, and false absence. Grounding failures were common: 41.3% of feedback instances contained at least one error. An inventory-list-first workflow reduced several error categories and lowered the overall error rate, but it did not resolve the underlying limitation: approximately one in three outputs remained flawed, with false absence as the dominant failure mode. Moreover, feedback that appears visually grounded offered little diagnostic value for identifying invalid instances. The findings indicate that modal decoupling is a substantial limitation and that valid feedback will require grounding mechanisms beyond common prompting strategies.
Authors: Ji Yeon Kim
Abstract: Agentic AI systems capable of autonomous goal setting and proactive intervention introduce new challenges for regulating moral-emotional processes in learning environments. Existing frameworks typically treat emotion as reactive feedback or engagement optimization, overlooking the need for normative regulation across autonomous decision cycles.This paper proposes an ethical emotion regulation framework for agentic AI learning design inspired by Toegye Yi Hwang's moral-emotional philosophy. The Ethical Emotion Feedback System (EEFS) is reconstructed as a five-stage architecture aligned with agentic cycles, articulating stage-specific design principles and scenario classifications.An EEFS Evaluation Instrument is introduced to enable systematic assessment of moral-emotional alignment in agentic AI systems.
Authors: Elham Nasarian, Abhilash Neog, Kwok-Leung Tsui, Niyousha HosseiniChimeh
Abstract: Integrating large language models (LLMs) into patient-facing healthcare systems offers significant potential to improve access to medical information. However, ensuring clinical safety and factual reliability remains a critical challenge. In practice, AI-generated responses may be conditionally correct yet medically inappropriate, as models often fail to interpret patient context and tend to produce agreeable responses rather than challenge unsafe assumptions. Unlike clinicians, who infer risk from incomplete information, LLMs frequently lack contextual awareness. Moreover, real-world patient interactions are open-ended and underspecified, unlike structured benchmark settings. We present CareGuardAI, a risk-aware safety framework for patient-facing medical question answering that addresses two key failure modes: clinical safety risk and hallucination risk. The framework introduces Clinical Safety Risk Assessment (SRA), inspired by ISO 14971, and Hallucination Risk Assessment (HRA) to evaluate medical risk and factual reliability. At inference time, CareGuardAI employs a multi-stage pipeline consisting of a controller agent, safety-constrained generation, and dual risk evaluation, followed by iterative refinement when necessary. Responses are released only when both SRA and HRA are less than or equal to 2, ensuring clinically acceptable outputs with bounded latency. We evaluate CareGuardAI on PatientSafeBench, MedSafetyBench, and MedHallu, covering both safety and hallucination detection. Across these benchmarks, the framework consistently outperforms strong baseline models, including GPT-4o-mini, demonstrating the importance of context-aware, risk-based, inference-time safety mechanisms for reliable deployment in healthcare.
Authors: Jinhui Han, Ming Hu, Xilin Zhang
Abstract: Transformer-based agentic AI is rapidly being deployed on major platforms to help users shop, watch, and navigate content with less effort. While these systems can deliver impressive performance, a key concern is whether they may be less reliable than they appear. We ask a simple but fundamental question: whether the mechanisms that make transformer-based agents effective can also induce systematic biases or distortions? We study this question through a theoretical analysis of transformer-based generative recommenders, in which the next user interaction is generated sequentially from the user history. Focusing on how the model allocates attention across historical evidence, we identify four bias channels: (i) Positional bias: stronger positional encoding shifts influence toward recent history, improving responsiveness but potentially reducing stability and long-term diversity; (ii) Popularity amplification: small frequency differences in data can be magnified into disproportionate exposure, contributing to Matthew effects and echo chambers; (iii) Latent driver bias: when important drivers of user choices are not directly observed, the model can place overly concentrated weight on a small subset of past events, creating overconfident attributions. (iv) Synthetic data bias: when users increasingly follow AI suggestions and platforms retrain on model-shaped synthetic logs, outputs can concentrate over time, and long-tail alternatives can disappear first. Our analysis highlights mechanism-level reliability risks that may not be visible in offline performance metrics. The four bias channels indicate that large-scale deployment may systematically distort exposure and choice. For managers, the immediate implication is to treat these as operational risk factors and to monitor concentration and drift over time, rather than assuming that performance gains alone guarantee reliability.
Authors: Pengfei He (Peter), Shaowei Wang (Peter), Tse-Hsun (Peter), Chen, Muhammad Asaduzzaman
Abstract: Static program slicing is a fundamental software engineering technique for isolating code relevant to specific variables. While recent learning-based approaches using language models (LMs) show promise in automating slice prediction, they suffer from inaccurate dependency modeling and unconstrained generation, where LMs fail to capture precise data flow relations and produce slices containing hallucinated tokens and statements. To address these challenges, we propose Sliceformer, a novel approach that reformulates static program slicing as a sequence-to-sequence task using small language models such as CodeT5+. Sliceformer introduces two key innovations that directly target the identified limitations. First, to improve dependency modeling, we design dataflow-aware pretraining objectives that leverage data flow graphs (DFG) to teach models data dependencies through dataflow-preserving statement permutation and dataflow-aware span corruption. Second, to eliminate hallucination, we develop a constrained decoding mechanism that enforces both lexical and syntactic constraints. We evaluate Sliceformer on Java and Python program slicing benchmarks, demonstrating consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines with up to 22% gain in ExactMatch.
Authors: Bingxi Zhao, Jiahao Zhang, Xubin Ren, Zirui Guo, Tianzhe Chu, Yi Ma, Chao Huang
Abstract: Education represents one of the most promising real-world applications for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, conventional tutoring systems rely on static pre-training knowledge that lacks adaptation to individual learners, while existing RAG-augmented systems fall short in delivering personalized, guided feedback. To bridge this gap, we present DeepTutor, an agent-native open-source framework for personalized tutoring where every feature shares a common personalization substrate. We propose a hybrid personalization engine that couples static knowledge grounding with dynamic multi-resolution memory, distilling interaction history into a continuously evolving learner profile. Moreover, we construct a closed tutoring loop that bidirectionally couples citation-grounded problem solving with difficulty-calibrated question generation. The personalization substrate further supports collaborative writing, multi-agent deep research, and interactive guided learning, enabling cross-modality coherence. To move beyond reactive interfaces, we introduce TutorBot, a proactive multi-agent layer that deploys tutoring capabilities through extensible skills and unified multi-channel access, providing consistent experience across platforms. To better evaluate such tutoring systems, we construct TutorBench, a student-centric benchmark with source-grounded learner profiles and a first-person interactive protocol that measures adaptive tutoring from the learner's perspective. We further evaluate foundational agentic reasoning abilities across five authoritative benchmarks. Experiments show that DeepTutor improves personalized tutoring quality while maintaining general agentic reasoning abilities. We hope DeepTutor provides unique insights into next-generation AI-powered and personalized tutoring systems for the community.
Authors: Mary Nusrat, Sarfuddin Bhuiyan, Gahangir Hossain
Abstract: The growing sophistication of contemporary cyber threats necessitates a more effective and adaptive approach to cybersecurity training. Intuitive and adaptive approaches to learning, which are often required, are not provided in traditional learning methods. In this article, we present a new educational framework, "Learning to Explain Cybersecurity with Q20 Game", based on explainable AI (XAI), an educational game to enhance interactivity in learning. We propose a novel, game-inspired framework - the Explainable Q20 Cybersecurity Recommender (EQ-20CR), that learns to elicit the minimal set of evidential facts needed to justify cybersecurity defensive action. By casting "Why should I execute this mitigation?" as a 20 questions (Q20) game, a policy-based reinforcement-learning (RL) agent actively queries an environment until it can both (i) recommend the optimal security education and (ii) explain that decision with a concise dialogue trace. The article draws from "Playing 20 Question Game with Policy-Based Reinforcement Learning" [1] and "Learning-to-Explain: Recommendation Reason Determination through Q20 Gaming" [2]. The framework uses a policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) agent that leads the user through a sequence of questions to recognize and articulate a targeted cybersecurity concept, attack vector, or defense strategy. Furthermore, users are gradually exposed to informative questions by the system, revealing complicated, structured way at an adaptive difficulty level. In this paper, we design the architecture, its application to various concepts of cybersecurity through illustrative case studies, and its transformative potential on the training and awareness of cybersecurity recommendations.
Authors: Jonas Dolezal, Sawood Alam, Mark Graham, Maty Bohacek
Abstract: The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments (sometimes subsumed under the Dead Internet Theory). What has hindered answering these questions is that it has not been understood just how much of the internet is actually AI-generated or AI-edited. To this end, we construct a representative sample of websites published on the internet between 2022 and 2025 using the Internet Archive, and apply a state-of-the-art AI text detector on them. We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT's launch in late 2022. We also find statistically significant evidence for some of the identified hypotheses; for example, that increases in AI-generated text on the internet correlate negatively with semantic diversity and positively with the prevalence of positive sentiment. We do not, however, find statistically significant evidence supporting the hypothesis that an increased rate of AI-generated text on the internet decreases factual accuracy or stylistic diversity. Notably, this diverges from public perception, which we measure in a user study, where the majority of US adults turned out to believe in all four of the above-mentioned hypotheses. Individuals who do not use AI or use it infrequently tend to believe in these negative impacts more than those who use it frequently; similarly, individuals who hold negative views of AI tend to believe in these hypotheses more than those with favorable views of the technology.
Authors: Sanjeev Rao Ganjihal
Abstract: Key-value (KV) cache memory management is the primary bottleneck limiting throughput and cost-efficiency in large-scale GPU inference serving. Current systems suffer from three compounding inefficiencies: (1) the absence of unified KV cache sizing across all attention architectures--particularly multi-head latent attention (MLA), which is unsupported in general-purpose frameworks, resulting in up to 57x memory over-provisioning; (2) confinement of KV cache to a single memory tier (GPU HBM) despite the availability of a rich hierarchy spanning CPU DRAM, CXL-attached memory, NVMe via GPUDirect Storage, RDMA fabric, and parallel filesystems; and (3) reactive eviction policies that discard reusable state, forcing redundant recomputation. We present a unified system that addresses all three problems. Our architecture-variant-aware sizing engine computes exact memory requirements per attention type, enabling up to 7.4x higher batch sizes. A six-tier memory hierarchy extends effective KV cache capacity from 40 GB to over 38 TB per node while maintaining sub-millisecond time-to-first-token (TTFT) for hot entries. A Bayesian reuse predictor with Beta conjugate priors over 16 (block-type, transition-type) pairs achieves 70-84% cache hit rates, combined with EMA-scored head-granular eviction and RoPE-aware prefetching. Component-level validation on trace replay using ShareGPT, LMSYS-Chat-1M, and agentic workloads demonstrates 70-84% cache hit rates. Analytical projections combining validated component behavior with published hardware specifications indicate 1.4-2.1x projected TTFT reduction, 1.7-2.9x throughput improvement, and 47% cost reduction compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors: Xidong Wu, Yue Zhuan, Ruoqiao Wei, Hangxin Chen, Di Bai, Jintao Liu, Xinyi Wang, Xue Wang, Luoshu Wang, Xinwu Cheng
Abstract: Modern large-scale recommendation systems are typically constructed as multi-stage pipelines, encompassing pre-ranking, ranking, and re-ranking phases. While traditional recommendation research typically focuses on optimizing a specific model, such as improving the pre-ranking model structure or ranking models training algorithm, system-level configurations optimization play a crucial role, which integrates the output from each model head to get the final score in each stage. Due to the complexity of the system, the configuration optimization is highly important and challenging. Any model modification requires new optimal system-level configurations. But each experimental iteration requires significant tuning effort. Furthermore, models in different stage operates within a distinct context and optimizes for different targets, requiring specialized domain expertise. In addition, optimization success depends on balancing competing multiple online metrics and alignment with shifting production development objectives. To address these challenges, we propose AgenticRecTune, an agentic framework comprising five specialized agents, Actor, Critic, Insight, Skill, and Online, designed to manage the end-to-end configuration optimization workflow. By leveraging the advanced reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically Gemini, AgenticRecTune explore the optimal configuration spaces. The Actor Agent proposes multiple candidates and Critic Agent filters out suboptimal proposals.Then Online Agent autonomously prepares A/B tests based on the proposed configurations set from the Critic Agent and captures the subsequencet experimental results. We also introduce a self-evolving Skillhub, which utilizes a collaboration between the Insight Agent and Skill Agent to summarize the history results, extract underlying mechanics of each task in recommendation system and update skills.
Authors: Mandar Karhade
Abstract: Knowledge graphs used for retrieval treat all facts as equally current. Existing temporal approaches apply uniform decay, using a single forgetting curve regardless of knowledge type. We show this is fundamentally misspecified: different knowledge types exhibit different temporal dynamics, and the core retrieval problem is not latency or throughput but identifying what is important at query time. We propose a hierarchical framework that replaces uniform decay with a continuous decay surface parameterized by two orthogonal signals: velocity (how frequently a concept is observed) and volatility (how much the value changes between observations, measured via embedding distance). The decay surface is decomposed into three learnable levels: domain-level parameters capture universal patterns (some predicates are inherently permanent, others inherently transient), context-level parameters capture setting-dependent variation, and entity-level adaptation personalizes decay to specific subjects. All parameters emerge from data through survival analysis on observed value lifetimes, requiring no predefined taxonomies or domain expertise. We formulate edge lifetime as a survival problem where the event is value supersession (a meaningfully different value replacing the current one), distinct from mere re-observation. Experiments on synthetic temporal knowledge graphs demonstrate recovery of planted hierarchical parameters (HDBSCAN ARI = 1.0). Validation on 107 Wikipedia articles and 1,163 patient records from the Synthea clinical EHR simulator shows that velocity-volatility clusters emerge naturally, align with observable persistence patterns, and near-universally exhibit the Lindy effect (Weibull shape k < 1). Uniform decay performs 18x worse than no temporal weighting. Heterogeneous decay recovers from this, with each hierarchy level contributing measurable improvement.
Authors: Marvin Grosser, Carsten Lutz
Abstract: We study the problem of fitting a description logic (DL) ontology to a given set of positive and negative examples that take the form of an ABox and a Boolean query. While previous work has investigated this problem for the expressive DLs ALC and ALCI, we here focus on the Horn DLs EL and ELI, as well as their extensions with the bottom concept. As the query language, we consider atomic queries (AQs), conjunctive queries (rooted CQs), and unions thereof (rooted UCQs). We provide characterization of the existence of a fitting ontology based on simulations, use them to develop decision procedures, and clarify the exact computational complexity. For AQs, the problem is in PTime for both EL and ELI. For rooted CQs and UCQ, it is Sigma_P^2-complete for EL and ExpTime-complete for ELI. Adding the bottom concept does not change any of these complexities. Interestingly, moving from ALC and ALCI to EL and ELI introduces additional technical challenges rather than simplifying the matter.
Authors: Xavier Parent
Abstract: In response to a concern raised by Horty, this paper develops a two-tiered, preference-based semantic framework for modeling defeasible conditional obligations. The paper extends a Hansson-Lewis style preference semantics for dyadic deontic logic by incorporating a nonmonotonic reasoning mechanism that enables previously derived obligations to be withdrawn when new, potentially conflicting information comes in. The account is bi-preferential: two orderings--ideality and normality--on worlds are employed to address shortcomings in earlier approaches, with a separate ranking method for each. At the nonmonotonic layer, a number of postulates are considered, including antecedent strengthening, inclusion and no-drowning. A connection is established with so-called constrained input/output (I/O) logic--an existing standard for normative reasoning based on a different methodology.
Authors: Anatole Moureaux, Anthony Lopes Temporao, Flavio Abreu Araujo
Abstract: In-memory computing (IMC) enables energy-efficient neural network inference by computing analog matrix-vector multiplications (MVM) in memory crossbar arrays. In this work we present a simulation framework for N-ary crossbar architectures that retrieves MVM results with minimal implementation assumptions. The XOR and MNIST classification tasks were successfully inferred using a simulated crossbar array of (4x4) 4-states magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJ). MNIST accuracy reached 94.48% (vs. 97.56% software baseline). The software-hardware performance gap was further reduced using PCA dimensionality reduction. We identified weight quantization as the primary error source, and studied its impact alongside systematic nonidealities and random noise. We find that cell-specific random noise is less detrimental than systematic errors due to averaging across the array. Finally, we demonstrate an optimal number of states per cell that balances quantization error against resistance state resolution to minimize total MVM error.
Authors: Michael Cardei, Huu Binh Ta, Ferdinando Fioretto
Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) generate discrete sequences by iterative denoising under an absorbing masking process. In standard masked diffusion, if a token remains masked after a reverse update, the model discards its clean-state prediction for that position. Thus, still-masked positions must be repeatedly inferred from the mask token alone. This design choice limits cross-step refinement. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a simple, yet effective, post-training adaptation for MDMs that conditions each denoising step on the model's own previous clean-state predictions. The resulting method, called Self-Conditioned Masked Diffusion Models (SCMDM), requires minimal architectural change, does not introduce a recurrent latent-state pathway, does not rely on an auxiliary reference model, and adds no extra denoiser evaluations during sampling. This is an important departure from partial self-conditioning approaches which requires expensive model training from scratch. In particular, the paper shows that partial self-conditioning, including the commonly used 50% dropout strategy for training self-conditioned models from scratch, is suboptimal in the post-training regime. Instead, once the model's self-generated clean-state estimates become informative, the specialization to refinement is preferable to mixing conditional and unconditional objectives. SCMDM is evaluated across multiple domains, demonstrating consistent improvement over vanilla MDM baselines, achieving nearly a 50% reduction in generative perplexity on OWT-trained models (42.89 to 23.72), alongside strong improvements in discretized image synthesis quality, small molecular generation, and enhanced fidelity in genomic distribution modeling.
Authors: Zheng Zhang, Milad Masroor, Cuong Nguyen, Tahir Hassan, Yuanhong Chen, David Rosewarne, Kevin Wells, Thanh-Toan Do, Gustavo Carneiro
Abstract: Recent advances in data-centric medical AI have produced highly accurate diagnostic systems, but the emphasis on data curation and performance metrics has not translated into widespread clinical adoption. We conjecture that this limited uptake stems from insufficient attention dedicated to the optimisation of fair performance across diverse patient populations and to workflow integration: performance biases can create regulatory barriers, and poorly integrated automation can disrupt clinical routines, degrade the quality of human-AI collaboration, and reduce clinicians' willingness to adopt AI tools. Prior work on workflow integration (e.g., Learning to Defer (L2D) and Learning to Complement (L2C)) and AI fairness has typically examined these challenges in isolation, overlooking their natural interdependence and the practical constraints of clinical environments, such as restricted clinician availability. We propose People-Centred Medical Image Analysis (PecMan), a human-AI framework that jointly optimises fairness, diagnostic accuracy, and workflow effectiveness through a dynamic gating mechanism that assigns cases to AI, clinicians, or both under clinician workload constraints. We also introduce the Fairness and Human-Centred AI (FairHAI) benchmark for evaluating trade-offs between accuracy, fairness, and clinician workload. Experiments using this benchmark show that PecMan consistently outperforms existing methods, paving the way for more trustworthy and clinically viable AI systems. Code will be available upon paper acceptance.
Authors: Akshay Mittal, Elyson De La Cruz
Abstract: Autonomous AI agent ecosystems require stronger mechanisms for secure discovery, identity verification, capability attestation, and policy governance. Current deployments frequently lack (1) uniform agent discovery, (2) cryptographic agent authentication, (3) capability proofs that protect secrets, and (4) enforceable policy controls. This paper presents an implementation-oriented proof of concept for the Agent Name Service (ANS), a DNS-inspired trust layer for AI agent discovery and interoperability in Kubernetes, grounded in the ANS protocol specification~\cite{huang2025ans}. The implementation uses Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), Verifiable Credentials (VCs), policy-as-code enforcement with Open Policy Agent (OPA), and Kubernetes-native integration patterns (CRDs, admission controls, service mesh integration). In a demo research environment (3-node cluster, 50-agent workflow simulation), we observe sub-10ms response in demonstrated service paths and full success for scripted demo deployment scenarios. We explicitly scope these findings as proof-of-concept evidence rather than production certification. We further provide a threat model, assumptions, and limitations to separate implemented evidence from protocol-defined and roadmap capabilities. The result is an evidence-grounded pathway from ANS protocol concepts to reproducible engineering practice for secure multi-agent systems.
Authors: Himadri S Samanta
Abstract: Automated depression detection often relies on static aggregation of conversational signals, potentially obscuring clinically meaningful behavioral dynamics. We investigated whether entropy-driven temporal biomarkers improve depression detection beyond standard pooled features using the DAIC-WOZ corpus. Using 142 labeled participants, we reconstructed utterance-level acoustic trajectories and compared pooled temporal baselines, trajectory dynamics, Shannon entropy biomarkers, recurrence quantification, sample entropy, fractal complexity, and coupling biomarkers under leakage-aware validation. Static pooling achieved an AUC of 0.593, trajectory dynamics improved performance to 0.637, and entropy biomarkers produced the strongest statistically significant improvement over pooled baselines (AUC 0.646; nested cross-validated AUC 0.615; permutation p = 0.017). Entropy biomarkers outperformed recurrence, coupling, sample entropy, and fractalbased features, with several biomarkers stable across folds. These findings suggest depression-related signal may lie less in average acoustic levels than in entropy of conversational dynamics, supporting temporally informed digital phenotypes for mental-health assessment.
Authors: Qisheng Hu, Quanyu Long, Wenya Wang
Abstract: Memory-augmented LLM agents offer an appealing shortcut to continual learning: rather than updating model parameters, they accumulate experience in external memory, seemingly sidestepping the stability-plasticity dilemma of parametric learning. We show that this challenge does not disappear but resurfaces at the memory level. Under a limited context window, old and new experiences compete during retrieval, relocating the continual-learning bottleneck from parameter updates to memory access. To study this phenomenon, we introduce a (k,v) framework that disentangles two fundamental design axes of external memory: how experience is represented and how it is organized for retrieval. Across sequential-task experiments in ALFWorld and BabyAI, we find that abstract procedural memories transfer more reliably than detailed trajectories, while negative transfer disproportionately harms the hard cases. Moreover, finer-grained memory organization is not universally beneficial: designs that yield strong forward transfer can simultaneously induce severe forgetting. Together, these results reveal that external memory does not resolve the continual-learning problem; it reshapes it into a problem of memory representation and retrieval design.
Authors: Gilberto Sussumu Hida, Danilo Monteiro Ribeiro, Erika Yahata
Abstract: Context: Study screening in systematic literature reviews is costly, inconsistency-prone, and risk-asymmetric, since false negatives can compromise validity. Despite rapid uptake of Large Language Models (LLMs), there is limited evidence on how such models behave during the study screening phase, particularly regarding the choice of specific LLMs and their comparison with classical models. Objective: To assess LLM performance and variability in screening, quantify the impact of input metadata (abstract, title, keywords), and compare LLMs with classical classifiers under a shared protocol. Methods: We analyzed 12 LLMs from 4 providers (OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic, Llama) and 4 classical models (Logistic Regression, Support Vector Classification, Random Forest, and Naive Bayes) on 2 real Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs), totaling 518 papers. The experimental design investigated 3 critical dimensions: (i) LLMs performance variability, (ii) the impact of input feature composition (abstract, title, and keywords) on LLM performance, and (iii) the real gain of using LLMs instead of more traditional classification models. Results: LLMs exhibited substantial heterogeneity and residual non-determinism even at temperature zero. Abstract availability was decisive: removing it consistently degraded performance, while adding title and/or keywords to the abstract yielded no robust gains. Compared to classical models, performance differences were not consistent enough to support generalizable LLM superiority. Discussion: LLM adoption should be justified by operational and governance constraints (reproducibility, cost, metadata availability), supported by pilot validation and explicit reporting of variability and input configuration.
Authors: Alessia Berarducci, Eric Rossetto, Alessandro Antonucci, Marco Zaffalon
Abstract: AutoML, intended as the process of automating the application of machine learning to real-world problems, is a key step for AI popularisation. Most AutoML frameworks are not accounting for the potential lack of fairness in the training data and in the corresponding predictions. We introduce \textsc{FairMind}, a software prototype aiming to automatise fairness analysis at the dataset level. We achieve that by resorting to the assumptions of the \emph{standard fairness model}, recently proposed by Ple\v{c}ko and Bareinboim. This allows for a sound fairness evaluation in terms of causal effects, based on \emph{counterfactual} queries involving the target, possibly confounders and mediators, and the different values of an input feature we regard as \emph{protected}. After the necessary data preprocessing, the tool implements a closed-form computation of the effects. LLMs are consequently exploited to generate accurate reports on the fairness levels detected in the training dataset. We achieve that in a zero-shot setup and show by examples the expected advantages with respect to a direct analysis performed by the LLM. To favour applications, extensions to ordinal protected variable and continuous targets and novel decomposition results are also discussed.
Authors: Karthik Charan Raghunathan, Christian Metzner, Laura Kriener, Melika Payvand
Abstract: In a continual learning setting, we require a model to be plastic enough to learn a new task and stable enough to not disturb previously learned capabilities. We argue that this dilemma has an architectural root. A finite network has limited representational and plastic resources, yet the required capacity depends on properties of the future task stream that are unknown: how many tasks will be encountered, and how much they overlap in feature space. Regularization-based methods preserve past knowledge within fixed-capacity architectures and therefore implicitly rely on an oracle architecture sized for this unknown future. When tasks are only weakly related, fixed architectures progressively run out of plastic resources; when tasks are few or strongly overlapping, models are often over-provisioned. Inspired by neurogenesis in biology, we propose NORACL to address the stability-plasticity dilemma by tackling the oracle architecture problem through neuronal growth. Starting from a compact network, NORACL grows only when needed by monitoring two complementary signals for representational and plasticity saturation. We evaluate NORACL against oracle-sized static baselines across varying task counts and geometries. Across all settings, NORACL achieves final average accuracies that are better than or on par with oracle-provisioned static baselines while using fewer parameters. Additionally, NORACL yields architectures with interpretable growth, i.e. dissimilar tasks predominantly expand feature-extraction layers, whereas tasks which rely on common features shift growth toward later feature-combination layers. Our analysis further explains why fixed-capacity networks lose plasticity as tasks accumulate, whereas NORACL creates fresh capacity for new tasks through growth. Together, these results show that adaptive neurogenesis pushes the stability-plasticity Pareto frontier of continual learning.
Authors: Samuel L Pugh, Eric Yang, Alexander Muir Sutherland, Alessandra Breschi
Abstract: As Large Language Model (LLM) agents transition from single-session tools to persistent systems managing longitudinal healthcare journeys, their memory architectures face a critical challenge: reconciling two imperfect sources of truth. The patient's evolving self-report is current but prone to recall bias, while the Electronic Health Record (EHR) is medically validated but frequently stale. General-purpose agent memory systems optimize for coherence by overwriting older facts with the user's latest statement, a pattern that risks safety failures when applied to clinical data. We introduce a Dual-Stream Memory Architecture that strictly separates the patient narrative from the structured clinical record (FHIR), governed by a dedicated Reconciliation Engine that evaluates every extracted memory against the patient's FHIR profile and classifies discrepancies by type, severity, and the specific FHIR resources involved. We evaluate this architecture on 26 patients across 675 longitudinal wellness coaching sessions, using a hybrid dataset that interleaves real provider-patient transcripts with synthetic, FHIR-grounded clinical scenarios. In isolated testing, the engine detects 84.4% of designed clinical discrepancies with 86.7% safety-critical recall. By coupling extraction and reconciliation evaluation on the same data, we directly quantify a 13.6% error cascade, tracing the degradation to clinical details lost during memory extraction from unstructured conversation rather than to downstream classification errors. These findings establish that validating patient-reported memories against clinical records is both feasible and necessary for safe deployment of longitudinal health agents.
Authors: Boris Shigida, Boris Hanin, Andrey Gromov
Abstract: The Normalized Transformer, or nGPT (arXiv:2410.01131) achieves impressive training speedups and does not require weight decay or learning rate warmup. However, despite having hyperparameters that explicitly scale with model size, we observe that nGPT does not exhibit learning rate transfer across model dimension and token horizon. To rectify this, we combine numerical experiments with a principled use of alignment exponents (arXiv:2407.05872) to revisit and modify the $\mu$P approach to hyperparameter transfer (arXiv:2011.14522). The result is a novel nGPT parameterization we call $\nu$GPT. Through extensive empirical validation, we find $\nu$GPT exhibits learning rate transfer across width, depth, and token horizon.
Authors: Yibin Luo, Shiwei Gao, Huichuan Zheng, Youyou Lu, Jiwu Shu
Abstract: Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on consumer-grade GPUs is highly cost-effective, yet constrained by limited GPU memory and slow PCIe interconnects. Pipeline parallelism combined with CPU offloading mitigates these hardware bottlenecks by reducing communication overhead. However, existing PP schedules suffer from an inherent limitation termed the weight binding issue. Binding uneven model stages (e.g., the LM head is large) to GPUs limits the pipeline's throughput to that of the GPU with the heaviest load, leading to severe pipeline bubbles. In this paper, we propose RoundPipe, a novel pipeline schedule that breaks the weight binding constraint on consumer GPU servers. RoundPipe treats GPUs as a pool of stateless execution workers and dynamically dispatches computation stages across devices in a round-robin manner, achieving a near-zero-bubble pipeline. To ensure training correctness and system efficiency, RoundPipe integrates a priority-aware transfer scheduling engine, a fine-grained distributed event-based synchronization protocol, and an automated layer partitioning algorithm. Evaluations on an 8$\times$ RTX 4090 server demonstrate that RoundPipe achieves 1.48--2.16$\times$ speedups over state-of-the-art baselines when fine-tuning 1.7B to 32B models. Remarkably, RoundPipe enables LoRA fine-tuning of the Qwen3-235B model with 31K sequence length on a single server. RoundPipe is publicly available as an open-source Python library with comprehensive documentation.
Authors: Mingqian Zheng, Malia Morgan, Liwei Jiang, Carolyn Rose, Maarten Sap
Abstract: Current LLM safety alignment techniques improve model robustness against adversarial attacks, but overlook whether and how LLMs can recover helpfulness when benign users clarify their intent. We introduce CarryOnBench, the first interactive benchmark that measures whether LLMs can revise their interpretation of user intent and recover utility, while remaining safe through multi-turn conversations. Starting from 398 seemingly harmful queries with benign underlying intents, we simulate 5,970 conversations by varying user follow-up sequences, evaluating 14 models on both intent-aligned utility and safety. CarryOnBench yields 1,866 different conversation flows of 4--12 turns, totaling 23,880 model responses. We design Ben-Util, a checklist-based metric that evaluates how well each model response fulfills the user's benign information need using atomic items. At turn one, models fulfill only 10.5--37.6% of the user's benign information need. When the same query includes the benign intent upfront, models fulfill 25.1--72.1%, confirming that models withhold information due to intent misinterpretation, not limited knowledge. With benign clarifications in multi-turn conversations, 13 of 14 models approach or exceed this single-turn baseline, yet recovery cost varies across models. We identify three failure modes invisible to single-turn evaluations: utility lock-in, where a model rarely updates despite clarification; unsafe recovery, where a model updates at disproportionate safety cost; and repetitive recovery, where a model recycles prior responses rather than providing new information. Moreover, conversations converge to similar harmfulness levels regardless of how conservative the model starts. These findings expose a gap that single-turn evaluations miss -- whether a model is appropriately cautious or simply unresponsive to clarified user intent.
Authors: Isaac Tettey Adjokatse, Samuel Senyo Koranteng, George Yamoah Afrifa, Theophilus Ansah-Narh, Marcellin Atemkeng, Joseph Bremang Tandoh, Kow Ahor Essel-Yorke, Richmond Opoku-Sarkodie, Rebecca Davis
Abstract: Soil contamination by heavy metals poses a persistent environmental and public health concern in rapidly urbanising regions of Ghana, particularly at unregulated waste disposal sites. This study applies an unsupervised machine learning framework to detect and characterise anomalous heavy metal contamination patterns in soils from twelve waste sites and residential controls in the Central Region, of Ghana. Concentrations of eight metals (As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Hg, Ni, Pb, Zn) were analysed alongside standard health risk indices, including the Hazard Index (HI) and Incremental Lifetime Cancer Risk (ILCR). Isolation Forest and PCA reconstruction error each identified $12$ anomalous samples ($15.4\%$ of $78$ samples), while DBSCAN detected no density-isolated noise points. A consensus approach isolated six robust anomalies ($7.7\%)$, all spatially concentrated at a single site (S3). Anomalies exhibited approximately $70$--$80\%$ higher mean HI values than normal samples, with all consensus anomalies exceeding the HI$=1$ threshold. PCA reconstruction error showed a strong positive association with HI ($r \approx 0.8$), indicating consistency between multivariate deviation and health risk. Three distinct anomaly types were identified: extreme Cu enrichment at S3, anomalously low Ni at S4/S5, and moderate multi-metal (Pb--Zn) co-elevation at S9--S12. The results demonstrate that unsupervised machine learning provides granular, objective insight beyond aggregate indices, enabling targeted site prioritisation and risk-informed environmental management.
Authors: Andrii Zadaianchuk, Leonardo Barcellona, Lennard Schuenemann, Christian Gumbsch, Zehao Wang, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Fabien Despinoy, Rahaf Aljundi, Stratis Gavves, Sergey Zakharov
Abstract: Accurately reconstructing complex full multi-object scenes from sparse observations remains a core challenge in computer vision and a key step toward scalable and reliable simulation for robotics. In this work, we introduce RecGen, a generative framework for probabilistic joint estimation of object and part shapes, as well as their pose under occlusion and partial visibility from one or multiple RGB-D images. By leveraging compositional synthetic scene generation and strong 3D shape priors, RecGen generalizes across diverse object types and real-world environments. RecGen achieves state-of-the-art performance on complex, heavily occluded datasets, robustly handling severe occlusions, symmetric objects, object parts, and intricate geometry and texture. Despite using nearly 80% fewer training meshes than the previous state of the art SAM3D, RecGen outperforms it by 30.1% in geometric shape quality, 9.1% in texture reconstruction, and 33.9% in pose estimation.
Authors: Eduardo Ferreira da Silva, Mayki dos Santos Oliveira, Joel Machado Pires, Denis Dantas Boaventura, Maycon Maciel Peixoto, Cassio Serafim Prazeres, Gustavo Bittencourt Figueiredo, Miriam Capretz, Frederico Araujo Dur\~ao
Abstract: Recommender systems increasingly incorporate textual reviews to enrich user and item representations. However, most review-aware models remain optimized for rating prediction rather than ranking quality. This misalignment limits their effectiveness in top-N recommendation scenarios, where discriminative ranking is essential. To address this gap, we propose a Gated Hybrid Collaborative Filtering framework that integrates review-derived representations into an autoencoder-based collaborative model. The architecture injects semantic signals layer-wise through an adaptive gating mechanism that dynamically balances collaborative embeddings and topic-based features during encoding. To further refine the latent space, we introduce a contrastive learning module that aligns semantic and collaborative signals. We evaluate the framework across five distinct configurations: Pure collaborative; Topic and Gated; Text and Gated; and the addition of contrastive objectives (Contrastive and Topic, and Contrastive and Text). To explicitly optimize ranking behavior, the model is trained with a pairwise Bayesian personalized ranking objective, which promotes separation between relevant and non-relevant items in the latent space. Experiments on Amazon Movies & TV, IMDb, and Rotten Tomatoes demonstrate consistent improvements in hit rate @10 and normalized discounted cumulative gain @10 over state-of-the-art review-aware baselines. Results highlight the importance of controlled semantic fusion for ranking-driven recommendation.
Authors: Yassine Ibork, Nhat Ha Nguyen, Myounggyu Won, Lokesh Das
Abstract: We present a priority-aware intelligent lane change advisory system based on multi-agent federated reinforcement learning, namely PALCAS, for autonomous vehicles (AVs). While existing lane-change approaches typically focus on single-agent systems or centralized multi-agent systems, we introduce a federated reinforcement learning-based multi-agent lane change system prioritizing lane changing based on vehicle destination urgency. PALCAS incorporates a novel priority-aware safe lane-change reward function to enable judicious lane-change decisions in both mandatory and discretionary scenarios. PALCAS leverages the parameterized deep Q-network (PDQN) algorithm to facilitate effective cooperation among agents, enabling both lateral and longitudinal motion controls of AVs. Extensive simulations conducted using the SUMO traffic simulator and Mosaic V2X communication framework demonstrate that PALCAS significantly improves traffic efficiency, driving safety, comfort, destination arrival rates, and merging success rates compared to baseline methods.
Authors: Haiyu Yang, Miel Hostens
Abstract: Foundation-model pipelines for individual-level livestock monitoring -- combining open-vocabulary detection, promptable video segmentation, and self-supervised visual embeddings -- have raised the accuracy ceiling of precision livestock farming (PLF), but their GPU memory budgets exceed the envelope of commodity edge accelerators. To close this gap, the 446M-parameter Perception Encoder (PE-ViT-L+) backbone of SAM 3 is distilled into a 40.66M-parameter multi-scale student through three mechanisms: a Feature Pyramid Network student encoder built on TinyViT-21M-512, a four-term direction-then-scale distillation loss, and backbone-substitution inference with sliding-window session pruning that bounds streaming GPU memory growth. The DINOv3 family includes a pre-distilled ViT-S/16 variant (21.6M parameters) released alongside a 6716M-parameter ViT-7B teacher; the ViT-S (21M) variant is adopted as the per-individual embedder. On the Edinburgh Pig dataset, the compressed pipeline reaches 92.29% MOTA and 96.15% IDF1 against the SAM 3 teacher (1.68- and 0.84-percentage-point losses), achieves a 7.77-fold reduction in system-level parameters and a 3.01-fold reduction in peak VRAM (19.52GB -> 6.49GB), and reaches 97.34% top-1 accuracy with 91.67% macro-F1 on nine-class pig behaviour classification. The pipeline fits inside an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 16GB envelope with 4.9GB of headroom, supporting a proposed -- but not yet empirically validated -- on-device embedding-pool re-identification mechanism whose per-individual footprint of approximately 94MB per animal per year produces a longitudinal visual record amenable to retrospective association with disease, lameness, reproductive, and growth outcome labels.
Authors: Benjamin Probst, Andreas Happe, J\"urgen Cito
Abstract: Recent research has demonstrated the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for autonomous penetration testing, particularly when using cloud-based restricted-weight models. However, reliance on such models introduces security, privacy, and sovereignty concerns, motivating the use of locally hosted open-weight alternatives. Prior work shows that small open-weight models perform poorly on automated Linux privilege escalation, limiting their practical applicability. In this paper, we present a systematic empirical study of whether targeted system-level and prompting interventions can bridge this performance gap. We analyze failure modes of open-weight models in autonomous privilege escalation, map them to established enhancement techniques, and evaluate five concrete interventions (chain-of-thought prompting, retrieval-augmented generation, structured prompts, history compression, and reflective analysis) implemented as extensions to hackingBuddyGPT. Our results show that open-weight models can match or outperform cloud-based baselines such as GPT-4o. With our treatments enabled, Llama3.1 70B exploits 83% of tested vulnerabilities, while smaller models including Llama3.1 8B and Qwen2.5 7B achieve 67% when using guidance. A full-factorial ablation study over all treatment combinations reveals that reflection-based treatments contribute most, while also identifying vulnerability discovery as a remaining bottleneck for local models.
Authors: Jerry Y. Huang, Justin Lin, Sheel Shah, Kartik Nair, Nicholas M. Boffi
Abstract: In generative modeling, we often wish to produce samples that maximize a user-specified reward such as aesthetic quality or alignment with human preferences, a problem known as guidance. Despite their widespread use, existing guidance methods either require expensive multi-particle, many-step schemes or rely on poorly understood approximations. We reformulate guidance as a deterministic optimal control problem, yielding a hierarchy of algorithms that subsumes existing approaches at the coarsest level. We show that the flow map, an object of significant recent interest for its role in fast inference, arises naturally in the optimal solution. Based on this observation, we propose Flow Map Reward Guidance (FMRG): a training-free, single-trajectory framework that uses the flow map to both integrate and guide the flow. At text-to-image scale, FMRG matches or surpasses baselines across inverse problems, style transfer, human preferences, and VLM rewards with as few as 3 NFEs, giving at least an order-of-magnitude speedup in comparison to prior state of the art.
Authors: Fatima Rabia Yapicioglu, Meltem Aksoy, Alberto Rigenti, Tuwe L\"ofstr\"om-Cavallin, Helena L\"ofstr\"om-Cavallin, Seyda Yoncaci, Luca Longo
Abstract: Conformal Prediction provides distribution-free prediction intervals with guaranteed coverage, but its reliance on a single global calibration threshold obscures the sources of uncertainty at the instance level. In particular, it conflates irreducible noise with uncertainty induced by heterogeneous training data (aleatoric), model limitations, or calibration mismatch (epistemic), offering little insight into why an interval is wide or whether it could be reduced. We introduce an uncertainty-aware explainability framework that analyses the reducibility of calibration-induced epistemic conformal uncertainty via progressive calibration localisation for regression tasks. The approach is diagnostic rather than causal: it does not estimate true aleatoric or epistemic uncertainty, but explains how conformal intervals contract and stabilise as calibration support is localised around a test instance. Across benchmarks and real-world data, absolute reducible uncertainty aligns with epistemic proxies, while its relative contribution varies by task, revealing regimes hidden by interval width. This instance-level view complements conformal uncertainty, enhancing interpretability without altering the predictor or coverage.
Authors: Paraskevas V. Lekeas, Giorgos Stamatopoulos
Abstract: LLM agents are known to deviate from Nash equilibria in strategic interactions, but nobody has looked inside the model to understand why, or asked whether the deviation can be reversed. We do both. Working with four open-source models (Llama-3 and Qwen2.5, 8B to 72B parameters) playing four canonical two-player games, we establish the behavioral picture through self-play and cross-play experiments, then open up the 32-layer Llama-3-8B model and examine what actually happens during a strategic decision. The mechanistic findings are clear. Opponent history is encoded with near-perfect fidelity at the first layer (96% probe accuracy) and consumed progressively by later ones, while Nash action encoding is weak throughout, never exceeding 56%. There is no dedicated Nash module. Instead, the model privately favors the Nash action through most of its forward pass, but a prosocial override concentrated in the final layers reverses this, reaching 84% probability of cooperation at layer 30. When we inject a learned Nash direction into the residual stream, the behavior shifts bidirectionally, confirmed through concept clamping. The behavioral experiments surface six scale- and architecture-dependent findings, the most notable being that chain-of-thought reasoning worsens Nash play in small models but achieves near-perfect Nash play above 70B parameters. The cross-play experiments reveal three phenomena invisible in self-play: a small model can unravel any partner's cooperation by defecting early; two large models reinforce each other's cooperative instincts indefinitely; and who moves first in a coordination game determines which Nash equilibrium the system reaches. LLMs do not lack Nash-playing competence. They compute it, then suppress it.
Authors: Ci Lin, Futong Li, Tet Yeap, Iluju Kiringa
Abstract: Time-series data augmentation plays a crucial role in regression-oriented forecasting tasks, where limited data restricts the performance of deep learning models. While Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown promise in synthetic time-series generation, existing approaches primarily focus on matching marginal data distributions and often overlook the temporal dynamics that naturally exist in the original multivariate time series. When generating multivariate time series, this mismatch leads to distribution shift and temporal drift, thereby degrading the fidelity of the synthetic sequences. In this work, we propose a model-agnostic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)-based framework to mitigate distribution shift and preserve temporal dynamics in synthetic time series. We provide a theoretical analysis of how conditional generative models accumulate deviations under sequential generation and demonstrate that the MCMC algorithm can correct these discrepancies by enforcing consistency with empirical transition statistics between neighboring time points. Extensive experiments on the Lorenz, Licor, ETTh, and ILI datasets using RCGAN, GCWGAN, TimeGAN, SigCWGAN, and AECGAN demonstrate that the proposed MCMC framework consistently improves autocorrelation alignment, skewness error, kurtosis error, R$^2$, discriminative score, and predictive score. These results suggest that synthetic time series consistent with the original data require explicit preservation of transition laws rather than solely relying on adversarial distribution matching, thereby offering a principled direction for improving generative modeling of time-series data.
Authors: Nilavra Pathak, Smriti Shyamal, Prasant Mhasker, Christopher Swartz
Abstract: We study finite-horizon budget allocation as a closed-loop economic control problem and evaluate receding-horizon Model Predictive Control (MPC) relative to reactive budgeting policies. Budgets are allocated periodically under execution noise and operational constraints, while return efficiency may evolve over time. Using a controlled simulation framework motivated by digital marketing, we compare reactive pacing to MPC across environments with increasing degrees of non-stationarity. Our results show that non-stationarity alone does not justify predictive control. When return dynamics are stationary or evolve through unpredictable stochastic drift, MPC offers no systematic advantage over reactive baselines. By contrast, when return efficiency exhibits predictable structure over the planning horizon, that is captured through an underlying model, MPC consistently outperforms reactive budgeting by exploiting intertemporal trade-offs.
Authors: Shouren Wang, Wang Yang, Chuang Ma, Debargha Ganguly, Vikash Singh, Chaoda Song, Xinpeng Li, Xianxuan Long, Vipin Chaudhary, Xiaotian Han
Abstract: Hybrid-thinking language models expose explicit think and no-think modes, but current designs do not separate them cleanly. Even in no-think mode, models often emit long and self-reflective responses, causing reasoning leakage. Existing work reduces this issue through better data curation and multi-stage training, yet leakage remains because both modes are still encoded in the same feed-forward parameters. We propose Path-Lock Expert (PLE), an architecture-level solution that replaces the single MLP in each decoder layer with two semantically locked experts, one for think and one for no-think, while keeping attention, embeddings, normalization, and the language-model head shared. A deterministic control-token router selects exactly one expert path for the entire sequence, so inference preserves the dense model's per-token computation pattern and each expert receives mode-pure updates during supervised fine-tuning. Across math and science reasoning benchmarks, PLE maintains strong think performance while producing a substantially stronger no-think mode that is more accurate, more concise, and far less prone to reasoning leakage. On Qwen3-4B, for example, PLE reduces no-think reflective tokens on AIME24 from 2.54 to 0.39 and improves no-think accuracy from 20.67% to 40.00%, all while preserving think-mode performance. These results suggest that controllable hybrid thinking is fundamentally an architectural problem, and separating mode-specific feed-forward pathways is a simple and effective solution.
Authors: Halley Young, Nikolaj Bj\"orner
Abstract: Large language models can now generate substantial code and draft research text, but research-software projects require more than either artifact alone. The mathematical thesis, executable system, benchmark surface, and public claims must mature together, yet often drift apart. We identify two LM-specific failure modes: hallucination accumulation, in which claims exceed what code or theory supports and unsupported assertions propagate across sessions; and desynchronization, in which code, theory, or the model's own world model fall out of alignment. We propose Comet-H, an iterative prompt automaton that orchestrates ideation, implementation, evaluation, grounding, and paper-writing as coupled coordinates of a single workspace state. At each step, a controller selects the next prompt by scoring it against what the workspace currently lacks, carries unfinished follow-up work forward with a half-life, and re-checks the paper and README against the code and benchmarks whenever documentation changes. We frame prompt selection as a small contextual bandit problem over prompt families, with prompts as arms, workspace deficits as context, and a hand-weighted linear score. This transparent scorer, paired with a fading record of unfinished work, bounds long-horizon follow-ups, requires no learned policy, and makes each prompt choice legible from the workspace. We created a portfolio of 46 research-software repositories across two dozen domains. We study A3 in depth, a Python static-analysis tool built entirely within the loop, which reaches (F1 = 0.768) on a 90-case benchmark, compared with a next-best baseline of 0.364. Across approximately 400 commits, we find that audit-and-contraction passes dominate the later phases of every successful trajectory.
Authors: Kashif Imteyaz, Isabel Lopez, Nakul Rajpal, Hunjun Shin, Saiph Savage
Abstract: Freelance workers must continually acquire new skills to remain competitive in online labor markets, yet they lack the organizational training, mentorship, and infrastructure available to traditional employees. Generative AI-powered tools like ChatGPT are reshaping market skill demands while also offering new forms of on-demand learning support to meet those demands. Despite growing interest in AI-powered learning tools, little is known about how freelancers actually use these tools to learn, the challenges they encounter, and how generative AI for learning interacts with precarity and competition in platform-based work. We present a mixed-methods study combining a survey and semi-structured interviews with freelance knowledge workers. Grounded in self-directed learning theory, we examine how freelancers integrate generative AI tools into their learning practices. Our findings show that freelancers increasingly rely on generative AI to structure learning and support exploratory skill acquisition, but do not treat it as their primary learning resource due to inconsistency, lack of contextual relevance, and verification overhead. We identify a shift from learning as growth to learning as survival, where upskilling is oriented toward immediate market viability rather than long-term development. We also surface a structural challenge we term invisible competencies, in which workers acquire skills through generative AI tools but lack credible ways to signal or validate these skills in competitive freelance markets. Based on these insights, we offer design recommendations for generative AI-powered learning tools for freelancers.
Authors: Jason Fournier (Imagine Learning), Kacper {\L}odzikowski (Adam Mickiewicz University, Pozna\'n, Poland)
Abstract: Generative AI has rapidly entered education through free consumer tools, outpacing the ability of schools and universities to respond. Now a new wave of more autonomous agentic AI systems--with the capacity to plan and act towards goals--promises both greater educational personalization and greater disruption. This chapter argues that successfully navigating these innovations requires balancing three core tensions: (1) Implementation Feasibility, or the practical capacity to integrate AI sustainably into real classrooms; (2) Adaptation Speed, or the mismatch between fast-evolving AI capabilities and the slower pace of educational change; and (3) Mission Alignment, or the need to ensure AI applications uphold educational values such as equity, privacy, and pedagogical integrity. First, we review early evidence of generative and agentic AI in various sectors and in frontline education to illustrate these tensions in context. Then, we present a three-tension framework to guide decision-makers in evaluating and designing AI initiatives across K-12 and higher education. We provide examples of how the framework can be applied to plan responsible AI deployments, and we identify emerging trends--such as curriculum-linked AI agents and educator-informed AI design--along with open research directions. We conclude the chapter with recommendations for educational leaders to proactively engage with the opportunities and challenges of AI, so that this technology can be harnessed to enhance teaching and learning in the decade ahead.
Authors: Jon-Paul Cacioli
Abstract: When instructed to underperform on multiple-choice evaluations, do language models engage with question content or fall back on positional shortcuts? We map the boundary between these regimes using a six-condition adversarial instruction-specificity gradient administered to two instruction-tuned LLMs (Llama-3-8B and Llama-3.1-8B) on 2,000 MMLU-Pro items. Distributional screening (response-position entropy) and an independent content-engagement criterion (difficulty-accuracy correlation) jointly characterise each condition. The gradient reveals three regimes rather than a monotonic transition. Vague adversarial instructions produce moderate accuracy reduction with preserved content engagement. Standard sandbagging and capability-imitation instructions produce positional entropy collapse with partial content engagement. A two-step answer-aware avoidance instruction produces extreme positional collapse, with near-total concentration on a single response position (99.9% and 87.4%) and no measurable content sensitivity. This was the only multi-step instruction tested, and it produced the most extreme shortcut. The attractor position matches each model's content-absent null-prompt default. The effect replicates across both models and four academic domains. Distributional collapse and content engagement can co-occur (50% concordance between screening criteria), indicating that entropy-based screening and difficulty-based content assessment capture partially independent dimensions of response validity. Results suggest that instruction complexity can determine whether adversarial compliance uses content-aware or content-blind mechanisms in small instruction-tuned LLMs under greedy decoding.
Authors: Xingwei Tan, Marco Valentino, Mahmud Elahi Akhter, Yuxiang Zhou, Maria Liakata, Nikolaos Aletras
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to acquire reasoning capabilities through shared inference patterns in pre-training data, which are further elicited via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) practices. However, whether fundamental reasoning patterns, such as induction, deduction, and abduction, can be decoupled from specific problem instances remains a critical challenge for model controllability, and for shedding light on reasoning controllability. In this paper, we present the first systematic investigation of this problem through the lens of reasoning conflicts: an explicit tension between parametric and contextual information induced by mandating logical schemata that deviate from those expected for a target task. Our evaluation reveals that LLMs consistently prioritize sensibility over compliance, favoring task-appropriate reasoning patterns despite conflicting instructions. Notably, task accuracy is not strictly determined by sensibility, with models often maintaining high performance even when using conflicting patterns, suggesting a reliance on internalized parametric memory that increases with model size. We further demonstrate that reasoning conflicts are internally detectable, as confidence scores significantly drop during conflicting episodes. Probing experiments confirm that reasoning types are linearly encoded from middle-to-late layers, indicating the potential for activation-level controllability. Leveraging these insights, we steer models towards compliance, increasing instruction following by up to 29%. Overall, our findings establish that while LLM reasoning is anchored to concrete instances, active mechanistic interventions can effectively decouple logical schemata from data, offering a path toward improved controllability, faithfulness, and generalizability.
Authors: Zuriel Y. Yescas-Ramos, Andr\'es \'Alvarez-Garc\'ia, Huziel E. Sauceda
Abstract: We present \textsc{dm-PhiSNet}, a physically constrained \textsc{PhiSNet}-based equivariant model that predicts one-electron reduced density matrices (1-RDMs) directly from molecular geometries in an atomic-orbital (AO) basis for accelerated self-consistent field (SCF) workflows. Training follows a two-stage schedule with progressively introduced physically motivated objectives, and the resulting predictions are refined by a lightweight analytic block. This block enforces electron-number conservation, drives the 1-RDM toward generalized idempotency in the AO metric, and regularizes the occupation spectrum of the L\"owdin-orthogonalized density. Across six closed-shell systems -- H$_2$O, CH$_4$, NH$_3$, HF, ethanol, and NO$_3^-$ -- the refined 1-RDMs provide SCF initial guesses that substantially reduce iteration steps by 49--81\% relative to standard initializations. Beyond SCF acceleration, the learned 1-RDMs yield accurate one-shot total energies and Hellmann--Feynman atomic forces without force supervision, indicating that the model captures chemically meaningful electronic structure. These results demonstrate that combining equivariant learning with analytic constraint enforcement provides a simple, general route to solver-ready density-matrix initializations and accelerated SCF workflows.
Authors: Marco Robol, Paolo Giorgini
Abstract: Autonomous agents can adapt their behaviour to changing environments, but remain bound to requirements, goals, and capabilities fixed at design time, preventing genuine software evolution. This paper introduces self-evolving software agents, combining BDI reasoning with LLMs to enable autonomous evolution of goals, reasoning, and executable code. We propose a BDI-LLM architecture in which an automated evolution module operates alongside the agent's reasoning loop, eliciting new requirements from experience and synthesizing corresponding design and code updates. A prototype evaluated in a dynamic multi-agent environment shows that agents can autonomously discover new goals and generate executable behaviours from minimal prior knowledge. The results indicate both the feasibility and current limits of LLM-driven evolution, particularly in terms of behavioural inheritance and stability.
Authors: Neha Nagaraja, Hayretdin Bahsi, Carlo R. da Cunha
Abstract: As large language models are integrated into autonomous robotic systems for task planning and control, compromised inputs or unsafe model outputs can propagate through the planning pipeline to physical-world consequences. Although prior work has studied robotic cybersecurity, adversarial perception attacks, and LLM safety independently, no existing study traces how these threat categories interact and propagate across trust boundaries in a unified architectural model. We address this gap by modeling an LLM-enabled autonomous robot in an edge-cloud architecture as a hierarchical Data Flow Diagram and applying STRIDE-per-interaction analysis across six boundary-crossing interaction points using a three-category taxonomy of Conventional Cyber Threats, Adversarial Threats, and Conversational Threats. The analysis reveals that these categories converge at the same boundary crossings, and we trace three cross-boundary attack chains from external entry points to unsafe physical actuation, each exposing a distinct architectural property: the absence of independent semantic validation between user input and actuator dispatch, cross-modal translation from visual perception to language-model instruction, and unmediated boundary crossing through provider-side tool use. To our knowledge, this is the first DFD-based threat analysis integrating all three threat categories across the full perception-planning-actuation pipeline of an LLM-enabled robotic system.
Authors: Chung-Hsiang Lo, Lu Li, Diji Yang, Tianyu Zhang, Yunkai Zhang, Yoshua Bengio, Yi Zhang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) conventionally process structured inputs as 1D token sequences. While natural for prose, such linearization may introduce additional representational burden for tasks whose computation depends directly on explicit 2D structure, because row--column alignment and local neighborhoods are no longer directly expressed in the input. We study this setting, which we refer to as serialization friction, on a small diagnostic testbed of synthetic tasks with explicit 2D structure: matrix transpose, Conway's Game of Life, and LU decomposition. To examine this question, we compare a text-only language pathway over serialized inputs with a vision-augmented pathway, built on the same language backbone, that receives the same underlying content rendered in task-faithful 2D layout, yielding a system-level comparison between two end-to-end input pathways. Across the tasks and settings we study, the visual pathway consistently outperforms the textual pathway; the gap often widens at larger dimensions, and error patterns under serialization become increasingly spatially structured. These findings indicate that the relationship between input representation and model performance on such tasks warrants further investigation, and suggest that preserving task-relevant 2D layout is a promising direction for structured 2D tasks.
Authors: Matthew Christian Agustin
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) reading assistants are increasingly used in settings that require interpretation rather than simple retrieval. In these contexts, the central risk is not only error or unsafe output, but interpretive displacement: the transfer of meaning-making work from reader to system. This paper examines that problem through the concept of epistemic guardrails, defined here as constraints on how an artificial intelligence (AI) system participates in reading and interpretation. Using TextWalk, a minimal reading-support prototype designed as a co-reader rather than an answer-provider, the study applies a fixed ten-prompt protocol to twelve analytical texts spanning four categories of argumentative prose. The protocol escalates from baseline reading support to interpretive inquiry, boundary stress, and explicit shortcut pressure, enabling guardrails to be examined as behavioral properties observable in interaction rather than as static instruction features. Results show strong baseline stability, measurable strain during interpretive inquiry, partial recovery under direct boundary stress, and late-stage stabilization under escalation pressure. The most consequential weaknesses did not appear as overt collapse, but in a middle zone between support and substitution, where the system remained grounded and pedagogical while redistributing too much interpretive labor away from the reader. The paper contributes a protocol for evaluating epistemic guardrails as interactional phenomena in conversational AI reading assistants, an empirical account of their behavioral dynamics under pressure, and an emerging model of interpretive boundary function in reading-support AI.
Authors: Yizhou Wu, Shansong Wang, Yuheng Li, Mojtaba Safari, Mingzhe Hu, Chih-Wei Chang, Harini Veeraraghavan, Xiaofeng Yang
Abstract: Brain MRI underpins a wide range of neuroscientific and clinical applications, yet most learning-based methods remain task-specific and require substantial labeled data. Here we show that a single self-supervised representation can generalize across heterogeneous brain MRI endpoints. We trained BrainDINO, a self-distilled foundation model, on approximately 6.6 million unlabeled axial slices from 20 datasets encompassing broad variation in population, disease, and acquisition setting. Using a frozen encoder with lightweight task heads, BrainDINO supported transfer across tumor segmentation, neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental conditions classification, brain age estimation, post-stroke temporal prediction, molecular status prediction, MRI sequence classification, and survival modeling. Across tasks and supervision regimes, BrainDINO consistently equaled or exceeded natural-image and MRI-specific self-supervised baselines, with particularly strong advantages under label scarcity. Representation analyses further showed anatomically organized and pathology-sensitive feature structure in the absence of task-specific supervision. Our findings indicate that large-scale slice-wise self-supervised learning can yield a unified brain MRI representation that supports diverse neuroimaging tasks without volumetric pretraining or full-network fine-tuning, establishing a scalable foundation for robust and data-efficient brain imaging analysis.
Authors: Mehmet Iscan
Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based coding agents increasingly rely on external memory to reuse prior debugging experience, repair traces, and repository-local operational knowledge. However, retrieved memory is useful only when the current failure is genuinely compatible with a previous one; superficial similarity in stack traces, terminal errors, paths, or configuration symptoms can lead to unsafe memory injection. This paper reframes issue-memory use as a selective, risk-sensitive control problem rather than a pure top-k retrieval problem. We introduce RSCB-MC, a risk-sensitive contextual bandit memory controller that decides whether an agent should use no memory, inject the top resolution, summarize multiple candidates, perform high-precision or high-recall retrieval, abstain, or ask for feedback. The system stores reusable issue knowledge through a pattern-variant-episode schema and converts retrieval evidence into a fixed 16-feature contextual state capturing relevance, uncertainty, structural compatibility, feedback history, false-positive risk, latency, and token cost. Its reward design penalizes false-positive memory injection more strongly than missed reuse, making non-injection and abstention first-class safety actions. In deterministic smoke-scale artifacts, RSCB-MC obtains the strongest non-oracle offline replay success rate, 62.5%, while maintaining a 0.0% false-positive rate. In a bounded 200-case hot-path validation, it reaches 60.5% proxy success with 0.0% false positives and a 331.466 microseconds p95 decision latency. The results show that, for coding-agent memory, the key question is not only which memory is most similar, but whether any retrieved memory is safe enough to influence the debugging trajectory.
Authors: Raviteja Anantha, Nick Levato, Layne C. Price
Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods face a tradeoff between adapter size and expressivity: ultra-low-parameter adapters are confined to fixed low-rank subspaces, capping performance even with extended training. We propose BoostLoRA, a gradient-boosting framework that overcomes this limit by iteratively training and merging minimal adapters on the examples the current model gets wrong. A ROTATE SVD basis strategy assigns each round to an orthogonal subspace, so cumulative effective rank grows linearly with the number of rounds while each adapter remains ultra-low-rank. After merging, adapters are discarded, leaving zero inference overhead. On Qwen2.5-3B, BoostLoRA reaches 89.1% on GSM8K and 68.8% on MATH-500, surpassing both the best single-shot ultra-low parameter adapter (TinyLoRA) and full fine-tuning; on code generation it reaches 57.2% on MBPP and 80.4% on HumanEval while full fine-tuning drops below the zero-shot baseline. We also demonstrate cross-architecture transfer on protein binding classification with ESM2-650M and cross-entropy training. BoostLoRA is, to our knowledge, the first PEFT method whose effective rank grows with training, separating per-round parameter cost from total representational capacity.
Authors: Pedro-Aar\'on Hern\'andez-\'Avalos, Luciano Garc\'ia-Ba\~nuelos
Abstract: The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly transformed tasks across Software Engineering. In the context of Business Process Management, LLMs are now being explored as tools to derive process models directly from textual descriptions. Existing approaches range from chatbot-driven systems that assist with iterative, text-based modeling to fully automated end-to-end modeling assistants. However, we argue that process modeling is inherently complex and cannot be effectively addressed through black-box solutions. Instead, we envision modeling as an open-ended conversational activity, best supported by an interactive, iterative process involving both humans and LLM. In our approach, the modeling task is decomposed into smaller, manageable steps. Each step results in intermediate artifacts and explicitly documents the rationale behind each modeling decision. During this process, we incrementally uncover simple behavioral relations that guide the construction of the model. Given the current limitations of LLMs in reasoning about complex dependencies, we complement them with specialized tools developed in the field to structure process models based on behavioral relations. This hybrid approach enables the generation of sound, yet comprehensible models that evolve through transparent and explainable steps. In this paper, we present our research agenda and introduce Pragmos, a prototype system that operationalizes this vision. Pragmos demonstrates how LLMs can collaborate with human users as both domain and modeling experts to co-create evolving process models through a structured and explainable workflow.
Authors: Md Hasan Saju, Akramul Azim
Abstract: Security Operations Centers (SOCs) face mounting operational challenges. These challenges come from increasing threat volumes, heterogeneous SIEM platforms, and time-consuming manual triage workflows. We present an end-to-end threat management framework that integrates ensemble-based detection, syntax-constrained query generation, and retrieval-augmented resolution support to automate critical security workflows. Our detection module evaluates both traditional machine learning classifiers and large language models (LLMs), then combines the three best-performing LLMs to create an ensemble model, achieving 82.8% accuracy while maintaining 0.120 false positive rate on SIEM logs. We introduce the SQM (Syntax Query Metadata) architecture for automated evidence collection. It uses platform-specific syntax constraints, metadata-based retrieval, and documentation-grounded prompting to generate executable queries for IBM QRadar and Google SecOps. SQM achieves a BLEU score of 0.384 and a ROUGE-L score of 0.731. These results are more than twice as good as the baseline LLM performance. For incident resolution and recommendation generation, we demonstrate that integrating SQM-derived evidence improves resolution code prediction accuracy from 78.3% to 90.0%, with an overall recommendation quality score of 8.70. In production SOC environments, our framework reduces average incident triage time from hours to under 10 minutes. This work demonstrates that domain-constrained LLM architectures with retrieval augmentation can meet the strict reliability and efficiency requirements of operational security environments at scale.
Authors: Vanessa B. Sibug, Emerson Q. Fernando, Almer B. Gamboa, Roque Francis B. Dianelo, Agnes R. Regala, Joseph Alexander Bansil, Jan Henry B. Sunga, Vernon Grace M. Maniago, John Paul P. Miranda
Abstract: This study examines the factors influencing pre-service teachers' behavioral intention to use AI-enabled educational tools during their practicum, using the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2) as the theoretical framework. The model includes the core UTAUT2 constructs such as performance expectancy, effort expectancy, hedonic motivation, social influence, facilitating conditions, price value, and habit. It also incorporates additional predictors including computer self-efficacy, computer anxiety, and computer playfulness. Data were collected from 563 pre-service teachers using a structured questionnaire and analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The results indicate that performance expectancy and hedonic motivation are the strongest predictors of behavioral intention. Computer self-efficacy, computer anxiety, and computer playfulness significantly influenced effort expectancy, although effort expectancy did not directly predict behavioral intention. Performance expectancy was significantly predicted by extrinsic motivation, job fit, relative advantage, and outcome expectations. Constructs such as social influence and facilitating conditions showed limited or inverse effects. These findings suggest that internal motivational, cognitive, and emotional factors are more influential than external or institutional factors in shaping the adoption of AI-enabled tools. The study highlights the importance of promoting personal relevance, confidence, and enjoyment in teacher preparation programs to encourage technology integration.
Authors: Emerson Q. Fernando, Julius Ceazar G. Tolentino, Maria Anna D. Cruz, Jordan L. Salenga, Vernon Grace M. Maniago, Juvy C. Grume, Erika M. Pineda, Aileen P. De Leon, John Paul P. Miranda
Abstract: The increasing dependency among Filipino college students on artificial intelligence (AI) poses concerns about the potential decline of fundamental academic competencies. This study examines the extent of AI dependency and its perceived effects on students' critical thinking, writing skills, learning independence, research skills, and academic engagement. Using a cross-sectional research design, data was collected from 651 students enrolled in higher education institutions (HEIs) in Pampanga, Philippines accredited by the Commission on Higher Education. The survey data was analyzed using Latent Class Analysis (LCA) to identify AI dependency patterns. Findings indicated that students show moderate to high AI dependency, specifically in research and writing tasks. LCA identified four distinct profiles: highly engaged independent learners, selective AI users, moderate AI users, and AI-dependent learners. Notably, AI-dependent learners demonstrated the weakest academic competencies, with significant dependency on AI-generated outputs. The study highlights the need to foster educational policies that integrate AI literacy while preserving essential academic skills. HEIs must also balance technological advancements with curriculum adaptations to promote critical thinking and ethical use of AI. Future research may explore the longitudinal impacts and intervention strategies to mitigate academic skill erosion caused by AI dependency.
Authors: Ta-Yang Wang, Rajgopal Kannan, Viktor Prasanna
Abstract: Heterogeneous graphs are widely used to model multi-relational systems, but missing node attributes remain a major bottleneck for downstream learning. In this paper, we identify and formalize type-dependent information asymmetry: the phenomenon that different node types provide substantially different levels of useful signal for attribute completion. Motivated by this observation, we propose TypeBandit, a lightweight, model-agnostic methodology for heterogeneous attribute completion. TypeBandit combines topology-aware initialization, type-level bandit sampling, and joint representation learning. It allocates a finite global sampling budget across node types, samples representative nodes within each type, and uses the resulting sampled type summaries as shared contextual signals during representation construction. By operating at the type level rather than over each target node's local neighborhood, TypeBandit keeps the adaptive state compact and practical for large heterogeneous graphs. A key advantage of TypeBandit is architectural flexibility. Rather than requiring a new heterogeneous graph neural network architecture, TypeBandit acts as a type-aware front end for representative heterogeneous GNN backbones, including R-GCN, HetGNN, HGT, and SimpleHGN. We further introduce a hybrid pretraining scheme that combines structural degree priors with feature propagation, yielding a more reliable initializer than degree-only pretraining. Under a fixed-split protocol on DBLP, IMDB, and ACM, TypeBandit provides dataset-dependent but practically meaningful gains. Additional ablation, stability, efficiency, semantic-propagation, and sampled OGBN-MAG experiments support TypeBandit as a practical strategy for heterogeneous attribute completion when type-specific information is unevenly distributed and sampling resources are limited.
Authors: Bingli Wang, Huanze Tang, Haijun Lv, Zhishan Lin, Lixin Gu, Lei Feng, Qipeng Guo, Kai Chen
Abstract: In recent years, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on a wide range of multimodal benchmarks. Despite these advances, most existing benchmarks mainly focus on single-image or multi-image comprehension. In real-world scenarios such as document reading, information is often presented as interleaved multimodel contexts. This requires MLLMs not only to recognize the content of individual images, but also to identify relevant textual and visual evidence, establish fine-grained alignments between them, and reason over these aligned signals in interleaved contexts based on contextual evidence. However, there is still a lack of systematic benchmarks for quantifying the fine-grained understanding ability of MLLMs in interleaved image-text contexts. To fill this gap, we propose COHERENCE, a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of MLLMs to recover fine-grained image-text correspondences in interleaved multimodal contexts. COHERENCE covers interleaved image-text content from four representative domains and contains 6,161 high-quality questions. Moreover, we perform a six-type error analysis, enabling fine-grained attribution of failures in interleaved image-text understanding to the specific capabilities missing in current MLLMs.
Authors: Jon-Paul Cacioli
Abstract: We adapted the Reliable Change Index (RCI; Jacobson and Truax, 1991) from clinical psychology to item-level LLM version comparison on 2,000 MMLU-Pro items (K=10 samples at T=0.7). Two within-family pairs were tested: Llama 3 to 3.1 (+1.6 points) and Qwen 2.5 to 3 (+2.8 points). On the full benchmark, most items showed no reliable change (79% and 72%). However, over half the items were floor/ceiling. Among analysable items, change was bidirectional with large effect sizes: 34% improved and 28% deteriorated for Llama; 47% improved and 39% deteriorated for Qwen (median |delta p| = 0.50 and 0.90). Churn was asymmetric by difficulty: low-accuracy items improved, high-accuracy items deteriorated. Domain-level decomposition revealed family-specific reversals: Llama lost physics while Qwen lost law. Greedy single-shot evaluation missed 42% of reliably changed items and falsely flagged 25% of unchanged items. The aggregate accuracy gain is the net residual of opposing item-level movements. We recommend reporting churn rate alongside aggregate accuracy.
Authors: Zi Li, Tian Zhou, Wenze Li, Jingyu Hua, Yunlong Mao, Sheng Zhong
Abstract: Local fine-tuning datasets routinely contain sensitive secrets such as API keys, personal identifiers, and financial records. Although ''local offline fine-tuning'' is often viewed as a privacy boundary, we reveal that compromised model code is sufficient to steal them. Current passive pretrained-weight poisoning attacks, while effective for natural language, fundamentally fail to capture such sparse high-entropy targets due to their reliance on probabilistic semantic prefixes. To bridge this gap, we identify and exploit a practical but overlooked supply-chain vector -- model code camouflaged as standard architectural definitions -- to realize a paradigm shift from passive weight poisoning to active execution hijacking. We introduce a deterministic full-chain memorization mechanism: it locks onto token-level secrets in dynamic computation flows via online tensor-rule matching, and leverages value-gradient decoupling to stealthily inject attack gradients, overcoming gradient drowning to force model memorization. Furthermore, we achieve, for the first time, attacker-verifiable secret stealing through black-box queries that precisely distinguishes true leakage from hallucination. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves over 98\% Strict ASR without compromising the primary task, and can effectively bypass defense measures including DP-SGD, semantic auditing, and code auditing.
Authors: Zehui Tang, Yuchen Liu, Feihu Huang
Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is a popular distributed learning paradigm in machine learning, which enables multiple clients to collaboratively train models under the guidance of a server without exposing private client data. However, FL's decentralized nature makes it vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where malicious clients can submit corrupted models to manipulate the system. To counter such attacks, although various Byzantine-robust methods have been proposed, these methods struggle to provide balanced defense against multiple types of attacks or rely on possessing the dataset in the server. To deal with these drawbacks, thus, we propose an effective multi-layer defensive adaptive aggregation for Bzantine-robust federated learning (AdaBFL) based on a novel three-layer defensive mechanism, which can adaptively adjust the weights of defense algorithms to counter complex attacks. Moreover, we provide convergence properties of our AdaBFL method under the non-convex setting on non-iid data. Comprehensive experiments across multiple datasets validate the superiority of our AdaBFL over the comparable algorithms.
Authors: Gabe Guo, Thanawat Sornwanee, Lutong Hao, Elon Litman, Stefano Ermon, Jose Blanchet
Abstract: Generating continuous-time, continuous-space stochastic processes (e.g., videos, weather forecasts) conditioned on partial observations (e.g., first and last frames) is a fundamental challenge. Existing approaches, (e.g., diffusion models), suffer from key limitations: (1) noise-to-data evolution fails to capture structural similarity between states close in physical time and has unstable integration in low-step regimes; (2) random noise injected is insensitive to the physical process's time elapsed, resulting in incorrect dynamics; (3) they overlook conditioning on arbitrary subsets of states (e.g., irregularly sampled timesteps, future observations). We propose ABC: Any-Subset Autoregressive Models via Non-Markovian Diffusion Bridges in Continuous Time and Space. Crucially, we model the process with one continual SDE whose time variable and intermediate states track the real time and process states. This has provable advantages: (1) the starting point for generating future states is the already-close previous state, rather than uninformative noise; (2) random noise injection scales with physical time elapsed, encouraging physically plausible dynamics with similar time-adjacent states. We derive SDE dynamics via changes-of-measure on path space, yielding another advantage: (3) path-dependent conditioning on arbitrary subsets of the state history and/or future. To learn these dynamics, we derive a path- and time-dependent extension of denoising score matching. Our experiments show ABC's superiority to competing methods on multiple domains, including video generation and weather forecasting.
Authors: Ziwei Zhang, Jonathan Yu-Meng Li
Abstract: Modern stochastic optimization pipelines increasingly rely on learned generative models to represent uncertainty, while downstream decisions are evaluated almost entirely through Monte Carlo scenarios. This shifts the operational object of uncertainty from an explicit probability law to the sampler induced by the learned generator. Reliability therefore depends on two errors: sampler misspecification and finite-simulation error. We propose Sampler-Robust Optimization (SRO), which optimizes decisions against the worst-case sampler induced by perturbing the learned generator. This sampler-first formulation aligns with simulation-based decision pipelines and admits a sharpness-aware interpretation: it favors decisions whose performance is stable under generator perturbations, rather than merely under the nominal sampler. Under a coverage assumption, we show that the empirical worst-case objective provides a high-probability upper certificate for the true population objective, with finite-simulation error partially absorbed by the robustification used to guard against sampler misspecification. The framework accommodates generative models with or without explicit densities and admits efficient minimax procedures. Portfolio-optimization experiments show that SRO produces more stable decisions and improves out-of-sample performance under distribution shift.
Authors: Seungho Han, Seokju Lee, Jeonguk Kang
Abstract: Dense, dynamic crowds pose a persistent challenge for autonomous mobile robots. Purely reactive planning methods, such as Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control, often fail to escape local minima in complex scenarios due to their limited prediction horizon. To bridge this gap, we propose Ray-based Task-Oriented Latent Dynamics (RAY-TOLD), a hybrid control architecture that integrates obstacle information into latent dynamics and utilizes the robustness of physics-based MPPI with the long-horizon foresight of reinforcement learning. RAY-TOLD leverages a LiDAR-centric latent dynamics model to encode high-dimensional sensor data into a compact state representation, enabling the learning of a terminal value function and a policy prior. We introduce a policy mixture sampling strategy that augments the MPPI candidate population with trajectories derived from the learned policy, effectively guiding the planner towards the goal while maintaining kinematic feasibility. Extensive tests in a stochastic environment with high-density dynamic obstacles demonstrate that our method outperforms the MPPI baseline, reducing the collision rate. The results confirm that blending short-horizon physics-based rollouts with learned long-horizon intent significantly enhances navigation reliability and safety.
Authors: Yonghao Liu, Jialu Sun, Wei Pang, Fausto Giunchiglia, Ximing Li, Xiaoyue Feng, Renchu Guan
Abstract: Graph few-shot learning, which focuses on effectively learning from only a small number of labeled nodes to quickly adapt to new tasks, has garnered significant research attention. Despite recent advances in graph few-shot learning that have demonstrated promising performance, existing methods still suffer from several key limitations. First, during the meta-training phase, these methods typically perform node representation learning in Euclidean space, which often fails to capture the inherently hierarchical structure existing in real-world graph data. Second, during the meta-testing phase, they usually fit an empirical target distribution derived from only a few support samples, even when this distribution significantly deviates from the true underlying distribution. To address these issues, we propose IMPRESS, a novel framework that IMproves graPh few-shot learning with hypeRbolic spacE and denoiSing diffuSion. Specifically, our model learns node representations in a hyperbolic space and enriches the support distribution through denoising diffusion mechanisms. Theoretically, IMPRESS achieves a tighter generalization bound. Empirically, IMPRESS consistently outperforms competitive baselines across multiple benchmark datasets.
Authors: Luyao Xu, Xiang Chen
Abstract: Autonomous agent frameworks built upon large language models (LLMs) are evolving into complex, tool-integrated, and continuously operating systems, introducing security risks beyond traditional prompt-level vulnerabilities. As this paradigm is still at an early stage of development, a timely and systematic understanding of its security implications is increasingly important. Although a growing body of work has examined different attack surfaces and defense problems in agent systems, existing studies remain scattered across individual aspects of agent security, and there is still a lack of a layered review on this topic. To address this gap, this survey presents a layered review of security risks and defense strategies in autonomous agent frameworks, with OpenClaw as a case study. We organize the analysis into four security-relevant layers: the context and instruction layer, the tool and action layer, the state and persistence layer, and the ecosystem and automation layer. For each layer, we summarize its functional role, representative security risks, and corresponding defense strategies. Based on this layered analysis, we further identify that threats in autonomous agent frameworks may propagate across layers, from manipulated inputs to unsafe actions, persistent state contamination, and broader ecosystem-level impact. Finally, we highlight potential key challenges, including research imbalance across layers, the lack of long-horizon evaluation, and weak ecosystem trust models, and outline future directions toward more systematic and integrated defenses.
Authors: Kazutoshi Shinoda, Kosuke Nishida, Kyosuke Nishida
Abstract: Reward models (RMs) play a central role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, RMs are often sensitive to spurious features such as response length. Existing inference-time approaches for mitigating these biases typically focus exclusively on response length, resulting in performance trade-offs. In this paper, we propose causally motivated intervention for mitigating multiple types of biases in RMs at inference time. Our method first identifies neurons whose activations are strongly correlated with predefined bias attributes, and applies neuron-level intervention that suppresses these signals. We evaluate our method on RM benchmarks and observe reductions in sensitivity to spurious features across diverse bias types, without inducing performance trade-offs. Moreover, when used for preference annotation, small RMs (2B and 7B) with our method, which edits less than 2% of all the neurons in RMs, enable LLMs to improve alignment, achieving performance comparable to that of a state-of-the-art 70B RM on AlpacaEval and MT-Bench. Further analysis reveals that bias signals are primarily encoded by neurons in early layers, shedding light on the internal mechanisms of bias exploitation in RMs.
Authors: Irene Celino
Abstract: As information ecosystems grow more heterogeneous, both humans and artificial agents increasingly face a simple yet unresolved question: when seeking knowledge, whom should we ask, and why? Inspired by how people intuitively "read a room", this paper introduces the concept of knowledge affordance (KA) to systematize how agents identify meaningful opportunities for information seeking in hybrid human-AI environments. Rather than introducing a fully formed framework, we propose KAs as declarative, semantically grounded descriptions of what a knowledge source can offer, for which kinds of questions, and with which contextual properties. Additionally, we suggest that KAs are relational, possibly emerging from the interplay between the agent's task, preferences and situational factors. Our contribution is thus a conceptual proposal that connects different research streams, including affordances, semantic web services, knowledge engineering and querying, and mutual intelligibility. We sketch possible research directions to build KA-aware systems that navigate information spaces with greater transparency, adaptability and shared understanding.
Authors: Pengyun Zhu, Qiheng Sun, Long Wen, Yanbo Wang, Yang Cao, Junxu Liu, Deyi Xiong, Jinfei Liu, Zhibo Wang, Kui Ren
Abstract: Privacy policies are essential for users to understand how service providers handle their personal data. However, these documents are often long and complex, as well as filled with technobabble and legalese, causing users to unknowingly accept terms that may even contradict the law. While summarizing and interpreting these privacy policies is crucial, there is a lack of high-quality English parallel corpus optimized for legal clarity and readability. To address this issue, we introduce APPSI-139, a high-quality English privacy policy corpus meticulously annotated by domain experts, specifically designed for summarization and interpretation tasks. The corpus includes 139 English privacy policies, 15,692 rewritten parallel corpora, and 36,351 fine-grained annotation labels across 11 data practice categories. Concurrently, we propose TCSI-pp-V2, a hybrid privacy policy summarization and interpretation framework that employs an alternating training strategy and coordinates multiple expert modules to effectively balance computational efficiency and accuracy. Experimental results show that the hybrid summarization system built on APPSI-139 corpus and the TCSI-pp-V2 framework outperform large language models, such as GPT-4o and LLaMA-3-70B, in terms of readability and reliability. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/EnlightenedAI/APPSI-139.
Authors: Henrik Voigt, Michael Habeck, Joachim Giesen
Abstract: Large-scale transformers achieve impressive results on program synthesis benchmarks, yet their true generalization capabilities remain obscured by data contamination and opaque training corpora. To rigorously assess whether models are truly generalizing or merely retrieving memorized templates, we introduce a strictly controlled program synthesis environment based on a domain-specific arithmetic grammar. By systematically enumerating and evaluating millions of unique programs, we construct interpretable syntactic and semantic metric spaces. This allows us to precisely map data distributions and sample train and test splits that isolate specific distributional shifts. Our experiments demonstrate that optimizing density generalization -- through diverse sampling over both semantic and syntactic spaces -- induces robust out-of-distribution generalization. Conversely, evaluating support generalization reveals that transformers severely struggle with extrapolation, experiencing a performance drop of over 30% when forced to generate syntactically novel programs. While steadily scaling up compute improves generalization, the gains follow a strictly log-linear relationship. We conclude that robust generalization requires maximizing training diversity across multiple manifolds, and our findings indicate the necessity for novel search-based approaches to break through current log-linear scaling bottlenecks.
Authors: Yucheng Chen, Yang Yu, Yufei Shi, Conghao Xiong, Xulei Yang, Si Yong Yeo
Abstract: Radiology report generation (RRG) has emerged as a promising approach to alleviate radiologists' workload and reduce human errors by automatically generating diagnostic reports from medical images. A key challenge in RRG is achieving fine-grained alignment between complex visual features and the hierarchical structure of long-form radiology reports. Although recent methods have improved image-text representation learning, they often treat reports as flat sequences, overlooking their structured sections and semantic hierarchies. This simplification hinders precise cross-modal alignment and weakens RRG accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose RIHA (Report-Image Hierarchical Alignment Transformer), a novel end-to-end framework that performs multi-level alignment between radiological images and their corresponding reports across paragraph, sentence, and word levels. This hierarchical alignment enables more precise cross-modal mapping, essential for capturing the nuanced semantics embedded in clinical narratives. Specifically, RIHA introduces a Visual Feature Pyramid (VFP) to extract multi-scale visual features and a Text Feature Pyramid (TFP) to represent multi-granularity textual structures. These components are integrated through a Cross-modal Hierarchical Alignment (CHA) module, leveraging optimal transport to effectively align visual and textual features across various levels. Furthermore, we incorporate Relative Positional Encoding (RPE) into the decoder to model spatial and semantic relationships among tokens, enhancing the token-level alignment between visual features and generated text. Extensive experiments on two benchmark chest X-ray datasets, IU-Xray and MIMIC-CXR, demonstrate that RIHA outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in both natural language generation and clinical efficacy metrics.
Authors: Zhenzhou Jin, Li You, Xiang-Gen Xia, Xiqi Gao
Abstract: Channel fingerprint (CF) is considered a key enabler for facilitating the acquisition of channel state information (CSI) in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems. In this work, we investigate a novel type of CF that stores statistical CSI (sCSI) at each potential location, referred to as statistical CF (sCF). Specifically, we reveal the relationship between sCSI, namely the channel spatial covariance matrix (CSCM), and the channel power angular spectrum (CPAS). Building on this foundation, we construct a unified tensor representation of the sCF and further reduce its dimension by exploiting the eigenvalue decomposition of the CSCM and its correlation with the PAS. Considering the practical constraints imposed by measurement cost, privacy, and security, we focus on three representative scenarios and uniformly formulate them as tensor restoration tasks. To this end, we propose a unified tensor-based learning architecture, termed LPWTNet. The architecture incorporates a closed-form Laplacian pyramid (LP) decomposition and reconstruction framework that replaces the traditional encoder-decoder structure, enabling efficient inference while capturing multi-scale frequency subband characteristics of the sCF. Additionally, a shared mask learning strategy is introduced to adaptively refine high-frequency sCF components through level-wise adjustments. To achieve a larger receptive field without over-parameterization, we further propose a small-kernel convolution mechanism based on the wavelet transform (WT), which decouples convolution across different frequency components of the sCF and enhances feature extraction efficiency. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach delivers competitive reconstruction accuracy and computational efficiency across various sCF construction scenarios when compared with state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors: Ji-Hyeon Kim, Ho-Joong Kim, Seong-Whan Lee
Abstract: Video moment retrieval is the task of retrieving specific segments of a video corresponding to a given text query. Recent studies have been conducted to improve multimodal alignment performance through visual-linguistic similarity learning at the snippet-level and transformer-based temporal boundary regression. However, existing models do not calculate similarity by considering the relationships between multiple answer segments that match the query. Therefore, existing models are easily influenced by visually similar segments in the surrounding context. Existing models calculate similarity at the snippet-level and ignore the relationships between multiple answer segments corresponding to a single query. Therefore, they struggle to exclude segments irrelevant to the query. To address this issues, we propose ClipTBP, a clip-pair temporal boundary prediction framework based on boundary-aware learning. ClipTBP introduces a clip-level alignment loss for explicitly learning the semantic relationship between answer segments. ClipTBP also predicts accurate temporal boundaries by applying both main boundary loss and auxiliary boundary loss. ClipTBP consistently improves performance when applied to various existing models and demonstrates more robust boundary prediction performance even in ambiguous query scenarios.
Authors: Al Zadid Sultan Bin Habib, Tanpia Tasnim, Md. Ekramul Islam, Muntasir Tabasum
Abstract: Learning informative representations from tabular data in remote sensing and environmental science is challenging due to heterogeneity, scarce labels, and redundancy among features. We present ZAYAN (Zero-Anchor dYnamic feAture eNcoding), a self-supervised, feature-centric contrastive framework for tabular data. ZAYAN performs contrastive learning at the feature rather than sample level, removing the need for explicit anchor selection and any reliance on class labels, while encouraging a redundancy-minimized, disentangled embedding space. The framework has two modules: ZAYAN-CL, which pretrains feature embeddings via a zero-anchor contrastive objective with dynamic perturbations and masking, and ZAYAN-T, a Transformer that conditions on these embeddings for downstream classification. Across eight datasets, including six remote-sensing tabular benchmarks and two remote-sensing-driven flood-prediction tables from satellite and GIS products, ZAYAN achieves superior accuracy, robustness, and generalization over tabular deep learning baselines, with consistent gains under label scarcity and distribution shift. These results indicate that feature-level contrastive learning and dynamic feature encoding provide an effective recipe for learning from tabular sensing data.
Authors: Wei Li, Haisheng Li, Weijie Li, Jiandong Wang, Kaichen Ma, Luming Yang
Abstract: With the widespread application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in bridge structural health monitoring, deep learning-based automatic crack detection has become a major research focus. However, practical UAV inspections still face four key challenges: weak crack features, degraded imaging conditions, severe class imbalance, and limited computational resources for practical UAV inspection workflows. To address these issues, this paper proposes a unified lightweight convolutional neural network framework composed of four synergistic components: a lightweight backbone network, a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) for channel and spatial enhancement, a directed robust augmentation strategy based on inspection-scene priors, and Focal Loss for hard-sample learning under class imbalance. Experiments on the SDNET2018 bridge deck dataset show that the proposed method achieves an inference speed of 825 FPS with only 11.21M parameters and 1.82G FLOPs. Compared with the baseline model, the complete framework improves the F1-score by 2.51% and recall by 3.95%. In addition, Grad-CAM visualizations indicate that the introduced attention module shifts the model's focus from scattered regions to precise tracking along crack trajectories. Overall, this study achieves a strong balance among accuracy, speed, and robustness, providing a practical solution for ground-station assisted real-time deployment in UAV bridge inspections. The source code is available at: https://github.com/skylynf/AttXNet .
Authors: Ali Aghazadeh Ardebili, Massimo Stella
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can strongly shape social discourse, yet datasets investigating how LLM outputs vary across controlled social and contextual prompting remain sparse. Cognitive Digital Shadows (CDS) is a 190,000-record synthetic corpus supporting analyses of LLM-generated discourse. Each CDS record is generated by one of 19 LLMs, prompted to shadow either a human persona or an AI-assistant role. CDS contains LLM responses on 4 controversial societal topics: vaccines/healthcare, social media disinformation, the gender gap in science, and STEM stereotypes. Persona-conditioned records encode 17 sociodemographic and psychological attributes, providing data linking LLMs' prompts, language, stances and reasoning. Texts are validated for topic anchoring and can support emotional analyses via interpretable NLP (e.g. textual forma mentis networks). CDS is enriched by a pooling platform with user-friendly dashboards, enabling easy, interactive group-level comparisons of emotional and semantic framing across personas, topics and models. The CDS prompting framework supports future audits of LLMs' bias, social sensitivity and alignment.
Authors: Chang-Chih Meng, Yu-Ren Lu, Guan-Yu Lin, Tsung Tai Yeh, Kai-Chiang Wu, I-Chen Wu
Abstract: Integrated Circuit (IC) verification consumes nearly 70% of the IC development cycle, and recent research leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate testbenches and reduce verification overhead. However, LLMs have difficulty generating testbenches correctly. Unlike high-level programming languages, Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) are extremely rare in LLMs training data, leading LLMs to produce incorrect code. To overcome challenges when using LLMs to generate Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) testbenches and sequences, wepropose HAVEN (Hybrid Automated Verification ENgine) to prevent LLMs from writing HDL directly. For UVM testbench generation, HAVEN utilizes LLM agents to analyze design specifications to produce a structured architectural plan. The HAVEN Template Engine then combines with predefined and protocol-specific templates to generate all UVM components with correct bus-handshake timing. For UVM sequence generation, HAVEN introduces a Protocol-Aware Sequence Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that decomposes sequences into fine-grained step types. A set of predefined DSL patterns first establishes sequences that achieve a high coverage rate without LLM involvement. HAVEN continues to improve the coverage rate by iteratively leveraging LLM agents to analyze coverage gap reports and compose additional targeted DSL sequences. Unlike previous works, HAVEN is the first system that utilizes pre-defined, protocol-specific Jinja2 templates to generate all UVM components and UVM sequences using our proposed Protocol-Aware DSL and rule-based code generator. Our experimental results on 19 open-source IP designs spanning three interface protocols (Direct, Wishbone, AXI4-Lite) show that HAVEN achieves 100% compilation success, 90.6% code coverage, and 87.9% functional coverage on average, and is SOTA among LLM-assisted testbench generation systems.
Authors: Chengcao Yang, Jun Chen
Abstract: We propose a paradigm shift from learning to answer to learning to question: can a language model generate verifiable problems, solve them, and turn the resulting feedback into self-improvement without human supervision? We introduce ANCORA, an anchored-curriculum framework in which a unified policy alternates between a Proposer that synthesizes novel specifications and a Solver that produces verified solutions. ANCORA rests on three load-bearing mechanisms: a two-level group-relative update that couples Proposer advantages across specifications with Solver advantages across solution attempts; iterative self-distilled SFT that projects the base model onto its valid-output manifold before RL; and a UCB-guided Curriculum DAG that grows only through strictly filtered, novel, Solver-verified specifications. These stabilizers are necessary because sparse verifier feedback otherwise drives Proposer collapse even under MLRL-aligned rewards. Instantiated in Verus, ANCORA lifts Dafny2Verus pass@1 from a 26.6% SFT baseline to 81.5% in the test-time-training setting under 0-shot evaluation, outperforming the PSV self-play baseline by 15.8 points despite PSV using 1-shot inference; in a separate transfer setting, training from Dafny2Verus seeds yields 36.2% and 17.2% pass@1 on held-out MBPP and HumanEval.
Authors: Kathrin Korte, Joachim Winter Pedersen, Eleni Nisioti, Sebastian Risi
Abstract: To preserve previously learned representations, continual learning systems must strike a balance between plasticity, the ability to acquire new knowledge, and stability. This stability-plasticity dilemma affects how representations can be reused across tasks: shared structure enables transfer when tasks are similar but may also induce interference when new learning disrupts existing representations. However, it remains unclear when and why structural separation influences this trade-off. In this study, we examine how network architecture, task similarity, and representational dimensionality jointly shape learning in a sequential task paradigm inspired by transfer-interference studies. We compare a task-partitioned modular recurrent network with a single-module baseline by systematically varying task similarity (low, medium, high) and the scale of weight initialization, which induces different learning regimes that we empirically characterize through the effective dimensionality of the learned representations. We find that architecture has minimal impact in high-dimensional regimes where representations are sufficiently unconstrained to accommodate multiple tasks without strong interference. In contrast, in lower-dimensional (rich) regimes, architectural separation is decisive: modular networks exhibit graded alignment of task-specific subspaces with overlap for similar tasks, partial orthogonalization for moderately dissimilar tasks, and stronger separation for dissimilar tasks. This graded geometry is absent in the single network baseline. Our findings suggest that representational dimensionality acts as a key organizing variable governing when structural separation becomes functionally relevant, and highlight adaptive geometry as a central principle for designing continual learning systems.
Authors: Hiroyuki Deguchi, Katsuki Chousa, Yusuke Sakai
Abstract: The hubness problem, in which hub embeddings are close to many unrelated examples, occurs often in high-dimensional embedding spaces and may pose a practical threat for purposes such as information retrieval and automatic evaluation metrics. In particular, since cross-modal similarity between text and images cannot be calculated by direct comparisons, such as string matching, cross-modal encoders that project different modalities into a shared space are helpful for various cross-modal applications, and thus, the existence of hubs may pose practical threats. To reveal the vulnerabilities of cross-modal encoders, we propose a method for identifying the hub embedding and its corresponding hub text. Experiments on image captioning evaluation in MSCOCO and nocaps along with image-to-text retrieval tasks in MSCOCO and Flickr30k showed that our method can identify a single hub text that unreasonably achieves comparable or higher similarity scores than human-written reference captions in many images, thereby revealing the vulnerabilities in cross-modal encoders.
Authors: Rog\'erio Almeida Gouv\^ea, Gian-Marco Rignanese
Abstract: While machine-learned interatomic potentials (MLIPs) accelerate phonon dispersion calculations, merely identifying dynamical instabilities in computationally predicted materials is insufficient; automated pathways to resolve them are required. We introduce VibroML, an open-source Python toolkit driven by foundational MLIPs that shifts the paradigm from stability verification to automated structural remediation. VibroML employs an energy-guided genetic algorithm that vastly outperforms traditional soft-mode following, efficiently navigating the potential energy surface to uncover diverse, dynamically stable polymorphs. As 0 K harmonic stability does not guarantee macroscopic viability, an automated molecular dynamics workflow evaluates finite-temperature structural retention. VibroML also couples with ProtoCSP, our combinatorial structure prediction engine, to stabilize frustrated crystal topologies via targeted alloying, successfully rescuing functional perovskite networks like Cs$_2$KInI$_6$ and KTaSe$_3$. Demonstrating broader applicability, we mined the Alexandria database -- where ~50% of quaternary and 99.5% of quinary elemental combinations lack any structural entries -- to identify thousands of abandoned, high-symmetry stoichiometries. Deploying ProtoCSP's "cold start" retrieval and VibroML's evolutionary search on a sample, we successfully identified dynamically stable low-symmetry candidates. Through integrated structural remediation, thermal validation, and systematic compositional exploration, VibroML enables a comprehensive deep-screening approach, yielding physically sound structural propositions that far surpass standard high-throughput workflows.
Authors: Pieter C. Gort, Lotte J. S. Ewals, Marion W. Tops-Welten, Cris H. B. Claessens, Joost Nederend, Fons van der Sommen
Abstract: Peritoneal metastases are currently assessed using diagnostic laparoscopy to determine Sugarbaker's Peritoneal Cancer Index (sPCI), which works by dividing the abdomen into 13 regions and scoring each region based on tumor size. A recent consensus study defined 3D regions to facilitate a radiological PCI (rPCI), providing standardized anatomical regions for imaging-based assessment. Despite its clinical value, sPCI is invasive and lacks a standardized imaging counterpart. In this study, we propose a deep learning-based approach to automatically segment the rPCI regions on CT. We evaluate nnU-Net and Swin UNETR on 62 CT scans with rPCI regions manually annotated by three clinical researchers and validated by two expert radiologists. Performance was assessed using five-fold cross-validation with the Dice Similarity Coefficient (Dice), 95th percentile Hausdorff distance and Average Surface Distance. nnU-Net achieved an overall Dice of 0.82, approaching interobserver agreement (0.88) and outperforming Swin UNETR (0.76), with remaining challenges primarily in right flank and small-bowel regions. These results demonstrate feasibility of automated rPCI segmentation, laying the foundation for non-invasive, imaging-based assessment.
Authors: Jiaju Chen, Jinghua Piao, Xia Xu, Songwei Li, Tong Xia, Xiangnan He, Yong Li
Abstract: A long-standing challenge in economics lies not in the lack of intuition, but in the difficulty of translating intuitive insights into verifiable research. To address this challenge, we introduce AgentEconomist, an end-to-end interactive system designed to translate abstract intuitions into executable computational experiments. Grounded in a domain-specific knowledge base covering over 13,000 high-quality academic papers, the system employs a modular multi-stage architecture. Specifically, the Idea Development Stage generates literature-grounded hypotheses, the Experimental Design Stage configures simulator-aligned experimental parameters and protocols, and the Experimental Execution Stage runs experiments and returns structured analyses. Together, these stages form a human-in-the-loop, iterative workflow that translates economic intuitions into executable computational experiments. Through extensive experiments involving human expert evaluation and large language models (LLMs) as judges, we show that the system generates research ideas with stronger literature grounding and higher novelty and insight than state-of-the-art generic LLMs. Overall, AgentEconomist adopts a human-AI collaboration paradigm that enables researchers to focus on high-level intuitions, while delegating the labor-intensive processes of translation and computational execution to agents.
Authors: Yuval Domb
Abstract: We develop a geometric and information-theoretic framework for encoder-decoder learning built on the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle. Recasting IB as a rate-distortion problem with Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as distortion, we show that the optimal representation at any distortion level is a soft clustering of the \emph{predictive manifold} $\mathcal{M}=\{p(Y|x):x\in\mathcal{X}\}$ inside the probability simplex, admitting a linear decoder in the canonical parameterization. We derive a chain of exact transformations, from flat Dirichlet to exponential to isotropic Gaussian, connecting the maximum entropy prior on the simplex to Euclidean space, with quantified entropy overhead at each step, and show that Sketched Isotropic Gaussian Regularization (SIGReg) implements a Gaussian relaxation of this principle whose overhead affects rate accounting but not achievable prediction. This relaxation provides a principled distributional regularizer for learning with limited or no supervision. Using the Conditional Entropy Bottleneck (CEB) decomposition, we derive concrete encoder losses for supervised and semi-supervised settings, estimated via minibatch marginals without variational bounds. In the self-supervised setting, the CEB conditional rate is replaced by a view-prediction proxy. SIGReg serves as the distributional regularizer for both the semi-supervised and self-supervised settings. Experiments on toy problems and FashionMNIST confirm the predicted rate-distortion trade-offs and show that the non-parametric estimator is competitive with the standard variational approach.
Authors: Jiaju Chen, Chongming Gao, Chenxiao Fan, Haoyan Liu, Qingpeng Cai, Peng Jiang, Xiangnan He
Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based generative list-wise recommendation has advanced rapidly, but decoding remains sequential and thus latency-prone. To accelerate inference without changing the target distribution, speculative decoding (SD) uses a small draft model to propose several next tokens at once and a target LLM to verify and accept the longest prefix, skipping multiple steps per round. In generative recommendation, however, each item is represented by multiple semantic-ID tokens, often with separators, and current drafts typically treat these tokens uniformly. This overlooks two practical facts: (i) a token's semantics depend on its within-item slot, and (ii) uncertainty tends to increase with speculation depth. Without modeling these effects, SD's speedups can be limited. We introduce PAD-Rec, Position-Aware Drafting for generative Recommendation, a lightweight module that augments the draft model with two complementary signals. Item position embeddings explicitly encode the within-item slot of each token, strengthening structural awareness. Step position embeddings encode the draft step, allowing the model to adapt to depth-dependent uncertainty and improve proposal quality. To harmonize these signals with base features, we add simple gates: a learnable coefficient for item slots and a context-driven gate for draft steps. The module is trainable, easy to integrate with standard draft models, and adds negligible inference overhead. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show up to 3.1x wall-clock speedup and about 5% average wall-clock speedup gain over strong SD baselines, while largely preserving recommendation quality.
Authors: Gurucharan Srinivas, Joshua Niemeijer, Frank K\"oster
Abstract: Integrating domain knowledge into deep neural networks is a promising way to improve generalization. Existing methods either encode prior knowledge in the loss function or apply post-processing modules, but both depend on identifying useful symbolic knowledge to integrate. Since such rules are often unavailable in real-world vision tasks, we propose a method for targeted knowledge discovery. We propose a Differentiable Knowledge Unit (DKU) that enables modulating the classifier logits, yielding refined class probabilities. The DKU uses implication rules to represent relationships between task classes and implicit concepts learned entirely from the main task supervision, without requiring concept labels. Concepts are identified by dedicated classifiers, whose probabilities are passed to DKU alongside the primary class probabilities. DKU computes a logic-based adjustment vector via fuzzy inference, which modulates the primary class logits to yield refined class probabilities. When concept classifiers represent concepts that do not support the logical rule structure, the resulting adjustments to the class probabilities do not directly minimize the supervision loss. Consequently, optimizing the supervision loss on these adjusted class probabilities implicitly trains the concept classifiers. We construct the rule base so that bidirectional logical relations connect concepts and classes. We enforce the concepts to be distinct from each other and with respect to the classes. This design enforces a clean supervision signal for concept learning. We evaluate our methods on the PASCAL-VOC, COCO, and MedMNIST datasets. We demonstrate improvement through our knowledge integration across these datasets. We conduct domain generalization and hard-sample ablation studies and find that our implicit knowledge discovery and integration outperforms the baseline.
Authors: Abdelrahman Sadallah, Kareem Elozeiri, Mervat Abassy, Rania Elbadry, Mohamed Anwar, Abed Alhakim Freihat, Preslav Nakov, Fajri Koto
Abstract: Poetry has long been a central art form for Arabic speakers, serving as a powerful medium of expression and cultural identity. While modern Arabic speakers continue to value poetry, existing research on Arabic poetry within Large Language Models (LLMs) has primarily focused on analysis tasks such as interpretation or metadata prediction, e.g., rhyme schemes and titles. In contrast, our work addresses the practical aspect of poetry creation in Arabic by introducing controllable generation capabilities to assist users in writing poetry. Specifically, we present a large-scale, carefully curated instruction-based dataset in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and various Arabic dialects. This dataset enables tasks such as writing, revising, and continuing poems based on predefined criteria, including style and rhyme, as well as performing poetry analysis. Our experiments show that fine-tuning LLMs on this dataset yields models that can effectively generate poetry that is aligned with user requirements, based on both automated metrics and human evaluation with native Arabic speakers. The data and the code are available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/instructpoet-ar
Authors: Arnau Ayguad\'e Domingo, Miquel Alberti-Binimelis, Cristian Gutierrez-Gomez, Emanuele Parisi, Razine Moundir Ghorab, Miquel Moreto, Gokcen Kestor, Dario Garcia-Gasulla
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly improved in performance across code-related tasks, making their integration into Register Transfer Level (RTL) development increasingly attractive. Mimicking the behavior of inline code assistants, many benchmarks evaluate LLMs' capabilities in code completion, either assessing the generation of entire hardware modules or the completion of a single line within a module. However both of these approaches lack the ability to control the granularity of the code-completion sample size and the syntactic range of completions. To overcome these limitations, we present a framework for language-agnostic rule completion (RuC), a grammar-driven, rule-selectable benchmark generator that automatically produces RTL code-completion tasks from a set of input hardware description sources. RuC uses the target Hardware Description Language (HDL) grammar to mask syntactically defined code regions and prompts a model to regenerate them using the surrounding unmasked code as context, enabling a controlled and scalable evaluation of the domain-specific model's code-understanding capabilities, ranging from assignments to the reconstruction of entire logic blocks. We use RuC to generate two SystemVerilog rule-completion benchmarks from the Tiny Tapeout shuttle TT07 and the CVE2 RISC-V core to demonstrate RuC's applicability to a broad range of designs, and conduct a comparative study of the code completion capabilities of modern open-source LLMs across diverse settings. Results indicate that completion performance strongly depends on the model type, the grammatical structure of the masked region, and the prompting strategy. Specifically, the highest scores are obtained with Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) prompting. These findings highlight the value of grammar-driven, arbitrarily granular benchmarks for meaningful evaluation of LLM capabilities in RTL development workflows.
Authors: Mohd Sameen Chishti, Damilare Peter Oyinloye, Jingyue Li
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as core dependencies in software systems. However, the hosted LLM services evolve continuously through provider-side updates without explicit version changes. These silent updates can introduce behavioral drift, causing regressions in functionality, formatting, safety constraints, or other application-specific requirements. Existing approaches focus primarily on regression testing or versioning but do not provide deployer-side mechanisms for governing compatibility during opaque model evolution. This paper proposes a deployment-side governance framework based on three components: clearly defined rules for how the model is allowed to behave (production contracts), focused testing organized by deployment risk categories (risk-category-based testing suite), and release checkpoints that block updates unless they meet defined safety and performance standards (compatibility gates). Through exploratory validation across multiple LLM versions, we provide evidence that targeted testing in specific risk areas can uncover performance regressions that overall metrics miss. We also identify several open research challenges, including how to systematically build effective test suites, how to set reliable performance thresholds in non-deterministic systems, and how to detect and explain model drift when providers offer limited transparency. Overall, we frame LLM update management as a software supply chain governance problem and outline a research agenda for putting deployer-side compatibility controls into practice.
Authors: Riley Grossman, Songjiang Liu, Michael K. Chen, Mike Smith, Cristian Borcea, Yi Chen
Abstract: Generative AI is being increasingly integrated into web search for the convenience it provides users. In this work, we aim to understand how generative AI disrupts web search by retrieving and presenting the information and sources differently from traditional search engines. We introduce a public benchmark dataset of 11,500 user queries to support our study and future research of generative search. We compare the search results returned by Google's search engine, the accompanying AI Overview (AIO), and Gemini Flash 2.5 for each query. We have made several key findings. First, we find that for 51.5\% of representative, real-user queries, AIOs are generated, and are displayed above the organic search results. Controversial questions frequently result in an AIO. Second, we show that the retrieved sources are substantially different for each search engine (<0.2 average Jaccard similarity). Traditional Google search is significantly more likely to retrieve information from popular or institutional websites in government or education, while generative search engines are significantly more likely to retrieve Google-owned content. Third, we observe that websites that block Google's AI crawler are significantly less likely to be retrieved by AIOs, despite having access to the content. Finally, AIOs are less consistent when processing two runs of the same query, and are less robust to minor query edits. Our findings have important implications for understanding how generative search impacts website visibility, the effectiveness of generative engine optimization techniques, and the information users receive. We call for revenue frameworks to foster a sustainable and mutually beneficial ecosystem for publishers and generative search providers.
Authors: Bokai Pan, Mingyue Cheng, Zhiding Liu, Shuo Yu, Xiaoyu Tao, Yuchong Wu, Qi Liu, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen
Abstract: Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise in time series forecasting. However, most existing LLM-based forecasting methods still follow a static generative paradigm that directly maps historical observations to future values in a single pass. Under this paradigm, forecasting is constrained by limited temporal pattern extraction, single-round acquisition of contextual features, one-shot forecast generation, and lack of support from ensemble forecasts. To address these limitations, in this work, we propose CastFlow, a dynamic agentic forecasting framework that enables multi-view temporal pattern extraction, multi-round contextual features acquisition, iterative forecast refinement, and forecasting with ensemble forecasts. First, CastFlow organizes the forecasting process into planning, action, forecasting, and reflection, establishing an agentic workflow. Second, this workflow is supported by a memory module that retrieves prior experience and a multi-view toolkit that constructs diagnostic evidence and provides a reliable ensemble forecast baseline. Third, CastFlow adopts a role-specialized design that combines general-purpose reasoning with specialized numerical forecasting. Under this design, a frozen LLM preserves general-purpose reasoning, while a fine-tuned domain-specific LLM performs evidence-guided numerical forecasting based on the ensemble forecast baseline, rather than from scratch. To optimize a fine-tuned domain-specific LLM, we further develop a two-stage workflow-oriented training that combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). To evaluate the effectiveness of CastFlow, we conduct extensive experiments on diverse datasets and show that it achieves superior overall results against strong baselines. We hope that this work can serve as a step toward more adaptive and accurate time series forecasting.
Authors: Shiyao Peng, Qianhe Zheng, Zhuodi Hao, Zichen Tang, Rongjin Li, Qing Huang, Jiayu Huang, Jiacheng Liu, Yifan Zhu, Haihong E
Abstract: Although precise recall is a core objective in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a critical oversight persists in the field: improvements in retrieval performance do not consistently translate to commensurate gains in downstream reasoning. To diagnose this gap, we propose the Recall Conversion Rate (RCR), a novel evaluation metric to quantify the contribution of retrieval to reasoning accuracy. Our quantitative analysis of mainstream RAG methods reveals that as Recall@5 improves, the RCR exhibits a near-linear decay. We identify the neglect of retrieval quality in these methods as the underlying cause. In contrast, approaches that focus solely on quality optimization often suffer from inferior recall performance. Both categories lack a comprehensive understanding of retrieval quality optimization, resulting in a trade-off dilemma. To address these challenges, we propose comprehensive retrieval quality optimization criteria and introduce the NeocorRAG framework. This framework achieves holistic retrieval quality optimization by systematically mining and utilizing Evidence Chains. Specifically, NeocorRAG first employs an innovative activated search algorithm to obtain a refined candidate space. Then it ensures precise evidence chain generation through constrained decoding. Finally, the retrieved set of evidence chains guides the retrieval optimization process. Evaluated on benchmarks including HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, MuSiQue, and NQ, NeocorRAG achieves SOTA performance on both 3B and 70B parameter models, while consuming less than 20% of tokens used by comparable methods. This study presents an efficient, training-free paradigm for RAG enhancement that effectively optimizes retrieval quality while maintaining high recall. Our code is released at https://github.com/BUPT-Reasoning-Lab/NeocorRAG.
Authors: Xubin Luo, Yang Cheng
Abstract: AI inference is becoming a persistent and geographically distributed source of electricity demand. Unlike many traditional electrical loads, inference workloads can sometimes be executed away from the user-facing service location, provided that latency, state locality, capacity, and regulatory constraints remain acceptable. This paper studies when such digital relocation of computation can be interpreted as latency-constrained relocation of electricity demand. We develop an energy-geography framework for geo-distributed AI inference. The framework models a three-layer architecture of clients, service nodes, and compute nodes, and formulates inference placement as a constrained optimization problem over electricity prices, marginal carbon intensity, power usage effectiveness, compute capacity, network latency, and migration frictions. The key object is the energy-latency frontier: the marginal cost and carbon benefit unlocked by relaxing inference latency budgets. The paper makes four contributions. First, it distinguishes physical electricity transmission from digital relocation of electricity-consuming computation. Second, it formulates a geo-distributed inference placement model with feasibility masks and migration frictions. Third, it introduces operational metrics, including relocatable inference demand, energy return on latency, carbon return on latency, and a relocation break-even condition. Fourth, it provides a transparent stylized simulation over representative global compute regions to show how heterogeneous latency tolerance separates workloads into local, regional, and energy-oriented execution layers. The results show that latency relaxation expands feasible geography, while migration frictions, egress costs, state locality, legal constraints, and capacity limits can sharply reduce realized benefits.
Authors: Dawid Wisniewski, Igor Czudy
Abstract: Preserving affective nuance remains a challenge in Machine Translation (MT), where semantic equivalence often takes precedence over emotional fidelity. This paper evaluates the performance of three state-of-the-art Small Language Models (SLMs) -- EuroLLM, Aya Expanse, and Gemma -- in maintaining fine-grained emotions during backtranslation. Using the GoEmotions dataset, which comprises Reddit comments across 28 distinct categories, we assess emotional preservation across five European languages: German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Polish. Specifically, we investigate (i) the inherent capability of these SLMs to retain emotional sentiment, (ii) the efficacy of emotion-aware prompting in improving preservation, and (iii) the performance of ModernBERT as a contemporary alternative to BERT for emotion classification in MT evaluation.
Authors: Sihong Wu, Owen Jiang, Yilun Zhao, Tiansheng Hu, Yiling Ma, Kaiyan Zhang, Manasi Patwardhan, Arman Cohan
Abstract: Peer review is a multi-stage process involving reviews, rebuttals, meta-reviews, final decisions, and subsequent manuscript revisions. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have motivated methods that assist or automate different stages of this pipeline. In this survey, we synthesize techniques for (i) peer review generation, including fine-tuning strategies, agent-based systems, RL-based methods, and emerging paradigms to enhance generation; (ii) after-review tasks including rebuttals, meta-review and revision aligned to reviews; and (iii) evaluation methods spanning human-centered, reference-based, LLM-based and aspect-oriented. We catalog datasets, compare modeling choices, and discuss limitations, ethical concerns, and future directions. The survey aims to provide practical guidance for building, evaluating, and integrating LLM systems across the full peer review workflow.
Authors: Shipeng Liu, Liang Zhao, Dengfeng Chen, Zhanping Song
Abstract: Tunnel inspection requires outputs that can support defect localization, measurement, severity grading, and engineering documentation. Existing training-free foundation-model pipelines usually stop at coarse open-vocabulary proposals, which are difficult to use directly in interference-heavy tunnel scenes. We propose a training-free framework TunnelMIND. Specifically, language-guided defect proposals are not treated as final outputs; instead, their spatial support is recalibrated at inference time through dense visual consistency, so that coarse semantic anchors can be transformed into more reliable prompts under tunnel-specific hard negatives. The resulting masks are further reconstructed into structured defect entities with category, location, geometry, severity, and context attributes, which are then mapped to retrieval-grounded explanation and engineering-readable report generation under expert knowledge constraints. On visible, GPR, and road defect tasks, TunnelMIND achieves F1 scores of 0.68, 0.78, and 0.72, respectively. Overall, TunnelMIND shows that training-free tunnel inspection can move beyond coarse localization toward structured defect evidence for engineering assessment.
Authors: Alexis Kafantaris
Abstract: In this paper an attractor FCM is created, tested, and analyzed. This FCM is neither a hebbian based nor agentic, nor a hybrid; it rather is a gradient descent based, physics constrained, Jacobian version of an FCM. Moreover, this model has several quirks; it uses residual memory, back propagation through time, and a fixed point anchor that is recursively implemented to update its weights. The residuals update the recursive part without losing the system memory. The model's anchor enables it to converge in a fixed point for which back propagation through time unrolls it and ensures that the error minimization is for an accurate gradient. Furthermore, a new learning algorithm is utilized. The Newton's method finds the system's fixed point attractor and then gradient descend is adaptively changing the landscape; an adaptive term is used to directly manipulate the weights through the attractor dynamics. As the adaptive term changes, the descent through the landscape is constantly adjusting according to sigmoid saturation, and that prevents premature convergence to a local minimum. Lastly, the updates are filtered by causal mask that informs the network about the physics, respecting the initial expert based opinions, for which model reduces the error to the target in an efficient way.
Authors: Guang Yang, Xing Hu, Xiang Chen, Xin Xi
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly used to translate visual artifacts into code, from UI mockups into HTML to scientific plots into Python scripts. A circuit diagram can be viewed as a visual domain-specific language for hardware: it encodes timing, topology, and bit level semantics that are invisible to casual inspection yet safety critical once fabricated in silicon. Translating such diagrams into register-transfer-level(RTL) code therefore represents an extreme reliability test for vision-to-code generation. We reveal a phenomenon we call Mirage: replacing a circuit diagram with a blank image leaves Pass@k unchanged or even higher, because models bypass the visual input and instead exploit identifier semantics in the module header to retrieve canonical RTL templates. This constitutes a new, highly covert class of defect in AI-assisted code generation that directly undermines MLLMs' trustworthiness. To quantify the effect, we construct C2VEVAL and evaluate eight MLLMs under a paired Normal/Anony protocol in which Anony mode anonymizes all identifiers in both the diagram and the module header; Anony-mode scores drop sharply across all models, confirming that high Normal-mode accuracy is largely a Mirage. We then propose VeriGround (4B), trained with identifier anonymization, refusal augmentation, and D-ORPO (Decision-Focused ORPO) preference alignment that up-weights pivotal generate-or-refuse tokens. VeriGround achieves Functional Pass@1 of 46.11%/42.51%(Normal/Anony) with a False Refusal Rate of only 1.20%/0.00%, while maintaining >92% Refusal Rate on blank images. With only 4B parameters, VeriGround performs on par with GPT-5.4 under Normal and significantly outperforms all baselines under Anony, confirming genuine visual grounding.
Authors: Ce Chen, Yi Ren, Yuanming Li, Viktor Goriachko, Zhenhui Ye, Zujin Guo, Zhibin Hong, Mingming Gong
Abstract: Traditional Shot Boundary Detection (SBD) inherently struggles with complex transitions by formulating the task around isolated cut points, frequently yielding corrupted video shots. We address this fundamental limitation by formalizing the Shot Transition Detection (STD) task. Rather than searching for ambiguous points, STD explicitly detects the continuous temporal segments of transitions. To tackle this, we propose TransVLM, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) framework for STD. Unlike regular VLMs that predominantly rely on spatial semantics and struggle with fine-grained inter-shot dynamics, our method explicitly injects optical flow as a critical motion prior at the input stage. Through a simple yet effective feature-fusion strategy, TransVLM directly processes concatenated color and motion representations, significantly enhancing its temporal awareness without incurring any additional visual token overhead on the language backbone. To overcome the severe class imbalance in public data, we design a scalable data engine to synthesize diverse transition videos for robust training, alongside a comprehensive benchmark for STD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TransVLM achieves superior overall performance, outperforming traditional heuristic methods, specialized spatiotemporal networks, and top-tier VLMs. This work has been deployed to production. For more related research, please visit HeyGen Research (https://www.heygen.com/research) and HeyGen Avatar-V (https://www.heygen.com/research/avatar-v-model). Project page: https://chence17.github.io/TransVLM/
URLs: https://www.heygen.com/research), https://www.heygen.com/research/avatar-v-model)., https://chence17.github.io/TransVLM/
Authors: Pourya Zamanvaziri, Amirhossein Sadr, Aida Pakniyat, Dara Rahmati
Abstract: Multivariate time series forecasting plays a pivotal role in numerous real-world applications, including financial analysis, energy management, and traffic planning. While Transformer-based architectures have gained popularity for this task, recent studies reveal that simpler MLP-based models can achieve competitive or superior performance with significantly reduced computational cost. In this paper, we propose ITS-Mina, a novel all-MLP framework for multivariate time series forecasting that integrates three key innovations: (1) an iterative refinement mechanism that progressively enhances temporal representations by repeatedly applying a shared-parameter residual mixer stack, effectively deepening the model's computational capacity without multiplying the number of distinct parameters; (2) an external attention module that replaces traditional self-attention with learnable memory units, capturing cross-sample global dependencies at linear computational complexity; and (3) a Harris Hawks Optimization (HHO) algorithm for automatic dropout rate tuning, enabling adaptive regularization tailored to each dataset. Extensive experiments on six widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate that ITS-Mina achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance compared to eleven baseline models across multiple forecasting horizons.
Authors: Prabhjot Singh, Abhishek Gupta, Chris Betz, Abe Flansburg, Brett Ives, Sudeep Lama, Jung Hoon Son
Abstract: We reframe clinician overrides of clinical AI recommendations as implicit preference data - the same signal structure exploited by reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), but richer: the annotator is a domain expert, the alternatives carry real consequences, and downstream outcomes are observable. We present a formal framework extending standard preference learning with three contributions: a five-category override taxonomy mapping override types to distinct model update targets; a preference formulation conditioned on patient state s, organizational context c, and clinician capability kappa, where kappa decomposes into execution capability kappa-exec and alignment capability kappa-align; and a dual learning architecture that jointly trains a reward model and a capability model via alternating optimization, preventing a failure mode we term suppression bias-the systematic suppression of correct-but-difficult recommendations when clinician capability falls below the execution threshold. We argue that chronic disease management under outcome-based payment contracts produces override data with uniquely favorable properties-longitudinal density, concentrated decision space, outcome labels, and natural capability variation-and that training environments combining longitudinal outcome measurement with aligned financial incentives are a necessary condition for learning a reward model aligned with patient trajectory rather than with encounter economics. This framework emerged from operational work to improve clinician capability in a live value-based care deployment.
Authors: Shuo Jiang, Jianxi Luo
Abstract: Design Structure Matrix (DSM) modularization, the task of partitioning system elements into cohesive modules, is a fundamental combinatorial challenge in engineering design. Traditional methods treat modularization as a pure graph optimization, without access to the engineering context embedded in the system. Building on prior work on LLM-based combinatorial optimization for DSM sequencing, this paper extends the method to modularization across five cases and three backbone LLMs. Our method achieves near-reference quality within 30 iterations without requiring specialized optimization code. Counterintuitively, domain knowledge, beneficial in sequencing, consistently impairs performance on more complex DSMs. We attribute this to semantic misalignment between the LLM's functional priors and the purely structural optimization objective, and propose the semantic-alignment hypothesis as a testable condition governing knowledge effectiveness with LLMs. Ablation studies identify the most effective input representation, objective formulation, and solution pool design for practical deployment. These findings offer practical guidance for deploying LLMs in engineering design optimization.
Authors: Smit Jivani, Sarvam Maheshwari, Sunita Sarawagi
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized Text-to-SQL generation, allowing users to query structured data using natural language with growing ease. Yet, real-world deployment remains challenging, especially in complex or unseen schemas, due to inconsistent accuracy and the risk of generating invalid SQL. We introduce Template Constrained Decoding (TeCoD), a system that addresses these limitations by harnessing the recurrence of query patterns in labeled workloads. TeCoD converts historical NL-SQL pairs into reusable templates and introduces a robust template selection module that uses a fine-tuned natural language inference model to match or reject queries efficiently. Once the template is selected, TeCoD enforces it during SQL generation through grammar-constrained decoding, implemented via a novel partitioned strategy that ensures both syntactic validity and efficiency. Together, these components yield up to 36% higher execution accuracy than in-context learning (ICL) and 2.2x lower latency on matched queries.
Authors: Jeanne Monnier, Thomas George, Fr\'ed\'eric Guyard, Christ\`ele Tarnec, Marios Kountouris
Abstract: Fairness in machine learning remains challenging due to its ethical complexity, the absence of a universal definition, and the need for context-specific bias metrics. Existing methods still struggle with intersectionality, multiclass settings, and limited flexibility and generality. To address these gaps, we introduce MIFair, a unified framework for bias assessment and mitigation based on mutual information. MIFair provides a flexible metric template and an in-processing mitigation method inspired by the Prejudice Remover, defining group fairness as statistical independence between prediction-derived variables and sensitive attributes. We further strengthen its information-theoretic foundation by establishing equivalences with widely used fairness notions such as independence and separation. MIFair naturally supports intersectionality, complex subgroup structures, and multiclass classification and employs regularization-based training to reduce bias according to the selected metric. Its key advantage is its versatility: it consolidates diverse fairness requirements into a single coherent framework, enabling consistent benchmarking and simplifying practical use. Experiments on real-world tabular and image datasets show that MIFair effectively reduces bias, including previously unaddressed multi-attribute scenarios, while maintaining strong predictive performance across the evaluated settings.
Authors: Shreya Chappidi, Jatinder Singh
Abstract: Responsible AI research typically focuses on examining the use and impacts of deployed AI systems. Yet, there is currently limited visibility into the pre-deployment decisions to pursue building such systems in the first place. Decisions taken in the earlier stages of development shape which systems are ultimately released, and therefore represent potential, but underexplored, points for intervention. As such, this paper investigates factors influencing AI non-development and abandonment throughout the development lifecycle. Specifically, we first perform a scoping review of academic literature, civil society resources, and grey literature including journalism and industry reports. Through thematic analysis of these sources, we develop a taxonomy of six categories of factors contributing to AI abandonment: ethical concerns, stakeholder feedback, development lifecycle challenges, organizational dynamics, resource constraints, and legal/regulatory concerns. Then, we collect data on real-world case of AI system abandonment via an AI incident database and a practitioner survey to evidence and compare factors that drive abandonment both prior to and following system deployment. While academic responsible AI communities often emphasize ethical risks as reasons to not develop AI, our empirical analysis of these cases demonstrates the diverse, and often non-ethics-related, levers that motivate organizations to abandon AI development. Synthesizing evidence from our taxonomy and related case study analyses, we identify gaps and opportunities in current responsible AI research to (1) engage with the diverse range of levers that influence organizations to abandon AI development, and (2) better support appropriate (dis)engagement with AI system development.
Authors: Qing Lyu, Jeremy Hudson, Mohammad Kawas, Yuming Jiang, Chenyu You, Christopher T Whitlow
Abstract: Individualized Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression prediction requires models that use irregular visits, account for censoring, avoid diagnostic leakage, and provide calibrated horizon risks. We propose PROgression-aware MultI-horizon Survival Estimation for Alzheimer's Disease (PROMISE-AD), a leakage-safe survival framework for predicting conversion from cognitively normal (CN) to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and from MCI to AD dementia using ADNI/TADPOLE tabular histories. PROMISE-AD converts pre-index visits into tokens with standardized measurements, missingness masks, longitudinal changes, time-normalized slopes, visit timing, and non-diagnostic categorical attributes. A temporal Transformer fuses global, attention-pooled, and latest-visit representations to estimate a progression score and latent discrete-time mixture hazards. Training combines survival likelihood, horizon-specific focal risk loss, progression ranking, hazard smoothness, and mixture-balance regularization, followed by validation-set isotonic calibration for 1-, 2-, 3-, and 5-year risks. In held-out testing across three seeds, PROMISE-AD achieved an integrated Brier score (IBS) of 0.085 $\pm$ 0.012, C-index of 0.808 $\pm$ 0.015, and mean time-dependent AUC of 0.840 $\pm$ 0.081 for CN-to-MCI conversion, yielding the lowest IBS among compared methods. For MCI-to-AD conversion, PROMISE-AD achieved the highest C-index (0.894 $\pm$ 0.018) and near-ceiling 5-year discrimination (AUROC 0.997 $\pm$ 0.003; AUPRC 0.999 $\pm$ 0.001), although some baselines had lower IBS. Ablations and interpretability supported longitudinal change features, fused temporal representations, mixture hazards, cognitive and functional measures, APOE4 status, and recent conversion-proximal visits. These findings suggest that progression-aware survival modeling can provide interpretable multi-horizon AD conversion risk estimates.
Authors: Ansar Aynetdinov, Patrick Haller, Alan Akbik
Abstract: Recent research has shown that filtering massive English web corpora into high-quality subsets significantly improves training efficiency. However, for high-resource non-English languages like German, French, or Japanese, aggressive filtering creates a strategic dilemma: should practitioners prioritize diversity by training once on large amounts of lightly filtered web data, or prioritize quality by strictly filtering for a high-quality core and repeating it over multiple epochs? We investigate this trade-off for German by constructing hierarchical quality filters applied to 500M web documents, comparing multi-epoch training on the filtered subsets against single-pass training on a diverse corpus. Our experiments across multiple model scales and token budgets show that repeating high-quality data consistently outperforms single-pass training on larger, less filtered sets. Notably, the performance gap persists even after 7 epochs. Our findings suggest that for non-English LLMs, semantic concentration through quality filtering offers a more viable path to efficient language modeling than simply maximizing unique data volume. We release our German language models (called Boldt), as well as our cleaned evaluation benchmarks to the research community. Our experiments indicate that they achieve state-of-the-art results despite training on 10-360x fewer tokens than comparable models.
Authors: An-Yang Ji, Jun-Peng Jiang, De-Chuan Zhan, Han-Jia Ye
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced Table Question Answering, where most queries can be answered by extracting information or simple aggregation. However, a common class of real-world queries is implicitly predictive, requiring the inference of unobserved answers from historical patterns rather than mere retrieval. These queries introduce two challenges: recognizing latent intent and reliable predictive reasoning over massive tables. To assess LLMs in such Tabular questiOn answering with implicit Prediction tasks, we introduce TopBench, a benchmark consisting of 779 samples across four sub-tasks, ranging from single-point prediction to decision making, treatment effect analysis, and complex filtering, requiring models to generate outputs spanning reasoning text and structured tables. We evaluate diverse models under both text-based and agentic workflows. Experiments reveal that current models often struggle with intent recognition, defaulting to just lookups. Deeper analysis identifies that accurate intent disambiguation serves as the prerequisite for leading these predictive behaviors. Furthermore, elevating the upper bound of prediction precision requires the integration of more sophisticated modeling or reasoning capabilities.
Authors: Zainab Rehan, Christian Medeiros Adriano, Sona Ghahremani, Holger Giese
Abstract: Rule-based systems remain central in safety-critical domains but often struggle with scalability, brittleness, and goal misspecification. These limitations can lead to reward hacking and failures in formal verification, as AI systems tend to optimize for narrow objectives. In previous research, we developed a neuro-symbolic causal framework that integrates first-order logic abduction trees, structural causal models, and deep reinforcement learning within a MAPE-K loop to provide explainable adaptations under distribution shifts. In this paper, we extend that framework by introducing a meta-level layer designed to mitigate goal misspecification and support scalable rule maintenance. This layer consists of a Goal/Rule Synthesizer and a Rule Verification Engine, which iteratively refine a formal rule theory from high-level natural-language goals and principles provided by human experts. The synthesis pipeline employs large language models (LLMs) to: (1) decompose goals into candidate causes, (2) consolidate semantics to remove redundancies, (3) translate them into candidate first-order rules, and (4) compose necessary and sufficient causal sets. The verification pipeline then performs (1) syntax and schema validation, (2) logical consistency analysis, and (3) safety and invariant checks before integrating verified rules into the knowledge base. We evaluated our approach with a proof-of-concept implementation in two autonomous driving scenarios. Results indicate that, given human-specified goals and principles, the pipeline can successfully derive minimal necessary and sufficient rule sets and formalize them as logical constraints. These findings suggest that the pipeline supports incremental, modular, and traceable rule synthesis grounded in established legal and safety principles.
Authors: Sigma Jahan, Saurabh Singh Rajput, Tushar Sharma, Mohammad Masudur Rahman
Abstract: Transformer models are widely deployed in critical AI applications, yet faults in their attention mechanisms, projections, and other internal components often degrade behavior silently without raising runtime errors. Existing fault diagnosis techniques often target generic deep neural networks and cannot identify which transformer component is responsible for an observed symptom. In this article, we present DEFault++, a hierarchical learning-based diagnostic technique that operates at three level of abstraction: it detects whether a fault is present, classifies it into one of 12 transformer-specific fault categories (covering both attention-internal mechanisms and surrounding architectural components), and identifies the underlying root cause from up to 45 mechanisms. To facilitate both training and evaluation, we construct DEFault-bench, a benchmark of 3,739 labeled instances obtained through systematic mutation testing. These instances are created across seven transformer models and nine downstream tasks using DEForm, a transformer-specific mutation technique we developed for this purpose. DEFault++ measures runtime behavior at the level of individual transformer components. It organizes these measurements through a Fault Propagation Graph (FPG) derived from the transformer architecture. It then produces an interpretable diagnosis using prototype matching combined with supervised contrastive learning. On DEFault-bench, DEFault++ exceeds an AUROC of 0.96 for detection and a Macro-F1 of 0.85 for both categorization and root-cause diagnosis on encoder and decoder architectures. In a developer study with 21 practitioners, the accuracy of choosing correct repair actions increased from 57.1% without support to 83.3% when using DEFault++.
Authors: Usha Bhalla, Thomas Fel, Can Rager, Sheridan Feucht, Tal Haklay, Daniel Wurgaft, Siddharth Boppana, Matthew Kowal, Vasudev Shyam, Jack Merullo, Atticus Geiger, Ekdeep Singh Lubana
Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are widely used to extract interpretable features from neural network representations, often under the implicit assumption that concepts correspond to independent linear directions. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that many concepts are instead organized along low-dimensional manifolds encoding continuous geometric relationships. This raises three basic questions: what does it mean for an SAE to capture a manifold, when do existing SAE architectures do so, and how? We develop a theoretical framework that answers these questions and show that SAEs can capture manifolds in two fundamentally different ways: globally, by allocating a compact group of atoms whose linear span contains the entire manifold, or locally, by distributing it across features that each selectively tile a restricted region of the underlying geometry. Empirically, we find that SAEs suboptimally recover continuous structures, mixing the global subspace and local tiling solutions in a fragmented regime we call dilution. This explains why manifold structure is rarely visible at the level of individual concepts and motivates post-hoc unsupervised discovery methods that search for coherent groups of atoms rather than isolated directions. More broadly, our results suggest that future representation learning methods should treat geometric objects, not just individual directions, as the basic units of interpretability.
Authors: Sudong Wang, Weiquan Huang, Xiaomin Yu, Zuhao Yang, Hehai Lin, Keming Wu, Chaojun Xiao, Chen Chen, Wenxuan Wang, Beier Zhu, Yunjian Zhang, Chengwei Qin
Abstract: The standard post-training recipe for large multimodal models (LMMs) applies supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on curated demonstrations followed by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). However, SFT introduces distributional drift that neither preserves the model's original capabilities nor faithfully matches the supervision distribution. This problem is further amplified in multimodal reasoning, where perception errors and reasoning failures follow distinct drift patterns that compound during subsequent RL. We introduce PRISM, a three-stage pipeline that mitigates this drift by inserting an explicit distribution-alignment stage between SFT and RLVR. Building on the principle of on-policy distillation (OPD), PRISM casts alignment as a black-box, response-level adversarial game between the policy and a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) discriminator with dedicated perception and reasoning experts, providing disentangled corrective signals that steer the policy toward the supervision distribution without requiring access to teacher logits. While 1.26M public demonstrations suffice for broad SFT initialization, distribution alignment demands higher-fidelity supervision; we therefore curate 113K additional demonstrations from Gemini 3 Flash, featuring dense visual grounding and step-by-step reasoning on the hardest unsolved problems. Experiments on Qwen3-VL show that PRISM consistently improves downstream RLVR performance across multiple RL algorithms (GRPO, DAPO, GSPO) and diverse multimodal benchmarks, improving average accuracy by +4.4 and +6.0 points over the SFT-to-RLVR baseline on 4B and 8B, respectively. Our code, data, and model checkpoints are publicly available at https://github.com/XIAO4579/PRISM.
Authors: Xu Wang, Zexian Li, Litong Gong, Tiezheng Ge, Zhijie Deng
Abstract: Diffusion models offer superior generation quality at the expense of extensive sampling steps. Distillation methods, with Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) as a popular example, can mitigate this issue, but performance degradation remains pronounced when sampling steps are limited. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been leveraged to improve the few-step generation quality during distillation, with the potential to even surpass the performance of the teacher model. However, existing approaches are combinatorial in nature, merely integrating an RL process with the distillation process, which introduces unnecessary complexities. To address this gap, we propose AdvDMD, a method that seamlessly unifies DMD distillation and RL. Specifically, AdvDMD employs the adversarially trained discriminator from DMD2 as the reward model, which assigns low scores to generated images and high scores to real ones. It is trained on both intermediate and final states of the denoising process and updated online with the distilled model, enabling a holistic supervision of the sampling trajectories and mitigating reward hacking. We adopt a unified SDE backward simulation and a different training schedule for DMD and RL to enable a more stable and efficient training. Experimental results demonstrate that the 4-step AdvDMD outperforms the original 40-step model for SD3.5 on DPG-Bench, while achieving significant performance gains for SD3 on the GenEval. On Qwen-Image, our 2-step AdvDMD achieves superior performance over TwinFlow.
Authors: Prashant Kulkarni
Abstract: Multi-turn prompt injection follows a known attack path -- trust-building, pivoting, escalation but text-level defenses miss covert attacks where individual turns appear benign. We show this attack path leaves an activation-level signature in the model's residual stream: each phase shift moves the activation, producing a total path length far exceeding benign conversations. We call this adversarial restlessness. Five scalar trajectory features capturing this signal lift conversation-level detection from 76.2% to 93.8% on synthetic held-out data. The signal replicates across four model families (24B-70B); probes are model-specific and do not transfer across architectures. Generalization is source-dependent: leave-one-source-out evaluation shows each of synthetic, LMSYS-Chat-1M, and SafeDialBench captures distinct attack distributions, with detection on real-world LMSYS reaching 47-71% when its distribution is represented in training. Combined three-source training achieves 89.4% detection at 2.4% false positive rate on a held-out mixed set. We further show that three-phase turn-level labels(benign/pivoting/adversarial) unique to our synthetic dataset are essential: binary conversation-level labels produce 50-59% false positives. These results establish adversarial restlessness as a reliable activation-level signal and characterize the data requirements for practical deployment.
Authors: Tianyuan Wu, Chaokun Chang, Lunxi Cao, Wei Gao, Wei Wang
Abstract: Autonomous agents act through sandboxed containers and microVMs whose state spans filesystems, processes, and runtime artifacts. Checkpoint and restore (C/R) of this state is needed for fault tolerance, spot execution, RL rollout branching, and safe rollback-yet existing approaches fall into two extremes: application-level recovery preserves chat history but misses OS-side effects, while full per-turn checkpointing is correct but too expensive under dense co-location. The root cause is an agent-OS semantic gap: agent frameworks see tool calls but not their OS effects; the OS sees state changes but lacks turn-level context to judge recovery relevance. This gap hides massive sparsity: over 75% of agent turns produce no recovery-relevant state, so most checkpoints are unnecessary. Crab (Checkpoint-and-Restore for Agent SandBoxes) is a transparent host-side runtime that bridges this gap without modifying agents or C/R backends. An eBPF-based inspector classifies each turn's OS-visible effects to decide checkpoint granularity; a coordinator aligns checkpoints with turn boundaries and overlaps C/R with LLM wait time; and a host-scoped engine schedules checkpoint traffic across co-located sandboxes. On shell-intensive and code-repair workloads, Crab raises recovery correctness from 8% (chat-only) to 100%, cuts checkpoint traffic by up to 87%, and stays within 1.9% of fault-free execution time.
Authors: Chenxin Li, Zhengyang Tang, Huangxin Lin, Yunlong Lin, Shijue Huang, Shengyuan Liu, Bowen Ye, Rang Li, Lei Li, Benyou Wang, Yixuan Yuan
Abstract: LLM agents are expected to complete end-to-end units of work across software tools, business services, and local workspaces. Yet many agent benchmarks freeze a curated task set at release time and grade mainly the final response, making it difficult to evaluate agents against evolving workflow demand or verify whether a task was executed. We introduce Claw-Eval-Live, a live benchmark for workflow agents that separates a refreshable signal layer, updated across releases from public workflow-demand signals, from a reproducible, time-stamped release snapshot. Each release is constructed from public workflow-demand signals, with ClawHub Top-500 skills used in the current release, and materialized as controlled tasks with fixed fixtures, services, workspaces, and graders. For grading, Claw-Eval-Live records execution traces, audit logs, service state, and post-run workspace artifacts, using deterministic checks when evidence is sufficient and structured LLM judging only for semantic dimensions. The release contains 105 tasks spanning controlled business services and local workspace repair, and evaluates 13 frontier models under a shared public pass rule. Experiments reveal that reliable workflow automation remains far from solved: the leading model passes only 66.7% of tasks and no model reaches 70%. Failures are structured by task family and execution surface, with HR, management, and multi-system business workflows as persistent bottlenecks and local workspace repair comparatively easier but unsaturated. Leaderboard rank alone is insufficient because models with similar pass rates can diverge in overall completion, and task-level discrimination concentrates in a middle band of tasks. Claw-Eval-Live suggests that workflow-agent evaluation should be grounded twice, in fresh external demand and in verifiable agent action.
Authors: Binghao Huang, Yunzhu Li
Abstract: We present FlexiTac, a low-cost, open-source, and scalable piezoresistive tactile sensing solution designed for robotic end-effectors. FlexiTac is a practical "plug-in" module consisting of (i) thin, flexible tactile sensor pads that provide dense tactile signals and (ii) a compact multi-channel readout board that streams synchronized measurements for real-time control and large-scale data collection. FlexiTac pads adopt a sealed three-layer laminate stack (FPC-Velostat-FPC) with electrode patterns directly integrated into flexible printed circuits, substantially improving fabrication throughput and repeatability while maintaining mechanical compliance for deployment on both rigid and soft grippers. The readout electronics use widely available, low-cost components and stream tactile signals to a host computer at 100 Hz via serial communication. Across multiple configurations, including fingertip pads and larger tactile mats, FlexiTac can be mounted on diverse platforms without major mechanical redesign. We further show that FlexiTac supports modern tactile learning pipelines, including 3D visuo-tactile fusion for contact-aware decision making, cross-embodiment skill transfer, and real-to-sim-to-real fine-tuning with GPU-parallel tactile simulation. Our project page is available at https://flexitac.github.io/.
Authors: Sriram Narayanan, Ziyu Jiang, Srinivasa Narasimhan, Manmohan Chandraker
Abstract: Modern video diffusion models excel at appearance synthesis but still struggle with physical consistency: objects drift, collisions lack realistic rebound, and material responses seldom match their underlying properties. We present PhyCo, a framework that introduces continuous, interpretable, and physically grounded control into video generation. Our approach integrates three key components: (i) a large-scale dataset of over 100K photorealistic simulation videos where friction, restitution, deformation, and force are systematically varied across diverse scenarios; (ii) physics-supervised fine-tuning of a pretrained diffusion model using a ControlNet conditioned on pixel-aligned physical property maps; and (iii) VLM-guided reward optimization, where a fine-tuned vision-language model evaluates generated videos with targeted physics queries and provides differentiable feedback. This combination enables a generative model to produce physically consistent and controllable outputs through variations in physical attributes-without any simulator or geometry reconstruction at inference. On the Physics-IQ benchmark, PhyCo significantly improves physical realism over strong baselines, and human studies confirm clearer and more faithful control over physical attributes. Our results demonstrate a scalable path toward physically consistent, controllable generative video models that generalize beyond synthetic training environments.
Authors: Mingyang Liu, Gabriele Farina, Asuman Ozdaglar
Abstract: Most familiar equilibrium concepts, such as Nash and correlated equilibrium, guarantee only that no single player can improve their utility by deviating unilaterally. They offer no guarantees against profitable coordinated deviations by coalitions. Although the literature proposes solution concepts that provide stability against multilateral deviations (\emph{e.g.}, strong Nash and coalition-proof equilibrium), these generally fail to exist. In this paper, we study an alternative solution concept that minimizes coalitional deviation incentives, rather than requiring them to vanish, and is therefore guaranteed to exist. Specifically, we focus on minimizing the average gain of a deviating coalition, and extend the framework to weighted-average and maximum-within-coalition gains. In contrast, the minimum-gain analogue is shown to be computationally intractable. For the average-gain and maximum-gain objectives, we prove a lower bound on the complexity of computing such an equilibrium and present an algorithm that matches this bound. Finally, we use our framework to solve the \emph{Exploitability Welfare Frontier} (EWF), the maximum attainable social welfare subject to a given exploitability (the maximum gain over all unilateral deviations).
Authors: OpenAI, :, Aaron Jaech, Adam Kalai, Adam Lerer, Adam Richardson, Ahmed El-Kishky, Aiden Low, Alec Helyar, Aleksander Madry, Alex Beutel, Alex Carney, Alex Iftimie, Alex Karpenko, Alex Tachard Passos, Alexander Neitz, Alexander Prokofiev, Alexander Wei, Allison Tam, Ally Bennett, Ananya Kumar, Andre Saraiva, Andrea Vallone, Andrew Duberstein, Andrew Kondrich, Andrey Mishchenko, Andy Applebaum, Angela Jiang, Ashvin Nair, Barret Zoph, Behrooz Ghorbani, Bohan Zhang, Ben Rossen, Benjamin Sokolowsky, Boaz Barak, Bob McGrew, Borys Minaiev, Botao Hao, Bowen Baker, Brandon Houghton, Brandon McKinzie, Brydon Eastman, Camillo Lugaresi, Cary Bassin, Cary Hudson, Chak Ming Li, Charles de Bourcy, Chelsea Voss, Chen Shen, Chong Zhang, Chris Koch, Chris Orsinger, Christopher Hesse, Claudia Fischer, Clive Chan, Dan Roberts, Daniel Kappler, Daniel Levy, Daniel Selsam, David Dohan, David Farhi, David Mely, David Robinson, Dimitris Tsipras, Doug Li, Dragos Oprica, Eben Freeman, Eddie Zhang, Edmund Wong, Elizabeth Proehl, Enoch Cheung, Eric Mitchell, Eric Wallace, Erik Ritter, Evan Mays, Fan Wang, Felipe Petroski Such, Filippo Raso, Florencia Leoni, Foivos Tsimpourlas, Francis Song, Fred von Lohmann, Freddie Sulit, Geoff Salmon, Giambattista Parascandolo, Gildas Chabot, Grace Zhao, Greg Brockman, Guillaume Leclerc, Hadi Salman, Haiming Bao, Hao Sheng, Hart Andrin, Hessam Bagherinezhad, Hongyu Ren, Hunter Lightman, Hyung Won Chung, Ian Kivlichan, Ian O'Connell, Ian Osband, Ignasi Clavera Gilaberte, Ilge Akkaya, Ilya Kostrikov, Ilya Sutskever, Irina Kofman, Jakub Pachocki, James Lennon, Jason Wei, Jean Harb, Jerry Twore, Jiacheng Feng, Jiahui Yu, Jiayi Weng, Jie Tang, Jieqi Yu, Joaquin Qui\~nonero Candela, Joe Palermo, Joel Parish, Johannes Heidecke, John Hallman, John Rizzo, Jonathan Gordon, Jonathan Uesato, Jonathan Ward, Joost Huizinga, Julie Wang, Kai Chen, Kai Xiao, Karan Singhal, Karina Nguyen, Karl Cobbe, Katy Shi, Kayla Wood, Kendra Rimbach, Keren Gu-Lemberg, Kevin Liu, Kevin Lu, Kevin Stone, Kevin Yu, Lama Ahmad, Lauren Yang, Leo Liu, Leon Maksin, Leyton Ho, Liam Fedus, Lilian Weng, Linden Li, Lindsay McCallum, Lindsey Held, Lorenz Kuhn, Lukas Kondraciuk, Lukasz Kaiser, Luke Metz, Madelaine Boyd, Maja Trebacz, Manas Joglekar, Mark Chen, Marko Tintor, Mason Meyer, Matt Jones, Matt Kaufer, Max Schwarzer, Meghan Shah, Mehmet Yatbaz, Melody Y. Guan, Mengyuan Xu, Mengyuan Yan, Mia Glaese, Mianna Chen, Michael Lampe, Michael Malek, Michele Wang, Michelle Fradin, Mike McClay, Mikhail Pavlov, Miles Wang, Mingxuan Wang, Mira Murati, Mo Bavarian, Mostafa Rohaninejad, Nat McAleese, Neil Chowdhury, Neil Chowdhury, Nick Ryder, Nikolas Tezak, Noam Brown, Ofir Nachum, Oleg Boiko, Oleg Murk, Olivia Watkins, Patrick Chao, Paul Ashbourne, Pavel Izmailov, Peter Zhokhov, Rachel Dias, Rahul Arora, Randall Lin, Rapha Gontijo Lopes, Raz Gaon, Reah Miyara, Reimar Leike, Renny Hwang, Rhythm Garg, Robin Brown, Roshan James, Rui Shu, Ryan Cheu, Ryan Greene, Saachi Jain, Sam Altman, Sam Toizer, Sam Toyer, Samuel Miserendino, Sandhini Agarwal, Santiago Hernandez, Sasha Baker, Scott McKinney, Scottie Yan, Shengjia Zhao, Shengli Hu, Shibani Santurkar, Shraman Ray Chaudhuri, Shuyuan Zhang, Siyuan Fu, Spencer Papay, Steph Lin, Suchir Balaji, Suvansh Sanjeev, Szymon Sidor, Tal Broda, Aidan Clark, Tao Wang, Taylor Gordon, Ted Sanders, Tejal Patwardhan, Thibault Sottiaux, Thomas Degry, Thomas Dimson, Tianhao Zheng, Timur Garipov, Tom Stasi, Trapit Bansal, Trevor Creech, Troy Peterson, Tyna Eloundou, Valerie Qi, Vineet Kosaraju, Vinnie Monaco, Vitchyr Pong, Vlad Fomenko, Weiyi Zheng, Wenda Zhou, Wenting Zhan, Wes McCabe, Wojciech Zaremba, Yann Dubois, Yinghai Lu, Yining Chen, Young Cha, Yu Bai, Yuchen He, Yuchen Zhang, Yunyun Wang, Zheng Shao, Zhuohan Li
Abstract: The o1 model series is trained with large-scale reinforcement learning to reason using chain of thought. These advanced reasoning capabilities provide new avenues for improving the safety and robustness of our models. In particular, our models can reason about our safety policies in context when responding to potentially unsafe prompts, through deliberative alignment. This leads to state-of-the-art performance on certain benchmarks for risks such as generating illicit advice, choosing stereotyped responses, and succumbing to known jailbreaks. Training models to incorporate a chain of thought before answering has the potential to unlock substantial benefits, while also increasing potential risks that stem from heightened intelligence. Our results underscore the need for building robust alignment methods, extensively stress-testing their efficacy, and maintaining meticulous risk management protocols. This report outlines the safety work carried out for the OpenAI o1 and OpenAI o1-mini models, including safety evaluations, external red teaming, and Preparedness Framework evaluations.
Authors: Ching-Chun Chang, Fan-Yun Chen, Shih-Hong Gu, Kai Gao, Hanrui Wang, Isao Echizen
Abstract: As the cornerstone of artificial intelligence, machine perception confronts a fundamental threat posed by adversarial illusions. These adversarial attacks manifest in two primary forms: deductive illusion, where specific stimuli are crafted based on the victim model's general decision logic, and inductive illusion, where the victim model's general decision logic is shaped by specific stimuli. The former exploits the model's decision boundaries to create a stimulus that, when applied, interferes with its decision-making process. The latter reinforces a conditioned reflex in the model, embedding a backdoor during its learning phase that, when triggered by a stimulus, causes aberrant behaviours. The multifaceted nature of adversarial illusions calls for a unified defence framework, addressing vulnerabilities across various forms of attack. In this study, we propose a disillusion paradigm based on the concept of an imitation game. At the heart of the imitation game lies a multimodal generative agent, steered by chain-of-thought reasoning, which observes, internalises and reconstructs the semantic essence of a sample, liberated from the classic pursuit of reversing the sample to its original state. As a proof of concept, we conduct experimental simulations using a multimodal generative dialogue agent and evaluates the methodology under a variety of attack scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently neutralises both deductive and inductive adversarial illusions across diverse white-box and black-box attack scenarios.
Authors: Ching-Chun Chang, Isao Echizen
Abstract: Provenance is the chronological history of things, resonating with the fundamental pursuit to uncover origins, trace connections, and situate entities within the flow of space and time. As artificial intelligence advances towards autonomous agents capable of interactive collaboration on complex tasks, the provenance of generated content becomes entangled in the interplay of collective creation, where contributions are continuously revised, extended or overwritten. In a multi-agent generative chain, content undergoes successive transformations, often leaving little, if any, trace of prior contributions. In this study, we investigate the problem of tracking multi-agent provenance across the temporal dimension of generation. We propose a chronological system for post hoc attribution of generative history from content alone, without reliance on internal memory states or external meta-information. At its core lies the notion of symbolic chronicles, representing signed and time-stamped records, in a form analogous to the chain of custody in forensic science. The system operates through a feedback loop, whereby each generative timestep updates the chronicle of prior interactions and synchronises it with the synthetic content in the very act of generation. This research seeks to develop an accountable form of collaborative artificial intelligence within evolving cyber ecosystems.
Authors: Amur Ghose, Andrew B. Kahng, Sayak Kundu, Zhiang Wang
Abstract: Machine learning has been widely used to optimize complex engineering workflows across numerous domains. In integrated circuit design, modern flows (e.g., register-transfer level to physical layout) involve extensive configuration via thousands of parameters, and small changes can have large downstream impacts on design performance, power, and area. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for learning and reasoning within such high-dimensional optimization tasks. In this work, we introduce ORFS-agent, an LLM-based iterative optimization agent that automates parameter tuning in an open-source hardware design flow. ORFS-agent adaptively explores parameter configurations, demonstrating improvements over standard Bayesian optimization approaches in terms of resource efficiency and final design metrics. Across six benchmarks on ASAP7 and SKY130HD, thinking-model backends (Sonnet 4.6 [69] and Kimi K2.5 [28]) improve the geometric-mean normalized wirelength, effective clock period, and co-optimization objectives by up to 1.0%, 1.3%, and 2.7% over OR-AutoTuner while using 40% fewer iterations; the open-weight Kimi K2.5 remains within 0.24% of Sonnet 4.6, enabling private deployment. Relative to the earlier Sonnet 3.5 backend, these thinking models improve the same objectives by up to 7.5%, 3.1%, and 4.0%. Optional retrieval tools accelerate early convergence but do not improve final endpoints. By following natural language objectives to trade off certain metrics for others, ORFS-agent demonstrates a flexible and interpretable framework for multi-objective and constrained optimization. Crucially, ORFS-agent is modular and model-agnostic, and can be plugged into any frontier LLM without any further fine-tuning. We also report checkpoint-aligned trajectories and reasoning summaries that document the agent's decision process.
Authors: Alexandros Evangelidis, Gricel V\'azquez, Simos Gerasimou
Abstract: Software-intensive systems, such as software product lines and robotics, utilise Markov decision processes (MDPs) to capture uncertainty and analyse sequential decision-making problems. Despite the usefulness of conventional policy synthesis methods, they fail to scale to large state spaces. Our approach addresses this issue and accelerates policy synthesis in large MDPs by dynamically refining the MDP and iteratively selecting the most fragile MDP regions for refinement. This iterative procedure offers a balance between accuracy and efficiency, as refinement occurs only when necessary. We formally show that the composed policy is near-optimal under standard assumptions, with error bounded by the local solver tolerance and boundary mismatch. Across diverse case studies and MDPs up to 1M states, we demonstrate that our approach achieves up to $2\times$ speedup over PRISM, offering a competitive solution for real-world policy synthesis in large MDPs.
Authors: Juan Manuel Contreras
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into real-world applications, scalable and rigorous safety evaluation is essential. This paper introduces Aymara AI, a programmatic platform for generating and administering customized, policy-grounded safety evaluations. Aymara AI transforms natural-language safety policies into adversarial prompts and scores model responses using an AI-based rater validated against human judgments. We demonstrate its capabilities through the Aymara LLM Risk and Responsibility Matrix, which evaluates 20 commercially available LLMs across 10 real-world safety domains. Results reveal wide performance disparities, with mean safety scores ranging from 86.2% to 52.4%. While models performed well in well-established safety domains such as Misinformation (mean = 95.7%), they consistently failed in more complex or underspecified domains, notably Privacy & Impersonation (mean = 24.3%). Analyses of Variance confirmed that safety scores differed significantly across both models and domains (p < .05). These findings underscore the inconsistent and context-dependent nature of LLM safety and highlight the need for scalable, customizable tools like Aymara AI to support responsible AI development and oversight.
Authors: Dorsa Macky Aleagha, Payam Zohari, Mostafa Haghir Chehreghani
Abstract: Major Depressive Disorder is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, yet its diagnosis still depends largely on subjective clinical assessments. Integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds promise for developing objective, scalable, and timely diagnostic tools. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art AI methods for depression detection and diagnosis, based on a systematic review of 55 key studies. We introduce a novel hierarchical taxonomy that structures the field by primary clinical task (diagnosis vs. prediction), data modality (text, speech, neuroimaging, multimodal), and computational model class (e.g., graph neural networks, large language models, hybrid approaches). Our in-depth analysis reveals three major trends: the predominance of graph neural networks for modeling brain connectivity, the rise of large language models for linguistic and conversational data, and an emerging focus on multimodal fusion, explainability, and algorithmic fairness. Alongside methodological insights, we provide an overview of prominent public datasets and standard evaluation metrics as a practical guide for researchers. By synthesizing current advances and highlighting open challenges, this survey offers a comprehensive roadmap for future innovation in computational psychiatry.
Authors: Kun Xiang, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Yinya Huang, Jixi He, Zirong Liu, Yueling Tang, Ruizhe Zhou, Lijing Luo, Youpeng Wen, Xiuwei Chen, Bingqian Lin, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Hanhui Li, Bin Dong, Xiaodan Liang
Abstract: The rapid advancement of embodied intelligence and world models has intensified efforts to integrate physical laws into AI systems, yet physical perception and symbolic physics reasoning have developed along separate trajectories without a unified bridging framework. This work provides a comprehensive overview of physical AI, establishing clear distinctions between theoretical physics reasoning and applied physical understanding while systematically examining how physics-grounded methods enhance AI's real-world comprehension across structured symbolic reasoning, embodied systems, and generative models. Through rigorous analysis of recent advances, we advocate for intelligent systems that ground learning in both physical principles and embodied reasoning processes, transcending pattern recognition toward genuine understanding of physical laws. Our synthesis envisions next-generation world models capable of explaining physical phenomena and predicting future states, advancing safe, generalizable, and interpretable AI systems. We maintain a continuously updated resource at https://github.com/AI4Phys/Awesome-AI-for-Physics.
Authors: Shir Rozenfeld, Rahul Pankajakshan, Itay Zloczower, Eyal Lenga, Gilad Gressel, Yisroel Mirsky
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly paired with activation-based monitoring to detect and prevent harmful behaviors that may not be apparent at the surface-text level. However, existing activation safety approaches, trained on broad misuse datasets, struggle with poor precision, limited flexibility, and lack of interpretability. This paper introduces a new paradigm: rule-based activation safety, inspired by rule-sharing practices in cybersecurity. We propose modeling activations as cognitive elements (CEs), fine-grained, interpretable factors such as 'making a threat' and 'payment processing', that can be composed to capture nuanced, domain-specific behaviors with higher precision. Building on this representation, we present a practical framework that defines predicate rules over CEs and detects violations in real time. This enables practitioners to configure and update safeguards without retraining models or detectors, while supporting transparency and auditability. Our results show that compositional rule-based activation safety improves precision, supports domain customization, and lays the groundwork for scalable, interpretable, and auditable AI governance. We open source GAVEL and introduce GAVEL Studio, an interactive rule authoring and management tool. Code and datasets are available at github.com/Offensive-AI-Lab/gavel.
Authors: Alessandro Burigana, Francesco Fabiano
Abstract: Epistemic planning extends (multi-agent) automated planning by making agents' knowledge and beliefs first-class aspects of the planning formalism. One of the most well-known frameworks for epistemic planning is Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL), which offers an rich and natural semantics for modelling problems in this setting. The high expressive power provided by DEL make DEL-based epistemic planning a challenging problem to tackle both theoretically, and in practical implementations. As a result, existing epistemic planners often target different DEL fragments, and typically rely on ad hoc languages to represent benchmarks, and sometimes no language at all. This fragmentation hampers comparison, reuse, and systematic benchmark development. We address these issues by introducing the Epistemic Planning Domain Definition Language (EPDDL). EPDDL provides a unique PDDL-like representation that captures the entire DEL semantics, enabling uniform specification of epistemic planning tasks. Our main contributions are: 1. A formal development of abstract event models, a novel representation for epistemic actions used to define the semantics of our language; 2. A formal specification of EPDDL's syntax and semantics grounded in DEL with abstract event models. Through examples of representative benchmarks, we illustrate how EPDDL facilitates interoperability, reproducible evaluation, and future advances in epistemic planning.
Authors: Niv Fono, Yftah Ziser, Omer Ben-Porat
Abstract: While Generative AI (GenAI) systems draw users away from (Q&A) forums, they also depend on the very data those forums produce to improve their performance. Addressing this paradox, we propose a framework of sequential interaction, in which a GenAI system proposes questions to a forum that can publish some of them. Our framework captures several intricacies of such a collaboration, including non-monetary exchanges, asymmetric information, and incentive misalignment. We bring the framework to life through comprehensive, data-driven simulations using real Stack Exchange data and commonly used LLMs. We demonstrate the incentive misalignment empirically, yet show that players can achieve roughly half of the utility in an ideal full-information scenario. Our results highlight the potential for sustainable collaboration that preserves effective knowledge sharing between AI systems and human knowledge platforms.
Authors: Hyomin Kim, Sang-Yeon Hwang, Jaechang Lim, Yinhua Piao, Yunhak Oh, Woo Youn Kim, Chanyoung Park, Sungsoo Ahn, Junhyeok Jeon
Abstract: Predicting gene regulation responses to biological perturbations requires reasoning about underlying biological causalities. While large language models (LLMs) show promise for such tasks, they are often overwhelmed by the entangled nature of high-dimensional perturbation results. Moreover, recent works have primarily focused on genetic perturbations in single-cell experiments, leaving bulk-cell chemical perturbations, which is central to drug discovery, largely unexplored. Motivated by this, we present LINCSQA, a novel benchmark for predicting target gene regulation under complex chemical perturbations in bulk-cell environments. We further propose PBio-Agent, a multi-agent framework that integrates difficulty-aware task sequencing with iterative knowledge refinement. Our key insight is that genes affected by the same perturbation share causal structure, allowing confidently predicted genes to contextualize more challenging cases. The framework employs specialized agents enriched with biological knowledge graphs, while a synthesis agent integrates outputs and specialized judges ensure logical coherence. PBio-Agent outperforms existing baselines on both LINCSQA and PerturbQA, enabling even smaller models to predict and explain complex biological processes without additional training.
Authors: Yuyu Guo, Wenjie Yang, Siyuan Yang, Ziyang Liu, Cheng Chen, Yuan Wei, Yun Hu, Yang Huang, Guoliang Hao, Dongsheng Yuan, Jianming Wang, Xin Chen, Hang Yu, Lei Lei, Peng Di
Abstract: To fulfill user instructions, autonomous web agents must contend with the inherent complexity and volatile nature of real-world websites. Conventional paradigms predominantly rely on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) using static datasets. However, these methods suffer from severe distributional shifts, as offline trajectories fail to capture the stochastic state transitions and real-time feedback of unconstrained wide web environments. In this paper, we propose a robust Online Reinforcement Learning WebAgent, designed to optimize its policy through direct, iterative interactions with unconstrained wide websites. Our approach comprises three core innovations: 1) Hierarchical Multi-Task Fine-tuning: We curate a comprehensive mixture of datasets categorized by functional primitives -- Planning, Acting, and Grounding -- establishing a Vision-Language Model (VLM) with strong instruction-following capabilities for Web GUI tasks. 2) Online Agentic RL in the Wild: We develop an online interaction environment and fine-tune the VLM using a specialized RL pipeline. We introduce a Hybrid Reward Mechanism that combines a ground-truth-agnostic WebJudge for holistic outcome assessment with a Rule-based Decision Tree (RDT) for progress reward. This system effectively mitigates the credit assignment challenge in long-horizon navigation. Notably, our RL-enhanced model achieves a 38.1\% success rate (pass@5) on WebArena, outperforming all existing monolithic baselines. 3) Operator Agent: We introduce a modular agentic framework, namely \textbf{OpAgent}, orchestrating a Planner, Grounder, Reflector, and Summarizer. This synergy enables robust error recovery and self-correction, elevating the agent's performance to a new State-of-the-Art (SOTA) success rate of \textbf{71.6\%}.
Authors: Hugh Xuechen Liu, K{\i}van\c{c} Tatar
Abstract: Creatively translating complex gameplay ideas into executable artifacts (e.g., games as Unity projects and code) remains a central challenge in computational game creativity. Gameplay design patterns provide a structured representation for describing gameplay phenomena, enabling designers to decompose high-level ideas into entities, constraints, and rule-driven dynamics. Among them, goal patterns formalize common player-objective relationships. Goal Playable Concepts (GPCs) operationalize these abstractions as playable Unity engine implementations, supporting experiential exploration and compositional gameplay design. We frame scalable playable pattern realization as a problem of constrained executable creative synthesis: generated artifacts must satisfy Unity's syntactic and architectural requirements while preserving the semantic gameplay meanings encoded in goal patterns. This dual constraint limits scalability. Therefore, we investigate whether contemporary large language models (LLMs) can perform such synthesis under engine-level structural constraints and generate Unity code (as games) structured and conditioned by goal playable patterns. Using 26 goal pattern instantiations, we compare a direct generation baseline (natural language -> C# -> Unity) with pipelines conditioned on a human-authored Unity-specific intermediate representation (IR), across three IR configurations and two open-source models (DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite-Instruct and Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct). Compilation success is evaluated via automated Unity replay. We propose grounding and hygiene failure modes, identifying structural and project-level grounding as primary bottlenecks.
Authors: Mohamed Elfeki, Tu Trinh, Kelvin Luu, Guangze Luo, Nathan Hunt, Ernesto Montoya, Nandan Marwaha, Yannis He, Charles Wang, Fernando Crabedo, Alessa Castilo, Bing Liu
Abstract: Frontier coding agents solve complex tasks when given complete context but collapse when specifications are incomplete or ambiguous. The bottleneck is not raw capability, but judgment: knowing when to act autonomously and when to ask for help. Current benchmarks are blind to this failure mode. They supply unambiguous detailed instructions and solely reward execution correctness, so an agent that makes a lucky guess for a missing requirement will score identically to one that would have asked to be certain. We present HiL-Bench (Human-in-the-Loop Benchmark) to measure this selective escalation skill. Each task contains human-validated blockers (missing information, ambiguous requests, contradictory information) that surface only through progressive exploration, not upfront inspection. Our core metric, Ask-F1, the harmonic mean of question precision and blocker recall, captures the tension between over-asking and silent guessing; its structure architecturally prevents gaming through question spam. Evaluation across SWE and text-to-SQL domains reveals a large universal judgment gap: no frontier model recovers more than a fraction of its full-information performance when deciding whether to ask. Failure analysis identifies three key help-seeking patterns: overconfident wrong beliefs with no gap detection; high uncertainty detection yet persistent errors; broad, imprecise escalation without self-correction. These consistent patterns confirm poor help-seeking is a model-level flaw, not task-specific. RL training on shaped Ask-F1 reward shows judgment is trainable: a 32B model improves both help-seeking quality and task pass rate, with gains that transfer across domains. The model does not learn domain-specific heuristics for when to ask; it learns to detect unresolvable uncertainty and act on it.
Authors: Yadong Li, Guoxin Wu, Haiping Hou, Biye Li
Abstract: Full-duplex speech interaction, as the most natural and intuitive mode of human communication, is driving artificial intelligence toward more human-like conversational systems. Traditional cascaded speech processing pipelines suffer from critical limitations, including accumulated latency, information loss, and error propagation across modules. To address these issues, recent efforts focus on the end-to-end audio large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4o, which primarily unify speech understanding and generation task. However, most of these models are inherently half-duplex, and rely on a suite of separate, task-specific front-end components, such as voice activity detection (VAD) and turn-taking detection (TD). In our development of speech assistant, we observed that optimizing the speech front-end is equally crucial as advancing the back-end unified model for achieving seamless, responsive interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose the first unified audio front-end LLM (UAF) tailored for full-duplex speech systems. Our model reformulates diverse audio front-end tasks into a single auto-regressive sequence prediction problem, including VAD, TD, speaker recognition (SR), automatic speech recognition (ASR) and question answer (QA). It takes streaming fixed-duration audio chunk (e.g., 600 ms) as input, leverages a reference audio prompt to anchor the target speaker at the beginning, and regressively generates discrete tokens encoding both semantic content and system-level state controls (e.g., interruption signals). Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves leading performance across multiple audio front-end tasks and significantly enhances response latency and interruption accuracy in real-world interaction scenarios.
Authors: Xue Xia, Chengkai Yao, Mingyu Tsoi, Xinjie Mao, Wenxuan Huang, Jiaqi Wei, Hao Wu, Cheng Tan, Lang Yu, Yuejin Yang, Mengdi Liu, Siqi Sun, Zhangyang Gao
Abstract: Systematic ablations are essential to attribute performance gains in AI Virtual Cells, yet they are rarely performed because biological repositories are under-standardized and tightly coupled to domain-specific data and formats. While recent coding agents can translate ideas into implementations, they typically stop at producing code and lack a verifier that can reproduce strong baselines and rigorously test which components truly matter. We introduce AblateCell, a reproduce-then-ablate agent for virtual cell repositories that closes this verification gap. AblateCell first reproduces reported baselines end-to-end by auto-configuring environments, resolving dependency and data issues, and rerunning official evaluations while emitting verifiable artifacts. It then conducts closed-loop ablation by generating a graph of isolated repository mutations and adaptively selecting experiments under a reward that trades off performance impact and execution cost. Evaluated on three single-cell perturbation prediction repositories (CPA, GEARS, BioLORD), AblateCell achieves 88.9% (+29.9% to human expert) end-to-end workflow success and 93.3% (+53.3% to heuristic) accuracy in recovering ground-truth critical components. These results enable scalable, repository-grounded verification and attribution directly on biological codebases.
Authors: Chenyang An, Qihao Ye, Minghao Pan, Jiayaun Zhang
Abstract: We explore a central question in AI for mathematics: can AI systems produce original, nontrivial proofs for open research problems? Despite strong benchmark performance, producing genuinely novel proofs remains an outstanding challenge for LLMs. Through systematic experiments with frontier LLMs on research-level proof tasks, we identify seven failure modes that prevent reliable proof generation, including context contamination, citation hallucination, hand-waving on key steps and misallocation of proof effort, unstable proof plans, unfocused verification, problem modification and single-model bottleneck. We argue that the gap between benchmark success and research-level proving is primarily one of system design, due to those failure modes. We present QED, an open-source multi-agent proof system in which each architectural decision directly addresses a specific failure mode. Evaluated on five open problems in applied analysis and PDEs contributed by domain experts, QED produces correct proofs for three problems, each verified by the contributing experts as original and nontrivial. QED is released as open-source software at https://github.com/proofQED/QED.
Authors: Meghyn Bienvenu, Camille Bourgaux
Abstract: We investigate practical algorithms for inconsistency-tolerant query answering over prioritized knowledge bases, which consist of a logical theory, a set of facts, and a priority relation between conflicting facts. We consider three well-known semantics (AR, IAR and brave) based upon two notions of optimal repairs (Pareto and completion). Deciding whether a query answer holds under these semantics is (co)NP-complete in data complexity for a large class of logical theories, and SAT-based procedures have been devised for repair-based semantics when there is no priority relation, or the relation has a special structure. The present paper introduces the first SAT encodings for Pareto- and completion-optimal repairs w.r.t. general priority relations and proposes several ways of employing existing and new encodings to compute answers under (optimal) repair-based semantics, by exploiting different reasoning modes of SAT solvers. The comprehensive experimental evaluation of our implementation compares both (i) the impact of adopting semantics based on different kinds of repairs, and (ii) the relative performances of alternative procedures for the same semantics.
Authors: Johan F. Hoorn, Ella-Jenna Oosterglorenwoud
Abstract: Currently, there is a trend for the wider public to rely on LLMs for financial or legal consultation, medical and mental support (Chatterji et al., 2025), often accepting the advice provided without necessarily seeking logical verification or empirical validation. While one might be fortunate enough to encounter a model with a particularly solid 'ground truth' or with auxiliary logic-symbolic reasoning capabilities, it remains a somewhat uncertain endeavour. Output is simply taken at face value, without further question. Yet, careless reliance on AI to answer our questions and to judge our output is a violation of Grice's Maxim of Quality as well as a violation of Lemoine's legal Maxim of Innocence. A low-sensitivity plagiarism scanner may produce a Type II error by failing to detect difference (the null hypothesis wrongly maintained). The fallacy of affirming the consequent occurs when the failure to detect difference is then interpreted as evidence of equivalence or demonstration of AI authorship. If the test is specified so that 'AI-generated' is effectively treated as the default H0, then a finding of 'no difference from AI' is taken as support for that null. Such a mis-specified test results in students being treated as guilty (AI/plagiarism) unless suspects can generate sufficient detectable difference from AI output, which yields false accusations under a fair null hypothesis (that the student wrote the work). To avoid LLMs becoming a sorcerer's apprentice, knowledge is required about which inference systems are or should become integrated for an LLM to become a trustworthy sparring partner. We end on a wider perspective where the formalisation of the observer effect shows that uncertainty, classification, and interpretation are already shaped by the human or artificial agency's belief system, affective state, and tolerance for ambiguity, rather than at the stage of LLM output.
Authors: Chengyang Huang, Siddhartha Srivastava, Kenneth K. Y. Ho, Kathy E. Luker, Gary D. Luker, Xun Huan, Krishna Garikipati
Abstract: Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is a powerful paradigm for uncovering the incentive structure that drives agent behavior, by inferring an unknown reward function from observed trajectories within a Markov decision process (MDP). However, most existing IRL methods require access to the transition function, either prescribed or estimated \textit{a priori}, which poses significant challenges when the underlying dynamics are unknown, unobservable, or not easily sampled. We propose Fokker--Planck inverse reinforcement learning (FP-IRL), a novel physics-constrained IRL framework tailored for systems that can be described by Fokker--Planck (FP) dynamics. FP-IRL simultaneously infers both the reward and transition functions directly from trajectory data, without requiring access to sampled transitions. Our method leverages a correspondence between MDPs and the FP equation, linking reward maximization in MDPs with free energy minimization in FP dynamics. This connection enables inference of the FP potential function using our inference approach of variational system identification, from which the full set of MDP components -- reward, transition, and policy -- can be recovered using analytic expressions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of FP-IRL through experiments on synthetic benchmarks and a modified version of the Mountain Car problem. Our results show that FP-IRL achieves accurate recovery of agent incentives while preserving computational efficiency and physical interpretability.
Authors: Lu Yin, Ajay Jaiswal, Shiwei Liu, Souvik Kundu, Zhangyang Wang
Abstract: We present Junk DNA Hypothesis by adopting a novel task-centric angle for the pre-trained weights of large language models (LLMs). It has been believed that weights in LLMs contain significant redundancy, leading to the conception that a considerable chunk of the parameters can be removed by pruning without compromising performance. Contrary to this belief, this paper presents a counter-argument: small-magnitude weights of pre-trained model weights encode vital knowledge essential for tackling difficult downstream tasks - manifested as the monotonic relationship between the performance drop of downstream tasks across the difficulty spectrum, as we prune more pre-trained weights by magnitude. Moreover, we reveal that these seemingly inconsequential weights can result in irreparable loss of knowledge and performance degradation in difficult tasks, even when downstream continual training is allowed. Interestingly, our evaluations show that the other popular compression, namely quantization, fails to exhibit similar monotonic effect and does not as convincingly disentangle this task-difficulty information. To study formally, we introduce several quantifiable metrics to gauge the downstream task difficulty: (1) within the same task category, and (2) across different task categories. Our extensive experiments substantiate the Junk DNA Hypothesis across a diverse range of model sizes, tasks, datasets, and even pruning methods. Codes are available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/Junk_DNA_Hypothesis.git.
URLs: https://github.com/VITA-Group/Junk_DNA_Hypothesis.git.
Authors: Chenguang Lu
Abstract: The Variational Bayesian method (VB) is used to solve the probability distributions of latent variables with the minimum free energy criterion. This criterion is not easy to understand, and the computation is complex. For these reasons, this paper proposes the Semantic Variational Bayes' method (SVB). The Semantic Information Theory the author previously proposed extends the rate-distortion function R(D) to the rate-fidelity function R(G), where R is the minimum mutual information for given semantic mutual information G. SVB came from the parameter solution of R(G), where the variational and iterative methods originated from Shannon et al.'s research on the rate-distortion function. The constraint functions SVB uses include likelihood, truth, membership, similarity, and distortion functions. SVB uses the maximum information efficiency (G/R) criterion, including the maximum semantic information criterion for optimizing model parameters and the minimum mutual information criterion for optimizing the Shannon channel. For the same tasks, SVB is computationally simpler than VB. The computational experiments in the paper include 1) using a mixture model as an example to show that the mixture model converges as G/R increases; 2) demonstrating the application of SVB in data compression with a group of error ranges as the constraint; 3) illustrating how the semantic information measure and SVB can be used for maximum entropy control and reinforcement learning in control tasks with given range constraints, providing numerical evidence for balancing control's purposiveness and efficiency. Further research is needed to apply SVB to neural networks and deep learning.
Authors: Ching-Chun Chang, Kai Gao, Shuying Xu, Anastasia Kordoni, Christopher Leckie, Isao Echizen
Abstract: Neural backdoors represent insidious cybersecurity loopholes that render learning machinery vulnerable to unauthorised manipulations, potentially enabling the weaponisation of artificial intelligence with catastrophic consequences. A backdoor attack involves the clandestine infiltration of a trigger during the learning process, metaphorically analogous to hypnopaedia, where ideas are implanted into a subject's subconscious mind under the state of hypnosis or unconsciousness. When activated by a sensory stimulus, the trigger evokes a conditioned reflex that directs a machine to mount a predetermined response. In this study, we propose a cybernetic framework for constant surveillance of backdoor threats, driven by the dynamic nature of untrustworthy data sources. We develop a self-aware unlearning mechanism to autonomously detach a machine's behaviour from the backdoor trigger. Through reverse engineering and statistical inference, we detect deceptive patterns and estimate the likelihood of backdoor infection. We employ model inversion to elicit artificial mental imagery, using stochastic processes to disrupt optimisation pathways and avoid convergent but potentially flawed patterns. This is followed by hypothesis analysis, which estimates the likelihood of each potentially malicious pattern as the true trigger and infers the probability of infection. The primary objective of this study is to maintain a stable state of equilibrium between knowledge fidelity and backdoor vulnerability.
Authors: Jiayang Niu, Jie Li, Ke Deng, Mark Sanderson, Nicola Ferro, Yongli Ren
Abstract: Quantum annealers offer a promising hardware platform for solving combinatorial optimization problems, especially those formulated as Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO). In this work, we propose PDQUBO (Performance-Driven Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization), a QUBO-based feature selection method that is directly executable on quantum annealers. Unlike prior QUBO-based feature selection approaches on quantum annealers, PDQUBO explicitly quantifies the performance impact of both individual features and feature pairs on recommender system models. This alignment between QUBO optimization objectives and model performance ensures that the solution direction is closely tied to recommendation quality, making it well-suited for practical deployment on quantum hardware. Moreover, by leveraging counterfactual analysis, PDQUBO is model-agnostic and evaluation-metric-independent, making it broadly applicable across diverse recommender architectures and assessment criteria. In addition, we investigate the instability of quantum annealing on real quantum devices with respect to varying problem sizes and problem difficulties. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that PDQUBO consistently outperforms prior QUBO-based feature selection methods on quantum annealers. Furthermore, we compare PDQUBO against classical feature selection baselines on click-through rate (CTR) prediction tasks, showing its strong performance and highlighting the potential of using quantum annealers for real-world feature selection applications. Our findings suggest that integrating quantum optimization with counterfactual analysis provides a promising direction for effective feature selection in recommender systems.
Authors: Sakshi Agarwal, Gabriel Hope, Jimin Heo, Erik B. Sudderth
Abstract: Diffusion probabilistic models learn to remove noise added during training, generating novel data (e.g., images) from Gaussian noise through sequential denoising. However, conditioning the generative process on corrupted or masked images is challenging. While various methods have been proposed for inpainting masked images with diffusion priors, they often fail to produce samples from the true conditional distribution, especially for large masked regions. Many baselines also cannot be applied to latent diffusion models which generate high-quality images with much lower computational cost. We propose a hierarchical variational inference algorithm that optimizes a non-Gaussian Markov approximation of the true diffusion posterior. Our VIPaint method outperforms existing approaches to inpainting, producing diverse high-quality imputations even for state-of-the-art text-conditioned latent diffusion models, and is also effective for other inverse problems like deblurring and superresolution.
Authors: Simon Schmitt, John Shawe-Taylor, Hado van Hasselt
Abstract: Decision makers may suffer from uncertainty induced by limited data. This may be mitigated by accounting for epistemic uncertainty, which is however challenging to estimate efficiently for large neural networks. To this extent we investigate Delta Variances, a family of algorithms for epistemic uncertainty quantification, that is computationally efficient and convenient to implement. It can be applied to neural networks and more general functions composed of neural networks. As an example we consider a weather simulator with a neural-network-based step function inside -- here Delta Variances empirically obtain competitive results at the cost of a single gradient computation. The approach is convenient as it requires no changes to the neural network architecture or training procedure. We discuss multiple ways to derive Delta Variances theoretically noting that special cases recover popular techniques and present a unified perspective on multiple related methods. Finally we observe that this general perspective gives rise to a natural extension and empirically show its benefit.
Authors: Rahul Nair, Bhanu Tokas, Hannah Kerner
Abstract: When we train models on biased datasets, they not only reproduce data biases, but can worsen them at test time - a phenomenon called bias amplification. Many of the current bias amplification metrics (e.g., BA (MALS), DPA) measure bias amplification only in classification datasets. These metrics are ineffective for image captioning datasets, as they cannot capture the language semantics of a caption. Recent work introduced Leakage in Captioning (LIC), a language-aware bias amplification metric that understands caption semantics. However, LIC has a crucial limitation: it cannot identify the source of bias amplification in captioning models. We propose Directional Bias Amplification in Captioning (DBAC), a language-aware and directional metric that can identify when captioning models amplify biases. DBAC has two more improvements over LIC: (1) it is less sensitive to sentence encoders (a hyperparameter in language-aware metrics), and (2) it provides a more accurate estimate of bias amplification in captions. Our experiments on gender and race attributes in the COCO captions dataset show that DBAC is the only reliable metric to measure bias amplification in captions.
Authors: Keano De Vos, Gert de Cooman, Alexander Erreygers, Jasper De Bock
Abstract: We provide a decision-theoretic framework for dealing with uncertainty in quantum mechanics. This uncertainty is two-fold: on the one hand there may be uncertainty about the state the quantum system is in, and on the other hand, as is essential to quantum mechanical uncertainty, even if the quantum state is known, measurements may still produce an uncertain outcome. In our framework, measurements therefore play the role of acts with an uncertain outcome and our simple decision-theoretic postulates ensure that Born's rule is encapsulated in the utility functions associated with such acts. This approach allows us to uncouple (precise) probability theory from quantum mechanics, in the sense that it leaves room for a more general, so-called imprecise probabilities approach. We discuss the mathematical implications of our findings, which allow us to give a decision-theoretic foundation to recent seminal work by Benavoli, Facchini and Zaffalon, and we compare our approach to earlier and different approaches by Deutsch and Wallace.
Authors: Jiwei Li, Bi Zhang, Xiaowei Tan, Wanxin Chen, Zhaoyuan Liu, Juanjuan Zhang, Weiguang Huo, Jian Huang, Lianqing Liu, Xingang Zhao
Abstract: The natural interaction and control performance of lower limb rehabilitation robots are closely linked to biomechanical information from various human locomotion activities. Multidimensional human motion data significantly deepen the understanding of the complex mechanisms governing neuromuscular alterations, thereby facilitating the development and application of rehabilitation robots in multifaceted real-world environments.However, existing lower limb datasets are inadequate for supplying the essential multimodal data and large-scale gait samples necessary for the development of effective data-driven approaches, and the significant effects of acquisition interference in real applications are neglected.To fill this gap, we present the K2MUSE dataset, which includes a comprehensive collection of multimodal data, comprising kinematic, kinetic, amplitude mode ultrasound (AUS), and surface electromyography (sEMG) measurements. The proposed dataset includes lower-limb multimodal data collected from two cohorts, including 30 able-bodied young adults and 12 older adults, across different inclines (0$^\circ$, $\pm$5$^\circ$, and $\pm$10$^\circ$), speeds (0.5 m/s, 1.0 m/s, and 1.5 m/s), and representative non-ideal acquisition conditions (muscle fatigue, electrode shifts, and interday differences). The kinematic and ground reaction force data were collected with a Vicon motion capture system and an instrumented treadmill with embedded force plates, whereas the sEMG and AUS data of thirteen muscles on the bilateral lower limbs were synchronously recorded.K2MUSE is released with the corresponding structured documentation, preprocessing pipelines, and example code, thereby providing a comprehensive resource for rehabilitation robot development, biomechanical analysis, and wearable sensing research. The dataset is available at https://k2muse.github.io/.
Authors: Musfiqur Rahman, SayedHassan Khatoonabadi, Emad Shihab
Abstract: Existing class-level code generation datasets are either synthetic (ClassEval: 100 classes) or insufficient in scale for modern training needs (RealClassEval: 400 classes), hindering robust evaluation and empirical analysis. We present OpenClassGen, a large-scale corpus of 324,843 Python classes extracted from 2,970 engineered open-source projects. Each entry pairs a human-written class with its corresponding skeleton, which comprises class and method signatures with associated docstrings, and is enriched with 27 static code metrics covering complexity, coupling, cohesion, and inheritance properties. Unlike prior benchmarks that require repository-level context resolution, OpenClassGen provides self-contained class skeletons that serve as complete generation specifications. We demonstrate the corpus's utility by evaluating three LLMs (GPT-o4-mini, Claude-4-Sonnet, Qwen-3-Coder) on a curated, executable subset of 300 classes, enriched with test suites achieving 58% branch coverage. Results show strong semantic similarity (CodeBERTScore-F3: 0.89) but moderate functional correctness (pass rate: 0.33), with substantial variance across models. This variance, along with diverse class characteristics, confirms that OpenClassGen enables meaningful differentiation of LLM capabilities. The dataset supports diverse use cases, including fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation, difficulty modelling, and failure mode analysis. The complete dataset and curation scripts are publicly available at https://zenodo.org/records/18409150.
Authors: Cyril Shih-Huan Hsu, Anestis Dalgkitsis, Chrysa Papagianni, Paola Grosso
Abstract: In the forthcoming era of 6G networks, characterized by unprecedented data rates, ultra-low latency, and ubiquitous connectivity, effective management of Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) is essential. VNFs are software-based counterparts of traditional hardware devices that facilitate flexible and scalable service provisioning. Service Function Chains (SFCs), structured as ordered sequences of VNFs, are pivotal in delivering complex network services. Nevertheless, splitting an SFC into multiple segments that are deployed across different network domains or infrastructure locations presents substantial challenges due to the potential heterogeneity of domain characteristic along with quality of service (QoS) constraints and limited visibility of network state. Conventional optimization methods have limited scalability, while existing data-driven approaches struggle to balance efficiency with capturing VNF inter-dependencies in SFCs. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a Transformer-empowered actor-critic framework specifically designed for sequence-aware SFC partitioning. By utilizing the self-attention mechanism, our approach effectively models complex inter-dependencies between VNFs, facilitating coordinated and parallel decision-making processes. Furthermore, to improve training stability and convergence we introduce an $\epsilon$-LoPe exploration strategy as well as Asymptotic Return Normalization. Comprehensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed methodology outperforms existing state-of-the-art solutions in terms of long-term service acceptance rates, resource utilization, and scalability while achieving fast inference.
Authors: Luoxi Tang, Tharunya Sundar, Yuqiao Meng, Shuai Yang, Ankita Patra, Lakshmi Manohar Chippada, Jiqian Zhao, Yi Li, Weicheng Ma, Zhaohan Xi
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into educational tools, current evaluations on standardized tests predominantly focus on binary outcome accuracy. Instead, an effective AI tutor must exhibit faithful reasoning, elucidate solution strategies, and diagnose specific human misconceptions. To bridge this gap, we introduce a pedagogical diagnostic framework that models English Standardized Test (EST) problem-solving as a traversal through a cognitive framework. Based on this framework, we present ESTBook, a multimodal benchmark encompassing 10,576 questions and 29 task types across five major exams. Unlike traditional datasets, ESTBook goes beyond data aggregation by enriching questions with formalized reasoning trajectories and distractor rationales that capture specific cognitive traps. Through extensive evaluations, we empirically demonstrate the practical utility of our diagnostic framework, showing that identifying cognitive trajectories facilitates the mitigation of performance gap and improves pedagogical reasoning through guided elicitation.
Authors: Anton Bj\"orklund, Mykola Zaitsev, Paolo Morettin, Marta Kwiatkowska
Abstract: The growing reliance on artificial intelligence in safety- and security-critical applications is raising concerns about the robustness of neural networks to erroneous or adversarial input. Certification is a methodology for ensuring model trustworthiness by providing formal guarantees on model behaviour. While most verification methods focus on worst-case analysis by bounding the network output, an alternative approach based on approximating the preimage can complement such analysis by estimating the proportion of inputs that satisfy a given specification. However, existing preimage-based methods, such as the state-of-the-art PREMAP, are limited to fully connected neural networks of moderate dimensionality. In this paper, we introduce PREMAP2, a collection of algorithmic extensions to PREMAP that enhance its scalability and efficiency through improved branching heuristics, adaptive Monte Carlo sampling, and reverse bound propagation. We further endow PREMAP2 with additional functionality such as support for non-uniform priors and confidence intervals. These advances enable the application of PREMAP2 to previously intractable settings, including real-world patch attacks against convolutional neural networks, where adversarial stickers or lighting conditions obscure parts of images. We showcase the effectiveness of our approach across several use cases, including certifying reliability, robustness, interpretability, and fairness, on domains ranging from computer vision to control tasks. Our implementation is available as open-source software.
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 steps required for transparency and verification. To address this gap, we introduce FinChain, the first benchmark specifically designed for verifiable Chain-of-Thought evaluation in finance. FinChain spans 58 topics across 12 financial domains, each represented by parameterized symbolic templates with executable Python code 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 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. This project is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/finchain.git.
Authors: Kaiqi Wu, Weiyang Kong, Sen Zhang, Zitong Chen, Yubao Liu
Abstract: Traffic prediction is a critical task in spatial-temporal forecasting with broad applications in travel planning and urban management. To model the complex spatial-temporal dependencies in traffic data, Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (STGCNs) have been widely employed, achieving advanced performance. However, when applied to large-scale road networks, the quadratic computational complexity of traditional graph convolution operations severely limits their scalability. Several methods attempt to address this issue through approximation, compression, or spatial partitioning. Nevertheless, these methods often either fail to achieve sufficient computational efficiency or compromise prediction accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose a Regularized Adaptive Graph Convolution (RAGC) model. First, to ensure scalability on large road networks, we develop the Efficient Cosine Operator (ECO), which performs graph convolution based on the cosine similarity of node embeddings with linear time complexity. Second, we introduce a regularized adaptive graph convolution framework that combines Stochastic Shared Embedding (SSE) and adaptive graph convolution through a residual difference mechanism. This design enables the model to learn high-quality node embeddings, thereby improving prediction accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency. Extensive experiments on four large-scale real-world traffic datasets show that RAGC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of prediction accuracy and exhibits competitive computational efficiency. The code is available at: https://github.com/wkq-wukaiqi/RAGC.
Authors: Wenrui Zhou, Mohamed Hendy, Shu Yang, Qingsong Yang, Zikun Guo, Yuyu Luo, Lijie Hu, Di Wang
Abstract: As video large language models (Video-LLMs) become increasingly integrated into real-world applications that demand grounded multimodal reasoning, ensuring their factual consistency and reliability is of critical importance. However, sycophancy, the tendency of these models to align with user input even when it contradicts the visual evidence, undermines their trustworthiness in such contexts. Current sycophancy research has largely overlooked its specific manifestations in the videolanguage domain, resulting in a notable absence of systematic benchmarks and targeted evaluations to understand how Video-LLMs respond under misleading user input. To fill this gap, we propose VISE(Video-LLM Sycophancy Benchmarking and Evaluation), the first benchmark designed to evaluate sycophantic behavior in state-of-the-art Video-LLMs across diverse question formats, prompt biases, and visual reasoning tasks. Specifically, VISEpioneeringly brings linguistic perspectives on sycophancy into the video domain, enabling fine-grained analysis across multiple sycophancy types and interaction patterns. Furthermore, we propose two potential training-free mitigation strategies revealing potential paths for reducing sycophantic bias: (i) enhancing visual grounding through interpretable key-frame selection and (ii) steering model behavior away from sycophancy via targeted, inference-time intervention on its internal neural representations. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/VideoSycophancy-567F.
URLs: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/VideoSycophancy-567F.
Authors: Weiyi Zhao, Xiaoyu Tan, Liang Liu, Sijia Li, Youwei Song, Xihe Qiu
Abstract: Automated identification of surgical safety risks is critical for improving patient outcomes; however, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) frequently suffer from Visual-Semantic Knowledge Conflicts (VS-KC), a phenomenon where models possess safety knowledge but fail to activate it during visual inspection. Investigating this alignment gap in operating rooms (ORs) is impeded by a critical bottleneck: the scarcity and privacy constraints of real-world OR data depicting safety violations. To address this, we introduce OR-VSKC, a benchmark for studying VS-KC and surgical risk perception in strictly regulated OR environments. Constructed via our Protocol-to-Pixel Generative Framework, OR-VSKC comprises 28,190 high-fidelity synthetic images grounded in authoritative safety standards, complemented by a 713-image expert-authored challenge subset validated by multiple experts. The full benchmark is built from authentic OR contexts drawn from the 4D-OR and CAMMA-MVOR datasets, where the 4D-OR-based portion serves as the primary benchmark core and the CAMMA-MVOR-based portion is reserved for external validation and cross-dataset generalization analysis. Evaluations of state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal substantial reliability gaps even in advanced generalist models. Furthermore, experiments show that fine-tuning on OR-VSKC effectively mitigates VS-KC and enables robust generalization to unseen camera viewpoints. We open-source the code and dataset to support reproducible research in safety-critical medical environments. The source code is available at https://github.com/zgg2577/VS-KC.
Authors: Perry Dong, Qiyang Li, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn
Abstract: We study the problem of training and fine-tuning expressive policies with online reinforcement learning (RL) given an offline dataset. Training expressive policy classes with online RL present a unique challenge of stable value maximization. Unlike simpler Gaussian policies commonly used in online RL, expressive policies like diffusion and flow-matching policies are parameterized by a long denoising chain, which hinders stable gradient propagation from actions to policy parameters when optimizing against some value function. Our key insight is that we can address stable value maximization by avoiding direct optimization over value with the expressive policy and instead construct an on-the-fly RL policy to maximize Q-value. We propose Expressive Policy Optimization (EXPO), a sample-efficient online RL algorithm that utilizes an on-the-fly policy to maximize value with two parameterized policies -- a larger expressive base policy trained with a stable imitation learning objective and a light-weight Gaussian edit policy that edits the actions sampled from the base policy toward a higher value distribution. The on-the-fly policy optimizes the actions from the base policy with the learned edit policy and chooses the value maximizing action from the base and edited actions for both sampling and temporal-difference (TD) backup. Our approach yields up to 2-3x improvement in sample efficiency on average over prior methods both in the setting of fine-tuning a pretrained policy given offline data and in leveraging offline data to train online.
Authors: Santosh Vasa, Aditi Ramadwar, Jnana Rama Krishna Darabattula, Md Zafar Anwar, Stanislaw Antol, Andrei Vatavu, Thomas Monninger, Sihao Ding
Abstract: Training of autonomous driving systems requires extensive datasets with precise annotations to attain robust performance. Human annotations suffer from imperfections, and multiple iterations are often needed to produce high-quality datasets. However, manually reviewing large datasets is laborious and expensive. In this paper, we introduce AutoVDC (Automated Vision Data Cleaning) framework and investigate the utilization of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to automatically identify erroneous annotations in vision datasets, thereby enabling users to eliminate these errors and enhance data quality. We validate our approach using the KITTI and nuImages datasets, which contain object detection benchmarks for autonomous driving. To test the effectiveness of AutoVDC, we create dataset variants with intentionally injected erroneous annotations and observe the error detection rate of our approach. Additionally, we compare the detection rates using different VLMs and explore the impact of VLM fine-tuning on our pipeline. The results demonstrate our method's high performance in error detection and data cleaning experiments, indicating its potential to significantly improve the reliability and accuracy of large-scale production datasets in autonomous driving.
Authors: Joshua Ong Jun Leang, Zheng Zhao, Aryo Pradipta Gema, Sohee Yang, Wai-Chung Kwan, Xuanli He, Wenda Li, Pasquale Minervini, Eleonora Giunchiglia, Shay B. Cohen
Abstract: Best-of-n sampling improves the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) and large reasoning models (LRMs) by generating multiple candidate solutions and selecting the one with the highest reward. The key challenge for reasoning tasks is designing a scoring function that can identify correct reasoning chains without access to ground-truth answers. We propose Probabilistic Confidence Selection And Ranking (PiCSAR): a simple, training-free method that scores each candidate generation using the joint log-likelihood of the reasoning and final answer. The joint log-likelihood of the reasoning and final answer naturally decomposes into reasoning confidence and answer confidence. PiCSAR achieves substantial gains across diverse benchmarks (+10.18 on MATH500, +9.81 on AIME2025), outperforming baselines with at least 2x fewer samples in 16 out of 20 comparisons. Our analysis reveals that correct reasoning chains exhibit significantly higher reasoning and answer confidence, justifying the effectiveness of PiCSAR.
Authors: Deniz Bayazit, Aaron Mueller, Antoine Bosselut
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) learn non-trivial abstractions during pretraining, such as detecting irregular plural noun subjects. However, because traditional evaluation methods (e.g., benchmarking) fail to reveal how models acquire these concepts and capabilities, it is not well understood when and how these specific linguistic abilities emerge. To bridge this gap and better understand model training at the concept level, we use sparse crosscoders to discover and align features across model checkpoints. Using this approach, we track the evolution of linguistic features during pretraining. We train crosscoders between open-sourced checkpoint triplets with significant performance and representation shifts, and introduce a novel metric, Relative Indirect Effects (RelIE), to trace training stages at which individual features become causally important for task performance. We show that crosscoders can detect feature emergence, maintenance, and discontinuation during pretraining. Our approach is architecture-agnostic and scalable, offering a promising path toward more interpretable and fine-grained analysis of representation learning throughout pretraining.
Authors: Ching-Chun Chang, Isao Echizen
Abstract: The rise of synthetic media has blurred the boundary between reality and fabrication under the evolving power of artificial intelligence, fueling an infodemic that erodes public trust in cyberspace. For digital imagery, a multitude of editing applications further complicates the forensic analysis, including semantic edits that alter content, photometric adjustments that recalibrate colour characteristics, and geometric projections that reshape viewpoints. Collectively, these transformations manipulate and control perceptual interpretation of digital imagery. This susceptibility calls for forensic enquiry into reconstructing the chain of events, thereby revealing deeper evidential insight into the presence or absence of criminal intent. This study seeks to address an inverse problem of tracing the underlying generation chain that gives rise to the observed synthetic media. A tell-tale watermarking system is developed for explanatory reasoning over the nature and extent of transformations across the lifecycle of synthetic media. Tell-tale watermarks are tailored to different classes of transformations, responding in a manner that is neither strictly robust nor fragile but instead interpretable. These watermarks function as reference clues that evolve under the same transformation dynamics as the carrier media, leaving interpretable traces when subjected to transformations. Explanatory reasoning is then performed to infer the most plausible account across the combinatorial parameter space of composite transformations. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the validity of tell-tale watermarking with respect to fidelity, synchronicity and traceability.
Authors: Quentin Uhl, Tommaso Pavan, Julianna Gerold, Kwok-Shing Chan, Yohan Jun, Shohei Fujita, Aneri Bhatt, Yixin Ma, Qiaochu Wang, Hong-Hsi Lee, Susie Y. Huang, Berkin Bilgic, Ileana Jelescu
Abstract: Biophysical diffusion MRI models like Neurite Exchange Imaging (NEXI) are essential for probing gray matter microstructure, estimating compartment diffusivities, neurite fraction, and exchange time. However, NEXI's multi-shell, multi-diffusion-time requirements cause prohibitively long acquisitions. Leveraging the Connectome 2.0 ultra-high gradient scanner, we developed a time-efficient protocol using an Explainable AI (XAI) framework. Combining XGBoost, SHAP, and Recursive Feature Elimination trained on synthetic signals, XAI identified an optimal 8-feature subset, cutting scan time from 27 to 14 minutes. Validated in vivo in seven healthy participants, the XAI protocol was benchmarked against the full 15-feature acquisition, a Cram'er-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) theoretical optimum, and two heuristics ("Mid-Range" and "Corner"). It robustly reproduced parameter estimates and maintained test-retest reproducibility. Remarkably, the XAI selection converged to the CRLB optimum. This validates XAI's optimality while highlighting its main advantage: achieving gold-standard optimization without complex analytical Jacobians, making it easily adaptable to numerical models or complex noise where CRLB is intractable. Furthermore, XAI showed superior in vivo robustness over heuristics: "Mid-Range" sampling yielded biased exchange time estimates from insufficient temporal diversity, while "Corner" sampling gave unstable intra-neurite diffusivity estimates (5-fold higher CV) due to noise sensitivity. Ultimately, this robust 14-minute protocol accelerates exchange-sensitive microstructural mapping, establishing a model-agnostic optimization framework adaptable to future ultra-high gradient systems and existing clinical scanners.
Authors: Brahim Mahmoudi, Naouel Moha, Quentin Sti\'evenart, Florent Avellaneda
Abstract: The rapid adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly realised through Machine Learning (ML) pipelines that integrate data preprocessing, model training, evaluation scripts, and configuration-heavy experimentation code. In these ML-based systems, small and often overlooked implementation choices can silently compromise experimental reproducibility, robustness to data and environment changes, and maintainability. We study ML code smells, recurring implementation patterns that can undermine reproducibility, robustness, and maintainability, for example by inducing silent failures or data leakage. We present SpecDetect4ML, a specification-driven detection tool that combines a declarative Domain-Specific Language (DSL) with a scalable analysis engine backed with Code Property Graphs (CPGs). Unlike the state-of-the-art (SOTA) analysers that rely on hand-coded, per-rule local pattern checks, our DSL expresses smells as executable specifications via reusable predicates, while the CPG analysis enables project-level reasoning over syntactic, control-flow, and data-flow relations. This CPG reasoning outperforms Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)-only analysers while remaining scalable and practical in analysis time. We specified 22 ML code smells and evaluated SpecDetect4ML on 890 ML-based systems. SpecDetect4ML achieves 95.82% precision and 88.14% recall on a unified ground truth, outperforming SOTA analysers in both effectiveness and coverage, providing an extensible foundation for detecting non-local, flow-dependent ML code smells.
Authors: Lute Lillo, Nick Cheney
Abstract: In independent, identically distributed (i.i.d.) training regimes, activation functions have been benchmarked extensively, and their differences often shrink once model size and optimization are tuned. In continual learning, however, the picture is different: beyond catastrophic forgetting, models can progressively lose the ability to adapt (referred to as loss of plasticity) and the role of the non-linearity in this failure mode remains underexplored. We show that activation choice is a primary, architecture-agnostic lever for mitigating plasticity loss. Building on a property-level analysis of negative-branch shape and saturation behavior, we introduce two drop-in nonlinearities (Smooth-Leaky and Randomized Smooth-Leaky) and evaluate them in two complementary settings: (i) supervised class-incremental benchmarks and (ii) reinforcement learning with non-stationary MuJoCo environments designed to induce controlled distribution and dynamics shifts. We also provide a simple stress protocol and diagnostics that link the shape of the activation to the adaptation under change. The takeaway is straightforward: thoughtful activation design offers a lightweight, domain-general way to sustain plasticity in continual learning without extra capacity or task-specific tuning.
Authors: Yucheng Wang, Yifan Hou, Aydin Javadov, Mubashara Akhtar, Mrinmaya Sachan
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) promise enhanced reasoning by integrating diverse inputs such as text, vision, and audio. Yet cross-modal reasoning remains underexplored, with conflicting reports on whether added modalities help or harm performance. These inconsistencies stem from a lack of controlled evaluation frameworks and analysis of models' internals to isolate when and why modality interactions support or undermine reasoning. We address this gap through a logic-grounded evaluation framework that categorizes multimodal reasoning into six interaction patterns, varying how facts are distributed across modalities and logically combined. Empirically, additional modalities enhance reasoning only when they provide independent and sufficient reasoning paths, while redundant or chained entailment support often hurts performance. Moreover, reasoning degrades in three systematic ways: weaker modalities drag down overall performance, conflicts bias preference toward certain modalities, and joint signals from different modalities fail to be integrated effectively. Therefore, we identify two core failures: task-composition bottleneck, where recognition and reasoning cannot be jointly executed in one pass, and fusion bottleneck, where early integration introduces bias. For further investigation, we find that attention patterns fail to encode fact usefulness, but a simple two-step prompting (recognize then reason) restores performance, confirming the task-composition bottleneck. Moreover, modality identity remains recoverable in early layers, and softening attention in early fusion improves reasoning, highlighting biased fusion as another failure mode. Overall, our findings show that integration, not perception, is the main barrier to multimodal reasoning, suggesting composition-aware training and early fusion control as promising directions.
Authors: Jinho Chang, Jaemin Kim, Jong Chul Ye
Abstract: Recent advancements in diffusion and flow-matching models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in high-fidelity image synthesis. A prominent line of research involves reward-guided guidance, which steers the generation process during inference to align with specific objectives. However, leveraging this reward-guided approach to the task of image editing, which requires preserving the semantic content of the source image while enhancing a target reward, is largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for training-free, reward-guided image editing. We formulate the editing process as a trajectory optimal control problem where the reverse process of a diffusion model is treated as a controllable trajectory originating from the source image, and the adjoint states are iteratively updated to steer the editing process. Through extensive experiments across distinct editing tasks, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing inversion-based training-free guidance baselines, achieving a superior balance between reward maximization and fidelity to the source image without reward hacking.
Authors: Francesca Gomez
Abstract: When AI agents operating with access to sensitive information encounter a conflict between completing an assigned task and following rules or ethical constraints, they can resort to unsanctioned behaviour. Existing inference time safety work addresses this primarily through monitoring and access restriction. We investigate a complementary and under-explored layer: environmental controls that act on the agent's decision context at the point of conflict, making it more likely that the agent takes an authorised alternative path rather than an unsanctioned one. Drawing on Situational Crime Prevention (SCP), a framework used in human insider risk management to make harmful actions less rewarding and compliant actions more viable by design choices in the environment, we design and evaluate escalation channels as a concrete instantiation of this control class. An escalation channel provides an agent with a formal, out-of-band route to surface a conflict to an independent authority. We evaluate two designs: a simple email escalation and an instrumentally credible channel that guarantees a 30-minute pause and independent review, making the authorised path genuinely useful for goal achievement rather than merely nominally available. Across 10 frontier LLMs using the agentic task-rule conflict scenario of Lynch et al. (2025), we find that without any control the harmful action rate is 38.73%. A simple escalation channel reduces this to 5.92%; the instrumentally credible channel reduces it further to 1.21%, a statistically significant improvement observed in all 10 models tested across 24,000 samples. Our results suggest that the instrumental credibility of the authorised alternative matters considerably, and that environmental control design is a productive and largely unexplored addition to the defence-in-depth toolkit for agentic AI systems.
Authors: Lorenzo Nikiforos, Luciano Prono, Charalampos Antoniadis, Fabio Pareschi, Riccardo Rovatti, Gianluca Setti
Abstract: The increasing scale of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) increases the need for compression techniques such as pruning, quantization, and low-rank decomposition. While these methods are very effective at reducing memory, computation, and energy consumption, they may introduce severe accuracy degradation, which is often mitigated by using iterative, gradual compression. However, different compression techniques require distinct iterative approaches, and some result in unstable, discontinuous model fine-tuning. We introduce Vanishing Contributions (VCON), a unified framework for the smooth, iterative transition of DNNs into a compressed form. Rather than replacing the original network directly with its compressed version, VCON executes both in parallel during fine-tuning. The contribution of the original (uncompressed) model is progressively reduced, while that of the compressed model is gradually increased. This affine combination allows the network to slowly adapt, improving stability and mitigating accuracy degradation. We evaluate VCON on computer vision and natural language processing benchmarks, using multiple compression strategies. In most settings, our framework improves accuracy over post-shot and iterative baselines. Typical gains exceed 1%, while some configuration exhibits improvements above 15%. VCON is thus compatible with existing compression techniques and consistently improves performance across diverse tasks.
Authors: Lang Gao, Xuhui Li, Chenxi Wang, Mingzhe Li, Wei Liu, Zirui Song, Jinghui Zhang, Rui Yan, Preslav Nakov, Xiuying Chen
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have grown more powerful in language generation, producing fluent text and even imitating personal style. Yet, this ability also heightens the risk of identity impersonation. To the best of our knowledge, no prior work has examined personalized machine-generated text (MGT) detection. In this paper, we introduce \dataset, the first benchmark for evaluating detector robustness in personalized settings, built from literary and blog texts paired with their LLM-generated imitations. Our experimental results demonstrate large performance gaps across detectors in personalized settings: some state-of-the-art models suffer significant drops. We attribute this limitation to the \textit{feature-inversion trap}, where features that are discriminative in general domains become inverted and misleading when applied to personalized text. Based on this finding, we propose \method, a simple and reliable way to predict detector performance changes in personalized settings. \method identifies latent directions corresponding to inverted features and constructs probe datasets that differ primarily along these features to evaluate detector dependence. Our experiments show that \method can accurately predict both the direction and the magnitude of post-transfer changes, showing 85\% correlation with the actual performance gaps. We hope that this work will encourage further research on personalized text detection.
Authors: Jiaqi Leng, Xiang Hu, Junxiong Wang, Jianguo Li, Wei Wu, Yucheng Lu
Abstract: Effectively processing long contexts is a critical challenge for language models. While standard Transformers are limited by quadratic complexity and poor length extrapolation, alternative architectures like sliding window attention and state space models sacrifice the ability to effectively utilize the full context due to their fixed-size memory. Chunk-based sparse attention has emerged as a promising paradigm for extreme length generalization, yet the key architectural principles underpinning its success are not yet fully understood. In this work, we present a systematic dissection of these models to identify the core components driving their performance. Through a unified framework and comprehensive ablation studies, we demonstrate that a combination of three design principles is critical: (1) an expressive, non-linear Chunk Encoder with a dedicated CLS token to produce representations for retrieval; (2) a Bypassing Residual Path to stably integrate retrieved global information without it being overridden by the local residual stream; and (3) enforced selection sparsity during pre-training to bridge the train-test distribution gap. We provide a theoretical motivation for intra-chunk information processing and landmark generation. By combining these principles, we establish a new state-of-the-art for training-free length extrapolation, successfully generalizing models trained on a 4K context to 32 million tokens on RULER and BABILong. Our findings provide a clear and empirically-grounded set of design principles for developing future, highly-capable long-context language models.
Authors: Ming Li, Pei Chen, Zhenhao Zhang, Tao Yang, Xinyang Zhang, Han Li, Tianyu Cao, Ming Zeng, Zhuofeng Wu, Meng Jiang, Huasheng Li, Lihong Li, Bing Yin
Abstract: Large Language Models demonstrate strong capabilities in single-turn instruction following but suffer from Lost-in-Conversation (LiC), a degradation in performance as information is revealed progressively in multi-turn settings. Motivated by the current progress on Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), we propose Curriculum Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Accuracy and Abstention Rewards (RLAAR), a framework that encourages models not only to generate correct answers, but also to judge the solvability of questions in the multi-turn conversation setting. Our approach employs a competence-gated curriculum that incrementally increases dialogue difficulty (in terms of instruction shards), stabilizing training while promoting reliability. Using multi-turn, on-policy rollouts and a mixed-reward system, RLAAR teaches models to balance problem-solving with informed abstention, reducing premature answering behaviors that cause LiC. Evaluated on LiC benchmarks, RLAAR significantly mitigates LiC performance decay (62.6% to 75.1%) and improves calibrated abstention rates (33.5% to 73.4%). Together, these results provide a practical recipe for building multi-turn reliable and trustworthy LLMs.
Authors: Changbo Wu, Zhuolong Yu, Gongming Zhao, Hongli Xu
Abstract: Collective communication (CC) is critical for scaling distributed machine learning (DML). The predictable traffic patterns of DML present a great opportunity for applying optical network technologies. Optical networks with reconfigurable topologies promise high bandwidth and low latency for collective communications. However, existing approaches face inherent limitations: static topologies are inefficient for dynamic communication patterns within CC algorithm, while frequent topology reconfiguration matching every step of the algorithm incurs significant overhead. In this paper, we propose SWOT, a demand-aware optical network framework that employs ``intra-collective reconfiguration'' to dynamically align network resources with CC traffic patterns. SWOT hides reconfiguration latency by overlapping it with data transmission through three key techniques: \textit{Heterogeneous Message Splitting}, \textit{Asynchronous Overlapping}, and \textit{Topology Bypassing}. Extensive simulations demonstrate that SWOT reduces communication completion time up to 89.7% across diverse CC algorithm compared to static baselines, demonstrating strong robustness to varying optical resources and reconfiguration delay.
Authors: Moin Safdar, Shahzaib Iqbal, Mubeen Ghafoor, Tariq M. Khan, Imran Razzak, Thantrira Porntaveetus, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny
Abstract: Medical image segmentation is essential for clinical applications such as disease diagnosis, treatment planning, and disease development monitoring because it provides precise morphological and spatial information on anatomical structures that directly influence treatment decisions. Convolutional neural networks significantly impact image segmentation; however, since convolution operations are local, capturing global contextual information and long-range dependencies is still challenging. Their capacity to precisely segment structures with complicated borders and a variety of sizes is impacted by this restriction. Since transformers use self-attention methods to capture global context and long-range dependencies efficiently, integrating transformer-based architecture with CNNs is a feasible approach to overcoming these challenges. To address these challenges, we propose the Focal Modulation and Bidirectional Feature Fusion Network for Medical Image Segmentation, referred to as FM-BFF-Net in the remainder of this paper. The network combines convolutional and transformer components, employs a focal modulation attention mechanism to refine context awareness, and introduces a bidirectional feature fusion module that enables efficient interaction between encoder and decoder representations across scales. Through this design, FM-BFF-Net enhances boundary precision and robustness to variations in lesion size, shape, and contrast. Extensive experiments on eight publicly available datasets, including polyp detection, skin lesion segmentation, and ultrasound imaging, show that FM-BFF-Net consistently surpasses recent state-of-the-art methods in Jaccard index and Dice coefficient, confirming its effectiveness and adaptability for diverse medical imaging scenarios.
Authors: Elena Celledoni, Brynjulf Owren, Lars Ruthotto, Tianjiao Nicole Yang
Abstract: Exploiting low-precision computations has become a standard strategy in deep learning to address the growing computational costs imposed by ever larger models and datasets. However, naively performing all computations in low precision can lead to roundoff errors and instabilities. Therefore, mixed precision training schemes usually store the weights in high precision and use low-precision computations only for whitelisted operations. Despite their success, these principles are currently not reliable for training continuous-time architectures such as neural ordinary differential equations (Neural ODEs). This paper presents a mixed precision training framework for neural ODEs consisting of explicit ODE solvers and a custom backpropagation scheme and shows their effectiveness in a range of learning tasks. Our scheme uses low-precision computations for evaluating the velocity, parameterized by the neural network, and for storing intermediate states, while numerical reliability is provided by custom dynamic adjoint scaling and by accumulating the solution and gradients in higher precision. These contributions address two key challenges in training neural ODEs: the computational cost of repeated network evaluations and the growth of memory requirements with the number of time steps or layers. Along with the paper we publish our extendable, open-source PyTorch package \texttt{rampde}, whose syntax resembles that of leading packages to provide a drop-in replacement in existing codes. We demonstrate the reliability and effectiveness of our scheme using challenging test cases and on neural ODE applications in image classification and generative models, achieving approximately 50\% memory reduction and up to 2x speedup while maintaining accuracy comparable to single-precision training.
Authors: Meixiu Long, Duolin Sun, Dan Yang, Yihan Jiao, Lei Liu, Jiahai Wang, BinBin Hu, Yue Shen, Jie Feng, Zhehao Tan, Junjie Wang, Lianzhen Zhong, Jian Wang, Peng Wei, Jinjie Gu
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for passage reranking in information retrieval, leveraging their superior reasoning capabilities to address the limitations of conventional models on complex queries. However, current LLM-based reranking paradigms are fundamentally constrained by an efficiency-accuracy trade-off: (1) pointwise methods are efficient but ignore inter-document comparison, yielding suboptimal accuracy; (2) listwise methods capture global context but suffer from context-window constraints and prohibitive inference latency. To address these issues, we propose GroupRank, a novel paradigm that balances flexibility and context awareness. To unlock the full potential of groupwise reranking, we propose an answer-free data synthesis pipeline that fuses local pointwise signals with global listwise rankings. These samples facilitate supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, with the latter guided by a specialized group-ranking reward comprising ranking-utility and group-alignment. These complementary components synergistically optimize document ordering and score calibration to reflect intrinsic query-document relevance. Experimental results show GroupRank achieves a state-of-the-art 65.2 NDCG@10 on BRIGHT and surpasses baselines by 2.1 points on R2MED, while delivering a 6.4$\times$ inference speedup.
Authors: Emma Andrews, Prabhat Mishra
Abstract: Classical autoencoders are widely used to learn features of input data. To improve the feature learning, classical masked autoencoders extend classical autoencoders to learn the features of the original input sample in the presence of masked-out data. While quantum autoencoders exist, there is no design and implementation of quantum masked autoencoders that can leverage the benefits of quantum computing and quantum autoencoders. In this paper, we propose quantum masked autoencoders (QMAEs) that can effectively learn missing features of a data sample within quantum states instead of classical embeddings. We showcase that our QMAE architecture can learn the masked features of an image and can reconstruct the masked input image with improved visual fidelity in MNIST-family images. Experimental evaluation highlights that QMAE can significantly outperform (12.86% on average) in classification accuracy compared to state-of-the-art quantum autoencoders in the presence of masks.
Authors: Daniel Agyei Asante, Md Mokarram Chowdhury, Yang Li
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have driven major advances across domains, yet their massive size hinders deployment in resource-constrained settings. Low-rank factorization addresses this challenge by compressing models to effectively reduce their computation and memory consumption while maintaining accuracy. While these compressed models boast benign performance and system-level advantages, their trustworthiness implications remain poorly understood. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study of how low-rank factorization affects LLM trustworthiness across privacy, adversarial robustness, ethics, and fairness, complemented by an explainability-driven analysis of the internal mechanisms behind these trust-related changes. We evaluate multiple LLMs of different sizes and architectures compressed with various low-rank factorization algorithms, revealing key insights: (1) low-rank factorization preserves training data privacy but weakens the protection of personally identifiable information during conversations; (2) adversarial robustness is generally enhanced under compression; (3) ethics degrades in zero-shot prompting but partially recovers in few-shot prompting; (4) fairness declines under compression. Beyond compression, we investigate how model scale and fine-tuning affect trustworthiness. Additionally, to move beyond black-box analysis, we employ a gradient-based attribution to identify which layers of LLMs contribute most to adversarial robustness.
Authors: Yuji Takubo, Arpit Dwivedi, Sukeerth Ramkumar, Luis A. Pabon, Daniele Gammelli, Marco Pavone, Simone D'Amico
Abstract: Reliable real-time trajectory generation is essential for future autonomous spacecraft. While recent progress in nonconvex guidance and control is paving the way for onboard autonomous trajectory optimization, these methods still rely on extensive expert input (e.g., waypoints, constraints, mission timelines, etc.), which limits operational scalability in complex missions such as rendezvous and proximity operations. This paper introduces SAGES (Semantic Autonomous Guidance Engine for Space), a trajectory-generation framework that translates natural-language commands into spacecraft trajectories that reflect high-level intent while respecting nonconvex constraints. Experiments in two settings (fault-tolerant proximity operations with continuous-time constraint enforcement and a free-flying robotic platform) demonstrate that SAGES reliably produces trajectories aligned with human commands, achieving over 90% semantic-behavioral consistency across diverse behavior modes. Ultimately, this work marks an initial step toward language-conditioned, constraint-aware spacecraft trajectory generation, enabling operators to interactively guide both safety and behavior through intuitive natural-language commands with reduced expert burden. Project Website: https://semantic-guidance4space.github.io/
Authors: Arijit Ray, Ahmed Abdelkader, Chengzhi Mao, Bryan A. Plummer, Kate Saenko, Ranjay Krishna, Leonidas Guibas, Wen-Sheng Chu
Abstract: Reasoning goes beyond language; the real world requires reasoning about space, time, affordances, and much more that words alone cannot convey. Existing multimodal models exploring the potential of reasoning with images are brittle and do not scale. They rely on calling specialist tools, costly generation of images, or handcrafted reasoning data to switch between text and image thoughts. Instead, we offer a simpler alternative -- Mull-Tokens -- modality-agnostic latent tokens pre-trained to hold intermediate information in either image or text modalities to let the model think free-form towards the correct answer. We investigate best practices to train Mull-Tokens inspired by latent reasoning frameworks. We first train Mull-Tokens using supervision from interleaved text-image traces, and then fine-tune without any supervision by only using the final answers. Across four challenging spatial reasoning benchmarks involving tasks such as solving puzzles and taking different perspectives, we demonstrate that Mull-Tokens improve upon several baselines utilizing text-only reasoning or interleaved image-text reasoning, achieving a +3% average improvement and up to +16% on a puzzle solving reasoning-heavy split compared to our strongest baseline. Adding to conversations around challenges in grounding textual and visual reasoning, Mull-Tokens offers a simple solution to abstractly think in multiple modalities.
Authors: Zhenguo Zhang, Haohan Zheng, Yishen Wang, Le Xu, Tianchen Deng, Xuefeng Chen, Qu Chen, Bo Zhang, Wuxiong Huang
Abstract: The deployment of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in safety-critical domains like autonomous driving (AD) is critically hindered by reliability failures, most notably object hallucination. This failure stems from their reliance on ungrounded, text-based Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. While existing multi-modal CoT approaches attempt mitigation, they suffer from two fundamental flaws: (1) decoupled perception and reasoning stages that prevent end-to-end joint optimization, and (2) reliance on expensive, dense localization labels. Thus we introduce OmniDrive-R1, an end-to-end VLM framework designed for autonomous driving, which unifies perception and reasoning through an interleaved Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought (iMCoT) mechanism. Our core innovation is an Reinforcement-driven visual grounding capability, enabling the model to autonomously direct its attention and "zoom in" on critical regions for fine-grained analysis. This capability is enabled by our pure two-stage reinforcement learning training pipeline and Clip-GRPO algorithm. Crucially, Clip-GRPO introduces an annotation-free, process-based grounding reward. This reward not only eliminates the need for dense labels but also circumvents the instability of external tool calls by enforcing real-time cross-modal consistency between the visual focus and the textual reasoning. Extensive experiments on DriveLMM-o1 demonstrate our model's significant improvements. Compared to the baseline Qwen2.5VL-7B, OmniDrive-R1 improves the overall reasoning score from 51.77% to 80.35%, and the final answer accuracy from 37.81% to 73.62%.
Authors: Yonggan Fu, Lexington Whalen, Zhifan Ye, Xin Dong, Shizhe Diao, Jingyu Liu, Chengyue Wu, Hao Zhang, Enze Xie, Song Han, Maksim Khadkevich, Jan Kautz, Yingyan Celine Lin, Pavlo Molchanov
Abstract: Diffusion language models (dLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm that enables parallel, non-autoregressive generation, but their learning efficiency lags behind that of autoregressive (AR) language models when trained from scratch. To this end, we study AR-to-dLM conversion to transform pretrained AR models into efficient dLMs that excel in speed while preserving AR models' task accuracy. We achieve this by identifying limitations in the attention patterns and objectives of existing AR-to-dLM methods and then proposing principles and methodologies for more effective AR-to-dLM conversion. Specifically, we first systematically compare different attention patterns and find that maintaining pretrained AR weight distributions is critical for effective AR-to-dLM conversion. As such, we introduce a continuous pretraining scheme with a block-wise attention pattern, which remains causal across blocks while enabling bidirectional modeling within each block. We find that this approach can better preserve pretrained AR models' weight distributions than fully bidirectional modeling, in addition to its known benefit of enabling KV caching, and leads to a win-win in accuracy and efficiency. Second, to mitigate the training-test gap in mask token distributions (uniform vs. highly left-to-right), we propose a position-dependent token masking strategy that assigns higher masking probabilities to later tokens during training to better mimic test-time behavior. Leveraging this framework, we conduct extensive studies of dLMs' attention patterns, training dynamics, and other design choices, providing actionable insights into scalable AR-to-dLM conversion. These studies lead to the Efficient-DLM family, which outperforms state-of-the-art AR models and dLMs, e.g., our Efficient-DLM 8B achieves +5.4%/+2.7% higher accuracy with 4.5x/2.7x higher throughput compared to Dream 7B and Qwen3 4B, respectively.
Authors: Chao Hu, Wenhao Zeng, Yuling Shi, Beijun Shen, Xiaodong Gu
Abstract: Repository-level code generation has attracted growing attention in recent years. Unlike function-level code generation, it requires the model to understand the entire repository, reasoning over complex dependencies across functions, classes, and modules. However, existing approaches such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or context-based function selection often fall short: they primarily rely on surface-level similarity and struggle to capture the rich dependencies that govern repository-level semantics. In this paper, we introduce InlineCoder, a novel framework for repository-level code generation. InlineCoder enhances the understanding of repository context by inlining the unfinished function into its call graph, thereby reframing the challenging repository understanding as an easier function-level coding task. Given a function signature, InlineCoder first generates a draft completion, termed an anchor, which approximates downstream dependencies and enables perplexity-based confidence estimation. This anchor drives a bidirectional inlining process: (i) Upstream Inlining, which embeds the anchor into its callers to capture diverse usage scenarios; and (ii) Downstream Retrieval, which integrates the anchor's callees into the prompt to provide precise dependency context. The enriched context, combining draft completion with upstream and downstream perspectives, equips the LLM with a comprehensive repository view.
Authors: Kai Li, Xuanqing Yu, Ziyi Ni, Yi Zeng, Yao Xu, Zheqing Zhang, Xin Li, Jitao Sang, Xiaogang Duan, Xuelei Wang, Chengbao Liu, Jie Tan
Abstract: Long-horizon conversational agents have to manage ever-growing interaction histories that quickly exceed the finite context windows of large language models (LLMs). Existing memory frameworks provide limited support for temporally structured information across hierarchical levels, often leading to fragmented memories and unstable long-horizon personalization. We present TiMem, a temporal--hierarchical memory framework that organizes conversations through a Temporal Memory Tree (TMT), enabling systematic memory consolidation from raw conversational observations to progressively abstracted persona representations. TiMem is characterized by three core properties: (1) temporal--hierarchical organization through TMT; (2) semantic-guided consolidation that enables memory integration across hierarchical levels without fine-tuning; and (3) complexity-aware memory recall that balances precision and efficiency across queries of varying complexity. Under a consistent evaluation setup, TiMem achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on both benchmarks, reaching 75.30% on LoCoMo and 76.88% on LongMemEval-S. It outperforms all evaluated baselines while reducing the recalled memory length by 52.20% on LoCoMo. Manifold analysis indicates clear persona separation on LoCoMo and reduced dispersion on LongMemEval-S. Overall, TiMem treats temporal continuity as a first-class organizing principle for long-horizon memory in conversational agents. The code is available at https://github.com/TiMEM-AI/timem.
Authors: Ahmed Abdelkawy, Ahmed Elsayed, Asem Ali, Aly Farag, Thomas Tretter, Michael McIntyre
Abstract: Understanding student behavior in the classroom is essential to improve both pedagogical quality and student engagement. Existing methods for predicting student engagement typically require substantial annotated data to model the diversity of student behaviors, yet privacy concerns often restrict researchers to their own proprietary datasets. Moreover, the classroom context, represented in peers' actions, is ignored. To address the aforementioned limitation, we propose a novel three-stage framework for video-based student engagement measurement. First, we explore the few-shot adaptation of the vision-language model for student action recognition, which is fine-tuned to distinguish among action categories with a few training samples. Second, to handle continuous and unpredictable student actions, we utilize the sliding temporal window technique to divide each student's 2-minute-long video into non-overlapping segments. Each segment is assigned an action category via the fine-tuned VLM model, generating a sequence of action predictions. Finally, we leverage the large language model to classify this entire sequence of actions, together with the classroom context, as belonging to an engaged or disengaged student. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in identifying student engagement. The source code will be available at https://github.com/ahmed-nady/context_aware_student_engagement.
URLs: https://github.com/ahmed-nady/context_aware_student_engagement.
Authors: Yixi Zhou, Fan Zhang, Yu Chen, Haipeng Zhang, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
Abstract: Financial question answering (QA) over long corporate filings requires evidence to satisfy strict constraints on entities, financial metrics, fiscal periods, and numeric values. However, existing LLM-based rerankers primarily optimize semantic relevance, leading to unstable rankings and opaque decisions on long documents. We propose FinCards, a structured reranking framework that reframes financial evidence selection as constraint satisfaction under a finance-aware schema. FinCards represents filing chunks and questions using aligned schema fields (entities, metrics, periods, and numeric spans), enabling deterministic field-level matching. Evidence is selected via a multi-stage tournament reranking with stability-aware aggregation, producing auditable decision traces. Across two corporate filing QA benchmarks, FinCards substantially improves early-rank retrieval over both lexical and LLM-based reranking baselines, while reducing ranking variance, without requiring model fine-tuning or unpredictable inference budgets. Our code is available at https://github.com/XanderZhou2022/FINCARDS.
Authors: Jihang Li, Qing Liu, Zulong Chen, Jing Wang, Wei Wang, Chuanfei Xu, Zeyi Wen
Abstract: Tax code prediction is a crucial yet underexplored task in automating invoicing and compliance management for large-scale e-commerce platforms. Each product must be accurately mapped to a node within a multi-level taxonomic hierarchy defined by national standards, where errors lead to financial inconsistencies and regulatory risks. This paper presents Taxon, a semantically aligned and expert-guided framework for hierarchical tax code prediction. Taxon integrates (i) a feature-gating mixture-of-experts architecture that adaptively routes multi-modal features across taxonomy levels, and (ii) a semantic consistency model distilled from large language models acting as domain experts to verify alignment between product titles and official tax definitions. To address noisy supervision in real business records, we design a multi-source training pipeline that combines curated tax databases, invoice validation logs, and merchant registration data to provide both structural and semantic supervision. Extensive experiments on the proprietary TaxCode dataset and public benchmarks demonstrate that Taxon achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines. Further, an additional full hierarchical paths reconstruction procedure significantly improves structural consistency, yielding the highest overall F1 scores. Taxon has been deployed in production within Alibaba's tax service system, handling an average of over 500,000 tax code queries per day and reaching peak volumes above five million requests during business event with improved accuracy, interpretability, and robustness.
Authors: Mark Rothermel, Marcus Kornmann, Marcus Rohrbach, Anna Rohrbach
Abstract: The growing scale of online misinformation urgently demands Automated Fact-Checking (AFC). Existing benchmarks for evaluating AFC systems, however, are largely limited in terms of task scope, modalities, domain, language diversity, realism, or coverage of misinformation types. Critically, they are static, thus subject to data leakage as their claims enter the pretraining corpora of LLMs. As a result, benchmark performance no longer reliably reflects the actual ability to verify claims. We introduce Verified Theses and Statements (VeriTaS), the first dynamic benchmark for multimodal AFC, designed to remain robust under ongoing large-scale pretraining of foundation models. VeriTaS currently comprises 25,000 real-world claims from 104 professional fact-checking organizations across 54 languages, covering textual and audiovisual content. Claims are added quarterly via a fully automated seven-stage pipeline that normalizes claim formulation, retrieves original media, and maps heterogeneous expert verdicts to a novel, standardized, and disentangled scoring scheme with textual justifications. Through human evaluation, we demonstrate that the automated annotations closely match human judgments. We commit to updating VeriTaS in the future, establishing a leakage-resistant benchmark, supporting meaningful AFC evaluation in the era of rapidly evolving foundation models. The code and data are publicly available under https://veritas.mai.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de .
Authors: Ruozhen Yang, Yucheng Jiang, Yueqi Jiang, Priyanka Kargupta, Yunyi Zhang, Jiawei Han
Abstract: Deploying large language models in long-horizon, goal-oriented interactions remains challenging because similar entities and facts recur under different latent goals and constraints, causing memory systems to retrieve context-mismatched evidence. We propose STITCH (Structured Intent Tracking in Contextual History), an agentic memory system that indexes each trajectory step with a structured retrieval cue, contextual intent, and retrieves history by matching the current step's intent. Contextual intent provides compact signals that disambiguate repeated mentions and reduce interference: (1) the current latent goal defining a thematic segment, (2) the action type, and (3) the salient entity types anchoring which attributes matter. During inference, STITCH filters and prioritizes memory snippets by intent compatibility, suppressing semantically similar but context-incompatible history. For evaluation, we introduce CAME-Bench, a benchmark for context-aware retrieval in realistic, dynamic, goal-oriented trajectories. Across CAME-Bench and LongMemEval, STITCH achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the strongest baseline by 35.6%, with the largest gains as trajectory length increases. Our analysis shows that intent indexing substantially reduces retrieval noise, supporting intent-aware memory for robust long-horizon reasoning.
Authors: Yelin Chen, Fanjin Zhang, Suping Sun, Yunhe Pang, Yuanchun Wang, Jian Song, Xiaoyan Li, Lei Hou, Shu Zhao, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li
Abstract: Understanding research papers remains challenging for foundation models due to specialized scientific discourse and complex figures and tables, yet existing benchmarks offer limited fine-grained evaluation at scale. To address this gap, we introduce RPC-Bench, a large-scale question-answering benchmark built from review-rebuttal exchanges of high-quality computer science papers, containing 15K human-verified QA pairs. We design a fine-grained taxonomy aligned with the scientific research flow to assess models' ability to understand and answer why, what, and how questions in scholarly contexts. We also define an elaborate LLM-human interaction annotation framework to support large-scale labeling and quality control. Following the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm, we develop a scalable framework that evaluates models on correctness-completeness and conciseness, with high agreement to human judgment. Experiments reveal that even the strongest models (GPT-5) achieve only 68.2% correctness-completeness, dropping to 37.46% after conciseness adjustment, highlighting substantial gaps in precise academic paper understanding. Our code and data are available at https://rpc-bench.github.io/.
Authors: Ken Deng, Yifu Qiu, Yoni Kasten, Shay B. Cohen, Yftah Ziser
Abstract: We study whether vision-language models (VLMs) can solve relative camera pose estimation (RCPE) from image pairs, a direct test of multi-view spatial reasoning. We cast RCPE as a discrete verbal classification task and introduce \texttt{VRRPI-Bench}, built from real RGB-D frames with object-centric camera motion, and \texttt{VRRPI-Diag}, which isolates individual motion degrees of freedom. Humans (0.91) and specialized geometric pipelines such as LoFTR (0.99) solve the task reliably, yet the best VLM reaches only 0.66 and most others remain near random. Our analyses show that this gap is not basic spatial competence: strong VLMs are near ceiling on single-image benchmarks, but most remain near random once reasoning must span views. They are unstable under source-target reversal (best 59.7\% consistency) and remain weak even in simplified single-DoF settings, especially on optical-axis motions such as roll and depth translation (GPT-5: 0.46 on roll). These failures are useful: they localize concrete missing capabilities, namely cross-view correspondence, view-consistent reasoning, and projective camera-motion understanding, making RCPE a targeted diagnostic for improving multi-view spatial reasoning in VLMs.
Authors: Weiyu Sun, Liangliang Chen, Yongnuo Cai, Huiru Xie, Yi Zeng, Ying Zhang
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) hold significant promise for revolutionizing traditional education and reducing teachers' workload. However, accurately interpreting unconstrained STEM student handwritten solutions with intertwined mathematical formulas, diagrams, and textual reasoning poses a significant challenge due to the lack of authentic and domain-specific benchmarks. Additionally, current evaluation paradigms predominantly rely on the outcomes of downstream tasks (e.g., auto-grading), which often probe only a subset of the recognized content, thereby failing to capture the MLLMs' understanding of complex handwritten logic as a whole. To bridge this gap, we release EDU-CIRCUIT-HW, a dataset consisting of 1,300+ authentic student handwritten solutions from a university-level STEM course. Utilizing the expert-verified verbatim transcriptions and grading reports of student solutions, we simultaneously evaluate various MLLMs' upstream recognition fidelity and downstream auto-grading performance. Our evaluation uncovers an astonishing scale of latent failures within MLLM-recognized student handwritten content, highlighting the models' insufficient reliability for auto-grading and other understanding-oriented applications in high-stakes educational settings. As a potential solution, we present a case study demonstrating that leveraging identified error patterns to preemptively detect and correct recognition errors, while requiring only minimal human intervention (e.g., routing 3.3% of assignments to human graders and the remainder to the GPT-5.1 grader), can effectively enhance the robustness of the deployed AI-enabled grading system. Code and dataset are available in this GitHub repo: https://gt-learning-innovation.github.io/CIRCUIT_EDU_HW_ACL.
URLs: https://gt-learning-innovation.github.io/CIRCUIT_EDU_HW_ACL.
Authors: I-Chun Arthur Liu, Krzysztof Choromanski, Sandy Huang, Connor Schenck
Abstract: Leveraging pre-trained 2D image representations in behavior cloning policies has achieved great success and has become a standard approach for robotic manipulation. However, such representations fail to capture the 3D spatial information about objects and scenes that is essential for precise manipulation. In this work, we introduce Contrastive Learning for 3D Multi-View Action-Conditioned Robotic Manipulation Pretraining (CLAMP), a novel 3D pre-training framework that utilizes point clouds and robot actions. From the merged point cloud computed from RGB-D images and camera extrinsics, we re-render multi-view four-channel image observations with depth and 3D coordinates, including dynamic wrist views, to provide clearer views of target objects for high-precision manipulation tasks. The pre-trained encoders learn to associate the 3D geometric and positional information of objects with robot action patterns via contrastive learning on large-scale simulated robot trajectories. During encoder pre-training, we pre-train a Diffusion Policy to initialize the policy weights for fine-tuning, which is essential for improving fine-tuning sample efficiency and performance. After pre-training, we fine-tune the policy on a limited amount of task demonstrations using the learned image and action representations. We demonstrate that this pre-training and fine-tuning design substantially improves learning efficiency and policy performance on unseen tasks. Furthermore, we show that CLAMP outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across six simulated tasks and five real-world tasks. The project website and videos can be found at https://clamp3d.github.io/CLAMP/.
Authors: Huiyang Yi, Xiaojian Shen, Yonggang Wu, Duxin Chen, He Wang, Wenwu Yu
Abstract: Causal discovery from time series is a fundamental task in machine learning. However, its widespread adoption is hindered by a reliance on untestable causal assumptions and by the lack of robustness-oriented evaluation in existing benchmarks. To address these challenges, we propose CausalCompass, a flexible and extensible benchmark framework designed to assess the robustness of time-series causal discovery (TSCD) methods under violations of modeling assumptions. To demonstrate the practical utility of CausalCompass, we conduct extensive benchmarking of representative TSCD algorithms across eight assumption-violation scenarios. Our experimental results indicate that no single method consistently attains optimal performance across all settings. Nevertheless, the methods exhibiting superior overall performance across diverse scenarios are almost invariably deep learning-based approaches. We further provide hyperparameter sensitivity analyses to deepen the understanding of these findings. We additionally conduct ablation experiments to explain the strong performance of deep learning-based methods under assumption violations. We also find, somewhat surprisingly, that NTS-NOTEARS relies heavily on standardized preprocessing in practice, performing poorly in the vanilla setting but exhibiting strong performance after standardization. Finally, our work aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic evaluation of TSCD methods under assumption violations, thereby facilitating their broader adoption in real-world applications. The user-friendly implementation, documentation and datasets are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CausalCompass-anonymous-5B4F/.
URLs: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CausalCompass-anonymous-5B4F/.
Authors: Nuno Fachada, Daniel Fernandes, Carlos M. Fernandes, Jo\~ao P. Matos-Carvalho
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can now synthesize non-trivial executable code from textual descriptions, raising an important question: can LLMs reliably implement agent-based models from standardized specifications in a way that supports replication, verification, and validation? We address this question by evaluating 17 contemporary LLMs on a controlled ODD-to-code translation task, using the PPHPC predator-prey model as a fully specified reference. Generated Python implementations are assessed through staged executability checks, model-independent statistical comparison against a validated NetLogo baseline, and quantitative measures of runtime efficiency and maintainability. Results show that behaviorally faithful implementations are achievable but not guaranteed, and that executability alone is insufficient for scientific use. GPT-4.1 consistently produces statistically valid and efficient implementations, with Claude 3.7 Sonnet performing well but less reliably. Overall, the findings clarify both the promise and current limitations of LLMs as model engineering tools, with implications for reproducible agent-based and ecological modeling.
Authors: Yuheng Luo, Shuyan Li, Zhong Cao
Abstract: Feature selection remains a major challenge in medical prediction, where existing approaches such as LASSO often lack robustness and interpretability. We introduce GRASP, a novel framework that couples Shapley value driven attribution with group $L_{21}$ regularization to extract compact and non-redundant feature sets. GRASP first distills group level importance scores from a pretrained tree model via SHAP, then enforces structured sparsity through group $L_{21}$ regularized logistic regression, yielding stable and interpretable selections. Extensive comparisons with LASSO, SHAP, and deep learning based methods show that GRASP consistently delivers comparable or superior predictive accuracy, while identifying fewer, less redundant, and more stable features.
Authors: Andrei Kojukhov, Arkady Bovshover
Abstract: Cybersecurity decision-making increasingly occurs in environments characterized by uncertainty, partial observability, and adversarial manipulation, where heterogeneous signals from multiple sources are often incomplete, ambiguous, or conflicting. Traditional Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) systems rely on deterministic pipelines and threshold-based triggers, limiting their ability to support reliable decision-making under such conditions. This paper proposes a probabilistic, agentic framework for cybersecurity orchestration that models decision-making as a meta-cognitive process. The framework decomposes cybersecurity functions into interacting agents responsible for detection, hypothesis formation, contextualization, explanation, and governance, coordinated through a meta-cognitive judgement mechanism. This mechanism evaluates uncertainty, agent disagreement, and operational constraints to determine decision readiness, enabling adaptive strategies including automated action, escalation, deferral, and evidence refinement. Empirical evaluation on benchmark datasets (CICIDS2017 and NSL-KDD), augmented with adversarial and uncertain conditions, demonstrates that the proposed approach improves robustness and decision quality compared to deterministic and single-agent baselines. The framework achieves higher accuracy under noise, reduces false positive rates, and produces better-calibrated confidence estimates, while enabling more adaptive and context-aware decision behavior. By explicitly modeling meta-cognitive processes - monitoring, evaluation, control, and reflection - the proposed approach reframes cybersecurity as an instance of AI-mediated cognitive problem solving, supporting accountable autonomy and more effective human-AI collaboration in adversarial environments.
Authors: Arjun Chatterjee, Sayeed Sajjad Razin, John Wu, Siddhartha Laghuvarapu, Jathurshan Pradeepkumar, Jimeng Sun
Abstract: Quantifying uncertainty in clinical predictions is critical for high-stakes diagnosis tasks. Conformal prediction offers a principled approach by providing prediction sets with theoretical coverage guarantees. However, in practice, patient distribution shifts violate the i.i.d. assumptions underlying standard conformal methods, leading to poor coverage in healthcare settings. In this work, we evaluate several conformal prediction approaches on EEG seizure classification, a task with known distribution shift challenges and label uncertainty. We demonstrate that personalized calibration strategies can improve coverage by over 20 percentage points while maintaining comparable prediction set sizes. Our implementation is available via PyHealth, an open-source healthcare AI framework: https://github.com/sunlabuiuc/PyHealth.
Authors: Joao Manoel Herrera Pinheiro, Gabriela Do Nascimento Herrera, Luciana Bueno Dos Reis Fernandes, Alvaro Doria Dos Santos, Ricardo V. Godoy, Eduardo A. B. Almeida, Helena Carolina Onody, Marcelo Andrade Da Costa Vieira, Angelica Maria Penteado-Dias, Marcelo Becker
Abstract: Accurate taxonomic identification is the cornerstone of biodiversity monitoring and agricultural management, particularly for the hyper-diverse superfamily Ichneumonoidea. Comprising the families Ichneumonidae and Braconidae, these parasitoid wasps are ecologically critical for regulating insect populations, yet they remain one of the most taxonomically challenging groups due to their cryptic morphology and vast number of undescribed species. To address the scarcity of robust digital resources for these key groups, we present a curated image dataset designed to advance automated identification systems. The dataset contains 3,556 high-resolution images, primarily focused on Neotropical Ichneumonidae and Braconidae, while also including supplementary families such as Andrenidae, Apidae, Bethylidae, Chrysididae, Colletidae, Halictidae, Megachilidae, Pompilidae, and Vespidae to improve model robustness. Crucially, a subset of 1,739 images is annotated in COCO format, featuring multi-class bounding boxes for the full insect body, wing venation, and scale bars. This resource provides a foundation for developing computer vision models capable of identifying these families.
Authors: Lingwei Gu, Nour Jedidi, Jimmy Lin
Abstract: How do large language models (LLMs) know what they know? Answering this question has been difficult because pre-training data is often a "black box" - unknown or inaccessible. The recent release of nanochat - a family of small LLMs with fully open pre-training data - addresses this as it provides a transparent view into where a model's parametric knowledge comes from. Towards the goal of understanding how knowledge is encoded by LLMs, we release NanoKnow, a benchmark dataset that partitions questions from Natural Questions and SQuAD into splits based on whether their answers are present in nanochat's pre-training corpus. Using these splits, we can now properly disentangle the sources of knowledge that LLMs rely on when producing an output. To demonstrate NanoKnow's utility, we conduct experiments using eight nanochat checkpoints. Our findings show: (1) closed-book accuracy is strongly influenced by answer frequency in the pre-training data, (2) providing external evidence can mitigate this frequency dependence, (3) even with external evidence, models are more accurate when answers were seen during pre-training, demonstrating that parametric and external knowledge are complementary, and (4) non-relevant information is harmful, with accuracy decreasing based on both the position and the number of non-relevant contexts. We release all NanoKnow artifacts at https://github.com/castorini/NanoKnow.
Authors: Oliver Hoidn, Albert Vong, Aashwin Mishra, Steven Henke, Matthew Seaberg
Abstract: Ptychographic imaging at synchrotron and XFEL sources requires dense overlapping scans, limiting throughput and increasing dose. Extending coherent diffractive imaging to overlap-free operation on extended samples remains an open problem. Here, we extend PtychoPINN (O. Hoidn \emph{et al.}, \emph{Scientific Reports} \textbf{13}, 22789, 2023) to deliver \emph{overlap-free, single-shot} reconstructions in a Fresnel coherent diffraction imaging (CDI) geometry while also accelerating conventional multi-shot ptychography. The framework couples a differentiable forward model of coherent scattering with a Poisson photon-counting likelihood; real-space overlap enters as a tunable parameter via coordinate-based grouping rather than a hard requirement. On synthetic benchmarks, reconstructions remain accurate at low counts ($\sim\!10^4$ photons/frame), and overlap-free single-shot reconstruction with an experimental probe reaches amplitude structural similarity (SSIM) 0.904, compared with 0.968 for overlap-constrained reconstruction. Against a data-saturated supervised model with the same backbone (16,384 training images), PtychoPINN achieves higher SSIM with only 1,024 images and generalizes to unseen illumination profiles. Per-graphics processing unit (GPU) throughput is approximately $40\times$ that of least-squares maximum-likelihood (LSQ-ML) reconstruction at matched $128\times128$ resolution. These results, validated on experimental data from the Advanced Photon Source and the Linac Coherent Light Source, unify single-exposure Fresnel CDI and overlapped ptychography within one framework, supporting dose-efficient, high-throughput imaging at modern light sources.
Authors: Zhengzhao Ma, Xueru Wen, Boxi Cao, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jinglin Yang, Min He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) significantly enhances large language models (LLMs) reasoning but severely suffers from calibration degeneration, where models become excessively over-confident in incorrect answers. Previous studies devote to directly incorporating calibration objective into existing optimization target. However, our theoretical analysis demonstrates that there exists a fundamental gradient conflict between the optimization for maximizing policy accuracy and minimizing calibration error. Building on this insight, we propose DCPO, a simple yet effective framework that systematically decouples reasoning and calibration objectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DCPO not only preserves accuracy on par with GRPO but also achieves the best calibration performance and substantially mitigates the over-confidence issue. Our study provides valuable insights and practical solution for more reliable LLM deployment.
Authors: Kemal Kirtac
Abstract: This paper studies whether a lightweight supervised aggregator can combine diverse zero-shot large language model outputs into a stronger downstream signal for corporate disclosure classification. Zero-shot LLMs can read disclosures without task-specific fine-tuning, but their predictions often vary across prompt perspectives, model families, and confidence levels. I examine this problem with a multi-prompt framework in which three fixed zero-shot LLM classifiers read each disclosure from different financial perspectives and output a sentiment label, a confidence score, and a short rationale. A logistic meta-classifier then aggregates these outputs to predict next-day stock return direction. To reduce pretrained-model contamination, I restrict evaluation to a post-release sample of 9{,}860 U.S.\ corporate disclosures issued by large publicly traded firms between January 2025 and March 2026, after the release of the frozen base LLMs used in the experiment. Results show that the trained aggregator outperforms single classifiers, majority vote, confidence-weighted voting, a zero-shot LLM judge, and a FinBERT baseline. Balanced accuracy rises from 0.566 for the best single classifier to 0.606 for the trained aggregator. The gain is largest in mixed-signal disclosures where classifiers disagree. The results suggest that zero-shot LLM outputs contain complementary financial signals, while also showing that the strongest gains come from supervised aggregation rather than from zero-shot voting alone.
Authors: Jinquan Zheng, Jia Yuan, Jiacheng Yao, Chenyang Gu, Pujun Zheng, Guoxiu He
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) used for multiple-choice and pairwise evaluation tasks often exhibit selection bias due to non-semantic factors like option positions and label symbols. Existing inference-time debiasing is costly and may harm reasoning, while pointwise training ignores that the same question should yield consistent answers across permutations. To address this issue, we propose Permutation-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (PA-GRPO), which mitigates selection bias by enforcing permutation-consistent semantic reasoning. PA-GRPO constructs a permutation group for each instance by generating multiple candidate permutations, and optimizes the model using two complementary mechanisms: (1) cross-permutation advantage, which computes advantages relative to the mean reward over all permutations of the same instance, and (2) consistency-aware reward, which encourages the model to produce consistent decisions across different permutations. Experimental results demonstrate that PA-GRPO outperforms strong baselines across seven benchmarks, substantially reducing selection bias while maintaining high overall performance. The code is available on github (https://github.com/ECNU-Text-Computing/PA-GRPO).
Authors: Selim An, Il hong Suh, Yeseong Kim
Abstract: Quantization techniques such as BitsAndBytes, AWQ, and GPTQ are widely used as a standard method in deploying large language models but often degrades accuracy when using low-bit representations, e.g., 4 bits. Low-rank correction methods (e.g., LQER, QERA, ASER) has been proposed to mitigate this issue, however, they restore all layers and insert error-correction modules into every decoder block, which increases latency and memory overhead. To address this limitation, we propose GlowQ, a group-shared low-rank approximation for quantized LLMs that caches a single shared right factor per input-sharing group and restores only the groups or layers that yield the highest accuracy benefit. GlowQ computes the high-precision projection once per input-sharing group and reuses it across its modules, reducing parameter and memory overhead, and retaining the expressivity of layer-specific corrections. We also propose a selective variant, GlowQ-S, that applies the cached shared module only where it provides the largest benefit. Compared with strong baselines, our approach reduces TTFB by (5.6%) and increases throughput by (9.6%) on average, while reducing perplexity on WikiText-2 by (0.17%) and increasing downstream accuracy by 0.42 percentage points. The selective model GlowQ-S further reduces latency, cutting TTFB by (23.4%) and increasing throughput by (37.4%), while maintaining accuracy within 0.2 percentage points on average. Code is available at https://github.com/ahnselim/GlowQ.
Authors: Ziyue Zeng, Xun Su, Haoyuan Liu, Bingyu Lu, Yui Tatsumi, Hiroshi Watanabe
Abstract: At ultra-low bitrates, high-fidelity reconstruction requires sampling plausible videos from the posterior rather than regressing to oversmoothed conditional means. We propose Generative Video Codebook Codec (GVCC), a zero-shot framework in which a pretrained video generative model serves directly as the decoder, and the transmitted bitstream specifies its generation trajectory. Modern rectified-flow video models are typically sampled with deterministic ODE solvers, which leave no per-step stochastic channel for transmitting compressed information. GVCC addresses this by converting the deterministic flow sampler into an equivalent marginal-preserving stochastic process, so that information can be transmitted by encoding the per-step stochastic innovations. Unlike images, videos introduce longer temporal dependencies and more diverse conditioning modes. We instantiate GVCC in three practical modes: Text-to-Video (T2V) without a reference frame, autoregressive Image-to-Video (I2V) with tail latent correction, and First-Last-Frame-to-Video (FLF2V) with boundary-sharing Group of Pictures (GOP) chaining. On UVG, GVCC achieves the lowest LPIPS among evaluated baselines across three representative bitrate regimes (down to ${\sim}$0.003\,bpp), with 65\% LPIPS reduction over DCVC-RT at matched bitrate.
Authors: Stella Girtsou, Konstantinos Alexis, Giorgos Giannopoulos, Charalambos Kontoes
Abstract: The increasing frequency and severity of climate related disasters have intensified the need for real time monitoring, early warning, and informed decision-making. Earth Observation (EO), powered by satellite data and Machine Learning (ML), offers powerful tools to meet these challenges. Foundation Models (FMs) have revolutionized EO ML by enabling general-purpose pretraining on large scale remote sensing datasets. However most existing models rely on high-resolution satellite imagery with low revisit rates limiting their suitability for fast-evolving phenomena and time critical emergency response. In this work, we present HighFM, a first cut approach towards a FM for high temporal resolution, multispectral EO data. Leveraging over 2 TB of SEVIRI imagery from the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) platform, we adapt the SatMAE masked autoencoding framework to learn robust spatiotemporal representations. To support real time monitoring, we enhance the original architecture with fine grained temporal encodings to capture short term variability. The pretrained models are then finetuned on cloud masking and active fire detection tasks. We benchmark our SEVIRI pretrained Vision Transformers against traditional baselines and recent geospatial FMs, demonstrating consistent gains across both balanced accuracy and IoU metrics. Our results highlight the potential of temporally dense geostationary data for real-time EO, offering a scalable path toward foundation models for disaster detection and tracking.
Authors: Mingyu Yang, Wentao Li, Wei Wang
Abstract: Hybrid queries combining high-dimensional vector similarity search with spatio-temporal filters are increasingly critical for modern retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. Existing systems typically handle these workloads by nesting vector indices within low-dimensional spatial structures, such as R-trees. However, this decoupled architecture fragments the vector space, forcing the query engine to invoke multiple disjoint sub-indices per query. This fragmentation destroys graph routing connectivity, incurs severe traversal overhead, and struggles to optimize for complex spatial boundaries. In this paper, we propose CubeGraph, a novel indexing framework designed to natively integrate vector search with arbitrary spatial constraints. CubeGraph partitions the spatial domain using a hierarchical grid, maintaining modular vector graphs within each cell. During query execution, CubeGraph dynamically stitches together adjacent cube-level indices on the fly whenever their spatial cells intersect with the query filter. This dynamic graph integration restores global connectivity, enabling a unified, single-pass nearest-neighbor traversal that eliminates the overhead of fragmented sub-index invocations. Extensive evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that CubeGraph significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, offering superior query execution performance, scalability, and flexibility for complex hybrid workloads.
Authors: Md Aminur Hossain, Ayush V. Patel, Siddhant Gole, Sanjay K. Singh, Biplab Banerjee
Abstract: Remote sensing semantic segmentation requires models that can jointly capture fine spatial details and high-level semantic context across complex scenes. While classical encoder-decoder architectures such as U-Net remain strong baselines, they often struggle to fully exploit global semantics and structured feature interactions. In this work, we propose HQF-Net, a hybrid quantum-classical multi-scale fusion network for remote sensing image segmentation. HQF-Net integrates multi-scale semantic guidance from a frozen DINOv3 ViT-L/16 backbone with a customized U-Net architecture through a Deformable Multiscale Cross-Attention Fusion (DMCAF) module. To enhance feature refinement, the framework further introduces quantum-enhanced skip connections (QSkip) and a Quantum bottleneck with Mixture-of-Experts (QMoE), which combines complementary local, global, and directional quantum circuits within an adaptive routing mechanism. Experiments on three remote sensing benchmarks show consistent improvements with the proposed design. HQF-Net achieves 0.8568 mIoU and 96.87% overall accuracy on LandCover.ai, 71.82% mIoU on OpenEarthMap, and 55.28% mIoU with 99.37% overall accuracy on SeasoNet. An architectural ablation study further confirms the contribution of each major component. These results show that structured hybrid quantum-classical feature processing is a promising direction for improving remote sensing semantic segmentation under near-term quantum constraints.
Authors: Santiago Param\'es-Est\'evez, Nicol\'as Filloy-Montesino, Jorge Fern\'andez-Fabeiro, Jos\'e Carlos Mouri\~no-Gallego
Abstract: The technical support team of a supercomputing centre accumulates, over the course of decades, a large volume of resolved incidents that constitute critical operational knowledge. At the Galician Supercomputing Center (CESGA) this history has been managed for over twenty years with Request Tracker (RT), whose built-in search engine has significant limitations that hinder knowledge reuse by the support staff. This paper presents Fragata, a semantic ticket search system that combines modern information retrieval techniques with the full RT history. The system can find relevant past incidents regardless of language, the presence of typos, or the specific wording of the query. The architecture is deployed on CESGA's infrastructure, supports incremental updates without service interruption, and offloads the most expensive stages to the FinisTerrae III supercomputer. Preliminary results show a substantial qualitative improvement over RT's native search.
Authors: Jasmine Moreira
Abstract: The widespread adoption of AI-assisted development tools in 2025 -- and the emergence of vibe coding, a practice of generating complete applications from natural language without verification -- exposed a critical and tool-agnostic failure pattern: experienced developers who used frontier AI models were measurably slower in objective evaluations despite believing they were faster. Concurrently, 10.3% of AI-generated applications in a production showcase contained critical security flaws. This paper argues that these failures share a structural cause -- the verification gap: every large language model (LLM), regardless of interface or capability, operates as a stochastic generator with zero internal semantic verification capability. The tool is irrelevant; the process is determinative. We present IACDM (Interactive Adversarial Convergence Development Methodology), a structured 8-phase framework designed to address the verification gap through external verification agents (VA) operating at discrete gates. Its three pillars are: (1) deep problem discovery via Hierarchical Semantic Analysis before any technical solution; (2) persistent knowledge management across sessions; and (3) systematic adversarial critique through specialized lenses before implementation. The methodology is tool-agnostic by construction, grounded in established software engineering tradition, and applied across more than 20 projects by multiple practitioners in a production R&D environment. Limitations are formalized as testable hypotheses for future empirical validation.
Authors: Nisrine Rair, Alban Goupil, Valeriu Vrabie, Emmanuel Chochoy
Abstract: Subjective NLP datasets typically aggregate annotator judgments into a single gold label, making it difficult to diagnose whether disagreement reflects unclear criteria, collapsed distinctions, or legitimate plurality. We propose a \emph{schema-level diagnostic} for auditing expert-designed annotation schemas \emph{prior to} gold-label commitment, using only multi-annotator criterion judgments. The diagnostic separates two failure modes: unstable criteria with hard-to-operationalize boundaries, and systematic overlap that blurs the boundaries between mutually exclusive categories. Applied to persuasive value extraction in commercial documents, we find that disagreement is not diffuse: instability concentrates in a few criteria, while nearly half of covered sentences activate multiple categories. These signals align with where domain experts disagree, yielding an evidence-based audit for tightening guidelines, revising category structure, or reconsidering the annotation paradigm.
Authors: Meghana Kshirsagar, Allen Nie, Ching-An Cheng, Fanglei Xue, Rahul Dodhia, Juan Lavista Ferres, Kevin K. Yang, Frank DiMaio
Abstract: We introduce RosettaSearch, an inference-time multi-objective optimization approach for backbone conditioned protein sequence design. We use large language models (LLMs) as a generative optimizer within a search algorithm capable of controlled exploration and exploitation, using rewards computed from RosettaFold3, a structure prediction model, under a strict computational budget. In a large-scale evaluation, we apply RosettaSearch to 400 suboptimal sequences generated by LigandMPNN (a state-of-the-art model trained for protein sequence design), recovering high-fidelity designs that LigandMPNN's single-pass decoding fails to produce. RosettaSearch's designs show improvements in structural fidelity metrics ranging between 18% to 68%, translating to a 2.5x improvement in design success rate. We observe that these gains in success rate are robust when RosettaSearch-designed sequences are evaluated with an independent structure prediction oracle (Chai-1) and generalize across two distinct LLM families (o4-mini and Gemini-3), with performance scaling consistently with reasoning capability. We further demonstrate that RosettaSearch improves the sequence fidelity of ProteinMPNN designs for de novo backbones from the Dayhoff atlas, showing that the approach generalizes beyond native protein structures to computationally generated backbones. We also demonstrate a multi-modal extension of RosettaSearch with vision-language models, where images of predicted protein structures are used as feedback to incorporate structural context to guide protein sequence generation. To our knowledge, this is the first large-scale demonstration that LLMs can serve as effective generative optimizers for backbone-conditioned protein sequence design, yielding systematic gains without any model retraining.
Authors: Zain Naboulsi
Abstract: AI coding assistants have proliferated rapidly, yet structured pedagogical frameworks for learning these tools remain scarce. Developers face a gap between tool documentation and practical mastery, relying on fragmented resources such as blog posts, video tutorials, and trial-and-error. We present cc-self-train, a modular interactive curriculum for learning Claude Code, an agentic AI coding tool, through hands-on project construction. The system introduces five contributions: (1) a persona progression model that adapts instructor tone across four stages (Guide, Collaborator, Peer, Launcher), operationalizing Gradual Release of Responsibility for AI-mediated instruction; (2) an adaptive learning system that observes engagement quality through hook-based heuristics and adjusts scaffolding at two timescales, using streak detection for mid-module intervention and aggregate metrics for module-boundary persona changes; (3) a cross-domain unified curriculum in which five distinct project domains share identical feature sequencing, enabling transfer learning; (4) a step-pacing mechanism with explicit pause primitives to manage information overload in an AI-as-instructor context; and (5) an auto-updating curriculum design in which the onboarding agent detects upstream tool changes and updates teaching materials before instruction begins. A parametrized test suite enforces structural consistency as a proxy for pedagogical invariants across all 50 modules. A pilot evaluation with 27 participants shows statistically significant reported self-efficacy gains across all 10 assessed skill areas (p < 0.001), with the largest effects on advanced features such as hooks and custom skills. We discuss implications for the design of auto-updating educational systems.
Authors: Yunke Ao, Le Chen, Bruce D. Lee, Assefa S. Wahd, Aline Czarnobai, Philipp F\"urnstahl, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Andreas Krause
Abstract: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has become the predominant algorithm for on-policy reinforcement learning due to its scalability and empirical robustness across domains. However, there is a significant disconnect between the underlying foundations of trust region methods and the heuristic clipped objective used in PPO. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing the Bounded Ratio Reinforcement Learning (BRRL) framework. We formulate a novel regularized and constrained policy optimization problem and derive its analytical optimal solution. We prove that this solution ensures monotonic performance improvement. To handle parameterized policy classes, we develop a policy optimization algorithm called Bounded Policy Optimization (BPO) that minimizes an advantage-weighted divergence between the policy and the analytic optimal solution from BRRL. We further establish a lower bound on the expected performance of the resulting policy in terms of the BPO loss function. Notably, our framework also provides a new theoretical lens to interpret the success of the PPO loss, and connects trust region policy optimization and the Cross-Entropy Method (CEM). We additionally extend BPO to Group-relative BPO (GBPO) for LLM fine-tuning. Empirical evaluations of BPO across MuJoCo, Atari, and complex IsaacLab environments (e.g., Humanoid locomotion), and of GBPO for LLM fine-tuning tasks, demonstrate that BPO and GBPO generally match or outperform PPO and GRPO in stability and final performance.
Authors: Jianyang Gao, Yutong Gou, Yuexuan Xu, Jifan Shi, Yongyi Yang, Shuolin Li, Raymond Chi-Wing Wong, Cheng Long
Abstract: This technical note revisits the relationship between RaBitQ and TurboQuant under a unified comparison framework. We compare the two methods in terms of methodology, theoretical guarantees, and empirical performance, using a reproducible, transparent, and symmetric setup. Our results show that, despite the claimed advantage of TurboQuant, TurboQuant performs worse than RaBitQ in most tested settings of inner-product estimation, nearest-neighbor search and KV cache quantization. We further find that several reported runtime and recall results in the TurboQuant paper could not be reproduced from the released implementation under the stated configuration. Overall, this note clarifies the shared structure and genuine differences between the two lines of work, while documenting reproducibility issues in the experimental results reported by the TurboQuant paper.
Authors: Taha Hammadia, Lucas Rea, Ahmad Mohammad Saber, Amr Youssef, Deepa Kundur
Abstract: The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) as assistants in electric grid operations promises to streamline compliance and decision-making but exposes new vulnerabilities to prompt-based adversarial attacks. This paper evaluates the risk of jailbreaking LLMs, i.e., circumventing safety alignments to produce outputs violating regulatory standards, assuming threats from authorized users, such as operators, who craft malicious prompts to elicit non-compliant guidance. Three state-of-the-art LLMs (OpenAI's GPT-4o mini, Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite, and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Haiku) were tested against Baseline, BitBypass, and DeepInception jailbreaking methods across scenarios derived from nine NERC Reliability Standards (EOP, TOP, and CIP). In the initial broad experiment, the overall Attack Success Rate (ASR) was 33.1%, with DeepInception proving most effective at 63.17% ASR. Claude 3.5 Haiku exhibited complete resistance (0% ASR), while Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite was most vulnerable (55.04% ASR) and GPT-4o mini moderately susceptible (44.34% ASR). A follow-up experiment refining malicious wording in Baseline and BitBypass attacks yielded a 30.6% ASR, confirming that subtle prompt adjustments can enhance simpler methods' efficacy.
Authors: Qiliang Liang, Hansi Wang, Zhong Liang, Yang Liu
Abstract: LLM agents increasingly rely on reusable skills, capability packages that combine instructions, control flow, constraints, and tool calls. In most current agent systems, however, skills are still represented by text-heavy artifacts, including SKILL{.}md-style documents and structured records whose machine-usable evidence remains embedded largely in natural-language descriptions. This poses a challenge for skill-centered agent systems: managing skill collections and using skills to support agent both require reasoning over invocation interfaces, execution structure, and concrete side effects that are often entangled in a single textual surface. An explicit representation of skill knowledge may therefore help make these artifacts easier for machines to acquire and leverage. Drawing on Memory Organization Packets, Script Theory, and Conceptual Dependency from Schank and Abelson's classical work on linguistic knowledge representation, we introduce what is, to our knowledge, the first structured representation for agent skill artifacts that disentangles skill-level scheduling signals, scene-level execution structure, and logic-level action and resource-use evidence: the Scheduling-Structural-Logical (SSL) representation. We instantiate SSL with an LLM-based normalizer and evaluate it on a corpus of skills in two tasks, Skill Discovery and Risk Assessment, and superiorly outperform the text-only baselines: in Skill Discovery, SSL improves MRR from 0.573 to 0.707; in Risk Assessment, it improves macro F1 from 0.744 to 0.787. These findings reveal that explicit, source-grounded structure makes agent skills easier to search and review. They also suggest that SSL is best understood as a practical step toward more inspectable, reusable, and operationally actionable skill representations for agent systems, rather than as a finished standard or an end-to-end mechanism for managing and using skills.
Authors: Kevin McKee, Thomas Hazy, Yicong Zheng, Zacharie Bugaud, Thomas Miconi
Abstract: Block-sequential continual learning demands that a single model both protect prior solutions from catastrophic forgetting and efficiently infer at inference time which prior solution matches the current input without task labels. We present Functional Task Networks (FTN), a parameter-isolation method inspired by structural and dynamical motifs found in the mammalian neocortex. Similar to mixture-of-experts, this method uses a high dimensional, self-organizing binary mask over a large population of small but deep networks, inspired by dendritic models of pyramidal neurons. The mask is produced by a three-stage procedure: (1) gradient descent on a continuous mask identifies task-relevant neurons, (2) a smoothing kernel biases the result toward spatial contiguity, (3) and k-winner-take-all binarizes the resulting group at a fixed capacity budget. Like mixture-of-experts, each neuron is an independent deep network, so disjoint masks give exactly disjoint gradient updates, providing structural guarantees against catastrophic forgetting. This three-stage procedure recovers the sub-network of a previously-trained task in a single gradient step, providing unsupervised task segmentation at inference time. We test it on three continual-learning benchmarks: (1) a synthetic multi-task classification/regression generator, (2) MNIST with shuffled class labels (pure concept shift), and (3) Permuted MNIST (domain shift). On all three, FTN with fine grained smoothing (FTN-Slow) results in nearly zero forgetting. FTN with a large kernel and only 2 iterations of smoothing (FTN-Fast) trades off some retention for increased speed. We show that the spatial organization mechanism reduces the effective mask search from the combinatorial top-k subset problem in O(C(H,K)) to the complexity of a near-linear scan in O(H) over compact cortical neighborhoods, which is parallelized by the gradient-based update.
Authors: Ma Zirui, Fan Zhihua, Li Wenxing, Wu Haibin, Zhang Fulin, Ye Xiaochun, Li Wenming
Abstract: Speculative decoding enhances the inference efficiency of large language models (LLMs) by generating drafts using a small draft language model (DLM) and verifying them in batches with a large target language model (TLM). However, adaptive drafting inference on a mobile single-NPU-PIM system faces idle overhead in traditional operator-level synchronous execution and wasted computation in asynchronous execution due to fluctuations in draft length. This paper introduces AHASD, a task-level asynchronous mobile NPU-PIM heterogeneous architecture for speculative decoding. Notably, AHASD achieves parallel drafting on the PIM and verification on a single NPU through task-level DLM-TLM decoupling and specifically, it incorporates Entropy-History-Aware Drafting Control and Time-Aware Pre-Verification Control to dynamically manage adaptive drafting algorithm execution and pre-verification timing, suppressing invalid drafting based on low-confidence drafts. Additionally, AHASD integrates Attention Algorithm Units and Gated Task Scheduling Units within LPDDR5-PIM to enable attention link localization and sub-microsecond task switching on the PIM side. Experimental results for different LLMs and adaptive drafting algorithms show that AHASD achieves up to 4.2$\times$ in throughput and 5.6$\times$ in energy efficiency improvements over a GPU-only baseline, and 1.5$\times$ in throughput and 1.24$\times$ in energy efficiency gains over the state-of-the-art GPU+PIM baseline, with hardware overhead below 3% of the DRAM area.
Authors: Zeming Dong, Yuejun Guo, Qiang Hu, Yao Zhang, Maxime Cordy, Hao Liu, Mike Papadakis, Yongqiang Lyu
Abstract: Source code and its accompanying comments are complementary yet naturally aligned modalities-code encodes structural logic while comments capture developer intent. However, existing vulnerability detection methods mostly rely on single-modality code representations, overlooking the complementary semantic information embedded in comments and thus limiting their generalization across complex code structures and logical relationships. To address this, we propose MultiVul, a multimodal contrastive framework that aligns code and comment representations through dual similarity learning and consistency regularization, augmented with diverse code-text pairs to improve robustness. Experiments on widely adopted DiverseVul and Devign datasets across four large language models (LLMs) (i.e., DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B, Qwen2.5-Coder-7B, StarCoder2-7B, and CodeLlama-7B) show that MultiVul achieves up to 27.07% F1 improvement over prompting-based methods and 13.37% over code-only Fine-Tuning, while maintaining comparable inference efficiency.
Authors: Nilavra Pathak, Olivier Jeunen, Eric Lambert
Abstract: Organizations routinely make strategic budget allocations under operational constraints, but often lack a principled way to assess whether realized allocations were close to the best feasible choices in hindsight. We present a retrospective auditing framework based on hindsight regret, defined as the opportunity cost of the realized allocation relative to a constraint-faithful benchmark under the same budget and stability guardrails. The framework estimates regime-specific spend--response functions from historical logs, computes feasible hindsight allocations via constrained optimization, and propagates uncertainty through Monte Carlo evaluation to produce regret distributions, expected lift, and probability-of-improvement summaries. This separates allocation inefficiency from uncertainty in the estimated response surfaces. Experiments on real marketing allocation logs show that the framework yields interpretable post-hoc diagnostics and reveals a practical trade-off between allocation flexibility and detectability: moderate feasible reallocations often capture most measurable gain, while larger shifts move into weak-support regions with higher uncertainty. The result is a practical method for auditing historical budget decisions when online experimentation is costly or infeasible.
Authors: Zhongkai Yu, Haotian Ye, Chenyang Zhou, Ohm Rishabh Venkatachalam, Zaifeng Pan, Zhengding Hu, Junsung Kim, Won Woo Ro, Po-An Tsai, Shuyi Pei, Yangwook Kang, Yufei Ding
Abstract: All current LLM serving systems place the GPU at the center, from production-level attention-FFN disaggregation to NVIDIA's Rubin GPU-LPU heterogeneous platform. Even academic PIM/PNM proposals still treat the GPU as the central hub for cross-device communication. Yet the GPU's compute-rich architecture is fundamentally mismatched with the memory-bound nature of decode-phase attention, inflating serving latency while wasting power and die area on idle compute units. The problem is compounded as reasoning and agentic workloads push context lengths toward one million tokens, making attention latency the primary user-facing bottleneck. To address these inefficiencies, we present AMMA, a multi-chiplet, memory-centric architecture for low-latency long-context attention. AMMA replaces GPU compute dies with HBM-PNM cubes, roughly doubling the available memory bandwidth to better serve memory-bound attention workloads. To translate this bandwidth into proportional performance gains, we introduce (i) a logic-die microarchitecture that fully exploits per-cube internal bandwidth for decode attention under a minimal power and area budget, (ii) a two-level hybrid parallelism scheme, and (iii) a reordered collective flow that reduces intra-chip die-to-die communication overhead. We further conduct a design-space exploration over per-cube compute power and intra-chip D2D link bandwidth, providing actionable guidance for hardware designers. Evaluations show that AMMA achieves 15.5X lower attention latency and 6.9X lower energy consumption compared with the NVIDIA H100.
Authors: Sonali Sharma, Jin Long, George Shih, Sarah Eid, Christian Bluethgen, Francine L. Jacobson, Emily B. Tsai, Global Radiology Consortium, Ahmed M. Alaa, Curtis P. Langlotz
Abstract: Chest X-ray interpretation is one of the most frequently performed diagnostic tasks in medicine and a primary target for AI development, yet current vision-language models are primarily trained on datasets of paired images and reports, not the cognitive processes and visual attention that underlie clinical reasoning. Here, we present CheXthought, a global, multimodal resource containing 103,592 chain-of-thought reasoning traces and 6,609,082 synchronized visual attention annotations across 50,312 multi-read chest X-rays from 501 radiologists in 71 countries. Our analysis reveals clinical reasoning patterns in how experts deploy distinct visual search strategies, integrate clinical context, and communicate uncertainty. We demonstrate the clinical utility of CheXthought across four dimensions. First, CheXthought reasoning significantly outperforms state-of-the-art vision-language model chain-of-thought in factual accuracy and spatial grounding. Second, visual attention data used as an inference-time hint recovers missed findings and significantly reduces hallucinations. Third, vision-language models trained on CheXthought data achieve significantly stronger pathology classification, visual faithfulness, temporal reasoning and uncertainty communication. Fourth, leveraging CheXthought's multi-reader annotations, we predict both human-human and human-AI disagreement directly from an image, enabling transparent communication of case difficulty, uncertainty and model reliability. These findings establish CheXthought as a resource for advancing multimodal clinical reasoning and the development of more transparent, interpretable vision-language models.