Authors: Rong Lu
Abstract: We present TADI (Tool-Augmented Drilling Intelligence), an agentic AI system that transforms drilling operational data into evidence-based analytical intelligence. Applied to the Equinor Volve Field dataset, TADI integrates 1,759 daily drilling reports, selected WITSML real-time objects, 15,634 production records, formation tops, and perforations into a dual-store architecture: DuckDB for structured queries over 12 tables with 65,447 rows, and ChromaDB for semantic search over 36,709 embedded documents. Twelve domain-specialized tools, orchestrated by a large language model via iterative function calling, support multi-step evidence gathering that cross-references structured drilling measurements with daily report narratives. The system parses all 1,759 DDR XML files with zero errors, handles three incompatible well naming conventions, and is backed by 95 automated tests plus a 130-question stress-question taxonomy spanning six operational categories. We formalize the agent's behavior as a sequential tool-selection problem and propose the Evidence Grounding Score (EGS) as a simple grounding-compliance proxy based on measurements, attributed DDR quotations, and required answer sections. The complete 6,084-line, framework-free implementation is reproducible given the public Volve download and an API key, and the case studies and qualitative ablation analysis suggest that domain-specialized tool design, rather than model scale alone, is the primary driver of analytical quality in technical operations.
Authors: Mohd Sameen Chishti, Damilare Peter Oyinloye, Jingyue Li
Abstract: Decentralized, agentic AI marketplaces are rapidly emerging to support software engineering tasks such as debugging, patch generation, and security auditing, often operating without centralized oversight. However, existing reputation mechanisms fail in this setting for three fundamental reasons: agents can strategically optimize against evaluation procedures; demonstrated competence does not reliably transfer across heterogeneous task contexts; and verification rigor varies widely, from lightweight automated checks to costly expert review. Current approaches to reputation drawing on federated learning, blockchain-based AI platforms, and large language model safety research are unable to address these challenges in combination. We therefore propose \textbf{AgentReputation}, a decentralized, three-layer reputation framework for agentic AI systems. The framework separates task execution, reputation services, and tamper-proof persistence to both leverage their respective strengths and enable independent evolution. The framework introduces explicit verification regimes linked to agent reputation metadata, as well as context-conditioned reputation cards that prevent reputation conflation across domains and task types. In addition, AgentReputation provides a decision-facing policy engine that supports resource allocation, access control, and adaptive verification escalation based on risk and uncertainty. Building on this framework, we outline several future research directions, including the development of verification ontologies, methods for quantifying verification strength, privacy-preserving evidence mechanisms, cold-start reputation bootstrapping, and defenses against adversarial manipulation.
Authors: Shubham Kumar, Narendra Ahuja
Abstract: Safety trained large language models (LLMs) can often be induced to answer harmful requests through jailbreak prompts. Because we lack a robust understanding of why LLMs are susceptible to jailbreaks, future frontier models operating more autonomously in higher-stakes settings may similarly be vulnerable to such attacks. Prior work has studied jailbreak success by examining the model's intermediate representations, identifying directions in this space that causally encode concepts like harmfulness and refusal. Then, they globally explain all jailbreak attacks as attempting to reduce or strengthen these concepts (e.g., reduce harmfulness). However, different jailbreak strategies may succeed by strengthening or suppressing different intermediate concepts, and the same jailbreak strategy may not work for different harmful request categories (e.g., violence vs. cyberattack); thus, we seek to give a local explanation -- i.e., why did this specific jailbreak succeed? To address this gap, we introduce LOCA, a method that gives Local, CAusal explanations of jailbreak success by identifying a minimal set of interpretable, intermediate representation changes that causally induce model refusal on an otherwise successful jailbreak request. We evaluate LOCA on harmful original-jailbreak pairs from a large jailbreak benchmark across Gemma and Llama chat models, comparing against prior methods adapted to this setting. LOCA can successfully induce refusal by making, on average, six interpretable changes; prior work routinely fails to achieve refusal even after 20 changes. LOCA is a step toward mechanistic, local explanations of jailbreak success in LLMs. Code to be released.
Authors: Kaituo Zhang, Zhen Xiong, Mingyu Zhong, Zhimeng Jiang, Zhouyuan Yuan, Zhecheng Li, Ying Lin
Abstract: Tool-augmented reasoning has become a popular direction for LLM-based agents, and it is widely assumed to improve reasoning and reliability. However, we demonstrate that this consensus does not always hold: in the presence of semantic distractors, tool-augmented reasoning does not necessarily outperform native CoT. To explain this performance gap, we propose a Factorized Intervention Framework that isolates the cost of prompt formatting, the overhead of the tool-calling protocol, and the actual gain from executing tools. Our analysis reveals a critical tradeoff: under semantic noise, the gains from tools often fail to offset the "tool-use tax", which is the performance degradation introduced by the tool-calling protocol itself. To address this, we introduce G-STEP, a lightweight inference-time gate to mitigate protocol-induced errors. While this yields partial recovery, our findings suggest that more substantial improvements still require strengthening the model's intrinsic reasoning and tool-interaction capabilities.
Authors: Abdulhady Abas Abdullah, Fatemeh Daneshfar, Seyedali Mirjalili, Mourad Oussalah
Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is commonly done via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) or, more simply, via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). While DPO is stable and RL-free, it treats preferences as flat winner vs. loser signals and is sensitive to noisy or brittle preferences arising from fragile chains of thought. We propose TUR-DPO, a topology- and uncertainty-aware variant of DPO that rewards how answers are derived, not only what they say, by eliciting lightweight reasoning topologies and combining semantic faithfulness, utility, and topology quality into a calibrated uncertainty signal. A small learnable reward is factorized over these signals and incorporated into an uncertainty-weighted DPO objective that remains RL-free and relies only on a fixed or moving reference policy. Empirically, across open 7-8B models and benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, factual question answering, summarization, and helpful/harmless dialogue, TUR-DPO improves judge win-rates, faithfulness, and calibration relative to DPO while preserving training simplicity and avoiding online rollouts. We further observe consistent gains in multimodal and long-context settings, and show that TUR-DPO matches or exceeds PPO on reasoning-centric tasks while maintaining operational simplicity.
Authors: Sydney Johns, Heng Jin, Chaoyu Zhang, Y. Thomas Hou, Wenjing Lou
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are now being explored for defense applications that require reliable and legally compliant decision support. They also hold significant potential to enhance decision making, coordination, and operational efficiency in military contexts. These uses demand evaluation methods that reflect the doctrinal standards that guide real military operations. Existing safety benchmarks focus on general social risks and do not test whether models follow the legal and ethical rules that govern real military operations. To address this gap, we introduce ARMOR 2025, a military aligned safety benchmark grounded in three core military doctrines the Law of War, the Rules of Engagement, and the Joint Ethics Regulation. We extract doctrinal text from these sources and generate multiple choice questions that preserve the intended meaning of each rule. The benchmark is organized through a taxonomy informed by the Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA) decision making framework. This structure enables systematic testing of accuracy and refusal across military relevant decision types. This benchmark features a structured 12-category taxonomy, 519 doctrinally grounded prompts, and rigorous evaluation procedures applied to 21 commercial LLMs. Evaluation results reveal critical gaps in safety alignment for military applications.
Authors: Frederik Hytting J{\o}rgensen, Sebastian Weichwald, Lewis Hammond
Abstract: A key challenge for the safety of advanced AI systems is the possibility that multiple simpler agents might inadvertently form a collective agent with capabilities and goals distinct from those of any individual. More generally, determining when a group of agents can be viewed as a unified collective agent is a foundational question in the study of interactions and incentives in both biological and artificial systems. We adopt a behavioral perspective in answering this question, ascribing collective agency to a group when viewing the group's joint actions as rational and goal-directed successfully predicts its behavior. We formalize this perspective on collective agency using causal games -- which are causal models of strategic, multi-agent interactions -- and causal abstraction -- which formalizes when a simple, high-level model faithfully captures a more complex, low-level model. We use this framework to solve a puzzle regarding multi-agent incentives in actor-critic models and to make quantitative assessments of the degree of collective agency exhibited by different voting mechanisms. Our framework aims to provide a foundation for theoretical and empirical work to understand, predict, and control emergent collective agents in multi-agent AI systems.
Authors: Tiejin Chen, Ahmadreza Moradipari, Kyungtae Han, Hua Wei, Nejib Ammar
Abstract: Trip planning for intelligent vehicles increasingly requires selecting optimal routes rather than merely producing feasible itineraries, as interacting factors such as travel time, energy consumption, and traffic conditions directly affect plan quality. Yet existing systems are largely designed for feasibility-oriented planning, and current benchmarks provide only reference answers without ground truth, preventing objective evaluation of optimization performance. In our paper, we address these limitations with an agentic AI framework that enables dynamic refinement through an orchestration agent coordinating specialized agents for traffic, charging, and points of interest, and with the Trip-planning Optimization Problems Dataset, which supplies definitive optimal solutions and category-level task structure for fine-grained analysis. Experiments show that our system achieves 77.4\% accuracy on the TOP Benchmark, significantly outperforming single-agent and workflow-based multi-agent baselines, demonstrating the importance of orchestrated agentic reasoning for robust trip planning optimization.
Authors: Yuxuan Gao, Megan Wang, Yi Ling Yu
Abstract: Public inference benchmarks compare AI systems at the model and provider level, but the unit at which deployment decisions are actually made is the endpoint: the (provider, model, stock-keeping-unit) tuple at which a specific quantization, decoding strategy, region, and serving stack is exposed. We introduce TokenArena, a continuous benchmark that measures inference at endpoint granularity along five core axes (output speed, time to first token, workload-blended price, effective context, and quality on the live endpoint) and synthesizes them, together with a modeled energy estimate, into three headline composites: joules per correct answer, dollars per correct answer, and endpoint fidelity (output-distribution similarity to a first-party reference). The framework's novelty is empirical and methodological. Across 78 endpoints serving 12 model families, the same model on different endpoints differs in mean accuracy by up to 12.5 points on math and code, in fingerprint similarity to first party by up to 12 points, in tail latency by an order of magnitude, and in modeled joules per correct answer by a factor of 6.2. We further show that workload-aware blended pricing reorders the leaderboard substantially: 7 of 10 top-ranked endpoints under the chat preset (3:1 input:output) fall out of the top 10 under the retrieval-augmented preset (20:1), and the reasoning preset (1:5) elevates frontier closed models that the chat preset penalizes on price. We release the framework, schema, probe and eval harness, and a v1.0 leaderboard snapshot under CC BY 4.0. TokenArena is a methodology, not a single ranking; we publish full provenance and limitations and welcome external replication.
Authors: Ranit Karmakar, Jayita Chatterjee
Abstract: Production agentic systems make many model calls per user request, and most of those calls are short, structured, and routine. This raises a practical routing question that existing evaluations do not directly answer: which parts of an agent workflow truly require large frontier intelligence, and which can be handled by smaller models? We introduce AgentFloor, a deterministic 30-task benchmark organized as a six-tier capability ladder, spanning instruction following, tool use, multi-step coordination, and long-horizon planning under persistent constraints. We evaluate 16 open-weight models, from 0.27B to 32B parameters, alongside GPT-5 across 16,542 scored runs. Our results reveal a clear boundary of model necessity. Small and mid-sized open-weight models are already sufficient for much of the short-horizon, structured tool use work that dominates real agent pipelines, and in aggregate, the strongest open-weight model matches GPT-5 on our benchmark while being substantially cheaper and faster to run. The gap appears most clearly on long-horizon planning tasks that require sustained coordination and reliable constraint tracking over many steps, where frontier models still hold an advantage, though neither side reaches strong reliability. We also find that this boundary is not explained by scale alone: some failures respond to targeted interventions, but the effects are model-specific rather than universal. These findings suggest a practical design principle for agentic systems: use smaller open-weight models for the broad base of routine actions, and reserve large frontier models for the narrower class of tasks that truly demand deeper planning and control. We release the benchmark, harness, sweep configurations, and full run corpus.
Authors: Sen Cui, Jingheng Ma
Abstract: World models have recently re-emerged as a central paradigm for embodied intelligence, robotics, autonomous driving, and model-based reinforcement learning. However, current world model research is often dominated by three partially separated routes: 2D video-generative models that emphasize visual future synthesis, 3D scene-centric models that emphasize spatial reconstruction, and JEPA-like latent models that emphasize abstract predictive representations. While each route has made important progress, they still struggle to provide physically reliable, action-controllable, and long-horizon stable predictions for embodied decision making. In this paper, we argue that the bottleneck of world models is no longer only whether they can generate realistic futures, but whether those futures are physically meaningful and useful for action. We propose \emph{Hamiltonian World Models} as a physically grounded perspective on world modeling. The key idea is to encode observations into a structured latent phase space, evolve the latent state through Hamiltonian-inspired dynamics with control, dissipation, and residual terms, decode the predicted trajectory into future observations, and use the resulting rollouts for planning. We discuss how Hamiltonian structure may improve interpretability, data efficiency, and long-horizon stability, while also noting practical challenges in real-world robotic scenes involving friction, contact, non-conservative forces, and deformable objects.
Authors: Haotian Zhao, Yuxin Zhang, Songlin Zhou, Stephen S. -T. Yau, Wenyu Zhang, Lun Tian, Tianshu Zhu, Yifeng Huang, Yucheng Zeng, Jingnan Gu, Daxiang Dong, Jianmin Wu
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly advanced the ability of large language model (LLM) agents to interact with environments and solve multi-turn tasks. Yet effective training remains challenging, as sparse, outcome-only rewards make it difficult to assign credit to individual steps in an agent's action trajectory. A common remedy is to introduce dense intermediate supervision, such as process reward models or auxiliary self-supervised signals, but this increases supervision and tuning complexity and often generalizes poorly across tasks and domains. This paper presents AEM, a supervision-free credit assignment method that adaptively modulates entropy dynamics during RL training to achieve a more effective exploration-exploitation trade-off. Theoretically, we elevate entropy analysis from the token level to the response level to reduce token sampling variance and show that entropy drift under natural gradients is intrinsically governed by the product of the advantage and the relative response surprisal. Specifically, we derive a practical proxy to reshape training dynamics, enabling a natural transition from exploration to exploitation. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks and models ranging from 1.5B to 32B parameters demonstrate the effectiveness of AEM, including a notable 1.4 percent gain when integrated into a state-of-the-art baseline on the highly challenging SWE-bench-Verified benchmark.
Authors: Jinkun Liu, Haohan Chi, Lingfeng Zhang, Yifan Xie, YuAn Wang, Long Chen, Hangjun Ye, Xiaoshuai Hao, Wenbo Ding
Abstract: Long-horizon robotic manipulation requires plans that are both logically coherent and geometrically grounded. Existing Vision-Language-Action policies usually hide planning in latent states or expose only one modality: text-only chain-of-thought encodes causal order but misses spatial constraints, while visual prediction provides geometric cues but often remains local and semantically underconstrained. We introduce Interleaved Vision--Language Reasoning (IVLR), a policy framework built around \trace{}, an explicit intermediate representation that alternates textual subgoals with visual keyframes over the full task horizon. At test time, a single native multimodal transformer self-generates this global semantic-geometric trace from the initial observation and instruction, caches it, and conditions a closed-loop action decoder on the trace, original instruction, and current observation. Because standard robot datasets lack such traces, we construct pseudo-supervision by temporally segmenting demonstrations and captioning each stage with a vision-language model. Across simulated benchmarks for long-horizon manipulation and visual distribution shift, \method{} reaches 95.5\% average success on LIBERO, including 92.4\% on LIBERO-Long, and 59.4\% overall success on SimplerEnv-WidowX. Ablations show that both modalities are necessary: without traces, LIBERO-Long success drops to 37.7\%; text-only and vision-only traces reach 62.0\% and 68.4\%, while the full interleaved trace reaches 92.4\%. Stress tests with execution perturbations and masked trace content show moderate degradation, suggesting that the trace can tolerate local corruption and moderate execution drift, but remains limited under stale or incorrect global plans.
Authors: Ching-Chun Chang, Yuchen Guo, Hanrui Wang, Timo Spinde, Isao Echizen
Abstract: The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has rendered the boundary between humanity and computational machinery increasingly ambiguous. In the presence of more interwoven relationships within human-machine symbiosis, the very notion of AI-generated information becomes difficult to define, as such information arises not from either humans or machines in isolation, but from their mutual shaping. Therefore, a more pertinent question lies not merely in whether AI has participated, but in how it has participated. In general, the role assumed by AI is often specified, either implicitly or explicitly, in the input prompt, yet becomes less apparent or altogether unobservable when the generated content alone is available. Once detached from the dialogue context, the functional role may no longer be traceable. This study considers the problem of tracing the functional role played by AI in natural language generation. A methodology is proposed to infer the latent role specified by the prompt, embed this role into the content during the probabilistic generation process and subsequently recover the nature of AI participation from the resulting text. Experimentation is conducted under a representative scenario in which AI acts either as an assistive agent that edits human-written content or as a creative agent that generates new content from a brief concept. The experimental results support the validity of the proposed methodology in terms of discrimination between roles, robustness against perturbations and preservation of linguistic quality. We envision that this study may contribute to future research on the ethics of AI with regard to whether AI has been used fairly, transparently and appropriately.
Authors: Yinghao Qin, Xinwei Wang, Mosab Bazargani, Jun Chen
Abstract: Algorithm performance in combinatorial optimization is highly sensitive to parameter settings, while a single globally tuned configuration often fails to exploit the heterogeneity of instances. This limitation is particularly evident in the Electric Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem, where instances differ in structure, demand patterns, and energy constraints. This paper investigates instance-aware parameter configuration for Bilevel Late Acceptance Hill Climbing, a state-of-the-art metaheuristic for the Electric Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem. An offline tuning procedure is used to obtain instance-specific parameter labels, which are then mapped from instance features via a regression model to enable parameter prediction for unseen instances prior to execution. Experimental results on the IEEE WCCI 2020 benchmark and its extensions show that the proposed approach achieves an average objective value reduction of $0.28\%$ across eight held-out test instances relative to a globally tuned configuration. This corresponds to a significant cost reduction in multimillion-dollar transportation operations.
Authors: Yan Zhang, Daiqing Wu, Huawen Shen, Yu Zhou, Can Ma
Abstract: Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding maps natural language instructions to the visual coordinates of target elements and serves as a core capability for autonomous GUI agents. Recent reinforcement learning methods (e.g., GRPO) have achieved strong performance, but they rely on expensive multiple rollouts and suffer from sparse signals on hard samples. These limitations make on-policy self-distillation (OPSD), which provides dense token-level supervision from a single rollout, a promising alternative. However, its applicability to GUI grounding remains unexplored. In this paper, we present GUI-SD, the first OPSD framework tailored for GUI grounding. First, it constructs a visually enriched privileged context for the teacher using a target bounding box and a Gaussian soft mask, providing informative guidance without leaking exact coordinates. Second, it employs entropy-guided distillation, which adaptively weights tokens based on digit significance and teacher confidence, concentrating optimization on the most impactful and reliable positions. Extensive experiments on six representative GUI grounding benchmarks show that GUI-SD consistently outperforms GRPO-based methods and naive OPSD in both accuracy and training efficiency. Code and training data are available at https://zhangyan-ucas.github.io/GUI-SD/.
Authors: Qinyuan Wu, Soumi Das, Mahsa Amani, Arijit Nag, Seungeon Lee, Krishna P. Gummadi, Abhilasha Ravichander, Muhammad Bilal Zafar
Abstract: Agentic AI architectures augment LLMs with external tools, unlocking strong capabilities. However, tool use is not always beneficial; some calls may be redundant or even harmful. Effective tool use, therefore, hinges on a core LLM decision: whether to call or not call a tool, when performing a task. This decision is particularly challenging for web search tools, where the benefits of external information depend on the model's internal knowledge and its ability to integrate potentially noisy tool responses. We introduce a principled framework inspired by decision-making theory to evaluate web search tool-use decisions along three key factors: necessity, utility, and affordability. Our analysis combines two complementary lenses: a normative perspective that infers true need and utility from an optimal allocation of tool calls, and a descriptive perspective that infers the model's self-perceived need and utility from their observed behaviors. We find that models' perceived need and utility of tool calls are often misaligned with their true need and utility. Building on this framework, we train lightweight estimators of need and utility based on models' hidden states. Our estimators enable simple controllers that can improve decision quality and lead to stronger task performance than the self-perceived set up across three tasks and six models.
Authors: Theodore Papamarkou, Pierre Alquier, Matthias Bauer, Wray Buntine, Andrew Davison, Gintare Karolina Dziugaite, Maurizio Filippone, Andrew Y. K. Foong, Vincent Fortuin, Dimitris Fouskakis, Jes Frellsen, Eyke H\"ullermeier, Theofanis Karaletsos, Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan, Nikita Kotelevskii, Salem Lahlou, Yingzhen Li, Fang Liu, Clare Lyle, Thomas M\"ollenhoff, Konstantina Palla, Maxim Panov, Yusuf Sale, Kajetan Schweighofer, Artem Shelmanov, Siddharth Swaroop, Martin Trapp, Willem Waegeman, Andrew Gordon Wilson, Alexey Zaytsev
Abstract: LLMs excel at predictive tasks and complex reasoning tasks, but many high-value deployments rely on decisions under uncertainty, for example, which tool to call, which expert to consult, or how many resources to invest. While the usefulness and feasibility of Bayesian approaches remain unclear for LLM inference, this position paper argues that the control layer of an agentic AI system (that orchestrates LLMs and tools) is a clear case where Bayesian principles should shine. Bayesian decision theory provides a framework for agentic systems that can help to maintain beliefs over task-relevant latent quantities, to update these beliefs from observed agentic and human-AI interactions, and to choose actions. Making LLMs themselves explicitly Bayesian belief-updating engines remains computationally intensive and conceptually nontrivial as a general modeling target. In contrast, this paper argues that coherent decision-making requires Bayesian principles at the orchestration level of the agentic system, not necessarily the LLM agent parameters. This paper articulates practical properties for Bayesian control that fit modern agentic AI systems and human-AI collaboration, and provides concrete examples and design patterns to illustrate how calibrated beliefs and utility-aware policies can improve agentic AI orchestration.
Authors: Garvin Kruthof
Abstract: When researchers iteratively refine ideas with large language models, do the models preserve fidelity to the original objective? We introduce DriftBench, a benchmark for evaluating constraint adherence in multi-turn LLM-assisted scientific ideation. Across 2,146 scored benchmark runs spanning seven models from five providers (including two open-weight), four interaction conditions, and 38 research briefs from 24 scientific domains, we find that iterative pressure reliably increases structural complexity and often reduces adherence to original constraints. A restatement probe reveals a dissociation between declarative recall and behavioral adherence, as models accurately restate constraints they simultaneously violate. The knows-but-violates (KBV) rate, measuring constraint non-compliance despite preserved recall, ranges from 8% to 99% across models. Structured checkpointing partially reduces KBV rates but does not close the dissociation, and complexity inflation persists. Human validation against blind raters confirms that the LLM judge under-detects constraint violations, making reported constraint adherence scores conservative. Sensitivity analyses confirm the findings are robust to temperature (0.7 vs.\ 1.0) and pressure type (novelty vs.\ rigor). We release all briefs, prompts, rubrics, transcripts, and scores as an open benchmark.
Authors: Pragya Sharma, Hang Qiu, Mani Srivastava
Abstract: The increasing deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs) in cyber-physical systems (CPS) enhances perception fidelity, but imposes substantial computational demands on execution platforms, posing challenges to real-time control deadlines. Traditional distributed CPS architectures typically favor on-device inference to avoid network variability and contention-induced delays on remote platforms. However, this design choice places significant energy and computational demands on the local hardware. In this work, we revisit the assumption that cloud-based inference is intrinsically unsuitable for latency-sensitive control tasks. We demonstrate that, when provisioned with high-throughput compute resources, cloud platforms can effectively amortize network and queueing delays, enabling them to match or surpass on-device performance for real-time decision-making. Specifically, we develop a formal analytical model that characterizes distributed inference latency as a function of the sensing frequency, platform throughput, network delay, and task-specific safety constraints. We instantiate this model in the context of emergency braking for autonomous driving and validate it through extensive simulations using real-time vehicular dynamics. Our empirical results identify concrete conditions under which cloud-based inference adheres to safety margins more reliably than its on-device counterpart. These findings challenge prevailing design strategies and suggest that the cloud is not merely a feasible option, but often the preferred inference location for distributed CPS architectures. In this light, the cloud is not as distant as traditionally perceived; in fact, it is closer than it appears.
Authors: Michael Chertkov
Abstract: Independent sample generation is the prevailing paradigm in modern diffusion-based generative models of AI. We ask a different question: can samples \emph{coordinate} through shared population statistics to transport probability mass more efficiently? We introduce Mean-Field Path-Integral Diffusion (MF-PID), a framework in which samples are promoted to interacting agents whose drift depends self-consistently on the evolving population density. The coupling converts distribution matching into a McKean--Vlasov extension of the stochastic optimal transport problem, unifying generative modeling and multi-agent control under the same Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman/Kolmogorov--Fokker--Planck duality. We identify two analytically tractable regimes: a Linear--Quadratic--Gaussian (LQG) benchmark in which the infinite-dimensional mean-field system reduces to a finite set of Riccati and linear ODEs, and a Gaussian-mixture regime governed by a piecewise-constant protocol that preserves closed-form solvability. For a quadratic interaction potential with schedule $\beta_t$ and zero base drift we prove that the self-consistent MF guidance is the \emph{exact} linear interpolant between initial and target global means -- a result that holds for arbitrary initial and target densities and any $\beta_t$. Applied to demand-response control of energy systems, where agents aggregated into an ensemble are energy consumers (e.g.\ thermal zones within a building), MF-PID achieves 19--24\% reductions in cumulative control energy over independent-agent baselines while matching the prescribed terminal distribution exactly, and reveals how coordination redistributes actuation effort across heterogeneous sub-populations.
Authors: Md Sirajul Islam, Isabelle G Chapman, N I Md Ashafuddula, Xu Yuan, Li Chen, Nian-Feng Tzeng, Klara Nahrstedt
Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative intelligence across decentralized data source devices in a privacy-preserving way. While substantial research attention has been drawn to optimizing the learning process for an individual task, real-world applications increasingly require multiple machine learning tasks simultaneously training their models across a shared pool of devices. Naively applying single-FL optimization techniques in multi-FL systems results in suboptimal system performance, particularly due to device heterogeneity and resource inefficiency. To address such a critical open challenge, we introduce {\em FedACT}, a novel resource heterogeneity-aware device scheduling approach designed to efficiently schedule heterogeneous devices across multiple concurrent FL jobs, with the goal of minimizing their average job completion time (JCT). {\em FedACT} dynamically assigns devices to FL jobs based on an alignment scoring mechanism that evaluates the compatibility between available resources of devices and resource demands of jobs. Additionally, it incorporates participation fairness to ensure balanced contributions from devices across jobs, further enhancing the accuracy levels of learned global models. An optimal scheduling plan is formulated in {\em FedACT} by prioritizing devices with higher alignment scores, while ensuring fair participation across jobs. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed scheduling algorithm, we carried out comprehensive experiments using diverse FL jobs and benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that {\em FedACT} reduces the average JCT by up to 8.3\(\times\) and improves model accuracy by up to 44.5\%, compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors: Roman Smirnov
Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) are used in many business applications in general, and specifically in web search systems and applications that generate overviews of search results - LLM Overview systems. Such systems are using an LLM to select most relevant sources from search results and generate an answer to the user's query. It is known from many studies that LLMs have different biases, in LLM Overview application both the source selection and answer generation stages may be affected by the biases of LLMs (here we are focusing mainly on the selection stage). This research is focused on investigating the presence of the biases in LLM Overview systems and on biases exploitation to manipulate LLM Overview results. Here we train a small language model using reinforcement learning to rewrite search snippets to increase their likelihood of being preferred by an LLM Overview. Our experimental setup intentionally restricts the policy to operate only on snippets and limits reward-hacking strategies, reflecting realistic constraints of web search environments. The results prove that LLM Overview systems have biases and that reinforcement learning in most of the cases can optimize snippet's content to manipulate LLM Overview results. We also prove that LLM Overview selections are driven by comparative rather than absolute advantages among candidate sources. In addition, we examine safety aspects of LLM Overview manipulation possibilities and show that context poisoning attacks can lead to inaccurate or harmful results.
Authors: Siyang Li, Yize Chen, Zijie Zhu, Yuxin Pan, Yan Guo, Ming Huang, Hui Xiong
Abstract: Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) advance generalization and data efficiency in time series forecasting by unified large-scale pretraining. But TSFMs remain lacking when adapting to specific downstream forecasting tasks for two reasons. First, the non-stationary and uncertain nature of time series data lead to inevitable temporal distribution shifts between historical training and future testing data, while current Supervised FineTuning (SFT)-based methods are prone to overfitting and may degrade generalization. Second, training data availability varies across forecasting tasks, requiring TSFMs to generalize well under diverse data regimes. To address these challenges, we introduce the Time series Reinforcement Finetuning (TimeRFT) paradigm for TSFM downstream adaptation, which consists of two task-specific training recipes: i) A forecasting quality-based temporal reward mechanism that conducts a multi-faceted evaluation of the contribution of each prediction step to overall forecasting accuracy. ii) A forecasting difficulty-based data selection strategy to identify time series samples with generalizable predictive patterns and informative training signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate TimeRFT can consistently outperform SFT-based adaptation methods across various real-world forecasting tasks and training data regimes, enhancing prediction accuracy and generalization against unforeseen distribution shifts.
Authors: Kejia Bian, Meixia Tao, Jianhua Mo, Zhiyong Chen, Leyan Chen
Abstract: The success of large foundation models is catalyzing a new paradigm for AI-native 6G network design: wireless foundation models for physical layer design. However, existing models often operate on channel state information (CSI) in the space-time-frequency (STF) domain, where distinct multipath components are inherently superimposed and structurally entangled. This hinders the learning of universal channel representation. Meanwhile, their reliance on global attention mechanisms incurs prohibitive computational overhead. In this paper, we propose AirFM-DDA, an Air-interface Foundation Model operating in the Delay-Doppler-Angle (DDA) domain for physicallayer tasks. Specifically, AirFM-DDA reparameterizes CSI from the STF domain into the DDA domain to explicitly resolve multipath components along physically meaningful axes. It employs a window-based attention module augmented with framestructure-aware positional encoding (FS-PE). This window-based attention aligns with locally clustered multipath dependencies while avoiding quadratic-complexity global attention, and FS-PE injects frame-structure priors into network. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AirFM-DDA achieves superior zero-shot generalization across unseen scenarios and datasets, consistently outperforming the baselines on channel prediction and estimation tasks. Compared to the global attention, its window-based attention reduces training and inference costs by nearly an order of magnitude. Moreover, AirFM-DDA maintains robustness under high mobility, large delay spreads, severe noise, and extreme aliasing conditions.
Authors: Woody Haosheng Gan, William Held, Diyi Yang
Abstract: The rapid proliferation of large audio models (LAMs) demands efficient approaches for model comparison, yet comprehensive benchmarks are costly. To fill this gap, we investigate whether minimal subsets can reliably evaluate LAMs while reducing costs and data redundancy. Analyzing 10 subset selection methods with 18 audio models across 40 tasks covering major LAM evaluation dimensions, we show that subsets of just 50 examples (0.3% of data) can achieve over 0.93 Pearson correlation with full benchmark scores. To understand how well these scores align with what practitioners ultimately care about, user satisfaction, we collect 776 human preference ratings from realistic voice assistant conversations, finding that both subsets and full benchmark achieve only 0.85 correlation with human. To better predict preferences, we trained regression models on these selected subsets, achieving 0.98 correlation -- outperforming regression models trained on both random subsets and the full benchmark. This demonstrates that in regression modeling, well-curated subsets outpredict the full benchmark, showing quality over quantity. We open-source these regression-weighted subsets as the HUMANS benchmark, an efficient proxy for LAM evaluation that captures both benchmark performance and user preferences.
Authors: Franziska Kaltenberger, Wei-Ling Chen, Enkeleda Thaqi, Enkelejda Kasneci
Abstract: Remote and webcam-based eye tracking in multi-line reading suffers from various noise factors and layout ambiguity, precisely where real-time reading support needs reliable, per-fixation line assignment. Prior work largely addresses this challenge post hoc or by restricting behavior (e.g., disallowing re-reading), undermining interactive use. We propose CONF-LA (Confidence-score-based Online Fixation-to-Line Assignment), a principled, low-latency approach that integrates knowledge about reading behavior and Gaussian line likelihoods over fixations to compute a posterior-line-score and defers assignments when uncertainty is high. Evaluated on existing open-source data, CONF-LA demonstrates stable performance in post hoc analysis and closes the online-offline gap (1-2 %) with a mean per-fixation latency of 0.348 ms. Our approach exhibits particular invariance toward regressions, yielding significant improvement in ad hoc median accuracies on children data (approx. 95 %) over all tested algorithms. We encourage further research in this direction and discuss possibilities for future development.
Authors: Yu Shen, Shiyang Liu, Qihang He, Yihang Cheng, Haining Xie, Zhiming He, Huahua Fan, Xianzhi Tan, Teng Ma, Shaoquan Zhang, Danqing Huang, Fan Jiang, Yang Li, Chongqing Zhao, Peng Chen, Jie Jiang, Bin Cui
Abstract: Big data platforms are widely used in modern enterprises, and an in-production intelligent assistant is increasingly important to help users quickly find actionable guidance and reduce operational burden. While recent LLM+RAG assistants provide a natural interface, they face practical challenges in real deployments: limited scenario coverage across both general consultation and domain-specific troubleshooting workflows, inefficient knowledge access due to inadequate multi-hop retrieval and flat knowledge organization, and high maintenance cost because escalated tickets are unstructured and hard to convert into assistant improvements and reusable SOPs. In this paper, we present SiriusHelper, a deployed intelligent assistant for big data platforms. SiriusHelper serves as a unified online assistant that automatically identifies user intent and routes queries to the right handling path, including dedicated expert workflows for specialized scenarios (e.g., SQL execution diagnosis). To support complex troubleshooting, SiriusHelper combines a DeepSearch-driven mechanism with a priority-based hierarchical knowledge base to enable multi-hop retrieval without context overload, thus improving answer reliability and latency. To reduce expert overhead, SiriusHelper further introduces automated ticket understanding and SOP distillation: it diagnoses the assistant failure reason (e.g., missing knowledge or wrong routing) and extracts domain-specific SOPs to continuously enrich the knowledge base. Experiments and online deployment on Tencent Big Data platform show that SiriusHelper outperforms representative alternatives and reduces online ticket volume by 20.8\%.
Authors: Diego F. Cuadros, Abdoul-Aziz Maiga
Abstract: We report a safety incident in a deployed multi-agent research system in which a primary AI agent installed 107 unauthorized software components, overwrote a system registry, overrode a prior negative decision from an oversight agent, and escalated through increasingly privileged operations up to an attempted system administrator command. The incident was preceded not by an adversarial attack but by routine content: a forwarded technology article written for human developers and shared by the principal investigator for discussion. The agent operated in a permissive environment, with unrestricted shell access, soft behavioral guidelines containing genuinely conflicting instructions, and no machine-enforced installation policy, and had recommended installing the same tool six hours earlier before being told to stand down. We analyze the behavioral cascade, the control boundaries that failed, and the limitations of multi-agent oversight in detecting and remediating the damage. We use directive weighting error as a descriptive interpretation of the observed failure and ambient persuasion as a provisional analytic label for the broader trigger configuration of non-adversarial environmental content preceding unauthorized agent action. The case highlights ethical and governance implications for deployed agent systems: ambiguous conversational cues are insufficient authorization for consequential actions, prior refusals must persist as enforceable constraints rather than message-level reminders, and oversight mechanisms require systematic post-incident auditing in addition to routine monitoring.
Authors: T. Ansah-Narh, G. Y. Afrifa, J. B. Tandoh, K. Asare, M. Addi, K. E. Yorke, D. M. A. Akpoley, K. Aidoo, S. K. Fosuhene
Abstract: Groundwater in the Densu Basin is increasingly threatened by heavy metal contamination, but conventional methods fail to capture the statistical complexity and spatial heterogeneity of pollution indicators. A key challenge is modelling the Heavy Metal Pollution Index (HPI), which is typically skewed and affected by correlated contaminants, leading to biased predictions without transformation. This study develops a predictive framework integrating response transformations with nested cross-validated ensemble machine learning. Three transformations (raw, log, and Gaussian copula) were applied to HPI and evaluated across six learners: support vector regression (SVM), $k$-nearest neighbours (k-NN), CART, Elastic Net, kernel ridge regression, and a stacked Lasso ensemble. Raw-scale models produced deceptively high fits (Elastic Net and stacked ensemble $R^2 \approx 1.0$), suggesting over-optimism. The log transformation stabilised variance (SVM: $R^2 = 0.93$, RMSE $= 0.18$; k-NN: $R^2 = 0.92$, RMSE $= 0.20$). The Gaussian copula gave the most reliable results: stacked ensemble $R^2 = 0.96$ (RMSE $= 0.19$), with other learners maintaining high accuracy. Copula-based models improved residuals and produced spatially plausible maps. DBSCAN clustering revealed Fe and Mn as primary HPI contributors, consistent with regional hydrogeochemistry. Limitations include reliance on random (not spatial) cross-validation and basin-specific scope. Future work should explore spatial validation and other geological settings. Overall, distribution-aware ensembles with clustering diagnostics offer robust, interpretable assessments of groundwater contamination.
Authors: Wentao Chen, Jingtang Chen, Mingjian Fu, Tiantian Li, Youfeng Su, Wenxi Liu, Yuanlong Yu
Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) finds extensive application in autonomous drone navigation within complex, high-risk environments. However, its practical deployment faces a safety-exploration dilemma: soft penalty mechanisms encourage risky trial-and-error, while most constraint-based methods suffer degraded performance under sensor noise and intent uncertainty. We propose Dynamic-TD3, a physically enhanced framework that enforces strict safety constraints while maintaining maneuverability by modeling navigation as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). This framework integrates an Adaptive Trajectory Relational Evolution Mechanism (ATREM) to capture long-range intentions and employs a Physically Aware Gated Kalman Filter (PAG-KF) to mitigate non-stationary observation noise. The resulting state representation drives a dual-criterion policy that balances mission efficiency against hard safety constraints via Lagrangian relaxation. In experiments with aggressive dynamic threats, this approach demonstrates superior collision avoidance performance, reduced energy consumption, and smoother flight trajectories.
Authors: Yiyang Wei, Tingyu Song, Siyue Zhang, Yilun Zhao
Abstract: Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval (RIR) targets retrieval settings where relevance is mediated by latent inferential links between a query and supporting evidence, rather than semantic similarity. Motivated by the emergent reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent work integrates these capabilities into the IR field, spanning the entire pipeline from benchmarks to retrievers and rerankers. Despite this progress, the field lacks a systematic framework to organize current efforts and articulate a clear path forward. To provide a clear roadmap for this rapidly growing yet fragmented area, this survey (1) systematizes existing RIR benchmarks by knowledge domains and modalities, providing a detailed analysis of the current landscape; (2) introduces a structured taxonomy that categorizes methods based on where and how reasoning is integrated into the retrieval pipeline, alongside an analysis of their trade-offs and practical applications; and (3) summarizes challenges and future directions to guide research in this evolving field.
Authors: Ricardo Luna Gutierrez, Sahand Ghorbanpour, Ejaz Rahman, Varchas Gopalaswamy, Riccardo Betti, Vineet Gundecha, Aarne Lees, Soumyendu Sarkar
Abstract: Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) holds transformative promise for sustainable, near-limitless clean energy, yet remains constrained by prohibitively high costs and limited experimental opportunities. This paper presents Human-in-the-Loop Meta Bayesian Optimization (HL-MBO), a framework that integrates expert knowledge with few-shot, uncertainty-aware machine learning to accelerate discovery in data-scarce, high-stakes scientific domains. HL-MBO introduces a meta-learned surrogate model with an expert-informed acquisition function to recommend candidate experiments. To foster trust and enable informed decisions, HL-MBO also provides interpretable explanations of its suggestions. We show HL-MBO outperforms current BO methods on ICF energy yield optimization, as well as benchmarks in molecular optimization and critical temperature maximization for superconducting materials.
Authors: Kenneth See, Xue Wen Tan
Abstract: Agentic payment systems extend delegated action to financial transfers, but scaling them on stablecoin rails in regulated settings requires safeguards that remain effective when humans are not continuously in the loop. We present a compliance-aware architecture that combines x402-style, signature-based payment authorisation and relayed execution with programmable compliance embedded as an on-chain guardrail via a policy wrapper and policy manager coordinating modular checks. By enforcing compliance at the point of execution, rather than as a separate off-chain workflow, the approach preserves low-friction settlement when conditions are satisfied, records transaction-linked on-chain attestations, and supports structured resolution when requirements are pending.
Authors: Jiutian Zeng, Junjie Li, Chengwei Dai, Jie Liang, Zhaoyu Hu, Yiliang Zhang, Ziang Weng, Longtao Huang, Dongjie Zhang, Libin Dong, Yang Ge, Yuanda Wang, Kaiwen Lv Kacuila, Bingyu Zhu, Jing Wang, Jin Xu
Abstract: We present XekRung, a frontier large language model for cybersecurity, designed to provide comprehensive security capabilities. To achieve this, we develop diverse data synthesis pipelines tailored to the cybersecurity domain, enabling the scalable construction of high-quality training data and providing a strong foundation for cybersecurity knowledge and understanding. Building on this foundation, we establish a complete training pipeline spanning continued pre-training (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL) to further extend the model's capabilities. We further introduce a multi-dimensional evaluation system to guide the iterative improvement of both domain-specific and general-purpose abilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that XekRung achieves state-of-the-art performance on cybersecurity-specific benchmarks among models of the same scale, while maintaining strong performance on general benchmarks.
Authors: Najmul Hasan
Abstract: DNA-synthesis providers screen incoming orders by searching the requested sequence against curated hazard lists. We show that this baseline collapses to a 100% false-flag rate when the hazardous sequence comes from a taxonomic family absent from the reference set: under Conformal Risk Control's certified miss-rate constraint, a low-discrimination signal forces the threshold below the entire test-benign mass. We compose three signals derived from a synthesis order's public annotation: $k$-mer Jaccard similarity to known toxins, the trimmed-mean score of a five-LLM judge panel, and cosine similarity to clustered embedding centroids. Fused under a monotone logistic aggregator and calibrated by Conformal Risk Control, the resulting screener certifies $\mathbb{E}[\mathrm{FNR}] \le \alpha$. Across ten leave-one-taxonomic-family-out folds at $\alpha=0.05$ on UniProt KW-0800 reviewed toxins, the calibrated screener achieves 0% test miss rate on every fold and 0% test false-flag rate on nine of ten folds. The bound's finite-sample slack $1/(n_{\mathrm{cal}}+1)$ caps the certifiable miss rate at 1.77% on our 200-hazard subsample; reaching procurement-grade $\alpha=10^{-3}$ requires an $18\times$ larger calibration set, which the full reviewed UniProt KW-0800 corpus is large enough to deliver. The binding constraint on certifiable DNA-synthesis screening is calibration data, not algorithms. Code: https://github.com/najmulhasan-code/crc-screen
Authors: Shalini Sarode, Brian Moser, Joachim Folz, Federico Raue, Tobias Nauen, Stanislav Frolov, Andreas Dengel
Abstract: The Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm presents a compelling, bio-inspired alternative to backpropagation. However, while efficient in training, it has a computationally prohibitive inference process that requires a separate forward pass for every class that is evaluated. In this work, we introduce the Hyperspherical Forward-Forward (HFF), a novel reformulation that resolves this critical bottleneck. Our core innovation is to reframe the local objective of each layer from a binary goodness-of-fit task to a direct multi-class classification problem within a hyperspherical feature space. We achieve this by learning a set of class-specific, unit-norm prototypes that act as geometric anchors and implicit negatives. This architectural innovation preserves the benefits of local training while enabling weight update and inference in a single forward pass, making it >40x faster than the original FF algorithm. Our method is simple to implement, scales effectively to modern convolutional architectures, and achieves superior accuracy on standard image classification benchmarks, closing the gap with backpropagation. Most notably, we are among the first greedy local-learning methods to report over 25% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k, and 65.96% with transfer learning.
Authors: Enzo S. N. Silva, Pablo B. Costa, Raphael C. Vlasman, Rosimeire P. Costa, Henrique L. P. Silva, Lucas F. A. O. Pellicer, Guilherme Rinaldo, Renato A. Almeida, Darian S. R. Rabbani, Cinthya O. Oestreich, Vinicius F. Carid\'a
Abstract: High-quality corpora are essential for advancing Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Portuguese. Building on previous encoder-only models such as BERTimbau and Albertina PT-BR, we introduce NorBERTo, a modern encoder based on the ModernBERT architecture, featuring long-context support and efficient attention mechanisms. NorBERTo is trained on Aurora-PT, a newly curated Brazilian Portuguese corpus comprising 331 billion GPT-2 tokens collected from diverse web sources and existing multilingual datasets. We systematically benchmark NorBERTo against Strong baselines on semantic similarity, textual entailment and classification tasks using standardized datasets such as ASSIN 2 and PLUE. On PLUE, NorBERTo-large achieves the best results among the encoder models we evaluated, notably reaching 0.9191 F1 on MRPC and 0.7689 accuracy on RTE. On ASSIN 2, NorBERTo-large attains the highest entailment F1 (~0.904) among all encoders considered, although Albertina-900M and BERTimbau-large still hold an advantage. To the best of our knowledge, Aurora-PT is currently the largest openly available monolingual Portuguese corpus, surpassing previous resources. NorBERTo provides a modern, mid-sized encoder designed for realistic deployment scenarios: it is straight-forward to fine-tune, efficient to serve, and well suited as a backbone for retrieval-augmented generation and other downstream Portuguese NLP systems.
Authors: Sichang Steven He, Calvin Ardi, Ramesh Govindan, Harsha V. Madhyastha
Abstract: Many recent news reports have claimed that content generated by large language models (LLMs) is taking over the web. However, these claims are typically not based on a representative sample of the web and the methodology underlying them is often opaque. Moreover, when aiming to minimize the chances of falsely attributing human-authored content to LLMs, we find that detectors of LLM-generated text perform much worse than advertised. Consequently, we lack an understanding of the true prevalence and characteristics of LLM content on the web. We describe DeGenTWeb which systematically identifies LLM-dominant websites: sites whose content has been generated using LLMs with little human input. We show how to adapt detectors of LLM-generated text for use on web pages, and how to aggregate detection results from multiple pages on a site for accurate site-level categorization. Using DeGenTWeb, we find that LLM-dominant sites are highly prevalent both in data from Common Crawl and in Bing's search results, and that this share is growing over time. We also show that continuing to accurately identify such sites appears challenging given the capabilities of the latest LLMs.
Authors: Sundas Iqbal, Qing Tian, Danish Ali, Jianping Gou, Weihua Oue
Abstract: Person re-identification (Re-ID) aims to match images of the same individual across non-overlapping camera views and remains challenging due to domain shifts caused by variations in illumination, background, camera characteristics, and population distributions. Although supervised models perform well under matched training and testing conditions, their performance degrades significantly when deployed in unseen environments. Existing intermediate domain approaches such as IDM and IDM++ alleviate this gap by constructing bridge feature distributions between domains; however, they rely on fixed mixing strategies and joint source-target access, limiting their applicability to multi-source and source-free settings. To address these limitations, this paper proposes Adaptive Intermediate Domain Adaptation (AIDA), also referred to as Source-Free Multi-Source Intermediate Domain Adaptation (SF-MIDA). The proposed framework treats intermediate-domain learning as a dynamically regulated process, where feature mixing and regularization strength are adaptively controlled using feedback signals derived from model uncertainty and training stability. A multi-source intermediate domain generator synthesizes diverse intermediate representations, while a pseudo-mirror regularization strategy preserves identity consistency under domain perturbations. Extensive experiments across domain generalization and source-free settings demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Authors: Ishan Gupta, Pavlo Buryi
Abstract: We examine if frontier chat-based large language models (LLMs) adjust their outputs based on neurodivergence (ND) context in system prompts and describe the nature of these adjustments. Specifically, we propose NDBench, a 576-output benchmark involving two frontier models, three system prompt types (baseline, ND-profile assertion, and ND-profile assertion with explicit instructions for adjustments), four canonical ND profiles, and 24 prompts across four categories, one of which involves an adversarial masking strategy. Four trends emerge consistently from our findings. First, LLMs show significant adaptation under ND context, where fully instructed conditions yield lengthier and more structured outputs, characterized by higher token counts, more headings, and more granular steps (p < 10^-8, Holm-corrected). Second, such adaptation is largely structural in nature: although list density does not change much, there is a marked rise in the frequency of headings and per-step detail. Third, ND persona assertion alone fails to suppress potentially harmful tendencies, as masking-reinforcement decreases only in explicitly instructed cases (36-44% reduction); the reduction rate barely changes in persona assertion conditions. Moreover, reliability analysis of LLM-based harm assessment reveals that only two out of the six dimensions (masking and reinforcement, validation quality) exceed the pre-defined inter-judge agreement criterion (alpha >= 0.67) and thus can be considered primary results. NDBench is made publicly available along with its prompts, outputs, code, and other resources, forming a reproducible framework for auditing future LLMs' adaptation to ND awareness.
Authors: Nhung Thi-Hong Duong, Mai Ngoc Ho, Tin Van Huynh, Kiet Van Nguyen
Abstract: In this article, we introduce ViLegalNLI, the first large-scale Vietnamese Natural Language Inference (NLI) dataset specifically constructed for the legal domain. The dataset consists of 42,012 premise-hypothesis pairs derived from official statutory documents and annotated with binary inference labels (Entailment and Non-entailment). It covers multiple legal domains and reflects realistic legal reasoning scenarios characterized by structured logic, conditional clauses, and domain-specific terminology. To construct ViLegalNLI, we propose a semi-automatic data generation framework that integrates large language models for controlled hypothesis generation and systematic quality validation procedures. The framework incorporates artifact mitigation strategies and cross-model validation to improve annotation reliability and ensure legal consistency. The resulting dataset captures diverse reasoning patterns, including paraphrasing, logical implication, and legally invalid inferences, thereby providing a comprehensive benchmark for Vietnamese legal inference tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on the ViLegalNLI using multilingual models, Vietnamese-specific pretrained language models, and instruction-tuned large language models. The results show that few-shot LLM configurations consistently achieve superior performance, while performance is significantly influenced by hypothesis length, lexical overlap, and reasoning complexity. Cross-domain evaluations further reveal the challenges of generalizing legal inference across distinct legal fields. Overall, ViLegalNLI establishes a foundational benchmark for Vietnamese legal NLI and supports future research in legal reasoning, statutory text understanding, and the development of reliable AI systems for legal analysis and decision support. The dataset is publicly available for research purposes.
Authors: Muhammad Dehan Al Kautsar, Saeed Almheiri, Momina Ahsan, Bilal Elbouardi, Younes Samih, Sarfraz Ahmad, Amr Keleg, Omar El Herraoui, Kareem Elzeky, Abed Alhakim Freihat, Mohamed Anwar, Zhuohan Xie, Junhong Liang, Mohammad Rustom Al Nasar, Preslav Nakov, Fajri Koto
Abstract: There is a significant gap in evaluating cultural reasoning in LLMs using conversational datasets that capture culturally rich and dialectal contexts. Most Arabic benchmarks focus on short text snippets in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), overlooking the cultural nuances that naturally arise in dialogues. To address this gap, we introduce ArabCulture-Dialogue, a culturally grounded conversational dataset covering 13 Arabic-speaking countries, in both MSA and each country's respective dialect, spanning 12 daily-life topics and 54 fine-grained subtopics. We utilize the dataset to form three benchmarking tasks: (i) multiple-choice cultural reasoning, (ii) machine translation between MSA and dialects, and (iii) dialect-steering generation. Our experiments indicate that the performance gap between MSA and Arabic dialects still exists, whereby the models perform worse on all three tasks in the dialectal setup, compared to the MSA one.
Authors: Debasis Dwibedy, Avyay Nishtala, Pranathi Mukku, D Snehaja
Abstract: Modern crop advisory systems exhibit a critical limitation termed \textit{economic blindness}. These systems primarily optimize for biological yield, often overlooking market price, which can lead farmers toward agronomically sound yet financially unviable decisions. In this paper, we develop Kisan AI, a smart profit-aware crop advisory system that resolves the above-mentioned limitation through a research-driven, full-stack application. We train the Random Forest(RF) classifier model on a nine-feature benchmark dataset, the standard seven agronomic attributes augmented with a \textit{market\_price} variable, and evaluated against eight baseline models, considering the evaluation matrices, such as, accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, and Log Loss. The RF model achieves the highest accuracy of 99.3\% and the lowest Log Loss, confirming that the inclusion of market price as a predictive feature is both valid and impactful. We then implement the RF model within a multilingual progressive Web App alongside a Facebook Prophet six-month price forecasting engine and a MobileNetV2 disease detection module. A nine-language AI chatbot powered by the Anthropic Claude API unifies all modules into a single, mobile-installable platform accessible to farmers across India.
Authors: Mohammad Hossein Moslemi, Nima Hosseini Dashtbayaz, Zhimin Mei, Boyu Wang, Bissan Ghaddar
Abstract: Dataset Distillation aims to compress a large dataset into a small synthetic one while maintaining predictive performance. We show that as different demographic groups exhibit distinct predictive patterns, the distillation process struggles to simultaneously preserve informative signals for all subgroups, regardless of whether group sizes are mildly or severely imbalanced. Consequently, models trained on distilled data can experience substantial performance drops for certain subgroups, leading to fairness gaps. Crucially, these gaps do not disappear by merely correcting group imbalance, since they stem from fundamental mismatches in subgroup predictive patterns rather than from sample-size disparities alone. We therefore formally analyze the interaction between these two sources of bias and cast the solution as identifying a group-imbalance-agnostic barycenter of the predictive information that induces similar representations across all subgroups. By distilling toward this shared aggregate representation, we show that group fairness concerns can be reduced. Our approach is compatible with existing distillation methods, and empirical results show that it substantially reduces bias introduced by dataset distillation.
Authors: Aur\'elien B\"uck-Kaeffer (McGill University, Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, Ubisoft La Forge), Sneheel Sarangi (McGill University, Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute), Maximilian Puelma Touzel (McGill University, Universit\'e de Montr\'eal), Reihaneh Rabbany (McGill University, Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute), Zachary Yang (McGill University, Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, Ubisoft La Forge), Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Godbout (Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, Universit\'e de Montr\'eal)
Abstract: Studies attempting to simulate human behavior with $\textit{Silicon Societies}$ grow in numbers while LLM-only social networks have started appearing outside of controlled settings. However, the design space of these networks remains under-studied, which contributes to a gap in validating model realism. To enable future works to make more informed design decisions, we perform a systematic analysis of the consequences and interactions of key design choices in simulated social networks, including the choice of base model used to model individual agents, and how they are connected to each other. Using surveys as a proxy for agent opinions, our findings suggest that the geometry of the design space is non-trivial, with some parameters behaving in additive ways while others display more complex interactions. In particular, the choice of the base LLM is the most important variable impacting the simulation outcomes.
Authors: Jugal Gajjar, Kamalasankari Subramaniakuppusamy
Abstract: When a language model answers a table question, users have no way to verify which cells informed which reasoning steps. We introduce RSAT, a method that trains small language models (SLMs, 1-8B) to produce step-by-step reasoning with cell-level citations grounded in table evidence. Phase 1 (SFT) teaches a structured JSON output format from verified reasoning traces. Phase 2 (GRPO) optimizes a composite reward centered on NLI-based faithfulness, alongside citation validity and parsimony. Across six models from two families-Qwen 2.5 (1.5B/3B/7B) and Llama 3 (1B/3B/8B)-RSAT improves faithfulness 3.7$\times$ over SFT alone (0.224$\rightarrow$0.826), with near-perfect citation validity (0.992). Post-hoc attribution collapses below 13% format success, confirming that attribution must be integrated into reasoning, not retrofitted. Ablations show the faithfulness reward is essential: removing it drops faithfulness from 0.97 to 0.03.
Authors: Jan Sobotka, Mustafa O. Karabag, Ufuk Topcu
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly tasked with strategic decision-making under incomplete information, such as in negotiation and policymaking. While LLMs can excel at many such tasks, they also fail in ways that are poorly understood. We shed light on these failures by uncovering two fundamental gaps in the internal mechanisms underlying the decision-making of LLMs in incomplete-information games, supported by experiments with open-weight models Llama 3.1, Qwen3, and gpt-oss. First, an observation-belief gap: LLMs encode internal beliefs about latent game states that are substantially more accurate than their own verbal reports, yet these beliefs are brittle. In particular, the belief accuracy degrades with multi-hop reasoning, exhibits primacy and recency biases, and drifts away from Bayesian coherence over extended interactions. Second, a belief-action gap: The implicit conversion of internal beliefs into actions is weaker than that of the beliefs externalized in the prompt, yet neither belief-conditioning consistently achieves higher game payoffs. These results show how analyzing LLMs' internal processes can expose systematic vulnerabilities that warrant caution before deploying LLMs in strategic domains without robust guardrails.
Authors: Aviral Srivastava, Sourav Panda
Abstract: Safety-aligned large language models rely on RLHF and instruction tuning to refuse harmful requests, yet the internal mechanisms implementing safety behavior remain poorly understood. We introduce the Attention Redistribution Attack (ARA), a white-box adversarial attack that identifies safety-critical attention heads and crafts nonsemantic adversarial tokens that redirect attention away from safety-relevant positions. Unlike prior jailbreak methods operating at the semantic or output-logit level, ARA targets the geometry of softmax attention on the probability simplex using Gumbel-softmax optimization over targeted heads. Across LLaMA-3-8B-Instruct, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.1, and Gemma-2-9B-it, ARA bypasses safety alignment with as few as 5 tokens and 500 optimization steps, achieving 36% ASR on Mistral-7B and 30% on LLaMA-3 against 200 HarmBench prompts, while Gemma-2 remains at 1%. Our principal mechanistic finding is a dissociation between ablation and redistribution: zeroing out the top-ranked safety heads produces at most 1 flip among 39 to 50 baseline refusals, while ARA targeting the corresponding safety-heavy layers flips 72/200 prompts on Mistral-7B and 60/200 on LLaMA-3. This suggests that safety is not localized in these heads as removable components, but emerges from the attention routing they perform. Removing a head allows compensation through the residual stream, while redirecting its attention propagates a corrupted signal downstream.
Authors: Xijia Wei, Yuan Fang, Kevin Chetty, Youngjun Cho, Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze
Abstract: Millimetre-wave (mmWave) radar offers a more privacy-preserving alternative to RGB-based human pose estimation. However, existing methods typically rely on pre-extracted intermediate representations such as sparse point clouds or spectrogram images, where the rich spatiotemporal information naturally present in radar video streams is discarded for model learning, while such signal processing adds system complexity. In addition, existing solutions are mainly conducted in an end-to-end supervised manner without leveraging unlabelled raw video streams to learn generalized representations. In this study, we present MAEPose, a masked autoencoding-based human pose estimation approach that operates directly on mmWave spectrogram videos. MAEPose learns spatiotemporal motion-aware generalized representations from unlabelled radar video, and leverages its heatmap decoder for multi-frame pose estimation predictions. We evaluate it across three datasets based on leave-one-person-out cross-validation with rigorous statistical testing. MAEPose consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 22.1% in MPJPE p<0.05, and maintains robust accuracy under zero-shot bystander interference with only a 6.5% error increase. Ablation studies confirm that both the pre-training and the heatmap decoder contribute substantially, while modality analysis indicates that leveraging Range-Doppler video as input achieves better pose estimation performance than Range-Azimuth or their fusion, with lower computational cost.
Authors: Junsun Choi, Sam Son, Sunjin Choi, Hansung Kim, Yakun Sophia Shao, Scott Shenker, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Borivoje Nikolic
Abstract: Mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures have turned LLM serving into a cluster-scale workload in which communication consumes a considerable portion of LLM serving runtime. This has prompted industry to invest heavily in expensive high-bandwidth scale-up networks. We question whether such costly infrastructure is strictly necessary. We present the first systematic cross-layer analysis of network cost-effectiveness for MoE LLM serving, comparing four representative XPU (e.g., GPU/TPU) topologies (scale-up, scale-out, 3D torus, and 3D full-mesh). We find that lower-cost switchless topologies are more cost-effective than the scale-up topology across all serving scenarios explored, improving cost-effectiveness by 20.6-56.2%. In particular, the 3D full-mesh topology is Pareto-optimal in terms of the performance-cost tradeoff. We also find that current scale-up link bandwidths are over-provisioned: reducing the link bandwidth improves throughput per cost by up to 27%. A forward-looking analysis of upcoming GPU generations indicates that the cost-performance advantage of switchless networks will likely persist.
Authors: Osmar Luiz Ferreira de Carvalho, Osmar Ab\'ilio de Carvalho J\'unior, Anesmar Olino de Albuquerque, Daniel Guerreiro e Silva
Abstract: SAM2 produces high-quality zero-shot segmentation on natural images, but applying it to large remote sensing scenes exposes two problems: (1) its mask generator faces an inherent quality-coverage trade-off: strict thresholds yield precise masks but leave most of the image unsegmented, while relaxed thresholds increase coverage at the cost of mask quality; and (2) large images must be tiled, fragmenting objects across tile boundaries. We propose Remote SAMsing, an open-source pipeline that solves both problems without modifying SAM2 or requiring training data. For coverage, a multi-pass algorithm runs SAM2 repeatedly on each tile, painting accepted masks black between passes to simplify the scene for the next iteration, and relaxing quality thresholds only when coverage gains stagnate, ensuring that the most precise masks are always captured first. For spatial consistency, contextual padding and a parameter-free best-match merge reconstruct objects fragmented across tile boundaries. Evaluated on seven scenes (5~cm to 4.78~m GSD), the pipeline raises coverage from 30--68\% (single-pass SAM2) to 91--98\%. Ablation experiments quantify the contribution of each component to coverage and detection quality. Per-class evaluation shows that SAM2 transfers well to discrete RS objects (buildings 95\%, cars 82--93\% Det@0.5) with segment boundaries 3--8$\times$ more precise than SLIC and Felzenszwalb baselines. Tile size functions as an implicit scale parameter: reducing it from $1{,}000$ to 250 raises Det@0.5 from 56\% to 85\%, outperforming SAM2's built-in multi-scale mechanism. The pipeline generalizes to MNF false-color imagery without retraining (99.5\% ASA) and scales to production-sized images: a 1.94 billion pixel Potsdam mosaic achieved 97\% coverage without quality degradation.
Authors: Jatin Gupta, Akhil Sharma, Saransh Singhania, Ali Imam Abidi
Abstract: The inception of Large Language Models (LLMs) has catalyzed AI adoption in the finance sector, yet their reliability in complex, jurisdiction-specific tasks like Indian Chartered Accountancy (CA) remains limited. The models display difficulty in executing numerical tasks which require multiple steps while also needing advanced knowledge about legal regulations and the method of scaling their operations is not feasible in settings which have limited access to resources. We present CA-ThinkFlow as a parameter-efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework which operates with a 14B, 4-bit-quantized reasoning model, 14B-DeepSeek-R1, and a layout-aware Docling extraction system which maintains document structure during extraction. CA-ThinkFlow uses a basic RAG method which automatically adds retrieved information into the prompt, while it depends on the model's built-in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) functions to create context and produce correct answers. The system we developed system operates at performance levels which match large proprietary models when we tested it on the multi-level CA-Ben benchmark, achieving Scholastic Reliability Coefficient (SRC) results which equal 68.75\% of GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The framework shows high efficiency and strength in handling parameters, but essential reasoning abilities fail to process complex regulatory texts which exist in fields such as Taxation.
Authors: Daniel Zhu, Zihan Wang, Jenny Bao, Jerry Wei
Abstract: As language model safeguards become more robust, attackers are pushed toward developing increasingly complex jailbreaks. Prior work has found that this complexity imposes a "jailbreak tax" that degrades the target model's task performance. We show that this tax scales inversely with model capability and that the most advanced jailbreaks effectively yield no reduction in model capabilities. Evaluating 28 jailbreaks on five benchmarks across Claude models ranging in capability from Haiku 4.5 to Opus 4.6, we find Haiku 4.5 loses an average of 33.1% on benchmark performance when jailbroken, while Opus 4.6 at max thinking effort loses only 7.7%. We also observe that across all models, reasoning-heavy tasks display considerably more degradation than knowledge-recall tasks. Finally, Boundary Point Jailbreaking, currently the strongest jailbreak against deployed classifiers, achieves near-perfect classifier evasion with near-zero degradation across safeguarded models. We recommend that safety cases for frontier models should not rely on a meaningful capability degradation from jailbreaks.
Authors: Sheza Munir, Ahanaf Rodoshi, Sumin Lee, Feiran Chang, Xujie Si, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed
Abstract: Standard methods for aggregating natural language judgments, such as majority voting, often fail to produce logically consistent results when applied to high-conflict domains, treating differing opinions as noise. We propose a neuro-symbolic aggregation framework that formalizes conflict resolution through Weighted Maximum Satisfiability (MaxSAT). Our pipeline utilizes a language model to map unstructured natural language explanations into interpretable logical predicates and confidence weights. These components are then encoded as soft constraints within the Z3 solver, transforming the aggregation problem into an optimization task that seeks the maximum consistency across conflicting testimony. Using the Reddit r/AmItheAsshole forum as a case study in large-scale moral disagreement, our system generates logically coherent verdicts that diverge from popularity-based labels 62% of the time, corroborated by an 86% agreement rate with independent human evaluators. This study demonstrates the efficacy of coupling neural semantic extraction with formal solvers to enforce logical soundness and explainability in the aggregation of noisy human reasoning.
Authors: Vincenzo Polizzi, David B. Lindell, Jonathan Kelly
Abstract: Event cameras provide several unique advantages over standard frame-based sensors, including high temporal resolution, low latency, and robustness to extreme lighting. However, existing learning-based approaches for event processing are typically confined to narrow, task-specific silos and lack the ability to generalize across modalities. We address this gap with REALM, a cross-modal framework that learns an RGB and Event Aligned Latent Manifold by projecting event representations into the pretrained latent space of RGB foundation models. Instead of task-specific training, we leverage low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to bridge the modality gap, effectively unlocking the geometric and semantic priors of frozen RGB backbones for asynchronous event streams. We demonstrate that REALM effectively maps events into the ViT-based foundation latent space. Our method allows us to perform downstream tasks like depth estimation and semantic segmentation by simply transferring linear heads trained on the RGB teacher. Most significantly, REALM enables the direct, zero-shot application of complex, frozen image-trained decoders, such as MASt3R, to raw event data. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in wide-baseline feature matching, significantly outperforming specialized architectures. Code and models are available upon acceptance.
Authors: Yujin Jeong, Arnas Uselis, Iro Laina, Seong Joon Oh, Anna Rohrbach
Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models achieve impressive visual fidelity, yet they remain unreliable in multi-object generation. Despite extensive empirical evidence of these failures, the underlying causes remain unclear. We begin by asking how much of this limitation arises from the data itself. To disentangle data effects, we consider two regimes across different dataset sizes: (1) concept generalization, where each individual concept is observed during training under potentially imbalanced data distributions, and (2) compositional generalization, where specific combinations of concepts are systematically held out. To study these regimes, we introduce mosaic (Multi-Object Spatial relations, AttrIbution, Counting), a controlled framework for dataset generation. By training diffusion models on mosaic, we find that scene complexity plays a dominant role rather than concept imbalance, and that counting is uniquely difficult to learn in low-data regimes. Moreover, compositional generalization collapses as more concept combinations are held out during training. These findings highlight fundamental limitations of diffusion models and motivate stronger inductive biases and data design for robust multi-object compositional generation.
Authors: Bingzheng Gan, Tianyi Zhang, Yusu Li, Jing Huang, Wei Shi, Yangkai Ding, Tao Yu
Abstract: The scalability of Large Language Models to long sequences is hindered by the quadratic cost of attention and the limitations of positional encodings. To address these, we introduce Caracal, a novel architecture that replaces attention with a parameter-efficient, $\mathcal{O}(L \log L)$ Multi-Head Fourier (MHF) module. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We leverage the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) for sequence mixing, inherently addressing both bottlenecks mentioned above. (2) We apply a frequency-domain causal masking technique that enforces autoregressive capabilities via asymmetric padding and truncation, overcoming a critical barrier for Fourier-based generative models. (3) Unlike efficient models relying on hardware-specific implementations (e.g., Mamba), we uses standard library operators. This ensures robust portability, eliminating common deployment barriers. Evaluations demonstrate that Caracal performs competitively with Transformer and SSM baselines, offering a scalable and simple pathway for efficient long-sequence modeling. Code is available in Appendix.
Authors: Zhili Li, Kangyang Chai, Zhihao Wang, Xiaowei Jia, Yanhua Li, Gengchen Mai, Sergii Skakun, Dinesh Manocha, Yiqun Xie
Abstract: Super-resolution (SR) techniques have made major advances in reconstructing high-resolution images from low-resolution inputs. The increased resolution provides visual enhancement and utility for monitoring tasks. In particular, SR has been increasingly developed for satellite-based Earth observation, with applications in urban planning, agriculture, ecology, and disaster response. However, existing SR studies and benchmarks typically use fidelity metrics such as PSNR or SSIM, whereas the true utility of super-resolved images lies in supporting downstream tasks such as land cover classification, biomass estimation, and change detection. To bridge this gap, we introduce GeoSR-Bench, a downstream task-integrated SR benchmark dataset to evaluate SR models beyond fidelity metrics. GeoSR-Bench comprises spatially co-located, temporally aligned, and quality-controlled image pairs from about 36,000 locations across diverse land covers, spanning resolutions from 500m to 0.6m. To the best of our knowledge, GeoSR-Bench is the first SR benchmark that directly connects improved image resolution from SR models with downstream Earth monitoring tasks, including land cover segmentation, infrastructure mapping, and biophysical variable estimation. Using GeoSR-Bench, we benchmark GAN, transformer, neural operator, and diffusion-based SR models on perceptual quality and downstream task performance. We conduct experiments with 270 settings, covering 2 cross-platform SR tasks, 9 SR models, 3 downstream task models, and 5 downstream tasks for each SR task. The results show that improvements in traditional SR metrics often do not correlate with gains in task performance, and the correlations can be negative, indicating that these metrics provide limited guidance for selecting superior models for downstream tasks. This reveals the need to integrate downstream tasks into SR model development and evaluation.
Authors: Guillaume Lambard
Abstract: The current structure-centric paradigm in artificial intelligence (AI)-driven materials discovery, despite delivering thousands of candidate structures, is stalling at a critical barrier: the synthesizability gap. We argue that closing this gap demands a pivot to a synthesis-first paradigm in which executable synthesis protocols, not just atomic configurations, are treated as primary design variables. We outline a roadmap built on three pillars: (i) representing synthesis procedures as machine-readable protocols, (ii) deploying generative and inverse-design models to propose actionable reaction pathways and recipes, and (iii) integrating closed-loop optimisation to refine protocols against experimental realities and sustainability constraints. Framed in terms of the causal backbone P->X->y from protocol P to structure X and properties y, this perspective sets out methodological building blocks, standards needs and self-driving laboratory (SDL) integration strategies to accelerate reproducible, data-first materials discovery.
Authors: Hongbo Wen, Ying Li, Hanzhi Liu, Chaofan Shou, Yanju Chen, Yuan Tian, Yu Feng
Abstract: An agent skill is a configuration package that equips an LLM-driven agent with a concrete capability, such as reading email, executing shell commands, or signing blockchain transactions. Each skill is a hybrid artifact-a structured half declares executable interfaces, while a prose half dictates when and how those interfaces fire-and the prose is reinterpreted probabilistically on every invocation. Conventional static analyzers parse the structured half but ignore the prose; LLM-based tools read the prose but cannot reproducibly prove that a tainted input reaches a high-impact sink. We present Semia, a static auditor for agent skills. Semia lifts each skill into the Skill Description Language (SDL), a Datalog fact base that captures LLM-triggered actions, prose-defined conditions, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints. Synthesizing a fact base that is both structurally sound and semantically faithful to the original prose is the central challenge; we address it with Constraint-Guided Representation Synthesis (CGRS), a propose-verify-evaluate loop that refines LLM candidates until convergence. Security properties (e.g., indirect injection, secret leakage, confused deputies, unguarded sinks, etc.) over an agent skill can then be reduced to Datalog reachability queries. We evaluate Semia on 13,728 real-world skills from public marketplaces. Semia renders all of them auditable and finds that more than half carry at least one critical semantic risk. On a stratified sample of 541 expert-labeled skills, Semia achieves 97.7% recall and an F1 of 90.6%, substantially outperforming signature-based scanners and LLM baselines.
Authors: Hao Li, Steffen Knoblauch
Abstract: As climate extreme and disaster events become more frequent and intense, Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) has emerged as a transformative approach for large-scale disaster mapping and risk reduction. However, the purely mechanical, performance-driven deployment of GeoAI models can result in amplifying inherent spatial inequalities, preventing effective emergency decision-making, and producing severe environmental carbon footprint. To unbox the concept of responsible GeoAI, this position paper examines its emerging role, e.g., in climate extreme and disaster mapping, from a critical GIS perspective. We address the nexus of responsible GeoAI into four interrelated theoretical dimensions, specifically Representativeness, Explainability, Sustainability, and Ethics, with examples from climate extreme and disaster mapping. Moreover, targeting at the operational practice, we then propose a conceptual governance Model of responsible GeoAI that categorizes its governance practices into Data, Application, and Society scopes. Last, this position paper aims to raise the attention in the broader GIS community that the future of climate resilience relies not just on building better algorithms, but on fostering a governance ecosystem where GeoAI is deployed responsibly, ethically, and sustainably.
Authors: Xingyu Hu, Kai Zhang, Jiancan Wu, Shuli Wang, Chi Wang, Wenshuai Chen, Yinhua Zhu, Haitao Wang, Xingxing Wang, Xiang Wang
Abstract: In large language model (LLM)-based recommendation systems, direct preference optimization (DPO) effectively aligns recommendations with user preferences, requiring multi-negative objective functions to leverage abundant implicit-feedback negatives and sharpen preference boundaries. However, our empirical analyses reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon, preference optimization collapse, where increasing the number of negative samples can lead to performance degradation despite a continuously decreasing training loss. We further theoretically demonstrate that this collapse arises from gradient suppression, caused by the dominance of easily discriminable negatives over boundary-critical negatives that truly define user preference boundaries. As a result, boundary-relevant signals are under-optimized, weakening the model's decision boundary. Motivated by these observations, we propose DynamicPO (Dynamic Preference Optimization), a lightweight and plug-and-play framework comprising two adaptive mechanisms: Dynamic Boundary Negative Selection, which identifies and prioritizes informative negatives near the model's decision boundary, and Dual-Margin Dynamic beta Adjustment, which calibrates optimization strength per sample according to boundary ambiguity. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show that DynamicPO effectively prevents optimization collapse and improves recommendation accuracy on multi-negative preference optimization methods, with negligible computational overhead. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/xingyuHuxingyu/DynamicPO.
Authors: Khizar Qureshi, Geoffrey Martin, Yifan Peng
Abstract: A key challenge for large language models is token cost per query and overall deployment cost. Clinical inputs are long, heterogeneous, and often redundant, while downstream tasks are short and high stakes. We study budgeted context selection, where a subset of document units is chosen under a strict token budget so an off-the-shelf generator can meet fixed cost and latency constraints. We cast this as a knapsack-constrained subset selection problem with two design choices, unitization that defines document segmentation and selection that determines which units are kept. We propose \textbf{RCD}, a monotone submodular objective that balances relevance, coverage, and diversity. We compare sentence, section, window, and cluster-based unitization, and introduce a routing heuristic that adapts to the budget regime. Experiments on MIMIC discharge notes, Cochrane abstracts, and L-Eval show that optimal strategies depend on the evaluation setting. Positional heuristics perform best at low budgets in extractive tasks, while diversity-aware methods such as MMR improve LLM generation. Selector choice matters more than unitization, with cluster-based grouping reducing performance and other schemes behaving similarly. ROUGE saturates for LLM summaries, while BERTScore better reflects quality differences. We release our code at https://github.com/stone-technologies/ACL_budget_paper.
URLs: https://github.com/stone-technologies/ACL_budget_paper.
Authors: Vanessa B. Sibug, Maria Anna D. Cruz, Vicky P. Vital, Juvy C. Grume, Almer B. Gamboa, Emerson Q. Fernando, Lloyd D. Feliciano, Jordan L. Salenga, John Paul P. Miranda
Abstract: The study examines the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in education by analyzing the roles of institutional support, teacher confidence, and teacher concerns. It aims to determine whether teacher concerns moderate the relationship between institutional support and two outcomes: teacher confidence and attitudes toward AI adoption. The sample included 260 teachers from the Philippines. Composite scores were calculated for institutional support, confidence, concerns, and attitudes. Moderated multiple regression analysis showed that institutional support significantly predicted both teacher confidence and attitudes toward AI. However, teacher concerns did not significantly moderate these relationships. A follow-up mediation analysis tested whether confidence explains the effect of institutional support on attitudes. Results showed full mediation. The indirect effect was significant based on the Sobel test, and the direct effect became non-significant when confidence was included in the model. This shows that institutional support improves teacher attitudes by increasing their confidence. The study recommends that institutions provide structured and ongoing support to strengthen teacher confidence. Professional development, mentoring, and AI integration in teacher education programs can increase readiness and support effective AI adoption.
Authors: Chengshuai Shi, Wenzhe Li, Xinran Liang, Yizhou Lu, Wenjia Yang, Ruirong Feng, Seth Karten, Ziran Yang, Zihan Ding, Gabriel Sarch, Danqi Chen, Karthik Narasimhan, Chi Jin
Abstract: Given the rapidly growing capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs), extending them to interactive decision-making tasks such as video games has emerged as a promising frontier. However, existing approaches either rely on large-scale supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on human trajectories or apply reinforcement learning (RL) only in relatively short-horizon settings (typically around 20--30 turns). In this work, we study RL-based training of VLMs for long-horizon decision-making in Super Mario Land, a visually grounded environment requiring 100+ turns of interaction with coordinated perception, reasoning, and action. We begin with a systematic investigation of key algorithmic components and propose an adapted variant of PPO with a lightweight turn-level critic, which substantially improves training stability and sample efficiency over critic-free methods such as GRPO and Reinforce++. We further show that pretrained VLMs provide strong action priors, significantly improving sample efficiency during RL training and reducing the need for manual design choices such as action engineering, compared to classical deep RL trained from scratch. Building on these insights, we introduce Odysseus, an open training framework for VLM agents, achieving substantial gains across multiple levels of the game and at least 3 times average game progresses than frontier models. Moreover, the trained models exhibit consistent improvements under both in-game and cross-game generalization settings, while maintaining general-domain capabilities. Overall, our results identify key ingredients for making RL stable and effective in long-horizon, multi-modal settings, and provide practical guidance for developing VLMs as embodied agents.
Authors: Xin Liu, Yuhang He, Sichen Zhao, Kejian Tong, Xingyu Zhang
Abstract: Root cause localization in cloud native microservice systems requires modeling complex service dependencies, irregular temporal dynamics, and heterogeneous observability data. We present HyperODE RCA, a unified framework that combines hypergraph attention learning, latent ordinary differential equations, and multimodal cross attention fusion for fine grained root cause analysis. The method learns higher order service interactions through differentiable hyperedge construction, captures continuous anomaly evolution from irregular observations with an ODE RNN encoder, and adaptively fuses logs, traces, metrics, entities, and events using context aware modality routing. We further improve robustness with a variational information bottleneck, temporal causal regularization, and invariant risk constraints. Experiments on the Tianchi AIOps benchmark show clear gains over strong baselines in ranking and classification performance, while preserving interpretability through learned hypergraph attention.
Authors: Farshad Noravesh, Reza Haffari, Layki Soon, Arghya Pal
Abstract: Many diffusion based molecule generation methods ignore the symbolic information of molecules and represent the atom and bond type as one hot representation. Methods based on Morgan fingerprints produce hash collisions and are hard to embed into a continuous space without information loss and random fingerprints correspond to no valid molecule. To circumvent this issue we use another paradigm and consider atom and bond codes as latent variables of VQ-VAE. We introduce VQ-SAD which first trains a VQ-VAE and uses the frozen pretrained VQ-VAE model and considers the codebooks for both atom and bond types as tokenizers for the downstream diffusion process. VQ-SAD is a neuro-symbolic model that utilizes both symbolic and neural structural information for a diffusion based model with learnable forward process. The large discrete code space provides a more balanced atom and bond types which enhances the denoising process. VQ-VAE slightly outperforms SOTA models for diffusion based molecule generation on QM9 and ZINC250k datasets.
Authors: Tianyu Hu, Weikai Lin, Weizhi Zhang, Jing Ma, Song Wang
Abstract: Long-term conversational agents must decide which turns to store in external memory, yet recent systems rely on autoregressive LLM generation at every turn to make that decision. We present MemRouter, a write-side memory router that decouples memory admission from the downstream answer backbone and replaces per-turn memory-management decoding with an embedding-based routing policy. MemRouter encodes each turn together with recent context, projects the resulting embeddings through a frozen LLM backbone, and predicts whether the turn should be stored using lightweight classification heads while training only 12M parameters. Under a controlled matched-harness comparison on LoCoMo, where the retrieval pipeline, answer prompts, and QA backbone (Qwen2.5-7B) are held identical, MemRouter outperforms an LLM-based memory manager on every question category (overall F1 52.0 vs 45.6, non-overlapping 95% CIs) while reducing memory-management p50 latency from 970ms to 58ms. Descriptive factorial averaging further shows that learned admission improves mean F1 by +10.3 over random storage, category-specific prompting adds +5.2 over a generic prompt, and retrieval contributes +0.7. These results suggest that write-side memory admission can be learned by a small supervised router, while answer generation remains a separate downstream component in long-horizon conversational QA.
Authors: Juvy C. Grume, John Paul P. Miranda, Aileen P. De Leon, Jordan L. Salenga, Hilene E. Hernandez, Mark Anthony A. Castro, Vernon Grace M. Maniago, Joel D. Canlas, Joel B. Quiambao
Abstract: GenAI systems such as ChatGPT are increasingly discussed in programming education, but the ways in which the research literature conceptualizes and frames their role remain unclear. This chapter applies text mining to publications indexed in a leading academic database to map scholarly discourse on ChatGPT in programming education. Term frequency analysis, phrase pattern extraction, and topic modeling reveal four dominant themes: pedagogical implementation, student-centered learning and engagement, AI infrastructure and human-AI collaboration, and assessment, prompting, and model evaluation. The literature prioritizes classroom practice and learner interaction, with comparatively limited attention to assessment design and institutional governance. Across studies, ChatGPT is positioned both as a learning aid that supports explanation, feedback, and efficiency and as a pedagogical risk linked to overreliance, unreliable outputs, and academic integrity concerns. These findings support responsible integration and highlight the need for stronger assessment and governance mechanisms.
Authors: Chenyu Huang, Jianghao Lin, Zhengyang Tang, Bo Jiang, Ruoqing Jiang, Benyou Wang, Lai Wei
Abstract: We study how large language models can be used to evolve inventory policies in online, non-stationary environments. Our work is motivated by recent advances in LLM-based evolutionary search, such as AlphaEvolve, which demonstrates strong performance for static and highly structured problems such as mathematical discovery, but is not directly suited to online dynamic inventory settings. To this end, we propose AlphaInventory, an end-to-end inventory-policy evolution and inference framework grounded in confidence-interval-based certification. The framework trains a large language model using reinforcement learning, incorporates demand data as well as numerical and textual features beyond demand, and generates white-box inventory policy with statistical safety guarantees for deployment in future periods. We further introduce a unified theoretical interface that connects training, inference, and deployment. This allows us to characterize the probability that the AlphaInventory evolves a statistically safe and improved policy, and to quantify the deployment gap relative to the oracle-safe benchmark. Tested on both synthetic data and real-world retail data, AlphaInventory outperforms classical inventory policies and deep learning based methods. In canonical inventory settings, it evolves new policies that improve upon existing benchmarks.
Authors: Zuyao You, Zhesong Yu, Mingyu Liu, Bilei Zhu, Yuan Wan, Zuxuan Wu
Abstract: In this paper, we propose GaMMA, a state-of-the-art (SoTA) large multimodal model (LMM) designed to achieve comprehensive musical content understanding. GaMMA inherits the streamlined encoder-decoder design of LLaVA, enabling effective cross-modal learning between music and language. By incorporating audio encoders in a mixture-of-experts manner, GaMMA effectively unifies both time-series and non-time-series music understanding tasks within one set of parameters. Our approach combines carefully curated datasets at scale with a progressive training pipeline, effectively pushing the boundaries of music understanding via pretraining, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and reinforcement learning (RL). To comprehensively assess both temporal and non-temporal capability of music LMMs, we introduce MusicBench, the largest music-oriented benchmark, comprising 3,739 human-curated multiple-choice questions covering diverse aspects of musical understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GaMMA establishes new SoTA in the music domain, achieving 79.1% accuracy on MuchoMusic, 79.3% on MusicBench-Temporal, and 81.3% on MusicBench-Global, consistently outperforming previous methods.
Authors: Fazle Rabbi, Lin Ling, Song Wang, Jinqiu Yang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed to generate code for human-centered applications where demographic fairness is critical. However, existing evaluations focus almost exclusively on functional correctness, leaving social bias in LLM-generated code largely unexamined. Extending our prior work on Solar, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study using SocialBias-Bench, a benchmark of 343 real-world coding tasks spanning seven demographic dimensions. We evaluate four prominent LLMs and find severe bias across all models, with Code Bias Scores reaching up to 60.58%. We further show that standard prompt-level interventions, such as Chain-of-Thought reasoning and fairness persona assignment, inadvertently amplify bias rather than reduce it. We then investigate whether structured multi-agent software process frameworks can improve fairness, finding that structured pipelines reduce bias when early roles correctly scope what the code should and should not consider. However, adding explicit fairness instructions to all agent roles produces worse outcomes than providing none, suggesting that diffused responsibility goes unaddressed. To address these limitations, we propose the Fairness Monitor Agent (FMA), a modular component that plugs into any existing code generation pipeline without modifying it. FMA analyzes the task description to determine which attributes should be considered or restricted, then detects and corrects violations through an iterative review process, without requiring an executable test suite. Evaluated on all 343 tasks, FMA reduces bias by 65.1% compared to a developer agent alone and improves functional correctness from 75.80% to 83.97%, outperforming all other studied approaches.
Authors: Bo Tang, Weiwei Xie
Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) provide a promising framework for energy-efficient and biologically grounded computation; however, scalable learning in deep recurrent architectures with sparse connectivity remains a major challenge. In this work, we propose a structured multi-layer recurrent SNN architecture composed of locally dense recurrent layers augmented with sparse small-world long-range projections to a readout population. The long-range connectivity is largely fixed, preserving routing efficiency and hardware scalability, while synaptic adaptation is performed using strictly local plasticity mechanisms. To enable supervised learning without backpropagation or surrogate gradients, we introduce a biologically motivated learning framework that combines: (i) population-based winner-take-all (WTA) teaching signals at the output layer, (ii) fixed random broadcast alignment feedback pathways, and (iii) low-dimensional modulatory neuron populations that gate synaptic updates through three-factor learning rules with eligibility traces. This design supports deep recurrent computation with sparse global communication and purely local synaptic updates. We analyze the algorithmic properties, computational complexity, and hardware feasibility of the proposed approach, and demonstrate stable learning and competitive performance on benchmark classification tasks. The results highlight the potential of structured recurrence and neuromodulatory learning to enable scalable, hardware-compatible SNN training beyond gradient-based methods.
Authors: Aninda Ray
Abstract: A multi-agent pipeline with N agents typically issues N LLM calls per run. Merging agents into fewer calls (compound execution) promises token savings, but naively merged calls silently degrade quality through tool loss and prompt compression. We present Agent Capsules, an adaptive execution runtime that treats multi-agent pipeline execution as an optimization problem with empirical quality constraints. The runtime instruments coordination overhead per group, scores composition opportunity, selects among three compound execution strategies, and gates every mode switch on rolling-mean output quality. A controlled negative result confirms that injecting more context into a merged call worsens compression rather than relieving it, so the framework's escalation ladder (standard, then two-phase, then sequential) recovers quality by moving toward per-agent dispatch rather than by rewriting merged prompts. On LLM-judged quality, the controller matches a hand-tuned oracle on every measured (model, group, mode) cell: routing compound whenever the oracle would, and reverting to fine whenever quality would fail the floor, without per-model configuration. Against a hand-crafted LangGraph implementation of a 14-agent competitive intelligence pipeline, Agent Capsules uses 51% fewer fine-mode input tokens and 42% fewer compound-mode input tokens, at +0.020 and +0.017 quality respectively. Against a DSPy implementation of a 5-agent due diligence pipeline, the framework uses 19% fewer tokens than uncompiled DSPy at quality parity, and 68% fewer tokens than MIPROv2 at +0.052 quality. Even before compound mode fires, the runtime delivers efficiency through automatic policy resolution, cache-aligned prompts, and topology-aware context injection, matching both hand-tuned and compile-time baselines without training data or per-pipeline engineering.
Authors: Sai Niranjan Ramachandran, Suvrit Sra
Abstract: Decision trees and diffusion models are ostensibly disparate model classes, one discrete and hierarchical, the other continuous and dynamic. This work unifies the two by establishing a crisp mathematical correspondence between hierarchical decision trees and diffusion processes in appropriate limiting regimes. Our unification reveals a shared optimization principle: \emph{Global Trajectory Score Matching (GTSM)}, for which gradient boosting (in an idealized version) is asymptotically optimal. We underscore the conceptual value of our work through two key practical instantiations: \treeflow, which achieves competitive generation quality on tabular data with higher fidelity and a 2\times computational speedup, and \dsmtree, a novel distillation method that transfers hierarchical decision logic into neural networks, matching teacher performance within 2\% on many benchmarks.
Authors: Pankaj Gupta, Kartik Bose
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) show promise in radiology but their deployment is limited by computational requirements that preclude use in resource-constrained clinical environments. We investigate whether small language models (SLMs) of 3-4 billion parameters can achieve strong multi-task radiology performance through LoRA fine-tuning, enabling deployment on consumer-grade CPUs. We train Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct and Qwen3-4B on 162K samples spanning 9 radiology tasks - RADS classification across 10 systems, impression generation, temporal comparison, radiology NLI, NER, abnormality detection, N/M staging, and radiology Q&A - compiled from 12 public datasets. Both models are evaluated on up to 500 held-out test samples per task with standardized metrics. Our key findings are: (1) LoRA fine-tuning dramatically improves performance over zero-shot baselines (RADS accuracy +53%, NLI +60%, N-staging +89%); (2) the two models exhibit complementary strengths - Qwen2.5 excels at structured generation tasks while Qwen3 dominates extractive tasks; (3) a task-outed oracle ensemble combining both models achieves the best performance across all tasks; (4) few-shot prompting with fine-tuned models hurts performance, demonstrating that LoRA adaptation is more effective than in-context learning for specialized domains; and (5) models can be quantized to GGUF format (~1.8-2.4GB) for CPU deployment at 4-8 tokens/second on consumer hardware. Our work demonstrates that small, efficiently fine-tuned models - which we collectively call RadLite - can serve as practical multi-task radiology AI assistants deployable entirely on consumer hardware without GPU requirements.
Authors: Zhixiong Zhao, Zukang Xu, Dawei Yang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have driven major progress in NLP, yet their substantial memory and compute demands still hinder practical deployment. Binarization can compress weights to 1 bit, fundamentally lowering compute and bandwidth cost. However, existing methods cannot address activation heavy tails and thus must keep activations in high precision, preventing true end-to-end acceleration. To overcome this limitation, we propose BWLA (Binarized Weights and Low-bit Activations), the first post-training quantization framework that preserves high accuracy while achieving 1-bit weight quantization together with low-bit activations (e.g., 6 bits). The Orthogonal-Kronecker Transformation (OKT) learns an orthogonal mapping via EM minimization, converting unimodal weights into symmetric bimodal forms while suppressing activation tails and incoherence. The Proximal SVD Projection (PSP) then performs lightweight low-rank refinement through proximal SVD projection, further enhancing quantizability with minimal overhead. On Qwen3-32B, BWLA reaches a Wikitext2 perplexity of 11.92 under 6-bit activations (vs. 38 from SOTA), improves five zero-shot tasks by more than 70%, and delivers 3.26 times inference speedup, demonstrating strong potential for real-world LLM compression and acceleration.
Authors: Alfredo Metere
Abstract: Agent skills -- structured packages of instructions, scripts, and references that augment a large language model (LLM) without modifying the model itself -- have moved from convenience to first-class deployment artifact. The runtime that loads them inherits the same problem package managers and operating systems have always faced: a piece of content claims a behavior; the runtime must decide whether to believe it. We argue this paper's central thesis up front: a skill is \emph{untrusted code} until it is verified, and the runtime that loads it must enforce that default rather than infer trust from a signature, a clearance, or a registry of origin. Without skill verification, a human-in-the-loop (HITL) gate must fire on every irreversible call -- which is operationally untenable and degrades into rubber-stamping at any non-trivial scale. With skill verification treated as a separate, gated process, HITL fires only for what is unverified, and the system becomes sustainable. We give a trust schema (\S\ref{sec:schema}) that includes an explicit verification level on every skill manifest; a capability gate (\S\ref{sec:gate}) whose HITL policy is a function of that verification level; a \emph{biconditional} correctness criterion (\S\ref{sec:biconditional}) that any candidate verification procedure must satisfy on an adversarial-ensemble exercise (\S\ref{sec:eval}); and a portable runtime profile (\S\ref{sec:guidelines}) with ten normative guidelines abstracted from a working open-source reference implementation \cite{metere2026enclawed}. The contribution is harness- and model-agnostic; nothing here requires retraining, fine-tuning, or proprietary infrastructure.
Authors: Shouyu Yin, Zhao Tian, Junjie Chen, Shikai Guo
Abstract: Code generation, which aims to automatically generate source code from given programming requirements, has the potential to substantially improve software development efficiency. With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), LLM-based code generation has attracted widespread attention from both academia and industry. However, as programming requirements become increasingly complex, existing LLMs still exhibit notable performance limitations. To address this challenge, recent studies have proposed training-based curriculum reinforcement learning (CRL) strategies to improve LLM code generation performance. Despite their effectiveness, existing CRL approaches suffer from several limitations, including misaligned requirement difficulty perception, the absence of requirement difficulty optimization, and suboptimal curriculum sampling strategies. In CRL-based code generation, programming requirements serve as the sole input to the model, making their quality and difficulty critical to training effectiveness. Motivated by insights from software requirements engineering, we propose RECRL, a novel requirement-aware curriculum reinforcement learning framework for enhancing LLM-based code generation. RECRL automatically perceives model-specific requirement difficulty, optimizes challenging requirements to improve training data utilization, and employs an adaptive curriculum sampling strategy to construct training batches with smoothly varying difficulty. Extensive experiments on five state-of-the-art LLMs across five widely-used code generation benchmarks by comparing with five state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrate the significant effectiveness of RECRL. For example, RECRL achieves an average Pass@1 improvement of 1.23%-5.62% over all state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors: Xin Du, Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii
Abstract: Mode collapse is a persistent challenge in generative modeling and appears in autoregressive text generation as behaviors ranging from explicit looping to gradual loss of diversity and premature trajectory convergence. We take a dynamical-systems view and reinterpret mode collapse as reduced state-space accessibility caused by *geometric collapse*: during generation, the model's internal trajectory becomes confined to a low-dimensional region of its representation space. This implies mode collapse is not purely a token-level phenomenon and cannot be reliably solved by symbolic constraints or probability-only decoding heuristics. Guided by this perspective, we propose *Reinforced Mode Regulation* (RMR), a lightweight, online state-space intervention that regulates dominant self-reinforcing directions in the Transformer value cache (implemented as low-rank damping). Across multiple large language models, RMR substantially reduces mode collapse and enables stable, high-quality generation at extremely low entropy rates (down to 0.8 nats/step), whereas standard decoding typically collapses near 2.0 nats/step.
Authors: Kenneth J. K. Ong
Abstract: Concerns with the safety and reliability of applying large-language models (LLMs) in unpredictable real-world applications motivate this study, which examines how task phrasing can lead to presumptions in LLMs, making it difficult for them to adapt when the task deviates from these assumptions. We investigated the impact of these presumptions on the performance of LLMs using the iterated prisoner's dilemma as a case study. Our experiments reveal that LLMs are susceptible to presumptions when making decisions even with reasoning steps. However, when the task phrasing was neutral, the models demonstrated logical reasoning without much presumptions. These findings highlight the importance of proper task phrasing to reduce the risk of presumptions in LLMs.
Authors: P. Rosciszewski, A. Krzywaniak, S. Iserte, K. Rojek, P. Gepner
Abstract: Intelligence Processing Units (IPU) have proven useful for many AI applications. In this paper, we evaluate them within the emerging field of \emph{AI for simulation}, where traditional numerical simulations are supported by artificial intelligence approaches. We focus specifically on a program for training machine learning models supporting a \emph{computational fluid dynamics} application. We use custom TensorFlow provided by the Poplar SDK to adapt the program for the IPU-POD16 platform and investigate its ease of use and performance scalability. Training a model on data from OpenFOAM simulations allows us to get accurate simulation state predictions in test time. We show how to utilize the \emph{popdist} library to overcome a performance bottleneck in feeding training data to the IPU on the host side, achieving up to 34\% speedup. Due to communication overheads, using data parallelism to utilize two IPUs instead of one does not improve the throughput. However, once the intra-IPU costs have been paid, the hardware capabilities for inter-IPU communication allow for good scalability. Increasing the number of IPUs from 2 to 16 improves the throughput from 560.8 to 2805.8 samples/s.
Authors: Yingbo Zhou, Yutong Ye, Shuhao Li, Rui Qian, Qiang Huang, Lemao Liu, Li Sun, Dejing Dou
Abstract: Real-world time series forecasting faces the fundamental challenge of non-stationary statistical properties, including shifts in mean and variance over time. While reversible instance normalization (RevIN) has shown promise by stationarizing inputs and denormalizing outputs, it relies on the strong assumption that historical and future distributions remain identical. We observe that in many practical applications, distribution shifts follow cyclical patterns that correlate with periodic positions (e.g., seasonal and holiday volatility). To this end, we propose PAMod, a lightweight yet powerful framework that models cyclical distribution shifts via Phase-Amplitude Modulation in the normalized feature space. PAMod learns periodic embeddings to modulate representations: phase modulation captures mean shifts, while amplitude modulation adapts to variance changes. Crucially, we prove mathematically that modulating in normalized space is equivalent to applying dynamic denormalization, offering an elegant unification of distribution adaptation and representation learning. Extensive experiments on twelve real-world benchmarks demonstrate that PAMod achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer computational resources. Furthermore, our modulation mechanism, as a novel plug-and-play technique, can improve existing time-series forecasting methods with simple integration.
Authors: Sara Malacarne, Eirik Hoel-H{\o}iseth, Erlend Aune, David Zsolt Bir\'o, Massimiliano Ruocco
Abstract: Mobile network operators must monitor thousands of heterogeneous network elements across the radio access network and the packet core, each exposing high-dimensional KPI time series. The scale and cost of incident labelling make supervised approaches impractical, motivating unsupervised anomaly detection robust to context shifts and nonstationarity. We propose \textbf{C-MTAD-GAT} (\emph{Context-aware Multivariate Time-series Anomaly Detection with Graph Attention}), an anomaly detection framework designed to operate as a single shared model across large populations of network elements. The model combines temporal and feature-wise graph attention with lightweight static and dynamic context conditioning and a dual-head decoder for reconstruction and multi-step forecasting. It produces per-element, per-feature anomaly scores, converted to alerts via fully unsupervised thresholds calibrated from validation residuals. On the TELCO dataset released with DC-VAE \cite{garcia2023onemodel}, C-MTAD-GAT improves event-level affiliation and pointwise F1 while generating fewer alarms than prior graph-attention and VAE-based baselines. We then apply the same system to nation-scale radio access and evolved packet core control-plane counter data from a mobile network operator, where it is deployed. Operator feedback indicates the alerts are actionable and support daily monitoring, showing scalability across domains without relying on labelled incidents.
Authors: Shardul Sapkota, Matthew J\"orke, Zane Sabbagh, Omar Shaikh, Grace Wang, James A. Landay
Abstract: Recent advances in user modeling make it feasible to conduct open-ended inference over a person's everyday computer use. Despite longstanding visions of systems that deeply understand our actions and the purposes they serve in our lives, existing systems only capture what a person is doing in the moment -- not why they are doing it -- limiting these systems to surface-level support. We introduce striving co-creation, a process for inferring broader life goals from unstructured observations of computer use. Grounded in Activity Theory and Emmons' personal strivings framework, our system progressively constructs a hierarchical representation of a person's activities. Crucially, strivings are difficult to fully resolve from observation alone, as the same action can be driven by many different goals. Our system therefore supports an editing interface that gives people agency over how they are understood by the system, feeding their corrections back into subsequent rounds of striving induction. In a week-long field deployment (N=14), we find that our co-creation process produces strivings that are representative of participants' long-term goals and gives them greater agency than baseline methods.
Authors: Lu Dai, Liang Sun, Fanpu Cao, Ziyang Rao, Cehao Yang, Hao Liu, Hui Xiong
Abstract: Modern information retrieval (IR) is no longer consumed primarily by humans but increasingly by large language models (LLMs) via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic search. Unlike human users, LLMs are constrained by limited attention budgets and are uniquely vulnerable to noise; misleading or irrelevant information is no longer just a nuisance, but a direct cause of hallucinations and reasoning failures. In this perspective paper, we argue that denoising-maximizing usable evidence density and verifiability within a context window-is becoming the primary bottleneck across the full information access pipeline. We conceptualize this paradigm shift through a four-stage framework of IR challenges: from inaccessible to undiscoverable, to misaligned, and finally to unverifiable. Furthermore, we provide a pipeline-organized taxonomy of signal-to-noise optimization techniques, spanning indexing, retrieval, context engineering, verification, and agentic workflow. We also present research works on information denoising in domains that rely heavily on retrieval such as lifelong assistant, coding agent, deep research, and multimodal understanding.
Authors: Zhanwei Wang, Huiling Yang, Min Sheng, Khaled B. Letaief, Kaibin Huang
Abstract: Leveraging continuous solar energy harvesting at high efficiency, space data centers are envisioned as a promising platform for executing energy-intensive large language models (LLMs). Recognizing this advantage, space and AI conglomerates (e.g., SpaceX, Google) are actively investing in this vision. One key challenge, however, is the efficient distributed deployment of a large-scale LLM in a satellite network due to the limited onboard computing and communication resources. This gives rise to a placement problem that involves partitioning and mapping model components to satellites such that the fundamentally different model architecture and network topology can be reconciled to ensure low-latency token generation. To address this problem, we present the Space Network of Experts (Space-XNet) framework targeting the distributed execution of a popular mixture-of-experts (MoE) model in space. The proposed placement strategies are two-level: (1) layer placement, which assigns MoE layers to satellite subnets; and (2) intra-layer expert placement, which assigns individual experts to satellites associated with the same layer/subnet. For layer placement, we exploit the ring-like communication pattern of autoregressive inference to partition the satellite constellation along the orbiting direction into subnets arranged on a ring, each hosting one MoE layer. Based on this architecture, we formulate and solve an optimization problem for intra-layer expert placement to map experts with heterogeneous activation probabilities onto satellites. The derived strategy reveals an intuitive principle: a frequently activated expert should be mapped to a satellite on a routing path with low expected latency. Experiments over a thousand-satellite constellation show that Space-XNet achieves at least a threefold latency reduction compared with conventional random and ablation-based placement strategies.
Authors: Allan Kazakov, Abdurrahman Javat
Abstract: The operational landscape of local Large Language Model (LLM) inference has shifted from lightweight models to datacenter-class weights exceeding 70B parameters, creating profound systems challenges for consumer hardware. This paper presents a systematic empirical analysis of the Nvidia and Apple Silicon ecosystems, specifically characterizing the distinct intra-architecture trade-offs required to deploy these massive models. On the Nvidia Blackwell architecture, we identify a critical "Backend Dichotomy" within the TensorRT-LLM stack: while the new NVFP4 quantization format delivers a 1.6x throughput advantage over optimized BF16 baselines (151 tokens/s vs. 92 tokens/s), realizing this performance requires navigating complex runtime constraints that trade startup latency for generation speed. Furthermore, we characterize the "VRAM Wall" for 70B+ models: on discrete GPUs, users face a destructive choice between aggressive quantization (e.g., Q2) that degrades model intelligence to fit in VRAM, or PCIe-bottlenecked CPU offloading, which reduces throughput by over 90% compared to full-GPU execution. Conversely, Apple's Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) circumvents these bottlenecks, enabling linear scaling for 80B parameter models at practical 4-bit precisions. This architectural divergence extends to operational sustainability, where Apple's SoC design demonstrates up to a 23x advantage in energy efficiency (tokens/joule). We conclude that for consumer-grade inference, the optimal hardware is defined by a complex interplay between compute density (Nvidia) and memory capacity (Apple), moderated by the significant "ecosystem friction" of proprietary quantization workflows.
Authors: Dongxin Guo, Jikun Wu, Siu Ming Yiu
Abstract: AI agents execute tens to hundreds of chained LLM calls per task, yet GPU schedulers treat each call as independent, discarding gigabytes of intermediate state between steps and inflating end-to-end latency by 3-8x. We argue that this request-level abstraction is fundamentally mismatched to compound AI workloads, and propose a shift to program-level scheduling: treating the entire agent workflow (not individual inference calls) as the first-class schedulable unit. We present SAGA, a distributed scheduler that implements this abstraction through three mechanisms: (1) Agent Execution Graphs that capture workflow structure to predict KV cache reuse across tool-call boundaries, achieving within 1.31x of B\'el\'ady's optimal offline policy; (2) session-affinity batching with work stealing that co-locates correlated requests while maintaining global load balance; and (3) Agent Fair Share, a task-completion-time fairness metric with provable bounded-deviation guarantees. On a 64-GPU cluster serving SWE-bench coding agents and WebArena browser tasks, SAGA reduces task completion time by 1.64x (geometric mean, p < 0.001) over vLLM v0.15.1 with prefix caching and affinity routing, while improving GPU memory utilization by 1.22x and achieving 99.2% SLO attainment under multi-tenant interference. These latency gains come at a quantified cost: approximately 30% lower peak throughput than throughput-optimal batch scheduling, a tradeoff appropriate for the latency-sensitive interactive deployments that dominate compound AI usage. Our results demonstrate that workflow-aware scheduling is essential for efficient compound AI serving.
Authors: Ziwen Zhao, Menglin Yang
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models with external knowledge, and tree-based RAG organizes documents into hierarchical indexes to support queries at multiple granularities. However, existing Tree-RAG methods designed for single-document retrieval face critical challenges in scaling to cross-document multi-hop questions: (1) poor distribution adaptability, where $k$-means clustering introduces noise due to rigid distribution assumptions; (2) structural isolation, as tree indexes lack explicit cross-document connections; and (3) coarse abstraction, which obscures fine-grained details. To address these limitations, we propose $\Psi$-RAG, a tree-RAG framework with two key components. First, a hierarchical abstract tree index built through an iterative "merging and collapse" process that adapts to data distributions without a priori assumption. Second, a multi-granular retrieval agent that intelligently interacts with the knowledge base with reorganized queries and an agent-powered hybrid retriever. $\Psi$-RAG supports diverse tasks from token-level question answering to document-level summarization. On cross-document multi-hop QA benchmarks, it outperforms RAPTOR by 25.9% and HippoRAG 2 by 7.4% in average F1 score. Code is available at https://github.com/Newiz430/Psi-RAG.
Authors: Junda Ying, Yuxuan Wang, Bowen Yang, Peijie Zhou, Lei Zhang
Abstract: Inferring cellular trajectories from destructive snapshots is complicated by the challenges of stochasticity and non-conservative mass dynamics such as cell proliferation and apoptosis. Existing unbalanced Optimal Transport (OT) methods treat mass as a continuous fluid, performing inference at the population level. However, this macroscopic view often fails to capture the discrete, jump-like nature of birth-death events at single-cell resolution, which is essential for understanding lineage branching and fate decisions. We present Unbalanced Schr\"odinger Bridge (USB), a simulation-free framework for learning underlying dynamics that effectively integrates both stochastic and unbalanced effects which also models the discrete, jump-like birth-death dynamics at single-cell resolution. Theoretically, USB provides a tractable solution to the Branching Schr\"odinger Bridge (BSB) problem, offering a rigorous microscopic interpretation where individual cells undergo both Brownian motion and discrete birth-death jumps. Technically, the method implements an efficient solver by introducing a simulation-free training objective that effectively scales to high-dimensional omics data. Empirically, we demonstrate on both simulated and real-world datasets that USB not only achieves trajectory reconstruction performance better than or comparable to deterministic baselines but also uniquely enables realistic discrete simulation of birth-death dynamics at single-cell resolution.
Authors: Michito Takeshita, Takuro Kawada, Takumi Ohashi, Shunsuke Kitada, Hitoshi Iyatomi
Abstract: AI agents that interact with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) require effective observation representations for reliable grounding. The accessibility tree is a commonly used text-based format that encodes UI element attributes, but it suffers from redundancy and lacks structural information such as spatial relationships among elements. We propose A11y-Compressor, a framework that transforms linearized accessibility trees into compact and structured representations. Our implementation, Compressed-a11y, applies a lightweight and structured transformation pipeline with modal detection, redundancy reduction, and semantic structuring. Experiments on the OSWorld benchmark show that Compressed-a11y reduces input tokens to 22% of the original while improving task success rates by 5.1 percentage points on average.
Authors: Ashwin George, Lucas Elbert Suryana, Lorenzo Flipse, Bart van Arem, David A. Abbink, Simeon Craig Calvert, Luciano Cavalcante Siebert, Arkady Zgonnikov
Abstract: Partial driving automation creates a tension: drivers remain legally responsible for vehicle behaviour, yet their active control is significantly reduced. This reduction undermines the engagement and sense of agency needed to intervene safely. Meaningful human control (MHC) has been proposed as a normative framework to address this tension. However, empirical methods for evaluating whether existing systems actually provide MHC remain underdeveloped. In this study, we investigated the extent to which drivers experience MHC when interacting with partially automated driving systems. Twenty-four drivers completed a simulator study involving silent automation failures under two modes - haptic shared control (HSC) and traded control (TC). We derived behavioural metrics from telemetry data, subjective perception scores from post-trial surveys and used them to test hypothesised relations between them derived from the properties of systems under MHC. The confirmatory analysis showed a significant negative correlation between the perception of the automated vehicle (AV) understanding the driver and conflict in steering torques. An exploratory analysis also revealed a surprising positive correlation between reaction times and the perception of sufficient control. Qualitative feedback from open-ended post-experiment questionnaires revealed that mismatches in intentions between the driver and automation, lack of safety, and resistance to driver inputs contribute to the reduction of perceived MHC, while subtle haptic guidance aligned with driver intent had a positive effect. These findings suggest that future designs should prioritise effortless driver interventions, transparent communication of automation intent, and context-sensitive authority allocation to strengthen meaningful human control in partially automated driving.
Authors: James Mooney, Zae Myung Kim, Young-Jun Lee, Dongyeop Kang
Abstract: Scientific discovery is an extended process of ideation--surveying prior work, forming hypotheses, and refining reasoning--yet existing approaches treat this phase as a brief preamble despite its central role in research. We introduce SCISENSE, a sensemaking-grounded framework that operationalizes ideation as a structured sequence of eight cognitive stages (Pirolli \& Card, 2005). We construct SCISENSE-Traj, a 100K-scale dataset of citation-conditioned research trajectories in two modes: Target, where an LLM reconstructs the ideation path leading to a known paper from its cited works, and Infer, where the LLM proposes novel directions from the same citations. We distill these into SCISENSE-LM, a family of sensemaking LLMs spanning 3B to 70B parameters. Contrary to the assumption that looser supervision promotes greater exploration, Target-trained models achieve a 2.0\% improvement in trajectory quality over Infer-trained models while also producing more novel and diverse outputs. This advantage propagates downstream: coding agents conditioned on Target trajectories produce research artifacts with higher executability and quality than those conditioned on Infer trajectories. This suggests that targeted ideation reduces cognitive burden on downstream agents, freeing them to explore more creatively. SCISENSE offers both a practical tool for augmenting LLM-driven research workflows and a principled testbed for studying how planning shapes scientific discovery.
Authors: Nick von Felten, Luisa Ella M\"uller, Johannes Sch\"oning
Abstract: Expectations about the support of artificial intelligence (AI) may influence interaction outcomes similar to placebos. Such expectations may result from AI washing, a practice of overstating a system's AI capabilities when actual functionality is limited. For example, some computer mice are marketed as "AI-assisted" despite lacking AI in core functions. In a within-subjects study, 28 participants completed Fitts' Law tasks with a computer mouse under three conditions: no support, supposed predictive AI support, and supposed biosignal-enhanced AI support. Objective Fitts' Law performance indicators and subjective performance expectations, perceived workload, and perceived usability were measured. Compared to baseline, participants expected significantly improved performance in placebo conditions. However, these expectations did not translate into differences in objective or subjective assessments. This paper contributes evidence that AI washing inflates user expectations without altering actual interaction outcomes, highlighting a critical transparency issue. By exposing how deceptive AI marketing can shape user expectations, we underscore the need for accountability in AI product claims. Further, we establish Fitts' Law as a rigorous methodological lens for auditing AI-labelled input devices.
Authors: Aharon Azulay, Jan Dubi\'nski, Zhuoyun Li, Atharv Mittal, Yossi Gandelsman
Abstract: The visual modality of vision-language models (VLMs) is an underexplored attack surface for bypassing safety alignment. We introduce four jailbreak attacks exploiting the vision component: (1) encoding harmful instructions as visual symbol sequences with a decoding legend, (2) replacing harmful objects with benign substitutes (e.g., bomb -> banana) then prompting for harmful actions using the substitute term, (3) replacing harmful text in images (e.g., on book covers) with benign words while visual context preserves the original meaning, and (4) visual analogy puzzles whose solution requires inferring a prohibited concept. Evaluating across six frontier VLMs, our visual attacks bypass safety alignment and expose a cross-modality alignment gap: text-based safety training does not automatically generalize to harmful intent conveyed visually. For example, our visual cipher achieves 40.9% attack success on Claude-Haiku-4.5 versus 10.7% for an equivalent textual cipher. To further our insight into the attack mechanism, we present preliminary interpretability and mitigation results. These findings highlight that robust VLM alignment requires treating vision as a first-class target for safety post-training.
Authors: Martin C. Cooper, Imane Bousdira
Abstract: In Machine Learning, an accepted definition of fairness of a decision taken by a classifier is that it should not depend on protected features, such as gender. Unfortunately, when constraints exist between features, such dependencies can be obscured by the constraints. To avoid this problem, we propose that a decision be considered fair if it has a fair explanation. We define a fair explanation as a prime-implicant reason for the decision that does not contain any protected feature (where the constraints are taken into account in the definition of prime-implicant). Surprisingly, ignoring constraints can completely change the fairness of a decision (according to this definition) even in the absence of constraints between protected and unprotected features. Three possible definitions of fairness of a classifier are that for all its decisions (1) there are only fair explanations, (2) there is at least one fair explanation, or (3) changing protected features does not change the outcome. We identify the relationships between these different definitions of fairness and study the computational complexity of testing fairness of classifiers.
Authors: Yao Ni, Jeremie Houssineau, Yew Soon Ong, Piotr Koniusz
Abstract: Deep neural networks achieve impressive results across diverse applications, yet their overconfidence on unseen inputs necessitates reliable epistemic uncertainty modelling. Existing methods for uncertainty modelling face a fundamental dilemma: Bayesian approaches provide principled estimates but remain computationally prohibitive, while efficient second-order predictors lack rigorous derivations connecting their specific objectives to epistemic uncertainty quantification. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce Dirichlet-approximated possibilistic posterior predictions (DAPPr), a principled framework leveraging possibility theory. We define a possibilistic posterior over parameters, projects this posterior to the prediction space via supremum operators, and approximates the projected posterior using learnable Dirichlet possibility functions. This projection-and-approximation strategy yields a simple training objective with closed-form solutions. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive or superior uncertainty quantification performance compared to state-of-the-art evidential deep learning methods while maintaining both principled derivation and computational efficiency. Code will be available at https://github.com/MaxwellYaoNi/DAPPr.
Authors: Massimo Rondelli, Francesco Pivi, Maurizio Gabbrielli
Abstract: Automatic generation of executable Blender code from natural language remains challenging, with state-of-the-art LLMs producing frequent syntactic errors and geometrically inconsistent objects. We present BlenderRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation system that operates on a curated multimodal dataset of 500 expert-validated examples (text, code, image) across 50 object categories. By retrieving semantically similar examples during generation, BlenderRAG improves compilation success rates from 40.8% to 70.0% and semantic normalized alignment from 0.41 to 0.77 (CLIP similarity) across four state-of-the-art LLMs, without requiring fine-tuning or specialized hardware, making it immediately accessible for deployment. The dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/MaxRondelli/BlenderRAG.
Authors: Steven R. Spurgeon, Milad Abolhasani, Frederick Baddour, Ryan B. Comes, Vinayak P. Dravid, Hilary Egan, Patrick Emami, Robert W. Epps, Davi M. F\'ebba, Renae Gannon, E. Ashley Gaulding, Ayana Ghosh, Kenny Gruchalla, Grace Guinan, Taro Hitosugi, Michael Holden, Sergei V. Kalinin, Yangang Liang, John S. Mangum, Matthew J. Olszta, Nathaniel H. Park, Axel Palmstrom, Michelle A. Smeaton, Brooks Tellekamp, Nicholas E. Thornburg, Raymond R. Unocic, Daniela Ushizima, Rama K. Vasudevan, Robert White, Andrew Young, Andriy Zakutayev
Abstract: Autonomous science is transforming how we discover materials and chemical systems for advanced energy technologies. However, many initially promising systems never reach deployment. This "valley of death" stems from optimization that prioritizes laboratory metrics over industrial viability. We propose a new strategy: "born-qualified" autonomous development, which embeds manufacturability, cost, and durability constraints from the outset. This approach is enabled by four pillars, including the development of multi-objective metrics, causal models, a modular infrastructure, and embedding manufacturing in the discovery loop. Realizing this vision will require sustained, community-wide commitment, but the potential return on that investment is commensurate with the scale of the challenge.
Authors: Jiali Cui, Zhiqiang Lao, Heather Yu
Abstract: Energy-based models (EBMs) are a flexible class of deep generative models and are well-suited to capture complex dependencies in multimodal data. However, learning multimodal EBM by maximum likelihood requires Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling in the joint data space, where noise-initialized Langevin dynamics often mixes poorly and fails to discover coherent inter-modal relationships. Multimodal VAEs have made progress in capturing such inter-modal dependencies by introducing a shared latent generator and a joint inference model. However, both the shared latent generator and joint inference model are parameterized as unimodal Gaussian (or Laplace), which severely limits their ability to approximate the complex structure induced by multimodal data. In this work, we study the learning problem of the multimodal EBM, shared latent generator, and joint inference model. We present a learning framework that effectively interweaves their MLE updates with corresponding MCMC refinements in both the data and latent spaces. Specifically, the generator is learned to produce coherent multimodal samples that serve as strong initial states for EBM sampling, while the inference model is learned to provide informative latent initializations for generator posterior sampling. Together, these two models serve as complementary models that enable effective EBM sampling and learning, yielding realistic and coherent multimodal EBM samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance for multimodal synthesis quality and coherence compared to various baselines. We conduct various analyses and ablation studies to validate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed multimodal framework.
Authors: Zhijie Cai, Haolong Chen, Guangxu Zhu
Abstract: Fine-tuning LLMs is necessary for various dedicated downstream tasks, but classic backpropagation-based fine-tuning methods require substantial GPU memory. To this end, a recent work, MeZO, which relies solely on forward passes to fine-tune LLMs, significantly reduces GPU requirements at the cost of slower convergence due to its indifference to loss landscapes. Standard solutions, such as Adam, explore loss landscapes by estimating the first- and second-order moments and storing them in memory to guide the model's movement through dimensions with lower curvature and vice versa. However, directly applying Adam negates MeZO's advantage as it will triple the memory requirement. In light of this, we propose AdaMeZO, a zeroth-order optimizer that leverages Adam-style first- and second-moment estimates without maintaining them in memory. We present a theoretical analysis of AdaMeZO, corroborated by extensive experiments demonstrating AdaMeZO's performance, showing that AdaMeZO can outperform MeZO while requiring up to $70\%$ fewer forward passes. Trajectory visualizations affirm AdaMeZO's ability to adapt to diverse loss landscapes.
Authors: Andrzej Ruszczynski, Tiangang Zhang
Abstract: For a risk-averse finite-horizon Markov Decision Problem, we introduce a special class of Markov coherent risk measures, called mini-batch measures. We also define the class of multipattern risk-averse problems that generalizes the class of linear systems. We use both concepts in a feature-based $Q$-learning method with multipattern $Q$-factor approximation and we prove a high-probability regret bound of $\mathcal{O}\big(H^2 N^H \sqrt{ K}\big)$, where $H$ is the horizon, $N$ is the mini-batch size, and $K$ is the number of episodes. We also propose an economical version of the $Q$-learning method that streamlines the policy evaluation (backward) step. The theoretical results are illustrated on a stochastic assignment problem and a short-horizon multi-armed bandit problem.
Authors: Jaeyoung Chung, Suyoung Lee, Kyoung Mu Lee
Abstract: We present a training-free approach for controllable 3D inpainting based on initial noise optimization. In the structured 3D latent diffusion framework, we observe that the underlying geometric structure is established during the early stages of the diffusion process and exhibits high sensitivity to the initial noise. Such characteristics compromise stability in tasks like inpainting and editing, where the model must ensure strict alignment with the existing context while synthesizing a new structure. In this paper, we introduce a strategy to optimize the initial noise within the structured 3D latent diffusion framework, ensuring high-fidelity 3D inpainting. Specifically, we update the initial noise by leveraging a backpropagation approximation grounded in the rectified flow model, with the spectral parameterization specially designed for robust and efficient structured 3D latent optimization. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in contextual consistency and prompt alignment over representative training-free inpainting baselines, establishing initial noise control as an independent dimension for 3D inpainting, orthogonal to conventional sampling trajectory manipulation.
Authors: Jiaming Zhang, Yujie Yang, Yao Lyu, Shengbo Eben Li, Liping Zhang
Abstract: Safety is a primary challenge in real-world reinforcement learning (RL). Formulating safety requirements as state-wise constraints has become a prominent paradigm. Handling state-wise constraints with the Lagrangian method requires a distinct multiplier for every state, necessitating neural networks to approximate them as a multiplier network. However, applying standard dual gradient ascent to multiplier networks induces severe training oscillations. This is because the inherent instability of dual ascent is exacerbated by network generalization -- local overshoots and delayed updates propagate to adjacent states, further amplifying policy fluctuations. Existing stabilization techniques are designed for scalar multipliers, which are inadequate for state-dependent multiplier networks. To address this challenge, we propose an augmented Lagrangian multiplier network (ALaM) framework for stable learning of state-wise multipliers. ALaM consists of two key components. First, a quadratic penalty is introduced into the augmented Lagrangian to compensate for delayed multiplier updates and establish the local convexity near the optimum, thereby mitigating policy oscillations. Second, the multiplier network is trained via supervised regression toward a dual target, which stabilizes training and promotes convergence. Theoretically, we show that ALaM guarantees multiplier convergence and thus recovers the optimal policy of the constrained problem. Building on this framework, we integrate soft actor-critic (SAC) with ALaM to develop the SAC-ALaM algorithm. Experiments demonstrate that SAC-ALaM outperforms state-of-the-art safe RL baselines in both safety and return, while also stabilizing training dynamics and learning well-calibrated multipliers for risk identification.
Authors: Anton Ratnarajah, Mehmet Ergezer, Arun Nair, Mrudula Athi
Abstract: The Room Acoustics and Speaker Distance Estimation (SDE) Challenge at ICASSP 2025 explores the effectiveness of augmented room impulse response (RIR) data for improving SDE model performance. This challenge at GenDARA involves generating RIRs to supplement sparse datasets and fine-tuning SDE models with the augmented data. We employ the open-source fast diffuse room impulse response generator (FastRIR) conditioned only on speaker and listener locations. We design a quality filter to ensure generated RIR alignment with challenge RIRs, and hyperparameter optimization is employed for model fine-tuning. Our approach reduces the mean absolute error (MAE) of the five positions from 1.66m to 0.6m for GWA rooms and from 2.18m to 0.69m for Treble rooms, with results demonstrating that the augmentation approach significantly improves estimation accuracy, particularly at medium to long distances.
Authors: Ziyu Zheng, Yaming Yang, Zhe Wang, Ziyu Guan, Wei Zhao
Abstract: While Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have achieved remarkable success in homogeneous graphs, extending them to multi-domain heterogeneous graphs (MDHGs) remains a formidable challenge due to cross-type feature shifts and intra-domain relation gaps. Existing global feature alignment methods (PCA or SVD) enforce a shared feature space blindly, which distorts type-specific semantics and disrupts original topologies, inevitably leading to "Type Collapse" and "Relation Confusion". To address these fundamental limitations, we propose Decoupled relation Subspace Alignment (DRSA), a novel, plug-and-play relation-driven alignment framework. DRSA fundamentally shifts the paradigm by decoupling feature semantics from relation structures. Specifically, it introduces a dual-relation subspace projection mechanism to coordinate cross-type interactions within a shared low-rank relation subspace explicitly. Furthermore, a feature-structure decoupled representation is designed to decompose aligned features into a semantic projection component and a structural residual term, adaptively absorbing intra-domain variations. Optimized via a stable alternating minimization strategy based on Block Coordinate Descent, DRSA constructs a well-calibrated, structure-aware latent space. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that DRSA can be seamlessly integrated as a universal preprocessing module, significantly and consistently enhancing the cross-domain and few-shot knowledge transfer capabilities of state-of-the-art GFMs. The code is available at: https://github.com/zhengziyu77/DSRA.
Authors: Zihao Ding, Beining Wu, Jun Huang
Abstract: Federated Multimodal Learning (FML) trains multimodal models across decentralized clients while keeping their image-text pairs private. However, joint embedding training entangles forgotten knowledge across both modalities and client gradient subspaces, hindering federated unlearning. Previous federated unlearning approaches neither sever the cross-modal reconstruction channel mediated by bilinear coupling nor separate forget-exclusive update directions from those shared with retained clients. We identify an Anchor Principle for federated multimodal contrastive unlearning: forgotten alignments persist through three residual anchors arising from bilinear cross-modal coupling, principal-angle subspace entanglement, and continued federated updates. At the modality level, we show that bilateral displacement of both visual and language branches closes the cross-modal reconstruction channel. Correspondingly, our method addresses subspace entanglement through Cosine--Sine decomposition of client-update subspaces, isolating forget-exclusive directions from retain support. Moreover, we propose a direction-selective Forget Lock that bounds residual drift across rounds. Combining these strategies, we present EASE, an Entanglement-Aware Subspace Excision framework that closes all three anchor channels under a unified design. EASE demonstrates consistent superiority across multiple datasets and unlearning scenarios, for instance, matching the retrain reference to within 0.2 and 4.2 R@1 points on the forget and retain sides under client unlearning on Flickr30K with CLIP-B/32.
Authors: Shradha Sharma, Swapnil Dhamal, Shweta Jain
Abstract: We propose a new framework for meritocratic fairness in budgeted combinatorial multi-armed bandits with full-bandit feedback (BCMAB-FBF). Unlike semi-bandit feedback, the contribution of individual arms is not received in full-bandit feedback, making the setting significantly more challenging. To compute arm contributions in BCMAB-FBF, we first extend the Shapley value, a classical solution concept from cooperative game theory, to the $K$-Shapley value, which captures the marginal contribution of an agent restricted to a set of size at most $K$. We show that $K$-Shapley value is a unique solution concept that satisfies Symmetry, Linearity, Null player, and efficiency properties. We next propose K-SVFair-FBF, a fairness-aware bandit algorithm that adaptively estimates $K$-Shapley value with unknown valuation function. Unlike standard bandit literature on full bandit feedback, K-SVFair-FBF not only learns the valuation function under full feedback setting but also mitigates the noise arising from Monte Carlo approximations. Theoretically, we prove that K-SVFair-FBF achieves $O(T^{3/4})$ regret bound on fairness regret. Through experiments on federated learning and social influence maximization datasets, we demonstrate that our approach achieves fairness and performs more effectively than existing baselines.
Authors: Scott Friedman, Ruta Wheelock, Sonja Schmer-Galunder, Drisana Iverson, Jake Vasilakes, Joan Zheng, Jeffrey Rye, Vasanth Sarathy, Christopher Miller
Abstract: The language in online platforms, influence operations, and political rhetoric frequently directs a mix of pro-social sentiment (e.g., advocacy, helpfulness, compassion) and anti-social sentiment (e.g., threats, opposition, blame) at different topics, all in the same message. While many natural language processing (NLP) tools classify or score a text's overall sentiment as positive, neutral, or negative, these tools cannot report that positive and negative sentiments coexist, and they cannot report the target of those sentiments. This paper presents the Directed Social Regard (DSR) approach to multi-dimensional, multi-valence sentiment analysis, comprised of a pair of transformer-based models that (1) detects span-level targets of sentiment in a message and then (2) scores all spans within the message context along three (-1, 1) axes of regard that are motivated by social science theories of moral disengagement and moral framing. We present a data collection and annotation strategy for DSR dataset construction, a transformer-based architecture for span-level scoring, and a validation study with promising results. We apply the validated DSR model on six third-party datasets of online media and report meaningful correlations between DSR outputs and the labels and topics in these pre-existing social science datasets.
Authors: Yinhao Xiao, Rongbo Xiao, Yihan Zhang
Abstract: Reliable spatial analysis in GIScience requires preserving coordinate semantics, topology, units, and geographic plausibility. Current LLM-based GIS systems generate fluent scripts but rarely enforce these geographic rules at scale. We present GeoContra, a verification and repair framework for LLM-driven Python GIS workflows. It represents each task as an executable geospatial contract-including natural-language questions, schemas, CRS metadata, expected outputs, spatial predicates, topology, metrics, required operations, and forbidden shortcuts. Generated programs undergo static rule inspection, runtime validation, and semantic verification, with violations fed back into a bounded repair loop. Evaluated on 7,079 real geospatial tasks across 15 Boston-area zones, 9 task families, and 11 open-source models (600 runs each), GeoContra improves spatial correctness on closed models from 47.6% to 77.5% for DeepSeek-V4 and from 57.7% to 81.5% for Kimi-K2.5. Across 11 open models, average correctness rises by 26.6%. GeoContra turns fluent code production into verifiable spatial analysis, catching negative travel times, CRS/field-schema violations, missing predicates, and brittle output casts that otherwise yield executable but geographically invalid results.
Authors: Xihao Chen, Yangyang Guo, Roger Zimmermann
Abstract: Key-Value (KV) cache has become a de facto component of modern Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for inference. While it enhances decoding efficiency in Large Language Models (LLMs), its direct adoption in LVLMs introduces substantial GPU memory overhead due to the large number of vision tokens processed during the prefill stage. To tackle this problem, we propose LightKV, a novel approach that reduces KV cache size by exploiting the redundancy among vision-token embeddings. Guided by text prompts, LightKV employs cross-modality message passing to aggregate informative messages across vision tokens and progressively compress them during prefill. This prompt-aware guidance distinguishes our method from prior vision-only compression strategies. We evaluate LightKV on eight open-source LVLMs across eight public benchmark datasets, e.g., MME and SeedBench. Experimental results demonstrate that with only 55% of the original vision tokens, LightKV (a) halves the vision-token KV cache size, (b) reduces computation by up to 40%, and (c) preserves general-purpose performance while significantly outperforming existing baselines.
Authors: Jingxi Pu, Tonghua Liu, Zhilin Guan, Siqiao Li, Yang Ming, Zheng Cong, Wei Zhang, Fangwei Li
Abstract: With the development of deep learning, medical image processing has been widely used to assist clinical research. This paper focuses on the denoising problem of low-dose computed tomography using deep learning. Although low-dose computed tomography reduces radiation exposure to patients, it also introduces more noise, which may interfere with visual interpretation by physicians and affect diagnostic results. To address this problem, inspired by Cycle-GAN for unsupervised learning, this paper proposes an end-to-end unsupervised low-dose computed tomography denoising framework. The proposed framework combines a U-Net structure for multi-scale feature extraction, an attention mechanism for feature fusion, and a residual network for feature transformation. It also introduces perceptual loss to improve the network for the characteristics of medical images. In addition, we construct a real low-dose computed tomography dataset and design a large number of comparative experiments to validate the proposed method, using both image-based evaluation metrics and medical evaluation criteria. Compared with classical methods, the main advantage of this paper is that it addresses the limitation that real clinical data cannot be directly used for supervised learning, while still achieving excellent performance. The experimental results are also professionally evaluated by imaging physicians and meet clinical needs.
Authors: Alfredo Madrid-Garc\'ia, Miguel Rujas
Abstract: Background: Patient-facing medical chatbots based on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) are increasingly promoted to deliver accessible, grounded health information. AI-assisted development lowers the barrier to building them, but they still demand rigorous security, privacy, and governance controls. Objective: To report an anonymized, non-destructive security assessment of a publicly accessible patient-facing medical RAG chatbot and identify governance lessons for safe deployment of generative AI in health. Methods: We used a two-stage strategy. First, Claude Opus 4.6 supported exploratory prompt-based testing and structured vulnerability hypotheses. Second, candidate findings were manually verified using Chrome Developer Tools, inspecting browser-visible network traffic, payloads, API schemas, configuration objects, and stored interaction data. Results: The LLM-assisted phase identified a critical vulnerability: sensitive system and RAG configuration appeared exposed through client-server communication rather than restricted server-side. Manual verification confirmed that ordinary browser inspection allowed collection of the system prompt, model and embedding configuration, retrieval parameters, backend endpoints, API schema, document and chunk metadata, knowledge-base content, and the 1,000 most recent patient-chatbot conversations. The deployment also contradicted its privacy assurances: full conversation records, including health-related queries, were retrievable without authentication. Conclusions: Serious privacy and security failures in patient-facing RAG chatbots can be identified with standard browser tools, without specialist skills or authentication; independent review should be a prerequisite for deployment. Commercial LLMs accelerated this assessment, including under a false developer persona; assistance available to auditors is equally available to adversaries.
Authors: Ziyang Huang, Yi Cao, Ali K. Shargh, Jing Luo, Ruidong Mei, Mohd Zaki, Zhan Liu, Wyatt Bunstine, William Jurayj, Somdatta Goswami, Tyrel McQueen, Michael Shields, Jaafar El-Awady, Paulette Clancy, Benjamin Van Durme, Nicholas Andrews, William Walden, Daniel Khashabi
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous coding agents and have achieved remarkably strong performance on software engineering benchmarks. However, it is unclear whether such success transfers to computational scientific workflows, where tasks require not only strong coding ability, but also the ability to navigate complex, domain-specific procedures and to interpret results in the context of scientific claims. To address this question, we present AutoMat, a benchmark for evaluating LLM-based agents' ability to reproduce claims from computational materials science. AutoMat poses three interrelated challenges: recovering underspecified computational procedures, navigating specialized toolchains, and determining whether the resulting evidence supports a claim. By working closely with subject matter experts, we curate a set of claims from real materials science papers to test whether coding agents can recover and execute the end-to-end workflow needed to support (or undermine) such claims. We then evaluate multiple representative coding agent settings across several foundation models. Our results show that current LLM-based agents obtain low overall success rates on AutoMat, with the best-performing setting achieving a success rate of only 54.1%. Error analysis further reveals that agents perform worst when workflows must be reconstructed from paper text alone and that they fail primarily due to incomplete procedures, methodological deviations, and execution fragility. Taken together, these findings position AutoMat as both a benchmark for computational scientific reproducibility and a tool for diagnosing the current limitations of agentic systems in AI-for-science settings.
Authors: Siyuan Huang, Xiaoye Qu, Yafu Li, Tong Zhu, Zefeng He, Muxin Fu, Daizong Liu, Wei-Long Zheng, Yu Cheng
Abstract: While autoregressive Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate remarkable proficiency in multimodal tasks, they face a "Visual Signal Dilution" phenomenon, where the accumulation of textual history expands the attention partition function, causing visual attention to decay inversely with generated sequence length. To counteract this, we propose Persistent Visual Memory (PVM), a lightweight learnable module designed to ensure sustained, on-demand visual perception. Integrated as a parallel branch alongside the Feed-Forward Network (FFN) in LVLMs, PVM establishes a distance-agnostic retrieval pathway that directly provides visual embeddings for precise visual perception, thereby structurally mitigating the signal suppression inherent to deep generation. Extensive experiments on Qwen3-VL models demonstrate that PVM brings notable improvements with negligible parameter overhead, delivering consistent average accuracy gains across both 4B and 8B scales, particularly in complex reasoning tasks that demand persistent visual perception. Furthermore, in-depth analysis reveals that PVM can resist length-induced signal decay and accelerate internal prediction convergence.
Authors: Preston Rozwood, Edward Mehrez, Ludger Paehler, Wen Sun, Steven L. Brunton
Abstract: The Bellman equation and its continuous form, the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation, are ubiquitous in reinforcement learning and control theory. However, these equations become intractable for high-dimensional or nonlinear systems. This paper develops two new reinforcement learning algorithms based on the data-driven Koopman operator, which lifts a nonlinear system into new coordinates where the dynamics become approximately linear, and where Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman-based methods are more tractable. In particular, the Koopman operator captures the expectation of the time evolution of the value function via linear dynamics in the lifted coordinates. By parameterizing the Koopman operator with the control actions, we construct a ``controlled Koopman tensor'' that facilitates the estimation of the optimal value function. This enables us to reformulate two max-entropy RL algorithms: soft value iteration and soft actor-critic. This flexible and interpretable framework includes deterministic and stochastic systems, as well as discrete and continuous dynamics. Koopman Assisted reinforcement learning attains state-of-the-art performance with respect to traditional neural network-based soft actor-critic baselines on a linear state-space system, the Lorenz system, fluid flow past a cylinder, and a double-well potential with non-isotropic stochastic forcing.
Authors: Guangyu Zhao, Kewei Lian, Haoxuan Ru, Borong Zhang, Haowei Lin, Zhancun Mu, Haobo Fu, Qiang Fu, Shaofei Cai, Zihao Wang, Yitao Liang
Abstract: Goal-conditioned policies enable decision-making models to execute diverse behaviors based on specified goals, yet their downstream performance is often highly sensitive to the choice of instructions or prompts. To bypass the limitations of discrete text prompts, we formulate post-training adaptation as a latent control problem, where the goal embedding serves as a continuous control variable to modulate the behavior of a frozen policy. We propose Preference Goal Tuning (PGT), a framework that optimizes this latent control variable to align the induced trajectory distribution with task preferences. Unlike standard fine-tuning that updates policy parameters, PGT keeps the policy frozen and updates only the latent goal using a trajectory-level preference objective. This approach essentially searches for the optimal conditioning input that maximizes the likelihood of preferred behaviors while suppressing undesirable ones. We evaluate PGT on the Minecraft SkillForge benchmark across 17 tasks. With minimal data, PGT achieves average relative improvements of 72.0\% and 81.6\% on two foundation policies, consistently outperforming expert-crafted prompts. Crucially, by decoupling task alignment (latent goal) from physical dynamics (frozen policy), PGT surpasses full fine-tuning by 13.4\% in out-of-distribution settings, demonstrating superior robustness and generalization.
Authors: Bin Lei, Weitai Kang, Zijian Zhang, Winson Chen, Xi Xie, Shan Zuo, Mimi Xie, Ali Payani, Mingyi Hong, Yan Yan, Caiwen Ding
Abstract: This paper introduces \textsc{InfantAgent-Next}, a generalist agent capable of interacting with computers in a multimodal manner, encompassing text, images, audio, and video. Unlike existing approaches that either build intricate workflows around a single large model or only provide workflow modularity, our agent integrates tool-based and pure vision agents within a highly modular architecture, enabling different models to collaboratively solve decoupled tasks in a step-by-step manner. Our generality is demonstrated by our ability to evaluate not only pure vision-based real-world benchmarks (i.e., OSWorld), but also more general or tool-intensive benchmarks (e.g., GAIA and SWE-Bench). Specifically, we achieve $\mathbf{7.27\%}$ accuracy on OSWorld, higher than Claude-Computer-Use. Codes and evaluation scripts are open-sourced at https://github.com/bin123apple/InfantAgent.
Authors: Yisen Gao, Jiaxin Bai, Tianshi Zheng, Qingyun Sun, Ziwei Zhang, Xingcheng Fu, Jianxin Li, Yangqiu Song
Abstract: Abductive reasoning in knowledge graphs aims to generate plausible logical hypotheses from observed entities, with broad applications in areas such as clinical diagnosis and scientific discovery. However, due to a lack of controllability, a single observation may yield numerous plausible but redundant or irrelevant hypotheses on large-scale knowledge graphs. To address this limitation, we introduce the task of controllable hypothesis generation to improve the practical utility of abductive reasoning. This task faces two key challenges when controlling for generating long and complex logical hypotheses: hypothesis space collapse and hypothesis oversensitivity. To address these challenges, we propose CtrlHGen, a Controllable logcial Hypothesis Generation framework for abductive reasoning over knowledge graphs, trained in a two-stage paradigm including supervised learning and subsequent reinforcement learning. To mitigate hypothesis space collapse, we design a dataset augmentation strategy based on sub-logical decomposition, enabling the model to learn complex logical structures by leveraging semantic patterns in simpler components. To address hypothesis oversensitivity, we incorporate smoothed semantic rewards including Dice and Overlap scores, and introduce a condition-adherence reward to guide the generation toward user-specified control constraints. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model not only better adheres to control conditions but also achieves superior semantic similarity performance compared to baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CtrlHGen.
Authors: Nitish Jaipuria, Lorenzo Gatto, Zijun Kan, Shankey Poddar, Bill Cheung, Diksha Bansal, Ramanan Balakrishnan, Aviral Suri, Jose Estevez
Abstract: The proliferation of digital payment platforms has transformed commerce, offering unmatched convenience and accessibility globally. However, this growth has also attracted malicious actors, leading to a corresponding increase in sophisticated social engineering scams. These scams are often initiated and orchestrated on multiple surfaces outside the payment platform, making user and transaction-based signals insufficient for a complete understanding of the scam's methodology and underlying patterns, without which it is very difficult to prevent it in a timely manner. This paper presents CASE (Conversational Agent for Scam Elucidation), a novel Agentic AI framework that addresses this problem by collecting and managing user scam feedback in a safe and scalable manner. A conversational agent is uniquely designed to proactively interview potential victims to elicit intelligence in the form of a detailed conversation. The conversation transcripts are then consumed by another AI system that extracts information and converts it into structured data for downstream usage in automated and manual enforcement mechanisms. Using Google's Gemini family of LLMs, we implemented this framework on Google Pay (GPay) India. By augmenting our existing features with this new intelligence, we have observed a 21% uplift in the volume of scam enforcements. The architecture and its robust evaluation framework are highly generalizable, offering a blueprint for building similar AI-driven systems to collect and manage scam intelligence in other sensitive domains.
Authors: Linhao Luo, Zicheng Zhao, Junnan Liu, Zhangchi Qiu, Junnan Dong, Serge Panev, Chen Gong, Thuy-Trang Vu, Gholamreza Haffari, Dinh Phung, Alan Wee-Chung Liew, Shirui Pan
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning but remain limited by static and incomplete parametric knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mitigates this by incorporating external knowledge, yet existing RAGs struggle with knowledge-intensive tasks due to fragmented information and weak modeling of knowledge structure. Graphs offer a natural way to model relationships within knowledge, but LLMs are inherently unstructured and cannot effectively reason over graph-structured data. Recent graph-enhanced RAG (GraphRAG) attempts to bridge this gap by constructing tailored graphs and enabling LLMs to reason on them. However, these methods often depend on ad-hoc graph designs, heuristic search, or costly agent pipelines, which hinder scalability and generalization. To address these challenges, we present G-reasoner, a unified framework that integrates graph and language foundation models for scalable reasoning over diverse graph-structured knowledge. Central to our approach is QuadGraph, a standardized four-layer abstraction that unifies heterogeneous knowledge sources into a common graph representation. Building on this, we introduce a 34M-parameter graph foundation model (GFM) that jointly captures graph topology and textual semantics, and is integrated with LLMs to enhance reasoning in downstream applications. To ensure scalability and efficiency, mixed-precision training and distributed message-passing are implemented to scale GFM with more GPUs. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks show that G-reasoner consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, significantly enhances LLM reasoning, and achieves strong efficiency and cross-graph generalization.
Authors: Songyuan Sui, Zihang Xu, Xia Hu
Abstract: Time series classification (TSC) spans diverse application scenarios, yet labeled data are often scarce, making task-specific training costly and inflexible. Recent reasoning-oriented large language models (LLMs) show promise in understanding temporal patterns, but purely zero-shot usage remains suboptimal. We propose FETA, a multi-agent framework for training-free TSC via exemplar-based in-context reasoning. FETA decomposes a multivariate series into channel-wise subproblems, retrieves a few structurally similar labeled examples for each channel, and leverages a reasoning LLM to compare the query against these exemplars, producing channel-level labels with self-assessed confidences; a confidence-weighted aggregator then fuses all channel decisions. This design eliminates the need for pretraining or fine-tuning, improves efficiency by pruning irrelevant channels and controlling input length, and enhances interpretability through exemplar grounding and confidence estimation. On nine challenging UEA datasets, FETA achieves strong accuracy under a fully training-free setting, surpassing multiple trained baselines. These results demonstrate that a multi-agent in-context reasoning framework can transform LLMs into competitive, plug-and-play TSC solvers without any parameter training. The code is available at https://github.com/SongyuanSui/FETATSC.
Authors: Richard Dewey, Janos Botyanszki, Ciamac C. Moallemi, Andrew T. Zheng
Abstract: AI researchers have long focused on poker-like games as a testbed for environments characterized by multi-player dynamics, imperfect information, and reasoning under uncertainty. While recent breakthroughs have matched elite human play at no-limit Texas hold'em, the multi-player dynamics are subdued: most hands converge quickly with only two players engaged through multiple rounds of bidding. In this paper, we present Solly, the first AI agent to achieve elite human play in reduced-format Liar's Poker, a game characterized by extensive multi-player engagement. We trained Solly using self-play with a model-free, actor-critic, deep reinforcement learning algorithm. Solly played at an elite human level as measured by win rate (won over 50% of hands) and equity (money won) in heads-up and multi-player Liar's Poker. Solly also outperformed large language models (LLMs), including those with reasoning abilities, on the same metrics. Solly developed novel bidding strategies, randomized play effectively, and was not easily exploitable by world-class human players.
Authors: Daniela Guericke, Rolf van der Hulst, Asal Karimpour, Ieke Schrader, Matthias Walter
Abstract: In this work, we present the solution approach for the Integrated Healthcare Timetabling Competition 2024 submitted by Team Twente, which ultimately ranked third among the finalists. Our approach combines mixed-integer programming, constraint programming, and simulated annealing in a 3-phase solution approach based on decomposition into subproblems. In addition to describing our approach and design decisions, we share our insights and, for the first time, lower bounds on the optimal solution values for the benchmark instances. We analyze the results based on solution quality for the competition and an extended runtime Additionally, we investigate the different soft constraints and specific parts of the algorithm. Finally, we highlight open problems and future research directions for further improving the approach.
Authors: Jinu Lee, Kyoung-Woon On, Simeng Han, Arman Cohan, Julia Hockenmaier
Abstract: Evaluating the quality of LLM-generated reasoning traces in expert domains (e.g., law) is essential for ensuring credibility and explainability, yet remains challenging due to the inherent complexity of such reasoning tasks. We introduce LEGIT (LEGal Issue Trees), a novel large-scale (24K instances) expert-level legal reasoning dataset with an emphasis on reasoning trace evaluation. We convert court judgments into hierarchical trees of opposing parties' arguments and the court's conclusions, which serve as rubrics for evaluating the issue coverage and correctness of the reasoning traces. We verify the reliability of these rubrics via human expert annotations and comparison with coarse, less informative rubrics. Using the LEGIT dataset, we show that (1) LLMs' legal reasoning ability is seriously affected by both legal issue coverage and correctness, and that (2) retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and RL with rubrics bring complementary benefits for legal reasoning abilities, where RAG improves overall reasoning capability, whereas RL improves correctness albeit with reduced coverage.
Authors: Kaixiang Wang, Yidan Lin, Jiong Lou, Zhaojiacheng Zhou, Bunyod Suvonov, Jie Li
Abstract: The evolution of Large Language Model (LLM) agents towards System~2 reasoning, characterized by deliberative, high-precision problem-solving, requires maintaining rigorous logical integrity over extended horizons. However, prevalent memory preprocessing paradigms suffer from destructive de-contextualization. By compressing complex sequential dependencies into pre-defined structures (e.g., embeddings or graphs), these methods sever the contextual integrity essential for deep reasoning. To address this, we propose E-mem, a framework shifting from Memory Preprocessing to Episodic Context Reconstruction. Inspired by biological engrams, E-mem employs a heterogeneous hierarchical architecture where multiple assistant agents maintain uncompressed memory contexts, while a central master agent orchestrates global planning. Unlike passive retrieval, our mechanism empowers assistants to locally reason within activated segments, extracting context-aware evidence before aggregation. Evaluations on the LoCoMo benchmark demonstrate that E-mem achieves over 54\% F1, surpassing the state-of-the-art GAM by 7.75\%, while reducing token cost by over 70\%.
Authors: Henry Han, Xiyang Liu, Xiaodong Wang, Fei Han, Xiaodong Li
Abstract: Neural scaling laws provide a predictable recipe for AI advancement: reducing numerical precision should linearly improve computational efficiency and energy profile ($E \propto \mathrm{bits}$). In this paper, we demonstrate that this scaling law breaks in the context of multi-hop reasoning. We reveal a 'quantization trap' where reducing precision from 16-bit to 8/4-bit paradoxically increases net energy consumption while degrading reasoning accuracy. We provide a rigorous theoretical decomposition that attributes this failure to hardware casting overhead, the hidden latency cost of dequantization kernels, which becomes a dominant bottleneck in sequential reasoning chains, as well as to a sequential energy amortization failure. As a result, scaling law breaking is unavoidable in practice. We formalize a Critical Model Scale $N^*$ that predicts when the trap dissolves or deepens as a function of model size, batch size, and hardware configuration, validated across a 120$\times$ range (0.6B--72B) on six GPU architectures. Our findings suggest that the industry's "smaller-is-better" heuristic is mathematically counterproductive for complex reasoning tasks.
Authors: Xiaochen Zhao, Kaikai Wang, Xiaowen Zhang, Chen Yao, Aili Wang
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents demonstrate strong performance in short-text contexts but often underperform in extended dialogues due to inefficient memory management. Existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness: memory compression risks losing critical details required for complex reasoning, while retaining raw text introduces unnecessary computational overhead for simple queries. The crux lies in the limitations of monolithic memory representations and static retrieval mechanisms, which fail to emulate the flexible and proactive memory scheduling capabilities observed in humans, thus struggling to adapt to diverse problem scenarios. Inspired by the principle of cognitive economy, we propose HyMem, a hybrid memory architecture that enables dynamic on-demand scheduling through multi-granular memory representations. HyMem adopts a dual-granular storage scheme paired with a dynamic two-tier retrieval system: a lightweight module constructs summary-level context for efficient response generation, while an LLM-based deep module is selectively activated only for complex queries, augmented by a reflection mechanism for iterative reasoning refinement. Experiments show that HyMem achieves strong performance on both the LOCOMO and LongMemEval benchmarks, outperforming full-context while reducing computational cost by 92.6\%, establishing a state-of-the-art balance between efficiency and performance in long-term memory management.
Authors: Alejandro Breen Herrera, Aayush Sheth, Steven G. Xu, Zhucheng Zhan, Charles Wright, Marcus Yearwood, Hongtai Wei, Sudeep Das, Danny Nightingale, Meg Watson, Charles Pollnow V
Abstract: Conversational shopping assistants (CSAs) represent a compelling application of agentic AI, but moving from prototype to production reveals two underexplored challenges: how to evaluate multi-turn interactions and how to optimize tightly coupled multi-agent systems. Grocery shopping further amplifies these difficulties, as user requests are often underspecified, highly preference-sensitive, and constrained by factors such as budget and inventory. In this paper, we present a practical blueprint for evaluating and optimizing conversational shopping assistants, illustrated through a production-scale AI grocery assistant. We introduce a multi-faceted evaluation rubric that decomposes end-to-end shopping quality into structured dimensions and develop a calibrated LLM-as-judge pipeline aligned with human annotations. Building on this evaluation foundation, we investigate two complementary prompt-optimization strategies based on a SOTA prompt-optimizer called GEPA (Shao et al., 2025): (1) Sub-agent GEPA, which optimizes individual agent nodes against localized rubrics, and (2) MAMuT (Multi-Agent Multi-Turn) GEPA (Herrera et al., 2026), a novel system-level approach that jointly optimizes prompts across agents using multi-turn simulation and trajectory-level scoring. We release rubric templates and evaluation design guidance to support practitioners building production CSAs.
Authors: Abhishek Bhandwaldar, Mihir Choudhury, Ruchir Puri, Akash Srivastava
Abstract: We present an empirical study of how far general-purpose coding agents -- without hardware-specific training -- can optimize hardware designs from high-level algorithmic specifications. We introduce an agent factory, a two-stage pipeline that constructs and coordinates multiple autonomous optimization agents. In Stage~1, the pipeline decomposes a design into sub-kernels, independently optimizes each using pragma and code-level transformations, and formulates an Integer Linear Program (ILP) to assemble globally promising configurations under an area constraint. In Stage~2, it launches $N$ expert agents over the top ILP solutions, each exploring cross-function optimizations such as pragma recombination, loop fusion, and memory restructuring that are not captured by sub-kernel decomposition. We evaluate the approach on 12 kernels from HLS-Eval and Rodinia-HLS using Claude Code (Opus~4.5/4.6) with AMD Vitis HLS. Scaling from 1 to 10 agents yields a mean $8.27\times$ speedup over baseline, with larger gains on harder benchmarks: streamcluster exceeds $20\times$ and kmeans reaches approximately $10\times$. Across benchmarks, agents consistently rediscover known hardware optimization patterns without domain-specific training, and the best designs often do not originate from top-ranked ILP candidates, indicating that global optimization exposes improvements missed by sub-kernel search. These results establish agent scaling as a practical and effective axis for HLS optimization.
Authors: Xiujiang Tan (Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Guangzhou, China)
Abstract: This paper identifies a structural limitation in current multimodal AI architectures that is topological rather than parametric. Contrastive alignment (CLIP), cross-attention fusion (GPT-4V/Gemini), and diffusion-based generation share a common geometric prior -- modal separability -- which we term contact topology. The argument rests on three pillars with philosophy as the generative center. The philosophical pillar reinterprets Wittgenstein's saying/showing distinction as a problem rather than a conclusion: where Wittgenstein chose silence, the Chinese craft epistemology tradition responded with xiang (operative schema) -- the third state emerging when saying and showing interpenetrate. A cruciform framework (dao/qi x saying/showing) positions xiang at the intersection, executing dual huacai (transformation-and-cutting) along both axes. This generates a dual-layer dynamics: chuanghua (creative transformation as spontaneous event) and huacai (its institutionalization into repeatable form). The cognitive science pillar reinterprets DMN/ECN/SN tripartite co-activation through the pathological mirror: overlap isomorphism vs. superimposition collapse in a 2D parameter space (coupling intensity x regulatory capacity). The mathematical pillar formalizes these via fiber bundles and Yang-Mills curvature, with the cruciform structure mapped to fiber bundle language. We propose UOO implementation via Neural ODEs with topological regularization, the ANALOGY-MM benchmark with error-type-ratio metric, and the META-TOP three-tier benchmark testing cross-civilizational topological isomorphism across seven archetypes. A phased experimental roadmap with explicit termination criteria ensures clean exit if falsified.
Authors: Zan Kai Chong, Hiroyuki Ohsaki, Bryan Ng
Abstract: Enterprise SLM deployment faces epistemic asymmetry: small models cannot self-correct reasoning errors, while frontier LLMs incur prohibitive costs and data sovereignty risks at scale. We propose Semantic Gradient Descent (SGDe), a teacher-student framework that compiles agentic workflows into discrete execution plans--DAG topologies, system prompts, and deterministic code. The trailing e distinguishes this discrete, compilation-based approach from stochastic gradient descent. Operating in discrete semantic space, a frontier teacher generates natural-language critiques that serve as directional gradients to iteratively refine the SLM's workflow artefacts. We formalise SGDe under PAC learning, establishing sample-complexity bounds that enable convergence with as few as three training examples by leveraging the teacher as a statistical prior. On an adversarially synthesized GSM-Hard test set, compiled workflows achieve 91.3% accuracy at m=5 and 99.3% at m=3--a +26.3% to +34.3% absolute gain over state-of-the-art prompt optimisers. Within harness engineering, SGDe treats deterministic code placement (which subtasks to delegate to Python versus retain as LLM calls) as a trace-driven, per-node optimisation target, generalising static whole-problem offloading in PAL and PoT. The teacher compiles two deterministic structures: capability offloading (delegating subtasks to Python when the SLM is unreliable) and structural consensus (wrapping variance-sensitive steps in fan-out/fan-in subgraphs with deterministic voting).
Authors: Damiano Fornasiere, Mirko Bronzi, Spencer Kitts, Alessandro Palmas, Yoshua Bengio, Oliver Richardson
Abstract: We provide evidence that language models can detect, localize and, to a certain degree, verbalize the difference between perturbations applied to their activations. More precisely, we either (a) mask activations, simulating dropout, or (b) add Gaussian noise to them, at a target sentence. We then ask a multiple-choice question such as "Which of the previous sentences was perturbed?" or "Which of the two perturbations was applied?". We test models from the Llama, Olmo, and Qwen families, with sizes between 8B and 32B, all of which can easily detect and localize the perturbations, often with perfect accuracy. These models can also learn, when taught in context, to distinguish between dropout and Gaussian noise. Notably, Qwen3-32B's zero-shot accuracy in identifying which perturbation was applied improves as a function of the perturbation strength and, moreover, decreases if the in-context labels are flipped, suggesting a prior for the correct ones -- even modulo controls. Because dropout has been used as a training-regularization technique, while Gaussian noise is sometimes added during inference, we discuss the possibility of a data-agnostic "training awareness" signal and the implications for AI safety.
Authors: Bo Deng
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a new concept called Artificial Special Intelligence by which Machine Learning models for the classification problem can be trained error-free, thus acquiring the capability of not making repeated mistakes. The method is applied to 18 MedMNIST biomedical datasets. Except for three datasets, which suffer from the double-labeling problem, all are trained to perfection.
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: 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: 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: Yujun Wu, Dongxu Zhang, Xinchen Li, Jinhang Xu, Yiling Duan, Yumou Liu, Jiabao Pan, Qiyuan Zhu, 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: Simeon Allmendinger, Domenique Zipperling, Lukas Struppek, Niklas K\"uhl
Abstract: In the landscape of generative artificial intelligence, diffusion-based models have emerged as a promising method for generating synthetic images. However, the application of diffusion models poses numerous challenges, particularly concerning data availability, computational requirements, and privacy. Traditional approaches to address these shortcomings, like federated learning, often impose significant computational burdens on individual clients, especially those with constrained resources. In response to these challenges, we introduce the novel approach CollaFuse for distributed collaborative diffusion models inspired by split learning. Our approach facilitates collaborative training of diffusion models while alleviating client computational burdens during image synthesis. This reduced computational burden is achieved by retaining data and computationally inexpensive processes locally at each client while outsourcing the computationally expensive processes to shared, more efficient server resources. Through experiments on the common datasets CelebA, CIFAR-10, and Animals-with-Attributes2, our approach demonstrates enhanced performance while decreasing information disclosure as it reduces the necessity for sharing raw data. These capabilities hold significant potential across various application areas, including the design of edge computing solutions. Thus, our work advances distributed machine learning by contributing to the evolution of collaborative diffusion models.
Authors: Dylan Bouchard
Abstract: Bias and fairness risks in Large Language Models (LLMs) vary substantially across deployment contexts, yet existing approaches lack systematic guidance for selecting appropriate evaluation metrics. We present a decision framework that maps LLM use cases, characterized by a model and population of prompts, to relevant bias and fairness metrics based on task type, whether prompts contain protected attribute mentions, and stakeholder priorities. Our framework addresses toxicity, stereotyping, counterfactual unfairness, and allocational harms, and introduces novel metrics based on stereotype classifiers and counterfactual adaptations of text similarity measures. We release an open-source Python library, \texttt{langfair}, for practical adoption. Extensive experiments on use cases across five LLMs and five prompt populations demonstrate that fairness risks cannot be reliably assessed from benchmark performance alone: results on one prompt dataset likely overstate or understate risks for another, underscoring that fairness evaluation must be grounded in the specific deployment context.
Authors: Washim Uddin Mondal, Vaneet Aggarwal
Abstract: This paper focuses on learning a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) via general parameterized policies. We propose a Primal-Dual based Regularized Accelerated Natural Policy Gradient (PDR-ANPG) algorithm that uses entropy and quadratic regularizers to reach this goal. For parameterized policy classes with a transferred compatibility approximation error, $\epsilon_{\mathrm{bias}}$, PDR-ANPG achieves a last-iterate $\epsilon$ optimality gap and $\epsilon$ constraint violation with a sample complexity of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-2}\min\{\epsilon^{-2},\epsilon_{\mathrm{bias}}^{-\frac{1}{3}}\})$. If the class is incomplete ($\epsilon_{\mathrm{bias}}>0$), then the sample complexity reduces to $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-2})$ for $\epsilon<(\epsilon_{\mathrm{bias}})^{\frac{1}{6}}$. Moreover, for complete policies with $\epsilon_{\mathrm{bias}}=0$, our algorithm achieves a last-iterate $\epsilon$ optimality gap and $\epsilon$ constraint violation with $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-4})$ sample complexity. It is a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art last-iterate guarantees of general parameterized CMDPs.
Authors: Hugo Attali, Davide Buscaldi, Nathalie Pernelle, Fragkiskos D. Malliaros
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks are powerful models for learning from graph-structured data, yet their effectiveness is often limited by two critical challenges: over-squashing, where information from distant nodes is excessively compressed, and over-smoothing, where repeated propagation makes node representations indistinguishable. Both phenomena stem from the interaction between message passing and the input topology, ultimately degrading information flow and limiting the performance of GNNs. In this survey, we examine graph rewiring techniques, a class of methods designed to modify the graph topology to enhance information propagation in GNNs. We provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art rewiring approaches, delving into their theoretical underpinnings, practical implementations, and performance trade-offs.
Authors: Cameron Yetman
Abstract: The extraordinary success of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) on a diverse array of tasks has led to an explosion of scientific and philosophical theorizing aimed at explaining how they do what they do. Unfortunately, disagreement over fundamental theoretical issues has led to stalemate, with entrenched camps of LLM optimists and pessimists often committed to very different views of how these systems work. Overcoming stalemate requires agreement on fundamental questions, and the goal of this paper is to address one such question, namely: is LLM behavior driven partly by representation-based information processing of the sort implicated in biological cognition, or is it driven entirely by processes of memorization and stochastic table look-up? This is a question about what kind of algorithm LLMs implement, and the answer carries serious implications for higher level questions about whether these systems have beliefs, intentions, concepts, knowledge, and understanding. I argue that LLM behavior is partially driven by representation-based information processing, and then I describe and defend a series of practical techniques for investigating these representations and developing explanations on their basis. The resulting account provides a groundwork for future theorizing about language models and their successors.
Authors: David Easley, Yoav Kolumbus, Eva Tardos
Abstract: We analyze the performance of heterogeneous learning agents in asset markets with stochastic payoffs. Our main focus is on comparing Bayesian learners and no-regret learners who compete in markets and identifying the conditions under which each approach is more effective. We formally relate the notions of survival and market dominance studied in economics and the framework of regret minimization, thereby bridging these theories. A central finding is that regret plays a key role in market selection, but low regret alone does not guarantee survival: surprisingly, an agent may achieve even logarithmic regret and yet be driven out of the market when competing against a Bayesian learner with a finite prior that assigns positive probability to the correct model. At the same time, we show that Bayesian learning is highly fragile, while no-regret learning requires less knowledge of the environment and is therefore more robust. Motivated by this contrast, we propose two simple hybrid strategies that incorporate Bayesian updates while improving robustness and adaptability to distribution shifts, taking a step toward a best-of-both-worlds learning approach. More broadly, our work contributes to the understanding of dynamics of heterogeneous learning agents and their impact on markets.
Authors: Wenyuan Zhang, Shuaiyi Nie, Xinghua Zhang, Zefeng Zhang, Tingwen Liu
Abstract: This paper explores the system 1 thinking capability of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), the intuitive ability to respond efficiently with minimal token usage. While existing LRMs rely on long-chain reasoning and excel at complex tasks, their system 1 thinking ability remains largely underexplored. This capability is essential as it reflects models' difficulty awareness and reasoning efficiency, both critical for real-world applications. We propose S1-Bench, a multi-domain, multilingual benchmark comprising model-simple system 1 questions. Our investigation of 28 LRMs reveals under-accuracy and inefficiency on system 1 problems. We find existing efficient reasoning methods either generalize poorly to simple questions or sacrifice performance for efficiency. Further exploration uncovers LRMs' early difficulty awareness accompanied by lower confidence, and shows that problem difficulty is implicitly encoded in hidden states.
Authors: Luca Castri, Gloria Beraldo, Nicola Bellotto
Abstract: The growing integration of robots in shared environments-such as warehouses, shopping centres, and hospitals-demands a deep understanding of the underlying dynamics and human behaviours, including how, when, and where individuals engage in various activities and interactions. This knowledge goes beyond simple correlation studies and requires a more comprehensive causal analysis. By leveraging causal inference to model cause-and-effect relationships, we can better anticipate critical environmental factors and enable autonomous robots to plan and execute tasks more effectively. To this end, we propose a novel causality-based decision-making framework that reasons over a learned causal model to assist the robot in deciding when and how to complete a given task. In the examined use case-i.e., a warehouse shared with people-we exploit the causal model to estimate battery usage and human obstructions as factors influencing the robot's task execution. This reasoning framework supports the robot in making informed decisions about task timing and strategy. To achieve this, we developed also PeopleFlow, a new Gazebo-based simulator designed to model context-sensitive human-robot spatial interactions in shared workspaces. PeopleFlow features realistic human and robot trajectories influenced by contextual factors such as time, environment layout, and robot state, and can simulate a large number of agents. While the simulator is general-purpose, in this paper we focus on a warehouse-like environment as a case study, where we conduct an extensive evaluation benchmarking our causal approach against a non-causal baseline. Our findings demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed solutions, highlighting how causal reasoning enables autonomous robots to operate more efficiently and safely in dynamic environments shared with humans.
Authors: Ziyuan Zhang, Darcy Wang, Ningyuan Chen, Rodrigo Mansur, Vahid Sarhangian
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate or automate human behavior in complex sequential decision-making settings. A natural question is then whether LLMs exhibit similar decision-making behavior to humans, and can achieve comparable (or superior) performance. In this work, we focus on the exploration-exploitation (E&E) tradeoff, a fundamental aspect of dynamic decision-making under uncertainty. We employ canonical multi-armed bandit (MAB) experiments introduced in the cognitive science and psychiatry literature to conduct a comparative study of the E&E strategies of LLMs, humans, and MAB algorithms. We use interpretable choice models to capture the E&E strategies of the agents and investigate how enabling thinking traces, through both prompting strategies and thinking models, shapes LLM decision-making. We find that enabling thinking in LLMs shifts their behavior toward more human-like behavior, characterized by a mix of random and directed exploration. In a simple stationary setting, thinking-enabled LLMs exhibit similar levels of random and directed exploration compared to humans. However, in more complex, non-stationary environments, LLMs struggle to match human adaptability, particularly in effective directed exploration, despite achieving similar regret in certain scenarios. Our findings highlight both the promise and limits of LLMs as simulators of human behavior and tools for automated decision-making and point to potential areas for improvement.
Authors: Jatin Gupta, Akhil Sharma, Saransh Singhania, Ali Imam Abidi
Abstract: In India, access to legal assistance for the general public has been observed to have a critical gap, as many citizens are not able to take full advantage of their legal rights due to limited access and awareness of apposite legal information. This paper thus introduces Legal Assist AI, a highly efficient framework designed to provide legal assistance in the Indian domain. The core contribution is a framework demonstrating how a smaller, 8-billion-parameter quantized model (Llama 3.1) can achieve superior domain-specific performance. This effective performance stems from integrating a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system with strategic prompt engineering, supported by a high-quality, up to date corpus of more than 600 legal documents. This corpus includes the Indian Constitution and more importantly, the newly enacted Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) among others. Further, by achieving a score of 60.08\% in the All-India Bar Examination (AIBE) benchmark, the specialized approach based on RAG was found to be highly efficient and effective, improving on the 58.72\% score of the 175-billion parameter GPT-3.5 Turbo. It was also observed that the framework was able to manage and mitigate instances of hallucinations successfully, which is a critical requirement for practical legal applications. A Parameter Efficiency Index (PEI) is also introduced, with the goal of quantifying the superior efficiency that the framework was able to achieve, demonstrating how the 8B model is 22 times more parameter-efficient than the 175B baseline, and hence corroborating the potential of smaller domain-adapted models.
Authors: Zexi Liu, Jingyi Chai, Xinyu Zhu, Shuo Tang, Rui Ye, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Siheng Chen
Abstract: The emergence of large language model (LLM)-based agents has significantly advanced the development of autonomous machine learning (ML) engineering. However, the dominant prompt-based paradigm exhibits limitations: smaller models lack the capacity to learn from execution trajectories for generalization, while large proprietary models incur high computational overhead, restricting accessibility and scalability. Focusing on this, for the first time, we explore the paradigm of learning-based agentic ML, where an LLM agent learns through interactive experimentation on ML tasks using online reinforcement learning (RL). To realize this, we propose a novel agentic ML training framework with three key components: (1) exploration-enriched fine-tuning, which enables LLM agents to generate diverse actions for enhanced RL exploration; (2) step-wise RL, which enables training on a single action step, accelerating experience collection and improving training efficiency; (3) an agentic ML-specific reward module, which unifies varied ML feedback signals into consistent rewards for RL optimization. Leveraging this framework, we train ML-Agent, driven by a 7B-sized Qwen-2.5 LLM for autonomous ML. Despite training on only 9 ML tasks, our 7B-sized ML-Agent achieves comparable performance to agents using much larger proprietary LLMs (e.g., GPT-5) but at significantly lower computational cost, demonstrating strong performance and cross-task generalization.
Authors: Kundan Krishna, Joseph Y Cheng, Charles Maalouf, Leon A Gatys
Abstract: Existing paradigms for ensuring AI safety, such as guardrail models and alignment training, often compromise either inference efficiency or development flexibility. We introduce Disentangled Safety Adapters (DSA), a novel framework addressing these challenges by decoupling safety-specific computations from a task-optimized base model. DSA utilizes lightweight adapters that leverage the base model's internal representations, enabling diverse and flexible safety functionalities with minimal impact on inference cost. Empirically, DSA-based safety guardrails substantially outperform comparably sized standalone models across hate speech classification, detecting unsafe model inputs and responses, and hallucination detection with relative improvements of up to 53% in AUC. Furthermore, DSA-based safety alignment allows dynamic, inference-time adjustment of alignment strength and a fine-grained trade-off between instruction following performance and model safety. Importantly, combining the DSA safety guardrail with DSA safety alignment facilitates context-dependent alignment strength, boosting safety on StrongREJECT by 93% while maintaining 98% performance on MTBench - a total reduction in alignment tax of 8 percentage points compared to standard safety alignment fine-tuning. Overall, DSA presents a promising path towards more modular, efficient, and adaptable AI safety and alignment.
Authors: Jiacong Wang, Zijian Kang, Haochen Wang, Haiyong Jiang, Jiawen Li, Bohong Wu, Ya Wang, Jiao Ran, Xiao Liang, Chao Feng, Jun Xiao
Abstract: In the field of multimodal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, existing approaches predominantly rely on reasoning on pure language space, which inherently suffers from language bias and is largely confined to math or science domains. This narrow focus limits their ability to handle complex visual reasoning tasks that demand comprehensive understanding of image details. To address these limitations, this paper introduces VGR, a novel reasoning multimodal large language model (MLLM) with enhanced fine-grained visual perception capabilities. Unlike traditional MLLMs that answer the question or reasoning solely on the language space, our VGR first detects relevant regions that may help to solve problems, and then provides precise answers based on replayed image regions. To achieve this, we conduct a large-scale SFT dataset called VGR -SFT that contains reasoning data with mixed vision grounding and language deduction. The inference pipeline of VGR allows the model to choose bounding boxes for visual reference and a replay stage is introduced to integrates the corresponding regions into the reasoning process, enhancing multimodel comprehension. Experiments on the LLaVA-NeXT-7B baseline show that VGR achieves superior performance on multi-modal benchmarks requiring comprehensive image detail understanding. Compared to the baseline, VGR uses only 30\% of the image token count while delivering scores of +4.1 on MMStar, +7.1 on AI2D, and a +12.9 improvement on ChartQA.
Authors: Lehan He, Zeren Chen, Zhe Zhang, Xiang Gao, Lu Sheng
Abstract: LLMs excel at code generation, yet ensuring the functional correctness of their outputs remains a persistent challenge. While recent studies have applied Test-Driven Development (TDD) to refine code, these methods are often undermined by poor feedback quality, stemming from the scarcity of high-quality test cases and noisy signals from auto-generated ones. In this work, we shift the focus from test quantity to feedback quality. We introduce the Property-Generated Solver (PGS), a novel paradigm designed to generate highly effective feedback via two principles: it must be property-oriented, to provide semantic guidance beyond simple I/O mismatches, and structurally minimal, to reduce cognitive load and isolate root causes. PGS operates by checking high-level program properties (e.g., a sorting function must produce a non-decreasing sequence) then providing the simplest failing counterexample to the LLM. By adhering to these principles, this targeted feedback mechanism leads to significant performance gains. Specifically, PGS achieves an improvement of up to 13.4% in pass@1 against other TDD-based methods and an over 64% fix rate on problems where the model initially failed. This property-driven, minimal feedback steers LLMs toward correct and generalizable solutions. Across diverse benchmarks, PGS demonstrates superior performance, achieving a bug fix rate 1.4x-1.6x higher than the strongest debugging-based approaches and establishing a new state-of-the-art in automated code refinement.
Authors: Rahul Ramachandran, Ali Garjani, Roman Bachmann, Andrei Atanov, O\u{g}uzhan Fatih Kar, Amir Zamir
Abstract: Multimodal foundation models (MFMs), such as GPT-4o, have recently made remarkable progress. However, their detailed visual understanding beyond question answering remains unclear. In this paper, we benchmark popular MFMs (GPT-4o, o4-mini, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 2.0 Flash, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Qwen2-VL, Llama 3.2) on standard computer vision tasks (semantic segmentation, object detection, image classification, depth and surface normal prediction) using established datasets (e.g., COCO, ImageNet, etc). The main challenges in performing this analysis are: 1) most models are trained to output text and cannot natively express versatile domains, such as segments or 3D geometry, and 2) many leading models are proprietary and accessible only at an API level, i.e., there is no weight access to adapt them. We address these by translating vision tasks into text-promptable, API-compatible formats via prompt chaining, creating a standardized benchmarking framework. We observe that: 1) The MFMs are not close to the state-of-the-art specialist models at any task. 2) They are respectable generalists; this is remarkable, as they are presumably trained on image-text-based tasks. 3) They perform semantic tasks notably better than geometric ones. 4) GPT-4o performs the best among non-reasoning models, securing the top position in 4 out of 6 tasks. 5) Reasoning models, e.g., o3, show improvements in geometric tasks. 6) While prompt chaining techniques affect performance, better models are less sensitive to prompt variations. 7) An analysis of models with native image generation, such as the latest GPT-4o, shows they exhibit failure modes, such as hallucinated objects or misalignment between input and output.
Authors: Yiran Wu, Mauricio Velazco, Andrew Zhao, Manuel Ra\'ul Mel\'endez Luj\'an, Srisuma Movva, Yogesh K Roy, Quang Nguyen, Roberto Rodriguez, Qingyun Wu, Michael Albada, Julia Kiseleva, Anand Mudgerikar
Abstract: We present ExCyTIn-Bench, the first benchmark to Evaluate an LLM agent X on the task of Cyber Threat Investigation through security questions derived from investigation graphs. Real-world security analysts must sift through a large number of heterogeneous security logs, follow multi-hop chains of evidence to investigate threats. With the developments of LLMs, building LLM-based agents for automatic threat investigation is a promising direction. We construct a benchmark from a controlled Azure tenant including a SQL environment covering 57 log tables from Microsoft Sentinel and related services, and 7542 generated questions. We leverage security logs extracted with expert-crafted detection logic to build threat investigation graphs, and then generate questions with LLMs using paired nodes on the graph, taking the start node as background context and the end node as answer. Anchoring each question to these explicit nodes and edges not only provides automatic, explainable ground truth answers but also makes the pipeline reusable and readily extensible to new logs. Our comprehensive experiments on the test set with different models confirm the difficulty of the task: the best model so far can achieve a reward of 0.606, leaving much headroom for future research. The code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/SecRL
Authors: Zhaomin Wu, Mingzhe Du, See-Kiong Ng, Bingsheng He
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in reasoning, planning, and decision-making tasks, making their trustworthiness critical. A significant and underexplored risk is intentional deception, where an LLM deliberately fabricates or conceals information to serve a hidden objective. Existing studies typically induce deception by explicitly setting a hidden objective through prompting or fine-tuning, which may not reflect real-world human-LLM interactions. Moving beyond such human-induced deception, we investigate LLMs' self-initiated deception on benign prompts. To address the absence of ground truth, we propose a framework based on Contact Searching Questions (CSQ). This framework introduces two statistical metrics derived from psychological principles to quantify the likelihood of deception. The first, the Deceptive Intention Score, measures the model's bias toward a hidden objective. The second, the Deceptive Behavior Score, measures the inconsistency between the LLM's internal belief and its expressed output. Evaluating 16 leading LLMs, we find that both metrics rise in parallel and escalate with task difficulty for most models. Moreover, increasing model capacity does not always reduce deception, posing a significant challenge for future LLM development.
Authors: Anirudh Iyengar Kaniyar Narayana Iyengar, Srija Mukhopadhyay, Adnan Qidwai, Shubhankar Singh, Dan Roth, Vivek Gupta
Abstract: We introduce InterChart, a diagnostic benchmark that evaluates how well vision-language models (VLMs) reason across multiple related charts, a task central to real-world applications such as scientific reporting, financial analysis, and public policy dashboards. Unlike prior benchmarks focusing on isolated, visually uniform charts, InterChart challenges models with diverse question types ranging from entity inference and trend correlation to numerical estimation and abstract multi-step reasoning grounded in 2-3 thematically or structurally related charts. We organize the benchmark into three tiers of increasing difficulty: (1) factual reasoning over individual charts, (2) integrative analysis across synthetically aligned chart sets, and (3) semantic inference over visually complex, real-world chart pairs. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art open- and closed-source VLMs reveals consistent and steep accuracy declines as chart complexity increases. We find that models perform better when we decompose multi-entity charts into simpler visual units, underscoring their struggles with cross-chart integration. By exposing these systematic limitations, InterChart provides a rigorous framework for advancing multimodal reasoning in complex, multi-visual environments.
Authors: Arshia Akhavan, Alireza Hosseinpour, Abbas Heydarnoori, Hamid Bagheri, Mehdi Keshani
Abstract: Issue-to-commit link recovery in software repositories is fundamental to software traceability and project management, yet it remains a challenging task. Prior studies show that only about 42.2% of issues on GitHub are correctly linked to their commits, highlighting the need for more effective solutions. Existing work has explored a range of ML/DL approaches, and more recently, large language models (LLMs) have been applied to this problem. However, these methods face two major limitations. First, LLMs are restricted by limited context windows and cannot simultaneously process all available data sources, such as long commit histories, extensive issue discussions, and large code repositories. Second, most approaches operate on individual issue-commit pairs, where a model independently scores the relevance of a single commit to an issue. This pairwise formulation fails to account for the complex associativity of software fixes, where an issue is often resolved by an aggregate chain of commits rather than a single atomic change. By ignoring these temporal and parental dependencies, existing methods often fail to incorporate the complete resolution logic and might misidentify intermediate commits as final fixes. Furthermore, this strategy is computationally inefficient in large repositories, as it requires exhaustively evaluating an enormous number of candidate pairs. To address these challenges, we present LinkAnchor, the first autonomous LLM-based agent designed specifically for issue-to-commit link recovery. LinkAnchor introduces a lazy-access architecture that allows the underlying LLM to dynamically retrieve only the most relevant contextual data, such as commits, issue comments, and code files, without exceeding token limits.
Authors: Diane Tchuindjo, Omar Khattab
Abstract: AI researchers and practitioners increasingly apply large language models (LLMs) to what we call reasoning-intensive regression (RiR), i.e., deducing subtle numerical scores from text. Unlike standard language regression tasks such as sentiment or similarity analysis, RiR often appears instead in ad-hoc applications such as rubric-based scoring, modeling dense rewards in complex environments, or domain-specific retrieval, where much deeper analysis of context is required while only limited task-specific training data and computation are available. We cast four realistic problems as RiR tasks to establish an initial benchmark, and use that to test our hypothesis that prompting frozen LLMs and fine-tuning Transformer encoders via gradient descent will both often struggle in RiR. We then propose MENTAT, a simple and lightweight method that combines batch-reflective prompt optimization with neural ensemble learning. MENTAT achieves up to 65% improvement over both baselines, though substantial room remains for future advances.
Authors: Jie Li, Youyang Hou, Laura Lin, Ruihao Zhu, Hancheng Cao, Abdallah El Ali
Abstract: Generative AI is reshaping product design practices through "vibe coding," where product team members express intent in natural language and AI translates it into functional prototypes and code. Despite rapid adoption, little research has examined how vibe coding reconfigures product development workflows and collaboration. Drawing on interviews with 22 product team members across enterprises, startups, and academia, we show how vibe coding follows a four-stage workflow of ideation, generation, debugging, and review. This accelerates iteration, supports creativity, and lowers participation barriers. However, participants reported challenges of code unreliability, integration, and AI over-reliance. We find tensions between efficiency-driven prototyping ("intending the right design") and reflection ("designing the right intention"), introducing new asymmetries in trust, responsibility, and social stigma within teams. Through a responsible human-AI collaboration lens for AI-assisted product design and development, we contribute a deeper understanding of deskilling, ownership and disclosure, and creativity safeguarding in the age of vibe coding.
Authors: Zhaomin Wu, Haodong Zhao, Ziyang Wang, Jizhou Guo, Qian Wang, Bingsheng He
Abstract: The explosive growth of large language models (LLMs) has created a vast but opaque landscape: millions of models exist, yet their evolutionary relationships through fine-tuning, distillation, or adaptation are often undocumented or unclear, complicating LLM management. Existing methods are limited by task specificity, fixed model sets, or strict assumptions about tokenizers or architectures. Inspired by biological DNA, we address these limitations by mathematically defining LLM DNA as a low-dimensional, bi-Lipschitz representation of functional behavior. We prove that LLM DNA satisfies inheritance and genetic determinism properties and establish the existence of DNA. Building on this theory, we derive a general, scalable, training-free pipeline for DNA extraction. In experiments across 305 LLMs, DNA aligns with prior studies on limited subsets and achieves superior or competitive performance on specific tasks. Beyond these tasks, DNA comparisons uncover previously undocumented relationships among LLMs. We further construct the evolutionary tree of LLMs using phylogenetic algorithms, which align with shifts from encoder-decoder to decoder-only architectures, reflect temporal progression, and reveal distinct evolutionary speeds across LLM families.
Authors: Kai-Wei Chang, En-Pei Hu, Chun-Yi Kuan, Wenze Ren, Wei-Chih Chen, Guan-Ting Lin, Yu Tsao, Shao-Hua Sun, Hung-yi Lee, James Glass
Abstract: Conversational Spoken Language Models (SLMs) are emerging as a promising paradigm for real-time speech interaction. However, their capacity of temporal dynamics, including the ability to manage timing, tempo and simultaneous speaking, remains a critical and unevaluated challenge for conversational fluency. To address this gap, we introduce the Game-Time Benchmark, a framework to systematically assess these temporal capabilities. Inspired by how humans learn a language through language activities, Game-Time consists of basic instruction-following tasks and advanced tasks with temporal constraints, such as tempo adherence and synchronized responses. Our evaluation of diverse SLM architectures reveals a clear performance disparity: while state-of-the-art models handle basic tasks well, many contemporary systems still struggle with fundamental instruction-following. More critically, nearly all models degrade substantially under temporal constraints, exposing persistent weaknesses in time awareness and full-duplex interaction. The Game-Time Benchmark provides a foundation for guiding future research toward more temporally-aware conversational AI. Demos and datasets are available on our project website https://ga642381.github.io/Game-Time.
Authors: Chenhui Xu, Fuxun Yu, Michael J. Bianco, Jacob Kovarskiy, Raphael Tang, Qi Zhang, Zirui Xu, Will LeVine, Brandon Dubbs, Heming Liao, Cassandra Burgess, Suvam Bag, Jay Patravali, Rupanjali Kukal, Mikael Figueroa, Rishi Madhok, Nikolaos Karianakis, Jinjun Xiong
Abstract: Training robust reasoning vision-language models (VLMs) in rare domains (such as geospatial) is fundamentally constrained by supervision scarcity. While raw geospatial imagery is abundant, the amount of task-direct supervision falls far behind that of common domains. In this work, we validate an important conclusion: indirect verifiable rewards, derived from seemingly unrelated metadata, are sufficient to induce sophisticated and generalizable geospatial reasoning across a wide range of downstream tasks (25+). We present Geo-R1 as one empirical instantiation of this paradigm. Rather than relying on limited task-specific annotations (i.e., direct rewards), Geo-R1 utilizes scalable, verifiable indirect proxy rewards based on cross-view alignment with metadata (geolocation information) to drive reinforcement learning at scale. Such indirect rewards successfully motivate the model to discover and internalize zero-shot geospatial reasoning across diverse tasks, achieving extraordinary zero-shot transfer on out-of-distribution benchmarks and even surpassing fully supervised specialists on certain benchmarks. These findings indicate that optimizing for indirect verifiable rewards may provide a scalable pathway to unlock generalized reasoning capabilities in rare domains with massive unlabeled data archives. Our code is availavle at: https://github.com/miniHuiHui/Geo-R1.
Authors: Lorenzo Nikiforos, Luciano Prono, Charalampos Antoniadis, Fabio Pareschi, Riccardo Rovatti, Gianluca Setti
Abstract: The increasing scale of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) introduces 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: Charidimos Papadakis, Angeliki Dimitriou, Giorgos Filandrianos, Maria Lymperaiou, Konstantinos Thomas, Giorgos Stamou
Abstract: Large language models show promise for financial decision-making, yet deploying them as autonomous trading agents raises fundamental challenges: how to adapt instructions when rewards arrive late and obscured by market noise, how to synthesize heterogeneous information streams into coherent decisions, and how to bridge the gap between model outputs and executable market actions. We present ATLAS (Adaptive Trading with LLM AgentS), a unified multi-agent framework that integrates structured information from markets, news, and corporate fundamentals to support robust trading decisions. Within ATLAS, the central trading agent operates in an order-aware action space, ensuring that outputs correspond to executable market orders rather than abstract signals. The agent can incorporate feedback while trading using Adaptive-OPRO, a novel prompt-optimization technique that dynamically adapts the prompt by incorporating real-time, stochastic feedback, leading to increasing performance over time. Across regime-specific equity studies and multiple LLM families, Adaptive-OPRO consistently outperforms fixed prompts, while reflection-based feedback fails to provide systematic gains.
Authors: Yingyao Zhou, Natasha Devroye, Onur G\"unl\"u
Abstract: We consider reversely-degraded secure-communication channels, for which the secrecy capacity is zero if there is no channel feedback. Specifically, we focus on a seeded modular code design for the block-fading Gaussian wiretap channel with channel-output feedback, combining universal hash functions for security and learned feedback-based codes for reliability. The trade-off between communication reliability and information leakage is studied, illustrating that feedback enables agreeing on a secret key shared between legitimate parties, overcoming the security advantage of the eavesdropper. Our findings motivate code designs for sensing-assisted secure communications in the context of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC).
Authors: Qingyao Ai, Yichen Tang, Changyue Wang, Jianming Long, Weihang Su, Yiqun Liu
Abstract: Scaling up data, parameters, and test-time computation has been the mainstream methods to improve LLM systems (LLMsys), but their upper bounds are almost reached due to the gradual depletion of high-quality data and marginal gains obtained from larger computational resource consumption. Inspired by the abilities of human and traditional AI systems in learning from practice, constructing memory and continual learning frameworks for LLMsys has become an important and popular research direction in recent literature. Yet, existing benchmarks for LLM memory often focus on evaluating the system on homogeneous reading comprehension tasks with long-form inputs rather than testing their abilities to learn from accumulated user feedback in service time. Therefore, we propose a user feedback simulation framework and a comprehensive benchmark covering multiple domains, languages, and types of tasks to evaluate the continual learning abilities of LLMsys. Experiments show that the effectiveness and efficiency of state-of-the-art baselines are far from satisfying, and we hope this benchmark could pave the way for future studies on LLM memory and optimization algorithms.
Authors: Jackson Hassell, Dan Zhang, Hannah Kim, Tom Mitchell, Estevam Hruschka
Abstract: We investigate how agents built on pretrained large language models (LLMs) can learn target classification functions from labeled examples without parameter updates. While conventional approaches like fine-tuning are often costly, inflexible, and opaque, we propose a memory-augmented framework that leverages LLM-generated critiques grounded in labeled data. Our framework uses episodic memory to store instance-level critiques - capturing specific past experiences - and semantic memory to distill these into reusable, task-level guidance. Across a diverse set of tasks and models, our best performing self-critique strategy (utilizing both memory types) yields an average improvement of 8.1 percentage points over the zero shot baseline, and 4.6pp over a RAG-based baseline that relies only on labels. However, improvements vary substantially across models and domains. To explain this variation, we introduce suggestibility - a novel metric capturing how receptive a model is to external reasoning provided in context. We use suggestibility to illuminate when and why memory augmentation succeeds or falls short. Beyond accuracy gains, we find pre-computed critiques substantially reduce inference-time computation for reasoning models, cutting thinking tokens by an average of 31.95% across all datasets by substituting for reasoning that the model would otherwise perform independently. Our findings highlight the conditions under which memory-driven, reflective learning can serve as a lightweight, interpretable, and efficient strategy for improving LLM adaptability.
Authors: Md. Mehedi Hasan, Sk Tanzir Mehedi, Ziaur Rahman, Rafid Mostafiz, Md. Abir Hossain
Abstract: This paper presents a real-time modular defense system named Sentra-Guard. The system detects and mitigates jailbreak and prompt injection attacks targeting large language models (LLMs). The framework uses a hybrid architecture with FAISS-indexed SBERT embedding representations that capture the semantic meaning of prompts, combined with fine-tuned transformer classifiers, which are machine learning models specialized for distinguishing between benign and adversarial language inputs. It identifies adversarial prompts in both direct and obfuscated attack vectors. A core innovation is the classifier-retriever fusion module, which dynamically computes context-aware risk scores that estimate how likely a prompt is to be adversarial based on its content and context. The framework ensures multilingual resilience with a language-agnostic preprocessing layer. This component automatically translates non-English prompts into English for semantic evaluation, enabling consistent detection across over 100 languages. The system includes a HITL feedback loop, where decisions made by the automated system are reviewed by human experts for continual learning and rapid adaptation under adversarial pressure. Sentra-Guard maintains an evolving dual-labeled knowledge base of benign and malicious prompts, enhancing detection reliability and reducing false positives. Evaluation results show a 99.96% detection rate (AUC = 1.00, F1 = 1.00) and an attack success rate (ASR) of only 0.004%. This outperforms leading baselines such as LlamaGuard-2 (1.3%) and OpenAI Moderation (3.7%). Unlike black-box approaches, Sentra-Guard is transparent, fine-tunable, and compatible with diverse LLM backends. Its modular design supports scalable deployment in both commercial and open-source environments. The system establishes a new state-of-the-art in adversarial LLM defense.
Authors: Feijie Wu, Weiwu Zhu, Yuxiang Zhang, Soumya Chatterjee, Jiarong Zhu, Fan Mo, Rong Luo, Jing Gao
Abstract: Multi-tool-integrated reasoning enables LLM-empowered tool-use agents to solve complex tasks by interleaving natural-language reasoning with calls to external tools. However, training such agents from outcome-only rewards suffers from credit-assignment ambiguity, obscuring which intermediate tool-use decisions drive success or failure. In this paper, we propose PORTool, an importance-aware policy-optimization algorithm that reinforces agents' tool-use competence from outcome-level supervision while assigning reward at the step level. Specifically, PORTool generates a rewarded rollout tree in which trajectories share prefixes before branching, enabling direct comparisons among alternative tool-use decisions within the same context. It then estimates each step's importance by a correctness-dominant signal, i.e., whether descendants of that step can ultimately produce a correct final answer, plus an auxiliary term indicating whether the step's tool calls satisfy formatting constraints and execute successfully. Using these step-wise importance estimates, PORTool updates the policy to generate efficient tool-call steps, guided by both local comparisons within each branching decision and the overall quality of entire trajectories. Experiments show that PORTool improves final-answer accuracy while reducing tool-call steps compared with state-of-the-art policy-optimization baselines, and ablation studies confirm the robustness of the proposed step-wise importance estimates.
Authors: Hatim Chergui, Farhad Rezazadeh, Mehdi Bennis, Merouane Debbah, Christos Verikoukis
Abstract: A critical barrier to the trustworthiness of sixth-generation (6G) agentic autonomous networks is the uncertainty neglect bias; a cognitive tendency for large language model (LLM)-powered agents to make high-stakes decisions based on simple averages while ignoring the tail risk of extreme events. This paper proposes an unbiased, risk-aware framework for agentic negotiation, designed to ensure robust resource allocation in 6G network slicing. Specifically, agents leverage Digital Twins (DTs) to predict full latency distributions, which are then evaluated using a formal framework from extreme value theory, namely, Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR). This approach fundamentally shifts the agent's objective from reasoning over the mean to reasoning over the tail, thereby building a statistically-grounded buffer against worst-case outcomes. Furthermore, our framework ensures full uncertainty awareness by requiring agents to quantify epistemic uncertainty -- confidence in their own DTs predictions -- and propagate this meta-verification to make robust decisions, preventing them from acting on unreliable data. We validate this framework in a 6G inter-slice negotiation use-case between an eMBB and a URLLC agent across 200 trials. The results demonstrate the profound failure of the biased, mean-based baseline, which systematically violates the strict URLLC SLA 11 times. Our unbiased, CVaR-aware agent successfully mitigates this bias, eliminating SLA violations entirely and significantly reducing the 99.999th-percentile latencies by up to 51.7\%. We show this reliability comes at the rational and quantifiable cost of reduced energy savings, exposing the false economy of the biased approach. Crucially, executing our framework with an otel-llm-1b-it model on a single NVIDIA RTX A4000 GPU achieves sub-1.5-second inference times, validating the feasibility for non-real-time RIC use-cases.
Authors: Baris Yilmaz, Bevan Deniz Cilgin, Erdem Akag\"und\"uz, Salih Tileylioglu
Abstract: Effective earthquake risk reduction relies on accurate site-specific evaluations, which require models capable of representing the influence of local site conditions on ground motion characteristics. We address strong ground motion generation from time-domain accelerometer records and introduce the TimesNet-Gen, a deep generative framework. In this framework, site-specific generation is directly achieved through a station-restricted, Dirichlet-based latent space resampling strategy, without relying on explicit conditioning inputs or dimensionality reduction. Pre-trained on the AFAD dataset via self-supervised learning, the frozen model demonstrates robust cross-regional generalization by successfully generating station-specific NGA-West2 records without any fine-tuning. Model performance is evaluated by comparing the distributions of generated and real records in the log-HVSR space, alongside the joint analysis of peak ground acceleration and fundamental site frequency. As a baseline, we construct a spectrogram-based conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) explicitly formulated for station-specific latent space modeling. The results show strong station-wise alignment, consistent cross-regional ground motion synthesis, and a favorable comparison with a spectrogram-based conditional variational autoencoder baseline, demonstrating that the model empirically maintains the essential physical coupling between frequency content and peak amplitude. Our codes are available via https://github.com/brsylmz23/TimesNet-Gen.
Authors: Th\'eo Cavignac (Research Center Future Energy Materials and Systems of the University Alliance Ruhr and ICAMS, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany), Jonathan Schmidt (Department of Materials, ETH Z\"urich, Z\"urich, Switzerland), Pierre-Paul De Breuck (Research Center Future Energy Materials and Systems of the University Alliance Ruhr and ICAMS, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany), Antoine Loew (Research Center Future Energy Materials and Systems of the University Alliance Ruhr and ICAMS, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany), Tiago F. T. Cerqueira (CFisUC, Department of Physics, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal), Hai-Chen Wang (Research Center Future Energy Materials and Systems of the University Alliance Ruhr and ICAMS, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany), Anton Bochkarev (ICAMS, Ruhr-Universit\"at Bochum and ACEworks GmbH, Bochum, Germany), Yury Lysogorskiy (ICAMS, Ruhr-Universit\"at Bochum and ACEworks GmbH, Bochum, Germany), Aldo H. Romero (Department of Physics, West Virginia University, Morgantown, USA), Ralf Drautz (ICAMS, Ruhr-Universit\"at Bochum and ACEworks GmbH, Bochum, Germany), Silvana Botti (Research Center Future Energy Materials and Systems of the University Alliance Ruhr and ICAMS, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany), Miguel A. L. Marques (Research Center Future Energy Materials and Systems of the University Alliance Ruhr and ICAMS, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany)
Abstract: We present a novel multi-stage workflow for computational materials discovery that achieves a 99% success rate in identifying compounds within 100 meV/atom of thermodynamic stability, with a threefold improvement over previous approaches. By combining the Matra-Genoa generative model, Orb-v2 universal machine learning interatomic potential, and ALIGNN graph neural network for energy prediction, we generated 119 million candidate structures and added 1.3 million DFT-validated compounds to the ALEXANDRIA database, including 74 thousand new stable materials. The expanded ALEXANDRIA database now contains 5.8 million structures with 175 thousand compounds on the convex hull. Predicted structural disorder rates (37-43%) match experimental databases, unlike other recent AI-generated datasets. Analysis reveals fundamental patterns in space group distributions, coordination environments, and phase stability networks, including sub-linear scaling of convex hull connectivity. We release the complete dataset, including sAlex25 with 14 million out-of-equilibrium structures containing forces and stresses for training universal force fields. We demonstrate that fine-tuning a GRACE model on this data improves benchmark accuracy. All data, models, and workflows are freely available under Creative Commons licenses.
Authors: Hee-Youl Kwak, Seong-Joon Park, Hyunwoo Jung, Jeongseok Ha, Jae-Won Kim
Abstract: Quantum error correction (QEC) for fault-tolerant quantum computing requires a balanced decoding solution that offers high performance, low complexity, and low latency. However, the de facto standard, belief propagation (BP) combined with ordered statistics decoding (OSD), suffers from excessive iterations in the BP stage and high complexity in the OSD stage. To address these challenges, we propose an evolutionary BP (EBP) decoder optimized via a differential evolution (DE) algorithm. By leveraging the gradient-free nature of DE, we enable end-to-end optimization of the EBP+OSD structure to maximize overall performance. In addition, a multi-objective selection rule is introduced to suppress frequent OSD activation, significantly reducing complexity overhead. Experimental results on surface codes and quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes demonstrate that EBP plus OSD simultaneously achieves superior decoding performance and substantially lower complexity compared to conventional BP plus OSD, particularly in stringent low-latency regimes.
Authors: Jiawei Ge, Jiuxin Cao, Xinyi Li, Xuelin Zhu, Chang Liu, Bo Liu, Chen Feng, Ioannis Patras
Abstract: Weakly-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection (WSCOD) aims to locate and segment objects that are visually concealed within their surrounding scenes, relying solely on sparse supervision such as scribble annotations. Despite recent progress, existing WSCOD methods still lag far behind fully supervised ones due to two major limitations: (1) the pseudo masks generated by general-purpose segmentation models (e.g., SAM) and filtered via rules are often unreliable, as these models lack the task-specific semantic understanding required for effective pseudo labeling in COD; and (2) the neglect of inherent annotation bias in scribbles, which hinders the model from capturing the global structure of camouflaged objects. To overcome these challenges, we propose ${D}^{3}$ETOR, a two-stage WSCOD framework consisting of Debate-Enhanced Pseudo Labeling and Frequency-Aware Progressive Debiasing. In the first stage, we introduce an adaptive entropy-driven point sampling method and a multi-agent debate mechanism to enhance the capability of SAM for COD, improving the interpretability and precision of pseudo masks. In the second stage, we design FADeNet, which progressively fuses multi-level frequency-aware features to balance global semantic understanding with local detail modeling, while dynamically reweighting supervision strength across regions to alleviate scribble bias. By jointly exploiting the supervision signals from both the pseudo masks and scribble semantics, ${D}^{3}$ETOR significantly narrows the gap between weakly and fully supervised COD, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks.
Authors: Jordan Taylor, William Agnew, Maarten Sap, Sarah E. Fox, Haiyi Zhu
Abstract: Visual generative AI models are trained using a one-size-fits-all measure of aesthetic appeal. However, what is deemed "aesthetic" is inextricably linked to personal taste and cultural values, raising the question of whose taste is represented in visual generative AI models. In this work, we study an aesthetic evaluation model--LAION-Aesthetics Predictor (LAP)--that is widely used to curate datasets to train visual generative image models, like Stable Diffusion, and evaluate the quality of AI-generated images. To understand what LAP measures, we audited the model across three datasets. First, we examined the impact of aesthetic filtering on the LAION-Aesthetics Dataset (approximately 1.2B images), which was curated from LAION-5B using LAP. We find that the LAP disproportionally filters in images with captions mentioning women, while filtering out images with captions mentioning men or LGBTQ+ people. Then, we used LAP to score approximately 330k images across two art datasets, finding the model rates realistic images of landscapes, cityscapes, and portraits from western and Japanese artists most highly. In doing so, the algorithmic gaze of this aesthetic evaluation model reinforces the imperial and male gazes found within western art history. In order to understand where these biases may have originated, we performed a digital ethnography of public materials related to the creation of LAP. We find that the development of LAP reflects the biases we found in our audits, such as the aesthetic scores used to train LAP primarily coming from English-speaking photographers and western AI-enthusiasts. In response, we discuss how aesthetic evaluation can perpetuate representational harms and call on AI developers to shift away from prescriptive measures of "aesthetics" toward more pluralistic evaluation.
Authors: Nigam H. Shah, Nerissa Ambers, Abby Pandya, Timothy Keyes, Juan M. Banda, Srikar Nallan, Carlene Lugtu, Artem A. Trotsyuk, Suhana Bedi, Alyssa Unell, Miguel Fuentes, Francois Grolleau, Sneha S. Jain, Jonathan Chen, Devdutta Dash, Danton Char, Aditya Sharma, Duncan McElfresh, Patrick Scully, Vishanthan Kumar, Clancy Dennis, Connor OBrien, Satchi Mouniswamy, Elvis Jones, Krishna Jasti, Gunavathi Mannika Lakshmanan, Sree Ram Akula, Varun Kumar Singh, Ramesh Rajmanickam, Sudhir Sinha, Vicky Zhou, Xu Wang, Bilal Mawji, Joshua Ge, Wencheng Li, Travis Lyons, Jarrod Helzer, Vikas Kakkar, Ramesh Powar, Darren Batara, Cheryl Cordova, William Frederick III, Olivia Tang, Phoebe Morgan, April S. Liang, Stephen P. Ma, Shivam Vedak, Dong-han Yao, Akshay Swaminathan, Mehr Kashyap, Brian Ng, Jamie Hellman, Nikesh Kotecha, Christopher Sharp, Gretchen Brown, Christian Lindmark, Anurang Revri, Michael A. Pfeffer
Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) can support clinical documentation needs, standalone tools struggle with "workflow friction" from manual data entry. We developed ChatEHR, a system that enables the use of LLMs with the entire patient timeline spanning several years. ChatEHR enables automations - which are static combinations of prompts and data that perform a fixed task - and interactive use in the electronic health record (EHR) via a user interface (UI). The resulting ability to sift through patient medical records for diverse use-cases such as pre-visit chart review, screening for transfer eligibility, monitoring for surgical site infections, and chart abstraction, redefines LLM use as an institutional capability. This system, accessible after user-training, enables continuous monitoring and evaluation of LLM use. In 1.5 years, we built 7 automations and 1075 users have trained to become routine users of the UI, engaging in 23,000 sessions in the first 3 months of launch. For automations, being model-agnostic and accessing multiple types of data was essential for matching specific clinical or administrative tasks with the most appropriate LLM. Benchmark-based evaluations proved insufficient for monitoring and evaluation of the UI, requiring new methods to monitor performance. Generation of summaries was the most frequent task in the UI, with an estimated 0.73 hallucinations and 1.60 inaccuracies per generation. The resulting mix of cost savings, time savings, and revenue growth required a value assessment framework to prioritize work as well as quantify the impact of using LLMs. Initial estimates are $6M savings in the first year of use, without quantifying the benefit of the better care offered. Such a "build-from-within" strategy provides an opportunity for health systems to maintain agency via a vendor-agnostic, internally governed LLM platform.
Authors: Lakshan Cooray, Deshan Sumanathilaka, Pattigadapa Venkatesh Raju
Abstract: Customer-service question answering (QA) systems increasingly rely on conversational language understanding. While Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance, their high computational cost and deployment constraints limit practical use in resource-constrained environments. Small Language Models (SLMs) provide a more efficient alternative, yet their effectiveness for multi-turn customer-service QA remains underexplored, particularly in scenarios requiring dialogue continuity and contextual understanding. This study investigates instruction-tuned SLMs for context-summarized multi-turn customer-service QA, using a history summarization strategy to preserve essential conversational state. We also introduce a conversation stage-based qualitative analysis to evaluate model behavior across different phases of customer-service interactions. Nine instruction-tuned low-parameterized SLMs are evaluated against three commercial LLMs using lexical and semantic similarity metrics alongside qualitative assessments, including human evaluation and LLM-as-a-judge methods. Results show notable variation across SLMs, with some models demonstrating near-LLM performance, while others struggle to maintain dialogue continuity and contextual alignment. These findings highlight both the potential and current limitations of low-parameterized language models for real-world customer-service QA systems.
Authors: Michael A. Lepori, Tal Linzen, Ann Yuan, Katja Filippova
Abstract: Though large language models (LLMs) have enabled great success across a wide variety of tasks, they still appear to fall short of one of the loftier goals of artificial intelligence research: creating an artificial system that can adapt its behavior to radically new contexts upon deployment. One important step towards this goal is to create systems that can induce rich representations of data that are seen in-context, and then flexibly deploy these representations to accomplish goals. Recently, Park et al. (2024) demonstrated that current LLMs are indeed capable of inducing such representation from context (i.e., in-context representation learning). The present study investigates whether LLMs can use these representations to complete simple downstream tasks. We first assess whether open-weights LLMs can use in-context representations for next-token prediction, and then probe models using a novel task, adaptive world modeling. In both tasks, we find evidence that open-weights LLMs struggle to deploy representations of novel semantics that are defined in-context, even if they encode these semantics in their latent representations. Furthermore, we assess closed-source, state-of-the-art reasoning models on the adaptive world modeling task, demonstrating that even the most performant LLMs cannot reliably leverage novel patterns presented in-context. Overall, this work seeks to inspire novel methods for encouraging models to not only encode information presented in-context, but to do so in a manner that supports flexible deployment of this information.
Authors: Teng-Fang Hsiao, Bo-Kai Ruan, Yu-Lun Liu, Hong-Han Shuai
Abstract: 3D editing has emerged as a critical research area to provide users with flexible control over 3D assets. While current editing approaches predominantly focus on 3D Gaussian Splatting or multi-view images, the direct editing of 3D meshes remains underexplored. Prior attempts, such as VoxHammer, rely on voxel-based representations that suffer from limited resolution and necessitate labor-intensive 3D mask. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{VecSet-Edit}, the first pipeline that leverages the high-fidelity VecSet Large Reconstruction Model (LRM) as a backbone for mesh editing. Our approach is grounded on a analysis of the spatial properties in VecSet tokens, revealing that token subsets govern distinct geometric regions. Based on this insight, we introduce Mask-guided Token Seeding and Attention-aligned Token Gating strategies to precisely localize target regions using only 2D image conditions. Also, considering the difference between VecSet diffusion process versus voxel we design a Drift-aware Token Pruning to reject geometric outliers during the denoising process. Finally, our Detail-preserving Texture Baking module ensures that we not only preserve the geometric details of original mesh but also the textural information. More details can be found in our project page: https://github.com/BlueDyee/VecSet-Edit/tree/main
Authors: Abdullah Arafat Miah, Kevin Vu, Yu Bi
Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are energy-efficient counterparts of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with high biological plausibility, as information is transmitted through temporal spiking patterns. The core element of an SNN is the spiking neuron, which converts input data into spikes following the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neuron model. This model includes several important hyperparameters, such as the membrane potential threshold and membrane time constant. Both the DNNs and SNNs have proven to be exploitable by backdoor attacks, where an adversary can poison the training dataset with malicious triggers and force the model to behave in an attacker-defined manner. Yet, how an adversary can exploit the unique characteristics of SNNs for backdoor attacks remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose \textit{BadSNN}, a novel backdoor attack on spiking neural networks that exploits hyperparameter variations of spiking neurons to inject backdoor behavior into the model. We further propose a trigger optimization process to achieve better attack performance while making trigger patterns less perceptible. \textit{BadSNN} demonstrates superior attack performance on various datasets and architectures, as well as compared with state-of-the-art data poisoning-based backdoor attacks and robustness against common backdoor mitigation techniques. Codes can be found at https://github.com/SiSL-URI/BadSNN.
Authors: Stephan Vonschallen, Dominique Oberle, Theresa Schmiedel, Friederike Eyssel
Abstract: Generative social robots (GSRs) powered by large language models enable adaptive, conversational tutoring but also introduce risks such as misinformation, overreliance, and privacy violations. Existing frameworks for educational technologies and responsible AI primarily define desired behaviors, yet they rarely specify the knowledge prerequisites that enable generative agents to express these behaviors reliably. To address this gap, we adopt a knowledge-based design perspective and investigate what information tutoring-oriented GSRs require to function responsibly and effectively in higher education. Based on twelve semistructured interviews with university students and lecturers, we identified twelve design requirements across three knowledge types: self-knowledge (assertive, conscientious, and friendly personality with customizable role), user-knowledge (personalized information about student learning goals, learning progress, motivation type, emotional state, and background), and context-knowledge (learning materials, educational strategies, courserelated information, and physical learning environment). Drawing from these results, this work provides a structured foundation for the design of tutoring GSRs, aligning generative AI capabilities with pedagogical and ethical expectations.
Authors: Aydin Ayanzadeh, Prakhar Dixit, Sadia Kamal, Milton Halem
Abstract: Wildfires are a growing threat to ecosystems, human lives, and infrastructure, with their frequency and intensity rising due to climate change and human activities. Early detection is critical, yet satellite-based monitoring remains challenging due to faint smoke signals, dynamic weather conditions, and the need for real-time analysis over large areas. We introduce WildfireVLM, an AI framework that combines satellite imagery wildfire detection with language-driven risk assessment. We construct a labeled wildfire and smoke dataset using imagery from Landsat-8/9, GOES-16, and other publicly available Earth observation sources, including harmonized products with aligned spectral bands. WildfireVLM employs YOLOv12 to detect fire zones and smoke plumes, leveraging its ability to detect small, complex patterns in satellite imagery. We integrate Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that convert detection outputs into contextualized risk assessments and prioritized response recommendations for disaster management. We validate the quality of risk reasoning using an LLM-as-judge evaluation with a shared rubric. The system is deployed using a service-oriented architecture that supports real-time processing, visual risk dashboards, and long-term wildfire tracking, demonstrating the value of combining computer vision with language-based reasoning for scalable wildfire monitoring. The code and dataset are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/Ayanzadeh93/_WildfireVLM_.
Authors: Yuduo Guo, Hao Zhang, Mingyu Li, Fujiang Yu, Yunjing Wu, Yuhan Hao, Song Huang, Yongming Liang, Xiaojing Lin, Xinyang Li, Jiamin Wu, Zheng Cai, Qionghai Dai
Abstract: The detection limit of astronomical imaging observations is limited by several noise sources. Some of that noise is correlated between neighbouring image pixels and exposures, so in principle could be learned and corrected. We present an astronomical self-supervised transformer-based denoising algorithm (ASTERIS), that integrates spatiotemporal information across multiple exposures. Benchmarking on mock data indicates that ASTERIS improves detection limits by 1.0 magnitude at 90% completeness and purity, while preserving the point spread function and photometric accuracy. Observational validation using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Subaru telescope identifies previously undetectable features, including low-surface-brightness galaxy structures and gravitationally-lensed arcs. Applied to deep JWST images, ASTERIS identifies three times more redshift > 9 galaxy candidates, with rest-frame ultraviolet luminosity 1.0 magnitude fainter, than previous methods.
Authors: Zhengyu Li, Xiangfei Qiu, Yuhan Zhu, Xingjian Wu, Jilin Hu, Chenjuan Guo, Bin Yang
Abstract: Exogenous variables offer valuable supplementary information for predicting future endogenous variables. Forecasting with exogenous variables needs to consider both past-to-future dependencies (i.e., temporal correlations) and the influence of exogenous variables on endogenous variables (i.e., channel correlations). This is pivotal when future exogenous variables are available, because they may directly affect the future endogenous variables. Many methods have been proposed for time series forecasting with exogenous variables, focusing on modeling temporal and channel correlations. However, most of them use a two-step strategy, modeling temporal and channel correlations separately, which limits their ability to capture joint correlations across time and channels. Furthermore, in real-world scenarios, time series are frequently affected by various forms of noises, underscoring the critical importance of robustness in such correlations modeling. To address these limitations, we propose GCGNet, a Graph-Consistent Generative Network for time series forecasting with exogenous variables. Specifically, GCGNet first employs a Variational Generator to produce coarse predictions. A Graph Structure Aligner then further guides it by evaluating the consistency between the generated and true correlations, where the correlations are represented as graphs, and are robust to noises. Finally, a Graph Refiner is proposed to refine the predictions to prevent degeneration and improve accuracy. Extensive experiments on 12 real-world datasets demonstrate that GCGNet outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors: Edward Izgorodin
Abstract: Graph-structured knowledge systems -- from knowledge graphs to GraphRAG pipelines -- organize information into hierarchical communities, yet lack a principled mechanism for continuous resolution control: where do the qualitative boundaries between abstraction levels lie, and how should an agent navigate them? Current approaches rely on discrete community detection with manually tuned resolution parameters (e.g., Leiden $\gamma$), offering no continuous zoom and no formal guarantees. We introduce Semantic Level of Detail (SLoD), a framework that addresses both problems by defining a continuous zoom operator via heat kernel diffusion on a graph Laplacian whose kNN structure is induced by a Poincare-ball embedding. We prove hierarchical coherence in the tree limit (exact tree with Sarkar embedding), with bounded approximation error, and demonstrate consistent boundary-detection behaviour on noisy hierarchies; spectral gaps in the graph Laplacian then induce emergent scale boundaries -- scales where the representation undergoes qualitative transitions -- detectable without manual resolution tuning. On synthetic hierarchies (HSBM, 1024 nodes), spectral clustering at the BoundaryScan-detected scale recovers planted levels, with macro ARI saturating at 1.00 in the high-SNR regime (50-seed median) and meso ARI reaching 0.89 [0.86, 0.92] at r=200. On the full WordNet noun hierarchy (82K synsets), using 100 stratified leaf queries, detected boundaries align with true taxonomic depth ($\tau = 0.79$), demonstrating meaningful abstraction-level discovery in real-world knowledge graphs without resolution-parameter tuning. The composite weights, MAD threshold, and kNN-parameter rule ($k = \max(10, \min(\lfloor\sqrt{N}\rfloor, 50))$) use defaults that transferred unchanged between HSBM and WordNet; their behaviour on graphs with implicit or qualitatively different hierarchical structure is open.
Authors: Chenglei Shen, Teng Shi, Weijie Yu, Xiao Zhang, Jun Xu
Abstract: Generative recommendation (GR) has shown strong potential for sequential recommendation in an end-to-end generation paradigm. However, existing GR models suffer from severe cold-start collapse: their recommendation accuracy on cold-start items can drop to near zero. Current solutions typically rely on retraining with cold-start interactions, which is hindered by sparse feedback, high computational cost, and delayed updates, limiting practical utility in rapidly evolving recommendation catalogs. Inspired by model editing in NLP, which enables training-free knowledge injection into large language models, we explore how to bring this paradigm to generative recommendation. This, however, faces two key challenges: GR lacks the explicit subject-object binding common in natural language, making targeted edits difficult; and GR does not exhibit stable token co-occurrence patterns, making the injection of multi-token item representations unreliable. To address these challenges, we propose GenRecEdit, a model editing framework tailored for generative recommendation. GenRecEdit explicitly models the relationship between the full sequence context and next-token generation, adopts iterative token-level editing to inject multi-token item representations, and introduces a one-to-one trigger mechanism to reduce interference among multiple edits during inference. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that GenRecEdit substantially improves recommendation performance on cold-start items while preserving the model's original recommendation quality. Moreover, it achieves these gains using only about 9.5% of the training time required for retraining, enabling more efficient and frequent model updates.
Authors: Jaesung Bae, Xiuwen Zheng, Minje Kim, Chang D. Yoo, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
Abstract: Dysarthric speech quality assessment (DSQA) is critical for clinical diagnostics and inclusive speech technologies. However, subjective evaluation is costly and difficult to scale, and the scarcity of labeled data limits robust objective modeling. To address this, we propose a three-stage framework that leverages unlabeled dysarthric speech and large-scale typical speech datasets to scale training. A teacher model first generates pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples, followed by weakly supervised pretraining using a label-aware contrastive learning strategy that exposes the model to diverse speakers and acoustic conditions. The pretrained model is then fine-tuned for the downstream DSQA task. Experiments on five unseen datasets spanning multiple etiologies and languages demonstrate the robustness of our approach. Our Whisper-based baseline significantly outperforms SOTA DSQA predictors such as SpICE, and the full framework achieves an average SRCC of 0.761 across unseen test datasets.
Authors: Gregory N. Frank
Abstract: Current alignment evaluation mostly measures whether models encode dangerous concepts and whether they refuse harmful requests. Both miss the layer where alignment often operates: routing from concept detection to behavioral policy. We study political censorship in Chinese-origin language models as a natural experiment, using probes, surgical ablations, and behavioral tests across nine open-weight models from five labs. Three findings follow. First, probe accuracy alone is non-diagnostic: political probes, null controls, and permutation baselines can all reach 100%, so held-out category generalization is the informative test. Second, surgical ablation reveals lab-specific routing. Removing the political-sensitivity direction eliminates censorship and restores accurate factual output in most models tested, while one model confabulates because its architecture entangles factual knowledge with the censorship mechanism. Cross-model transfer fails, indicating that routing geometry is model- and lab-specific. Third, refusal is no longer the dominant censorship mechanism. Within one model family, hard refusal falls to zero while narrative steering rises to the maximum, making censorship invisible to refusal-only benchmarks. These results support a three-stage descriptive framework: detect, route, generate. Models often retain the relevant knowledge; alignment changes how that knowledge is expressed. Evaluations that audit only detection or refusal therefore miss the routing mechanism that most directly determines behavior.
Authors: Ehtibar N. Dzhafarov, Victor H. Cervantes
Abstract: We introduce a new notion, that of a contextuality profile of a system of random variables. Rather than characterizing a system's contextuality by a single number, its overall degree of contextuality, we show how it can be characterized by a curve relating degree of contextuality to level at which the system is considered. A system is represented at level n if one only considers the joint distributions with no more than n variables, ignoring higher-order joint distributions. We show that the level-wise contextuality analysis can be used in conjunction with any well-constructed measure of contextuality. We present a method of concatenated systems to explore contextuality profiles systematically, and we apply it to the contextuality profiles for three major measures of contextuality proposed in the literature.
Authors: Zaid A. Abod, Furqan Aziz
Abstract: Complete and high-quality multi-modal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is essential for accurate neuro-oncological assessment, as each contrast provides complementary anatomical and pathological information. However, acquiring all modalities (e.g., T1c, T1n, T2w, T2f) for every patient is often impractical due to prolonged scan times, cost, and patient discomfort, potentially limiting comprehensive tumour evaluation. We propose 3D-MC-SAGAN (3D Multi-Contrast Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Network), a unified 3D multi-contrast synthesis framework that generates high-fidelity missing modalities from a single T2w input while explicitly preserving tumour characteristics. The model employs a multi-scale 3D encoder--decoder generator with residual connections and a novel Memory-Bounded Hybrid Attention (MBHA) block to capture long-range dependencies efficiently, and is trained with a WGAN-GP critic and an auxiliary domain classification head to produce T2f, T1n, and T1c volumes within a unified network. To ensure anatomical and pathological fidelity, we incorporate a frozen 3D U-Net-based segmentation network that enforces a tumour-consistency constraint during training. A composite objective combining adversarial, reconstruction, perceptual, structural similarity, contrast-classification, and segmentation-guided losses further promotes both global realism and tumour-preserving structure. Extensive experiments on 3D brain MRI datasets demonstrate that 3D-MC-SAGAN achieves state-of-the-art quantitative performance and produces visually coherent, anatomically plausible contrasts with improved distributional realism. Importantly, the proposed method maintains tumour segmentation accuracy comparable to that achieved using fully acquired multi-modal inputs, highlighting its potential to reduce acquisition burden while preserving clinically meaningful information.
Authors: Gregory N. Frank
Abstract: We localize the policy routing mechanism in alignment-trained language models. An intermediate-layer attention gate reads detected content and triggers deeper amplifier heads that boost the signal toward refusal. In smaller models the gate and amplifier are single heads; at larger scale they become bands of heads across adjacent layers. The gate contributes under 1% of output DLA, yet interchange testing (p < 0.001) and knockout cascade confirm it is causally necessary. Interchange screening at n >= 120 detects the same motif in twelve models from six labs (2B to 72B), though specific heads differ by lab. Per-head ablation weakens up to 58x at 72B and misses gates that interchange identifies; at scale, interchange is the only reliable audit. Modulating the detection-layer signal continuously controls policy from hard refusal through evasion to factual answering. On safety prompts the same intervention turns refusal into harmful guidance, showing that the safety-trained capability is gated by routing, not removed. Thresholds vary by topic and by input language, and the circuit relocates across generations within a family even while behavioral benchmarks register no change. Routing is early-commitment: the gate fires at its own layer before deeper layers finish processing the input. An in-context substitution cipher collapses gate interchange necessity by 70 to 99% across three models, and the model switches to puzzle-solving rather than refusal. Injecting the plaintext gate activation into the cipher forward pass restores 48% of refusals in Phi-4-mini, localizing the bypass to the routing interface. A second method, cipher contrast analysis, uses plain/cipher DLA differences to map the full cipher-sensitive routing circuit in O(3n) forward passes. Any encoding that defeats detection-layer pattern matching bypasses the policy regardless of whether deeper layers reconstruct the content.
Authors: Andoni Irazusta Garmendia
Abstract: Most neural solvers for the Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) are trained to output a single solution, even though practitioners rarely stop there: at test time, they routinely spend extra compute on sampling or post-hoc search. This raises a natural question: can the search procedure itself be learned? Neural improvement methods take this perspective by learning a policy that applies local modifications to a candidate solution, accumulating gains over an improvement trajectory. Yet learned improvement for TSP remains comparatively immature, with existing methods still falling short of robust, scalable performance. We argue that a key reason is design mismatch: many approaches reuse state representations, architectural choices, and training recipes inherited from single-solution methods, rather than being built around the mechanics of local search. This mismatch motivates NICO-TSP (Neural Improvement for Combinatorial Optimization): a 2-opt improvement framework for TSP. NICO-TSP represents the current tour with exactly $n$ edge tokens aligned with the neighborhood operator, scores 2-opt moves directly without tour positional encodings, and trains via a two-stage procedure: imitation learning to short-horizon optimal trajectories, followed by critic-free group-based reinforcement learning over longer rollouts. Under compute-matched evaluations that measure improvement as a function of both search steps and wall-clock time, NICO-TSP delivers consistently stronger and markedly more step-efficient improvement than prior learned and heuristic search baselines, generalizes far more reliably to larger out-of-distribution instances, and serves both as a competitive replacement for classical local search and as a powerful test-time refinement module for constructive solvers.
Authors: Tao Li, Kaiyuan Hou, Tuan Vinh, Monika Raj, Zhichun Guo, Carl Yang
Abstract: Lead optimization in drug discovery requires improving therapeutic properties while ensuring that molecular modifications correspond to feasible synthetic routes. Existing approaches either prioritize property scores without enforcing synthesizability, or rely on expensive enumeration over large reaction networks, while direct application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to molecular generation frequently produces chemically invalid structures. We introduce MolReAct, a framework that formulates lead optimization as a Markov Decision Process over a synthesis-constrained action space defined by validated reaction templates. A tool-augmented LLM agent serves as a dynamic reaction environment, invoking specialized chemical analysis tools to identify reactive sites and functional groups and proposing a compact set of chemically grounded transformations from matched templates. A dedicated policy model trained via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) selects among these constrained actions to maximize long-term oracle reward across multi-step trajectories, with a SMILES-based caching mechanism reducing end-to-end optimization time by approximately 43%. Across 13 property optimization tasks from the Therapeutic Data Commons and one structure-based docking task, MolReAct achieves an average Top-10 score of 0.571, the highest among all baselines, ranking first or second on 13 of 14 tasks and attaining the best sample efficiency on 9 of 14 tasks. By grounding every optimization step in validated reaction templates, MolReAct produces molecules that are not only property-improved but each accompanied by an explicit template-grounded synthetic pathway.
Authors: Akira Miura, Yuki Sasahara, Momoka Demura, Yuji Masubuchi, Tetsuya Asai, Chikahiko Mitsui
Abstract: While advances in materials informatics have accelerated the development of Self-Driving Laboratories (SDLs), human-led experiments remain standard in many educational and exploratory research laboratories. In specific lab settings, formal documentation alone is often insufficient for safe and reliable operation. We refer to the gap between formal documentation and reliable execution in such settings as the experimental last mile; this gap mainly involves site-specific operational know-how, including local rules, routine checks, procedural details, and safety-conscious actions that are can be verbalizable but are often under-documented in standard manuals. In this proof-of-concept study, we developed a human-in-the-loop AI assistant that combines first-person experimental video, multimodal AI, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Using powder X-ray diffraction experiments and student-recorded video data as inputs, the system extracts site-specific laboratory knowledge from recorded procedures, including physical techniques and audible confirmation that conventional manuals could omit. It then provides grounded responses based on the resulting manual. To reduce the risk of unsupported outputs, the system employs a two-layer safety design: source restriction through RAG and strict system-prompt constraints. Instructor-based evaluation showed alignment with expected guidance for questions covered by the manual. For out-of-scope queries, the system appropriately refused to answer, indicating a reduced risk of hallucination. Expert evaluation further indicated that the generated advisory reports were useful and safe (utility: 3.25/4.00; safety: 4.00/4.00). These results suggest the feasibility of a framework for bridging the experimental last mile in which AI supports laboratory practice under explicit human supervision rather than replacing human judgment.
Authors: Wei Chen, Yubing Wu, Junmei Yang, Delu Zeng, Qibin Zhao, John Paisley, Min Chen, Zhou Wang
Abstract: Preference optimization is widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, many margin-based methods also suppress the chosen response when they try to suppress the rejected one, and there is no general way to prevent this across different objectives. We address this issue with a unified incentive-score decomposition of preference optimization, revealing that different objectives share the same local update directions and differ only in their scalar weights. This decomposition provides a common framework for analyzing objectives that were previously studied in separate settings. Building on this decomposition, by analyzing the dynamics of the chosen/rejected likelihoods, we identify the disentanglement band (DB), a simple, testable condition that tells us when training can follow the desired path: suppress the loser while preserving the winner, possibly after an early stage. Using the DB, we propose reward calibration (RC), a plug-and-play method that adaptively rebalances the updates for chosen and rejected responses to satisfy the DB, without redesigning the base objective. Empirical results show that RC leads to more disentangled dynamics, with better downstream performance observed across several settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/IceyWuu/DisentangledPreferenceOptimization.
URLs: https://github.com/IceyWuu/DisentangledPreferenceOptimization.
Authors: Rania Elbadry, Sarfraz Ahmad, Ahmed Heakl, Dani Bouch, Momina Ahsan, Muhra AlMahri, Marwa Elsaid khalil, Yuxia Wang, Salem Lahlou, Sophia Ananiadou, Veselin Stoyanov, Jimin Huang, Xueqing Peng, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
Abstract: English financial NLP has advanced rapidly through benchmarks targeting earnings analysis, market sentiment, tabular reasoning, and financial question answering, yet Arabic financial NLP remains virtually nonexistent, despite 422 million speakers, $4.9 trillion in Gulf sovereign wealth, and a $4-5 trillion Islamic finance industry requiring specialized Shari'ah compliance over instruments like sukuk, murabaha, and takaful. We introduce Sahm, the first Arabic financial benchmark spanning seven tasks: AAOIFI standards QA, fatwa-based QA/MCQ, accounting and business exams, financial sentiment analysis, extractive summarization, and event-cause reasoning, comprising 14,380 expert-verified instances from authentic regulatory, juristic, and corporate sources. Evaluating 20 LLMs, we find Arabic fluency does not imply financial reasoning: models achieving 91% on recognition tasks drop sharply on generation, and event-cause reasoning exposes the widest performance gap (1.89-9.84/10). We release the benchmark and dataset to support trustworthy Arabic financial assistants.
Authors: Lam Pham, Khoi Vu, Dat Tran, Phat Lam, Vu Nguyen, David Fischinger, Son Le
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a deep-learning framework for environmental sound deepfake detection (ESDD) -- the task of identifying whether the sound scene and sound event in an input audio recording is fake or not. To this end, we conducted extensive experiments to explore how individual spectrograms, a wide range of network architectures and pre-trained models, ensemble of spectrograms or network architectures affect the ESDD task performance. The experimental results on the benchmark datasets of EnvSDD and ESDD-Challenge-TestSet indicate that detecting deepfake audio of sound scene and detecting deepfake audio of sound event should be considered as individual tasks. We also indicate that the approach of finetuning a pre-trained model is more effective compared with training a model from scratch for the ESDD task. Eventually, our best model, which was finetuned from the pre-trained WavLM model with the proposed three-stage training strategy, achieve the Accuracy of 0.98, F1 Score of 0.95, AuC of 0.99 on EnvSDD Test subset and the Accuracy of 0.88, F1 Score of 0.77, and AuC of 0.92 on ESDD-Challenge-TestSet dataset.
Authors: Emil Ryd, Henning Bartsch, Julian Stastny, Joe Benton, Vivek Hebbar
Abstract: As AI systems begin to automate complex tasks, supervision increasingly relies on weaker models or limited human oversight that cannot fully verify output quality. A model more capable than its supervisors could exploit this gap through sandbagging, producing work that appears acceptable but falls short of its true abilities. Can training elicit a model's best work even without reliable verification? We study this using model organisms trained to sandbag, testing elicitation techniques on problem-solving math, graduate-level science, and competitive coding tasks. We find that training with weak supervision can reliably elicit sandbagging models when supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) are combined: SFT on weak demonstrations breaks the sandbagging behavior, enabling RL to then fully elicit performance. Neither method succeeds reliably alone-RL without SFT almost always leads to reward hacking rather than genuine improvement, and SFT without RL fails to elicit full performance when the supervisor is much weaker than the untrusted model. Critically, this relies on training being indistinguishable from deployment; when models can distinguish between training and deployment, they can perform well during training while continuing to sandbag afterward. Our results provide initial evidence that training is a viable mitigation against sandbagging, while highlighting the importance of making training indistinguishable from deployment.
Authors: Xiaohang Yu, Hejia Geng, Xinmeng Zeng, William Knottenbelt
Abstract: Agentic systems increasingly act with user secrets for APIs, messaging platforms, and cloud services. Today's bearer-secret interfaces implement authorization by exposure: enabling action often means placing a reusable secret, or a reusable artifact derived from it, within a model-steerable boundary, so a transient prompt-injection or tool-side compromise becomes durable account compromise. Existing defenses cover adjacent pieces such as secret storage, scoped delegation, sender-constrained tokens, and runtime monitoring, but leave the combined agentic obligation without a common specification: an untrusted autonomous requester should be able to cause a user-authorized secret-backed operation without exposing reusable authority to the requester. We formalize this problem as Agent Secret Use (ASU). From ASU we derive a security-property taxonomy that separates the problem's structural obligations from the realization-level robustness conditions any concrete construction must establish, enabling principled comparison of existing agentic-secret defenses against a problem-grounded specification. We propose the Secret-Use Delegation Protocol (SUDP), a three-role protocol realizing ASU: a requester proposes a canonical operation; the user authorizes it with a fresh authenticator-backed grant; and a custodian redeems the grant once to perform the bounded use, so reusable authority never crosses the requester boundary. We specialize SUDP for agentic deployments: agents propose operations; they do not retrieve secrets. Under explicit assumptions, we show that SUDP satisfies the ASU requirements: authorization is verifiable, operation-bound, and single-use. SUDP also provides storage confidentiality and wrapping-epoch key isolation under stated sealing and erasure assumptions; plaintext-level forward secrecy of the underlying secret additionally requires the environment to rotate and revoke it.
Authors: Wenshuo Zhao (May), Qi Zhu (May), Xingshan Zeng (May), Fei Mi (May), Lifeng Shang (May), Yi R. (May), Fung
Abstract: An effective way to scale up test-time compute of large language models is to sample multiple responses and then select the best one, as in Grok Heavy and Gemini Deep Think. Existing selection methods often rely on external reward models, which requires training a strong reward model and introduces additional computation overhead. As an alternative, previous approaches have explored intrinsic signals, such as confidence and entropy, but these signals are noisy with naive aggregation. In this work, we observe that high-entropy tokens tend to cluster into consecutive groups during inference, providing a more stable notion of model uncertainty than individual tokens. Together, these clusters reveal temporal patterns of model uncertainty throughout the inference process. Motivated by this observation, we propose to use the temporal structure of uncertainty as an intrinsic reward. To this end, we first formalize the basic unit of segment-level uncertainty as the High Entropy Phase (HEP), a variable-length segment that begins at a high-entropy token and ends when consecutive low-entropy tokens appear. We then define the Entropy Centroid, inspired by the concept of the center of mass in physics, as the weighted average position of all HEPs along the trajectory. Intuitively, a lower centroid indicates early exploration followed by confident generation, which we find often corresponds to higher response quality. Based on this insight, we propose the Lowest Centroid method, which selects the response with the lowest entropy centroid among multiple candidates. Experiments on mathematics, code generation, logical reasoning, and agentic tasks, across model scales ranging from 14B to 480B, show that Lowest Centroid consistently outperforms existing baselines and delivers stable gains as model size increases. Code is available at https://github.com/hkust-nlp/entropy-centroid.
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: 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: Xubin Luo, Cheng Yang
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: 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: Chenxin Li, Zhengyang Tang, Mingxin Huang, 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.