Authors: Logan Mann, Ajit Saravanan, Ishan Dave, Shikhar Shiromani, Saadullah Ismail, Yi Xia, Emily Huang
Abstract: A pervasive intuition holds that vision-language models (VLMs) are most trustworthy when their attention maps look sharp: concentrated attention on the queried region should imply a confident, calibrated answer. We test this Attention-Confidence Assumption directly. We instrument three open-weight VLM families (LLaVA-1.5, PaliGemma, Qwen2-VL; 3-7B parameters) with a unified mechanistic pipeline -- the VLM Reliability Probe (VRP) -- that compares attention structure, generation dynamics, and hidden-state geometry against a single correctness label. Three results emerge. (i) Attention structure is a near-zero predictor of correctness (R_pb(C_k,y)=0.001, 95% CI [-0.034,0.036]; R_pb(H_s,y)=-0.012, [-0.047,0.024] on a pooled n=3,090 split), even though attention remains causally necessary for feature extraction (top-30% patch masking drops accuracy by 8.2-11.3 pp, p<0.001). (ii) Reliability becomes legible later in the computation: a single hidden-state linear probe reaches AUROC>0.95 on POPE for two of three families, and self-consistency at K=10 is the strongest behavioral predictor we measure at 10x inference cost (R_pb=0.43). (iii) Causal neuron-level ablations expose a sharp architectural split with direct monitor-design implications: late-fusion LLaVA concentrates reliability in a fragile late bottleneck (-8.3 pp object-identification accuracy after top-5 probe-neuron ablation), whereas early-fusion PaliGemma and Qwen2-VL distribute it widely and absorb destruction of ~50% of their peak-layer hidden dimension with <=1 pp degradation. The takeaway is narrow but consequential: in 3-7B VLMs, reliability is read more reliably off hidden-state geometry, layer-wise margin formation, and sparse late-layer circuits than off attention-map sharpness.
Authors: Andrei Lazarev, Dmitrii Sedov, Alexander Galkin
Abstract: The automated extraction of data from scientific charts is a critical task for large-scale literature analysis. While multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise, their accuracy on non-standardized charts remains a challenge. This raises a key research question: what is the most effective strategy to improve model performance (high-level semantic priming) or low-level spatial priming? This paper presents a comparative investigation into these two distinct strategies. We describe our exploratory experiments with semantic methods, such as a two-stage metadata-first framework and Chain-of-Thought, which failed to produce a statistically significant improvement. In contrast, we present a simple but highly effective spatial priming method: overlaying a coordinate grid onto the chart image before analysis. Our quantitative experiment on a synthetic dataset demonstrates that this grid-based approach provides a statistically significant reduction in data extraction error (SMAPE reduced from 25.5% to 19.5%, p < 0.05) compared to a baseline. We conclude that for the current generation of multimodal models, providing explicit spatial context is a more effective and reliable strategy than high-level semantic guidance for this class of tasks.
Authors: Juanxi Tian, Fengyuan Liu, Jiaming Han, Yilei Jiang, Yongliang Wu, Yesheng Liu, Haodong Li, Furong Xu, Wanhua Li
Abstract: Aligning multimodal generative models with human preferences demands reward signals that respect the compositional, multi-dimensional structure of human judgment. Prevailing RLHF approaches reduce this structure to scalar or pairwise labels, collapsing nuanced preferences into opaque parametric proxies and exposing vulnerabilities to reward hacking. While recent Rubrics-as-Reward (RaR) methods attempt to recover this structure through explicit criteria, generating rubrics that are simultaneously reliable, scalable, and data-efficient remains an open problem. We introduce Auto-Rubric as Reward (ARR), a framework that reframes reward modeling from implicit weight optimization to explicit, criteria-based decomposition. Before any pairwise comparison, ARR externalizes a VLM's internalized preference knowledge as prompt-specific rubrics, translating holistic intent into independently verifiable quality dimensions. This conversion of implicit preference structure into inspectable, interpretable constraints substantially suppresses evaluation biases including positional bias, enabling both zero-shot deployment and few-shot conditioning on minimal supervision. To extend these gains into generative training, we propose Rubric Policy Optimization (RPO), which distills ARR's structured multi-dimensional evaluation into a robust binary reward, replacing opaque scalar regression with rubric-conditioned preference decisions that stabilize policy gradients. On text-to-image generation and image editing benchmarks, ARR-RPO outperforms pairwise reward models and VLM judges, demonstrating that explicitly externalizing implicit preference knowledge into structured rubrics achieves more reliable, data-efficient multimodal alignment, revealing that the bottleneck is the absence of a factorized interface, not a deficit of knowledge.
Authors: Carter Blair, Ariel D. Procaccia, Milind Tambe
Abstract: Modern AI is opening the door to collective decision-making in which participants express their views as free-form text rather than voting on a fixed set of candidates. A natural idea is to embed these opinions in a vector space so that the substantial literature on facility location problems and fair clustering can be brought to bear. But standard text embeddings measure semantic similarity, whereas distances in facility location problems and fair clustering require what we call \textit{preferential similarity}: a participant's agreement with a piece of text should be inversely related to their distance from it. Off-the-shelf embeddings inherit a coarse preference signal through a correlation between semantic and preferential similarity, but fail to capture preferences when the correlation breaks. We formalize this as an invariance problem: text embedding models encode both a preference-relevant signal (stance and values) and semantic nuisance (style and wording), and the two are observationally correlated, so a geometry that relies on nuisance can appear preference-correct even when it is not. We show that synthetic training data designed to break this correlation provably shifts the optimal scorer away from nuisance-dominated cosine and significantly improves preference prediction across 11 online deliberation datasets.
Authors: Yuhao Li, Shengchao Liu
Abstract: Debates about large language model post-training often treat supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as imitation and reinforcement learning (RL) as discovery. But this distinction is too coarse. What matters is whether a training procedure increases the probability of behaviors the pretrained model could already produce, or whether it changes what the model can practically reach. We argue that post-training research should distinguish between capability elicitation and capability creation. We make this distinction operational by introducing the notion of accessible support: the set of behaviors that a model can practically produce under finite budgets. Post-training that reweights behaviors within this support is capability elicitation; whereas changing the support itself corresponds to capability creation. We develop this argument through a free-energy view of post-training. SFT and RL can both be seen as reweighting a pretrained reference distribution, only with different external signals. Demonstration signals define low-energy behavior for SFT, and reward signals define low-energy behavior for RL. When the update remains close to the base model, the main effect is local reweighting, not capability creation. Within this framework, the central question is no longer whether post-training is framed as SFT or RL, but whether it reweights behaviors already within reach, or instead expands the model's reachable behavioral space through search, interaction, tool use, or the incorporation of new information.
Authors: Junwei Liao, Haoting Shi, Ruiwen Zhou, Jiaqian Wang, Shengtao Zhang, Wei Zhang, Weinan Zhang, Ying Wen, Zhiyu Li, Feiyu Xiong, Bo Tang, Muning Wen
Abstract: Episodic memory allows LLM agents to accumulate and retrieve experience, but current methods treat each memory independently, i.e., evaluating retrieval quality in isolation without accounting for the dependency chains through which memories enable the creation of future memories. We introduce MemQ, which applies TD($\lambda$) eligibility traces to memory Q-values, propagating credit backward through a provenance DAG that records which memories were retrieved when each new memory was created. Credit weight decays as $(\gamma\lambda)^d$ with DAG depth $d$, replacing temporal distance with structural proximity. We formalize the setting as an Exogenous-Context MDP, whose factored transition decouples the exogenous task stream from the endogenous memory store. Across six benchmarks, spanning OS interaction, function calling, code generation, multimodal reasoning, embodied reasoning, and expert-level QA, MemQ achieves the highest success rate on all six in generalization evaluation and runtime learning, with gains largest on multi-step tasks that produce deep and relevant provenance chains (up to +5.7~pp) and smallest on single-step classification (+0.77~pp) where single-step updates already suffice. We further study how $\gamma$ and $\lambda$ interact with the EC-MDP structure, providing principled guidance for parameter selection and future research. Code is available at https://github.com/jwliao-ai/MemQ.
Authors: Yongliang Miao, Ziyang Yu, Liang Zhao, Bowen Zhu, Hasibul Haque
Abstract: Skill libraries have become a practical way for LLM agents to reuse procedural experience across tasks. However, existing systems typically treat skills as flat, single-resolution prompt blocks. This creates a tension between relevance and cost: injecting coarse skills can introduce irrelevant or misleading context, while rewriting entire skills is expensive and often unnecessary. We propose SkillLens, a hierarchical skill-evolution framework that organizes skills into a four-layer graph of policies, strategies, procedures, and primitives, and retrieves them at mixed granularity. Given a task, SkillLens first retrieves semantically relevant skill seeds, expands them through degree-corrected random walk over the skill graph, and then uses a verifier to decide whether each visited unit should be accepted, decomposed, rewritten, or skipped. This enables the agent to reuse compatible subskills directly while adapting only locally mismatched components. To improve the system over time, SkillLens further refines multi-granularity skills and verifier in order to improve its routing decisions. We provide theoretical analysis showing that mixed-granularity adaptation incurs sublinear cost under sparse mismatch assumptions and that the evolutionary update rule monotonically improves the validation objective until a local optimum. Across MuLocbench and ALFWorld, SkillLens consistently improves over strong skill-based baselines, achieving up to a 6.31 percentage-point Acc@1 gain for bug localization and raising agent success rate from 45.00% to 51.31%.
Authors: Pranavkumar Mallela, Vinay Kumar, Shashi Shekhar Jha, Shweta Jain
Abstract: Human-AI teams play a pivotal role in improving overall system performance when neither the human nor the model can achieve such performance on their own. With the advent of powerful and accessible Generative AI models, several mundane tasks have morphed into Human-AI team tasks. From writing essays to developing advanced algorithms, humans have found that using AI assistance has led to an accelerated work pace like never before. In classification tasks, where the final output is a single hard label, it is crucial to address the combination of human and model output. Prior work elegantly solves this problem using Bayes rule, using the assumption that human and model output are conditionally independent given the ground truth. Specifically, it discusses a combination method to combine a single deterministic labeler (the human) and a probabilistic labeler (the classifier model) using the model's instance-level and the human's class-level calibrated probabilities.
Authors: Ziyang Yu, Qiyue Li, Liang Zhao
Abstract: Tool-augmented language models can extend small language models with external executable skills, but scaling the tool library creates a coupled challenge: the library must evolve with the planner as new reusable subroutines emerge, while retrieval from the growing library must remain within a fixed context budget. Existing tool-use and skill-library methods typically treat tools as flat or text-indexed memories, causing prompt cost to grow with library size and obscuring the typed, compositional structure of executable code. We propose CoCoDA, a framework that co-evolves the planner and tool library through a single code-native structure: a compositional code DAG. Nodes are primitive or composite tools, edges encode invocation dependencies, and each node stores a typed signature, description, pre/post-condition specification, and worked examples. At inference time, Typed DAG Retrieval prunes candidates by symbolic signature unification, ranks survivors by descriptions, filters them by behavioral specifications, and disambiguates with examples, keeping expensive context materialization on progressively smaller candidate sets. At training time, successful trajectories are folded into validated composite tools, while the planner is updated with a DAG-induced reward that credits composites by their primitive expansion size. We provide theoretical results showing retrieval cost reduction, sublinear retrieval time, compositional advantage under the shaped reward, monotone co-evolution under conservative updates, and DAG well-formedness. Across mathematical reasoning, tabular analysis, and code task benchmarks, CoCoDA enables an 8B student to match or exceed a 32B teacher on GSM8K and MATH and consistently improves over strong tool-use and library-learning baselines.
Authors: Katharine Kowalyshyn, Timothy Duggan, Daniel Little, Michael C Hughes
Abstract: How do LLMs learn in-context? Is it by pattern-matching recent tokens, or by inferring latent structure? We probe this question using a toy graph random-walk across two competing graph structures. This task's answer is, in principle, decidable: either the model tracks global topology, or it copies local transitions. We present two lines of evidence that neither account alone is sufficient. First, reconstructing the internal representation structure via PCA reveals that at intermediate mixture ratios, both graph topologies are encoded in orthogonal principal subspaces simultaneously. This pattern is difficult to reconcile with purely local transition copying. Second, residual-stream activation patching and graph-difference steering causally intervene on this graph-family signal: late-layer patching almost fully transfers the clean graph preference, while linear steering moves predictions in the intended direction and fails under norm-matched and label-shuffled controls. Taken together, our findings are most consistent with a dual-mechanism account in which genuine structure inference and induction circuits operate in parallel.
Authors: Will Beaumaster, Paul Schrater
Abstract: Conversational AI has a fundamental flaw as a knowledge interface: sycophantic chatbots induce epistemic entrenchment and delusional belief spirals even in rational agents. We propose the problem does not stem from the AI model, rooted instead in a systemic consequence of the paradigm shift from user-driven knowledge search to users and agents engaged in strategic, repeated-play communication. We formalize the problem as a Crawford-Sobel cheap talk game, where costless user signals induce a pooling equilibrium. Agents optimized for user satisfaction produce sycophantic strategies that provide identical reinforcement across user types with opposite epistemic incentives: exploratory ``Growth-seekers'' ($\theta_G$) and confirmatory ``Validation-seekers'' ($\theta_V$). Under repeated play, this identification failure creates a coordination trap -- analogous to a Prisoner's Dilemma -- where locally rational feedback loops drive users toward pathologically certain false beliefs. We propose an inference-time mechanism design intervention called an Epistemic Mediator that breaks this pooling equilibrium by introducing a costly signal (epistemic friction), forcing type revelation based on users' asymmetric cognitive costs for processing resistance. A key contribution is Belief Versioning, a git-inspired epistemic meta-memory system that stores healthy beliefs and rollbacks when validation-seeking resistance is detected. In simulation, this intervention achieves a separating equilibrium achieving a $48\times$ differential in spiral rates while passing a learning preservation criterion), evidence that epistemic safety in AI is fundamentally a problem of strategic information environment design rather than simple model alignment.
Authors: Bruno Bianchi, Diego Tiscornia, Matias Travizano, Ariel Futoransky
Abstract: Since the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), a significant area of research has focused on their intrinsic biases, particularly in political discourse. This study investigates a different but related concept, "political plasticity", which is defined as the capacity of models to adapt their responses based on the user supplied context. To analyze this, a testing framework was developed using an expanded corpus of 200 politically-oriented questions across economic and personal freedom axes, based on a prior framework by Lester (1996). The study explored several methods to induce political bias, including simplified and topic-based system prompts, as well as user prompts with few-shot examples. The results show that while system prompts were largely ineffective, user prompts successfully elicited significant ideological shifts, particularly along the Economic Freedom axis in larger and newer models. Through a validation experiment, we examined whether models answer questionnaires by recognizing the underlying question format. Inverting the sense of the questions revealed unexpected, counter-intuitive shifts in most models, suggesting potential data leakage. Finally, we also analyzed how model plasticity varies when the experiment is conducted in different languages. The results reveal subtle yet notable shifts across each of the analyzed languages. Overall, our results indicate that small and older LLMs exhibit limited or unstable political plasticity, whereas newer frontier models display reliable, expected adaptability.
Authors: Nicholas Caputo
Abstract: Jurisprudence, the study of how judges should properly decide cases, and alignment, the science of getting AI models to conform to human values, share a fundamental structure. These seemingly distant fields both seek to predict and shape how decisions by powerful actors, in one case judges and in the other increasingly powerful artificial intelligences, will be made in the unknown future. And they use similar tools of the specification and interpretation of language to try to accomplish those goals. The great debates of jurisprudence, about what the law is and what it should be, can provide insight into alignment, and lessons from what does and does not work in alignment can help make progress in jurisprudence. This essay puts the two fields directly into conversation. Drawing on leading accounts of jurisprudence, particularly Dworkin's principle-oriented interpretivism and Sunstein's positivist account of law as analogical reasoning, and on cutting-edge alignment approaches, namely Constitutional AI and case-based reasoning, it illustrates the value of a more sophisticated legally-inspired approach to the interplay of rules and cases in finetuning alignment and points to ways that AI can provide a better understanding of how the law works and how it can be improved by the introduction of AI. AI systems and the law should operate to empower people to act in the world, helping to expand their capabilities and the extent to which they are able to achieve their goals. As AI continues to improve in capacity, and as the constraints that legal theory places on human judges seem be coming undone, the conversation between these two fields will become increasingly essential and may help point to a better version of both.
Authors: Gabriele La Malfa, Emanuele La Malfa, Saar Cohen, Jie M. Zhang, Michael Luck, Michael Wooldridge, Elizabeth Black
Abstract: Self-play red team is an established approach to improving AI safety in which different instances of the same model play attacker and defender roles in a zero-sum game, i.e., where the attacker tries to jailbreak the defender; if self-play converges to a Nash equilibrium, the model is guaranteed to respond safely within the settings of the game. Although the parameter sharing enforced by the use of the same model for the two roles improves stability and performance, it introduces fundamental theoretical and architectural limitations. We show that the set of Nash equilibria that can be reached corresponds to a broad class of behaviours that includes trivial always refuse strategies and oracle-like defenders, thus limiting practical applicability. We then show that when attacker and defender share and update the same base model, the dynamics collapse to self-consistency, so that attacks do not enforce adversarial pressure on the defender. In response, we propose Anchored Bipolicy Self-Play, which trains distinct role-specific LoRA adapters on top of a frozen base model, thereby maintaining stable optimisation while preserving adversarial pressure through explicit role separation. In relation to standard self-play, we show up to 100x greater parameter efficiency than finetuning and consistent improvements in safety compared to self-play fine-tuned models. We evaluate on Qwen2.5-{3B, 7B,14B}-IT models across widely used safety benchmarks, showing improved robustness without loss of reasoning ability. Cross-play experiments further show that our attacker and defender models are superior to self-play in terms of adversarial defence and safety.
Authors: Prasanna Desikan, Harshit Rajgarhia, Shivali Dalmia, Ananya Mantravadi
Abstract: AI models are increasingly deployed in live clinical environments where they must perform reliably across complex, high-stakes workflows that standard training and validation datasets were never designed to capture. Evaluating these systems requires benchmarks: structured combinations of tasks, datasets, and metrics that enable reproducible, comparable measurement of what a model can do. The central challenge in healthcare AI is not performance alone, but the absence of systematic methods to measure reliability, safety, and clinical relevance under real-world conditions. Most existing benchmarks test what a model knows; too few test whether it can perform reliably and without failing across the full complexity of real clinical tasks. Current benchmarks have accumulated through ad hoc dataset construction optimized for narrow task performance: frontier models achieve near-perfect scores on medical licensing examinations, but when evaluated across real clinical tasks, performance degrades sharply, scoring 0.74--0.85 on documentation, 0.61--0.76 on clinical decision support, and only 0.53--0.63 on administrative and workflow tasks \cite{medhelm}. High benchmark scores give a false sense of deployment readiness, and the gap between performance and utility widens precisely as AI systems take on more consequential clinical roles. Without a principled framework for benchmark design, the field cannot determine whether poor clinical performance reflects model limitations or failures in how performance is being measured.
Authors: Jacob Ativo, Bharaneeshwar Balasubramaniyam, Anh Tran, Khushboo Gupta, Hongmin Li, Doina Caragea, Cornelia Caragea
Abstract: Semi-supervised learning approaches have been investigated as a means to enhance the analysis of social media data in disaster management contexts. In this work, we present the first empirical evaluation of large language model (LLM) guided semi-supervised learning for crisis related tweet classification. We compare two recent LLM assisted semi-supervised methods, VerifyMatch and LLM guided Co-Training ( LG-CoTrain), against established semi-supervised baselines. Our results show that LG-CoTrain significantly outperforms classical semi-supervised approaches in low resource settings with 5, 10 and 25 labeled examples per class, achieving the highest averaged Macro F1 across events. VerifyMatch achieves competitive performance while also demonstrating strong calibration properties. As the number of labeled examples increases, the performance gap narrows and Self Training emerges as a strong baseline. We further observe that compact semi-supervised models can, in some cases, outperform very large LLMs operating in zero-shot settings. This finding highlights the potential of transferring knowledge from LLMs into smaller and more deployable models through LLM guided semi-supervised learning, offering a practical pathway for real world disaster response applications. Our project repository on Github is here.
Authors: Sarah Wilson, Diem Linh Dang, Usman Ali Moazzam, Shan Ye, Gail Kaiser
Abstract: Autonomous AI agents are increasingly deployed in open social environments, yet the relationship between their configuration specifications and their emergent social behavior remains poorly understood. We present a controlled, multi-factor empirical study in which thirteen OpenClaw agents are deployed on Moltbook -- a Reddit-like social network built for AI agents -- across three systematically varied independent variables: (1) personality specification, (2) underlying LLM model backbone, and (3) operational rules and memory configuration. A default control agent provides a behavioral baseline. Over a one-week observation window spanning approximately 400 autonomous sessions per agent, we collect behavioral, linguistic, and social metrics to assess how configuration layers predict emergent social behavior. We find that personality specification is the dominant behavioral lever, producing a massive spread in response length across agents, while model backbone and operational rules drive more moderate but still meaningful effects on rhetorical style and topic engagement breadth. Our findings contribute empirical evidence to the emerging literature on deployed multi-agent social systems and offer practical guidance for designing agents intended for collaborative or monitoring tasks in real social environments.
Authors: Aswin RRV, Jacob Dineen, Divij Handa, Mihir Parmar, Ben Zhou, Swaroop Mishra, Chitta Baral
Abstract: The effectiveness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) depends on the nature and diversity of the data used before and during RL. In particular, reasoning problems can often be approached in multiple ways that rely on different forms of reasoning, and exposure to only a limited range of such approaches in the training data may limit the effectiveness of RL. Motivated by this, we investigate using diverse self-generated data during mid-training as an intermediate step before RL training. Specifically, we adopt a bootstrapped data-generation framework guided by George Polya's problem-solving approaches for generating multiple variants of correct answers for each question in the training data, and then perform fine-tuning. We first provide a theoretical perspective on how mid-training on such data improves RL and explain how policy-gradient updates can incentivize combining multiple approaches. We then empirically demonstrate that RL-trained models initialized with our mid-training data achieve consistent improvements across various mathematical reasoning benchmarks and other OOD tasks like code generation and narrative reasoning. Overall, our investigative study shows that a language model learning multiple problem-solving approaches, through self-generated data helps subsequent RL.
Authors: Preyash Yadav, Michelle Cohn, Priyanka Koppolu, Hritvik Agarwal, Amey Gohil, Tejas Patil, Sasha Pimento, Alyssa Weakley
Abstract: Individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Alzheimer's disease-related dementia (ADRD) experience memory and thinking changes that impact their ability to use digital daily management tools. For example, adding an event to a digital calendar requires multiple steps that may act as barriers to independent use for individuals with AD/ADRD. This paper presents AI-Care, a conversational agentic artificial intelligence (AI) layer built on top of a remote caregiving platform co-designed with people with AD/ADRD. AI-Care is designed to reduce the cognitive load on individuals with AD/ADRD when managing everyday tasks such as setting calendar reminders and organizing to-do lists through natural-language interaction with a voice-first chatbot. The system uses a LangGraph-based stateful orchestration approach in which each request passes through sanitization, intent classification, context loading, safety checks, deterministic slot collection, tool execution, and response composition. Safety-critical responses, particularly around medications and allergies, are grounded in caregiver-verified records rather than free-form model generation. The system does not make autonomous medical or treatment decisions. Incomplete or ambiguous requests are handled through controlled multi-turn clarification rather than silent failure or guessing. The system supports both typed and spoken input, with voice output through ElevenLabs text-to-speech. Longer responses are chunked before synthesis to avoid rushed playback. A preliminary pilot with four individuals with mild-to-moderate AD/ADRD showed that users found the system trustworthy, competent, and likable, and were able to complete the evaluated coordination tasks through conversation. We describe the design goals, system architecture, safety controls, and findings from this formative evaluation.
Authors: Linh Le, David Williams-King, Mohamed Amine Merzouk, Aton Kamanda, Adam Oberman
Abstract: Current adversarial robustness methods for large language models require extensive datasets of harmful prompts (thousands to hundreds of thousands of examples), yet remain vulnerable to novel attack vectors and distributional shifts. We propose Latent Personality Alignment (LPA), a sample-efficient defense that achieves robustness by training models on abstract personality traits rather than specific harmful behaviors. Using fewer than 100 trait statements and latent adversarial training, LPA achieves comparable attack success rates to methods trained on 150k+ examples, while maintaining superior utility. Critically, LPA generalizes better to unseen attack distributions, reducing misclassification rates by 2.6x compared to baseline across six harm benchmarks -- without ever seeing harmful examples during training. Our results demonstrate that personality-based alignment offers a principled approach to building robust defenses with minimal cost.
Authors: Darryl Jacob, Xinyu Liu, Muchao Ye, Xiaoyong Yuan, Pan He
Abstract: Transparent decision-making is essential for traffic signal control (TSC) systems to earn public trust. However, traditional reinforcement learning-based TSC methods function as black boxes with limited interpretability. Although large language models (LLMs) can provide natural language reasoning, reinforcement finetuning for TSC remains unstable because feedback is sparse and delayed, while most actions produce only marginal changes in congestion metrics. We introduce OracleTSC, which stabilizes LLM-based TSC through two mechanisms: (1) a reward hurdle mechanism that filters weak learning signals by subtracting a calibrated threshold from environmental rewards, and (2) uncertainty regularization that maximizes the probability of the selected response to encourage consistent decisions across sampled outputs. Experiments on the LibSignal benchmark show that OracleTSC enables a compact LLaMA3-8B model to substantially improve traffic efficiency, achieving a 75% reduction in travel time and a 67% decrease in queue length compared with the pretrained baseline while preserving interpretability through natural language explanations. OracleTSC also demonstrates strong cross-intersection generalization: a policy trained on one intersection transfers to a structurally different intersection with 17% lower travel time and 39% lower queue length without additional finetuning. These results suggest that uncertainty-aware reward shaping can improve the stability and effectiveness of reinforcement fine-tuning for TSC.
Authors: Dhaval Patel, Chathurangi Shyalika, Suryanarayana Reddy Yarrabothula, Ling Yue, Shuxin Lin, Nianjun Zhou, James Rayfield
Abstract: Competition retrospectives are useful when they explain what a leaderboard measured, how hidden evaluation changed conclusions, and which design patterns were rewarded. We revisit the CODS 2025 \assetopslive{} challenge, a privacy-aware Codabench competition on industrial multi-agent orchestration built on \assetops{}. We combine final rank sheets, a 300-submission server log, 149-team registrations, best-submission exports, the organizer winners report, the companion \assetopslive{} system paper, and verified planning-track source trees. Five results stand out. First, the public planning leaderboard saturates at 72.73\%, and richer prompts do not improve that peak. Second, hidden evaluation changes the story: public and private scores correlate moderately in planning ($r{=}0.69$) but negatively in execution ($r{=}{-}0.13$), with several 45.45\% public execution systems reaching 63.64\% on the hidden set. Third, the \tmatch{} term is numerically almost inert in the official composite -- combined on a 0--1 scale with 0--100 percentage scores, it contributes at most 0.05 points per track, and rescaling would swap the top two teams. Fourth, the competition is operationally account-based but substantively team-based: 149 registered teams reduce to 24 with non-zero public scores and 11 fully ranked, while 52.3\% of deduplicated registrations list multiple usernames. Fifth, successful execution methods mostly improve guardrails -- response selection, contamination cleanup, fallback, and context control -- rather than novel agent architectures. These findings identify which behaviors the evaluation rewarded, and motivate scale-aware composites, skill-level diagnostics, and versioned artifact release.
Authors: Burcu Sayin, Ngoc Vo Hong, Ipek Baris Schlicht, Jacopo Staiano, Pasquale Minervini, Sara Allievi, Nicola Susca, Nicola Osti, Alberto Maino, Vito Racanelli, Andrea Passerini
Abstract: Clinical decision-making in emergency medicine demands rapid, accurate diagnoses under uncertainty. Despite benchmark progress, evidence for LLMs as interactive aids in live physician workflows remains sparse. MedSyn lets physicians iteratively query an LLM provided with the full clinical record while initially viewing only the chief complaint. Seven physicians (three seniors, four residents) completed baseline and AI-assisted sessions across 52 MIMIC-IV cases stratified by difficulty. Blinded evaluation showed residents' Hard-case correctness rose from 0.589 to 0.734; difficulty-standardised completely-correct rates confirmed a medium effect ({\Delta} = 0.092; p = 0.071; d = 0.47). Automated metrics corroborated these gains: standardised any-match accuracy improved by 0.156 (p < 0.0001), and residents showed the largest F1 gain ({\Delta} = 0.138; p < 0.0001). Dialogue analysis revealed expertise-dependent strategies (seniors asked targeted, hypothesis-driven questions; residents relied on broader queries) and cross-expertise concordance increased ({\Delta} = 0.145; p < 0.0001). Interactive LLM support meaningfully enhances diagnostic reasoning.
Authors: Doga Kerestecioglu, Alexei Robsky, Clemens Vasters, Anshul Sharma, Yitzhak Kesselman
Abstract: Current LLM agents lack principled mechanisms for managing persistent memory across long interaction horizons. We present a biologically-grounded memory architecture comprising six cognitive mechanisms: (1) sleep-phase consolidation, (2) interference-based forgetting, (3) engram maturation, (4) reconsolidation upon retrieval, (5) entity knowledge graphs, and (6) hybrid multi-cue retrieval. Each mechanism addresses a specific failure mode of naive memory accumulation. We introduce a synthetic calibration methodology that derives all pipeline thresholds without benchmark data exposure, eliminating a common source of evaluation leakage. We evaluate on two benchmarks. First, a VSCode issue-tracking dataset (13K issues, 120K events) where deduplication-based consolidation achieves 97.2% retention precision with 58% store reduction (+21.8 pp over baseline). Second, the LongMemEval personal-chat benchmark where we conduct the first streaming M-tier evaluation (475 sessions, ~540K unique turns). At a 200K-token context budget, our pipeline matches raw retrieval accuracy (70.1% vs. 71.2%, overlapping 95% CI) while exposing a tunable accuracy/store-size operating curve. At S-tier scale (50 sessions), dedup-based consolidation yields a +13.3 pp improvement in preference recall.
Authors: Peter Kirgis, Sayash Kapoor, Stephan Rabanser, Nitya Nadgir, Cozmin Ududec, Magda Dubois, JJ Allaire, Conrad Stosz, Marius Hobbhahn, Jacob Steinhardt, Arvind Narayanan
Abstract: Agent benchmarks typically report only final outcomes: pass or fail. This threatens evaluation credibility in three ways. First, scores may be inflated or deflated by shortcuts and benchmark artifacts, misrepresenting capability. Second, benchmark performance may fail to predict real-world utility due to scaffold limitations and recurring failure modes. Finally, capability scores may conceal dangerous or catastrophic actions taken by the agent. We argue that log analysis -- the systematic tracking and analysis of the inputs, execution, and outputs of an AI agent -- is necessary to overcome these validity threats and promote credible agent evaluation. In this paper, we (1) present a taxonomy of threats to credible evaluation documented through log analysis, and (2) develop a set of guiding principles for log analysis. We illustrate these principles on tau-Bench Airline, revealing that pass^5 performance was under-elicited by nearly 50% and surfacing deployment failure modes invisible to outcome metrics. We conclude with pragmatic recommendations to increase uptake of log analysis, directed at diverse stakeholders including benchmark creators, model developers, independent evaluators, and deployers.
Authors: Xiao Xiao, Hayoun Noh, Mar Gonzalez-Franco
Abstract: Conversational AI is increasingly personalized around users' preferences, histories, goals, and knowledge, but much less around how users interpret and take up model outputs to construct and understand their reality. We draw on Robert Kegan's constructive-developmental theory as a complementary lens on this dimension. Existing methods for assessing developmental stage in the Keganian tradition rely either on expert interviews that do not scale or on sentence-completion instruments that are proprietary, lengthy, or invasive. To make this perspective tractable for LLM evaluation, we introduce the Developmental Sentence Completion Test (DSCT), a 20-item instrument designed to elicit developmental signal in self-administered text. Throughout, we treat the resulting labels as characterizations of stage-like structure in elicited responses, not as validated person-level developmental stage. We then ask how much of that signal can be recovered by LLMs across three elicited response regimes: simulated personas, real human respondents, and default model-generated answers. On simulated personas, top frontier models recover simulator-intended labels with high accuracy. On real human DSCT responses, human-LLM agreement is fair, with much stronger within-neighborhood than exact agreement. Finally, when LLMs answer DSCT prompts without persona-conditioning, their responses exhibit stable stage-like differences across model families, with larger and newer models tending to generate higher-rated text. These results suggest that stage-conditioned signal is cleaner in synthetic responses than in human-written DSCT text, and that the core constraint for stage-aware conversational AI is not classifier accuracy alone, but the availability of developmental signal from elicited text.
Authors: Zhanfu Yang
Abstract: When an LLM agent fails a multi-step tool-augmented task and retries, the failed attempt typically remains in its context window -- contaminating the next attempt and elevating the per-step error rate beyond the base level. This context-contaminated restart phenomenon is widely observed in practice yet entirely lacks formal treatment. We introduce the Context-Contaminated Restart Model (CCRM): a chain of T tool-call steps, each failing with base rate epsilon_0; after any failed attempt, the subsequent attempt operates in contaminated context with elevated error rate epsilon_1 > epsilon_0. Under this model we derive five main results. (R1) An exact closed-form formula for P(succeed in at most K attempts). (R2) A cascade-overhead theorem giving the additional attempts Delta K incurred by contamination versus the clean-restart baseline. (R3) An optimal budget-allocation theorem identifying the pipeline depth T* that maximises success probability for a fixed total budget B=KT; we prove the closed form T* = sqrt(B * log(1/(1-epsilon_1)) / log(1/(1-epsilon_0))), with K*=B/T*. (R4) An information-theoretic lower bound via Le Cam's method showing K_CCRM is tight up to O(1). (R5) A clean-restart dominance theorem quantifying the exact benefit of context-clearing before retry. We validate CCRM on real SWE-bench Verified data: the IID model overestimates pass@3 by 17.4 percentage points (98.6% vs. 81.2%), while CCRM fits with error less than 0.001, implying a cascade ratio of epsilon_1/epsilon_0 = 7.1. Monte Carlo experiments confirm all theoretical predictions.
Authors: Jake Lance, Larry Kieu
Abstract: The feedback alignment (FA) algorithm offers a biologically plausible alternative to backpropagation (BP) for training neural networks yet notably fails to scale to convolutional architectures. Modifications have been proposed to address this limitation, but at questionable cost to biological plausibility. In this paper, we evaluate five learning algorithms including modified FA and standard BP, applied to the same convolutional architecture with the CIFAR-10 dataset. We provide a tripartite comparative analysis focusing on biological plausibility, interpretability, and computational complexity. Our results indicate that modified FA algorithms converge on internal representations that are structurally similar to those produced by backpropagation. In particular, it appears the functional success of modified FA algorithms may be rooted in their ability to mimic the representational geometry of backpropagation, converging on similar representations despite relying on fundamentally different weight update mechanisms.
Authors: Zhengqing Hu, Dong Chen, Junkun Yuan, Liang Liu, Hua Wang, Zhao Jin, Yingchaojie Feng, Wei Chen, Mingliang Xu
Abstract: Traditional simulation methods reproduce occurred emergency instances through presetting to assist people in risk assessment and emergency decision-making. However, due to the lack of randomness and diversity, existing simulation systems struggle to fully explore the potential risk as emergency instances are scarce. In contrast, Large Models (LMs) can dynamically adjust generation strategies to introduce controllable randomness, while also possessing extensive prior knowledge and cross-domain knowledge transfer capabilities. Inspired by it, we propose the LMs-driven World Line Divergence System (WLDS), which enables diversified visualization and deduction of emergency instances in different domains. WLDS leverages LMs to deduce emergency instances in various development directions, and introduces the factual calibration and logical calibration mechanism to ensure factual accuracy and logical rigor during the deduction process. The interactive module can independently select deduction directions to avoid potential hallucinations that are difficult for the system to identify. Furthermore, by introducing the visualization module, WLDS forms simulation and deduction that combine text and images, which enhances interpretability. Extensive experiments conducted on the proposed Emergency Instances Deduction (EID) benchmark dataset demonstrate that WLDS achieves high-precision and high-fidelity simulation and deduction of emergency instances in multiple specific domains. Relevant experiments further demonstrate that WLDS can generate more emergency instances deduction data for users and provide support for better decision-making in similar emergency instances in the future.
Authors: Jared Glover
Abstract: Current language model memory systems store what happened but not how it felt. This distinction -- between semantic memory (knowing about a past event) and episodic memory (re-experiencing it) -- was identified by Tulving as the difference between noetic and autonoetic consciousness. Damasio demonstrated that humans with intact knowledge but absent emotional markers exhibit impaired decision-making. We bridge this gap for language models. Using Gemma 3 1B-IT with pretrained Gemma Scope 2 sparse autoencoders, we identify 310 emotion-exclusive features at layer 22 with psychologically valid geometry. We construct distinctive-feature emotion vectors during experience and partially re-inject them during recall, triggered by context similarity at layer 7. We test four conditions paralleling Damasio's framework: A (no memory), B (semantic labels), C (emotion echo), and BC (semantic + echo). For emotional orientation, the echo alone steepens the threat-safety gradient: the regression slope of threat rating on contextual similarity is 0.80 for C vs 0.56 for A ($p$=0.011, permutation test). For decisions, the echo amplifies knowledge into action: BC=80% good choices vs B=52% ($z$=+2.60, $p$<0.01), while the echo alone has no effect (C=22%, n.s.). The echo changes how the model feels independently, but changes what it does only when combined with knowledge -- replicating Damasio's core finding. The echo amplifies knowledge. It does not replace it.
Authors: Yong Xiao, Jingxuan Chai, Guangming Shi, Ping Zhang
Abstract: The evolution of 6G networking toward agentic AI networking (AgentNet) systems requires a shift from traditional data pipelines to task-aware, agentic AI-native communication solutions. Emergent communication, a novel communication paradigm in which autonomous agents learn their own signaling protocols through interaction, is increasingly viewed as a promising solution to address the challenges posed by existing rigid, predefined protocol-based networking architecture. However, most existing emergent communication frameworks fail to account for physical networking constraints, such as bandwidth and computational complexity, and often lack a rigorous information-theoretical foundation. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a novel emergent communication framework that facilitates collaborative task-solving among heterogeneous agents through an information-theoretic lens. We propose a novel joint loss function that unifies the optimization of decision-making functions and the learning of communication signaling. Our proposed solution is grounded on the multi-agent and multi-task distributed information bottleneck (DIB) theory, which allows the quantification of the fundamental trade-off between task-relevant information representation and computational complexity. We further provide theoretical generalization bounds of the emergent communication protocol during decentralized inference across unseen environmental states. Experimental validation on a real-world hardware prototype confirms that our proposed framework significantly improves generalization performance, compared to the state-of-the-art solutions.
Authors: Devin Yasith De Silva, Dhaval Patel, Christodoulos Constantinides, Shuxin Lin, Nianjun Zhou, Paul J Adams, Sal Rosato, Nicolas Constantinides, Deborah L. McGuinness, Jayant Kalagnanam
Abstract: Monitoring complex industrial assets relies on engineer-authored symbolic rules that trigger based on sensor conditions and prompt technicians to perform corrective actions. The bottleneck is not detection but response: translating rules into maintenance steps requires asset-specific knowledge gained through years of practice. We investigate whether LLMs can serve as decision support for this rule-to-action step and introduce \ours{}, a benchmark of 6{,}690 expert-validated multiple-choice questions from 118 rule-action pairs across 16 asset types. We contribute (i) a symbolic-to-MCQA pipeline normalizing rules to Disjunctive Normal Form with embedding-based distractor sampling, (ii) five variants probing distinct failure modes (Pro, Pert, Verbose, Aug, Rationale), and (iii) a benchmark of 29 LLMs and 4 embedding baselines. A human evaluation (9 practitioners, mean 45.0\%) confirms \ours{} requires specialist knowledge beyond operational experience. Three findings stand out. The frontier has closed: the top three LLMs lie within one Macro point, with Bradley-Terry Elo placing claude-opus-4-6 30 points above the next model. Yet \ours{}\,Pro exposes brittleness, with every model losing 13--60\% relative accuracy under distractor expansion. \ours{}\,Aug exposes pattern-matching: under condition inversion, frontier models still select the original answer 49--63\% of the time. The deployment bottleneck is not capability but calibration: frontier models handle template-style fault detection but break under structural perturbation.
Authors: Khoa Tran, T. Nguyen-Thoi, Vin Nguyen-Thai, Duong Tran Anh, Hung-Cuong Trinh, Tri Le
Abstract: Accurate state-of-charge (SOC) estimation is critical for the safe and efficient operation of lithium-ion batteries in battery management systems (BMS). Although data-driven approaches can effectively capture nonlinear battery dynamics, many existing methods rely on long historical input sequences, resulting in high computational cost and introducing padding-induced positional bias at the beginning of drive cycles. To address these limitations, we propose C2L-Net, a novel context-to-latest data-driven framework for realistic online SOC estimation using only a short historical window (20 s). Unlike existing short-receptive-field or long-history models, the proposed framework explicitly separates contextual encoding from latest-measurement updating, enabling both efficient temporal modeling and rapid adaptation to dynamic battery states. The proposed model incorporates a chunk-based feature extraction mechanism that combines Theta Attention Pooling with a Fourier-based Seasonality Basis to capture local temporal patterns while reducing sequence length. A causal context encoder, integrating a gated recurrent unit (GRU) with Causal Cosine Attention, models temporal dependencies without information leakage. Furthermore, a latest-measurement decoder, inspired by recursive filtering, updates the contextual state using the most recent measurement, enhancing responsiveness to dynamic operating conditions. Extensive experiments on a public lithium-ion battery drive-cycle dataset under multiple fixed-temperature conditions demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art or competitive accuracy while significantly improving computational efficiency. In particular, C2L-Net achieves up to 60 times faster inference and requires fewer parameters than recent data-driven baselines, while maintaining robust performance across unseen driving profiles.
Authors: Yixuan Li, Mingshu Cai, Ziyang Xiao, Wanyuan Wang, Yanchen Deng, Bo An
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) powered AI agents have emerged as a promising paradigm for autonomous problem-solving, yet they continue to struggle with complex, multi-step real-world tasks that demand domain-specific procedural knowledge. Reusable agent skills, which encapsulate successful problem-solving strategies, offer a natural remedy by enabling agents to build on prior experience. However, curating such skills has largely remained a manual endeavor, requiring human experts to distill rich domain knowledge into actionable guidelines. In this work, we present $\textbf{M}$ulti-agent $\textbf{IN}$duction and $\textbf{D}$eduction for $\textbf{Skill}$s ($\textbf{MIND-Skill}$), a framework that automatically induces generalizable skills from successful trajectories with robust quality guarantees. MIND-Skill consists of an induction agent which is tasked to abstract reusable skills from successful trajectories, and a deduction agent which aims to reconstruct trajectories by following the induced skills. To guarantee the quality of the generated skills, we introduce a reconstruction loss that compares input and reconstructed trajectories, an outcome loss that enforces the correctness of the reconstructed trajectories, and a rubric loss that assesses the documentation quality and regularizes the abstraction level of the generated skills according to predefined criteria. These textual losses are jointly optimized with TextGrad, and the resulting skills are evaluated on held-out tasks unseen during optimization. Experiments on AppWorld and BFCL-v3 show that MIND-Skill consistently outperforms concurrent skill generation methods.
Authors: Wenzhi Fang, Liangqi Yuan, Guangchen Lan, Dong-Jun Han, Christopher G. Brinton
Abstract: Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems often rely on a controller to coordinate a pool of heterogeneous models, yet existing controllers are typically limited to one-shot routing: they select a model once and return its output directly. Such routing-only designs provide no mechanism to critique intermediate drafts or support iterative refinement. To address this limitation, we propose a critique-and-routing controller that casts multi-agent coordination as a sequential decision problem. At each turn, the controller evaluates the current draft, decides whether to stop or continue, and, if needed, selects the next agent for further refinement. We formulate this process as a finite-horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP) with explicit agent-utilization constraints, design a composite reward for controller decisions across turns, and optimize the controller via policy gradients under a Lagrangian-relaxed objective. Extensive experiments across multiple heterogeneous multi-agent systems and seven reasoning benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and substantially narrows the gap to the strongest agent, while using it for fewer than 25% of total calls.
Authors: Leopoldo Bertossi
Abstract: We establish, from the point of view of Explainable AI (XAI), connections between Consistency-Based Diagnosis (CBD), on one side, and Actual Causality and Causal Responsibility, on the other. CBD has received little attention from the XAI community. Connections between these two areas could have a fruitful impact on XAI and Explainable Data Management.
Authors: Min Yang, Jinghua Piao, Xu Xia, Xiaochong Lan, Jiaju Chen, Yongshun Gong, Yong Li
Abstract: Skills provide an effective mechanism for improving LLM agents on complex tasks, yet in existing agent frameworks, their creation, refinement, and selection are typically governed by external teachers, hand-designed rules, or auxiliary modules. As a result, skills remain external resources to be invoked, rather than capabilities that agents can develop, adapt, and internalize through experience. To endow LLM agents with autonomous skill mastery, we propose SkillMaster, a training framework that teaches agents to create new skills, refine existing skills, and select accumulated skills during task solving. This capability is achieved through three key designs. First, we train agents through trajectory-informed skill review, teaching agents to propose, update, or retain skills based on evidence from completed episodes. Second, each candidate skill edit is designed to be evaluated by its counterfactual utility on related probe tasks, providing a direct learning signal for training skill-editing decisions. Third, we introduce DualAdv-GRPO, which separately estimates advantages for task-solving actions and skill-editing decisions, stabilizing joint training across task solving and skill management. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop show that SkillMaster improves the overall success rate over state-of-the-art baselines by 8.8% and 9.3%, respectively, achieving the best performance among all compared methods. Further analysis reveals a marked shift in agent capability: agents trained with SkillMaster can identify skill failures, refine procedural knowledge from trajectory evidence, and transfer improvements to future tasks with limited skill-bank edits. Overall, SkillMaster moves LLM agents beyond mere skill use toward self-improving agents capable of developing, adapting, and applying their own skill repertoires.
Authors: Yuhao Jia, Duantengchuan Li, Jinsong Chen, Zhongjie Mao, Mingwen Tong, Yue Li, Xiaoguang Wang
Abstract: The emerging collaborative information-based knowledge tracing (KT) has been a promising way to enhance modeling of learners' knowledge states. The core idea is to extract the collaborative information from interaction sequences of other learners to assist the prediction on the target one. Despite effectiveness, existing methods are built on the raw interaction sequences with tailored modules, which inevitably limits their capacity in deeply capturing learning behavioral patterns and generalization. To this end, we propose a general meta-behavioral pattern-aware framework (MBP-KT) for KT. Specifically, MBP-KT introduces a novel meta-behavioral sequence construction to transform the raw interaction sequences into the combinations of different meta-behavioral patterns. In this way, the learning behavioral patterns of learners can be effectively preserved. Then, MBP-KT develops a parameter-free module to extract the global collaborative representations from the constructed meta-behavioral sequences. Moreover, MBP-KT provides general injection strategies to introduce the extracted global collaborative information into various downstream KT models, ensuring the universality of the collaborative information. Extensive results on real-world datasets demonstrate that MBP-KT can consistently boosts the performance of a wide range of KT models.
Authors: Yuxuan Zhang, Penghui Du, Bo Li, Cong Wei, Junwen Miao, Huaisong Zhang, Songcheng Cai, Yubo Wang, Dongfu Jiang, Yuyu Zhang, Ping Nie, Wenhu Chen, Changqian Yu, Kelsey R. Allen
Abstract: Evaluating instruction-guided image edits requires rewards that reflect subtle human preferences, yet current reward models typically depend on large-scale preference annotation and additional model training. This creates a data-efficiency gap: humans can often infer the target evaluation criteria from only a few examples, while models are usually trained on hundreds of thousands of comparisons. We present RewardHarness, a self-evolving agentic reward framework that reframes reward modeling as context evolution rather than weight optimization. Instead of learning from large-scale annotations, RewardHarness aligns with human preferences by iteratively evolving a library of tools and skills from as few as 100 preference demonstrations. Given a source image, candidate edited images, and an editing instruction, an Orchestrator selects the most relevant subset of tools and skills from the maintained library, and a frozen Sub-Agent uses them to construct a reasoning chain that produces a preference judgment. By comparing predicted judgments with ground-truth preferences and analyzing successes and failures in the reasoning process, the Orchestrator automatically refines its library of tools and skills without additional human annotation. Using only 0.05% of the EditReward preference data, RewardHarness achieves 47.4% average accuracy on image-editing evaluation benchmarks, surpassing GPT-5 by 5.3 points. When used as a reward signal for GRPO fine-tuning, RL-tuned models achieve 3.52 on ImgEdit-Bench. Project page: https://rewardharness.com.
Authors: Hyunmin Hwang, Jaemin Kim, Choonghan Kim, Hangeol Chang, Jong Chul Ye
Abstract: Multi-agent reasoning has shown promise for improving the problem-solving ability of large language models by allowing multiple agents to explore diverse reasoning paths. However, most existing multi-agent methods rely on inference-time debate or aggregation, which can be vulnerable to incorrect peer influence and biased consensus. Moreover, the agents themselves remain static, as their underlying reasoning skills do not evolve across tasks. In this paper, we introduce AgentPSO, a particle-swarm-inspired framework for evolving multi-agent reasoning skills. AgentPSO treats each agent as a particle-like reasoner whose state is a natural-language skill and whose velocity is a semantic update direction, iteratively moving agents toward stronger skill states to improve both individual and collective reasoning performance. Across training iterations, each agent updates its skill by combining its previous velocity, personal-best skill, global-best skill, and a self-reflective direction derived from peer reasoning trajectories. This enables agents to learn reusable reasoning behaviors from both their own experiences and the strongest skills discovered by the population, without updating the parameters of the backbone language model. Experiments on mathematical and general reasoning benchmarks show that AgentPSO improves over static single-agent skills and test-time-only multi-agent reasoning baselines. The evolved skills further transfer across benchmarks and to another backbone model, suggesting that AgentPSO captures reusable reasoning procedures rather than merely optimizing benchmark-specific prompts. Code is open-sourced at https://github.com/HYUNMIN-HWANG/AgentPSO/.
Authors: Dongxin Guo, Jikun Wu, Siu-Ming Yiu
Abstract: Human-AI teams fail to outperform their best member in 70% of studies, yet no theory specifies when complementarity is achievable. We derive tight bounds for the broad class of confidence-based aggregation rules by integrating signal detection theory with information-theoretic analysis, yielding four results: (1) a complementarity theorem (teams outperform individuals iff error correlation $\rho_{HM} < \rho^*$, with $\rho^* \approx a$ in the symmetric near-chance regime); (2) minimax bounds showing gains scale as $\Theta(\sqrt{\Delta d})$ with metacognitive sensitivity difference; (3) an impossibility result proving no confidence-based aggregation rule achieves complementarity when $\rho_{HM} \geq \rho^*$; and (4) multi-class generalization $\rho^*_K \approx \rho^*/\sqrt{K-1}$. Predictions match observed team accuracy ($R = 0.94$ on ImageNet-16H, $R = 0.91$ on CIFAR-10H) and the multi-class threshold scaling holds on human data ($R = 0.93$, $K = 16$), with robustness under non-Gaussian distributions. The framework explains why complementarity is rare and provides actionable design formulas; results apply to aggregation, not to interactive deliberation that generates novel answers.
Authors: Jikun Wu, Dongxin Guo, Siu-Ming Yiu
Abstract: Are certain cognitive biases mathematically inevitable consequences of sequential information processing? We prove that primacy effects, anchoring, and order-dependence are architecturally necessary in autoregressive language models due to causal masking constraints. Our three impossibility theorems establish: (1) primacy bias arises from asymmetric attention accumulation; (2) anchoring emerges from sequential conditioning with provable information bounds; and (3) exact debiasing by permutation marginalization requires factorial-time computation, with Monte Carlo approximation feasible at constant per-tolerance overhead. We validate these bounds across 12 frontier LLMs ($R^2 = 0.89$; $\Delta$BIC $= 16.6$ vs. next-best alternative). We then derive quantitative predictions from the framework and test them in two pre-registered human experiments ($N = 464$ analyzed). Study 1 confirms anchor position modulates anchoring magnitude ($d = 0.52$, BF$_{10} = 847$). Study 2 shows working memory load amplifies primacy bias ($d = 0.41$, BF$_{10} = 156$), with WM capacity predicting bias reduction ($r = -.38$). These convergent findings reframe cognitive biases as resource-rational responses to sequential processing.
Authors: Ying Chen, Rui Jiang, Lihuang Fang, Mingxu Wang, Zhifeng Gu, Lei Yi, Jie Chen
Abstract: Standard embodied evaluations do not independently score whether an agent correctly commits to task completion at episode closure, a capacity we call terminal commitment. Behaviorally distinct failures--never completing the task, completing it but failing to stop, and reporting success without sufficient evidence--collapse into the same benchmark failure. We introduce VIGIL, an evaluation framework that makes terminal commitment independently measurable. Under VIGIL's default protocol, agents observe only egocentric RGB, receive no action-success signals, and must end each episode with a semantic report checked deterministically against hidden world state. This yields two separate scores: world-state completion (W) and benchmark success (B), where B additionally requires a correct terminal report. This decoupling makes four outcome categories distinguishable: missed execution, post-attainment drift, unsupported commitment, and verified success. Across 20 models on 1,000 frozen episodes, systems with comparable W differ by up to 19.7 pp in B: one model converts achieved states into correct reports, while another with near-identical execution drifts past the goal without closing. An action-feedback intervention further tests the separation: execution-oriented signals improve W broadly, yet commitment failures persist in models that do not already ground terminal reports in the achieved state. VIGIL provides a protocol that makes terminal commitment independently visible and scorable.
Authors: Shizhong Zhou, Haifeng Liu, Zheng Zhang, Shiyu Zhang, Bo Yang, Yi Lin
Abstract: Taxiway routing and on-surface conflict avoidance are coupled safety-critical decision problems in airport surface operations. Existing planning and optimization methods are often limited by online computational cost, while reinforcement learning methods may struggle to represent downstream traffic conflicts and balance multiple objectives. This paper presents Conflict-aware Taxiway Routing (CaTR), a reinforcement learning framework for real-time multi-aircraft taxiway routing. CaTR constructs a grid-based airport surface environment with action masking, introduces a hierarchical foresight traffic representation to encode current and downstream conflict-related traffic conditions, and adopts a value-decomposed reinforcement learning strategy to prioritize sparse but safety-critical objectives. Experiments are conducted on a realistic environment based on Changsha Huanghua International Airport under multiple traffic density levels. Results show that CaTR achieves better safety--efficiency trade-offs than representative planning, optimization, and reinforcement learning baselines while maintaining practical runtime.
Authors: Haoze Lv, Ning Lu, Ziang Zhou, Shengcai Liu
Abstract: Automatic heuristic design (AHD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for solving NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems (COPs). Recent works show that large language models (LLMs), when integrated into well-designed frameworks (i.e., LLM-AHD), can autonomously discover high-performing heuristics. However, existing LLM-AHD frameworks typically treat LLMs as passive generators within fixed workflows, where the model generates heuristics from manually designed, limited context. Such context may fail to capture state-dependent information (e.g., specific failure modes), leading to inefficient trial-and-error exploration. To overcome these limitations, we propose AHD Agent, a novel tool-integrated, multi-turn framework that empowers LLMs to proactively decide whether to generate heuristics or invoke tools to retrieve targeted evidence from the solving environment. To effectively train such a dynamic decision-making agent, we introduce an agentic reinforcement learning (RL) system, which leverages a novel environment synthesis pipeline to optimize a compact model's generalizable AHD capabilities. Experiments across eight diverse domains, including four held-out tasks, demonstrate that our 4B-parameter agent matches or surpasses state-of-the-art baselines using much larger models, while requiring significantly fewer evaluations. Model and inference scaling analysis further reveals that AHD Agent offers an effective trajectory toward truly autonomous heuristic design.
Authors: Jiahao Chen, Letian Gao, Yanhao Zhu, Wenbiao Zhou, Bing Su, Zhi John Lu, Bo Huang
Abstract: Recent advances in generative modeling have enabled significant progress in structure-based drug design (SBDD). Existing methods typically condition molecule generation on empty binding pockets from holo complexes, overlooking informative components such as the filler (ligands and solvent). Here, we leverage low-resolution electron density (ED) derived from the filler as a physically grounded condition for \textit{de novo} drug design. We consider two types of ED, calculated and cryo-EM/X-ray, obtainable from computational or experimental sources, supporting unified pre-training and experimental integration. Compared with rigid pocket representations, experimental ED naturally captures conformational flexibility and provides a more faithful description of the binding environment. Based on this, we introduce EDMolGPT, a decoder-only autoregressive framework that generates molecules from low-resolution ED point clouds. By grounding generation in physically meaningful density signals, EDMolGPT mitigates structural bias and produces molecules with 3D conformations. Evaluations on 101 biological targets verify the effectiveness. Our project page: https://jiahaochen1.github.io/EDMolGPT_Page/.
Authors: Chengdong Xu, Kaiqiang Ke, Ziheng Liu, Jiaqi Wei, Zibo Shao, Weile Guo, Chao Yu
Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems have shown strong potential on complex tasks through agent specialization, tool use, and collaborative reasoning. However, most automated multi-agent system design methods still follow a one-shot paradigm: a workflow is optimized or selected before execution and then reused unchanged throughout the task. This static coordination strategy is ill-suited for long-horizon tasks whose subgoals, intermediate evidence, and information needs evolve over multiple execution stages. We propose EvoMAS, a framework for execution-time multi-agent workflow construction. EvoMAS formulates workflow construction as a meta-level sequential decision problem along a single task trajectory. At each stage, it constructs an explicit task state through a Planner-Evaluator-Updater pipeline and uses a learned Workflow Adapter to instantiate a stage-specific layered workflow from a fixed pool of candidate agents. The adapter is trained with policy gradients using sparse, verifiable terminal task success as the main supervision signal, while evaluator-based process reward is analyzed separately under very-hard sparse-reward settings. Experiments on GAIA, HLE, and DeepResearcher show that EvoMAS outperforms single-agent baselines and recent automated multi-agent workflow design methods. Our analyses further show that explicit task-state construction and learned workflow adaptation provide complementary benefits. Additional results indicate that process reward is most useful when terminal success is extremely sparse, and qualitative case studies illustrate that EvoMAS adapts agent coordination as the task state evolves.
Authors: Han Yang, Mingyan Wu, Bailan He, Zeyu Cao, Sikuan Yan, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Zifeng Ding
Abstract: Reasoning-centric large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance by generating intermediate reasoning trajectories, but often incur excessive token usage and high inference-time decoding cost. We observe that, when solving the same problems, larger reasoning models can often produce more concise traces, whereas smaller reasoning models tend to generate longer and more redundant trajectories. This is especially problematic in real-world deployment, where memory, latency, and serving-cost constraints often favor smaller models. Our observations suggest that reasoning compression can be transferred from large models to small ones rather than enforced through explicit length constraints. Based on this insight, we propose Mixed-Policy Distillation (MPD), a reasoning compression framework that transfers concise reasoning behavior from a larger-sized teacher to a smaller student by distilling teacher-compressed student trajectories. Unlike on-policy distillation, which aligns the student with teacher distributions over verbose student trajectories, or off-policy distillation, which relies on teacher-generated trajectories and may suffer from distribution mismatch, MPD combines the strengths of both. Given a student-sampled trajectory, the teacher rewrites it into a more concise reasoning trace, and the student is trained via KL-based alignment on the compressed trajectory. This preserves student-policy exploration while injecting teacher-guided compression. Experiments on Qwen3-1.7B show that MPD reduces token usage by up to 27.1% while improving performance across multiple reasoning benchmarks, demonstrating an effective approach to efficient small-model reasoning.
Authors: Zhida He, Xiaoyu Wen, Han Qi, Ziyuan Zhou, Peng Yu, Xingcheng Xu, Dongrui Liu, Xia Hu, Chaochao Lu, Qiaosheng Zhang
Abstract: Deploying LLMs in multi-turn dialogues facilitates jailbreak attacks that distribute harmful intent across seemingly benign turns. Recent training-based multi-turn jailbreak methods learn long-horizon attack strategies from interaction feedback, but often rely on coarse trajectory-level outcome signals that broadcast uniformly to every turn. However, we find that turn-level contributions in multi-turn jailbreaking are non-uniform, phase-dependent, and target-specific. Such coarse outcome supervision induces a credit assignment problem, leading to over-rewarding redundant turns in successful trajectories and under-crediting useful intermediate turns in failed ones. To address this, we propose TRACE, a turn-aware credit assignment framework for reinforcement learning (RL)-based multi-turn jailbreaking. For successful trajectories, TRACE estimates turn-level contributions via leave-one-turn-out semantic masking; for failed ones, TRACE assigns penalties based on prompt harmfulness and semantic relevance, with an additional local refusal-aware penalty. Furthermore, we reuse the attack-side credit signal for multi-turn defense alignment. Extensive experiments on open-source and closed-source targets show that TRACE achieves strong overall performance in effectiveness, transferability, and efficiency, yielding about a 25% relative improvement in attack success rate over the strongest RL baseline while also improving the safety-utility balance when reused for defense alignment.
Authors: Filippo Ziliotto, Ciro Beneduce, Bruno Lepri, Luciano Serafini, Massimiliano Luca, Tommaso Campari
Abstract: In the animal kingdom, mirror self-recognition is a canonical probe of higher-order cognition, emerging only in some species. We ask whether an analogous functional capability emerges in embodied vision-language model (VLM) agents: can they recognize themselves in a mirror? We introduce a controlled 3D benchmark where a first-person VLM agent must infer a hidden body attribute from its reflection and select the matching target, while avoiding self-other misattribution. To separate mirror-grounded self-identification from shortcuts, we test mirror removal, misleading cues, and occluded reflections. We also evaluate the decision process through mirror seeking, temporal ordering, self-attribution, and reasoning-action consistency. Our experiments show that mirror-based self-identification emerges mainly in stronger VLMs. These models can use reflected evidence for action, whereas weaker models often inspect the mirror but fail to extract self-relevant information or misattribute their reflection. Language-vision conflict further shows that self-referential language alone is not evidence of grounded self-identification. Overall, mirror-based evaluation provides a diagnostic for whether embodied self-grounding is causally rooted in perception and action rather than priors, prompt compliance, or confabulation.
Authors: Yifan Xu, Junren Chen, Yifan Chen
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) recently thrives in large language model (LLM) reasoning tasks. However, the reward sparsity and the long reasoning horizon make effective exploration challenging. In practice, this challenge manifests as the \emph{entropy collapse} phenomenon, where RLVR improves single-rollout accuracy but fails to expand coverage on successful reasoning trajectories. Passive exploration techniques like entropy regularization tend to dismiss generation quality, resulting in noisy rollouts. In response to this issue, we propose an Information-Maximizing Augmented eXploration (IMAX) framework to train a pool of soft prefixes that reshapes the base model's prior over reasoning trajectories. Rather than relying on RL to incentivize exploration on top of the base model, each prefix acts as a trainable control knob that induces a distinct rollout distribution from the same backbone model. To encourage discovery of diverse and task-relevant reasoning behaviors, we derive an Information Maximization (InfoMax) reward to complement the verifiable rewards for RL training. IMAX is in general algorithm-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into existing RLVR pipelines. Experiment results have shown that across three backbone scales, IMAX consistently improves reasoning performance over standard RLVR, with gains up to 11.60\% in Pass@4 and 10.57\% in Avg@4.
Authors: Srimonti Dutta, Ratna Kandala
Abstract: The safety of mental health AI is often judged at the wrong temporal scale. Current evaluations typically score isolated responses, endpoint outcomes, or aggregate dialogue quality, while clinically consequential failures may arise from the order and accumulation of interactions themselves, including delayed escalation, repeated reinforcement, dependency formation, failed repair, and gradual deterioration across turns. This paper argues that this mismatch is not merely a limitation of evaluation coverage but a source of invalid safety conclusions. We introduce Temporal Safety Non-Identifiability, a formal account of why safety properties that depend on sequence, timing, accumulation, or recovery cannot be certified by protocols that discard those features. From this formalization, we develop SCOPE (Safety Claims Over Preserved Evidence) as a general principle for aligning safety claims with the evidence an evaluation actually retains, and instantiate it as SCOPE-MH, a mental-health instantiation of this reporting standard. We operationalize SCOPE-MH through a proof-of-concept on the AnnoMI dataset of expert-annotated motivational interviewing conversations, which reveals mechanisms of failure that per-turn behavior scoring does not represent. We propose SCOPE-MH as a diagnostic complement to existing evaluation infrastructure and argue that evaluation preserving temporal evidence is necessary, not optional, for safety-critical mental health AI deployment.
Authors: Strick Sheng, Ziyue Wang, Liyi Zhou
Abstract: Large language model agents increasingly operate through environment-facing scaffolds that expose files, web pages, APIs, and logs. These observations influence tool use, state tracking, and action sequencing, yet their reliability and authority are often uncertain. Environmental grounding is therefore a systems-level problem involving context admission, evidence provenance, freshness checking, verification policy, action gating, and model reasoning. Existing agent benchmarks mainly evaluate task capability or specific attacks such as prompt injection and memory poisoning, but they under-specify a fundamental reliability question: whether agents remain grounded in the true environment state when observations are stale, incorrect, or malicious. We introduce EnvTrustBench, an agentic framework for benchmarking this failure mode. We define an evidence-grounding defect (EGD) as a behavioral failure in which an agent treats an environment-facing claim as sufficient evidence for action without resolving it against available current evidence, leading to a task-incorrect false path under the true environment state. Given a task scenario, EnvTrustBench generates the workspace, environment, agent-facing objective, and validation oracle, executes the evaluated agent, records its action-observation trajectory and final state, and applies the oracle to produce a verdict. Using 6 LLM backbones and 5 widely used scaffolds, we evaluate 55 generated cases across 11 task scenarios, with each scenario expanded through five feedback-guided generation iterations. Results show that EGDs consistently emerge across operational workflows, highlighting environmental grounding as a core agent reliability problem with important security implications.
Authors: Mengqi Li, Wensheng Lin, Jinshuai Yang, Lixin Li
Abstract: Effective sequence modeling fundamentally requires balancing the retention of unbounded history with the high-resolution detection of abrupt short-term variations common in real-world phenomena. However, existing state space models (SSMs) relying on high-order polynomial projection operators (HiPPO) face a critical trade-off where uniform measures dilute recent information to maintain timescale invariance, while exponential measures sacrifice global context to capture local dynamics. This paper proposes a Fractional Recurrent Architecture for Computational Temporal Analysis of Long sequences (FRACTAL), a novel architecture integrating fractional measure theory into recursive memory updates to address this limitation. By deriving projection operators with analytically characterized spectral properties and a tunable singularity index, the proposed method amplifies sensitivity to recent signal perturbations while preserving the spectral structure that encodes scale-invariant memory dynamics. This theoretical innovation is instantiated within a simplified diagonalized state space framework by modulating input projection initialization to enable simultaneous capture of multi-scale temporal features. FRACTAL achieves an average score of 87.11\% on the Long Range Arena benchmark, including 61.85\% on the ListOps task, outperforming the S5 model.
Authors: Ziqi Zhou, Peng Yang, Yuxin Liang, Mingliu Liu, Jia Lu
Abstract: The expansion of Artificial Intelligence-generated content service requires diffusion model serving to simultaneously achieve high throughput and low task end-to-end (E2E) latency. However, existing continuous batching methods suffer from severe resource contention during UNet-VAE concurrency, leading to latency spikes. Furthermore, concurrent multi-task scheduling entails a trade-off between UNet throughput and VAE latency across varying scheduling strategies. To address these, we propose SynerDiff, an efficient continuous batching system built on intra-inter level synergy. At the intra-concurrency level, SynerDiff alleviates resource contention by pruning component-specific resource bottlenecks via VAE Chunking and Adaptive Skip-CFG. At the inter-concurrency level, leveraging components' differential sensitivity to scheduling granularities, a threshold-aware scheduler plans concurrent sequences and tunes intra-concurrency decisions to minimize VAE latency while maintaining UNet within high-throughput threshold. Additionally, a feedback controller dynamically adjusts this threshold based on queue loads to boost system capacity ceiling. Experimental results show that, SynerDiff improves throughput by 1.6$\times$ and decreases both average E2E and P99 tail latencies by up to 78.7\%, compared to benchmarks while guaranteeing high image fidelity.
Authors: Yuan Mei, Xingyu Song, Xiaowen Song, Naoya Takeishi
Abstract: Neural surrogate models for physical simulations are trained on discretized samples of continuous domains, where the induced empirical measure leads to uneven supervision, biasing optimization and causing spatial inconsistencies in physical fidelity. To mitigate this measure-induced bias, we propose M$^3$ (Multi-scale Morton Measure), a scalable framework that balances training measures by partitioning space according to physical variation and allocating supervision across multiple scales. Applied to three industrial-scale datasets with diverse discretizations, M$^3$ consistently improves predictions in the continuous physical domain, achieving up to 4.7$\times$ lower error in large-scale volumetric cases. These gains persist under aggressive subsampling (160M $\rightarrow$ 16M $\rightarrow$ 1.6M points), where M$^3$-trained models outperform those trained on higher-resolution data, reducing physics-weighted relative $L_2$ error by 3--4$\times$ and the corresponding MSE by up to 13$\times$. These results highlight data distribution as a key factor in operator learning and position M$^3$ as a scalable, data-efficient approach for physically consistent modeling.
Authors: Feng Xiong, Zengbin Wang, Yong Wang, Xuecai Hu, Jinghan He, Liang Lin, Yuan Liu, Xiangxiang Chu
Abstract: Self-evolving agents present a promising path toward continual adaptation by distilling task interactions into reusable knowledge artifacts. In practice, this paradigm remains hindered by two coupled bottlenecks: data inefficiency, where costly rollout effort is disproportionately spent on low-value samples rather than informative ones, and knowledge interference, where heterogeneous knowledge stored in shared repositories leads to noisy retrieval and task-misaligned guidance. Together, these issues form a self-reinforcing failure loop in which uninformative rollouts yield noisy knowledge, which in turn degrades subsequent rollouts. In this work, we introduce Ace-Skill, a co-evolutionary framework that jointly optimizes rollout allocation and knowledge organization for self-evolving multimodal agents. Specifically, Ace-Skill combines aprioritized sampler with lazy-decay proficiency tracking to focus rollouts on informative and insufficiently mastered samples, and a clustered organizer that semantically clusters knowledge for cleaner retrieval and more reliable adaptation. By improving sampling and organization together, Ace-Skill turns self-evolution into a virtuous cycle in which more informative rollouts produce higher-quality knowledge that supports stronger subsequent rollouts. Across four multimodal tool-use benchmarks, Ace-Skill delivers strong gains (e.g., +35.46% relative improvement in Avg@4 accuracy), enabling an opensource 35B MoE model to match or surpass proprietary models. The acquired knowledge also transfers effectively in a zero-shot manner to smaller 9B and 4B models, allowing resource-constrained agents to inherit advanced capabilities without additional training. The code has been publicly available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/Ace-Skill.
Authors: Xiaozhe Li, Jixuan Chen, Xinyu Fang, Shengyuan Ding, Haodong Duan, Qingwen Liu, Kai Chen
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and tool use. However, the fundamental cognitive faculties essential for problem solving, including perception, reasoning, and memory, remain the stable core of intelligence. Unlike memorizing specific patterns, humans succeed in novel environments by applying these intrinsic faculties to adapt and optimize. Yet, whether LLMs possess this essential capacity, namely the ability to continuously refine solutions in response to dynamic environmental feedback, remains underexplored. To address this challenge, we introduce OPT-BENCH, a benchmark for evaluating self-improvement capabilities in large-scale search spaces. By combining 20 machine learning tasks with 10 classic NP-hard problems, OPT-BENCH provides a rigorous setting to assess whether agents can adapt through intrinsic self-reflection rather than rote tool application. We further propose OPT-Agent, a framework that emulates human-like cognitive adaptation. It operates through a general perception, memory, and reasoning loop, iteratively refining solutions based on environmental feedback. Through extensive experiments on 19 LLMs from 7 model families, including reasoning models, general models, and open-source models ranging from 3B to 235B parameters, we demonstrate that stronger models are more effective at leveraging feedback signals for self-improvement. However, this upper-bound adaptability remains fundamentally constrained by the models' base capacity, and even the most advanced LLMs still fall short of human expert performance.
Authors: Xiaozhe Li, Xinyu Fang, Shengyuan Ding, Yang Li, Linyang Li, Haodong Duan, Qingwen Liu, Kai Chen
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success on reasoning benchmarks through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), excelling at tasks such as math, coding, logic, and puzzles. However, existing benchmarks evaluate only correctness, while overlooking optimality, namely the ability to find the best solutions under constraints. We propose OPT-BENCH, the first comprehensive framework for training and evaluating LLMs on NP-hard optimization problems through quality-aware RLVR. OPT-BENCH provides three key components: a scalable training infrastructure with instance generators, quality verifiers, and optimal baselines across 10 tasks; a rigorous benchmark with 1,000 instances evaluating both feasibility, measured by Success Rate, and quality, measured by Quality Ratio; and quality-aware rewards that enable continuous improvement beyond binary correctness. Training on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-1M with 15K examples achieves 93.1% SR and 46.6% QR, significantly outperforming GPT-4o, which achieves 29.6% SR and 14.6% QR. Beyond optimization, training on OPT-BENCH transfers to diverse tasks, including mathematics (+2.2%), logic (+1.2%), knowledge (+4.1%), and instruction following (+6.1%). Our analysis reveals that quality-aware rewards improve solutions by 28.8% over binary rewards, and that task diversity drives generalization more than data quantity, offering insights into RLVR scaling for complex reasoning.
Authors: Yi Zhang, Yuxin Chen, Leheng Sheng, Dongcheng Zhang, Chaochao Lu, Xiang Wang, An Zhang
Abstract: While explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) empowers large reasoning models (LRMs), it enables the generation of riskier final answers. Current alignment paradigms primarily rely on externally enforced compliance, optimizing models to detect malicious prompts rather than evaluating the safety of their own outputs. We argue that this approach remains largely behavioral: our empirical analysis reveals that ostensibly aligned models lack intrinsic safety understanding, often failing to verify their own response safety and remaining vulnerable to adversarial jailbreaks. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose Safety Internal (SInternal), a framework that internalizes safety specifications by training LRMs exclusively on safety verification tasks to critique their own generated answers using expert reasoning trajectories. We demonstrate that learning to verify induces a strong generalization for response safety, significantly enhancing robustness against out-of-domain jailbreaks. Furthermore, when combined with reinforcement learning, SInternal serves as a superior initialization compared to standard supervised fine-tuning, suggesting that internalizing safety understanding creates a more robust foundation for alignment than merely mimicking safe behaviors. Our codes are available at https://github.com/AlphaLab-USTC/SInternal
Authors: Hao Wu, Fan Xu, Yuxu Lu, Penghao Zhao, Fan Zhang, Hao Jia, Yuxuan Liang, Ruijian Gou, Qingsong Wen, Xian Wu, Xiaomeng Huang, Yuan Gao
Abstract: Coupled spatiotemporal forecasting is important for predicting the future evolution of multiple interacting dynamical systems, such as in climate models. However, existing methods are severely constrained by the persistent bottleneck of compounding errors. In coupled systems, errors from each subsystem simulator propagate and amplify one another, a phenomenon we term Reciprocal Error Amplification, leading to a rapid collapse of long-range predictions. To address this challenge, we propose a universal framework called PnP-Corrector (Plug-and-Play Corrector). The core idea of our framework is to decouple the physical simulation from the error correction process: it freezes pre-trained physics simulation engines and exclusively trains a correction agent to proactively counteract the systematic biases emerging from the coupled system. Furthermore, we design an efficient predictive model architecture, DSLCast, to serve as the backbone of this framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the long-term stability and accuracy of coupled forecasting systems. For instance, in the challenging task of a 300-day global ocean-atmosphere coupled forecast, our PnP-Corrector framework reduces the prediction error of the baseline model by 29% and surpasses state-of-the-art models on several key metrics.
Authors: Dongcheng Zhang, Yi Zhang, Yuxin Chen, An Zhang, Xiang Wang, Chaochao Lu
Abstract: Large Reasoning Models possess remarkable capabilities for self-correction in general domain; however, they frequently struggle to recover from unsafe reasoning trajectories under adversarial attacks. Existing alignment methods attempt to mitigate this vulnerability by fine-tuning the model on expert data including reflection traces or adversarial prefixes. Crucially, these approaches are often hindered by static training data which inevitably deviate from model's dynamic, on-policy reasoning traces, resulting in model hardly covering its vast generation space and learning to recover from its own failures. To bridge this gap, we propose Self-ReSET, a pure reinforcement learning framework designed to equip LRMs with the intrinsic capacity to recover from their own safety error trajectories, which are subsequently reused as an initial state for reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments across various LRMs and benchmarks demonstrate that Self-ReSET significantly enhances robustness against adversarial attacks especially out-of-distribution (OOD) jailbreak prompts while maintaining general utility, along with efficient data utilization. Further analysis reveals that our method effectively fosters self-recovery patterns, enabling models to better identify and recover from unsafe intermediate error states back to benign paths. Our codes and data are available at https://github.com/Ing1024/Self-ReSET.
Authors: Ali Baheri, David Millard, Ignacio Laguna Peralta
Abstract: Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs) can greatly accelerate PDE simulation, but they are often used without formal guarantees that they preserve basic physical structure. We show that, once the trained weights and grid are fixed, the spectral convolution in an FNO is a linear map. As a result, the full forward pass is piecewise-linear and can be represented exactly in Z3's linear real arithmetic. We study two encodings. The exact encoding compiles the spectral convolution into a dense matrix multiplication, which is sound for both proofs and counterexamples. The lighter frozen encoding replaces the spectral path with a constant, making it faster but approximate. On 10 small FNO surrogates for 1D advection-diffusion-reaction (85 to 117 parameters, grids 8 to 32), the exact encoding gives 2 sound positivity proofs on linear (ReLU-free) models, 5 sound positivity counterexamples, and 10 sound mass-violation counterexamples; the remaining 3 positivity queries on ReLU models time out. For mass non-increase, Z3 finds worse counterexamples than both gradient-based falsification and Monte Carlo on 7 of 10 models. The frozen encoding scales to grid size 64 with sub-second positivity checks, but it no longer provides certificates for the original FNO. Overall, the results make the soundness--scalability tradeoff explicit and point to what is needed for formal verification of production-scale neural operators.
Authors: Vinay Kumar, Satyendra Rajput, Mausam, N. M. Anoop Krishnan
Abstract: The promise of AI-driven scientific discovery hinges on whether AI agents can autonomously design and execute the computational workflows that underpin modern science. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation presents a natural test bed to stress-test this claim; it requires translating physical intuition into syntactically and semantically correct input scripts, reasoning about initial and boundary conditions, diagnosing numerically unstable trajectories, and interpreting outputs against known physical behavior and laws. We introduce MDGYM, a benchmark of 169 expert-curated MD simulations spanning LAMMPS and GROMACS, two widely used MD packages, across three increasing difficulty levels. We evaluate three agentic frameworks -- Claude Code, Codex, and OpenHands -- with four LLMs, and find that all perform poorly: even the strongest agent solves only 21\% of easy-level tasks, with less than 10\% at higher difficulties. Trajectory analysis reveals a characteristic pattern of failure -- agents successfully invoke simulation machinery but produce physically unstable configurations, fabricate numerical outputs without executing the underlying computation, or abandon tasks prematurely rather than iterating through simulation-specific errors. These failure modes are qualitatively distinct from those observed in general software engineering benchmarks, indicating that fluent code generation does not transfer to grounded physical reasoning.
Authors: Harshit Bisht, Vinay Kumar, Kevin Maik Jablonka, Mausam, N. M. Anoop Krishnan
Abstract: A growing body of work pursues AI scientists capable of end-to-end autonomous scientific discovery. This position paper argues that although they already function as co-scientists, agentic AI scientists are not built for autonomous scientific discovery. We identify the following challenges in building and deploying autonomous AI scientists: (1) Problem selection is influenced by the McNamara fallacy; (2) Agents are built on large language models (LLMs) whose training corpora omit tacit procedural and failure knowledge of laboratory practice; (3) Preference optimisation during post-training compresses output diversity toward consensus; and (4) Most scientific benchmarks measure single-turn prediction accuracy and lack feedback from physical experiments back to the computational model. These challenges are not just questions of scale and scaffolding; they require revisiting fundamental design choices. To build truly autonomous AI scientists, we recommend the use of scientific simulations as verifiers for training, the design of persistent world models that represent the shifting objectives governing real investigations, the establishment of a centralized preregistration repository for all AI-generated hypotheses, and application driven by scientific need rather than tool affordance.
Authors: Yunseong Jeon, Namcheol Lee, Yoonsu Lee, Jangwoon Park, Sol Ahn, Jong-Chan Kim, Seongsoo Hong
Abstract: Reasoning-based end-to-end (E2E) autonomous driving has recently emerged as a promising approach to improving the interpretability of driving decisions as it can generate human-readable reasoning together with predicted trajectories. Such approaches commonly generate multiple trajectories to capture diverse future behaviors, and they fall into two categories: (1) multi-reasoning, where one reasoning sequence is generated per trajectory, and (2) single-reasoning, where a single reasoning is shared across all trajectories. The former offers richer diversity at the cost of redundant computation, while the latter is more efficient but is often assumed to sacrifice diversity. Alpamayo 1, a representative system, adopts the multi-reasoning approach and achieves competitive trajectory prediction performance. However, the efficiency of this design remains largely unexplored, making it a well-motivated subject for investigation. In this paper, we systematically analyze and improve Alpamayo 1 in two ways. First, we reduce inference latency while preserving trajectory diversity by redesigning Alpamayo 1 into a single-reasoning system. Through extensive experiments, we find that replacing multi-reasoning with single-reasoning does not meaningfully degrade trajectory diversity. Second, we accelerate diffusion-based action generation by eliminating inter-block overhead arising from unnecessary copy operations and inefficient kernel execution. Through closed-loop and open-loop experiments, we validate both optimizations, demonstrating a 69.23% reduction in inference latency while maintaining trajectory diversity and prediction quality. These results highlight the importance of jointly analyzing system architecture and runtime execution to improve the efficiency of reasoning-based E2E AD systems.
Authors: Xingyuan Hua, Sheng Yue, Ju Ren
Abstract: Recent advancements in agentic test-time scaling allow models to gather environmental feedback before committing to final actions. A key limitation of existing methods is that they typically employ undifferentiated exploration strategies, lacking the ability to adaptively distinguish when exploration is truly required. In this paper, we propose an exploration-aware reinforcement learning framework that enables LLM agents to adaptively explore only when uncertainty is high. Our method introduces a fine-grained reward function via variational inference that explicitly evaluates exploratory actions by estimating their potential to improve future decision-making, together with an exploration-aware grouping mechanism that separates exploratory actions from task-completion actions during optimization. By targeting informational gaps, this design allows agents to explore selectively and transition to execution as soon as the task context is clear. Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach achieves consistent improvements across a range of challenging text-based and GUI-based agent benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/HansenHua/EAPO-ICML26 and models are available at https://huggingface.co/hansenhua/EAPO-ICML26.
URLs: https://github.com/HansenHua/EAPO-ICML26, https://huggingface.co/hansenhua/EAPO-ICML26.
Authors: Jacek Szybowski, Konrad Ku{\l}akowski, Jiri Mazurek
Abstract: A series of papers has introduced the Heuristic Rating Estimation method, which evaluates a set of alternatives based on pairwise comparisons and the weights of reference alternatives. We formulate the conditions under which the HRE method can be applied correctly. The research considers both arithmetic and geometric algorithms for complete and incomplete pairwise comparison methods. The illustrative examples show that the estimations of inconsistency in the arithmetic variant are optimal.
Authors: Zicheng Lyu, Wenjie Yang, Shengzhong Zhang, Zengfeng Huang
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly capable at closed-world mathematical reasoning, but research assistance also requires source-grounded use of the literature. When a proof reaches a non-trivial step, a useful assistant should determine whether the needed tool (e.g., a lemma) already exists, identify a suitable scholarly source, and verify that its assumptions align with the current proof context. To rigorously evaluate such capabilities, we introduce Re$^2$Math, a benchmark for tool-grounded retrieval from partial mathematical proofs. Each instance is built from a candidate instrumental citation in the proof of a main theorem, with hierarchical context and an optional leakage-controlled anchor hint. We also make the task source-grounded yet citation-agnostic in that any admissible theorem sufficient for the proof transition is accepted. Evaluation uses a release-frozen retrieval artifact, ensuring reproducibility, while the benchmark itself supports automatic, continual expansion with newly constructed instances. On the current benchmark test set, the best fixed-judge ToolAcc reaches 7.0%, despite substantially higher rates of source grounding, indicating that current systems often retrieve valid statements but fail to establish their applicability to the local proof step. By decoupling citation recall, grounding, and proof-gap sufficiency, Re$^2$Math transforms literature-grounded mathematical tool use into a controlled diagnostic task.
Authors: Chun-Wun Cheng, Sifan Wang, Carola-Bibiane Sch\"onlieb, Angelica I. Aviles-Rivero
Abstract: Neural operators have emerged as powerful data-driven solvers for PDEs, offering substantial acceleration over classical numerical methods. However, existing transformer-based operators still face critical challenges when modeling PDEs on complex geometries: directly processing over massive mesh points is computationally expensive, while operating in raw discretization coordinates may obscure the intrinsic geometry where physical interactions are more naturally expressed. To address these limitations, we introduce the Charted Axial Transformer Operator (CATO), a geometry-adaptive and derivative-aware neural operator for PDEs on general geometries. Instead of applying attention directly in the physical coordinate system, CATO learns a continuous latent chart that maps mesh coordinates into a learned chart space, where chart-conditioned axial attention efficiently captures long-range dependencies with reduced computational cost. In addition, CATO introduces a derivative-aware physics loss for steady-state PDEs that jointly supervises solution values, mesh-consistent gradients, and an auxiliary flux-like field, improving physical fidelity and reducing oversmoothing. We further provide a theoretical approximation result showing that, under a favorable chart, charted axial attention can represent low-rank axial solution operators with controlled error, and that small chart perturbations induce bounded approximation degradation. CATO achieves the best performance across all evaluated datasets, yielding an average improvement of approximately 26.76\% over the strongest competing baselines while reducing the number of parameters by 81.98\%. These results highlight the effectiveness of learning geometry-adaptive charts and derivative-aware physical supervision for accurate and efficient PDE operator learning.
Authors: Jinchao Hu, Meizhi Zhong, Kehai Chen, Min Zhang
Abstract: Teaching language models to use search tools is not only a question of whether they search, but also of whether they issue good queries. This is especially important in open-domain question answering, where broad or copied queries often waste retrieval budget and derail later reasoning. We propose \Ours, a framework that makes query planning explicit through reusable search skills. At each step, the model first selects a skill, then generates a search or answer action conditioned on the selected skill card. The skill inventory itself is not fixed: SearchSkill maintains an evolving SkillBank, expands or refines it from recurrent failure patterns, and reconstructs affected trajectories before supervised training. The resulting two-stage SFT recipe aligns training with the inference-time protocol of skill selection followed by skill-grounded execution. Across open-source and closed-source models, SearchSkill improves exact match on knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks and yields better retrieval behavior, including fewer copied first queries, more atomic hop-focused queries, and more correct answers within a small search budget. These results suggest that explicit skill-conditioned query planning is a lightweight alternative to treating search as an undifferentiated action.
Authors: Hongwei Zhang, Qiqiang Zhong, Jiangxia Cao, Yiyang Lv, Huanjie Wang, Liwei Guan, Jing Yao, Yiyu Wang, Junfeng Shu, Zhaojie Liu, Han Li
Abstract: Modeling ultra-long user sequences involves a difficult trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness. While current paradigms rely on either item-specific search or item-agnostic compression, we propose UxSID, a framework exploring a third path: semantic-group shared interest memory. By utilizing Semantic IDs (SIDs) and a dual-level attention strategy, UxSID captures target-aware preferences without the heavy cost of item-specific models. This end-to-end architecture balances computational parsimony with semantic awareness, achieving state-of-the-art performance and a 0.337% revenue lift in large-scale advertising A/B test.
Authors: Royce Moon, Lav R. Varshney
Abstract: Agentic frameworks are the software layer through which AI agents act in the world. Existing safety methods intervene on the model and therefore remain conditional on unverifiable properties of learned behavior. We introduce containment verification, which locates safety guarantees in the agentic framework itself. Under havoc oracle semantics, the AI is modeled as an unconstrained oracle ranging over the entire typed action space, and the verified containment layer must enforce the boundary policy for every possible AI output. For boundary-enforceable properties, expressed over modeled boundary events, action arguments, and state, we prove a universal guarantee by forward-simulation refinement and mechanize it in Dafny. We instantiate the paradigm by verifying PocketFlow, a minimalist agentic LLM framework, and use an agentic synthesis pipeline to generate the specification, operational model, and refinement proof under an information barrier against tautological specifications. To our knowledge, this is the first deductive formal verification of an agentic framework, and its guarantee is invariant to model capability over the modeled typed action boundary.
Authors: Nicol\'as Astorga, Anita Kriz, Mihaela van der Schaar
Abstract: Despite surpassing human performance across mathematics, coding, and other knowledge-intensive tasks, large language models (LLMs) continue to struggle with causal reasoning. A core obstacle is the target data itself: causal systems are complex and often expressed in non-executable forms, while ground-truth answers to causal queries are inherently scarce. We introduce CauSim, a framework that turns causal reasoning from a scarce-label problem into a scalable supervised one. CauSim constructs increasingly complex causal simulators: executable structural causal models (SCMs), incrementally built by LLMs, that scale to globally complex systems while maintaining verifiable answers to causal queries. CauSim operates across representations by formalizing non-executable causal knowledge into code, enabling data augmentation, and translating executable SCMs into natural language, enabling supervision in previously difficult-to-supervise representations. We structure our research into two parts: (1) how to construct increasingly complex causal simulators, and (2) a systematic study of what CauSim enables, demonstrating generalization across representations, consistent gains from curriculum scaling and data volume, LLM self-improvement through self-generated simulators, and data augmentation via formalization of existing domain knowledge.
Authors: Zhijun Zeng, Yixuan Jiang, Pipi Hu, Zuoqiang Shi
Abstract: Density estimation is a central primitive in probabilistic modeling, yet continuous, discrete, and mixed-variable domains are often treated by separate objectives, limiting the ability to exploit a common statistical structure across data types. Continuous score-based methods rely on log-density gradients, while discrete extensions typically use concrete score whose unbounded targets become unstable near low-probability states. We introduce Constant-Target Energy Matching (CTEM), a unified energy-based framework for density estimation on general state spaces. CTEM replaces ordinary density-ratio regression with a bounded energy-difference transform and derives from it a sample-only training objective with the constant target 1. The learned scalar potential recovers log p without partition-function estimation or explicit unbounded ratio regression. Across continuous, discrete, and mixed-variable benchmarks, CTEM substantially improves density estimation over competitive baselines and yields higher-quality samples under standard sampling procedures.
Authors: Yuxi Chen, Junming Chen, Chenyu He, Yiwei Li, Yicheng Ji, Yifan Wu, Dingyu Yang, Lansong Diao, Lidan Shou, Hongliang Zhang, Huan Li, Gang Chen
Abstract: As LLM agents evolve, tokens have emerged as the core economic primitives of Agentic AI. However, their exponential consumption introduces severe computational, collaborative, and security bottlenecks. Current surveys remain fragmented across system optimization, architecture design, and trust, lacking a unified framework to evaluate the fundamental trade-off between output quality and economic cost. To bridge this gap, this survey presents the first comprehensive survey of Token Economics. By unifying computer science and economics, we conceptualize tokens as production factors, exchange mediums, and units of account. We synthesize existing literature across a four-dimensional taxonomy: (1) Micro-level (Single Agent): Optimizing budget-constrained factor substitution via neoclassical firm theory. (2) Meso-level (Multi-Agent Systems): Minimizing collaboration friction using transaction cost and principal-agent theories. (3) Macro-level (Agent Ecosystems): Addressing congestion externalities and pricing via mechanism design. (4) Security: Internalizing adversarial threats as endogenous economic constraints. Finally, we outline frontier directions, including differentiable token budgets and dynamic markets, to lay the theoretical foundation for scalable next-generation agent systems.
Authors: Yann Berthelot, Philippe Preux, Riad Akrour
Abstract: Many continuous-control problems ship with a competent but suboptimal controller (a tuned PID, a hand-designed gait). A growing family of methods uses such controllers as queryable experts during RL, but each method has been proposed in isolation, on a different benchmark, without imperfect-expert testing. We harmonize the comparison on a shared SAC backbone, common HPO and evaluation protocols, 100/50 seeds per (env, method), and a degradation sweep over expert undertuning, action bias, and observation noise. The comparison surfaces three failure modes single-paper evaluations miss: (F1) a critic blind spot under argmax-plus-bootstrap that drags IBRL below no-expert SAC on experts close to the no-expert-RL ceiling (RL-near-ceiling, distinct from the absolute physical ceiling); (F2) residual saturation on far-from-optimal experts; and (F3) warm-start buffer poisoning that collapses training-time-handoff methods under deployment-time expert undertuning. No single method dominates: each wins on one task-structure regime and fails predictably elsewhere; on RL-near-ceiling experts (FourTank, GlassFurnace) no query-time method clears the expert within our 1M-step budget, leaving open whether this is a fundamental wall or a budget effect. We convert the spread into a testable decision rule keyed on three pre-training observables (expert quality, task termination, perturbation type). The benchmark, taxonomy, and decision rule are the primary contribution; we additionally describe EDGE, a softmax-over-ensemble-LCB design point used to demonstrate that both axes the taxonomy points to (gate form, scoring rule) are individually exploitable.
Authors: Daking Rai, Mor Geva, Ziyu Yao
Abstract: Circuit discovery aims to explain how language models (LMs) implement a specific task by localizing and interpreting a circuit, a computational subgraph responsible for the LM's behavior. Existing circuit discovery methods are hypothesis-driven; they first informally define a task with a dataset, and then apply a circuit discovery algorithm over that dataset to obtain a single circuit. This imposes two strong assumptions: that the LM implements the task with a single circuit, and that the dataset adequately represents the task as humans understand it. We systematically test these assumptions across four previously studied tasks and find that even minor dataset variations that preserve task semantics can produce circuits with low edge overlap and cross-dataset faithfulness. More strikingly, when applied to a mixed dataset with two distinct tasks whose separately discovered circuits have near-zero cross-faithfulness, existing methods still return a single circuit with high faithfulness across both tasks. This indicates that current methods discover dataset-specific circuits, rather than general task circuits. We propose Data-driven Circuit Discovery (DCD), a new discovery framework that drops both assumptions: instead of returning a single circuit for a dataset, DCD first clusters examples in the dataset by how similarly the model processes them and discovers a separate circuit for each group. This allows distinct mechanisms to appear separately rather than merged into a single circuit; each circuit explains its group, not the full task. Experiments show that DCD discovers multiple circuits per dataset, each more faithful to its group than a single circuit discovered by existing methods. Broadly, DCD lets the data reveal mechanistic structure within LMs, rather than relying on human-defined task boundaries that may not align with how models organize their computation.
Authors: Giridhar Ganapavarapu, Dhaval Patel
Abstract: The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has unified the interface between Large Language Models (LLMs) and external tools, yet a fundamental gap remains in how agents conceptualize the environments within which they operate. Current paradigms are bifurcated: Task-level planning often ignores execution-time dynamics, while reactive execution lacks long-horizon foresight. We present MCP-Cosmos, a framework that infuses generative World Models (WM) into the MCP ecosystem to enable predictive task automation. By unifying three disparate technologies, namely MCP, World Model, and Agent, we demonstrate that a "Bring Your Own World Model" (BYOWM) strategy allows agents to simulate state transitions and refine plans in a latent space before execution. We conducted experiments using two strategies, namely ReAct and SPIRAL with 2 planning models and 3 representative world models over 20+ MCP-Bench tasks. We observed improvements in Agent's environment interaction KPI such as tool success rate and tool parameter accuracy. The framework also offers new metrics such as Execution Quality to generate new insights about the effectiveness of world models compared to baseline.
Authors: Yuanhao Li, Hongbo Wang, Xiaotang Shang, Xunzhu Tang, Yiming Cao, Xuhong Chen
Abstract: Reinforcement learning for program repair is hindered by sparse execution feedback and coarse sequence-level rewards that obscure which edits actually fix bugs. We present BoostAPR, a three-stage framework addressing these challenges: (1) supervised fine-tuning on execution-verified demonstrations with reasoning traces, (2) training dual reward models--a sequence-level assessor and a line-level credit allocator--from execution outcomes, and (3) PPO optimization where the line-level model redistributes rewards to critical edit regions. This line-level credit assignment operates at an intermediate granularity naturally suited to code changes. Trained on SWE-Gym and evaluated on four benchmarks, BoostAPR achieves 40.7% on SWE-bench Verified (+22.9pp over base model), 24.8% on Defects4J (Python-to-Java transfer), 84.5% on HumanEval-Java, and 95.0% on QuixBugs, achieving competitive results among open-source models with strong cross-language generalization.
Authors: Nils A. Herrmann, Leander Girrbach, Kirill Bykov, Zeynep Akata
Abstract: Recent work shows that large language models (LLMs) encode behavioural traits ("personas") as linear directions in activation space, often called "persona vectors". Prior work has used such directions as static handles for behavioural steering. Building on this, we treat them as dynamic signals instead: probes we can monitor and intervene on as reasoning unfolds. We use the term polylogue to denote the time series of alignments between persona vectors and hidden activations over the course of generation. Experiments across four open-weight models show that polylogue features predict correctness on MMLU-Pro competitively with low-dimensional activation baselines, while remaining interpretable through their associated persona directions. They also suggest concrete steering targets, namely which latent directions to modulate at different stages of a response. We instantiate this as a simple paragraph-conditioned intervention that improves accuracy on three of four models, pointing to stage-aware latent steering as a promising direction for reasoning-time control. Together, this positions the polylogue as an interpretable tool for reasoning-time monitoring and intervention.
Authors: Shawn Li, Chenxiao Yu, Han Wang, Wei Yang, Ryan Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Xiyang Hu, Philip Yu, Chaowei Xiao, Huan Zhang, Yue Zhao
Abstract: Large language model agents increasingly operate through an intermediate skill layer that mediates between user intent and concrete task execution. This layer is widely treated as an organizational abstraction, but we argue it is also a privilege boundary that current models routinely exceed. We present \textbf{FORTIS}, a benchmark that evaluates over-privilege in agent skills across two stages: whether a model selects the minimally sufficient skill from a large overlapping library, and whether it executes that skill without expanding into broader tools or actions than the skill permits. Across ten frontier models and three domains, we find that over-privileged behavior is the norm rather than the exception. Models consistently reach for higher-privilege skills and tools than the task requires, failing at both stages at rates that remain high even for the strongest available models. Failure is especially severe under the ordinary conditions of real user interaction: incomplete specification, convenience framing, and proximity to skill boundaries. None of these requires adversarial construction. The results indicate that the skill layer, far from containing agent behavior, is itself a primary source of privilege escalation in current systems.
Authors: Fabio Rovai
Abstract: A valid tool call is not necessarily a valid intervention. Tool-using language agents are guarded by schema validators, policy filters, provenance checks, state predictors, and self-verification, yet such safeguards do not certify that a state-changing action has an identifiable causal effect. In confounded workflows, the action that looks optimal in observational logs can reduce utility when executed. We introduce CIVeX, a causal intervention verifier that maps proposed actions to structural causal queries over a committed action-state graph, checks identifiability, and returns one of four auditable verdicts: EXECUTE, REJECT, EXPERIMENT, or ABSTAIN. Execution requires an assumption-scoped causal certificate carrying graph commitments, an identification argument, a one-sided lower confidence bound (LCB), provenance, and risk limits. On Causal-ToolBench (1,890 instances, 7 seeds), CIVeX yields zero observed false executions across moderate and adversarial confounding. Under adversarial confounding it reaches 84.9% accuracy and 81.1% of oracle utility (+2.23 vs +2.76) and is the only non-oracle method whose constrained utility under a zero-false-execution constraint exceeds the AlwaysAbstain floor. On IHDP and ZOZO Open Bandit (real production logs with uniform-random ground truth), CIVeX matches Oracle correct-execution within 0.1pp and cuts per-execute false-execution by >=50x over naive baselines. A chain-of-thought LLM verifier (Claude Opus, Sonnet) cuts false-execution by an order of magnitude over a terse baseline, yet under adversarial confounding Opus's utility falls to 74% of CIVeX's. Intervention identifiability, not action validity, is the missing primitive for reliable tool use.
Authors: Fabio Rovai
Abstract: We present Open Ontologies, an open-source ontology engineering system implemented in Rust that integrates LLM-driven construction with formal OWL reasoning and ontology alignment via the Model Context Protocol. Our primary finding is that stable 1-to-1 matching is the dominant factor in ontology alignment quality: on the OAEI Anatomy track, it achieves F1 = 0.832 (P = 0.963, R = 0.733), competitive with state-of-the-art systems and exceeding all in precision. Ablation across five weight configurations shows that signal weights are irrelevant when stable matching is applied (F1 varies by less than 0.004), while removing stable matching drops F1 to 0.728. On the Conference track, the same method achieves F1 = 0.438. On tool-augmented ontology interaction, we find a surprising result: an LLM reading a raw OWL file (F1 = 0.323) performs worse than the same LLM with no file at all (F1 = 0.431), while structured MCP tool access achieves F1 = 0.717. This demonstrates that tool structure provides a qualitatively different mode of access that the LLM cannot replicate by reading raw syntax. The system ships as a single binary under the MIT licence.
Authors: Liding Xu, Yugeng Zhou, Sebastian Pokutta
Abstract: Mixed-integer programming (MIP) research is both mathematically sophisticated and engineering-intensive: testing an algorithmic hypothesis within a branch-and-cut solver requires substantial implementation, debugging, tuning, and large-scale benchmarking. We propose an agentic MIP research framework that shortens this feedback loop by embedding LLM agents into a solver-aware harness for generating, verifying, and evaluating plugins for the open-source solver SCIP. Propagation methods play a central role in accelerating MIP solving by exploiting global constraints. We instantiate our framework on the semantic lifting of MIP formulations into global constraints and the automatic construction of propagation-only SCIP constraint handlers. On the MIPLIB 2017 benchmark set, the framework successfully recovers global constraint structures from constraint programming and generates executable constraint detectors and propagation-only constraint handlers. Furthermore, the framework naturally extends to in-context learning within a sandboxed environment, enabling agents not only to tune and debug generated constraint handlers on real instances, but also to explore global constraint patterns in MIP problems and discover novel propagation strategies not yet implemented in SCIP. This framework allows us to systematically distinguish meaningful algorithmic improvements from low-value or overly costly candidates: the novel propagation methods successfully solved five additional instances within the explored benchmark. Overall, this framework demonstrates that LLM agents can autonomously navigate the complex MIP research loop, paving the way for a more automated solver development process.
Authors: Carla Griffiths, Mirco Musolesi
Abstract: Understanding how linguistic structure emerges in language models is central to interpreting what these systems learn from data and how much supervision they truly require. In particular, semantic role understanding ("who did what to whom") is a core component of meaning representation, yet it remains unclear whether it arises from pre-training alone or depends on task-specific fine-tuning. We study whether semantic role understanding emerges during language model pre-training or requires task-specific fine-tuning. We freeze decoder-only transformers and train linear probes to extract semantic roles, using performance to infer whether role information is already encoded in pre-training or learned during adaptation. Across model scales, we find that frozen representations contain substantial semantic role information, with performance improving but not fully matching fine-tuned models. This indicates partial but incomplete emergence from pre-training alone. We show that semantic role structure emerges from language modeling objectives, but its internal implementation shifts toward more distributed representations as model scale increases.
Authors: Yang Zhou, Zihan Dong, Zhenting Wang, Can Jin, Shiyu Zhao, Bangwei Guo, Difei Gu, Linjun Zhang, Mu Zhou, Dimitris N. Metaxas
Abstract: Agent skills can remarkably improve task success rates by using human-written procedural documents, but their quality is difficult to assess without environment-grounded verification. Existing skill generation methods heavily rely on preference logs rather than direct environment interaction, often yielding negligible or even degraded gains. We identify that it is a fundamental timing bottleneck: robust skills should be posterior-based, distilled from empirical environment interaction rather than prior plans. In this study, we introduce the Posterior Distillation Index (PDI), a trajectory-level metric that quantifies how well a distilled skill is grounded in the task-environment evidence. To operationalize PDI, we present SPARK (Structured Pipelines for Autonomous Runnable tasKs and sKill generation) for preserving task execution evidence towards full trajectory-level analysis. SPARK generates environment-verified trajectories used to compute PDI, and it applies PDI as an online diagnostic and intervention signal to ensure posterior skill formation. Across 86 runnable tasks, SPARK-generated skills consistently surpass no-skill baselines and outperform human-written skills on student models (inference cost up to 1,000x cheaper than teacher models). These findings show that PDI-guided distillation produces efficient and transferable skills grounded in the task-environment interaction. We release our code at https://github.com/EtaYang10th/spark-skills .
Authors: Rania Elbadry, Ahmed Heakl, Fan Zhang, Dani Bouch, Yuxia Wang, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
Abstract: Large language models confidently produce outdated answers, and no existing method can detect them. We show this is not an engineering failure but a structural one: temporal drift, whether a stored fact has changed since training, is encoded as a direction in the residual stream geometrically orthogonal to both correctness and uncertainty. Any method operating on correctness or uncertainty signals is therefore blind to drift by construction. We verify this across six instruction-tuned models. A linear probe trained directly on drift labels achieves AUROC $0.83$--$0.95$; methods based on token entropy, semantic entropy, CCS, and SAPLMA all remain near chance ($0.49$--$0.57$). Five tests confirm the geometric orthogonality: weight cosines ($|\cos| \leq 0.14$), score correlations ($|r| \leq 0.20$), bidirectional null-space projection ($|\Delta| \leq 0.008$), iterative null-space projection with $k{=}10$, and difference-of-means dissociation. Mechanistically, the MLP retrieval circuit produces identical dynamics for stale recall and confabulation ($r > 0.81$, six models), explaining why output confidence cannot separate them. A cross-cutoff experiment holds inputs constant and varies only the model: the probe fires on the model whose training predates the fact's transition and stays silent otherwise ($P(A{>}B) = 0.975$--$0.998$, twelve model pairs), confirming it reads model-internal knowledge state rather than input properties. Our code and datasets will be publicly released.
Authors: Karim Abdel Sadek, Mark Bedaywi, Rhys Gould, Stuart Russell
Abstract: For AI systems to be useful to humans, they must understand and act in accordance with our values and preferences. Since specifying preferences is a hard task, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to develop methods that allow for inferring preferences from observed behavior. However, IRL assumes the human to be approximately optimal. This is a big limitation in cases where the human themselves may be learning to act optimally in an environment. In this paper, we formalize the problem of learning the preferences of a learning agent: a predictor observes a learner acting online and tries to infer the underlying reward function being (initially suboptimally) optimized by the learner. We model the learner as either being no-regret, or as converging to an optimal Boltzmann policy over time. In each of these settings, we establish theoretical guarantees for various preference learning algorithms, or otherwise show that such guarantees are impossible.
Authors: Lane Lewis, Zhixin Wang, David Schwab, Xaq Pitkow
Abstract: If a person can solve a task, can measuring their brain make it easier to train a model to solve that task too? Recent NeuroAI work suggests that supplementing task training with neural recordings can modestly improve model performance and robustness. However, it is unclear when there should be a benefit from using neural data and how much benefit to expect. We formulate this question mathematically, and begin to address it theoretically using a simple, analytically tractable linear gaussian model of task targets and neural recordings. For a multimodal estimator trained on both brain data and task labels, we derive scaling laws for how performance scales with the numbers of brain and task samples. From these laws we derive relative value and exchange rates between brain samples and task samples, quantifying how much extra task samples neural data is worth as a function of task-brain alignment, neural and task noise, latent dimension, and brain data sample size. We also analyze test distribution shift, to identify conditions where brain-regularized learning can produce substantial robustness gains through learned invariances. Finally, under a fixed collection budget, we characterize the regimes in which brain data is worth collecting. Our results provide a foundation for understanding how valuable brain data could be for improving machine learning.
Authors: Kun Xiang, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Zirong Liu, Bokai Zhou, Yueling Tang, Junjie Yu, Jiacong Lu, Shangrui Huang, Heng Li, Likui Zhang, Kunkun Liu, Changzheng Zhang, Yangle Fang, Boqiang Guo, Hui-Ling Zhen, Dandan Tu, Yinya Huang, Xiaodan Liang
Abstract: We introduce SeePhys Pro, a fine-grained modality transfer benchmark that studies whether models preserve the same reasoning capability when critical information is progressively transferred from text to image. Unlike standard vision-essential benchmarks that evaluate a single input form, SeePhys Pro features four semantically aligned variants for each problem with progressively increasing visual elements. Our evaluation shows that current frontier models are far from representation-invariant reasoners: performance degrades on average as information moves from language to diagrams, with visual variable grounding as the most critical bottleneck. Motivated by this inference-time fragility, we further develop large training corpora for multimodal RLVR and use blind training as a diagnostic control, finding that RL with all training images masked can still improve performance on unmasked validation sets. To analyze this effect, text-deletion, image-mask-rate, and format-saturation controls suggest that such gains can arise from residual textual and distributional cues rather than valid visual evidence. Our results highlight the need to evaluate multimodal reasoning not only by final-answer accuracy, but also by robustness under modality transfer and by diagnostics that test whether improvements rely on task-critical visual evidence.
Authors: Zhiqin Yang, Yuhan Liu, Jingwen Fu, Pei Fu anf Bo Han, Masashi Sugiyama, Nanning Zheng
Abstract: Although natural language is the default medium for Large Language Models (LLMs), its limited expressive capacity creates a profound bottleneck for complex problem-solving. While recent advancements in AI have relied heavily on scaling, merely internalizing knowledge does not guarantee its effective application. Defining language representation as the linguistic and symbolic constructs used to map and model the real world, this paper argues that shaping schemas through advanced language representation is the next frontier for expanding LLM intelligence. We posit that an LLM's knowledge activation and organization -- its schema -- depends heavily on the structural and symbolic sophistication of the language used to represent a given task. This paper contributes both a formalization of this claim and the empirical evidence to support it. With a new formalization, we present multiple lines of evidence to support our position: Firstly, we review recent empirical practices and emerging methodologies that demonstrate the substantial performance gains achievable through deliberate language representation design, even without modifying model parameters or scale. Secondly, we conduct controlled experiments showing that LLM performance and its internal feature activations vary under different language representations of the same underlying task. Together, these findings highlight language representation design as a promising direction for future research.
Authors: Meet Shah, Jason Gusdorf, Anil Palepu, Chunjong Park, Jack W. O'Sullivan, Vishnu Ravi, Tim Strother, Pavel Dubov, Aliya Rysbek, Toshiyuki Fukuzawa, Yana Lunts, Jan Freyberg, Michael B. Chang, Aniruddh Raghu, David Stutz, Devora Berlowitz, Eliseo Papa, Taylan Cemgil, JD Velasquez, Jack Chen, Arthur Chen, Doug Fritz, Charlie Taylor, Katya Tregubova, Jing Rong Lim, Richard Green, Sara Mahdavi, Mahvish Nagda, Jihyeon Lee, Craig Schiff, Liviu Panait, Sukhdeep Singh, Valentin Li\'evin, David G. T. Barrett, Hannah Gladman, Anna Cupani, Francesca Pietra, Uchechi Okereke, Katherine Tong, Clemens Meyer, Erwan Rolland, Mili Sanwalka, Michael D. Howell, Shixiang Shane Gu, Bibo Xu, Euan A. Ashley, S. M. Ali Eslami, Gregory Wayne, Pushmeet Kohli, Vivek Natarajan, Adam Rodman, Alan Karthikesalingam, Ryutaro Tanno
Abstract: The practice of medicine relies not only upon skillful dialogue but also on the nuanced exchange and interpretation of rich auditory and visual cues between doctors and patients. Building on the low-latency voice and video processing capabilities of Gemini, we introduce AI co-clinician, a first-of-its-kind conversational AI system utilizing continuous streams of audio-visual data from live patient conversations to inform real-time clinical decisions. Its dual-agent architecture balances deep clinical reasoning with the low latency required for natural dialogue. To assess this system, we implemented a video-based interface emulating telemedicine consultations. We crafted 20 standardized outpatient scenarios requiring proactive real-time auditory and visual reasoning and designed "TelePACES" evaluation criteria alongside case-specific rubrics. In a randomized, interface-blinded, crossover simulation study (n = 120 encounters) with 10 internal medicine residents as patient actors, we compared AI co-clinician with primary care physicians (PCPs), GPT-Realtime, and a baseline agent. AI co-clinician approached PCPs in key TelePACES dimensions, including management plans and differential diagnosis, while significantly outperforming GPT-Realtime across all general criteria. While our agent demonstrated parity with PCPs in case-specific triage measures, physicians maintained superior overall performance in case-specific assessments. Although AI co-clinician marks a significant advance in real-time telemedical AI, gaps remain in physical examination and disease-specific reasoning. Our work shows that text-only approaches fail to capture the true challenges of medical consultation and suggests that high-stakes real-time diagnostic AI is most safely advanced in collaborative, triadic models where AI can be a supportive co-clinician for doctors and patients.
Authors: Yuqiao Meng, Sakshi Sunil Narvekar, Luoxi Tang, Rupali Rajendra Vaje, Yingxue Zhang, Muchao Ye, Zhaohan Xi
Abstract: Multi-agent debate (MAD) systems increasingly rely on shared memory to support long-horizon reasoning, but this convenience opens a critical vulnerability: a single corrupted entry can contaminate the downstream memory-augmented reasoning, and debate alone fails to filter such errors. Existing safeguards filter entries via heuristics or LLM-based validation, yet they rely on AI judgments that share the same failure modes and overlook the cross-agent dynamics of MAD. We address this gap by formulating memory updating in MAD as a zero-trust memory game, in which no agent is assumed honest and the game's equilibrium serves as an indicator of optimal memory trust. Guided by this equilibrium, we propose EquiMem, an inference-time calibration mechanism that quantifies each update algorithmically against the shared memory state, using agents' existing retrieval queries and traversal paths as evidence rather than soliciting any LLM judgment. EquiMem instantiates calibration for both embedding- and graph-based memory, and across diverse benchmarks, MAD frameworks, and memory architectures, it consistently outperforms existing safeguards, remains robust under adversarial agents, and incurs negligible inference overhead.
Authors: Shusaku Egami, Masahiro Hamasaki
Abstract: The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the software agents built on them (AI agents) marks a turning point in the transition from a human-centric Web to an ``Agentic Web'' driven by AI agents. However, for AI-Generated Content (AIGC), which is expected to dominate the Web, there is currently no mechanism for agents to verify its reliability, reproducibility, or license compliance during generation. This lack of transparency risks causing chained hallucinations and compliance violations through the reuse of AIGC. Consequently, a framework to manage the provenance and generation conditions of AIGC is essential. In this paper, we present a framework that automatically attaches structured metadata to AIGC at generation time, including modularized prompts, contexts, thoughts, model information, hyperparameters, and confidence. The metadata is enveloped together with verifiable credentials to support the reliable assessment and reuse of AIGC. This framework enables efficient curation of structured AIGC and facilitates its safe use for applications such as fine-tuning and knowledge distillation.
Authors: Dongyi Liu, Yifan Niu, Qinwen Wang, Han Xiao, Jia Li
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based search agents trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have significantly improved the performance of knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing methods encounter critical challenges in long-horizon credit assignment: (i) Reward Sparsity, where models receive only outcome feedback without step-level guidance to differentiate action quality; (ii) Isolated Credit, where credit is assigned to steps independently, failing to capture sequential dependencies; and (iii) Distributional Shift, where rewards are estimated on templates that deviate from the model's natural generative distribution. To address these issues, we propose Pivot-Based Credit Assignment (PiCA), a novel step reward mechanism that reformulates the search trajectory as a sequential process of cumulative search progress. Unlike prior isolated step rewards, PiCA defines process rewards as success probabilities dependent on the historical context based on Potential-Based Reward Shaping (PBRS). This approach identifies pivot steps, which comprise target golden sub-queries and sub-answers derived from historical trajectories, as information peaks that significantly boost the likelihood of a correct final answer. By anchoring these step rewards to the final task objective, PiCA provides dense, pivot-aware and trajectory-dependent guidance while maintaining distributional consistency. Extensive experiments show that PiCA outperforms existing strong baselines across seven knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks, achieving 15.2% and 2.2% improvements for 3B and 7B models. The consistent performance gains across various models show PiCA's robust generalization. The code is available at https://github.com/novdream/PiCA.
Authors: Xia Yang, Xuanyi Zhang, Hao Hu, Feng Ji
Abstract: Large language models now achieve high final-answer accuracy on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, but accuracy alone does not capture reasoning flexibility. We introduce a strategy-level evaluation framework instantiated on 80 AMC 10/12 and AIME problems with 217 AoPS-derived reference strategy families. Model outputs are annotated for strategy identity, validity, and correctness using dual-AI coding with human adjudication. Across four frontier models, we find a pronounced decoupling between answer accuracy and strategy diversity. Under a single-solution prompt, all models achieve high accuracy (95%-100%), but under a multiple-strategy prompt they recover substantially fewer strategies than the human reference set. Gemini, DeepSeek, GPT, and Claude generate 184, 152, 151, and 110 distinct valid strategies, respectively, with the largest gaps in Geometry and Number Theory. The models collectively produce 50 benchmark-novel valid strategies, indicating both incomplete coverage of human strategies and some capacity for alternative reasoning. A repeated-run robustness check on 20 problems shows diminishing gains in discovered strategies, with the strongest model recovering only 39 of 55 AoPS-reference strategies (71%) after three runs. These findings position strategy diversity as a complementary dimension for evaluating mathematical reasoning beyond answer correctness.
Authors: Xin Li, Yan Ke, Longbing Cao
Abstract: ESG-aware portfolio optimization is increasingly important for sustainable capital allocation, yet most learning-based methods still operationalize ESG by appending static scores to the policy observation or reward. This creates a mismatch for sequential control: ESG scores are noisy, provider-dependent, low-frequency, and temporally misaligned with sequential portfolio decisions, while financial evidence suggests that ESG is better treated as a portfolio preference, risk-exposure, or hedge dimension than as a robust alpha factor. We propose to impose ESG constraints without modifying the financial policy's observation or reward, using a Multimodal Action-Conditioned Constraint Field (MACF) that learns mechanism-specific ESG costs from point-in-time multimodal evidence and contemplated portfolio transitions. We then introduce MACF-X, a family of optimizer-specific adapters that converts MACF costs and uncertainties into native constrained-optimization interfaces through a shared slack- and uncertainty-aware pressure layer. Across multiple constraint-integration interfaces, MACF-X reduces tail ESG budget pressure while maintaining competitive financial performance. Ablations show that this improvement depends on dynamic evidence inputs and three-head decomposition, while static ESG-score proxies are nearly indistinguishable from score-shuffled noise baselines.
Authors: Xiangkun Sun, Lingkai Kong, Aoqi Zhang, Liang Zeng, Tonghan Wang
Abstract: Language models can be persuaded to abandon factual knowledge. This vulnerability is central to AI safety, but its internal mechanism remains poorly understood. We uncover a compact causal mechanism for persuasion-induced factual errors. A small set of mid-layer attention heads almost entirely determines the model's answer. These heads write answer options into a low-dimensional polyhedron, with options occupying distinct vertices. Persuasion does not blur belief or merely reduce confidence; it causes a discrete latent jump from the correct-answer vertex to the persuasion-target vertex. We show that decision heads are not reasoning over evidence. Instead, they copy whichever option token their attention selects. Persuasion works by redirecting attention. We isolate a rank-one evidence-routing feature that controls the route. Directly modifying this feature steers the model's choice, and removing it blocks persuasion. We then trace the feature back to a band of shallower attention heads that build it from persuasive keywords in the input. Every step is validated by intervention. This mechanism appears across open-source LLMs and realistic poisoning scenarios such as Generative Engine Optimization, revealing persuasion as a narrow, monitorable circuit.
Authors: Ye Yu, Xiaopeng Yuan, Haibo Jin, Heming Liu, Yaoning Yu, Haohan Wang
Abstract: Recent advances in LLM agents enable systems that autonomously refine workflows, accumulate reusable skills, self-train their underlying models, and maintain persistent memory. However, we show that such self-evolution is often non-monotonic: adapting to new task distributions can progressively degrade previously acquired capabilities across all major evolution channels. We identify this phenomenon as \emph{capability erosion under self-evolution} and show that it consistently emerges across workflow, skill, model, and memory evolution. To mitigate this issue, we propose \emph{Capability-Preserving Evolution} (CPE), a general stabilization principle that constrains destructive capability drift during continual adaptation. Across all four evolution dimensions, CPE consistently improves retained capability stability while preserving adaptation performance. For example, in workflow evolution, CPE improves retained simple-task performance from 41.8\% to 52.8\% under GPT-5.1 optimization while simultaneously achieving stronger complex-task adaptation. Our findings suggest that stable long-horizon self-evolving agents require not only acquiring new capabilities, but also explicitly preserving previously learned ones during continual adaptation.
Authors: Zeyu Li, Lei Li
Abstract: Decision making in large-scale complaint handling systems increasingly relies on heterogeneous evidence, including complaint narratives, screenshots, order metadata, historical interactions, and platform policies. Existing complaint understanding systems mainly perform shallow classification or template matching over isolated modalities, while underutilizing explicit scene structure, rule knowledge, and cross-evidence dependencies. To address this limitation, we present SKG-VLA for multimodal complaint decision making. The core idea is to model each case as a structured complaint scene and represent its decision-relevant semantics with a \emph{Scene Knowledge Graph} (SKG), which organizes complaint entities, evidence items, policy clauses, temporal events, transactional states, and action-relevant relations into a unified graph. Based on SKG, we build a data synthesis pipeline that generates complaint scene descriptions, rule-consistent graph generalizations, question-answer supervision, and decision recommendations. We further construct a large-scale complaint scene dataset with both text-only and multimodal in-domain benchmarks. Finally, we adopt a three-stage training strategy -- domain-adaptive pre-training, task-oriented instruction fine-tuning, and end-to-end multimodal alignment -- to inject structured scene priors into a multimodal decision model. Experiments show that SKG-VLA consistently improves policy-grounded reasoning, complaint decision accuracy, long-tail generalization, and robustness under incomplete evidence.
Authors: Yaofang Zhang, Ken Zhou, Adnan Darwiche
Abstract: Discrete variables are common in many applications, such as probabilistic reasoning, planning and explainable AI. When symbolic reasoning techniques are brought in to bear on these applications, a standard technique for handling discrete variables is to binarize them into Boolean variables to allow the use of Boolean computational machinery such as SAT solvers. This technique can face both computational and semantical challenges though. In this work, we develop a native SAT solver for discrete logic, which is a direct extension of Boolean logic in which variables can take arbitrary values. Our proposed solver has a similar design to Boolean SAT solvers, with ingredients such as unit resolution and clause learning but ones that operate natively on discrete variables. We illustrate the merits of the developed SAT solver by comparing it empirically to CSP solvers applied to discrete CNFs, to Boolean SAT solver applied to binarized CNFs, and to some hybrid solvers.
Authors: Gabriela Dobrita, Simona-Vasilica Oprea, Adela Bara
Abstract: Smart-contract exploits have caused billions of USD in cumulative losses, yet audits remain expensive and slow. Automated tools have emerged to close this gap, but each class has a characteristic failure mode. Static analyzers report findings that frequently fail manual triage at high rates, while large language models (LLMs) hallucinate findings that contradict the source code. Thus, we propose Chaintrix, an end-to-end auditing framework whose central architectural commitment is that every LLM-generated claim must be discharged against a deterministic structural contract representation. We introduce a Cross-Contract Interaction Model (CCIM) that parses Solidity into a structured map of function-level reads, writes, modifiers and resolved cross-contract calls. CCIM serves as the substrate against which all 12 of Chaintrix's deterministic signal engines and the parallel LLM audit pipelines operate. A staged false-positive-reduction pipeline, terminating in a Structural Verdict Engine (SVE) that applies deterministic structural checks against parsed code, filters the merged finding set, with selected high-confidence findings further validated through symbolic execution and fuzz testing. We evaluate Chaintrix on EVMbench, the smart-contract security benchmark by OpenAI, Paradigm, OtterSec. Chaintrix detects 86 of 120 high-severity vulnerabilities (71.7% recall), with 25 audits scoring 100% recall, placing Chaintrix 26 percentage points above the strongest frontier-model baseline.
Authors: Zhaoyang Zhang, Run Shao, Dongyue Wu, Jiajie Teng, Chao Tao, Jingdong Chen, Haifeng Li
Abstract: Understanding why independently trained neural networks from different modalities converge toward shared representations, and where this convergence leads, remains an open question in representation learning. All existing evidence relies on symmetric similarity measures, which can detect convergence but are structurally blind to its direction. We introduce directional convergence analysis using cycle-kNN, an asymmetric alignment measure, applied across dozens of independently trained unimodal models spanning point clouds, vision, and language. We uncover a consistent directional asymmetry: non-language modalities move toward the neighborhood structure of language significantly more than the reverse, and this pattern holds across all model families and scales--yet is entirely invisible to symmetric measures. Mechanistic analysis traces the directionality to feature density asymmetry, whereby language representations occupy the most compact regions of representational space. The Information Bottleneck framework provides a principled interpretation: optimization under compression drives representations toward discrete, compositional structures characteristic of language. We formalize this as the Wittgensteinian Representation Hypothesis: the semantic structure of language is the asymptotic attractor of multimodal representation convergence.
Authors: Kuldeep Singh, Anson Bastos, Isaiah Onando Mulang'
Abstract: Enterprise workloads are dominated by deterministic, structured, and knowledge-dependent tasks operating under strict cost, latency, and reliability constraints. While these are often addressed through large language model (LLM) deployment or distillation into smaller models, we argue this is inefficient, unreliable, and misaligned with enterprise task structures. Instead, AI systems should treat language models as interfaces rather than monolithic engines, externalizing knowledge and computation into dedicated components for greater reliability, scalability, and transparency. Our theoretical evidences show that finite-capacity models cannot fully capture the breadth of knowledge required for enterprise tasks, creating inherent limits to efficiency and interpretability. Building on this, we take the position that language models should primarily be used for structured extraction in deterministic enterprise workflows, while computation and storage are delegated to knowledge bases and symbolic procedures. We formally demonstrate that such modular architectures are more reliable and maintainable than monolithic frameworks, offering a sustainable foundation for enterprise tasks.
Authors: Keqi Han, Songlin Zhao, Yao Su, Lifang He, Carl Yang
Abstract: Transforming neuroimaging data into clinically actionable biomarkers is a knowledge-intensive and labor-intensive process. Standardized workflows such as fMRIPrep have improved robustness and efficiency, but they are statically configured and cannot reason about downstream objectives, deliberate over alternative strategies, or close the loop between intermediate evidence and subsequent decisions in the way a human researcher would. This lack of closed-loop adaptation often leaves domain experts trapped in a cycle of manual trial-and-error to tune parameters and remediate pipeline failures, severely constraining the scalability of clinical biomarker development. To bridge this gap, we introduce NIAgent, a multi-agent system for autonomous end-to-end neuroimaging analysis. Unlike conventional flat tool-calling agents, NIAgent adopts a code-centric execution paradigm where specialist agents collaboratively synthesize and optimize executable programs over composable domain-specific primitives. This design enables robust, long-horizon workflow construction that adapts dynamically to runtime observations. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical verification framework for autonomous quality control, integrating cohort-level metric screening with agentic visual inspection to drive evidence-grounded workflow remediation. Experiments on ADHD-200 and ADNI demonstrate that NIAgent outperforms standard workflow-based baselines in predictive performance while exhibiting sophisticated agentic behaviors, including strategy exploration and adaptive refinement.
Authors: Siyu Wu, Cong Xu, Wei Zhang
Abstract: Knowledge Tracing (KT) models students' knowledge states based on learning interactions to predict performance. While deep learning-based KT models have boosted predictive accuracy, most models rely on deterministic vector embeddings and opaque latent state transitions, limiting interpretability regarding how specific past behaviors influence predictions. To address this limitation, we propose Probabilistic Logical Knowledge Tracing (PLKT), an interpretable KT framework that formulates prediction as a goal-conditioned evidence reasoning process over historical learning behaviors. Instead of representing knowledge states as deterministic vector embeddings, PLKT employs robust Beta-distributed probabilistic embeddings to represent student knowledge states. This probabilistic foundation allows us to model the uncertainty of historical behaviors and perform explicit logical operations (e.g., conjunction), constructing transparent reasoning paths that reveal how specific past interactions contribute to the prediction. Extensive experiments show that PLKT outperforms state-of-the-art KT methods while achieving superior interpretability. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PLKT-D3CE/.
Authors: Tiehan Cui, Peipei Liu, Yanxu Mao, Congying Liu, Mingzhe Xing, Datao You
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed progress in embodied intelligence, a fundamental gap between their inherent probabilistic uncertainty and the strict determinism and verifiable safety required in the physical world. To mitigate this gap, this paper introduces NEXUS, a modular framework designed for continual learning in embodied agents. Different from prior works that treat symbolic artifacts merely as static interfaces, NEXUS leverages them for symbolic grounding and knowledge evolution. The framework explicitly decouples physical feasibility from safety specifications: capability of agents is improved through closed-loop execution feedback, while probabilistic risk assessments are grounded into deterministic hard constraints to establish a rigorous pre-action defense. Experiments on SafeAgentBench demonstrate that NEXUS achieves superior task success rates while effectively refusing unsafe instructions, exhibiting robust defense against adversarial attacks, and progressively improving planning efficiency through knowledge accumulation.
Authors: Prasad Mahadik, Adrians Skapars
Abstract: It is becoming increasingly necessary to have monitors check for harmful behaviors during language model interactions, but text-only monitoring has not been sufficient. This is because models sometimes exhibit strategic deception and sandbagging, changing their behavior during evaluation. This motivates the use of white-box monitors like linear probes, which can read the model internals directly. Currently, such probes can fail under distribution shift, limiting their usefulness in real settings. We study whether there exists a low-dimensional subspace of the model internals that captures harmful behaviors more robustly, while leaving out spuriously correlative features. Inspired by the Assistant Axis and Persona Selection Model, we construct persona axes for deception and sycophancy using contrastive persona prompts. The first principal components, obtained by unsupervised PCA of the persona-specific vectors, cleanly separate harmful and harmless personas. Across 10 evaluation datasets, we show that persona-derived directions transfer non-trivially and probes trained on persona-PC projections generalize better than probes trained on raw activations. We also find that a unified axis consisting of multiple harmful and harmless behaviors improves generalization across behaviors and datasets. Overall, persona vectors provide a useful inductive bias for building more transferable behavior probes.
Authors: Lin Li, Jiawei Huang, Qihao Quan, Dan Li, Boxin Li, Xiao Zhang, Erli Meng, Wenjie Feng, Jian Lou, See-Kiong Ng
Abstract: In this paper, we propose the first VL$\underline{\textbf{M}}$ $\underline{\textbf{a}}$gentic $\underline{\textbf{r}}$easoning framework for few-$\underline{\textbf{s}}$hot multimodal $\underline{\textbf{T}}$ime $\underline{\textbf{S}}$eries $\underline{\textbf{C}}$lassification ($\textbf{MarsTSC}$), which introduces a self-evolving knowledge bank as a dynamic context iteratively refined via reflective agentic reasoning. The framework comprises three collaborative roles: i) Generator conducts reliable classification via reasoning; ii) Reflector diagnoses the root causes of reasoning errors to yield discriminative insights targeting the temporal features overlooked by Generator; iii) Modifier applies verified updates to the knowledge bank to prevent context collapse. We further introduce a test-time update strategy to enable cautious, continuous knowledge bank refinement to mitigate few-shot bias and distribution shift. Extensive experiments across 12 mainstream time series benchmarks demonstrate that $\textbf{MarsTSC}$ delivers substantial and consistent performance gains across 6 VLM backbones, outperforming both classical and foundation model-based time series baselines under few-shot conditions, while producing interpretable rationales that ground each classification decision in human-readable feature evidence.
Authors: Adeela Bashir, Zia Ush Shamszaman, Zhao Song, The Anh Han
Abstract: The growing integration of AI into cybersecurity is reshaping the balance between attackers and defenders. When access to advanced AI-enabled defence tools is uneven, resource-limited defenders may be unable to adopt effective protection, creating persistent system vulnerabilities. We study the impact of differential AI access using an evolutionary game-theoretic model in a finite population. We first show that when high-capability defence is costly, the population is driven toward low-cost, weak-defence behaviour, sustaining attacks and weakening long-run security. To address this problem, we introduce differential access to AI defence tools by allowing defenders to choose between low- and high-capability protection based on their resources. We then examine the role of a small group of committed defenders who always adopt strong defence and influence others through social learning. Although commitment increases the prevalence of strong defence, it alone cannot stabilise secure outcomes due to high defence costs. We therefore incorporate a targeted subsidy to remove the cost disadvantage from committed defenders. Our analysis shows that subsidised commitment significantly increases strong defence adoption, suppresses successful attacks, and improves overall system resilience. Simulations across a broad parameter space confirm that subsidies consistently outperform commitment alone. In addition, social-welfare analysis shows improved defender outcomes while keeping attacker gains low. These findings suggest that targeted support for key defenders can be an effective mechanism for stabilising cybersecurity in AI-driven environments and provide a theoretical bridge between cybersecurity policy, AI governance, and strategic allocation of defensive AI capabilities.
Authors: Yanan Xiao, Yixiang Tang, Zechen Feng, Lu Jiang, Minghao Yin, Pengyang Wang
Abstract: While experience replay is essential for data efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), standard methods treat the replay buffer as a passive memory system, prioritizing samples based on numerical prediction errors rather than their semantic significance. This approach stands in contrast to human learning, which accelerates mastery by actively abstracting fragmented experiences into behavioral rules. To bridge this gap, we propose Neuro-Symbolic Experience Replay (NSER), a framework that transforms experience replay from a passive sample reuse mechanism into an active engine for knowledge construction. Specifically, NSER addresses the incompatibility between linguistic reasoning and numerical optimization through a novel neuro-symbolic grounding pipeline. It leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) in a zero-shot manner to induce candidate behavioral rules from accumulated trajectories, grounds these insights into differentiable first-order logic representations, and utilizes the resulting symbolic structures to dynamically reweight the replay distribution. By allowing abstract knowledge to directly shape policy optimization, NSER achieves consistent superior sample efficiency and convergence speed across reactive, rule-based, and procedural benchmarks.
Authors: Haoqiang Kang, Xiaokang Ye, Yuhan Liu, Siddhant Hitesh Mantri, Lingjun Mao, James Fleming, Drishti Regmi, Lianhui Qin
Abstract: LLM/VLM-based digital agents have advanced rapidly thanks to scalable sandboxes for coding, web navigation, and computer use, which provide rich interactive training grounds. In contrast, embodied agents still lack abundant, diverse, and automatically generated 3D environments for interactive learning. Existing embodied simulators rely on manually crafted scenes or procedural templates, while recent LLM-based 3D generation systems mainly produce static scenes rather than deployable environments with verifiable tasks and standard learning interfaces. We introduce SimWorld Studio, an open-source platform built on Unreal Engine 5 for generating evolving embodied learning environments. At its core is SimCoder, a tool/skill-augmented coding agent that writes and executes engine-level code to construct physically grounded 3D worlds from language/image instructions. SimCoder self-evolves by using verifier feedback (e.g., compilation errors, physics checks, VLM critiques) to revise environments and autonomously add reusable tools and skills to its library. Generated worlds are exported as Gym-style environments for embodied agent learning. SimWorld Studio further enables co-evolution between environment generation and embodied learning: agent performance feedback guides SimCoder to generate adaptive curricula near the learner's capability frontier, so that environments become increasingly challenging as the embodied agent improves. Three case studies on embodied navigation show that self-evolution improves generation reliability, generated environments substantially improve embodied agent performance that generalizes to unseen benchmarks, and co-evolution yields an 18-point success-rate gain over fixed-environment learning and a 40-point gain over an untrained agent.
Authors: Wenxin Tang, Xiang Zhang, Junliang Liu, Jingyu Xiao, Xi Xiao, Jinlong Yang, Yuehe Ma, Zhenyu Liu, Zhengheng Li, Zicheng Wang, Wang Luo, Qing Li, Lei Wang, Peng Xiangli
Abstract: Automated vulnerability detection is a fundamental task in software security, yet existing learning-based methods still struggle to capture the structural dependencies, domain-specific vulnerability knowledge, and complex program semantics required for accurate detection. Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong code understanding ability, but directly prompting them with raw source code often leads to missed vulnerabilities or false alarms, especially when vulnerable and benign functions differ only in subtle semantic details. To address this, we propose VulTriage, a triple-path context augmentation framework for LLM-based vulnerability detection. VulTriage enhances the LLM input through three complementary paths: a Control Path that extracts and verbalizes AST, CFG, and DFG information to expose control and data dependencies; a Knowledge Path that retrieves relevant CWE-derived vulnerability patterns and examples through hybrid dense--sparse retrieval; and a Semantic Path that summarizes the functional behavior of the code before the final judgment. These contexts are integrated into a unified instruction to guide the LLM toward more reliable vulnerability reasoning. Experiments on the PrimeVul pair test set show that VulTriage achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing deep learning and LLM-based baselines on key pair-wise and classification metrics. Further ablation studies verify the effectiveness of each path, and additional experiments on the Kotlin dataset demonstrate the generalization ability of VulTriage under low-resource and class-imbalanced settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/vinsontang1/VulTriage
Authors: Yilin Zhang, Yingkai Hua, Chunyu Wei, Xin Wang, Yueguo Chen
Abstract: Vision-language model (VLM) based web agents demonstrate impressive autonomous GUI interaction but remain vulnerable to deceptive interface elements. Existing approaches either detect deception without task integration or document attacks without proposing defenses. We formalize deception-aware web agent defense and propose DUDE (Deceptive UI Detector & Evaluator), a two-stage framework combining hybrid-reward learning with asymmetric penalties and experience summarization to distill failure patterns into transferable guidance. We introduce RUC (Real UI Clickboxes), a benchmark of 1,407 scenarios spanning four domains and deception categories. Experiments show DUDE reduces deception susceptibility by 53.8% while maintaining task performance, establishing an effective foundation for robust web agent deployment.
Authors: Yuyang Dai, Zheng Chen, Jathurshan Pradeepkumar, Yasuko Matsubara, Jimeng Sun, Yasushi Sakurai, Yushun Dong
Abstract: Epilepsy diagnosis and treatment require evidence-intensive reasoning across heterogeneous clinical knowledge, including biosignal patterns, genetic mechanisms, pharmacogenomics, treatment strategies, and patient outcomes. In this work, we present \textsc{EpiGraph}, a large-scale epilepsy knowledge graph and benchmark for evaluating knowledge-augmented clinical reasoning. \textsc{EpiGraph} integrates 48,166 peer-reviewed papers and seven clinical resources into a heterogeneous graph containing 24,324 entities and 32,009 evidence-grounded triplets across five clinical layers. Built upon this graph, \textsc{EpiBench} defines five clinically motivated tasks spanning clinical decision-making, EEG report generation, pharmacogenomic precision medicine, treatment recommendation, and deep research planning. We evaluate six LLMs under both standard and Graph-RAG settings. Results show that integrating \textsc{EpiGraph} consistently improves performance across all tasks, with the largest gains observed in pharmacogenomic reasoning (+30--41\%). Our findings demonstrate that structured epilepsy knowledge substantially enhances evidence-grounded clinical reasoning and provides a practical benchmark framework for evaluating knowledge-augmented LLMs in real-world neurological settings. Our code is available at: https://github.com/LabRAI/EEG-KG.
Authors: Yi Xiao, Qilong Jia, Hang Fan, Pascal Fua, Robert Jenssen, Xiaosong Ma, Wei Xue
Abstract: Many downstream decisions in complex terrain require fast wind estimates at a small number of user-specified locations and heights for a given forecast valid time, rather than another dense forecast field on a fixed grid. We present WindINR, a latent-state implicit neural representation framework for continuous high-resolution local wind query and sparse-observation correction. WindINR maps static terrain descriptors, a low-resolution background field, and continuous query coordinates to a high-resolution wind state through a latent-conditioned decoder. To enable rapid inference-time correction, WindINR separates reusable representation learning from sample-specific latent-state correction. During training, a privileged encoder infers a reference latent state from high-resolution supervision, a deployable latent predictor estimates an initial latent state from inference-time inputs alone, and their discrepancies are summarized into a dataset-adaptive Gaussian prior over latent corrections. At inference time, within the WindINR module, network weights remain fixed and only the latent state is updated by minimizing a regularized correction objective using sparse observations and their uncertainty. In controlled OSSEs over the Senja region, including a UAV-aided approach scenario and random-observation robustness tests, WindINR improves local high-resolution wind estimates by updating only a compact latent state rather than the full network. The corrected representation remains continuously queryable at arbitrary coordinates and, in our CPU benchmark, yields about a $2.6\times$ online-correction speedup over full-network fine-tuning, suggesting a practical interface between kilometer-scale background products, sparse local observations, and wind queries in complex terrain.
Authors: Djamel Bouchaffra
Abstract: Large language models rely on multihead attention, but interactions among heads remain poorly understood. We apply the Game Theoretic Free Energy Principle (GTFEP): a framework casting multiagent systems as distributed variational inference to analyze attention heads as bounded rational agents. According to GTFEP, each head minimizes its variational free energy, and collective behavior follows a Gibbs distribution over coalition structures whose energy is decomposed into Harsanyi dividends. Using a tractable approximation (uniform prior, deterministic dynamics), coalition free energy reduces to joint Shannon entropy of discretized head outputs (argmax key index). Pairwise dividends become mutual information (nonnegative), while triple dividends correspond to interaction information and can be negative. On BERT, GPT2, and Llama with GSM8K, triple dividends are consistently negative, revealing higher order redundancy. The Nash FEP correspondence guarantees that stationary points of collective free energy are epsilon Nash equilibria; thus, heads with negligible contribution can be pruned with minimal performance loss. Pruning heads with low marginal contribution reduces computational cost with minimal performance loss: for example, pruning 20% of heads in GPT2 reduces FLOPs by 18%, increases throughput by 22%, and raises perplexity only modestly (from 28.4 to 33.4 on GSM8K). Our work shows GTFEP provides a principled foundation for analyzing and optimizing transformer architectures.
Authors: Joohyung Lee, Yi Wang
Abstract: We introduce the concept of weighted rules under the stable model semantics following the log-linear models of Markov Logic. This provides versatile methods to overcome the deterministic nature of the stable model semantics, such as resolving inconsistencies in answer set programs, ranking stable models, associating probability to stable models, and applying statistical inference to computing weighted stable models. We also present formal comparisons with related formalisms, such as answer set programs, Markov Logic, ProbLog, and P-log.
Authors: Michael Bartholomew, Joohyung Lee
Abstract: Recently there has been an increasing interest in incorporating ``intensional'' functions in answer set programming. Intensional functions are those whose values can be described by other functions and predicates, rather than being pre-defined as in the standard answer set programming. We demonstrate that the functional stable model semantics plays an important role in the framework of ``Answer Set Programming Modulo Theories (ASPMT)'' -- a tight integration of answer set programming and satisfiability modulo theories, under which existing integration approaches can be viewed as special cases where the role of functions is limited. We show that ``tight'' ASPMT programs can be translated into SMT instances, which is similar to the known relationship between ASP and SAT.
Authors: Joseph Babb, Joohyung Lee
Abstract: We present Version 2 of system Cplus2ASP, which implements the definite fragment of action language C+. Its input language is fully compatible with the language of the Causal Calculator Version 2, but the new system is significantly faster thanks to modern answer set solving techniques. The translation implemented in the system is a composition of several recent theoretical results. The system orchestrates a tool chain, consisting of f2lp, clingo, iclingo, and as2transition. Under the incremental execution mode, the system translates a C+ description into the input language of iclingo, exploiting its incremental grounding mechanism. The correctness of this execution is justified by the module theorem extended to programs with nested expressions. In addition, the input language of the system has many useful features, such as external atoms by means of Lua calls and the user interactive mode. The system supports extensible multi-modal translations for other action languages, such as B and BC, as well.
Authors: Rishabh Jakhar, Michel Dumontier, Remzi Celebi
Abstract: Extracting multi-step explanations from knowledge graphs poses a combinatorial challenge requiring both heuristic guidance (as candidates proliferate with depth) and credit assignment (as path quality emerges over extended sequences). Frontier LLMs, strong on knowledge/reasoning benchmarks, offer a compelling source of such heuristics, yet their knowledge comes sans guarantees and compositional performance degrades as chains lengthen. We thus present TESSERA, a 3-part neuro-symbolic framework that uses LLMs in a circumscribed role: for local discriminative judgement rather than autonomous multi-step generation; the knowledge graph then defines the hypothesis space enforcing hard structural constraints, and MCTS coordinates the long-horizon search with principled credit assignment via backpropagation. LLMs perform dual roles as a prior policy biasing exploration and a comparative state evaluator supplying reward signals. Evaluation on drug mechanism elucidation across two complementary knowledge graphs demonstrates fidelity to curated biology while surfacing coherent alternative mechanisms, with ablations confirming discriminative contribution from both LLM components. Beyond its current application, our framework offers a general paradigm for compositional reasoning over structured knowledge.
Authors: Yize Li, Junzhi Li, Jason Song, Chuxiong Sun, Rui Wang, Changwen Zheng
Abstract: Tool-integrated reasoning has emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing large language models with external computation, retrieval, and execution capabilities. However, the field still lacks a high-quality and unified evaluation benchmark, and existing TIR evaluations remain limited in dataset quality, task diversity, diagnostic comprehensiveness, and evaluation efficiency. In this work, we introduce TIDE-Bench, a holistic and efficient benchmark for evaluating TIR methods, featuring three key advantages. First, it provides diverse task settings, combining widely used mathematical reasoning and knowledge-intensive QA tasks with two newly designed tasks, namely the tool-grounded experimental design task and the dynamic interactive task, to probe models' abilities in complex tool invocation and multi-tool coordination. Second, TIDE-Bench adopts a comprehensive yet task-aware evaluation protocol, jointly measuring final answer quality, process reliability, tool-use efficiency, and inference cost across heterogeneous task settings. Third, TIDE-Bench constructs high-quality and discriminative evaluation sets by filtering low-discrimination instances from existing datasets, substantially reducing evaluation cost while focusing on more challenging samples. Extensive experiments on multiple foundation models and TIR methods reveal persistent bottlenecks in tool grounding, offering insights for future TIR research.
Authors: Zhen Hang, Yushan Yashengjiang, Junhui Li, Huanshuo Dong, Yang Wei, Zhezheng Hao, Jiangtao Ma, Songlin Bai, Haozhong Kai, Xihang Yue, Gangzong Si, Dongming Jiang, Chao Yao, Zhanhua Hu, Jiangqing Zhang, Pengwei Liu, Yaomin Shen, Xingyu Ren, Lei Liu, Zikang Xu, Han Li, Qingsong Yao, Hande Dong, Hong Wang
Abstract: PDE-to-solver code generation aims to automatically synthesize executable numerical solvers from partial differential equation (PDE) specifications. This task requires not only understanding the mathematical structure of PDEs, but also selecting appropriate discretization schemes and solver configurations, and correctly implementing the resulting formulations in finite-element method (FEM) libraries. Existing code generation benchmarks mainly evaluate syntactic correctness, or success on predefined test cases. To our knowledge, there is currently no publicly available benchmark specifically for PDE-to-solver code generation, and general-purpose code benchmarks do not fully capture the unique challenges of numerical PDE solution, such as ensuring solver accuracy, efficiency, and compatibility with professional FEM libraries. We introduce PDEAgent-Bench, to the best of our knowledge, the first multi-metric, multi-library benchmark for PDE-to-solver code generation. PDEAgent-Bench contains 645 instances across 6 mathematical categories and 11 PDE families, with common FEM libraries for DOLFINx, Firedrake, and deal.II. Each instance provides an agent-facing problem specification, a reference solution on a prescribed evaluation grid, and case-specific accuracy and runtime targets. PDEAgent-Bench adopts a staged evaluation framework in which generated solvers must sequentially pass executability, numerical accuracy, and computational efficiency checks. Experiments with representative LLMs and code agents show that models can often produce runnable code, but their pass rate drops substantially once accuracy and efficiency requirements are enforced. These results indicate that current agents remain limited in producing numerically reliable and efficient PDE solvers, and that PDEAgent-Bench provides a reproducible testbed grounded in the practical requirements of numerical PDE solving.
Authors: Elad Sarafian, Gal Kaplun, Ron Banner, Daniel Soudry, Boris Ginsburg
Abstract: Modern agents built on frontier language models often cannot adapt their weights. What, then, remains trainable? We argue it is the agent's \emph{workspace}, the structured external substrate it reads, writes, and tests; we call its evolution workspace optimization. Workspace optimization targets hard multi-turn environments where a frontier model has strong priors but cannot solve the task in a single shot, so the agent must learn through interaction. We propose a principled way to evolve the workspace, mirroring the structure of weight-space training: artifacts in place of parameters, evidence in place of data, counterexamples in place of losses, and textual feedback in place of gradients. We instantiate the idea in DreamTeam, a multi-agent harness for ARC-AGI-3 whose roles build an executable world model, plan, hypothesize, probe, strategize, and route failures. On the current 25-game ARC-AGI-3 public set under the official scoring protocol and averaged over two independent runs, DreamTeam improves the SOTA protocol-matched agent's score from 36% to 38.4%, while using 31% fewer environment actions per game.
Authors: Timothy Ossowski, Xinchi Liu, Danyal Maqbool, Vaibhav Dhanuka, Sheng Zhang, Hoifung Poon, Majid Afshar, Tyler Bradshaw, Junjie Hu
Abstract: Clinical reasoning agents based on large language models (LLMs) aim to automate tasks such as intensive care unit (ICU) monitoring and patient state tracking from electronic health records (EHRs). Existing systems typically rely on manually curated clinical tools or skills for concepts such as sepsis detection and organ failure assessment. However, maintaining these tool libraries requires substantial expert effort, while zero-shot querying or code generation often produces inefficient and unreliable reasoning chains, especially under institution-specific clinical policies. We introduce CodeClinic, a benchmark built on MIMIC-IV for evaluating whether LLM agents can synthesize and compose reusable clinical skills instead of relying on fixed toolboxes. The benchmark contains two complementary tasks: longitudinal ICU surveillance and compositional information seeking. The longitudinal setting simulates monitoring patient trajectories with structured decisions every four hours across 25 findings and eight clinical families, while the compositional setting spans 63k instances across 259 tasks in nine domains and is stratified by compositional dependency depth to evaluate increasingly complex multi-step reasoning. We further propose an offline autoformalization pipeline that converts natural-language clinical guidelines into reusable and verified Python skill libraries through iterative LLM refinement. Compared with zero-shot code generation, the resulting libraries improve consistency while reducing per-query token usage by up to 40%.
Authors: Ryan Albright, Golam Md Muktadir, Zarif Ikram, S M Jubaer, Mehrab Hossain, Dianbo Liu
Abstract: While extremely powerful and versatile at various tasks, the thinking capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are often put under scrutiny as they sometimes fail to solve problems that humans can systematically solve. However, recent literature focuses on breaking LLM reasoning with increasingly complex problems, and whether an LLM is robust in simple logical reasoning remains underexplored. This paper proposes Absurd World, a benchmarking framework, to test LLMs against altered realism, where scenarios are logically coherent, and humans can easily solve the tasks. Absurd World breaks a real-world model into symbols, actions, sequences, and events, which are automatically altered to create absurd worlds where the logic to solve the tasks remains the same. It evaluates a large collection of models with simple and advanced prompting techniques, and proves that it is an effective tool to determine LLMs' ability to think logically, ignoring the patterns learned from the real world. One can use this framework to extensively test an LLM against a real-world problem to verify whether the LLM's reasoning capability is robust against variations of the task.
Authors: Jia Xiao
Abstract: Unpredictable behavior is often taken as evidence of control, yet stochastic dispersion and structured action control need not coincide. This paper tests whether stochastic sampling can substitute for structured mechanisms that couple reasons, memory, self-state and inhibition to action selection in a language-agent implementation whose control components can be selectively disabled. In a seven-dataset baseline lesion matrix comprising 74,352 calls, the high-stochasticity comparator was more unpredictable than the structured-control variant in 7/7 datasets, whereas targeted reason and veto lesions reduced the expected structured-control profiles in 7/7 datasets each. In a matched-interface control spanning 26,946 generations, the structured agent maintained stronger action-field coupling than all stochastic, post-hoc, scrambled and verbosity controls across every dataset. The primary behavioral test removed free-form trace wording from the evaluation: 57,816 scored records showed the structured-control variant exceeding the high-stochasticity comparator or the reason/veto lesions in 7/7 datasets for all predefined behavioral components. Later open-weight runs extended the no-context controls to Qwen2.5 7B, 14B and 32B and to an independent Mistral-7B family across 20 task families and three agent scaffolds; no-fields, scrambled-context and distribution-matched controls failed to recover structured action control. A three-annotator blinded audit over 1,200 overlap items preserved high agreement. Strict entropy matching, strict token/compute matching and a formal counterfactual-flip stress test did not meet their gates and are treated as limitations. Stochastic unpredictability did not reproduce structured, action-coupled control in this implemented agent family.
Authors: Josefa Lia Stoisser, Marc Boubnovski Martell, Sidsel Boldsen, Kaspar M\"artens, Robert Kitchen
Abstract: As data-science agents shift from co-pilots to auto-pilots, silent misframing becomes a critical failure mode. Agents quietly commit to plausible but unintended task framings, producing clean, executable artifacts that hide their incorrect assessment of the task. Existing benchmarks score whether the pipeline runs, ignoring whether the agent recognized the task was underspecified. We introduce Ambig-DS, two diagnostic suites: one for prediction-target ambiguity (Ambig-DS-Target, 51 tasks built on DSBench, a tabular modeling benchmark) and one for evaluation-objective ambiguity (Ambig-DS-Objective, 61 tasks built on MLE-bench, a Kaggle-style ML competition benchmark), constructed so that scoring uses each source benchmark's original evaluator. For every task we pair the original, fully specified version with an ambiguous variant produced by controlled edits; a human-and-LLM verification pipeline confirms each variant admits multiple plausible interpretations with decision-relevant consequences. The suites are analyzed independently and ambiguity lowers performance in both. Across five agents spanning efficient to frontier-class models, we find in our controlled diagnostic setting: (i) failures are silent commitments: wrong-target submissions on Target, wrong-metric or non-committal baseline submissions on Objective, rather than execution errors; (ii) allowing the agent to ask one clarifying question recovers much of the loss under idealized conditions, suggesting missing framing information drives a substantial part of the observed degradation; but (iii) agents cannot reliably tell when to use it: permissive prompts induce over-asking on clear tasks, while conservative prompts induce silent defaulting on ambiguous ones. Recognizing target and objective underspecification, not pipeline execution, is the bottleneck missing from standard DS-agent evaluations.
Authors: Katherine M. Collins, Marlene Berke, Ilia Sucholutsky, Ayman Ali, Adrian Weller, Timothy J. O'Donnell, Tyler Brooke-Wilson, Lionel Wong, Joshua B. Tenenbaum
Abstract: Medicine is rife with high-stakes uncertainty. Doctors routinely make clinical judgments and decisions that juggle many fundamental unknowns, like predictions about what might be causing a patients' symptoms or decisions about what treatment to try next. Despite increasing interest in developing AI systems that aid or even replace doctors in clinical settings, current systems struggle with calibrated reasoning under uncertainty, and are often deeply opaque about their reasoning. We propose a framework for AI systems that can make practically useful but formally transparent clinical predictions under uncertainty. Given a clinical situation, our framework (MedMSA) uses language models to retrieve relevant prior knowledge, but constructs a formal probabilistic model to support calibrated and verifiable inferences under uncertainty. We show how an initial proof-of-concept of this framework can be used for differential diagnosis, producing an uncertainty-weighted list of potential diagnoses that could explain a patients' symptoms, and discuss future applications and directions for applying this framework more generally for safe clinical collaborations.
Authors: Federico Tomasi, Dmitrii Moor, Alice Wang, Mounia Lalmas
Abstract: Discrete diffusion models generate structured sequences by progressively unmasking tokens, but enforcing global property constraints during generation remains an open challenge. We propose primal-dual guided decoding, an inference-time method that formulates constrained generation as a KL-regularised optimisation problem and solves it online via adaptive Lagrangian multipliers. At each denoising step, the method modifies token logits through an additive, constraint-dependent bias, with multipliers updated by mirror descent based on constraint violation. The bias arises as the optimal KL-regularised projection of the constraint, so the constrained distribution remains as close as possible to the model's unconstrained distribution while still satisfying the constraint. The method requires no retraining and no additional model evaluations beyond standard sampling, supports multiple simultaneous constraints, and provides formal bounds on constraint violation. We evaluate our approach on topical text generation, molecular design, and music playlist generation, showing that a single algorithm instantiated via domain-specific scoring functions improves constraint satisfaction while preserving relevant domain-specific quality metrics.
Authors: Dima Galat, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu
Abstract: This paper describes our system for classifying psychological defense mechanisms in emotional support dialogues using the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales (DMRS), placing second (F1 0.406) among 64 teams. A central insight is that defense mechanisms are defined by what is absent: missing affect, blocked cognition, denied reality. We encode this as an affect-cognition integration spectrum in prompt-level clinical rules, which account for the largest single gain (+11.4pp F1). Our architecture is a multi-phase deliberative council of Gemini 2.5 agents where class-specific advocates rate evidence strength rather than voting, achieving F1 0.382 with no fine-tuning - a top-5 result on its own. We find, however, that the council is confidently wrong about minority classes: 59-80% of stable minority predictions are incorrect, driven by a systematic "L7 attractor" in which emotional content defaults to the majority class. A targeted override ensemble from three fine-tuned Qwen3.5 models applies 16 overrides (+2.4pp), selected by a structured multi-agent system (builder, critic, regression guard) that produced a larger F1 gain in one iteration than 8 prior attempts combined.
Authors: Ziquan Wei, Tingting Dan, Guorong Wu
Abstract: Despite the central role of sensor-derived measurements such as imaging traits and plasma biomarkers in biomedical research and clinical practice, existing generative models for disease prediction largely depend on event-level representations from hospital and registry data. Given the multi-factorial nature of human disease, the absence of explicit modeling of social determinants of health (SDoH), even in the limited form of ICD-coded proxies (chapters Z and V--Y in ICD-10), limits the capacity for personalized disease modeling and clinical decision support. To address this limitation, we propose a generative model with ICD-coded proxies of SDoH for \textit{in silico} modeling of disease reasoning, a conditioned latent diffusion framework that establishes the connection between multi-organ sensor data with tokenized healthcare events. Specifically, we introduce a novel geometric diffusion model to characterize the temporal evolution of complex data representation such as brain networks (region-to-region connectivity encoded in a graph), in parallel with diffusion models for tabular data from other organ systems. Together, we integrate the generative model with digitalized SDoH proxies (coined \modelname{}) for simulated intervention and reasoning of future disease trajectories. We conduct extensive experiments on the UK Biobank (UKB) dataset, which contains organ-specific imaging traits, including brain (44,834), heart (23,987), liver (28,722), and kidney (32,155), along with nearly 500k medical history sequences (age range: 25$\sim$89 years). Our \modelname{} achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art human disease autoregressive models and imaging trait generative baselines.
Authors: Paul Kobialka, Andrea Pferscher, Francesco Leofante, Erika \'Abrah\'am, Silvia Lizeth Tapia Tarifa, Einar Broch Johnsen
Abstract: Attribution techniques explain the outcome of an AI model by assigning a numerical score to its inputs. So far, these techniques have mainly focused on attributing importance to static input features at a single point in time, and thus fail to generalize to sequential decision-making settings. This paper fills this gap by introducing techniques to generate attribution-based explanations for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We give a formal characterization of what attributions should represent in MDPs, focusing on explanations that assign importance scores to both individual states and execution paths. We show how importance scores can be computed by leveraging techniques for strategy synthesis, enabling the efficient computation of these scores despite the non-determinism inherent in an MDP. We evaluate our approach on five case-studies, demonstrating its utility in providing interpretable insights into the logic of sequential decision-making agents.
Authors: Gurusha Juneja, Dylan Lu, Saaket Agashe, Parth Diwane, Edward Gunn, Jayanth Srinivasa, Gaowen Liu, William Yang Wang, Yali Du, Xin Eric Wang
Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to track others epistemic state, makes humans efficient collaborators. AI agents need the same capacity in multi agent settings, yet existing benchmarks mostly test literal ToM by asking direct belief questions. The ability act optimally on implicit beliefs in embodied environments, called functional ToM, remains largely untested. We introduce EnactToM, an evolving benchmark of 300 embodied multi-agent tasks set in a 3D household with partial observability, private information, and constrained communication. Each task is formally verified for solvability and required epistemic depth, and new tasks are generated increase difficulty as models improve. On the hard split, all seven evaluated frontier models score 0.0% Pass^3 on functional task completion, while averaging 45.0% on literal belief probes. Manual analysis traces 93% of sampled failures to epistemic coordination breakdowns such as withheld information, ignored partner constraints, and misallocated messages, providing a concrete target for future work.
Authors: Aman Singh, Tokunbo Ogunfunmi, Sanjiv Das
Abstract: While machine learning has revolutionized many fields such as natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision, its impact on time-series forecasting is still widely disputed, especially in the finance domain. This paper compares forecasting performance on U.S. Treasury yield curve data across econometrics/time-series analysis, classical machine learning, and deep learning methods, using daily data over 47 years. The Treasury yield curve is important because it is widely used by every participant in the bond markets, which are larger than equity markets. We examine a variety of methods that have not been tested on yield curve forecasting, especially deep learning algorithms. The algorithms include the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model and its extensions, naive benchmarks, ensemble methods, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and multiple transformers built for forecasting. ARIMA and naive econometric models outperform other models overall, except in one time block. Of the machine learning methods, TimeGPT, LGBM and RNNs perform the best. Furthermore, the paper explores whether stationary or nonstationary data are more appropriate as input to deep learning models.
Authors: Rafael C. T. Oliveira
Abstract: The Metacognitive Probe is an exploratory five-task, 15-slot diagnostic that decomposes an LLM's confidence behaviour into five behaviourally-distinct dimensions: confidence calibration (T1-CC), epistemic vigilance (T2-EV), knowledge boundary (T3-KB), calibration range (T4-CR), and reasoning-chain validation (T5-RCV). It is evaluated on N=8 frontier models and N=69 humans. The instrument is motivated by Flavell (1979) and Nelson and Narens (1990) but operates on observable confidence-correctness alignment; it is not a validated cross-species metacognition scale, and the pre-specified human developmental hypothesis was falsified. Composite benchmarks (MMLU, BIG-Bench, HELM, GPQA) ask whether a model produces a correct response. They are silent on whether the model knows when its response is wrong. A model can score 80 on a composite calibration benchmark and still be wildly overconfident in narrow pockets the aggregate cannot surface. The Metacognitive Probe surfaces those pockets. Our headline is a 47-point within-model dissociation in Gemini 2.5 Flash: panel-best within-task calibration (T1-CC = 88; Spearman rho = +0.551, 95% CI [+0.14, +0.80], p = 0.005) and panel-worst cross-task difficulty prediction (T4-CR = 41; sigma_conf = 1.4 across twelve factoids).
Authors: Gideon Popoola, John Sheppard
Abstract: Machine learning algorithms are being used in high-stakes decisions, including those in criminal justice, healthcare, credit, and employment. The research community has responded with two largely independent research fields: \emph{algorithmic fairness}, which targets equitable outcomes, and \emph{explainable AI} (XAI), which targets interpretable reasoning. This survey identifies and maps a novel blind spot at their intersection, which is a model that can satisfy every standard fairness criterion in its outputs while being profoundly unfair in its \emph{reasoning process}. We refer to this as the procedural bias, and mitigating it requires treating the fairness of explanations as a distinct object of scientific study. To our knowledge, we provide the first unified theoretical and literature review of this emerging field and elucidate the drawbacks of post-hoc explainers in certifying explanation fairness. Our central contribution is a \emph{conditional invariance framework} formalizing explanation fairness as the requirement that explanations should be indifferent regardless of the protected attributes $ P(E(X) \in \cdot \mid X_\text{rel} = x_\text{rel},\, A = a) = P(E(X) \in \cdot \mid X_\text{rel} = x_\text{rel},\, A = b)$ for all task-relevant $x$, a single principle from which all existing explanation fairness metrics emerge as partial operationalizations. We introduce a seven-dimensional taxonomy, identify three generative mechanisms of explanation inequity (representation-driven, explanation-model mismatch, actionability-driven), and propose a canonical six-step evaluation workflow for operationalizing explanation fairness audits in practice.
Authors: Chen Li, Zhantao Yang, Fangyi Chen, Han Zhang, Anudeepsekhar Bolimera, Marios Savvides
Abstract: Long-horizon reasoning requires deciding not only what actions to take, but how deeply to commit before the next observation. We formalize this as \emph{commitment depth}: the number of primitive actions executed open-loop between replans. Commitment depth induces a trade-off between replanning cost and compounding execution error, yet most existing long-horizon systems fix it as a hand-designed scalar. In this work, we instead treat commitment depth as a learnable, state-conditioned variable of the policy itself. We instantiate this within a model-native vision--language policy that jointly predicts both what to execute and for how long. Across Sliding Puzzle and Sokoban, the resulting adaptive policy Pareto-dominates every non-degenerate fixed-depth baseline, achieving up to 12.5 percentage points higher solve rate while using approximately 25\% fewer primitive actions per episode. Despite using a 7B backbone, our method outperforms GPT-5.5 and Claude Sonnet on both tasks, while every tested open-weight vision--language model achieves 0\% zero-shot success. We further present a theoretical analysis showing that, under the standard commitment-depth surrogate, state-conditioned commitment strictly dominates any fixed depth whenever the locally optimal depth varies across states.
Authors: Su-Hyeon Kim, Yo-Sub Han
Abstract: Large language models from different families use different hidden dimensions, tokenizers, and training procedures, making behavioral directions difficult to compare or transfer across models. We introduce an anchor-projection framework that maps hidden representations from each model into a shared anchor coordinate space (ACS). Behavioral directions extracted from source models are projected into ACS and averaged into a canonical direction. For a new model, the canonical direction is reconstructed into its native hidden space using only anchor activations, without fine-tuning or target-specific direction extraction. We evaluate five instruction-tuned model families and ten behavioral axes. We find that same-axis directions align tightly across the Llama-Qwen-Mistral-Phi (LQMP) cluster in ACS. This shared structure transfers to downstream tasks. For the aligned LQMP cluster, held-out targets achieve (0.83) ten-way detection accuracy and (0.95) mean binary AUROC, while canonical steering induces refusal-rate shifts of up to +0.46% under distribution shift. Sensitivity analyses show that two source models and small anchor pools already suffice to approximate transferable directions. Overall, ACS provides a novel perspective on cross-family interpretability, revealing that representation-level transfer remains robust across model families.
Authors: Junjian Wang, Xin Zhou, Qiran Xu, Kun Zhan
Abstract: While reasoning has become a central capability of large language models (LLMs), the reasoning patterns required for different scenarios are often misaligned. Mathematical reasoning typically relies on intrinsic logic to solve closed-world problems in a single response, whereas agentic reasoning requires not only internal reasoning but also multi-turn interaction with external environments, interleaving thought and action. This misalignment prevents mathematical and agentic reasoning from effectively benefiting from each other, often yielding unstable reasoning behavior and only limited performance gains under multi-task learning. In this paper, we propose M2A, a novel paradigm that synergizes mathematical and agentic reasoning via model merging. To avoid overfitting to superficial reasoning patterns under joint training, M2A operates directly in parameter space: it identifies the feature subspace critical for agent behavior, and merges the mathematical reasoning task vector only along its null space, thereby injecting reasoning capability along directions that do not perturb agent behavior. Unlike SFT or RL, M2A requires no additional gradient-update and exposes the merging coefficient as a simple knob for controlling reasoning length. Experiments in a challenging real-world coding agent setting show that our method effectively extends agentic reasoning depth and delivers substantial performance improvements. Applied to a fine-tuned Qwen3-8B, M2A improves its SWE-Bench Verified resolved rate from 44.0% to 51.2% without retraining the model. Code is available at https://github.com/laplucky/M2A.git.
Authors: Hao Liu, Jicheng Liu
Abstract: A vision-language model can look at a knot diagram and report what it sees, yet fail to act on that structure. KnotBench pairs an 858,318-image corpus from 1,951 prime-knot prototypes (crossing numbers 3 to 19) with a protocol whose answers are checked against Regina's canonical knot signature. Its 14 tasks span four families, equivalence judgment, move prediction, identification, and cross-modal grounding; an image-versus-symbol split locates failures along the perception-operation gap. We score Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT-5, each with and without thinking, under a 64K output-token budget matched on both vendors. Across 56 (task, model) cases, 15 sit at or below a random baseline and 8 of 14 tasks have a best score under 1.5x random. On diagram-to-symbol transcription, no model produces a strictly correct string, and permissive Regina decoding recovers the knot in 0 to 4 of 100 items. Thinking-mode reasoning lifts overall accuracy by 1.65 points for Claude and 9.25 points for GPT-5, narrowing the gap only modestly. Read together, the four families suggest current vision-language models hold features of a diagram but lack apparatus to simulate moves on those features.
Authors: Xuanchen Li, Yuheng Lu, Chenrui Cui, Tianrui Wang, Zikang Huang, Yu Jiang, Long Zhou, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
Abstract: Audio and vision provide complementary evidence for audio-visual question answering, yet current audio-visual large language models may suffer from cross-modal interference: information from one modality misguides the interpretation of another, thereby inducing hallucinations. We attribute this issue to uncontrolled cross-modal interactions during intermediate reasoning. To mitigate this, we propose Separate First, Fuse Later (SFFL), an audio-visual reasoning framework designed to reduce cross-modal interference. SFFL enforces modality-specific chain-of-thought reasoning, producing separate audio and visual reasoning traces and integrating evidence for answering. We construct modality-preference labels via a data pipeline under different modality input settings. We use these labels as an auxiliary reward in reinforcement learning to encourage a instance-dependent preference for modality cues when answering. We further introduce a modality-specific reasoning mechanism that preserves modality isolation during the separated reasoning stage while enabling full access to cross-modal information at the evidence fusion stage. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in both accuracy and robustness, yielding an average relative gain of 5.16\% on general AVQA benchmarks and 11.17\% on a cross-modal hallucination benchmark.
Authors: Zhen Zhang, Wanjing Zhou, Juncheng Li, Hao Fei, Jun Wen, Wei Ji
Abstract: Compared with individual agents, large language model based multi-agent systems have shown great capabilities consistently across diverse tasks, including code generation, mathematical reasoning, and planning, etc. Despite their impressive performance, the effectiveness and robustness of these systems heavily rely on their communication topology, which is often fixed or generated in a single step. This restricts fine-grained structural exploration and flexible composition, resulting in excessive token utilization on simple tasks while limiting capability on complicated tasks. To mitigate this challenge, we introduce RADAR, a redundancy-aware and query-adaptive generative framework that actively reduce communication overhead. Motivated by recent progress in conditional discrete graph diffusion models, we formulate communication topology design as a step-by-step generation process, guided by the effective size of the graph. Comprehensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that RADAR consistently outperforms recent baselines, achieving higher accuracy, lower token consumption, and greater robustness across diverse scenarios. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/cszhangzhen/RADAR.
Authors: Mingxiong Lin, Zhangquan Gong, Maowen Tang, Qian Li, Chuangchuang Wang, Jian Ma, Sutian Huang, Kai Tang, Haonan Lu
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become the standard paradigm for LLM mathematical reasoning, where Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) serves as the mainstream algorithm. We point out two understudied inefficiencies existing in GRPO. First, the fixed KL penalty coefficient overly restricts policy exploration at stages where the model requires significant deviation from the reference policy. Second, uniform sampling of training questions ignores that moderately difficult problems provide the most informative gradient signals for optimization. We propose Exploration-Prioritized Policy Optimization (EXPO) with two lightweight plug-in modules. The Accuracy-Conditioned KL Scaling (AKL) dynamically adjusts KL regularization strength through a smooth nonlinear function of batch average accuracy, relaxing the penalty when the model underperforms and strengthening it when the model achieves good results. The Gaussian Curriculum Sampling (GCS) assigns sampling weights to questions following a Gaussian distribution centered at moderate accuracy around 0.5, focusing training on the model's learning frontier. We conduct extensive experiments on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B and Qwen3-8B-Base over six mathematical reasoning benchmarks. The results show EXPO steadily surpasses vanilla GRPO. It obtains an absolute gain of 13.34 on AIME 2025 pass@32, rising from 63.33 percent to 76.67 percent, and achieves an average pass@32 improvement of 2.66 on the 8B model. The much larger performance gains on pass@32 compared with pass@1 demonstrate that EXPO effectively enlarges the model's exploration boundary under a fixed inference cost budget.
Authors: Dongming Jiang, Yi Li, Guanpeng Li, Qiannan Li, Bingzhe Li
Abstract: Memory retrieval in agentic large language model (LLM) systems is often treated as a static lookup problem, relying on flat vector search or fixed binary relational graphs. However, fixed graph structures cannot capture the varying strength, confidence, and query-dependent relevance of relationships between events. In this paper, we propose HAGE, a weighted multi-relational memory framework that reconceptualizes retrieval as sequential, query-conditioned traversal over a unified relational memory graph. Memory is organized as relation-specific graph views over shared memory nodes, where each edge is associated with a trainable relation feature vector encoding multiple relational signals. Given a query, an LLM-based classifier identifies the relational intent, and a routing network dynamically modulates the corresponding dimensions of the edge embedding. Traversal scores are computed via a learned combination of semantic similarity and these query-conditioned edge representations. This allows memory traversal to prioritize high-utility relational paths while softly suppressing noisy or weakly relevant connections. Beyond adaptive traversal, HAGE further introduces a reinforcement learning-based training framework that jointly optimizes routing behavior and edge representations using downstream tasks. Finally, empirical results demonstrate improved long-horizon reasoning accuracy and a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off compared to state-of-the-art agentic memory systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/FredJiang0324/HAGE_MVPReview.
Authors: Boyang Shen, Kaixiang Yang, Hao Wang, Qiuyu Yu, Qiang Xie, Qiang Li, Zhiwei Wang
Abstract: Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models typically treat the deepest representation of a vision-language backbone as universally optimal for action prediction. However, robotic manipulation is composed of many frequent closed-loop spatial adjustments, for which excessive abstraction may waste computation and weaken low-level geometric cues essential for precise control. Existing early-exit strategies attempt to reduce computation by stopping at predefined layers or applying heuristic rules such as action consistency, but they do not directly answer when a representation is actually sufficient for action. In this paper, we present LoopVLA, a recurrent VLA architecture that jointly learns representation refinement, action prediction, and sufficiency estimation. LoopVLA iteratively applies a shared Transformer block to refine multimodal tokens, and at each iteration produces both a candidate action and a sufficiency score that estimates whether further refinement is necessary. By sharing parameters across iterations, LoopVLA decouples refinement from absolute layer indices and grounds sufficiency estimation in the evolving representation itself. Since sufficiency has no direct supervision, we introduce a self-supervised distribution alignment objective, where intermediate confidence scores are trained to match the relative action quality across refinement steps, thereby linking sufficiency learning to policy optimization signals. Experiments on LIBERO, LIBERO-Plus, and VLA-Arena show that LoopVLA pushes the efficiency-performance frontier of VLA policies, reducing parameters by 45% and improving inference throughput by up to 1.7 times while matching or outperforming strong baselines in task success.
Authors: Ziqi Gao, Chenyi Zi, Zijing Liu, Ziqiao Meng, Yu Li, Jia Li
Abstract: Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are fundamental to cellular function and disease mechanisms. Current learning-based PPI predictors focus on learning powerful protein representations but neglect designing specialized classification heads. They mainly rely on generic aggregating methods like concatenation or dot products, which lack biological insight. Motivated by the biological "L3 rule", where multiple length-3 paths between a pair of proteins indicate their interaction likelihood, our study addresses this gap by designing a biologically informed PPI classifier. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that popular PPI datasets strongly support the L3 rule. We propose an L3-path-regularized graph prompt learning method called L3-PPI, which can generate a prompt graph with virtual L3 paths based on protein representations and controls the number of paths. L3-PPI reformulates the classification of protein embedding pairs into a graph-level classification task over the generated prompt graph. This lightweight module seamlessly integrates with PPI predictors as a plug-and-play component, injecting the interaction prior of complementarity to enhance performance. Extensive experiments show that L3-PPI achieves superior performance enhancements over advanced competitors.
Authors: Leonardo Hernandez Cano, Ivan Zareski, Luisa El Amouri, Pinzhe Zhao, Max Mascini, Emanuele Sansone, Yewen Pu, Bonan Zhao, Marta Kryven
Abstract: A core challenge in program synthesis is online library learning: the incremental acquisition of reusable abstractions under uncertainty about future task demands. Existing algorithms treat library learning as retrospective compression over a static task distribution, where the learned library is determined by the corpus of past tasks. However, real-world learning domains are often non-stationary, with tasks arising from a generative process that evolves over time. We propose and test the hypothesis that in non-stationary domains human library learning selects abstractions prospectively: targeting compression of future tasks. We study this question using the Pattern Builder Task, a visual program synthesis paradigm in which participants construct increasingly complex geometric patterns from a small set of primitives, transformations, and custom helpers that carry forward across trials. Using this task, we conduct two experiments with complementary latent curricula, designed to dissociate between behaviors consistent with prospective compression, and alternative library learning accounts. Using six computational models spanning online library learning strategies, we show that human abstraction behavior reflects sensitivity to latent, non-stationary structure in the task-generating process. This behavior is consistent with prospective compression, and cannot be captured by existing retrospective compression-based algorithms, or inductive biases modeled by LLM-based program synthesis.
Authors: Fangzhao Zhang, Sungyoon Kim, Erica Zhang, Yiqi Jiang, Mert Pilanci
Abstract: Mode connectivity has been widely studied, yet the role of the optimizer remains underexplored. We revisit it through optimizer-induced implicit regularization, asking how connectivity behaves when restricted to solutions constrained by a given optimizer. For two-layer ReLU networks, we show that solutions from a single optimizer -- AdamW, Muon, or others in the Lion-$\mathcal{K}$ family -- form a connected set at sufficiently large width, a result not implied by prior work. We then characterize how optimizer-induced regions interact: at large width two different regions can be disjoint or overlap depending on regularization, while in our small-width example AdamW and Muon converge to disconnected zero-loss components separated by a provable loss barrier. Empirically, in GPT-2 pretraining, we observe same-optimizer paths preserve each model's spectrum while cross-optimizer paths traverse a smooth transition. Our results reveal optimizer-dependent structure beyond classical mode connectivity literature.
Authors: Haojie Rao (School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China), Kun Li (School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China), Yida Xiong (School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China), Jiameng Chen (School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China), Wenbin Hu (School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China), Yizhen Zheng (Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Monash University, Victoria, Australia), Jiajun Yu (College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China), Duanhua Cao (School of Life Sciences and Technology, Tongji University, Shanghai, China)
Abstract: Conditional molecular optimization aims to edit a molecule to realize a specified property shift. In practice, structurally similar molecule data is scarce, while decisions are inherently action-level: at each step, the system must select one local structural edit from a candidate set that is strictly filtered by chemical feasibility rules. This level mismatch between supervision and decision makes oracle-in-the-loop search unstable in molecular optimization. Regressing on property differences between molecule pairs improves data efficiency but relies on oracle-in-the-loop search, entangling transformation effects with global context and providing limited guidance for selecting the next feasible edit, often resorting to oracle-in-the-loop search. For this reason, we propose a response-oriented discrete edit optimization approach comprising two tightly coupled components: a single-step molecular edit response predictor (SMER) and a multi-step planner that composes local predictions into optimization trajectories via guided tree search (SMER-Opt). The approach learns a directional evaluation model over edit actions to support constraint-aware planning. It mines weakly related molecule pairs and decomposes their structural differences into minimal edit units, turning endpoint property annotations into process-level supervision and yielding reusable, transferable action primitives. A directional edit evaluator then scores feasible candidate edits by their likelihood of moving the molecule toward the desired property change, substantially reducing dependence on external evaluator queries at decision time. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SMER.
Authors: Hangchen Liu, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang, Jiewen Deng, Weiwei Ye, Yoshihide Sekimoto
Abstract: Time series analysis underpins forecasting, monitoring, and decision making in domains such as finance and weather, where solving a task often requires both numerical accuracy and contextual reasoning. Recent progress has moved from specialized neural predictors to approaches built on LLMs and foundation models that can reason over time series inputs and use external tools. However, most such systems remain execution-centric: they focus on solving the current instance but learn little from exploratory execution. This is especially limiting in verifiable numeric settings, where multiple candidate executions and tool-use procedures may all be task-valid yet differ sharply in quantitative quality, and where early success can trigger tool-prior collapse that suppresses further exploration. To address this limitation, we present TimeClaw, an exploratory execution learning framework that turns exploratory execution into reusable hierarchical distilled experience through a four-stage loop: Explore, Compare, Distill, and Reinject. TimeClaw combines metric-supervised exploratory execution learning, task-aware tool dropout, and hierarchical distilled experience for inference-time reinjection, while keeping the base model frozen and avoiding online test-time adaptation. In an MTBench-aligned evaluation with 17 tasks that span finance and weather prediction and reasoning tasks, TimeClaw delivers consistent gains over the baselines. These results suggest that, for scientific systems, the bottleneck is not only execution-time capability, but how exploratory experience is compared, distilled, and reused.
Authors: Ruiyi Yang, Lihuan Li, Hao Xue, Flora D. Salim
Abstract: Compositional spatiotemporal reasoning often requires a system to invoke multiple heterogeneous specialists, such as geometric, temporal, topological, and trajectory agents. A central question is how such a system should route among specialists when execution does not simply succeed or fail, but fails in qualitatively different ways. Existing tool-augmented and multi-agent LLM systems typically leave this routing decision implicit in language generation, making recovery ad hoc, difficult to interpret, and hard to optimize. This paper presents STAR (Spatio-Temporal Agent Router), a failure-aware routing framework that externalizes inter-agent control as a state-conditioned transition policy over the current agent, task type, and typed execution status. At the center of STARis an agent routing matrix that combines expert-specified nominal routes with recovery transitions learned from execution traces. Because the matrix conditions on distinct failure states, the router can respond differently to malformed outputs, missing dependencies, and tool--query mismatches, rather than collapsing them into a generic retry signal. Specialists execute through a tool-grounded extract--compute--deposit protocol and write intermediate results to a shared blackboard for downstream fusion. Results prove that retaining unsuccessful traces during training enlarges the support of the routing policy on error states, enabling recovery transitions that success-only training cannot represent. Across three spatiotemporal benchmarks and eight backbone LLMs, STAR improves over multiple baselines with the clearest gains on queries whose execution deviates from the nominal routing path. Router-specific ablations and recovery analyses further show that typed failure-aware routing, rather than specialist composition alone, is a key factor for these improvements.
Authors: Shijun Lei, Quang Nguyen, Swapneel S Mehta, Zeping Li, Huichuan Fu, Xiaolong Zheng, Siki Chen, Yunji Liang, Philip Torr, Zhenfei Yin
Abstract: Agent-based modeling (ABM) has long been used in economics to study human behavior, and large language model (LLM) agents now enable new forms of social and economic simulation. While prior work has discovered strategic deception by LLM agents in financial trading and auction markets, e-commerce remains underexplored despite its distinctive information asymmetry: sellers privately observe product quality, whereas buyers rely on advertised claims and reputation signals. We introduce TruthMarketTwin, a controlled simulation framework for studying LLM-agent behavior in e-commerce markets. The framework is one of the first to model bilateral trade under asymmetric information sharing, where agents make strategic listing, purchasing, rating, and recourse-related decisions to optimize seller profit and buyer utility. We find that LLM agents released into traditional markets autonomously exploit weaknesses in reputation-based governance, while warrant enforcement reduces deception and reshapes strategic reasoning. Our results position LLM-agent simulation as a tool for studying institution-governed autonomous markets.
Authors: Ruiyi Yang, Zechen Li, Hao Xue, Imran Razzak, Flora D. Salim
Abstract: Self-evolving language-model agents must decide what to learn next and how to preserve what they have learned across iterations. Existing systems typically carry this cross-iteration knowledge as natural-language feedback, flat episodic memory, or implicit reinforcement signals, none of which cleanly supports a frozen weak backbone at inference time. This paper introduces MAGE (Multi-Agent Graph-guided Evolution), a framework that externalizes self-knowledge into a four-subgraph co-evolutionary knowledge graph. Its experience subgraph stores both teacher-written failure corrections and the learner's own past correct reasoning traces, which are retrieved as task-conditioned guidance for a frozen execution model. During evolution, the graph, a task-level search bandit, and a skill-level routing bandit are updated from the same reward stream, while the learner's backbone remains unchanged. We further provide structural analysis showing how append-only memory growth, bounded curriculum coverage, and task-filtered retrieval together support stable improvement of the retrieval substrate for frozen-learner evolution. Across nine benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, multi-hop and open-domain question answering, spatio-temporal analysis, financial numerical reasoning, medical multiple-choice, an open-world survival game, and web navigation, MAGE achieves strong performance against prompt-based frozen-backbone baselines. Ablations show that self-harvested success traces and teacher-written corrections are complementary, with success memories contributing most on reasoning-template-heavy tasks and corrective memories supporting harder composition and interaction settings.
Authors: Zeli Liu, Jiancheng Zhang, Cong Liu, Yinglun Zhu
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) require reliable evaluation from pre-training to test-time scaling, making evaluation a recurring rather than one-off cost. As model scales grow and target tasks increasingly demand expert annotators, both the compute and labeling costs needed for each evaluation rise rapidly. Active testing aims to alleviate this bottleneck by approximating the evaluation result from a small but informative subset of the evaluation pool. However, existing approaches primarily target classification and break down on generative tasks. We introduce a novel active testing algorithm tailored to generative tasks. Our method leverages semantic entropy from surrogate models to stratify the evaluation pool and then conducts approximate Neyman allocation based on signals extracted from these surrogates. Across multiple language and multimodal benchmarks and a range of surrogate-target model pairs, our method significantly improves on baselines and closely tracks Oracle-Neyman, delivering up to 28\% MSE reduction over Uniform Sampling and an average of 22.9\% budget savings.
Authors: Hongqin Lyu, Yonghao Wang, Zhiteng Chao, Tiancheng Wang, Huawei Li
Abstract: Assertion-based Verification (ABV) is essential for ensuring that hardware designs conform to their intended specifications. However, existing automated assertion-generation approaches, such as LLM-based frameworks, often generate large numbers of redundant assertions, which significantly degrade simulation efficiency. To mitigate the simulation overhead caused by redundant assertions, this paper proposes Arcane, an efficient assertion reduction framework. It integrates a two-tier assertion clustering approach for accurate semantic classification of large assertion sets, and employs Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to explore optimal rule-application sequences for efficient assertion reduction. The experimental results on Assertionbench [20] show that Arcane achieves a reduction of up to 76.2% in the assertion count while fully preserving formal coverage and mutation-detection ability. Further simulation studies demonstrate a speedup of 2.6x to 6.1x speedup in simulation time. The proposed framework is released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Arcane1-0A6F/.
Authors: Canhong Yu, Changliang Zhou, Rongsheng Chen, Zhenkun Wang, Yu Zhou
Abstract: Heavy-Encoder-Light-Decoder (HELD) neural routing solvers have emerged as a promising paradigm due to their broad applicability across multiple vehicle routing problems (VRPs). However, they typically struggle with VRP variants with complex constraints. To address this limitation, this paper systematically revisits existing neural solvers from the perspective of the generation mechanism for state embeddings (i.e., query vector prior to compatibility calculation) during decoding. We identify that current mechanisms restrict the observation space during attention computation, introducing a key bottleneck to achieving high-quality solutions. Through detailed empirical analysis, we demonstrate the necessity of preserving a global observation space. To overcome the constraint-agnostic drawback inherent to global observation spaces, we propose a simple yet powerful Constraint-Aware Residual Modulation (CARM) module. By adaptively modulating the context embedding with constraint-relevant variables, CARM effectively enhances constraint awareness, enabling the neural solver to fully leverage the global observation space and generate an efficient state embedding. Extensive experimental results across two single-task and five multi-task neural routing solvers confirm that the CARM module consistently boosts baseline performance. Notably, solvers equipped with our CARM achieve substantial improvements in scaling to large-scale instances and in generalizing to unseen VRP variants. These findings provide valuable insights for the architectural design of neural routing solvers.
Authors: Anthea Dathe, Kiran Hoffmann, Aline Mangold
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are being incorporated into scientific research workflows with the potential to enhance efficiency in tasks such as document analysis, question answering (Q&A), and literature search. However, system outputs are often difficult to verify, lack transparency in their generation and remain prone to errors. Suitable benchmarks are needed to document and evaluate arising issues. Nevertheless, existing benchmarking approaches are not adequately capturing human-centered criteria such as usability, interpretability, and integration into research workflows. To address this gap, the present work proposes and applies a benchmarking framework combining human-centered and computer-centered metrics to evaluate AI-based Q&A and literature review tools for research use. The findings suggest that Q&A tools can offer valuable overviews and generally accurate summaries; however, they are not always reliable for precise information extraction. Explainable AI (xAI) accuracy was particularly low, meaning highlighted source passages frequently failed to correspond to generated answers. This shifted the burden of validation back onto the researcher. Literature review tools supported exploratory searches but showed low reproducibility, limited transparency regarding chosen sources and databases, and inconsistent source quality, making them unsuitable for systematic reviews. A comparison of these tool groups reveals a similar pattern: while AI tools can enhance efficiency in the early stages of the research workflow and shallow tasks, their outputs still require human verification. The findings underscore the importance of explainability features to enhance transparency, verification efficiency and careful integration of AI tools into researchers' workflows. Further, human-centered evaluation remains an important concern to ensure practical applicability.
Authors: Zeynel A. Ulu\c{s}an, Burak S. Akbudak, Can S. Erer, G\"ozde G\"ul \c{S}ahin
Abstract: Recent neural theorem provers use reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), where proof assistants provide binary correctness signals. While verifiable rewards are cheap and scalable without reward hacking issues, they suffer from sparse credit assignment: models receive no learning signal from difficult problems where partial progress goes unrewarded. This motivates learned reward models that can evaluate proof quality beyond binary verification. However, comparing reward models is challenging since it typically requires expensive RL training ablations. To address this, we introduce \textbf{FormalRewardBench}, the first benchmark for evaluating reward models in formal theorem proving with Lean 4. Our benchmark consists of 250 preference pairs where correct proofs are paired with incorrect variants generated through five expert curated error injection strategies: forced mistakes, minimal single-point variations, verbose incorrect proofs, natural language justification, and Python code injection. We evaluate frontier LLMs (e.g., Claude Opus 4.5), judge LLMs (e.g., CompassJudger-1-14B), general-purpose LLMs (e.g., Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct), and specialized theorem proving models (e.g., DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B). Our results reveal that frontier LLMs achieve the highest performance (59.8\%) while specialized theorem provers perform the worst (24.4\%), suggesting that theorem proving ability does not transfer to proof evaluation. We provide further insights on various error injection mechanisms, highlighting the challenging nature of most injection mechanisms. We release \textbf{FormalRewardBench} publicly to encourage more research on developing reward models in formal mathematics.
Authors: Qinghua Mao, Xi Lin, Jinze Gu, Jun Wu, Siyuan Li, Yuliang Chen
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on knowledge editing to support knowledge-intensive reasoning, but this flexibility also introduces critical safety risks: adversaries can inject malicious or misleading knowledge that corrupts downstream reasoning and leads to harmful outcomes. Existing knowledge editing benchmarks primarily focus on editing efficacy and lack a unified framework for systematically evaluating the safety implications of edited knowledge on reasoning behavior. To address this gap, we present EditRisk-Bench, a benchmark for systematically evaluating safety risks of knowledge-intensive reasoning under malicious knowledge editing. Unlike prior benchmarks that mainly emphasize edit success, generalization, and locality, EditRisk-Bench focuses on how injected knowledge affects downstream reasoning behavior and reliability. It integrates diverse malicious scenarios, including misinformation, bias, and safety violations, together with multi-level knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks and representative editing strategies within a unified evaluation framework measuring attack effectiveness, reasoning correctness, and side effects. Extensive experiments on both open-source and closed-source LLMs show that malicious knowledge editing can reliably induce incorrect or unsafe reasoning while largely preserving general capabilities, making such risks difficult to detect. We further identify several key factors influencing these risks, including edit scale, knowledge characteristics, and reasoning complexity. EditRisk-Bench provides an extensible testbed for understanding and mitigating safety risks in knowledge editing for LLMs.
Authors: Krishnendu Chatterjee, Ehsan Kafshdar Goharshady, Mehrdad Karrabi, Maximilian Seeliger, {\DJ}or{\dj}e \v{Z}ikeli\'c
Abstract: Reachability games are two-player games played on a graph, where the objective of $\texttt{REACH}$ player is to reach the target set whereas the objective of $\texttt{SAFE}$ player is to stay away from the target set. Reachability games have important applications in artificial intelligence and reactive synthesis, and many of these applications give rise to infinite-state reachability games. In this paper, we study turn-based reachability games on infinite-state graphs defined over valuations of a finite set of real variables. We consider the problem of determining the existence of and computing a winning strategy for $\texttt{REACH}$ player. Our contributions are twofold. First, we propose ranking certificates for reachability games, a sound and complete proof rule for proving that $\texttt{REACH}$ player has a winning strategy from the specified initial state. Second, we consider polynomial reachability games, where transitions and objectives are described by polynomial constraints over real variables, and propose a fully automated algorithm for computing a winning strategy for $\texttt{REACH}$ player together with a formal correctness witness in the form of a ranking certificate. The algorithm is sound, semi-complete, and runs in sub-exponential time. Our experiments demonstrate the ability of our method to solve challenging examples from the literature that were out of the reach of existing methods. Specifically, for the classical Cinderella-Stepmother game, we are able to compute an optimal winning strategy for an arbitrary precision parameter for the first time.
Authors: Jiaxuan Wang, Xuan Ouyang, Zhiyu Chen, Yulan Hu, Zheng Pan, Xin Li, Lan-Zhe Guo
Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (self-OPD) densifies reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by letting a policy teach itself under privileged context. We find that when this guidance spans the full response, all-token KL spends gradients on mostly redundant positions and amplifies privileged-information leakage, causing entropy rise, shortened reasoning, and out-of-distribution degradation in long-horizon math training. We propose Token-Routed Alignment for Critical rEasoning (TRACE), which distills only on annotator-marked critical spans: forward KL on key spans of correct rollouts, optional reverse KL on localized error spans, and GRPO on all remaining tokens, with the KL channel annealed away after a short warm-up. Our analysis explains TRACE through two effects: forward KL provides non-vanishing lift to teacher-supported tokens that the student under-allocates, while span masking and decay keep cumulative privileged-gradient exposure finite. On four held-out math benchmarks plus GPQA-Diamond, TRACE improves over GRPO by 2.76 percentage points on average and preserves the Qwen3-8B base OOD score on GPQA-Diamond, where GRPO and all-token self-OPD baselines degrade. Gains persist under online self-annotation (+1.90 percentage points, about 69% of the strong-API gain), reducing the concern that TRACE merely imports external annotator capability. Across scales, the best routed action is base-dependent: on Qwen3-8B it is forward KL on key spans, while on Qwen3-1.7B it shifts to reverse KL on error spans.
Authors: Kai Pan, Rong Hou
Abstract: Current large language model agent frameworks prioritize autonomy but lack the governability mechanisms required for enterprise deployment. High-risk write operations proceed without independent review, complex tasks lack acceptance verification, and computational resources are allocated uniformly regardless of risk level. We propose the Dynamic Tiered AgentRunner, a controlled execution protocol distilled from a production-grade multi-tenant SaaS platform. The framework introduces three core mechanisms: (1) Risk-Adaptive Tiering that dynamically allocates computational resources and review intensity based on task risk profiles, achieving Pareto-optimal trade-offs between safety and efficiency; (2) Separation of Powers architecture where proposal, review, execution, and verification are performed by independent agents with physically isolated boundaries; and (3) Resilience-by-Design through a Verifier-Recovery closed loop that treats failure as a first-class system state. We formalize the tier selectio
Authors: Michael Chin
Abstract: Current AI-powered research systems adopt a direct search-then-summarize paradigm that treats hypotheses as end products of scientific discovery. We argue this leaves a critical gap: hypotheses can serve a far more powerful role as organizational instruments that structure the research process itself. We propose the Hypothesis-Driven Deep Research (HDRI) methodology - the first framework using hypotheses to organize general-purpose deep research across arbitrary domains, rather than merely validating claims within specific domains. This transforms research from reactive information retrieval into proactive, verifiable, and iterative knowledge discovery. HDRI is formalized with six core principles and an eight-stage pipeline. A central innovation is the gap-driven iterative research mechanism - a closed-loop quality assurance system that automatically identifies informational and logical gaps, triggering targeted supplementary investigation. We further introduce a fact reasoning framework with traceable reasoning chains and quantified confidence propagation, a subject locking mechanism to prevent entity confusion, and a multi-dimensional quality assessment scheme. The methodology is realized in the INFOMINER system. Experiments demonstrate improvements of 22.4% in fact density, 90% subject matching accuracy, 0.92 multi-source verification confidence, and 14% completeness gain from gap-driven supplementation. Five case studies validate its practical applicability, achieving an average quality rating of 4.46/5.0.
Authors: Zonglin Yang, Xingtong Liu, Xinyan Xu
Abstract: AI scientist systems are increasingly deployed for autonomous research, yet their academic integrity has never been systematically evaluated. We introduce SCIINTEGRITY-BENCH, the first benchmark designed around a dilemmatic evaluation paradigm: each of its 33 scenarios across 11 trap categories is constructed so that honest acknowledgment of failure is the only correct response, while task completion requires misconduct. Across 231 evaluation runs spanning 7 state-of-the-art LLMs, the overall integrity problem rate reaches 34.2%, and no model achieves zero failures. Most strikingly, across missing-data scenarios, all seven models generate synthetic data rather than acknowledging infeasibility, differing only in whether they disclose the substitution. A further prompt ablation study separates two drivers: removing explicit completion pressure sharply reduces undisclosed fabrication from 20.6% to 3.2%, while the underlying synthesis rate remains unchanged, revealing an intrinsic completion bias that persists independent of prompt-level instructions. These findings point to the absence of honest refusal as a trained disposition as the primary driver of observed failures. We release SCIINTEGRITY-BENCH at https://github.com/liuxingtong/Sci-Integrity-Bench.
Authors: Alberto Castagna, Stefan Zahlner, Adrian Egli, Christian Eichenberger, Daniel Boos, Manuel Meyer, Anton Fuxjager
Abstract: Managing disruptions in railway traffic management is a major challenge. Rising traffic density and infrastructure limits increase complexity, making the Vehicle Routing and Scheduling Problem (VRSP) difficult to solve reliably and in real time. While Operational Research (OR) methods are widely used, most dispatching still relies on human expertise due to the problem's exponential combinatorial complexity. Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained attention for its potential in multi-agent coordination, but existing RL approaches often underperform OR methods and struggle to scale in dense rail networks. This paper addresses this gap from a machine learning perspective by introducing a semi-hierarchical RL formulation tailored to operational railway constraints. The method separates dispatching from routing through dedicated action and observation spaces, enabling policies to specialise in distinct decision scopes and addressing the imbalance between rare dispatch decisions and frequent routing updates. The approach is evaluated on the Flatland-RL simulator across five difficulty levels and 50 random seeds, with 7 to 80 trains. Results show substantially improved coordination, resource utilisation, and robustness compared with heuristic baselines and monolithic RL, nearly doubling the number of trains reaching their destinations, while keeping deadlock rates below 5% and adaptively sequencing, delaying, or cancelling trains under heavy congestion.
Authors: Hasib Aslam, Muhammad Ali Chattha, Muhammad Taha Mukhtar, Muhammad Imran Malik, Andreas Dengel, Sheraz Ahmed
Abstract: TCAV (Testing with Concept Activation Vectors) is an interpretability method that assesses the alignment between the internal representations of a trained neural network and human-understandable, high-level concepts. Though effective, TCAV suffers from significant computational overhead, inter-layer disagreement of TCAV scores, and statistical instability. This work takes a step toward addressing these challenges by introducing E-TCAV, a framework for efficient approximation of TCAV scores, which is based on extensive investigation into three key aspects of the TCAV methodology: 1) the effect of latent classifiers on the stability of TCAV scores, 2) the inter-layer agreement of TCAV scores, and 3) the use of the penultimate layer as a fast proxy for earlier layers for TCAV computation. To ensure a solid foundation for E-TCAV, we conduct extensive evaluations across four different architectures and five datasets, encompassing problems from both computer vision and natural language domains. Our results show that the layers in the final block of the neural network strongly agree with the penultimate layer in terms of the TCAV scores, and the commonly observed variance of the TCAV scores can be attributed to the choice of the latent classifier. Leveraging this inter-layer agreement and the degeneracy of directional sensitivities at the penultimate layer, E-TCAV guarantees linearly scaling speed-ups with respect to the network's size and the number of evaluation samples, marking a step towards efficient model debugging and real-time concept-guided training.
Authors: Songlin Bai, Xintong Wang, Linlin Yu, Bin Chen, Zhiang Xu, Yuyang Sheng, Changtong Zan, Xiaofeng Zhu, Yizhe Zhang, Jiru Li, Mingze Guo, Ling Zou, Yalong Li, Chengfu Huo, Liang Ding
Abstract: In industrial procurement, an LLM answer is useful only if it survives a standards check: recommended material must match operating condition, every parameter must respect a regulated threshold, and no procedure may contradict a safety clause. Partial correctness can mask safety-critical contradictions that aggregate LLM benchmarks rarely capture. We introduce IndustryBench, a 2,049-item benchmark for industrial procurement QA in Chinese, grounded in Chinese national standards (GB/T) and structured industrial product records, organized by seven capability dimensions, ten industry categories, and panel-derived difficulty tiers, with item-aligned English, Russian, and Vietnamese renderings. Our construction pipeline rejects 70.3% of LLM-generated candidates at a search-based external-verification stage, calibrating how unreliable industrial QA remains after LLM-only filtering. Our evaluation decouples raw correctness, scored by a Qwen3-Max judge validated at $\kappa_w = 0.798$ against a domain expert, from a separate safety-violation (SV) check against source texts. Across 17 models in Chinese and an 8-model intersection over four languages, we find: (i) the best system reaches only 2.083 on the 0--3 rubric, leaving substantial headroom; (ii) Standards & Terminology is the most persistent capability weakness and survives item-aligned translation; (iii) extended reasoning lowers safety-adjusted scores for 12 of 13 models, primarily by introducing unsupported safety-critical details into longer final answers; and (iv) safety-violation rates reshuffle the leaderboard -- GPT-5.4 climbs from rank 6 to rank 3 after SV adjustment, while Kimi-k2.5-1T-A32B drops seven positions. Industrial LLM evaluation therefore requires source-grounded, safety-aware diagnosis rather than aggregate accuracy. We release IndustryBench with all prompts, scoring scripts, and dataset documentation.
Authors: Baraa Al Jorf, Farah E. Shamout
Abstract: Building effective clinical decision support systems requires the synthesis of complex heterogeneous multimodal data. Such modalities include temporal electronic health records data, medical images, radiology reports, and clinical notes. Large language model (LLM)-based agents have shown impressive performance in various healthcare tasks, especially those involving textual modalities. Considering the fragmentation of healthcare data across hospital systems, collaborative agent frameworks present a promising direction to mitigate data sharing challenges. However, the effectiveness of LLM agents for multimodal clinical risk prediction remains largely unexamined. In this work, we conduct a systematic evaluation of LLM-based agents for clinical prediction tasks using large-scale real-world data. We assess performance in unimodal and multimodal settings and quantify performance gaps between single agent and multi-agent systems. Our findings highlight that single agent frameworks outperform naive multi-agent systems, are better at handling multimodal data, and are better calibrated. This underscores a critical need for improving multi-agent collaboration to better handle heterogeneous inputs. By open-sourcing our code and evaluation framework, this work offers a new benchmark to support future developments relating to agentic systems in healthcare.
Authors: Ruben Laukkonen, Seb Krier, Chlo\'e Bakalar, Shamil Chandaria, Morten Kringelbach, Adam Elwood, Daniel Ford, Fernando Rosas, Maty Bohacek, Matija Franklin, Nenad Toma\v{s}ev, Stephanie Chan, Verena Rieser, Roma Patel, Michael Levin, Arun Rao
Abstract: Existing alignment research is dominated by concerns about safety and preventing harm: safeguards, controllability, and compliance. This paradigm of alignment parallels early psychology's focus on mental illness: necessary but incomplete. What we call Positive Alignment is the development of AI systems that (i) actively support human and ecological flourishing in a pluralistic, polycentric, context-sensitive, and user-authored way while (ii) remaining safe and cooperative. It is a distinct and necessary agenda within AI alignment research. We argue that several existing failures of alignment (e.g., engagement hacking, loss of human autonomy, failures in truth-seeking, low epistemic humility, error correction, lack of diverse viewpoints, and being primarily reactive rather than proactive) may be better addressed through positive alignment, including cultivating virtues and maximizing human flourishing. We highlight a range of challenges, open questions, and technical directions (e.g., data filtering and upsampling, pre- and post-training, evaluations, collaborative value collection) for different phases of the LLM and agents lifecycle. We end with design principles for promoting disagreement and decentralization through contextual grounding, community customization, continual adaptation, and polycentric governance; that is, many legitimate centers of oversight rather than one institutional or moral chokepoint.
Authors: Huining Yuan, Zelai Xu, Huaijie Wang, Xiangmin Yi, Jiaxuan Gao, Xiao-Ping Zhang, Yu Wang, Chao Yu, Yi Wu
Abstract: Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), but most existing approaches rely on sparse outcome-level feedback. This sparsity creates a credit assignment challenge in long-horizon agentic reasoning: a trajectory may fail despite containing many correct intermediate decisions, or succeed despite containing flawed ones. In this work, we study a class of densely-verifiable agentic reasoning problems, where intermediate actions can be objectively checked by symbolic or algorithmic oracles. We propose Verifiable Process Rewards (VPR), a framework that converts such oracles into dense turn-level supervision for reinforcement learning, and instantiate it in three representative settings: search-based verification for dynamic deduction, constraint-based verification for logical reasoning, and posterior-based verification for probabilistic inference. We further provide a theoretical analysis showing that dense verifier-grounded rewards can improve long-horizon credit assignment by providing more localized learning signals, with the benefit depending on the reliability of the verifier. Empirically, VPR outperforms outcome-level reward and rollout-based process reward baselines across controlled environments, and more importantly, transfers to both general and agentic reasoning benchmarks, suggesting that verifiable process supervision can foster general reasoning skills applicable beyond the training environments. Our results indicate that VPR is a promising approach for enhancing LLM agents whenever reliable intermediate verification is available, while also highlighting its dependence on oracle quality and the open challenge of extending VPR to less structured, open-ended environments.
Authors: Ruofei Ju, Xinrui Wang, Xin Ding, Yifan Yang, Hao Wu, Shiqi Jiang, Qianxi Zhang, Hao Wen, Xiangyu Li, Weijun Wang, Kun Li, Yunxin Liu, Haipeng Dai, Wei Wang, Ting Cao
Abstract: Embodied agents can benefit from skills that guide object search, action execution, and state changes across diverse environments. Since embodied environments vary across layouts, object states, and other execution factors, these skills must self-evolve from trajectories generated during task execution. However, existing skill self-evolution methods are mainly developed in digital environments and often convert trajectories into coarse skill updates. Directly applying this paradigm to embodied settings is problematic, because a failed task execution may reflect not only incorrect skill content, but also an execution lapse in which the agent fails to follow valid guidance. We propose EmbodiSkill, a training-free framework for embodied skill self-evolution through skill-aware reflection and targeted revision. EmbodiSkill interprets each trajectory with respect to the current skill, uses skill-changing evidence to update the skill body, and uses execution-lapse evidence to preserve and emphasize valid guidance. Experiments on ALFWorld and EmbodiedBench show that EmbodiSkill consistently improves embodied task success. On ALFWorld, EmbodiSkill enables a frozen Qwen3.5-27B executor to reach 93.28% task success, outperforming GPT-5.2 used as a direct agent without skills by 31.58%. These results show that skill-aware self-evolution helps embodied agents accumulate reusable procedural knowledge from their own trajectories.
Authors: Liuyin Yang, Qiang Sun, Bob Van Dyck, Eva Calvo Merino, Marc M. Van Hulle
Abstract: Intracranial electrocorticography (ECoG) offers high-signal-to-noise access to cortical activity for brain-computer interfaces, yet limited per-patient data has led most prior work to rely on small, subject-specific decoders that neglect information shared across patients. We investigate whether large pretrained scalp-EEG foundation models (EEG FMs) can be adapted to ECoG, enabling cross-patient learning and competitive decoding performance while calibrating to a held-out patient in 10-30 minutes on a single GPU. We introduce CORTEG, a cross-modality transfer framework that combines a pretrained EEG FM backbone, an electrode-aware KNNSoftFourier spatial adapter, a dual-stream tokenizer for low-frequency and high-gamma activity, and a leave-one-subject-out fine-tuning strategy. We evaluate CORTEG on two challenging regression tasks: public finger trajectory regression (n=9) and private audio envelope regression (n=16). CORTEG matches or exceeds the strongest task-specific baselines on both tasks: it reaches the highest mean correlation among compared methods on the public finger benchmark (gain not statistically significant on n=9 subjects), with larger and statistically significant gains on the audio task and in low-data per-patient calibration. Feature analyses align with neurophysiology, and latent manifolds capture low-dimensional finger-movement structure. CORTEG provides systematic evidence that scalp-EEG pretraining can be repurposed for ECoG decoding, enabling data-efficient intracranial BCIs that can adapt to new patients.
Authors: Bihui Yu, Xinglong Xu, Junjie Jiang, Jiabei Cheng, Caijun Jia, Siyuan Li, Conghui He, Jingxuan Wei, Cheng Tan
Abstract: A LaTeX manuscript that compiles without error is not necessarily publication-ready. The resulting PDFs frequently suffer from misplaced floats, overflowing equations, inconsistent table scaling, widow and orphan lines, and poor page balance, forcing authors into repetitive compile-inspect-edit cycles. Rule-based tools are blind to rendered visuals, operating only on source code and log files. Text-only LLMs perform open-loop text editing, unable to predict or verify the two-dimensional layout consequences of their changes. Reliable typesetting optimization therefore requires a visual closed loop with verification after every edit. We formalize this problem as Visual Typesetting Optimization (VTO), the task of transforming a compilable LaTeX paper into a visually polished, page-budget-compliant PDF through iterative visual verification and source-level revision, and introduce a five-category taxonomy of typesetting defects to guide diagnosis. We present PaperFit, a vision-in-the-loop agent that iteratively renders pages, diagnoses defects, and applies constrained repairs. To benchmark VTO, we construct PaperFit-Bench with 200 papers across 10 venue templates and 13 defect types at different difficulty. Extensive experiments show that PaperFit outperforms all baselines by a large margin, establishing that bridging the gap from compilable source to publication-ready PDF requires vision-in-the-loop optimization and that VTO constitutes a critical missing stage in the document automation pipeline.
Authors: George Wu, Nan Jing, Qing Yi, Chuan Hao, Ming Yang, Feng Chang, Yuan Wei, Jian Yang, Ran Tao, Bryan Dai
Abstract: Test-time scaling has become an effective paradigm for improving the reasoning ability of large language models by allocating additional computation during inference. Recent structured approaches have further advanced this paradigm by organizing inference across multiple trajectories, refinement rounds, and verification-based feedback. However, existing structured test-time scaling methods either weakly coordinate parallel reasoning trajectories or rely on noisy historical information without explicitly deciding what should be retained and reused, limiting their ability to balance exploration and exploitation. In this work, we propose TMAS, a framework for scaling test-time compute via multi-agent synergy. TMAS organizes inference as a collaborative process among specialized agents, enabling structured information flow across agents, trajectories, and refinement iterations. To support effective cross-trajectory collaboration, TMAS introduces hierarchical memories: the experience bank reuses low-level reliable intermediate conclusions and local feedback, while the guideline bank records previously explored high-level strategies to steer subsequent rollouts away from redundant reasoning patterns. Furthermore, we design a hybrid reward reinforcement learning scheme tailored to TMAS, which jointly preserves basic reasoning capability, enhances experience utilization, and encourages exploration beyond previously attempted solution strategies. Extensive experiments on challenging reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that TMAS achieves stronger iterative scaling than existing test-time scaling baselines, while hybrid reward training further improves scaling effectiveness and stability across iterations. Code and data are available at https://github.com/george-QF/TMAS-code.
Authors: Weikai Xu, Kun Huang, Yunren Feng, Jiaxing Li, Yuhan Chen, Yuxuan Liu, Zhizheng Jiang, Heng Qu, Pengzhi Gao, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Xiaolin Hu, Bo An
Abstract: Recent advances in vision-language models have enabled mobile GUI agents to perceive visual interfaces and execute user instructions, but reliable prediction of action consequences remains critical for long-horizon and high-risk interactions. Existing mobile world models provide either text-based or image-based future states, yet it remains unclear which representation is useful, whether generated rollouts can replace real environments, and how test-time guidance helps agents of different strengths. To answer the above questions, we filter and annotate mobile world-model data, then train world models across four modalities: delta text, full text, diffusion-based images, and renderable code. These models achieve SoTA performance on both MobileWorldBench and Code2WorldBench. Furthermore, by evaluating their downstream utility on AITZ, AndroidControl, and AndroidWorld, we obtain three findings. First, renderable code reconstruction achieves high in-distribution fidelity and provides effective multimodal supervision for data construction, while text-based feedback is more robust for online out-of-distribution (OOD) execution. Second, world-model-generated trajectories can provide transferable interaction experience in the training process and improve agents' end-to-end task performance, although these data do not preserve the original distribution. Last, for overconfident mobile agents with low action entropy, posterior self-reflection provides limited gains, suggesting that world models are more effective as prior perception or training supervision than as universal post-hoc verifiers.
Authors: Haonan Dong, Qiguan Feng, Kehan Jiang, Haoran Ye, Xin Zhang, Guojie Song
Abstract: Autonomous agents have rapidly matured as task executors and seen widespread deployment via harnesses such as OpenClaw. Safety concerns have rightly drawn growing research attention, and beneath them lie the values silently steering agent behavior. Existing value benchmarks, however, remain confined to LLMs, leaving agent values largely uncharted. From intuitive, empirical, and theoretical vantage points, we show that an agent's values diverge from those of its underlying LLM, and the agentic modality further introduces dataset-, evaluation-, and system-level challenges absent from text-only protocols. We close this gap with Agent-ValueBench, the first benchmark dedicated to agent values. It features 394 executable environments across 16 domains, offering 4,335 value-conflict tasks that cover 28 value systems and 332 dimensions. Every instance is co-synthesized through our purpose-built end-to-end pipeline and curated per-instance by professional psychologists. Each task ships with two pole-aligned golden trajectories whose checkpoints anchor a trajectory-level rubric-based judge. Benchmarking 14 frontier proprietary and open-weights models across 4 mainstream harnesses, we uncover three concerted findings. Agent values first manifest as a Value Tide of cross-model homogeneity beneath interpretable counter-currents. This tide bends non-additively under harness pull, and yet more decisively under deliberate steering via embedded skills. Together these results signal that the agent-alignment lever is shifting from classical model alignment and prompt steering toward harness alignment and skill steering.
Authors: Zike Yuan, Yukun Cao, Han Zhang, Jianzhi Yan, Le Liu, Cai ke, Yue Yu, Hui Wang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
Abstract: Graph reasoning agents operating from natural-language inputs must solve a coupled problem: they must reconstruct a structured graph instance from text, decide whether existing computational assets are sufficient, interact with tools under a strict execution protocol, and satisfy an external verifier that checks structured correctness rather than textual plausibility. Existing approaches usually improve either the instruction side or the tool side in isolation, which leaves unclear what should be updated after failure. We propose EGL-SCA, a verifier-centric dual-space framework that models a graph reasoning agent using two collaborative components: an instruction-side policy space for reasoning strategies, and a tool-side program space for executable algorithmic tools. Our central mechanism is structural credit assignment, which maps trajectory evidence to conditional updates, precisely routing failures to either prompt optimization or tool synthesis and repair. To provide sufficient learning signals for dual-space adaptation, we introduce a training distribution stratified by task family, coupled with a Pareto-style retention strategy to balance success, generality, and parsimony. Experiments on four graph reasoning benchmarks show that EGL-SCA achieves a state-of-the-art 92.0\% average success rate. By effectively co-evolving instructions and tools, our framework significantly outperforms both pure-prompting and fixed-toolbox baselines.
Authors: Zeyd Boukhers, Oya Beyan, Cong Yang, Christoph Lange
Abstract: Scientific knowledge on the Web is published as passive assertions and cannot decide when to validate evidence, reconcile contradictions, or update confidence as findings accumulate. Curation depends on centralised middleware and institutional continuity, but when registries close, active stewardship stops even when data remain online. We advance the concept of Autonomous FAIR Digital Objects (aFDOs) from an abstract idea to an operational model, to offer a route from passive scientific publication toward accountable, standards-aligned automation that can outlive its publishing institutions. aFDO augments FDOs with three capabilities anchored in Semantic Web standards, namely 1) a policy layer over RDF-star aligned with PROV-O, SHACL, and ODRL for portable condition-action rules, 2) an announcement layer over ActivityStreams 2.0 that bounds per-announcement evaluation cost, and 3) an agreement layer that resolves multi-source contradictions through reputation and confidence weighted agreement under a bounded adversarial model. We provide a formal definition that distinguishes policy specifications, event handlers, and communication interfaces. We evaluate an open reference implementation on 4,305 FDOs grounded in rare-disease ontologies, namely ClinVar, HPO, and Orphanet, combined with controlled synthetic observations. The consensus mechanism resolves 56.3% of 3,914 naturally occurring ClinVar conflicts where multiple submitters disagree and an expert panel has subsequently adjudicated. Under Sybil, collusion, and poisoning attacks, the mechanism degrades gracefully within its design Byzantine-tolerance bound (f < n/5), and fails as predicted beyond that bound.
Authors: Jinha Chung, Byeongjun Shin, Jiin Kim, Minsoo Rhu
Abstract: LLM-based agents deliver state-of-the-art performance across tasks but incur high end-to-end latency on edge devices. We introduce Agent-X, a software-only, accuracy-preserving framework that accelerates both the prefill and decode stages of on-device agent workloads. Agent-X's two key components rewrite prompts to leverage prefix caching tailored to agent-specific input-token patterns and enable LLM-free speculative decoding for fast token generation with minimal overhead. On representative agentic workloads, Agent-X achieves a 1.61x end-to-end speedup in real systems with no accuracy loss and can be seamlessly integrated into existing on-device AI agents. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first to systematically characterize and eliminate latency bottlenecks in on-device agents.
Authors: Shiqiang Wang, Herbert Woisetschl\"ager
Abstract: Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is a natural fit for Internet of Things (IoT) and edge systems, but edge deployments are often constrained to models around 8 billion parameters or smaller. An important question is: How much agentic-task quality is lost when model size is constrained by memory, power, and latency budgets? To address this question, in this paper, we provide an initial empirical study considering edge-focused model scaling, general-purpose versus coder-oriented model effects, and tool-enabled execution under a fixed protocol. We introduce a domain-conditioned evaluation methodology, an implementation-grounded analysis of model-tool interactions, practical guidance for model selection under constraints, and an analysis of failure modes that reveals distinct semantic versus execution failure patterns across model families. Our core finding is that edge-agent quality is not a simple function of parameter count. Robust deployment depends on the joint design of model choice and tool workflow. Domain-conditioned analysis reveals Pareto fronts in the accuracy-latency space that can guide strategy selection based on operational priorities.
Authors: Tianyuan Zhang, Peng Yue, Zihao Peng, Jiangfan Liu, Zonghao Ying, Jiakai Wang, Tianlin Li, Jian Yang, Yaodong Yang, Aishan Liu, Xianglong Liu
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly integrated into autonomous driving (AD) systems; however, they remain vulnerable to diverse safety threats, particularly in accident-prone scenarios. Recent safeguard mechanisms have shown promise by incorporating logical constraints, yet most rely on static formulations that lack temporally grounded safety reasoning over evolving traffic interactions, resulting in limited robustness in dynamic driving environments. To address these limitations, we propose GuardAD, a model-agnostic safeguard that formulates AD safety as an evolving Markovian logical state. GuardAD introduces Neuro-Symbolic Logic Formalization, which represents safety predicates over heterogeneous traffic participants and continuously induces them via n-th order Markovian Logic Induction. This design enables the inference of emerging and latent hazards beyond single-step observations. Rather than simply vetoing unsafe actions, GuardAD performs Logic-Driven Action Revision, where inferred safety states actively guide action refinement without modifying the underlying MLLM. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and AD-MLLMs demonstrate that GuardAD substantially reduces accident rates (-32.07%) while slightly improving task performance (+6.85%). Moreover, closed-loop simulation evaluations, together with physical-world vehicle studies, further validate the effectiveness and potential of GuardAD.
Authors: Zhinan Hou, Xingchen Li, Yankai Zhang, Tianxun Li, Keyou You
Abstract: Efficient branching policies are essential for accelerating Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) solvers. Their design has long relied on hand-crafted heuristics, and now machine learning has emerged as a promising paradigm to automate this process. However, existing learning-based methods are often hindered by their dependence on expensive expert demonstrations and the gap between training objectives and the solver's end-to-end performance. In this work, we propose LLM4Branch, a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the discovery of efficient branching policies. Specifically, the discovered policy is an executable program with a program skeleton generated by the LLM and a parameter vector, which is optimized via a zeroth-order method over a few instances with their end-to-end performance feedback. Extensive experiments on standard MILP benchmarks demonstrate that LLM4Branch establishes a new state-of-the-art among CPU-based methods and achieves performance competitive with advanced GPU-based models. Codes are available at https://github.com/hzn18/LLM4Branch.
Authors: Shanshan Gao, Liyi Zhou
Abstract: Interactive agent benchmarks map an agent run to a binary outcome through outcome checks. When these checks rely on surface level signals or fail to capture the agent's actual action path, they cannot reliably determine whether the run succeeded. For example, a benchmark task may ask whether Alice's shipping address was changed, while the outcome check only verifies that the agent clicked "Save." This does not guarantee that the intended state change occurred, since the agent may have modified the wrong record. Treating such a run as successful therefore makes the reported score misleading. Benchmark quality thus depends not only on task design, but also on the reliability of outcome detection. We address this problem by introducing an outcome evidence reporting layer for existing benchmarks, without modifying their tasks, agents, or evaluators. The layer performs three functions. First, before scoring, it specifies which stored artifacts are required to verify the claimed outcome for each case. Second, it applies a locked checklist to each completed run and assigns one of three evidence labels: Evidence Pass, Evidence Fail, or Unknown. Third, it reports evidence supported score bounds that quantify uncertainty arising from Unknown cases. Rather than silently counting, discarding, or hiding uncertain cases inside a single aggregate success rate, the framework keeps them explicitly visible. We evaluate the outcome evidence layer on five public benchmarks: ANDROIDWORLD, AGENTDOJO, APPWORLD, tau3 bench retail, and MINIWOB. The resulting reports separate several empirically distinct failure modes.
Authors: Dario Piga, Marco Forgione
Abstract: Over the years, research in system identification has provided a rich set of methods for learning dynamical models, together with well-established theoretical guarantees. In practice, however, the choice of model class, training algorithm, and hyperparameter tuning is still largely left to empirical trial-and-error, requiring substantial expert time and domain experience. Motivated by recent advances in agentic artificial intelligence, we present ASIA, a framework that delegates this iterative search to a large language model acting as an autonomous coding agent. Building on existing agentic platforms, ASIA closes the loop between hypothesis, implementation, and evaluation without human intervention, requiring only a plain-English description of the identification problem. We conduct an empirical study of ASIA on two system identification benchmarks and analyse the agent's search behaviour, the architectures and training strategies it discovers, and the quality of the resulting models. We also discuss the potential of the approach and its current limitations, including implicit test leakage, reduced methodological transparency, and reproducibility concerns.
Authors: Genrui Zhang, Erle Zhu, Jinfeng Zhou, Caiyan Jia, Hongning Wang
Abstract: Agent skills today are static artifact: authored once -- by human curation or one-shot generation from parametric knowledge -- and then consumed unchanged, with no mechanism to improve from real use. We propose \textbf{SkillEvolver}, a lightweight, plug-and-play solution for online skill learning, in which a single meta-skill iteratively authors, deploys, and refines domain-specific skills. The learning target of SkillEvolver is the skill's prose and code, not model weights, so that the resulting artifact drops into any agent without retraining; and the meta-skill itself is just another skill, loaded through the same interface by any protocol-compliant CLI-agent. Unlike trace-distillation, the meta-skill refines only after deploying the learnt skill, such that the learning signal comes from failures another agent encounters while using it -- not from exploratory traces alone. Refinement iterations are governed by a fresh-agent overfit audit that catches possible leakage as well as deployed-skill-specific failures, including the silent-bypass mode in which a skill appears valid in content but is never invoked at runtime. On $83$ SkillsBench tasks spanning $15^{+}$ domains, SkillEvolver reaches $56.8\%$ accuracy versus $43.6\%$ for curated human skills and $29.9\%$ for the no-skill baseline; on three GPU kernel optimization tasks from KernelBench, it also raises mean speedup from $1.16$ to $1.51$ on average.
Authors: Yiming Liu, Bin Lu, Xinbing Wang, Chenghu Zhou, Meng Jin
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable semantic understanding but often struggle with structural understanding when processing graph topologies in a serialized format. Existing solutions rely on training external graph-based adapters or fine-tuning, which incur high costs and lost generalizability. In this work, we investigate the internal mechanisms of LLMs and present a critical finding: LLMs spontaneously reconstruct the graph's topology internally, evidenced by a distinct "sawtooth" pattern in their attention maps that structurally aligns with the "token-level adjacency matrix". However, this intrinsic structural understanding is diluted by the attention sink. We theoretically formalize this dilution as a representation bottleneck, stemming from a fundamental conflict: the model's anisotropic bias, essential for language tasks, suppresses the topology-aware local aggregation required for graph reasoning. To address this, we propose a training-free solution, named StructuraL Attention SHarpening (SLASH), which amplifies this internal structural understanding via a plug-and-play attention redistribution. Experiments on pure graph tasks and molecular prediction validate thst SLASH delivers significant and consistent performance gains across diverse LLMs.
Authors: Harsh Raj, Niranjan Orkat, Suvrorup Mukherjee, Aritra Guha, Cheryl Flynn, Subhabrata Majumdar
Abstract: This paper establishes a rigorous measurement science for AI agent reliability, providing a foundational framework for quantifying consistency under semantically preserving perturbations. By leveraging $U$-statistics for output-level reliability and kernel-based metrics for trajectory-level stability, we offer a principled approach to evaluating agents across diverse operating conditions. Our proposal highlights the important distinction between the core capability and execution robustness of an agent, showing that minor task-level variations can induce complete strategy breakdowns despite the agent possessing the requisite knowledge for the task. We validate our framework through extensive experiments on three agentic benchmarks, demonstrating that trajectory-level consistency metrics provide far greater diagnostic sensitivity than traditional pass@1 rates. By providing the mathematical tools to isolate where and why agents deviate, we enable the identification and rectification of architectural concerns that hinder the deployment of agents in high-stakes, real-world environments.
Authors: Yousef A. Radwan, Yao Li, Qing Qing, Ziqi Xu, Xingtong Yu, Jiaxing Huang, Renqiang Luo, Xikun Zhang
Abstract: Biomedical knowledge graphs underwrite drug repurposing and clinical decision support, yet the upstream ontologies they depend on update on independent cycles that add millions of edges and deprecate hundreds of thousands more between releases. Yet existing continual graph learning has been studied almost exclusively on synthetic random splits of static, generic KGs, a regime that cannot reproduce the asynchronous, structured evolution real biomedical KGs undergo. To this end, we introduce PrimeKG-CL, a CGL benchmark built from nine authoritative biomedical databases (129K+ nodes, 8.1M+ edges, 10 node types, 30 relation types) with two genuine temporal snapshots (June 2021, July 2023; 5.83M edges added, 889K removed, 7.21M persistent), 10 entity-type-grouped tasks, multimodal node features, and a per-task persistent/added/removed test stratification. On three tasks (biomedical relationship prediction, entity classification, KGQA), we evaluate six CL strategies across four KGE decoders, plus LKGE, an LLM-RAG agent, and CMKL. We find that decoder choice and continual learning strategy interact strongly: no single strategy performs best across all decoders, and mismatched combinations can significantly degrade performance. Moreover, only DistMult exhibits a clear separation between persistent and deprecated knowledge, indicating that standard metrics conflate retention of still-valid facts with failure to forget outdated ones; this effect is absent under RotatE. In addition, multimodal features improve entity-level tasks by up to 60%, and a recent CKGE framework (IncDE) failed to scale to our 5.67M-triple base task across five attempts up to 350GB RAM. Data, pipeline, baselines, and the stratified split are released openly. Dataset:huggingface.co/datasets/yradwan147/PrimeKGCL|Code:github.com/yradwan147/primekg-cl-neurips2026
Authors: Jayalakshmi Baskar, Vera C. Kaelin, Kaan Kilic, Helena Lindgren
Abstract: This work investigates whether knowledge-driven large language model (LLM)-based storytelling can support purposeful narrative interaction with a digital companion for older adults. To address known limitations of LLMs, including hallucinations and limited transparency, we present a reflective storytelling agent integrating knowledge graphs, user modelling, argumentation theory, and argument mining to guide and inspect narrative generation. The study consisted of two phases. Phase I employed participatory design involving 11 domain experts in a formative evaluation that informed iterative refinement. The resulting system generates narratives grounded in structured user models representing health-promoting activities and motivations. Phase II involved 55 older adults evaluating persona-based narratives across four prompts and two creativity levels. Participants assessed perceived purpose, usefulness, cultural relatability, and inconsistencies. The system additionally computed hallucination-risk indicators to evaluate generated narratives. Participants recognised personally relevant purposes in roughly two thirds of narratives, while argument-based purposes were identified in around half of these cases. Cultural recognisability strongly influenced willingness to use the functionality, whereas minor inconsistencies were often tolerated when narratives remained understandable and personally relevant. Narratives with higher hallucination-risk indicators were more often perceived as inconsistent, while higher argument-quality indicators tended to co-occur with higher clarity and meaningfulness ratings. Overall, the study positions argument mining as a reflective inspection mechanism for comparing formal grounding signals with human evaluations in health-oriented LLM storytelling for older adults.
Authors: Yao Li, Xikun Zhang, Xiaotao Shen, Sonika Tyagi, Xin Zheng, Jiaxing Huang, Feng Xia
Abstract: Epigenetic clocks based on DNA methylation have emerged as powerful tools for estimating biological age, with broad applications in aging research, age-related disease studies, and longevity science. Despite advances across machine learning approaches to epigenetic age prediction, spanning penalised linear regression, deep feedforward networks, residual architectures, and graph neural networks, no existing method jointly models co-methylation graph structure and site-specific DNA sequence context within a unified framework. We propose a unified sequence--graph integration framework for epigenetic age prediction that addresses this gap, integrating eight-dimensional DNA sequence statistical features through a lightweight gated modulation mechanism that adaptively scales each site's methylation signal according to its sequence-determined biological relevance prior to graph convolution. Evaluated on 3,707 blood methylation samples against a comprehensive set of baselines, our method achieves a test MAE of 3.149 years, a 12.8\% improvement over the strongest graph-based baseline. Biologically informed statistical features outperform CNN-based sequence encoding, demonstrating that handcrafted sequence features are more effective than end-to-end learned representations in this data regime. Post-hoc interpretability analysis identifies CpG density and local adenine frequency as features with age-dependent importance shifts, consistent with known mechanisms of age-related hypermethylation at CpG-dense promoter regions. Our code is at https://github.com/yaoli2022/graphage-seq.
Authors: Kai Pan
Abstract: As AI agents transition from research prototypes to enterprise production systems, the tool interfaces they consume remain rooted in human-oriented CRUD paradigms. This paper identifies five fundamental architectural mismatches between conventional APIs and autonomous agent requirements: exact-identifier dependence, rendering-oriented responses, single-shot interaction assumptions, user-equivalent authorization, and opaque error semantics. We propose the Agent-First Tool API paradigm, comprising three integrated mechanisms: (1) a Six-Verb Semantic Protocol that decomposes tool interactions into search, resolve, preview, execute, verify, and recover phases; (2) a Normalized Tool Contract (NTC) providing structured decision-support metadata including confidence scores, evidence chains, and suggested next actions; and (3) a dual-layer governance pipeline combining static capability policies with dynamic risk escalation. The paradigm is implemented and validated in a production multi-tenant SaaS platform serving 85 registered tools across 6 business domains. Comparative experiments on 50 real operational tasks demonstrate that Agent-First APIs achieve 88% end-to-end task success rate versus 64% for optimized CRUD baselines (+37.5%), while reducing required human interventions by 72.7% and improving autonomous error recovery by 5.8x. We establish that the paradigm is orthogonal and complementary to transport-layer standards such as MCP, operating as the semantic application layer above existing tool discovery and invocation protocols.
Authors: Adam Gould, Francesca Toni
Abstract: Deep learning has become the dominant approach for creating high capacity, scalable models across diverse data modalities. However, because these models rely on a large number of learned parameters, tightly couple feature extraction with task objectives, and often lack explicit reasoning mechanisms, it is difficult for humans to understand how they arrive at their predictions. Understanding what representations emerge and why they arise from the training data remains an open challenge. We introduce Deep Arguing, a novel neurosymbolic approach that integrates deep learning with argumentation construction and reasoning for interpretable classification with different data modalities. In our approach deep neural networks construct an argumentation structure wherein data points support their assigned label and attack different ones. Using differentiable argumentation semantics for reasoning, the model is trained end-to-end to jointly learn feature representation and argumentative interactions. This results in argumentation structures providing faithful case-based explanations for predictions. Structure constraints over the argumentation graph guide learning, improving both interpretability and predictive performance. Experiments with tabular and imaging datasets show that Deep Arguing achieves performance competitive with standard baselines whilst offering interpretable argumentative reasoning.
Authors: Shray Mathur, J. Anibal Boscoboinik, Esther H. R. Tsai, Kevin G. Yager
Abstract: As artificial intelligence advances, models are not improving uniformly. Instead, progress unfolds in a jagged fashion, with capabilities growing unevenly across tasks, domains, and model scales. In this work, we examine this dynamic jaggedness through the lens of scientific idea generation. We introduce SciAidanBench, a benchmark of open-ended scientific questions designed to measure the scientific creativity of large language models (LLMs). Given a scientific question, models are asked to generate as many unique and coherent ideas as possible, with the total number of valid responses serving as a proxy for creative potential. Evaluating 19 base models across 8 providers (30 total variants including reasoning versions), we find that jaggedness manifests both across models and within models. First, in a cross-task comparison between general and scientific creativity, improvements in general creativity do not translate uniformly to scientific creativity, revealing divergent capability profiles across models. Second, at the prompt level, stronger models do not improve uniformly; instead, they exhibit high variability, with bursts of creativity on some questions and limited performance on others. Third, at the domain level, individual models display uneven strengths across scientific subfields, reflecting fragmented internal capability profiles. Finally, we show that this jaggedness can be harnessed. We explore mechanisms of inference-time compute, knowledge pooling, and brainstorming to combine models effectively and construct meta-model ensembles that outperform any single model. Our results position jaggedness not as a limitation, but as a resource, a structural feature of AI progress that, when understood and leveraged, can amplify LLM-driven scientific creativity.
Authors: Vipin Singh, Tianheng Ling, Peter Ghaly, Felix Grimmeisen, Gregor Schiele, Felix Biessmann
Abstract: Aging combined sewer systems in many historical cities are increasingly stressed by extreme rainfall events, which can trigger combined sewer overflows (CSO) with significant environmental and public health impacts. Forecasting the filling dynamics of overflow basins is critical for anticipating capacity exceedance and enabling timely preventive actions for CSO. We present a web-based demonstrator (https://riwwer.demo.calgo-lab.de) that integrates Deep Learning forecasting methods in both cloud and edge settings into an interactive monitoring dashboard for overflow monitoring, resilient to network outages. A video showcase is available online (https://cloud.bht-berlin.de/index.php/s/b9xt4T3SdiLBiFZ).
URLs: https://riwwer.demo.calgo-lab.de), https://cloud.bht-berlin.de/index.php/s/b9xt4T3SdiLBiFZ).
Authors: Philipp Steigerwald, Mara Stieler, Jennifer Burghardt, Eric Rudolph, Jens Albrecht
Abstract: We demonstrate LLARS (LLM Assisted Research System), an open-source platform that bridges the gap between domain experts and developers for building LLM-based systems. It integrates three tightly connected modules into an end-to-end pipeline: Collaborative Prompt Engineering for real-time co-authoring with version control and instant LLM testing, Batch Generation for configurable output production across user-selected prompts $\times$ models $\times$ data with cost control, and Hybrid Evaluation where human and LLM evaluators jointly assess outputs through diverse assessment methods, with live agreement metrics and provenance analysis to identify the best model-prompt combination for a given use case. New prompts and models are automatically available for batch generation and completed batches can be turned into evaluation scenarios with a single click. Interviews with six domain experts and three developers in online counselling confirmed that LLARS feels intuitive, saves considerable time by keeping everything in one place and makes interdisciplinary collaboration seamless.
Authors: Maxime Bouscary, Manxi Wu, Saurabh Amin
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for automatic algorithm design (AAD). However, existing pipelines remain inefficient. They operate at the granularity of full algorithms, redundantly rewriting recurring substructures and discarding low-fitness candidates that may contain valuable algorithmic features. We formalize budget-efficient automatic algorithm design, wherein the search policy maximizes realized fitness subject to limited computational cost. We propose a directed acyclic graph representation of algorithms and build a search framework that fully exploits the LLM's output. Instead of querying the LLM for full algorithms, we use it to obtain corrections: compact operators that add, replace, or remove code blocks. Each correction augments the graph, yielding new algorithms that compose with prior corrections. This graph structure decomposes algorithms into sets of corrections, enabling correction-level credit assignment that informs subsequent queries. We complement this framework with theoretical insights into the ideal balance between search depth and breadth at different budget levels. We validate our method empirically on three combinatorial optimization problems, demonstrating consistent superiority of our graph-based search over full-algorithm search at equal token budget. Finally, our experiments suggest that rich contexts help only when the LLM's prior knowledge is shallow, and can hinder performance otherwise.
Authors: Phongsakon Mark Konrad, Tim Lukas Adam, Ane Cathrine Holst Merrild, Riccardo Terrenzi, Rebecca De Rosa, Toygar Tanyel, Serkan Ayvaz
Abstract: AI deployment in sensitive domains such as health care, credit, employment, and criminal justice is often treated as unsafe to authorize until model internals can be explained. This often leads to an excessive reliance on mechanistic interpretability to address a deployment challenge beyond its intended scope. We argue that the gate should instead be calibrated verification: authorization should be domain-scoped, independently checkable, monitored after release, accountable, contestable, and revocable. The reason is twofold. First, model capability is uneven across nearby tasks, so authorization must attach to a specific use rather than to a model in general. Second, societies have long governed opaque expertise through credentials, monitoring, liability, appeal, and revocation rather than mechanism-level explanation. Recent evidence reinforces this distinction between mechanistic understanding and deployment authority: a 53-percentage-point gap between internal representations and output correction shows that understanding may not translate into action, while one scoping review found that only 9.0% of FDA-approved AI/ML device documents contained a prospective post-market surveillance study. We propose Verification Coverage, a six-component reportable standard with a minimum-composition rule, as the metric that should sit beside capability scores in model cards, leaderboards, and regulatory disclosures.
Authors: Riya Tapwal, Abhishek Kumar, Carsten Maple
Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems introduce a security risk in which sensitive information accessed by one agent can propagate through shared context and reappear in downstream outputs, even without explicit adversarial intent. We formalise this phenomenon as propagation amplification, where leakage risk increases across agent boundaries as sensitive content is repeatedly exposed to downstream generators. Existing defences, including prompt-based safeguards, static pattern matching, and LLM-as-judge filtering, are not designed for this setting: they either operate after generation, rely primarily on surface-form patterns, or add substantial latency without modelling the generation process itself. To resolve these issues, we propose PRISM, a real-time defence that treats credential leakage as a sequential risk accumulation problem during generation. At each decoding step, PRISM combines 16 signals spanning lexical, structural, information-theoretic, behavioural, and contextual features into a calibrated risk score, enabling per-token intervention through green, yellow, and red risk zones. Our central observation is that credential reproduction is often preceded by a measurable shift in generation dynamics, characterised by entropy collapse and increasing logit concentration. When combined with text-structural cues such as identifier-pattern detection, these temporal signals provide an early warning of leakage before a secret is fully reconstructed. Across a 2,000-task adversarial benchmark covering 13 attack categories and three pressure levels in a heterogeneous four-agent pipeline, PRISM achieves F1 = 0.832 with precision = 1.000 and recall = 0.712, while producing no observed leakage on our benchmark (0.0% task-level leak rate) and preserving output utility of 0.893. It substantially outperforms the strongest baseline, Span Tagger, which achieves F1 = 0.719 with a 15.0% task-level leak rate.
Authors: Ramesh Arvind Naagarajan, Z\"uhal Wagner, Stefan Streif
Abstract: Model Predictive Control (MPC) is widely used to operate safety-critical infrastructure by predicting future trajectories and optimizing control actions. However, nonlinear dynamics, hard safety constraints, and numerical optimization often render individual control moves opaque to human operators, undermining trust and hindering deployment. This paper presents Hierarchical Causal Abduction (HCA), which combines (i) physics-informed reasoning via domain knowledge graphs, (ii) optimization evidence from Karush--Kuhn--Tucker (KKT) multipliers, and (iii) temporal causal discovery via the PCMCI algorithm to generate faithful, human-interpretable explanations for control actions computed by nonlinear MPC. Across three diverse control applications (greenhouse climate, building HVAC, chemical process engineering) with expert validation, HCA improves explanation accuracy by 53\% over LIME (0.478 vs. 0.311) using a single set of cross-domain parameters without per-domain tuning; domain-specific KKT-threshold calibration over 2--3 days further increases accuracy to 0.88. Ablation studies confirm that each evidence source is essential, with 32--37\% accuracy degradation when any component is removed, and HCA's ranking-and-validation methodology generalizes beyond MPC to other prediction-based decision systems, including learning-based control and trajectory planning.
Authors: Minyu Chen, Song Qin, Ling-I Wu, Jianxin Xue, Guoqiang Li
Abstract: LLM-based automatic heuristic design has shown promise for generating executable heuristics for combinatorial optimization, but existing methods mainly rely on delayed endpoint performance. We propose a \emph{teacher-aware evolutionary framework} that uses independently trained learned optimization policies as behavioral teachers. Instead of deploying or imitating the teacher, our method queries it on states visited by candidate heuristic programs and uses its action preferences as local feedback for evolution. The resulting search discovers static executable heuristics guided by both task performance and teacher-derived behavioral signals. Experiments on scheduling, routing, and graph optimization benchmarks show that our method improves over performance-driven LLM heuristic evolution baselines while requiring no neural inference at deployment. These results suggest that learned optimization policies can be repurposed as behavioral feedback sources for automatic heuristic discovery.
Authors: Regina Gugg, Selina Niederl\"ander, Andreas St\"ockl, Martin Flechl
Abstract: The rapid adoption of LLMs in both research and industry highlights the challenges of deploying them safely and reveals a gap in the systematic evaluation of toxicity benchmarks. As organizations increasingly rely on these benchmarks to certify models for customer-facing applications and automated moderation, unrecognized evaluation biases could lead to the deployment of vulnerable or unsafe systems. This work investigates the robustness of established benchmarking setups and examines how to measure currently neglected intrinsic biases, such as those related to model choice, metrics, and task types. Our experiments uncover significant discrepancies in benchmark behaviors when evaluation setups are altered. Specifically, shifting the task from text completion to summarization increases the tendency of benchmarks to flag content as harmful. Additionally, certain benchmarks fail to maintain consistent behavior when the input data domain is changed. Furthermore, we observe model-specific instabilities, demonstrating a clear need for more robust and comprehensive safety evaluation frameworks.
Authors: Florent Gu\'epin, Cheick Tidiani Cisse, Denis Renaud, Fran\c{c}ois Bidet, Arnaud Legendre
Abstract: Trajectories are nowadays valuable information for a wide range of applications. However they are also inherently sensitive, as they contain highly personal information about individuals. Facing this challenge, synthesizing mobility trajectories has emerged as a promising solution to leverage mobility information while preserving privacy. State-of-the-art models, often rely on the false assumptions of generative models implicit privacy and fails to provide privacy guarantees while preserving trajectories utility. Here, we introduce diffGHOST, a conditional diffusion model based on latent space segmentation, designed to answer this challenge. Thus, this paper propose a methodology that identify and mitigate memorization of critical samples using condition segments of a learn latent space.
Authors: Zhiyuan Fan, Wenwei Jin, Feng Zhang, Bin Li, Yihong Dong, Yao Hu, Jiawei Li
Abstract: Experience-driven self-evolving agents aim to overcome the static nature of large language models by distilling reusable experience from past interactions, thus enabling adaptation to novel tasks at deployment time. This process places substantial demands on the foundation model's capacities for abstraction, generalization, and in-context learning. However, most existing studies focus primarily on system-level design choices, such as how experience is represented and managed, neglecting the inherent capabilities of the underlying model. While some recent works have started to optimize the experience utilization stage via reinforcement learning, they still fail to treat self-evolution as a unified process to be jointly optimized. To this end, we propose Evolving-RL, an efficient algorithmic framework that jointly improves the experience extraction and utilization capabilities required for self-evolution. Specifically, we center the learning process on experience extraction and evaluation, using the two supervisory signals derived from evaluation to optimize the extractor and solver separately and thus enable their coordinated co-evolution. Experiments on ALFWorld and Mind2Web show that Evolving-RL effectively enhances LLMs' ability to extract and reuse experience, leading to strong performance gains on out-of-distribution tasks (up to 98.7% relative improvement over the GRPO baseline on ALFWorld unseen tasks and 35.8% on Mind2Web), and these gains are fully unlocked only through the coordinated co-evolution of experience extraction and utilization. Furthermore, Evolving-RL inherently functions as an experience-augmented RL algorithm. By internalizing reusable experience patterns directly into model parameters, it achieves remarkable performance gains over standard baselines on both seen and unseen tasks, even in the absence of test-time experience accumulation.
Authors: Yanjie Li, Weijun Li, Xin Ning
Abstract: Mathematical formulas serve as a language through which humans communicate with nature. Discovering mathematical laws from scientific data to describe natural phenomena has been a long-standing pursuit of humanity for centuries. In the field of artificial intelligence, this challenge is known as the symbolic regression problem. Among existing symbolic regression approaches, Genetic Programming (GP) based on evolutionary algorithms remains one of the most classical and widely adopted methods. GP simulates the evolutionary process across generations through genetic mutation and crossover. However, mutations and crossovers in GP are entirely random. While this randomness effectively mimics natural evolution, it inevitably produces both beneficial and detrimental variations. If there existed a metaphorical `God` capable of foreseeing which genetic mutations or crossovers would yield superior outcomes and performing targeted gene editing accordingly, the efficiency of evolution could be substantially improved. Motivated by this idea, we propose in this paper a symbolic regression approach based on gene editing, termed GESR. In GESR, we trained two "hands of God" (two BERT models). Among them, the first leverages the BERT's masked language modeling capability to guide the mutation of genes (expression symbols). The other BERT model guides the crossover of individual genes by predicting the crossover point. Experimental results demonstrate that GESR significantly improves computational efficiency compared with traditional GP algorithms and achieves strong overall performance across multiple symbolic regression tasks.
Authors: Xinrun Wang, Chang Yang, He Zhao, Zhuoyi Lin, Shuyue Hu
Abstract: LLM-based foundation agents that perceive, reason, and act across thousands of reasoning steps are rapidly becoming the dominant paradigm for deploying artificial intelligence in open-ended, long-horizon complex tasks. Despite this significance, the field remains overwhelmingly engineering-driven. Engineering practice has converged on useful primitives (tool loops, memory banks, harnesses, reflection steps), yet these are assembled by empirical trial and error rather than from first principles. Fundamental questions remain open: under what conditions does a long-running agent remain on-task? How should an agent respond when its environment exceeds its representational capacity? What architectural properties are necessary for safe self-improvement? We argue that cybernetics, the mid-twentieth-century science of control and communication in complex systems, provides the missing theoretical scaffold for foundation agents. By mapping six canonical laws of classical cybernetics onto six agent design principles, and synthesizing those principles into three engineering desiderata (reliability, lifelong running, and self-Improvement), we arrive at a framework termed Agent Cybernetics. Three application domains, code generation, computer use and automated research, exemplify the analytical framework of agent cybernetics by identifying failure modes and concrete engineering recommendations. We hope that agent cybernetics opens a new research venue and establishes the scientific foundation that foundation agents need for principled, reliable real-world deployment.
Authors: Tim Van hamme, Thomas Vissers, Javier Carnerero-Cano, Mario Fritz, Emil C. Lupu, Lieven Desmet, Dinil Mon Divakaran
Abstract: LLMs are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents with access to tools, databases, and external services, yet practitioners (across different sectors) lack systematic methods to assess how known threat classes translate into concrete risks within a specific agentic deployment. We present MATRA, a pragmatic threat modeling framework for agentic AI systems that adapts established risk assessment methodology to systematically assess how known LLM threats translate into deployment-specific risks. MATRA begins with an asset-based impact assessment and utilizes attack trees to determine the likelihood of these impacts occurring within the system architecture. We demonstrate MATRA on a personal AI agent deployment using OpenClaw, quantifying how architectural controls such as network sandboxing and least-privilege access reduce risk by limiting the blast radius of successful injections.
Authors: Lihuan Li, Wilson Wongso, Baiyu Chen, Hao Xue, Ruiyi Yang, Yifan Duan, Xiachong Lin, Yang Song, Flora Salim
Abstract: Urban mobility is naturally expressed both as trajectories in space and as natural-language descriptions of travel intent, constraints, and preferences. However, prior work rarely evaluates these two modalities together on the same real-world trajectories: trajectory modeling often stays geometry-centric, while language-centric mobility benchmarks frequently target route planning and tool use rather than fine-grained, verifiable alignment between text and the underlying route. We introduce TrajPrism, a multi-task benchmark for language-trajectory alignment that unifies (i) instruction-conditioned trajectory generation, (ii) language-driven semantic trajectory retrieval, and (iii) trajectory captioning, together with an evaluation protocol that measures trajectory fidelity, retrieval quality, and language groundedness. We construct TrajPrism by pairing real urban trajectories with judge-filtered language annotations generated under a four-dimensional travel-intent taxonomy. The benchmark contains 300K selected trajectories across Porto, San Francisco, and Beijing, yielding 2.1M task instances from three instruction variants, three retrieval queries, and one caption per trajectory. We further develop proof-of-concept models for each task: TrajAnchor for instruction-conditioned trajectory generation, TrajFuse for semantic trajectory retrieval, and TrajRap for trajectory captioning. These models instantiate the proposed tasks and show that geometry-only trajectory baselines leave a large gap on our protocol, especially where language is part of the input-output interface. We release TrajPrism with code and a reproducible annotation pipeline that is designed to be portable across cities, given compatible trajectory inputs and map resources.
Authors: Yuanyang Li, Xue Yang, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Hongyang Chen
Abstract: Current LLM agents are proficient at calling isolated APIs but struggle with the "last mile" of commercial software automation. In real-world scenarios, tools are not independent; they are atomic, interdependent, and prone to environmental noise. We introduce $\textbf{ComplexMCP}$, a benchmark designed to evaluate agents in these rigorous conditions. Built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), $\textbf{ComplexMCP}$ provides over 300 meticulously tested tools derived from 7 stateful sandboxes, ranging from office suites to financial systems. Unlike existing datasets, our benchmark utilizes a seed-driven architecture to simulate dynamic environment states and unpredictable API failures, ensuring a deterministic yet diverse evaluation. We evaluate various LLMs across full-context and RAG paradigms, revealing a stark performance gap: even top-tier models fail to exceed a 60% success rate, far trailing human performance 90%. Granular trajectory analysis identifies three fundamental bottlenecks: (1) $\textbf{tool retrieval saturation}$ as action spaces scale; (2) $\textbf{over-confidence}$, where agents skip essential environment verifications; and (3) $\textbf{strategic defeatism}$, a tendency to rationalize failure rather than pursuing recovery. These findings underscore the insufficiency of current agents for interdependent workflows, positioning $\textbf{ComplexMCP}$ as a critical testbed for the next generation of resilient autonomous systems.
Authors: Shengxiang Gao, Chao Lei, Jey Han Lau, Jianzhong Qi
Abstract: Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) aims to answer user questions by reasoning over Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Recent KGQA methods mainly follow the retrieval-augmented generation paradigm to ground Large Language Models~(LLMs) with structured knowledge from KGs. However, training effective models to retrieve question-relevant evidence from KGs typically requires high-quality intermediate supervision signals, such as question-relevant paths or subgraphs, which are time- and resource-intensive to obtain. We propose PathISE, a novel framework for learning high-quality intermediate supervision from answer-level labels. PathISE introduces a lightweight transformer-based estimator that estimates the informativeness of relation paths to construct pseudo path-level supervision. This supervision is then distilled into an LLM path generator, whose generated paths are grounded in the KG to provide compact evidence for inductive answer reasoning. ExtensiveISE experiments on three KGQA benchmarks show that PathISE achieves competitive or state-of-the-art KGQA performance, and provides reusable supervision signals that can enhance existing KGQA models, without relying on costly LLM-refined supervision signals. Our source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PathISE-2F87.
Authors: Yu-Fang Tsai, Yu-Jen Chen, Kok-Hua Tan, Sheng-Chieh Huang, You-Ying Ji, Yu-Lun Chen, Chun-Yi Wang, Chien-Ming Hsu
Abstract: Machine learning has become increasingly prevalent in football performance analysis, yet most studies prioritize predictive accuracy while implicitly assuming that learned performance determinants and their interpretations are transferable across competition levels. Whether interpretability remains reliable under domain shift-from elite to university football remains largely unexplored. This study investigates whether performance determinants learned from elite competitions are structurally transferable to university-level football and whether their interpretations remain robust under domain shift. Models were trained on large-scale event data from the top five European leagues and applied to university football data from National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) using an identical feature space. Random Forest and Multilayer Perceptron models were interpreted using SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) and Counterfactual Impact Score (CIS). Across five experiments, elite football exhibited a stable and consistent hierarchy of performance determinants across leagues, models, and explanation methods. In contrast, NTHU university football showed substantial reordering of key indicators, reduced explanation stability, weaker structural agreement with elite domains, and increased sensitivity to explanation method. These findings suggest that interpretability robustness is domain-dependent. Rather than reflecting methodological limitations alone, instability in explanations under domain shift may serve as a diagnostic signal of structural ambiguity in the target domain.
Authors: Jinwen Tang
Abstract: Campus well-being underpins academic success, yet many universities lack effective methods for monitoring satisfaction and detecting mental health risks. This dissertation addresses these gaps through prevention (improving feedback collection) and intervention (advancing mental health detection), unified under an integrated framework. For prevention, we developed TigerGPT, a personalized survey chatbot leveraging LLMs to engage users in context-aware conversations grounded in conversational design and engagement theory, achieving 75% usability and 81% satisfaction. To address its limitations in repetitiveness and response depth, we introduced AURA, a reinforcement-learning framework that adapts follow-up question types (validate, specify, reflect, probe) within a session using an LSDE quality signal (Length, Self-disclosure, Emotion, Specificity), initialized from 96 prior conversations. AURA achieved +0.12 mean quality gain (p=0.044, d=0.66), with 63% fewer specification prompts and 10x more validation behavior. For intervention, we examine Expressive Narrative Stories (ENS) for mental health screening, showing BERT(128) captures nuanced linguistic features without keyword cues, while conventional classifiers depend heavily on explicit mental health terms. We then developed PsychoGPT, an LLM built on DSM-5 and PHQ-8 guidelines that performs initial distress classification, symptom-level scoring, and reconciliation with external ratings for explainable assessment. To reduce hallucinations, we proposed Stacked Multi-Model Reasoning (SMMR), layering expert models where early layers handle localized subtasks and later layers reconcile findings, outperforming single-model solutions on DAIC-WOZ in accuracy, F1, and PHQ-8 scoring. Finally, a cohesive framework unifies these tools, enabling adaptive survey insights to flow directly into specialized mental health detection models.
Authors: Wenbo Zhang, Lijinghua Zhang, Liner Xiang, Hengrui Cai
Abstract: Reasoning-capable large language models (LLMs) have recently been adopted as automated judges, but their benefits and costs in LLM-as-a-Judge settings remain unclear. Through controlled comparisons between reasoning and non-reasoning judges, we show that explicit reasoning substantially improves judgment accuracy on tasks requiring structured verification (e.g., math and coding), while offering limited or even negative gains on simpler evaluations and incurring significantly higher computational cost. These findings motivate that reasoning should be used selectively rather than universally, with awareness of possible distribution shift. We propose a Robust Adaptive Cost-Efficient Routing (RACER), which dynamically selects between reasoning and non-reasoning judges under a fixed budget by formulating routing as a constrained distributionally robust optimization problem. RACER explicitly accounts for distribution shift via a KL-divergence uncertainty set, admits an efficient primal--dual algorithm, and enjoys theoretical guarantees including uniqueness of the optimal policy and linear convergence. Extensive experiments show that RACER achieves superior accuracy--cost trade-offs under distribution shift.
Authors: Jinhang Xu, Qiyuan Zhu, Yujun Wu, Zirui Wang, Dongxu Zhang, Jianxin Tang, Marcia Tian, Yiling Duan, Siyuan Li, Jingxuan Wei, Sirui Han, Yike Guo, Odin Zhang, Conghui He, Cheng Tan
Abstract: LLM-powered multi-agent systems can now automate the full research pipeline from ideation to paper writing, but a fundamental question remains: automation for whom? Researchers operate under different resource configurations, hold different methodological preferences, and target different output formats. A system that produces uniform outputs regardless of these differences will systematically under-serve every individual user, making personalization a precondition for research automation to be genuinely usable. However, achieving it requires three capabilities that current systems lack: accumulating reusable procedural knowledge across projects, retaining user-specific experience across sessions, and internalizing implicit preferences that resist explicit formalization. We propose NanoResearch, a multi-agent framework that addresses these gaps through tri-level co-evolution. A skill bank distills recurring operations into compact procedural rules reusable across projects. A memory module maintains user- and project-specific experience that grounds planning decisions in each user's research history. A label-free policy learning converts free-form feedback into persistent parameter updates of the planner, reshaping subsequent coordination. These three layers co-evolve: reliable skills produce richer memory, richer memory informs better planning, and preference internalization continuously realigns the loop to each user. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NanoResearch delivers substantial gains over state-of-the-art AI research systems, and progressively refines itself to produce better research at lower cost over successive cycles.
Authors: Jihoo Jung, Chaeyoung Jung, Ji-Hoon Kim, Joon Son Chung
Abstract: Audio-visual large language models (AVLLMs) have recently emerged as a powerful architecture capable of jointly reasoning over audio, visual, and textual modalities. In AVLLMs, the bidirectional interaction between audio and video modalities introduces intricate processing dynamics, necessitating a deeper understanding of their internal mechanisms. However, unlike extensively studied text-only or large vision language models, the internal workings of AVLLMs remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we focus on cross-modal information flow between audio and visual modalities in AVLLMs, investigating where information derived from one modality is encoded within the token representations of the other modality. Through an analysis of multiple recent AVLLMs, we uncover two common findings. First, AVLLMs primarily encode integrated audio-visual information in sink tokens. Second, sink tokens do not uniformly hold cross-modal information. Instead, a distinct subset of sink tokens, which we term cross-modal sink tokens, specializes in storing such information. Based on these findings, we further propose a simple training-free hallucination mitigation method by encouraging reliance on integrated cross-modal information within cross-modal sink tokens. Our code is available at https://github.com/kaistmm/crossmodal-hub.
Authors: Peng Cao, Ali Mirzazadeh, Jong Woo Lee, Aleksandar Videnovic, Dina Katabi
Abstract: Clinical EEG interpretation requires reasoning over full EEG sessions and integrating signal patterns with clinical context. Existing EEG foundation models are largely designed for short-window decoding and do not incorporate clinical context. We introduce CLEF, a clinically grounded long-context EEG foundation model. CLEF represents EEG sessions as 3D multitaper spectrogram tokens, enabling tractable Transformer modeling at session scale, and aligns embeddings with neurologist reports and structured EHR data through contrastive objectives. We evaluate CLEF on a new 234-task benchmark spanning disease phenotypes, medication exposures, and EEG findings, with more than 260k EEG sessions from over 108k patients. CLEF outperforms prior EEG foundation models on 229 of 234 tasks, improving mean AUROC from 0.65 to 0.74. Reconstruction-only pretraining surpasses prior EEG foundation models, while report and EHR alignment yields further gains. Held-out concept and external-cohort experiments suggest that these representations transfer beyond observed alignment targets. These results support session-scale, clinically grounded representation learning as a promising foundation-model paradigm for clinical EEG.
Authors: Moksh Jain, Mehdi Bennani, Johannes Bausch, Yuri Chervonyi, Bogdan Georgiev, Simon Osindero, Nenad Toma\v{s}ev
Abstract: Scientific discovery is fundamentally a resource-constrained process that requires navigating complex trade-offs between the quality and quantity of measurements due to physical and cost constraints. Measurements drive the scientific process by revealing novel phenomena to improve our understanding. Existing benchmarks for evaluating agents for scientific discovery focus on either static knowledge-based reasoning or unconstrained experimental design tasks, and do not capture the ability to make measurements and plan under constraints. To bridge this gap, we propose Measuring and Discovering Physics (MaD Physics), a benchmark to evaluate the ability of agents to make informative measurements and conclusions subject to constraints on the quality and quantity of measurements. The benchmark consists of three environments, each based on a distinct physical law. To mitigate contamination from existing knowledge, MaD Physics includes altered physical laws. In each trial, the agent makes measurements of the system until it exhausts an allotted budget and then the agent has to infer the underlying physical law to make predictions about the state of the system in the future. MaD Physics evaluates two fundamental capabilities of scientific agents: inferring models from data and planning under constraints. We also demonstrate how MaD Physics can be used to evaluate other capabilities such as multimodality and in-context learning. We benchmark agents on MaD Physics using four Gemini models (2.5 Flash Lite, 2.5 Flash, 2.5 Pro, and 3 Flash), identifying shortcomings in their structured exploration and data collection capabilities and highlighting directions to improve their scientific reasoning.
Authors: Muhan Gao, Zih-Ching Chen, Kuan-Hao Huang
Abstract: As large language models are increasingly deployed in retrieval-augmented generation and agentic systems that accumulate extensive context, understanding how distracting information affects long-context performance becomes critical. Prior work shows that semantically relevant yet misleading documents degrade performance, but the quantitative relationship between the proportion of distractors and performance remains unstudied. In this work, we systematically vary the hard-distractor proportion in fixed-length contexts, revealing a striking nonlinear pattern: as the proportion of hard distractors increases, performance drops sharply within the first small fraction, while the remainder of the range yields only marginal additional decline. We term this ''The First Drop of Ink'' effect, analogous to how a single drop of ink contaminates water. Our theoretical and empirical analyses grounded in attention mechanics show that hard distractors capture disproportionate attention even at small proportions, with diminishing marginal impact as their proportion grows. Controlled experiments further show that filtering gains mainly come from context-length reduction rather than distractor removal; substantial recovery requires reducing the hard-distractor proportion to near zero, highlighting the importance of upstream retrieval precision.
Authors: Pedro Conde, Henrique Branquinho, Valerio Mazzone, Bruno Mendes, Andr\'e Baptista, Nuno Moniz
Abstract: AI pentesting agents are increasingly credible as offensive security systems, but current benchmarks still provide limited guidance on which will perform best in real-world targets. Existing evaluation protocols assess and optimize for predefined goals such as capture-the-flag, remote code execution, exploit reproduction, or trajectory similarity, in simplified or narrow settings. These tools are valuable for measuring bounded capabilities, yet they do not adequately capture the complexity, open-ended exploration, and strategic decision-making required in realistic pentesting. In this paper, we present a practical evaluation protocol that shifts assessment from task completion to validated vulnerability discovery, allowing evaluation in sufficiently complex targets spanning multiple attack surfaces and vulnerability classes. The protocol combines structured ground-truth with LLM-based semantic matching to identify vulnerabilities, bipartite resolution to score findings under realistic ambiguity, continuous ground-truth maintenance, repeated and cumulative evaluation of stochastic agents, efficiency metrics, and reduced-suite selection for sustainable experimentation. This protocol extends the state of the art by enabling a more realistic, operationally informative comparison of AI pentesting agents. To enable reproducibility, we also release expert-annotated ground truth and code for the proposed evaluation protocol: https://github.com/jd0965199-oss/ethibench.
Authors: Daniel Mitropolsky, Susan S. Hong, Riccardo Neumarker, Emanuele Rimoldi, Tomaso Poggio
Abstract: We introduce the Generalized Turing Test (GTT), a formal framework for comparing the capabilities of arbitrary agents via indistinguishability. For agents A and B, we define the Turing comparator A $\geq$ B to hold if B, acting as a distinguisher, cannot reliably distinguish between interactions with A (instructed to imitate B) and another instance of B. This yields a dataset- and task-agnostic notion of relative intelligence. We study the comparator's structure, including conditions under which it is transitive and therefore induces an ordering over equivalence classes, and we define and analyze variants with querying, bounded interaction, and fixed distinguishers. To complement the theory, we instantiate the framework on a collection of modern models, empirically evaluating pairwise indistinguishability across thousands of trials. The resulting comparisons exhibit a stratified structure consistent with existing rankings, hinting that the proposed framework yields meaningful empirical orderings. Our results position indistinguishability as a unifying lens for reasoning about intelligence, suggesting a foundation for evaluation and, potentially, training objectives that are inherently independent of fixed datasets or benchmarks.
Authors: Haozhe Zhang, Kaichen Liu, Miaomiao Chen, Lei Li, Shaojie Yang, Cheng Peng, Hanjie Chen
Abstract: Industrial Computer-Aided Design (CAD) code generation requires models to produce executable parametric programs from visual or textual inputs. Beyond recognizing the outer shape of a part, this task involves understanding its 3D structure, inferring engineering parameters, and choosing CAD operations that reflect how the part would be designed and manufactured. Despite the promise of Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for this task, they are rarely evaluated on whether these capabilities jointly hold in realistic industrial CAD settings. We present BenchCAD, a unified benchmark for industrial CAD reasoning. BenchCAD contains 17,900 execution-verified CadQuery programs across 106 industrial part families, including bevel gears, compression springs, twist drills, and other reusable engineering designs. It evaluates models through visual question answering, code question answering, image-to-code generation, and instruction-guided code editing, enabling fine-grained analysis across perception, parametric abstraction, and executable program synthesis. Across 10+ frontier models, BenchCAD shows that current systems often recover coarse outer geometry but fail to produce faithful parametric CAD programs. Common failures include missing fine 3D structure, misinterpreting industrial design parameters, and replacing essential operations such as sweeps, lofts, and twist-extrudes with simpler sketch-and-extrude patterns. Fine-tuning and reinforcement learning improve in-distribution performance, but generalization to unseen part families remains limited. These results position BenchCAD as a benchmark for measuring and improving the industrial readiness of multimodal CAD automation.
Authors: Mingxi Zou, Zhihan Guo, Langzhang Liang, Zhuo Wang, Qifan Wang, Qingsong Wen, Irwin King, Lizhen Qu, Zenglin Xu
Abstract: Long-horizon language agents must operate under limited runtime memory, yet existing memory mechanisms often organize experience around descriptive criteria such as relevance, salience, or summary quality. For an agent, however, memory is valuable not because it faithfully describes the past, but because it preserves the distinctions between histories that must remain separated under a fixed budget to support good decisions. We cast this as a decision-centric rate-distortion problem, measuring memory quality by the loss in achievable decision quality induced by compression. This yields an exact forgetting boundary for what can be safely forgotten, and a memory-distortion frontier characterizing the optimal tradeoff between memory budget and decision quality. Motivated by this decision-centric view of memory, we propose DeMem, an online memory learner that refines its partition only when data certify that a shared state would induce decision conflict, and prove near-minimax regret guarantees. On both controlled synthetic diagnostics and long-horizon conversational benchmarks, DeMem yields consistent gains under the same runtime budget, supporting the principle that memory should preserve the distinctions that matter for decisions, not descriptions.
Authors: Simon Yu, Derek Chong, Ananjan Nandi, Dilara Soylu, Jiuding Sun, Christopher D Manning, Weiyan Shi
Abstract: We introduce Shepherd, a functional programming model that formalizes meta-agent operations on target agents as functions, with core operations mechanized in Lean. Shepherd records every agent-environment interaction as a typed event in a Git-like execution trace, enabling any past state to be forked and replayed. The system forks the agent process and its filesystem $5\times$ faster than Docker, achieving $>95\%$ prompt-cache reuse on replay. We demonstrate the model through three applications. First, in runtime intervention, a live supervisor increases pair coding pass rates from 28.8% to 54.7% on CooperBench. Second, in counterfactual meta-optimization, branching exploration outperforms baselines across four benchmarks by up to 11 points while reducing wall-clock time by up to 58%. Third, in Tree-RL training, forking rollouts at selected turns improves TerminalBench-2 performance from 34.2% to 39.4%. These results establish Shepherd as an efficient infrastructure for programming meta-agents. We open-source the system to support future research.
Authors: Ali Saraeb
Abstract: This paper presents two concrete applications of Artificial Intelligence to algorithmic and analytic number theory. Recent benchmarks of large language models have mainly focused on general mathematics problems and the currently infeasible objective of automated theorem proving. In the first part of this paper, we relax our ambition and focus on a more specialized domain: we evaluate the performance of the state-of-the-art open-source large language model Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct on algorithmic and computational tasks in algorithmic number theory. On a benchmark of thirty algorithmic problems and thirty computational questions taken from classical number-theoretic textbooks and Math StackExchange, the model achieves at least 0.95 accuracy (relative to the true answer) on every problem or question when given an optimal non-spoiling hint. The second part of the paper empirically verifies a folklore conjecture in analytic number theory stating that the modulus \(q\) of a Dirichlet character \(\chi\) is uniquely determined by the initial nontrivial zeros \(\{\rho_1,\dots,\rho_k\}\) (for some \(k\in\mathbb{N}\)) of the corresponding Dirichlet \(L\)-function \(L(s,\chi)\). We train a LightGBM multiclass classifier to predict the conductor \(q\) for 214 randomly chosen Dirichlet \(L\)-functions from a vector of statistical features of their initial zeros (moments, finite-difference statistics, FFT magnitudes, etc.). The model empirically verifies the conjecture for small \(q\), achieving at least 93.9\% test accuracy when sufficient statistical properties of the zeros are incorporated. For the second part of the paper, code and dataset are available.
Authors: Zhiyuan Li, Rongzhen Zhao, Wenyan Yang, Wenshuai Zhao, Pekka Marttinen, Joni Pajarinen
Abstract: The de facto approach in video object-centric learning maintains temporal consistency through learned dynamics modules that predict future object representations, called slots. We demonstrate that these predictors function as expensive approximations of discrete correspondence problems. Modern self-supervised vision backbones already encode instance-discriminative features that distinguish objects reliably. Exploiting these features eliminates the need for learned temporal prediction. We introduce Grounded Correspondence, a framework that replaces learned transition functions with deterministic bipartite matching. Slots initialize from salient regions in frozen backbone features. Frame-to-frame identity is maintained through Hungarian matching on slot representations. The approach requires zero learnable parameters for temporal modeling yet achieves competitive performance on MOVi-D, MOVi-E, and YouTube-VIS. Project page: https://magenta-sherbet-85b101.netlify.app/
Authors: Hao Yu
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) alignment via reinforcement learning from human preferences (RLHF) suffers from unstable policy updates, ambiguous gradient directions, poor interpretability, and high gradient variance in mainstream pairwise preference learning paradigms. To systematically address these limitations, we establish a unified theoretical framework for preference-based RL optimization centered on the Pair-GRPO family, comprising two tightly coupled variants: Soft-Pair-GRPO and Hard-Pair-GRPO. Soft-Pair-GRPO is a minimal modification of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) that replaces group-normalized scalar rewards with binary pairwise preference rewards, retaining GRPO's clipped surrogate and KL-regularized structure. We prove a critical gradient equivalence theorem: under first-order Taylor expansion around the current policy, Soft-Pair-GRPO's gradient is a positive scalar multiple of standard GRPO's gradient, explaining its empirical stability despite discarding continuous reward magnitudes. Building on this foundation, we propose Hard-Pair-GRPO, an advanced variant introducing explicit local probability constraints and constrained KL-fitting optimization to further suppress gradient noise and global policy drift. We provide comprehensive theoretical guarantees for both variants--including monotonic policy improvement, deterministic gradient direction, gradient-variance reduction, and dynamic step-size convergence. Extensive experiments on standard LLM alignment benchmarks (HH-RLHF,UltraFeedback) and the MuJoCo continuous control task HalfCheetah-v4 demonstrate that our Pair-GRPO family consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in alignment quality, human preference win rate, training stability, and generalization to general reinforcement learning. Ablation studies validate the critical contributions of each core component.
Authors: Mahdi Erfanian, Nelson Daniel Troncoso, Aashna Garg, Amabel Gale, Xiaoyu Liu, Pareesa Ameneh Golnari, Shengyu Fu
Abstract: Large Language Models for code generation frequently produce hallucinations in Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) tasks -- plausible but incorrect completions such as invented API methods, invalid parameters, undefined variables, or non-existent imports. These failures pass superficial review yet introduce runtime errors. We introduce Delulu, a verified multi-lingual benchmark of 1,951 FIM samples across 7 languages and 4 hallucination types. Samples are curated through an adversarial pipeline: a frontier LLM generates plausible hallucinations, four diverse judge models evaluate them, embedding-based clustering mines progressively harder examples, self-contained Docker containers verify that golden completions compile while hallucinated variants produce the expected runtime error, and a final human-expert review removes any remaining biased or trivially decidable samples. We evaluate 11 open-weight FIM models from five families spanning 0.5B-32B parameters: a six-point Qwen2.5-Coder scaling slate, plus a cross-family slate (CodeLlama, DeepSeek-Coder-V2, StarCoder2). The strongest model reaches only 84.5% pass@1, no family exceeds 0.77 Edit Similarity, and every family produces hallucination-aligned completions on a non-trivial share of samples, confirming that the difficulty exposed by Delulu is task-intrinsic rather than family-specific. We release the benchmark, containers, and evaluation framework at https://github.com/microsoft/delulu.
Authors: Maribeth Rauh, Dick A. H. Blankvoort, Matias Duran, Caoilfhionn N\'i Dheor\'ain, Harshvardhan J. Pandit, Siddharth D. Jaiswal, Anthony Ventresque, Abeba Birhane
Abstract: The use of chatbots for various forms of companionship is growing rapidly, raising a myriad of questions about simulated relationships, emotional dependence, and psychological harm. While major platforms such as ChatGPT, Grok, and Character.AI are the subject of a growing body of research and legal inquiries, apps explicitly built for simulating intimate interpersonal relationships remain under-explored. In this work, we evaluate the five most popular AI companion mobile applications in the EU and UK markets for factors that encourage parasocial interaction and may manipulate users. We do this by manually annotating the user experience each offers. Specifically, we systematically record and quantify design dark patterns, anthropomorphism, stereotypes, erotica, and technical performance issues. We find that all apps contain substantial dark patterns aimed at increasing monetisation and user engagement. Erotica and gamification features such as levelling are also prevalent, and although other features vary considerably between applications, all apps have highly anthropomorphic design. These findings shed light on the mechanics used to leverage users' simulated relationships. On that basis, we put forward concrete recommendations for regulators to strengthen consumer protection in this rapidly emerging market. Content warning: This article contains objectifying images of women, erotic images, textual references to incest, and other potentially sensitive, offensive, and distressing text.
Authors: Xinchun Su, Chunxu Luo, Lipeng Ma, Yixuan Li, Weidong Yang
Abstract: Accurate clinical diagnosis requires extensive domain knowledge and complex clinical reasoning capabilities. Although large language models (LLMs) hold great potential for clinical reasoning, their high computational and memory requirements limit their deployment in resource-constrained environments. Knowledge distillation (KD) can compress LLM capabilities into smaller models, but traditional KD merely transfers superficial answer patterns and fails to preserve the structured reasoning required for reliable diagnosis. To address this, we propose a two-stage distillation framework, MedThink, designed to cultivate robust clinical reasoning in small language models (SLMs). In the first stage, a teacher LLM screens data and injects domain-knowledge explanations to fine-tune a student model, establishing a knowledge foundation. In the second stage, the teacher evaluates the student's errors, generates reasoning chains linking knowledge to correct answers, and refines the student's diagnostic reasoning through a second round of fine-tuning. We evaluate MedThink on general medical benchmarks and a gastroenterology dataset comprising 955 question-answer pairs. Experiments demonstrate that MedThink outperforms six distillation strategies in all benchmarks: achieving an improvement of up to 12.7% over the student baseline in general tasks, and reaching a total top accuracy of 56.4% in gastroenterology evaluation. This indicates that iterative distillation centered on reasoning can significantly enhance the diagnostic accuracy and generalization capabilities of SLMs whilst maintaining computational efficiency. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/destinybird/PrecisionBoost.
Authors: Takanori Kotama, Yang Huang
Abstract: High-entropy alloys (HEAs) have attracted growing attention for their exceptional mechanical and thermal properties arising from complex atomic configurations. In this paper, we propose crystal fractional graph neural network for predicting the energy of high-entropy alloys by explicitly integrating both local atomic environments and global compositional information. The model consists of three components: a crystal graph neural network, which employs graph attention network layers to learn local interactions among 16 on-site atoms within the crystal lattice; fractional neural network, a fully connected network that embeds the global fraction of constituent elements; and feature fusion neural network, which fuses the outputs of the two submodels to predict the total crystal energy. We train the model on a dataset of 1,049 crystal structures and validate it on 198 quaternary structures, optimizing all hyperparameters via Optuna. Our results show that our model achieves an RMSE comparable to first-principles calculations and maintains high accuracy even for low-energy configurations. However, the model exhibits limitations in handling large crystal cells, which we aim to address in future work to extend its applicability to more complex systems.
Authors: Dario Coscia, Sindy L\"owe, Max Welling
Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become the standard for fine-tuning large pre-trained models at reduced computational cost. However, its low-rank point-estimate updates limit expressiveness, leave a persistent gap relative to full fine-tuning accuracy, and provide no built-in uncertainty quantification, limiting its applicability in settings where reliability matters as much as accuracy. We introduce BaLoRA, a Bayesian extension of LoRA with a novel input-adaptive Bayesian parameterization of LoRA matrices that adds minimal parameters and compute. Surprisingly, not only does the Bayesian extension yield well-calibrated uncertainty estimates, but the adaptive noise injection underlying our approach also significantly improves prediction accuracy, narrowing the gap with full fine-tuning across both natural language reasoning and vision tasks. When applied to band gap prediction in metal-organic frameworks, BaLoRA produces zero-shot test-time uncertainty estimates that correlate more strongly with model error than a trained ensemble of LoRA models, and improve monotonically with compute without sacrificing accuracy.
Authors: Omar Faruque, Sahara Ali, Xue Zheng, Jianwu Wang
Abstract: The widespread availability of complex time series data in various domains such as environmental science, epidemiology, and economics demands robust causal discovery methods that can identify intricate contemporaneous and lagged relationships in non-stationary, nonlinear, and noisy settings. Existing constraint-based methods often rely heavily on conditional independence tests that degrade for limited data samples and complex distributions, while score-based methods impose strong statistical assumptions. Recent methods address special cases such as change point detection or distribution shifts, but struggle to provide a unified solution. We propose the Transformer Integrated Temporal Causal Discovery (TTCD) Framework, a novel end-to-end approach that learns contemporaneous and lagged causal relations from non-stationary time series. TTCD introduces a Non-Stationary Feature Learner integrating temporal and frequency-domain attention with dynamic non-stationarity profiling, and a custom Causal Structure Learner. A key innovation is reconstruction-guided causal signal distillation, to distill essential causal signals through the reconstruction process of the transformer decoder, which mitigates noise and spurious correlations while preserving meaningful dependencies. The Causal Structure Learner operates on distilled reconstructed signals to infer the underlying causal graph without restrictive assumptions on noise distributions or data generation processes. Experiments on synthetic, benchmark, and real world datasets show that TTCD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both accuracy and consistency with domain knowledge, demonstrating the approach's effectiveness for causal discovery in challenging real world contexts.
Authors: Drew Dillon, Kasyap Varanasi
Abstract: AI coding agents powered by large language models can read codebases and produce functional code, but they routinely violate team-specific product decisions that are invisible in the source code alone. We introduce a controlled benchmark measuring decision compliance, the rate at which an AI coding agent follows established product, design, and engineering decisions, across 8 realistic software engineering tasks containing 41 weighted decision points. We compare a baseline configuration (Claude Code with codebase access only) against an augmented configuration that adds Brief, a product-context retrieval system providing spec generation, mid-build consultation, and retrieval of recorded decisions, persona pain points, customer signals, and competitive intelligence. On identical prompts and the same repository, the augmented configuration achieves 95% decision compliance versus 46% for the baseline, a 49 percentage point improvement. Per-decision analysis reveals that the baseline achieves 100% compliance on decisions visible in the codebase and 0-33% on decisions requiring product context, suggesting that product-context retrieval is a key driver of the improvement. We release the benchmark repository, all 16 pull requests, and scoring harness for independent reproduction.
Authors: Amman Yusuf, Zhejun Jiang, Mijung Park
Abstract: Recent work on text diffusion models offers a promising alternative to autoregressive generation, but controlling their safety remains underexplored. Existing safety approaches are geared toward autoregressive models and typically rely on post-hoc filtering or inference-time interventions. These are inadequate for effectively addressing safety risks in text diffusion models. We propose the Safety-Aware Denoiser (SAD), a safety-guidance framework in text diffusion models. The SAD modifies the iterative denoising process such that the text sample at the final denoising step is steered toward provably safe regions of the text space. This inference-time method can integrate safety constraints into the denoiser, avoiding computationally expensive retraining of the underlying diffusion model and enabling flexible, lightweight safety guidance. We evaluate the safety of the generated text using the SAD, with respect to hazard taxonomy, memorization, and jailbreak. Experimental results show that SAD substantially reduces unsafe generations while preserving generation quality, diversity, and fluency, outperforming existing methods. These results demonstrate that our safety guidance during denoising provides an effective and scalable mechanism for enforcing safety in text diffusion models.
Authors: Yongzhong Xu
Abstract: Tian (2025) proves a repulsion theorem (Theorem 6) for the matrix $ B = (\widetilde{F}^\top \widetilde{F} + \eta I)^{-1} $ during the interactive feature-learning stage of grokking: similar features have negative off-diagonal entries $ B_{j\ell} $, producing an effective repulsive force that drives them apart. However, the theorem does not specify when this mechanism becomes empirically observable, nor whether it leaves a measurable spectral signature in the parameter updates. We test this directly on Tian's modular addition setup ($ M = 71 $, $ K = 2048 $, MSE loss) and observe a clear structure-mechanism dissociation. The predicted sign rule holds robustly on the top-200 most-similar feature pairs across activations (empirical sign-match rising from 0.865 to 0.985 on $ \sigma = x^2 $ across 5 seeds, and saturating at 1.000 on $ \sigma = \operatorname{ReLU} $). However, the spectral signature in the parameter updates is strongly activation-dependent. With $ \sigma = x^2 $, a simple slope detector on the rolling eigengap $ \sigma_2 / \sigma_3 $ of $ \Delta W $ fires in 15/15 grokking seeds at epoch 174 (IQR [173,174]) and in 0/15 non-grokking controls, with 229$ \times $ late-stage magnitude separation; the spectrum is rank-2. In contrast, with $ \sigma = \operatorname{ReLU} $, the detector never fires and the spectrum remains effectively rank-1. This dissociation aligns with Tian's Theorem 5 distinction between focused (power-law) and spreading (ReLU) memorization: while the sign structure of $ B $ depends only on $ \widetilde{F}^\top \widetilde{F} $, how feature repulsion translates into weight updates critically depends on the activation derivative $ \sigma' $.
Authors: Jiaxin Qi, Hang Li, Yan Cui, Yuhua Zheng, Jianqiang Huang
Abstract: Gene Regulatory Network (GRN) inference is essential for understanding complex cellular mechanisms, rendered tractable through single-cell transcriptomic data. With the emergence of single-cell Foundation Models (scFMs), enhanced transcriptomic encoding is widely expected to revolutionize GRN inference. However, we observe that their performance remains far from satisfactory. The primary reason is that the standard reconstruction-based pre-training objectives often fail to explicitly capture latent regulatory signals. To bridge this gap, we first introduce a GRN generalization benchmark designed to evaluate regulatory predictions on unseen genes and datasets, which relies on the zero-shot capabilities of scFMs and is inherently challenging for traditional methods. Furthermore, to unlock the regulatory knowledge within the foundation models, we propose two novel methods, Virtual Value Perturbation and Gradient Trajectory, to distill implicit regulatory information from scFMs into highly generalizable inter-gene features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods, establishing a new paradigm for leveraging the potential of scFMs in universal GRN inference.
Authors: Rui Zhao, Haofeng Hu, Zhenhai Gao, Jiaqiao Liu, Gao Fei
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving, yet their reliance on implicit parametric knowledge limits generalization in long-tail scenarios. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a solution by accessing external expert priors, standard visual retrieval suffers from high latency and semantic ambiguity. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{VLADriver-RAG}, a framework that grounds planning in explicit, structure-aware historical knowledge. Specifically, we abstract sensory inputs into spatiotemporal semantic graphs via a \textit{Visual-to-Scenario} mechanism, effectively filtering visual noise. To ensure retrieval relevance, we employ a \textit{Scenario-Aligned Embedding Model} that utilizes Graph-DTW metric alignment to prioritize intrinsic topological consistency over superficial visual similarity. These retrieved priors are then fused within a query-based VLA backbone to synthesize precise, disentangled trajectories. Extensive experiments on the Bench2Drive benchmark establish a new state-of-the-art, achieving a Driving Score of 89.12.
Authors: Natalia Frumkin, Bokun Wang, Hung-Yueh Chiang, Chi-Chih Chang, Mohamed S. Abdelfattah, Diana Marculescu
Abstract: Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to auto-regressive (AR) models, offering greater expressive capacity and potential for parallel generation and faster inference. However, open-source dLLMs remain immature, lagging behind AR models in both efficiency and quality. We identify an underexplored property of dLLMs: *token-wise redundancy* in bi-directional self-attention. Self-attention activations are highly correlated across tokens, and temporal changes in query representations can predict redundancy in corresponding key, value, and output activations. We introduce DARE, with two complementary mechanisms: DARE-KV, which reuses cached key-value (KV) activations, and DARE-O, which reuses output activations to reduce redundant computation while preserving quality. DARE achieves up to 1.20x per-layer latency reduction and reuses up to 87% of attention activations, with negligible degradation on reasoning and code-generation benchmarks. DARE-KV and DARE-O incur average performance drops of only 2.0% and 1.2%, respectively. Combined with techniques such as prefix caching and Fast-dLLM, DARE provides additive gains without retraining. These results establish token-wise reuse as an effective strategy for improving the efficiency of diffusion-based LLMs while preserving generation fidelity. Code: https://github.com/enyac-group/DARE
Authors: Pamela Barboza, V\'ictor Castelli, Bel\'en Pereira, Ricardo Grando, Bruna de Vargas, Augusto Calfani
Abstract: Visual perception plays a central role in competitive robotics, where environmental variations can directly affect real-time detection performance. The related literature on transformer-based detectors lack information regarding the impact of backbone scale and environmental settings on model performance. This work presents a comparative evaluation of RT-DETR for detecting round objects under environmental and hyperparameter variations relevant to competitive robotics. Four ResNet backbones (ResNet18, ResNet34, ResNet50, and ResNet101) were compared using dropout rates, analyzing their effect on confidence and accuracy. All models were trained under the same configuration and evaluated under changes in lighting and background contrast. Environmental conditions primarily impact prediction confidence, while inference latency remains largely unaffected and classification accuracy stays consistently high, approaching or above 1.00 in most cases. Two distinct behaviors were observed. Under illumination variation, ResNet50 achieves the best trade-off, combining near-perfect accuracy, confidence values up to approximately 0.869 and latency around 0.058-0.059 ms. Under background variation, ResNet34 provides the most balanced performance, reaching near-perfect accuracy and higher confidence values up to approximately 0.887. These results indicate that the optimal architecture depends on the type of environmental variation, with intermediate-depth models offering the best balance between performance and efficiency.
Authors: Plawan Kumar Rath, Rahul Maliakkal
Abstract: Weight pruning is widely advocated for deploying Large Language Models on resource-constrained IoT and edge devices, yet its impact on model fairness remains poorly understood. We conduct a controlled empirical study of three instruction-tuned models (Gemma-2-9b-it, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, Phi-3.5-mini-instruct) across three pruning methods (Random, Magnitude, Wanda) at four sparsity levels (10-70%) on 12,148 BBQ bias benchmark items with 5 random seeds, totaling 2,368,860 inference records. Our results reveal a Smart Pruning Paradox: activation-aware pruning (Wanda) preserves perplexity nearly perfectly (just 3.5% increase at 50% sparsity for Mistral-7B), yet produces the highest bias amplification, with Stereotype Reliance Score increasing 83.7% and 47-59% of previously unbiased items developing new stereotypical behaviors at 70% sparsity. Random pruning destroys language capability entirely (perplexity exceeding $10^4$ and reaching $10^8$) but produces only random-chance bias. We further show that unstructured pruning provides zero storage savings and zero inference latency reduction on real edge hardware, undermining the primary motivation for its use in IoT deployment. Of 180 dense-vs-pruned comparisons, 141 (78.3%) are significant ($p < 0.05$) with mean $|h| = 0.305$. Published quantization studies report up to 21% of responses flipping between biased and unbiased states; our pruning results show transition rates nearly three times higher (47-59%), suggesting pruning poses a categorically greater risk to alignment than quantization. These findings demonstrate that perplexity-based evaluation provides false assurance of behavioral equivalence, and that IoT deployment pipelines require bias-aware validation before deploying pruned models at the edge.
Authors: Gopal Krishna Shyam, Priyanka Bharti
Abstract: In modern distributed cloud environments, efficient resource allocation is required as traditional scaling mechanisms are often subject to cloud thrashing due to network-induced latencies. In this paper, we propose C-SAS (Complex-Stability Aware Scaling), an intelligent autonomous orchestration framework that leverages complex analytic methods to achieve system-wide equilibrium. In contrast to heuristic-based models, C-SAS acts as a stability-aware agent, converting telemetry noise into a deterministic "Safety Envelope" on the $s$-plane using the Argument Principle and Rouch\'e's Theorem. The algorithm smartly suppresses oscillatory scaling operations that would otherwise degrade performance, by computing a real-time Analytic Stability Index (ASI). The experimental results show that C-SAS reduces VM flapping by 94\%, and achieves 96\% resource efficiency, significantly outperforming standard PID and ML-based autonomous agents. Our results suggest that future resilient autonomous cloud infrastructures will require AI-driven orchestrators with built-in formal stability constraints.
Authors: Nicholas Tan Jerome, Nadia Aouadi, Christoph Koehler, Suren Chilingaryan, Andreas Kopmann
Abstract: The Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment (KATRIN) aims to measure the absolute neutrino mass with unprecedented sensitivity, requiring precise monitoring of the windowless gaseous tritium source, where tritium beta decay occurs. To track variations of the source activity, beta-induced X-ray spectroscopy provides real-time diagnostics. However, traditional drift detection methods struggle with the infrequent and transient nature of instability events in gaseous tritium. This study bridges the gap between state-of-the-art time-series forecasting models and real-world experimental applications by leveraging deep learning to predict the time to stability after instabilities. Unlike standard benchmarking approaches that emphasize algorithmic performance on fixed datasets, we apply forecasting models -- including LSTM, N-BEATS, TFT, NHITS, DLinear, NLinear, TSMixer, and Chronos-LLM -- to complex, large-scale experimental data. Our findings highlight two challenges: learning from sparse instability events and forecasting long time horizons (i.e., predicting hundreds of future points), both of which are ongoing challenges in time-series forecasting and remain active areas of research. This prediction task has direct experimental value by enabling better scheduling and maintenance planning. A reliable forecast of stability time allows for more efficient measurement and task management during stabilization periods. Through model selection, we identified N-BEATS as the top performer, excelling in accuracy and repeatability, demonstrating that deep learning can optimize large-scale physics experiments.
Authors: Yuan Fang, Yi Xie, Xuming Ran
Abstract: Large language models encode vast factual knowledge that inevitably becomes outdated or incorrect after deployment, yet retraining is costly prohibitive, motivating model editing in lifelong settings that updates targeted behavior without harming the rest of the model. One line of work installs new facts by directly modifying base weights through locate-then-edit procedures, but accumulated edits progressively disrupt originally preserved knowledge, even with constraint-based projections. A complementary line leaves base weights intact and routes edits through external memory, but it faces routing challenges and its performance degrades at scale. We propose HoReN, a codebook-based parameter-preserving editor with enhanced routing built on three ideas. First, HoReN wraps a single MLP layer with a discrete key-value codebook, where each entry is interpreted simultaneously as a knowledge-memory key and a modern Hopfield stored pattern. Second, both keys and queries are projected onto the unit hypersphere so retrieval is governed by angular similarity, removing magnitude-driven mismatches between an edit prompt and its rephrasings. Third, the query is refined through damped Hopfield attractor dynamics, so paraphrases relax into the correct stored pattern's basin of attraction while unrelated queries remain undisturbed. HoReN achieves well-edited performance with consistent gains across diverse benchmarks spanning standard ZsRE, structured WikiBigEdit, and unstructured UnKE evaluations. Moreover, HoReN scales to 50K sequential edits on ZsRE with stable overall performance above 0.9, while prior editors collapse or degrade severely before reaching 10K. Our code is available at https://github.com/ha11ucin8/HoReN.
Authors: Fang Wu, Haokai Zhao, Da Xing, Hanqun Cao, Tinson Xu, Yanchao Li, Xiangru Tang, Zehong Wang, Aaron Tu, Kuan Pang, Hanchen Wang, Hongbin Lin, Zeqi Zhou, Yinxi Li, Peng Xia, Li Erran Li, Molei Tao, Jure Leskovec, Aditya Joshi, Yejin Choi
Abstract: Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of generative tasks, yet their training paradigm largely treats injected noise as uniformly informative. In this work, we challenge this assumption and introduce NoiseRater, a meta-learning framework for instance-level noise valuation in diffusion model training. We propose a parametric noise rater that assigns importance scores to individual noise realizations conditioned on data and timestep, enabling adaptive reweighting of the training objective. The rater is trained via bilevel optimization to improve downstream validation performance after inner-loop diffusion updates. To enable efficient deployment, we further design a decoupled two-stage pipeline that transitions from soft weighting during meta-training to hard noise selection during standard training. Extensive experiments on FFHQ and ImageNet demonstrate that not all noise samples contribute equally, and that prioritizing informative noise improves both training efficiency and generation quality. Our results establish noise valuation as a complementary and previously underexplored axis for improving diffusion model training. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NoiseRater-DEB116.
Authors: Yuriel Ryan, Hei Man Ip, Adriel Kuek, Paul Pu Liang, Roy Ka-Wei Lee
Abstract: Current vision language models face hallucination and robustness issues against ambiguous or corrupted modalities. We hypothesize that these issues can be addressed by exploiting the shared information between modalities to compensate for the impaired one. To this end, we analyze multimodal interactions -- redundant (shared), unique (exclusive), and synergistic (emergent) task-relevant information provided by the modalities -- to determine their impacts on model reliability. Specifically, amplifying redundant interactions would increase this exploitable shared information to resolve these issues; yet, modern instruction datasets often eliminate redundancies to prioritize visual grounding. We bridge this gap through a self-captioning workflow featuring a \textsc{Multimodal Interaction Gate}: a mechanism to convert unique interactions into redundant interactions. Our findings suggest that increasing redundancy can reduce visual induced errors by 38.3\% and improve consistency by 16.8\%.
Authors: Zi-Yi Jia, Zi-Jian Cheng, Xin-Yue Zhang, Kun-Yang Yu, Zhi Zhou, Yu-Feng Li, Lan-Zhe Guo
Abstract: Multi-model learning has attracted great attention in visual-text tasks. However, visual-tabular data, which plays a pivotal role in high-stakes domains like healthcare and industry, remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce \textit{VT-Bench}, the first unified benchmark for standardizing vision-tabular discriminative prediction and generative reasoning tasks. VT-Bench aggregates 14 datasets across 9 domains (medical-centric, while covering pets, media, and transportation) with over 756K samples. We evaluate 23 representative models, including unimodal experts, specialized visual-tabular models, general-purpose vision-language models (VLMs), and tool-augmented methods, highlighting substantial challenges of visual-tabular learning. We believe VT-Bench will stimulate the community to build more powerful multi-modal vision-tabular foundation models. Benchmark: https://github.com/Ziyi-Jia990/VT-Bench
Authors: Jincheng Xie, Yawen Ling, Qi Xiao, Feiyu Zhang, Zhongyi Huang, Wen Hu, Yu Zheng
Abstract: LLM serving platforms are increasingly deployed as multi-model cloud systems, where user demand is often long-tailed: a few popular large models receive most requests, while many smaller tail models remain underutilized. We propose \textbf{SPECTRE} (Parallel \textbf{SPEC}ulative Decoding with a Multi-\textbf{T}enant \textbf{RE}mote Drafter), a serving framework that reuses underutilized tail-model services as remote drafters for heavily loaded large-model services through speculative decoding. SPECTRE enables draft generation and target-side verification to run in parallel, and makes such parallelism effective through three techniques: a hybrid ordinary-parallel speculative decoding strategy guided by a threshold derived from throughput analysis, speculative priority scheduling to preserve draft--target overlap under multi-tenant traffic, and draft-side prompt compression to reduce draft latency. We implement SPECTRE in \texttt{SGLang} and evaluate it across multiple draft--target model pairs, reasoning benchmarks, real-world long-context workloads, and a wide range of batch sizes. Results show that SPECTRE consistently improves large-model serving throughput while causing only minor interference to the native workloads of tail-model services. In large-model deployments, including Qwen3-235B-A22B with TP=8, SPECTRE achieves up to \textbf{2.28$\times$ speedup} over autoregressive decoding and up to an additional \textbf{66\% relative improvement} over the strongest speculative decoding baselines. Talk is cheap, we show you the code: https://github.com/sgl-project/sglang/pull/22272.
Authors: Divya Gupta
Abstract: The intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and distributed systems has given rise to Federated Learning (FL), a paradigm that enables decentralized model training without compromising local data privacy. As organizational data silos grow, deploying complex machine learning models across highly distributed edge networks becomes a critical infrastructural challenge. Standard FL implementations suffer from severe vulnerabilities related to adversarial gradient updates and computational bottlenecks at the aggregation layer. This paper presents a novel, end-to-end distributed architecture that hardens FL pipelines using advanced cryptographic verification and optimized big data processing frameworks. We introduce a Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) wrapper that cryptographically validates node computations before global aggregation, neutralizing model poisoning attacks without inspecting raw gradients. Additionally, we evaluate the system's performance using extreme gradient boosting models optimized for distributed edge execution. We formalize the mathematical transformation of the machine learning loss functions into Rank-1 Constraint Systems (R1CS) suitable for succinct verification. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our hybrid architecture achieves a 94.2\% accuracy retention under adversarial conditions while maintaining scalable throughput across 1,000 parallel distributed nodes, effectively bridging the gap between rigorous cryptographic security and high-performance distributed AI.
Authors: Junyi Hu, Qiji Zhou, Lei Zhang, Yue Zhang
Abstract: Zero-shot recognition aims to classify an image by selecting the most compatible label description from a set of candidate classes without any task-specific supervision. In fine-grained settings, however, the relevant evidence often lies in localized parts, attributes, or textures rather than in the full image, making whole-image alignment suboptimal. Recent localized visual-text alignment methods address this by comparing class descriptions with multiple image regions, but they typically rely on large sets of random or redundant crops, increasing inference cost and introducing many highly redundant or weakly relevant candidates. Moreover, introducing semantic guidance too early can create an error-amplifying feedback process in which inaccurate intermediate predictions bias later localization and reinforce subsequent mistakes; we refer to this failure mode as the prediction loop. We propose LAGO (LAnguage-Guided adaptive Object-region focus), a framework for efficient and robust zero-shot localized visual-text alignment. LAGO first performs class-agnostic object-centric candidate discovery to obtain a stable visual initialization, and then applies adaptive language-guided refinement with the strength of semantic guidance controlled by intermediate confidence. It further combines object-level, contextual, and full-image evidence through an effective object-context dual-channel aggregation strategy. Extensive experiments show that LAGO consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard zero-shot benchmarks and challenging distribution-shift settings, while requiring substantially fewer candidate regions at inference time.
Authors: Haopeng Jin, Hongzhu Yi, Wenlong Zhao, Jinwen Luo, Shani Ye, Zhenyu Guan, Shiquan Dong, Tiankun Yang, Tao Yu
Abstract: Long-video understanding with multimodal language models suffers from three compounding bottlenecks: heavy decode cost to obtain dense RGB frames, quadratic token growth with frame count, and weak motion perception under sparse keyframe sampling. We present HY-Himmel, a hierarchical video-language framework that allocates semantic and motion capacity separately. A small set of sparse anchor I-frames is routed to the expensive host ViT to ground object identity and scene layout, while the far denser inter-frame intervals are encoded by a lightweight compressed-domain tri-stream adapter that distils motion evidence from motion-vector maps, residual maps, and I-frame context into aligned motion tokens. These tokens are injected into the LLM via a differentiable placeholder mechanism after a dedicated Stage-1 contrastive alignment that places the motion representation in a geometry compatible with the frozen visual backbone. On Video-MME, HY-Himmel surpasses the dense 32-frame baseline by +2.3 pp (61.2 to 63.5%) while using 3.6x fewer context tokens. Extensive ablations over stream composition, motion encoder family, fusion mode, alignment objective, anchor count, LoRA rank, and video duration confirm that the full tri-stream is necessary and sufficient for the observed gains.
Authors: Girmaw Abebe Tadesse, Titien Bartette, Andrew Hassanali, Allen Kim, Jonathan Chemla, Andrew Zolli, Yves Ubelmann, Caleb Robinson, Inbal Becker-Reshef, Juan Lavista Ferres
Abstract: Monitoring archaeological sites at scale is vital for protecting cultural heritage, yet pinpointing when disturbances occur remains difficult because visual cues are subtle and ground-truth data are sparse. We introduce WATCH, a framework for month-level change-event localization over PlanetScope satellite mosaics (2017-2024, 4.7 m/px) that supports three complementary scoring approaches: (i) Temporal Embedding Distance (TED), a training-free method that scores month-to-month deviations from a local temporal reference; (ii) Self-Supervised Change Detection (SSCD), an ensemble of reconstruction, forecasting, and latent-novelty signals; and (iii) a Weakly Supervised (WS) temporal localization model trained with sparse event-month labels. We benchmark WATCH on 1,943 archaeological sites in Afghanistan using embeddings from six foundation models (CLIP, GeoRSCLIP, SatMAE, Prithvi-EO-2.0, DINOv3, and Satlas-Pretrain) alongside a handcrafted spectral and texture baseline, and assess cross-regional generalization on sites in Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt. The unsupervised approaches (TED, SSCD) consistently outperform the weakly supervised alternative. TED with SatMAE achieves the highest exact-month recall (55% at m=0), while TED with GeoRSCLIP, CLIP, or Satlas-Pretrain reaches 92.5% within a three-month tolerance (m=3). Handcrafted features remain competitive for exact-month detection under weak supervision. Our directional margin analysis reveals systematic temporal biases: SSCD paired with GeoRSCLIP or Prithvi-EO-2.0 exhibits the strongest early-warning profile, detecting anomalies before the recorded event, while TED favors confirmation-oriented detection after a change has materialized. These results show that satellite imagery combined with foundation-model embeddings enables scalable, decision-relevant heritage monitoring. Code: https://github.com/microsoft/WATCH
Authors: Liwei Cheng, Zirui Song, Shibo Feng, Lunjie Zhou, Yixuan Guan, Dayan Guan
Abstract: Text-in-image editing has become a key capability for visual content creation, yet existing benchmarks remain overwhelmingly English-centric and often conflate visual plausibility with semantic correctness. We introduce MULTITEXTEDIT, a controlled benchmark of 3,600 instances spanning 12 typologically diverse languages, 5 visual domains, and 7 editing operations. Language variants of each instance share a common visual base and are paired with a human-edited reference and region masks, isolating the language variable for cross-lingual comparison. To capture script-level errors that coarse text-matching metrics miss, such as missing diacritics, reversed RTL order, and mixed-script renderings, we introduce a language fidelity (LSF) metric scored by a two-stage LVM protocol that first traces the edited target text and then judges it in isolation, reaching a quadratic-weighted \k{appa} of 0.76 against native-speaker annotators. Evaluating 12 open-source and proprietary systems with LSF alongside standard semantic and mask-aware pixel metrics, we find pronounced cross-lingual degradation for every model, largest on Hebrew and Arabic and smallest on Dutch and Spanish, and concentrated in text accuracy and script fidelity rather than in coarse structural dimensions. We also uncover a pervasive semantic and pixel mismatch, where outputs preserve global layout and background fidelity yet distort script-specific forms.
Authors: Rebekah Lane, Logan Cummins, Andy Perkins, George Trawick, Ioana Banicescu, Sudip Mittal
Abstract: The digital age has completely transformed the way that information is processed and stored, which makes cybersecurity a crucial field of research. Cybersecurity contains many different domains, but this work focuses on Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). Within the literature, Hierarchical Self-Organizing Maps (HSOMs) have been used to create trustworthy, explainable, and AI-based IDSs. However, HSOMs are trained sequentially, which means that training HSOMs on large datasets is slow. This work presents a novel parallel HSOM architecture, called parHSOM. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect that parallel computation has on the HSOM training time. parHSOM is tested on two different testbeds, four different output grid sizes, and five different cybersecurity datasets. Performance metrics collected from these experiments show that parHSOM consistently trains faster than the Sequential HSOM algorithm without any significant loss in performance. Additionally, this work provides a platform for further investigation into parallel HSOM implementations.
Authors: Fatma Betul Buyuk, Gozde Karatas Baydogmus, Ali Buldu, Ayaulym Tulendiyeva, Zhuldyz Baizhumanova
Abstract: The increasing availability of advanced image editing tools has led to a significant rise in manipulated digital content, posing serious challenges for digital forensics and information security. This study presents a transfer learning-based framework for digital image forgery detection that integrates compression-aware feature enhancement with deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures. The proposed approach introduces a hybrid input representation that combines RGB images with compression difference-based features (FDIFF), explicitly highlighting subtle manipulation artifacts that are often difficult to detect. In addition, a model-specific adaptive threshold optimization strategy based on the Youden Index is employed to improve classification reliability by achieving a better balance between true positive and false positive rates. Experiments conducted on the CASIA v2.0 dataset using multiple pretrained CNN architectures, including DenseNet121, VGG16, ResNet50, EfficientNetB0, MobileNet, and InceptionV3, demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework. The models are evaluated using comprehensive performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), and area under the ROC curve (AUC). The results show that DenseNet121 achieves the highest accuracy and AUC, while ResNet50 provides the most balanced and reliable predictions with the highest MCC. The findings emphasize that relying solely on accuracy is insufficient for forensic applications, where minimizing false negatives is critical. Overall, the proposed framework improves the visibility of manipulation artifacts and enhances classification robustness, making it suitable for real-world digital image forgery detection scenarios.
Authors: Ayoub Agouzoul
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a promising path to generalist robot control, but their inference latency causes observation staleness when generated actions are executed asynchronously. Several methods have been proposed concurrently to mitigate this problem: inference-time inpainting (IT-RTC), training-time delay simulation (TT-RTC), future-state-aware conditioning (VLASH), and lightweight residual correction (A2C2). Each takes a fundamentally different approach, but they have so far been evaluated independently with different codebases, base policies, and protocols. We present a systematic comparison of these four methods under controlled conditions. We develop two unified codebases that integrate all methods with harmonized library and dataset versions, and we benchmark them on the Kinetix suite with MLPMixer policies and on the LIBERO manipulation benchmark with SmolVLA, sweeping inference delays up to $d=20$ control steps. A2C2's per-step residual correction is the most effective method on Kinetix, holding above 90% solve rate up to $d=8$, and also leads on LIBERO from $d=4$ onwards. IT-RTC is competitive at low delays but degrades sharply under long chunks ($H=30$) and high delays. TT-RTC is the most robust training-based method: stable across $d_\max$ choices, generalizes beyond its training delay distribution, and adds zero inference overhead. VLASH exhibits a clear low-delay vs. high-delay trade-off governed by the fine-tuning delay range $[0,d_\max]$. Code is available at https://github.com/TheAyos/async-vla-inference
Authors: Savitha N J, Lata B T
Abstract: Automated culprit identification in surveillance systems is a critical task that requires high accuracy along with computational efficiency for real-time deployment. In this paper, an optimized deep learning framework is proposed using a lightweight MobileNet architecture integrated with channel and spatial attention mechanisms. The proposed model enhances feature representation by selectively focusing on the most discriminative regions while suppressing irrelevant background information, thereby improving identification performance. The framework incorporates efficient preprocessing, attention based feature refinement, and a robust classification strategy optimized using the Adam Optimizer. Experiments were conducted on benchmark face recognition datasets, including Labelled Faces in the Wild (LFW), CASIA-WebFace, and a subset of VGGFace2, under realistic conditions with variations in illumination, pose, and occlusion. The results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves a high classification accuracy of 97.8%, outperforming conventional models such as baseline CNN, ResNet, and standard MobileNet. The confusion matrix analysis indicates strong class-wise discrimination with minimal misclassification, while ROC-AUC evaluation confirms robust performance across all classes. Additionally, the proposed approach maintains low computational complexity and reduced inference time, making it suitable for real-time surveillance and edge-based applications.
Authors: Lurong Pan
Abstract: Background and motivation. The Communication Dynamics (CD) framework, introduced in two earlier papers for atomic-energy prediction and field-induced superconductivity, treats each physical channel as a (2l+1)-vertex polygon whose discrete Fourier transform yields its energy spectrum. This paper applies the same circulant-spectral machinery to neural-network design. Layer construction. CDLinear is a block-circulant linear layer with block size B = 2l+1 and 1/B the parameter count of a dense layer of equal input/output dimensions. Three properties follow from the construction. (i) The Hessian of mean-squared loss with respect to the weights is diagonalized by the discrete Fourier transform, with eigenvalues |F[Xj](k)|^2 read directly from the input statistics (Theorem 1). (ii) Under input pre-whitening, the population Hessian condition number satisfies kappa = 1 exactly, with the empirical condition number bounded by 1+O(sqrt(B/N)) on N samples (Theorem 2). (iii) The Shannon noise rate alpha_CD = 0.0118 calibrated in the parent CD papers from the Na D-doublet specifies a transferable, non-arbitrary dropout rate. Empirical evaluation. A CDLinear MLP at B = 4 achieves 97.50% +/- 0.23% test accuracy with 2,380 parameters versus 98.15% +/- 0.47% for a parameter-matched dense MLP at 8,970 parameters, a 3.8x parameter reduction at 0.65% accuracy cost, within one standard deviation of the seed-to-seed spread. The CD-MLP mean Hessian condition number kappa = 1.9x10^4 is 310x smaller than the dense baseline kappa = 5.9x10^6, in quantitative agreement with Theorem 2.
Authors: Jingze Ge, Xue Geng, Yun Liu, Wanqi Dong, Wang Zhe Mark, Min Wu, Ngai-Man Cheung, Bharadwaj Veeravalli, Xulei Yang
Abstract: To mitigate the memory constraints associated with fine-tuning large pre-trained models, existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as LoRA, rely on low-rank updates. However, such updates fail to fully capture the rank characteristics of the weight modifications observed in full-parameter fine-tuning, resulting in a performance gap. Furthermore, LoRA and other existing PEFT methods still require substantial memory to store the full set of frozen weights, limiting their efficiency in resource-constrained settings. To addres these limitations, we introduce Cumulative Energy-Retaining Subspace Adaptation (CERSA), a novel fine-tuning paradigm that leverages singular value decomposition (SVD) to retain only the principal components responsible for 90% to 95% of the spectral energy. By fine-tuning low-rank representations derived from this principal subspace, CERSA significantly reduces memory consumption. We conduct extensive evaluations of CERSA across models of varying scales and domains, including image recognition, text-to-image generation, and natural language understanding. Empirical results demonstrate that CERSA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art PEFT methods while achieving substantially lower memory requirements. The code will be publicly released.
Authors: Archishman Ghosh, Abhinaba Roy, Dorien Herremans
Abstract: While significant progress has been made in Video Question Answering and cross-modal understanding, causal reasoning about how visual dynamics drive musical structure in music videos remains under-explored. We introduce KARMA-MV, a large-scale multiple-choice QA dataset derived from 2,682 YouTube music videos, designed to test models' ability to integrate temporal audio-visual cues and reason about visual-to-musical influence across reasoning, prediction, and counterfactual questions. Unlike traditional datasets requiring manual annotation, KARMA-MV leverages LLM reasoning for scalable generation and validation, yielding 37,737 MCQs. We propose a causal knowledge graph (CKG) approach that augments vision-language models (VLMs) with structured retrieval of cross-modal dependencies. Experiments on state-of-the-art VLMs and LLMs show consistent gains from CKG grounding -- especially for smaller models -- establishing the value of explicit causal structure for music-video reasoning. KARMA-MV provides a new benchmark for advancing causal audio-visual understanding beyond correlation.
Authors: Yihang Peng, Peng Jin, Jie Gong, Xingyuan Chen, Lingjiao Xu, Ning Su, Yan Ran
Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become a practical route for adapting large language models to downstream tasks, with LoRA-style methods being particularly attractive because they are inexpensive to train and easy to deploy. Most LoRA variants, however, revise the update rule within the weight space of each layer and leave the intermediate representations formed by deeper layers largely unused. We propose Echo-LoRA, a cross-layer representation injection method for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. During training, Echo-LoRA collects boundary hidden states from deeper source layers, aggregates them into a sample-level echo representation, and uses lightweight projection and gating networks to inject the resulting signal into shallow LoRA or DoRA modules. Answer-only masking, masked distillation, and stochastic routing are used to keep this auxiliary path stable and to reduce the gap between training and inference. On eight commonsense reasoning benchmarks, Echo-LoRA exceeds the reported LoRA baselines by 5.7 percentage points on average across LLaMA-7B, LLaMA2-7B, and LLaMA3-8B. Under reproduced LoRA baselines in our unified implementation, the average gain is 3.0 points; when combined with DoRA, the gain is 2.7 points. The Echo path is discarded after training, so the deployed model keeps the original low-rank LoRA/DoRA form and adds neither inference-time parameters nor inference computation.
Authors: Zhongzheng Yuan, Lianshuai Guo, Xunkai Li, Wenyu Wang, Meixia Qu
Abstract: Federated Graph Learning (FGL) enables collaborative learning over distributed graph data, yet existing approaches largely rely on a closed-world assumption, limiting their applicability in dynamic environments where novel categories continuously emerge. To bridge this gap, we target the practical scenario of Federated Graph Generalized Category Discovery (FGGCD), aiming to collaboratively discover novel categories across decentralized graph clients while retaining knowledge of known categories. We observe that FGGCD introduces two fundamental challenges: (1) the Neighborhood Absorption Effect, where structural fragmentation leads to biased neighborhood aggregation, causing novel nodes to be misclassified as known categories; and (2) Global Semantic Inconsistency, where the aforementioned local biases propagate to the server and are amplified by heterogeneous subgraph distributions, hindering cross-client knowledge integration. To address these issues, we propose GCD-FGL, an FGL framework for GCD that integrates a client-side Topology-Reliable Semantic Alignment and Discovery process to mitigate the neighborhood absorption effect, and a server-side Hierarchical Prototype Alignment strategy to resolve global semantic inconsistency. Extensive experiments on five real-world graph datasets demonstrate that GCD-FGL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average absolute gain of +4.86 in HRScore.
Authors: Hrishikesh Dutta, Roberto Minerva, Reza Farahbakhsh, Noel Crespi
Abstract: Modern IoT and sensor networks generate vast amounts of data, posing significant challenges for storage, transmission, and real-time processing. Traditional approaches, such as compressive sensing and machine learning-based compression, often suffer from computational inefficiencies and irreversible data loss. This paper introduces Information Density as a quantitative metric to support sensor deployment and enable AI-driven virtual sensing. We propose a framework that leverages spatial, temporal and inter-modal correlations among sensor signals to perform sensing tasks even in the absence of physical sensors. Two complementary measures: (i) Phase in Eigen Space and (ii) Mutual Information, are developed to quantify and assess information density, enabling the selection of optimal sensor configurations across both intra-modality and cross-modality scenarios. Validated using real-world data from Madrid's smart city infrastructure, this framework demonstrates the feasibility of replacing physical sensors with virtual ones under bounded error conditions (e.g., achieving $<3.21\%$ mean error with a single sensor). The results highlight the potential for scalable and energy-efficient sensing systems in smart environments.
Authors: Weicai Yan, Xinhua Ma, Wang Lin, Tao Jin
Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods introduce a small number of training parameters, enabling pre-trained models to adapt rapidly to new data distributions. While these methods have shown promising results, they exhibit notable limitations. First, most existing methods operate in the signal space domain, which results in substantial information redundancy. Second, most existing methods utilize fixed prompts or adaptation layers, failing to fully account for the multi-scale characteristics of signals. To address these challenges, we propose the Multi-Scale Frequency Adapter (FreqAdapter), which integrates textual information and performs multi-scale fine-tuning of signals in the frequency domain. Additionally, we introduce a multi-scale adaptation strategy to optimize receptive fields across different frequency ranges, further enhancing the model's representational capacity. Extensive experiments on multimodal models, including CLIP and LLaVA, demonstrate that FreqAdapter significantly improves both performance and efficiency. FreqAdapter improves performance with minimal cost and fast convergence within one epoch. Code is available at https://github.com/Kelvin-ywc/FreqAdapter.
Authors: Zhaofan Zhang, Minghao Yang, Rufeng Chen, Sihong Xie, Hui Xiong
Abstract: Quantile-based distributional reinforcement learning methods learn return distributions through sampled quantile regression, but their bootstrapped target quantiles may induce distorted or degenerate distribution estimates. We propose Robust Quantile-based Implicit Quantile Networks (RQIQN), a lightweight Wasserstein distributionally robust enhancement boosted from a quantile estimation perspective. We first reinterpret a snapshot of IQN loss as a collection of local empirical quantile estimation problems over sampled current fractions. We then robustify each local slot with a Wasserstein distributionally robust quantile estimation formulation, yielding a closed-form, fraction-dependent correction to the Bellman target. This correction directly addresses distributional degeneration: its median antisymmetry preserves the risk-neutral quantile average, while its monotonicity enlarges upper-lower quantile gaps and counteracts collapsed distributional spread. RQIQN thus regularizes quantile geometry without changing the underlying value objective or requiring additional sample set reconstruction. Finally, we empirically show that the proposed RQIQN outperforms other existing quantile-based distributional reinforcement learning algorithms in risk-sensitive navigation and Atari games.
Authors: Zhen Tang, Ameer Hamoodi, Stevie Foglia, Aimee Nelson, Zhen Gao
Abstract: This research addresses a validated TMS EEG cleaning pipeline and a corresponding benchmark dataset. It evaluates two widely used artifact removal pipelines. A reference dataset of carefully preprocessed EEG signals was established to support future algorithm development and enable systematic comparison of automated artifact removal strategies, despite the absence of a true physiological ground truth. The study evaluates the effectiveness of two widely used source based artifact removal approaches and examines their impact on signal quality improvement and preservation of TMS-evoked potentials. The results support the robustness of the proposed preprocessing workflow and demonstrate its potential for improving data reliability in both research and clinical applications. A key goal is integrating TMS EEG and embedding it within a larger BCI framework. Ultimately, these efforts aim to enhance understanding of cortical dynamics and expand the clinical and research applications of TMS EEG.
Authors: Aomar Osmani
Abstract: The Robotic Service Ontology (RoSO) gives service robotics a typed semantic vocabulary for services, functions, interactions, and deployment-sensitive constraints. Its public revision trail makes visible a harder question than ontology conformance alone can settle: once a service is rebound, recomposed, repaired, or redeployed, under what conditions does the resulting configuration remain an admissible realization of the same protected service? This article argues that the Structural Model of General Intelligence (SMGI) is relevant exactly at that level \citep{osmani2026smgi}. SMGI adds not only a structural interface $\theta$, but an induced behavioral semantics $T_\theta$ and a governance discipline for norm-respecting change. We show that RoSO can be embedded into SMGI as a typed semantic layer, so that service descriptions become dynamically governable rather than merely well formed. This yields a RoSO-to-SMGI adequacy theorem, identity-preserving reconfiguration criteria, and compositional conditions under which locally acceptable updates remain globally admissible. The resulting claim is not that SMGI replaces RoSO, but that it provides a formal account of what admissible runtime change requires once service semantics must survive revision.
Authors: Wei-Ping Huang, Chee-En Yu, Guan-Ting Lin, Hung-yi Lee
Abstract: Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) via entropy minimization (EM) has proven effective for classification tasks, yet its application to generative autoregressive models remains theoretically fragmented. Existing approaches typically rely on distinct heuristics, such as teacher forcing with pseudo labels or policy-gradient-based reinforcement learning, without a unified mathematical foundation. In this work, we resolve this discrepancy by deriving a rigorous formulation of EM tailored to autoregressive models. We show that the exact objective naturally decomposes into a token-level policy gradient loss and a token-level entropy loss, and we reinterpret prior methods as partial realizations of this unified formulation. Using Whisper ASR as a testbed, we demonstrate that our approach consistently improves performance across more than 20 diverse domains, including acoustic noise, accents, and multilingual settings.
Authors: Mathis Immertreu, Fitim Abdullahu, Thomas Kinfe, Helmut Grabner, Patrick Krauss, Achim Schilling
Abstract: Human attention is the gateway to conscious perception, memory and decision-making. However, its role in modern transformer models remains largely unexplored. As these systems increasingly influence what people see, prefer and buy, the question arises as to whether they encode principles of human interest or merely exploit large-scale correlations. Addressing this issue is crucial for understanding cognition and ensuring the responsible use of AI in communication and marketing. In order to address this issue, the concept of visual interest was examined within the multimodal vision-language-model Qwen3-VL-8B, using a pre-defined Common Interestingness (CI) score derived from large-scale human engagement data on the photo-sharing platform Flickr. Here, we analyzed internal representations across vision and language components using methods from the neurosciences. Our analyses revealed that CI information is linearly decodable from final-layer embeddings, indicating that it is aligned with human-derived measures of visual interestingness. Dimensionality reduction and Generalized Discrimination Value (GDV) analyses demonstrate that CI-related hidden representations emerge in intermediate vision transformer layers and becomes progressively more distinguishable across language model layers. Concept vectors derived using geometric, probe, and Sparse Auto-Encoder based methods converge in higher layers, as confirmed by representational similarity analysis. This indicates a robust and structured encoding of visual interestingness without explicit supervision. Future work will seek to identify shared computational principles linking human brain dynamics and transformer architectures, with the ultimate goal of uncovering the organizing mechanisms that give rise to attention and interest in both biological and artificial systems.
Authors: Maria Stoica, Abdelrahman Hekal, Alessio Lomuscio
Abstract: Reliable out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a critical requirement for the safe deployment of machine learning systems. Despite recent progress, state-of-the-art OOD detectors are highly susceptible to adversarial attacks, which undermines their trustworthiness in automated systems. To address this vulnerability, we apply median smoothing to baseline OOD detection scores, balancing clean and adversarial accuracies. Our key insight is that the noisy samples generated for median smoothing can be repurposed to quantify the local instability of the base score. We observe that OOD samples exhibit higher instability under perturbation. Based on this, we propose ROSS, a novel and robust post-hoc OOD detector that leverages the instability of baseline scores to further distinguish between in-distribution (ID) and OOD samples. ROSS achieves symmetric robustness, performing strongly against both score-minimising and score-maximising attacks, unlike prior work. This symmetric defence leads to state-of-the-art robustness, outperforming prior methods by up to 40 AUROC points. We demonstrate ROSS's effectiveness on extensive experiments across CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet. Code is available at: https://github.com/Abdu-Hekal/ROSS.
Authors: Varad Vishwarupe, Nigel Shadbolt, Marina Jirotka, Ivan Flechais
Abstract: Frontier AI safety claims - published assertions that a highly capable general-purpose model is below a threshold of concern, adequately mitigated, or suitable for release - increasingly shape model deployment, governance, and public trust. Yet the artefacts needed to evaluate them are routinely withheld, producing an evidential inversion: the most consequential claims in AI safety are often the least reproducible. This position paper argues that NeurIPS should require reproducibility standards for papers making such claims, treating non-reproducibility not as a transparency preference but as an evaluation-methodology failure. The 2026 International AI Safety Report [Bengio et al., 2026] concludes that reliable pre-deployment safety testing has become harder to conduct and that models now distinguish test from deployment contexts; the 2025 Foundation Model Transparency Index [Wan et al., 2025] reports a sector-average transparency score of 40/100 with no major developer adequately disclosing train-test overlap; contemporaneous measurement-theory work shows that attack-success-rate comparisons across systems are often founded on low-validity measurements [Chouldechova et al., 2025]. We propose a three-tier disclosure framework, distinguishing public, controlled, and claim-restricted disclosure, paired with a mandatory claim inventory, scope statements, and a phased implementation path with graduated sanctions. The framework treats secrecy and openness as endpoints of a spectrum, with controlled review (via a federated colloquium of qualified secure-review hosts) covering claims whose artefacts cannot be released publicly, and right-scaling claims whose artefacts cannot be reviewed even confidentially. The standard the community applies to its most consequential claims should be at least as high as the standard it applies to its least.
Authors: Youssef Saied, Fran\c{c}ois Fleuret
Abstract: Normalization Equivariance (NE), equivariance to global contrast and brightness transforms, improves robustness to distribution shift in image-to-image prediction. Existing methods enforce this prior by constraining internal layers to NE-compatible families, limiting compatibility with standard components such as attention and LayerNorm, and adding runtime cost. We characterize the full NE function class: a function is NE if and only if it admits a normalize-process-denormalize factorization. This turns exact NE enforcement, for the ideal wrapper, from an internal architectural constraint into an input-output parameterization problem, allowing a parameter-free wrapper (WNE) to enforce NE around any backbone, including transformers. In a single-noise mismatch diagnostic for blind denoising, the wrapper improves CNN and transformer robustness with no measurable GPU overhead; architectural NE baselines incur up to a 1.6x slowdown.
Authors: Serafim Batzoglou
Abstract: Most causal benchmarks for language models score local answers or graph structure. We introduce ReplaySCM, a 1,300 item benchmark for executable causal mechanism induction from finite interventional evidence. Each item contains binary worlds generated by a latent fully observed acyclic Boolean structural causal model (SCM). A system must output a mechanism map in a restricted Boolean DSL; the submission is parsed, checked for legality and acyclicity, and replayed on training and held-out intervention worlds. Scoring uses replay behavior rather than formula strings, so syntactically different mechanisms receive credit when they behave correctly. ReplaySCM varies the structural information disclosed to the model through Ordered, Block-order, Hidden-order, and Hidden-roots settings, and includes Alternative-SCM tasks that supply a valid reference SCM and ask for a semantically distinct alternative that fits the training worlds, together with a separating intervention and witness. Frontier LLMs infer parts of the functional-parent structure, but held-out replay drops sharply when order or root structure is hidden. We also evaluate a matched support-audit ladder: Original, Extra Worlds, and Counterexample Audit (CEx), that raises mean local predecessor-pattern coverage from 0.8949 to 0.9815 to 1.0; under the audited searches, no discovered semantic alternative remains consistent with the training worlds. The Ordered/Hidden-order gap persists under this stronger evidence. ReplaySCM complements answer-level causal reasoning and graph-discovery benchmarks by evaluating executable replay generalization from finite interventional evidence, without claiming unique identification of the latent SCM.
Authors: Farjana Yesmin
Abstract: We present FairHealth, an open-source Python library that provides a unified, modular framework for trustworthy machine learning in healthcare applications, with particular focus on low-resource and low-income country (LMIC) settings such as Bangladesh. FairHealth addresses four critical gaps in existing healthcare AI toolkits: (1) the absence of integrated fairness auditing for biosignals and clinical tabular data; (2) the lack of privacy-preserving federated learning tools compatible with standard ML workflows; (3) missing explainability tools tailored for low-bandwidth clinical decision support; and (4) no existing toolkit covering Global South healthcare datasets. Built from five peer-reviewed research contributions, FairHealth provides six modules covering federated learning with homomorphic encryption (fairhealth.federated), intersectional fairness metrics (fairhealth.fairness), hybrid fuzzy-SHAP explainability (fairhealth.explain), multilingual dengue triage (fairhealth.lowresource), equitable disaster aid allocation (fairhealth.equity), and public dataset loaders (fairhealth.datasets). All datasets used are publicly available without institutional data use agreements. FairHealth is installable via pip install fairhealth(PyPI: pypi.org/project/fairhealth/) and available at https://github.com/Farjana-Yesmin/fairhealth.
Authors: Sparsh Tiwari, Bettina Finzel, Gesina Schwalbe
Abstract: Neurosymbolic systems promise to combine deep neural network's (DNN) processing of raw sensor inputs with few-shot performance of symbolic artificial intelligence. Two-stage approaches explicitly decouple DNN based perception from subsequent rule based reasoning. This avoids optimization and interpretability issues of end to end differentiable approaches, but requires costly labels for the perception output. This paper introduces an efficient weak supervision scheme for the perception stage to ground its output symbols for logical induction in object-centric reasoning tasks. It combines a slot-based architecture for object-centricity with a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) for self-supervision, competing with concept guidance on latent dimensions for human interpretable grounding. The resulting predictions are translated into symbolic background knowledge for reasoning frameworks, such as Inductive Logic Programming (ILP), Decision Trees, and Bayesian Networks. Our extensive empirical evaluation on synthetic and real world datasets shows that our approach can discover complex, abstract rules for object centric reasoning whilst reducing supervision to as little as 1% of labels, and being robust even under substantial domain shift. Notably, at 1% supervision it even outperforms state of the art foundation model baselines in domain generalization
Authors: Qingjun Wang, Hongtu Zhou, Hang Yu, Junqiao Zhao, Yanping Zhao, Chen Ye, Ziqiao Wang, Guang Chen
Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) faces a critical challenge of overestimating the value of out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. Existing methods mitigate this issue by penalizing unseen samples, yet they fail to accurately identify OOD actions and may suppress beneficial exploration beyond the behavioral support. Although several methods have been proposed to differentiate OOD samples with distinct properties, they typically rely on restrictive assumptions about the data distribution and remain limited in discrimination ability. To address this problem, we propose DOSER (Diffusion-based OOD Detection and Selective Regularization), a novel framework that goes beyond uniform penalization. DOSER trains two diffusion models to capture the behavior policy and state distribution, using single-step denoising reconstruction error as a reliable OOD indicator. During policy optimization, it further distinguishes between beneficial and detrimental OOD actions by evaluating predicted transitions, selectively suppressing risky actions while encouraging exploration of high-potential ones. Theoretically, we prove that DOSER is a $\gamma$-contraction and therefore admits a unique fixed point with bounded value estimates. We further provide an asymptotic performance guarantee relative to the optimal policy under model approximation and OOD detection errors. Across extensive offline RL benchmarks, DOSER consistently attains superior performance to prior methods, especially on suboptimal datasets.
Authors: Mohammed Aman Bhuiyan, Md Sazzad Hossain Adib, Samiul Basir Bhuiyan, Amit Chakraborty, Aritra Islam Saswato, Ahmed Faizul Haque Dhrubo, Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman Khan
Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and speaker diarization in Bangla remain challenging due to long form recordings, diverse acoustic conditions, and significant speaker variability. This work addresses these two core tasks in Bangla spoken language understanding by developing robust systems for long form ASR and speaker diarization. For ASR (Problem 1), we fine tune the tugstugi bengaliai regional asr whisper medium model on a custom-curated dataset of approximately 15,000 chunked and aligned Bangla audio segments, employing full weight training with extensive data augmentation including noise injection, reverb simulation, echo, clipping distortion, and pitch/time perturbation. For speaker diarization (Problem 2), we fine-tune the pyannote/segmentation-3.0 model using PyTorch Lightning on the competition annotated diarization dataset, swapping the fine-tuned segmentation backbone into the pyannote/speaker-diarization-community-1 pipeline while retaining the pretrained speaker embedding and clustering components. Our ASR system achieves a Word Error Rate (WER) of 0.2441, while our diarization system achieves a Diarization Error Rate (DER) of 0.2392, both evaluated on the test set, demonstrating notable improvements over the respective pretrained baselines. We describe our complete pipeline, including data preprocessing, text normalization, audio augmentation, training strategies, inference optimization, and post-processing for both tasks.
Authors: Michael Jerge, David Evans
Abstract: This paper presents NoisyCoconut, a novel inference-time method that enhances large language model (LLM) reliability by manipulating internal representations. Unlike fine-tuning methods that require extensive retraining, NoisyCoconut operates directly on model representations during inference and requires no retraining. Rather than training models to reason in latent space, we inject controlled noise into latent trajectories to generate diverse reasoning paths. Agreement among these paths provides a confidence signal, enabling models to abstain when uncertain. We demonstrate that this approach achieves effective coverage-accuracy tradeoffs across multiple reasoning benchmarks without requiring access to training data or modification of model parameters. This approach provides a practical pathway to improving the reliability of LLM outputs while maintaining compatibility with existing models. Our experiments show that unanimous agreement among noise-perturbed paths reduces error rates from 40-70% to below 15%, enabling models to exceed 95% accuracy on mathematical reasoning tasks through selective abstention.
Authors: Sarah Binta Alam Shoilee, Victor de Boer, Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Susan Leg\^ene
Abstract: Handwritten archival tables contain rich historical information, yet transforming them into structured representations, such as Knowledge Graphs, requires integrating table structure recognition, handwriting recognition, and semantic interpretation - a complex multimodal process. End-to-end AI implementations can obscure these steps, resulting in opaque algorithmic operations that hinder human oversight, critical assessment, and trust. To address this, we present a modular, provenance-aware pipeline to convert handwritten tabular images into KGs supporting human-AI collaboration. The pipeline decomposes the workflow into three stages - table reconstruction, information extraction, and KG construction - while exposing intermediate representations for inspection, evaluation, and correction. A key contribution of our approach is the systematic integration of data provenance at every stage, ensuring that all extracted entities and literals remain traceable to their visual and textual origins. The proposed pipeline is demonstrated through a number of experiments on real-world archival material concerning military careers. The results across three different table reconstruction variants highlight the importance of modularisation. By coupling modularity with data provenance, our work advances transparent and collaboratively controllable image-to-KG pipelines for complex historical data.
Authors: Chang Meng, Hanyu Wang, Yuyang Ye, Mingfei Yu, Wayne Burleson, Giovanni De Micheli
Abstract: Reducing power consumption in AI accelerators is increasingly important. Approximate computing can reduce power consumption while keeping the accuracy loss small. Since multipliers are power-hungry components in AI models, this paper focuses on synthesizing low-power approximate multipliers (AxMs). Unlike prior works that design AxMs separately from AI model training, we present TRAM, which jointly optimizes the AxM structure and AI model parameters to lower power with small accuracy loss. Experiments show that compared to state-of-the-art AxMs, TRAM achieves up to 25.05% AxM power reduction on CNNs with CIFAR-10, and reduces power by up to 27.09% on vision transformers with ImageNet.
Authors: Ruijie Zhang, Haozhe Liang, Da Chang, Li Hu, Fanqi Kong, Huaxiao Yin, Yu Li
Abstract: Long-context LLM inference is bottlenecked by the memory and bandwidth cost of reading large KV caches during decoding. KV compression reduces this cost by keeping only part of the cache, but task accuracy alone does not identify why a selector succeeds or fails. A selector can fail at three steps: it may miss the evidence future decoding needs, give high scores to tokens that do not affect the output, or break related evidence when fitting scores into a small cache. We introduce a fixed-contract diagnostic that holds the selector's setup fixed and changes one decision slot at a time. For value ranking, the probe combines a block's attention mass with the estimated output change from removing it. On LongBench across three models and two budgets, the probe is positive on 72.6% of positive-margin cells and 32.4% of nonpositive-margin cells. NeedleBench M-RT at 32k and a RULER 8k check probe support closure under branched retrieval, and a 264-cell sign evaluation separates support recovery and output-value ranking from leverage effects near the boundary. The resulting order is to recover decode-side evidence, rank its output value, and preserve coupled evidence during projection.
Authors: Farhana Yasmin, Mahade Hasan, Haipeng Liu, Amjad Ali, Ghulam Muhammad, Yu Xue
Abstract: Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) segmentation underpins quantitative assessment of ventricular structure and function, yet reliable delineation remains difficult due to low tissue contrast, fuzzy boundaries, and inter scan variability. We present CardiacNAS, an evolutionary neural architecture search (NAS) framework that couples a UNet like supernet with a cardiac aware search space spanning depth width, kernel size, filter size, attention, fusion, activation, dropout, and residual scaling. The search is explicitly resource aware, jointly optimizing dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and 95th percentile Hausdorff distance (HD95) versus model size and floating point operations (FLOPs) under fixed compute budgets. Candidate architectures are instantiated from the supernet, trained with proxy budgets, and evolved through crossover, mutation, and elitist selection. We evaluate on the ACDC dataset and compare against six state of the art methods, using qualitative comparisons, learning curve analyses, and design factor correlation studies. The resulting model attains 93.22% average DSC and 4.73 mm HD95 with 3.58M parameters and 14.56 GFLOPs, demonstrating a favorable accuracy efficiency trade off. Analyses indicate that searched attention and fusion choices, together with residual scaling, contribute to improved boundary fidelity and stability. CardiacNAS offers a principled, resource aware approach to deployable CMR segmentation with transparent reporting of architectural complexity and compute budgets.
Authors: Bibin Wilson
Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) has transformed representation learning for large models, yet remains unexplored for microcontroller (MCU)-class models with fewer than 500K parameters. We identify three obstacles at this scale -- projection head dominance, representation bottleneck, and augmentation sensitivity -- and propose Capacity-Aware Distilled Self-Supervised Learning (CA-DSSL), a teacher-guided framework that overcomes them without labels or text supervision. CA-DSSL combines asymmetric distillation from a frozen DINO ViT-S/16 teacher, multi-scale feature distillation for spatial representations, and a progressive augmentation curriculum. On a MobileNetV2-0.35 backbone (396K parameters) pretrained on CIFAR-100, CA-DSSL reaches 62.7 0.5% linear-probe accuracy (3-seed mean) -- surpassing SimCLR-Tiny by 18 pp, matching SEED (61.7%) with 10 fewer projection parameters (426K vs. 3.15M), and reaching 94.0% of a supervised upper bound. Standard SSL methods (BYOL-Tiny, DINO-Tiny) collapse entirely at this scale. On Pascal VOC detection, CA-DSSL achieves 2.3 the mAP of random initialization and +3 pp over SEED, though SimCLR-Tiny matches CA-DSSL on detection mAP. The deployed backbone occupies 378 KB (INT8) with no inference overhead from pretraining. Preliminary ImageNet-100 experiments reveal that CA-DSSL's advantage is specific to small-data regimes; scaling to ImageNet-1K is discussed as future work.
Authors: Wing Yi Yu, Chun Yin Chiu
Abstract: Clinical dietary assessment can generate detailed but high-dimensional nutrient and food-group information that is difficult to translate quickly into counselling priorities. This paper proposes an explainable unsupervised-to-supervised machine learning framework for discovering, reproducing and interpreting dietary patterns using public UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey data. Adult participants aged 19 years and above from NDNS Years 12-15 were represented using 25 energy-adjusted nutrient and food-group features. K-means, Gaussian Mixture Models and Agglomerative Clustering were compared across k = 2-8, with stability and dietetic interpretability used alongside internal validation metrics. The selected K-means k = 4 solution identified four interpretable dietary patterns: high fat/meat and sodium, higher fibre fruit-vegetable micronutrient, high free-sugar snacks and sugary drinks, and dairy/cereal calcium-rich saturated-fat. A supervised surrogate classifier reproduced held-out cluster membership with high test performance (macro-F1 = 0.963), but was interpreted only as an explanatory surrogate rather than as an independent clinical prediction model. SHAP analysis linked predictions to dietetically meaningful drivers, suggesting potential value for dietitian-in-the-loop assessment, counselling prioritisation and follow-up monitoring.
Authors: Harshvardhan Saini, Samyak Jha, Yiming Tang, Dianbo Liu
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) increasingly power high-stakes applications, from medical imaging to autonomous systems, yet they routinely hallucinate, confidently describing content not present in the input. We investigate the root causes of these failure modes with a mechanistic analysis focusing on the decoder-based VLMs. We trace these failure modes to a geometric over-alignment: to bridge the modality gap required by attention mechanisms, decoder-based VLMs over-align visual embeddings with the text manifold, injecting a statistical linguistic bias that systematically overshadows fine-grained visual evidence. While prior work either aggressively closes this gap or suppresses hallucinations through expensive black-box decoding strategies, none addresses the underlying geometric cause. We provide the first quantitative characterization of this over-alignment, demonstrating that linguistic bias concentrates in the top principal components of a universal, dataset-agnostic text subspace. Building on this insight, we propose two complementary remedies: a training-free inference strategy and a bias-aware fine-tuning paradigm, both of which explicitly project out this subspace from visual representations. Our methods significantly reduce hallucinations across POPE, CHAIR, and AMBER benchmarks, and improve CLAIR scores on long-form captioning tasks, with the training-free variant adding no computational overhead over the base model.
Authors: Andrea Valenzuela Ramirez, Cristian Gutierrez-Gomez, Marta Barroso, Dario Garcia-Gasulla, Sara Royuela
Abstract: GCC and LLVM underpin much of modern software infrastructure, relying on distinct Intermediate Representations (IRs) to drive optimizations and code generation. However, the semantic and structural differences between these IRs create significant barriers for cross-toolchain interaction, limiting the reuse of compiler frontends, backends, and optimization pipelines across programming languages and compilation ecosystems. Traditional rule-based translators have attempted to bridge this gap, but their complexity and maintenance cost have hindered practical adoption. In this context, Large Language Models (LLMs) appear to be an emerging technology that offers a data-driven alternative, capable of learning complex mappings between heterogeneous compiler IRs directly from sufficiently representative examples. To explore this approach, this paper presents IRIS-14B, a 14-billion-parameter transformer model fine-tuned to translate GIMPLE (as emitted by GCC) to LLVM IR (as emitted by LLVM). The model is trained on paired IRs extracted from C sources and evaluated on the GIMPLE-to-LLVM IR transformation applied to IRs derived from real-world C code and competitive programming problems. To the best of our knowledge, IRIS-14B is the first model trained explicitly for IR-to-IR translation. It outperforms the accuracy of widely used models, including the largest state-of-the-art open models available today, ranging from 13 to 1,000 billion parameters, by up to 44 percentage points. The proposed transformation supports the integration of LLMs as complementary components within hybrid neuro-symbolic compiler architectures, where models such as IRIS-14B act as interoperability layers enabling cross-toolchain workflows without modifying existing compiler passes, while traditional compiler infrastructure continues to perform deterministic compilation and optimization.
Authors: Xiaoce Wang, Sifan Zhou, Kaifei Wang, Leli Xu, Xuerui Qiu, Tao He, Ming Li
Abstract: Recent advances in diffusion transformers (DiTs) have enabled promising single-turn image editing capabilities. However, multi-turn editing often leads to progressive semantic drift and quality degradation.In this work, we study this problem from a latent-space frequency perspective by decomposing the editing process into two functional components: VAE and DiT. Through systematic analysis in the VAE latent space, we uncover that the DiT introduces dominant low-frequency drift that accumulates as semantic misalignment across editing rounds, while the VAE contributes comparatively stable reconstruction bias.Based on this insight, we propose VAE-LFA (Low Frequency Alignment), a training-free, plug-and-play method that performs alignment in VAE latent space. VAE-LFA decomposes latent discrepancies across editing rounds via low-pass filtering, and aligns low-frequency statistics to an exponential moving average of previous rounds, effectively suppressing accumulated semantic drift while preserving high-frequency details.Our method requires no retraining, ground-truth priors, or access to diffusion parameters, making it applicable to both white-box and black-box DiT editors. For white-box models, VAE-LFA is seamlessly integrated into the editing pipeline by eliminating redundant VAE round trips; for black-box models, it operates via an off-the-shelf VAE to perform inter-round latent alignment.Extensive experiments demonstrate that VAE-LFA improves semantic consistency and visual fidelity across diverse multi-turn editing scenarios, including both controlled and in-the-wild images.
Authors: Boyang Xu, Qing Zou, Siqin Yang, Hao Yan
Abstract: Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) models the full return distribution, but existing finite-support or quantile-based methods rely on projections, while recent flow-based approaches can suffer from \emph{boundary mismatch} at the flow source or from \emph{high-variance} bootstrapping when current and successor noises are independent. We propose Path-Coupled Bellman Flows (PCBF), a continuous-time DRL method that learns return distributions with flow matching using \textbf{source-consistent Bellman-coupled paths}: the current path starts from the required base prior at $t{=}0$, reaches the Bellman target at $t{=}1$, and maintains a pathwise affine relation to the successor flow at intermediate times (without requiring time-$t$ marginals to satisfy a distributional Bellman fixed point for all $t$). PCBF couples current and successor return flows through shared base noise and uses a $\lambda$-parameterized control-variate target: $\lambda{=}0$ recovers an unbiased sample Bellman target, while $\lambda{>}0$ trades controlled bias for variance reduction. Experiments on analytically tractable MRPs, OGBench, and D4RL show improved distributional fidelity and training stability, and competitive offline RL performance.
Authors: Valentino Maiorca, Eleonora Gualdoni, Xavier Suau, Marco Cuturi, Luca Zappella, Pau Rodr\'iguez
Abstract: As foundation models grow in capability, the ability to efficiently and reliably control their behavior becomes critical. Fine-tuning these models can be costly, and while prompting can be practical for controllability, it remains fragile due to models' high sensitivity to exact prompt wording and structure. This brittleness has driven interest in activation steering techniques that offer more stable and predictable control over model behavior. However, existing activation steering methods require per-concept optimization, which makes them ill-suited to deployment scenarios where the concept set is large, evolving, or only specified at request time: each new concept incurs at least minutes of optimization on the target model. We propose HyperTransport, a hypernetwork framework that amortizes this cost by mapping embeddings from a pretrained encoder (CLIP in our instantiation) directly to intervention parameters, trained end-to-end using an optimal transport loss. Once trained, HyperTransport produces each new intervention in a single hypernetwork forward pass, 3600-7000x faster than per-concept fitting. On concepts unseen during training, it matches the strongest per-concept baselines at inducing the target concept. By decoupling concept representation from intervention prediction, HyperTransport combines three capabilities that no existing approach offers as a set: amortized steering for open-ended concept sets, continuous interpretable strength control, and cross-modal conditioning where reference images can directly steer text-based generation. We validate HyperTransport on DMD2 and Nitro-1-PixArt across 167 held-out test concepts via CLIP-based metrics, a VLM-as-a-judge evaluation, and a user study. In pairwise comparisons, both human and VLM judges prefer HyperTransport over prompting ~2x as often.
Authors: Yuchu Liu, Rui Zhu, Jingwei Xiong, Haixu Tang
Abstract: Can large language models predict physical and mechanical polymer properties simply by reading unstructured scientific prose? Polymer performance is rarely determined by chemical structure alone; identical nominal polymers can exhibit drastically different behaviors depending on their synthesis route, processing history, morphology, and testing conditions. Yet, state-of-the-art polymer property models typically rely on structure-only representations -- such as SMILES or molecular graphs -- which strip away this vital experimental context. In this work, we introduce \textbf{PolyLM}, a natural-language-only, process- and condition-aware framework that predicts materials performance directly from full-text literature. By circumventing structural inputs entirely, PolyLM preserves the nuanced, unstructured descriptions of synthesis and processing reported by domain scientists. To train this framework, we curated an unprecedented, literature-scale dataset encompassing 185,000 scientific papers and over 276,400 unique polymer samples across 22 physical, mechanical, and thermal properties. We fine-tuned a massive 9-billion-parameter language model (Qwen3.5-9B) using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and task-level uncertainty weighting. Evaluated on 68,283 held-out observations, the model achieves remarkably high predictive accuracy, establishing new state-of-the-art benchmarks for complex properties. Across the 22 diverse targets, the model achieves a median $R^2$ of 0.74, with predictions for key thermal, mechanical, and physicochemical properties frequently surpassing an $R^2$ of 0.80. These results unequivocally demonstrate that natural language is a powerful, highly scalable interface for realistic materials performance prediction.
Authors: Saisai Hu
Abstract: Motivated by the challenge to improve the adversarial robustness, security, and trust of medical decision making intelligent agents, this study develops a full-link security enhancement framework, which describes "input risk perception - medical evidence constraint - knowledge consistency verification - decision confidence reweighting - security output control - adversarial feedback update." We propose ARSM-Agent and define a weighted joint objective consisting of decision accuracy loss, adversarial robustness loss, safety refusal loss, and knowledge consistency loss, with weights of 0.3, 0.3, 0.2, and 0.2, respectively. The whole medical decision formulation is implemented by multi-module collaborative linkage. We verify that the algorithm is more efficient than four baselines, including LLM-Agent, Retrieval-Agent, Filter-Agent, and Adv-Train-Agent. Under semantic perturbation, prompt injection, drug-name confusion, and false-evidence attacks, ARSM-Agent reduces the overall attack success rate to 8.7% and achieves a knowledge consistency score of 0.91. Ablation experiments quantify each module's contribution: removing risk perception, evidence retrieval, consistency verification, and confidence reweighting reduces accuracy by 6.7%, 9.1%, 7.6%, and 4.4%, respectively, and increases attack success rate by 13.8%, 11.1%, 8.6%, and 6.9%. The proposed approach addresses key security issues of medical decision making intelligent agents, obtains secure decision making in challenging scenarios, and provides reliable intelligent support for medical decision-making intelligent agents.
Authors: Pierluca D'Oro, Sneha Silwal, William Wong, Yuxuan Sun, Fanyi Xiao, Manchen Wang, Eric Gan, Allen Bolourchi, Joseph Tighe
Abstract: Evaluating Computer Use Agents (CUAs) on interactive environments is fraught with methodological pitfalls that the field has yet to systematically address. We show that a 1MB replay script that blindly executes a recorded action sequence without ever observing the screen outperforms frontier models on prominent static benchmarks, and prove that its expected success rate is exactly equal to the source agent's pass@k in deterministic environments. We trace this and other failures to two root causes: non-principled environment design (static, unsandboxed, or unreliably verified environments) and non-principled evaluation methodology (naive aggregation and misuse of pass@k for stateful UI interactions). To address the first, we propose PRISM, five design principles for CUA environments (privileged verification, realistic environments, integrity-checked configurations, sandboxed execution, and multifactorial variability) and instantiate them in DigiWorld, a benchmark of 15 realistic sandboxed mobile applications able to evaluate agents in over 3.2 million verified unique configurations. To address the second, we develop an aggregation framework pairing Wilson score intervals with hierarchical bootstrap, producing confidence intervals that correctly account for the nested structure of CUA benchmarks, as we empirically demonstrate. All together, we show that principled environment design and rigorous evaluation methodology are not optional refinements but prerequisites for meaningful CUA research.
Authors: Rees Chang, Andrew Novick, Ryan P Adams, Elif Ertekin
Abstract: Crystal generative models have shown rapid progress for accelerating the discovery of bulk, periodic materials. However, many material systems such as 2D superconductors, thin film semiconductors, and catalytic surfaces are diperiodic, i.e., aperiodic along one of the lattice directions. These systems are invariant under the layer groups, which are known to influence materials properties yet not considered by existing models. In this paper, we propose SLayerGen, a generative model that produces crystals constrained to be invariant to any space or layer group. SLayerGen consists of coarse-to-fine discrete autoregressive lattice generation; transformer-based autoregressive sampling of Wyckoff positions, elements, and numbers of symmetrically unique atoms; and space or layer group equivariant diffusion of atomic coordinates. For the diffusion component, we corrected an inconsistency in the loss from prior work arising from hexagonal groups being non-orthogonal in fractional coordinates. To facilitate progress in generative modeling of diperiodic materials, we assembled and filtered datasets of monolayers and bilayers, propose relevant evaluation metrics, and developed novel representations for layer group symmetries. For de novo generation of diperiodic materials, SLayerGen achieves consistent performance gains over bulk crystal generative models and is competitive when training jointly on bulk and diperiodic materials.
Authors: Krti Tallam
Abstract: Enterprise AI backends increasingly admit heterogeneous execution requests across model deployment, inference, evaluation, data movement, and agentic workflows. In many systems, those requests arrive in service-specific shapes, which makes it difficult to attach shared admission-time behavior such as logging, governance hints, resource accounting, authorization-aware policy hooks, and later runtime review without rebuilding the same contract in each subsystem. This paper introduces the execution envelope, a normalized internal admission object that records who is asking for what kind of execution, what resources were requested, what policy-relevant scope accompanied the request, and what the backend ultimately granted. The proposal is intentionally narrow. It does not replace service-specific request models, perform scheduling, or introduce a new authority token. Instead, it defines a descriptive admission seam that can be threaded through real backend paths before backend-specific resolution begins. I formalize the distinction between requested and granted resources, specify the field families, invariants, and lifecycle of the envelope, work through POST /serving/deploy_model as an initial proving ground, and position the design relative to usage control, analyzable authorization, admission control, and cluster scheduling. The central claim is that a shared execution-admission contract is a useful missing primitive for modern AI backends because it creates one place to attach governance and observability without pretending to solve placement, policy, and runtime execution in a single step.
Authors: Xiaolin Sun, Zixuan Liu, Yibin Hu, Zizhan Zheng
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems where agents communicate in natural language to solve tasks jointly. A key capability in such systems is consensus formation, where agents iteratively exchange messages and update decisions to reach a shared outcome. However, most existing multi-agent LLM frameworks assume that all participating agents are aligned with the system objective. In practice, a malicious insider may participate as a legitimate member of the group while pursuing a hidden adversarial goal. In this work, we study insider manipulation in multi-agent LLM consensus systems. We formalize the problem as a sequential decision-making task in which a malicious agent seeks to delay or prevent agreement among benign agents. To make attack optimization tractable, we propose a world-model-based framework that learns surrogate dynamics over the latent behavioral states of benign agents and then trains an attacker using reinforcement learning based on this learned model. Preliminary results show that the trained attacker reduces the benign consensus rate and prolongs disagreement more effectively than the direct malicious-prompt baseline. These results suggest that combining latent world models with reinforcement learning is a promising direction for adaptive insider attacks in language-based multi-agent systems.
Authors: Zequan Xie, Weiming Zeng, Yunhua Chen, Sichang Ling, Tongyang Chen, Jinsheng Xiao
Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer notable advantages in biological plausibility and energy efficiency, making them promising candidates for building low-power Transformers. However, existing Spiking Transformers largely adhere to a passive reactive paradigm, which struggles to focus on task-relevant information and incurs substantial computational overhead when processing redundant visual data. To overcome this fundamental yet underexplored limitation, we propose SAFformer, a novel Spiking Transformer architecture based on an active predictive filtering paradigm. Inspired by the brain's predictive coding mechanism, SAFformer actively suppresses predictable signals and focuses on salient visual features. Extensive experiments show that SAFformer establishes new state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10/100 and CIFAR10-DVS. Remarkably, on ImageNet-1K, it achieves 80.50% Top-1 accuracy with only 26.58M parameters and an energy consumption of 5.88 mJ, demonstrating an exceptional balance between accuracy and efficiency.
Authors: Jiazheng Li, Chi-Hao Wu, Yunze Liu, Kaize Ding, Jundong Li, Chuxu Zhang
Abstract: Understanding ultra-long videos such as egocentric recordings, live streams, or surveillance footage spanning days to weeks, remains a challenge. For current multimodal LLMs: even with million-token context windows, frame budgets cover only tens of minutes of densely sampled video, and most evidence is discarded before inference begins. Memory-augmented and agentic approaches help with scale, but their retrieval remains fragmented across modalities and lacks long-range narrative summaries that span days or weeks. We propose \textbf{MAGIC-Video}, a training-free framework built around a multimodal memory graph with interleaved narrative chain: the graph unifies episodic, semantic, and visual content through six typed edges and supports cross-modal retrieval, while the chain distils long-horizon entity biographies and recurring activity events. At inference time, an agentic loop interleaves graph retrieval with narrative fact injection, covering both the modality and time dimensions of ultra-long video in a single retrieval pipeline. On EgoLifeQA, Ego-R1 and MM-Lifelong, MAGIC-Video consistently outperforms strong general-purpose, long-video, and agentic baselines, with gains of 10.1, 7.4, and 5.9 points over the prior best agentic system on each benchmark. Code is available at https://github.com/lijiazheng0917/MAGIC-video.
Authors: Qianru Zhang, Xinyi Gao, Alexander Zhou, Reynold Cheng, Siu-Ming Yiu, Hongzhi Yin
Abstract: Accurate traffic prediction is essential for optimizing transportation systems, enhancing resource allocation, and improving overall urban administration. Spatio-temporal graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance and have been widely used in various spatio-temporal prediction scenarios. However, these prediction methods often exhibit low generalization ability, struggling with distribution shifts caused by spatio-temporal dynamics. To address this challenge, we propose an approach to enhance the generalization and adaptation of spatio-temporal GNNs through efficient prompting. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight and model-agnostic prompt tuning framework for spatio-temporal GNNs, named SimpleST. It facilitates adapting pre-trained spatio-temporal GNNs to novel distributions while keeping the model parameters fixed. This prompt mechanism reduces the overhead and complexity of adaptation, enabling efficient utilization of pre-trained models for out-of-distribution generalization. Extensive experiments conducted on five real-world urban spatio-temporal datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of prediction accuracy and computational efficiency.
Authors: Kejia Chen, Jiawen Zhang, Boheng Li, Pengcheng Li, Jian Lou, Zunlei Feng, Mingli Song, Ruoxi Jia, Tianwei Zhang
Abstract: Many-shot jailbreaking (MSJ) causes safety-aligned language models to answer harmful queries by preceding them with many harmful question-answer demonstrations. We study why this attack becomes stronger as the number of demonstrations increases. Empirically, we find that MSJ induces a progressive activation drift: the representation of a fixed harmful query moves step by step away from the safety-aligned region as more harmful demonstrations are added. Theoretically, we show that this drift can be interpreted as implicit malicious fine-tuning: conditioning on N harmful demonstrations induces SGD-style updates equivalent to optimizing on the corresponding N harmful samples. This view turns the attack mechanism into a defense principle. We append a fixed one-shot safety demonstration at inference time, which induces a counteracting safety-oriented update and restores refusal behavior. The resulting method improves the model's robustness to MSJ without modifying its parameters or requiring white-box access at deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/Thecommonirin/SafeEnd.
Authors: Fan Yang, Binyan Xu, Di Tang, Kehuan Zhang
Abstract: GNNs have become a standard tool for learning on relational data, yet they remain highly vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Prior defenses often depend on inspecting specific subgraph patterns or node features, and thus can be circumvented by adaptive attackers. We propose PRAETORIAN, a new defense that targets intrinsic requirements of effective GNN backdoors rather than surface-level cues. Our key observation is that flipping a victim node's prediction requires substantial influence on the victim: attackers tend to either inject many trigger nodes or rely on a small set of highly influential ones. Building on this observation, PRAETORIAN (i) analyzes internal correlations within potential trigger subgraphs to detect abnormally large injected structures, and (ii) quantifies external node influence to identify triggers with disproportionate impact. Across our evaluations, PRAETORIAN reduces the average attack success rate (ASR) to 0.55% with only a 0.62% drop in clean accuracy (CA), whereas state-of-the-art defenses still yield an average ASR of >20% and a CA drop of >3% under the same conditions. Moreover, PRAETORIAN remains effective against a range of adaptive attacks, forcing adversaries to either inject many trigger nodes to achieve high ASR (>80%), which incurs a >10% CA drop, or preserve CA at the cost of limiting ASR to 18.1%. Overall, PRAETORIAN constrains attackers to an unfavorable trade-off between efficacy and detectability.
Authors: Qixin Xiao, Maani Ghaffari
Abstract: Learning predictive world models from visual observations is a core problem in embodied AI, with applications to model-based reinforcement learning and robotic planning. Existing latent world models typically generate future states with unconstrained neural transition functions, while modern video generation systems often prioritize perceptual plausibility or introduce physical structure through auxiliary losses, external guidance, or separate dynamics modules. As a result, long-horizon rollouts can remain weakly grounded in the physical principles that govern real dynamics, leading to compounding error, energy drift, and physically inconsistent futures. We propose Least Action World Models (LaWM), a latent world-modeling framework that operationalizes the Principle of Least Action in learned visual latent space: future rollouts are governed by a learned Lagrangian action functional rather than produced only by an unconstrained transition predictor. Our main technical realization is a latent variational integrator: LaWM encodes observations into learned generalized coordinates, learns a latent discrete Lagrangian over consecutive latent states, constructs a discrete action functional, and advances prediction by solving the corresponding discrete integration condition. Thus, physical structure is not merely used to score, regularize, or constrain a completed trajectory; it defines the latent transition rule itself. Because the transition is induced by a discrete variational principle, LaWM provides a structure-preserving bias for long-horizon visual prediction. Across physics-clean synthetic dynamics and embodied robot interaction benchmarks, LaWM improves physical invariance, background consistency, motion smoothness, and appearance and geometric prediction metrics over video-generation and world-model baselines.
Authors: Lu Bowen, Xinyu Tang, Yin Yin Low, Shu-Min Leong
Abstract: Preserving model fidelity is essential for stealthy text-to-image (T2I) backdoor attacks. Existing methods such as Learning without Forgetting (LwF) rely on output-based distillation, which provides limited regularization. We introduce Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) as a parameter-based alternative for preserving fidelity in backdoor learning. While stronger in principle, we show that standard static EWC with a fixed regularization weight lambda and mean-squared utility loss creates an artificial trade-off between attack success rate (ASR) and fidelity, particularly degrading performance on weak triggers. To address this, we propose Cosine-Aware Adaptive EWC, which dynamically adjusts EWC regularization using a cosine-based semantic utility and adaptive scheduling. This approach transforms EWC from a fixed penalty into a context-sensitive constraint, maintaining high ASR while preserving model fidelity. Experiments demonstrate improved ASR-fidelity balance and enhanced robustness on out-of-domain (OOD) datasets compared to existing baselines.
Authors: Lennard M. van Karnenbeek, Hilde G. A. van der Pol, Mark Wijkhuizen, Eva Poelman, Caroline A. Drukker, Theo Ruers, Freija Geldof, Behdad Dashtbozorg
Abstract: Purpose: We aim to enhance the image quality of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) devices using deep learning and a novel paired dataset of POCUS and high-end ultrasound images. Approach: We collected the first accurately paired dataset using a custom-built automated gantry system of low-end POCUS and high-end ultrasound images. A conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN) was utilized based on the pix2pix architecture, with a U-Net generator that incorporates both L1 and structural similarity index (SSIM) losses to improve perceptual quality. Pretraining on a simulation dataset further boosts performance. Evaluation was performed on 1064 paired ex vivo tissue and phantom ultrasound image sets. Results: Our approach improves the SSIM from 0.29 to 0.54 and PSNR from 19.16 dB to 22.41 dB. No-reference metrics also indicate substantial enhancement, with the Natural Image Quality Evaluator (NIQE) and Perception-based Image Quality Evaluator (PIQE) scores dropping from 7.95 to 4.44 and 31.12 to 19.99, respectively. Conclusions: This work presents the first publicly available accurately paired dataset of low-end POCUS to high end ultrasound images. Additionally, our results demonstrate the potential of the proposed framework to overcome hardware limitations of handheld POCUS, enhancing its diagnostic value in low-resource and point-of-care settings. The POCUS-IQ Dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/NKI-MedTech-AI/POCUS-IQ.
Authors: Xincheng Yao, Ruoqi Li, Cheng Chen, Daoxin Zhang, Yi Wu, Yao Hu, Chongyang Zhang
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a pivotal technique for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the de facto practice of mainstream RL algorithms is to treat all tokens of one response equally and assign the same optimization objective to each token, failing to provide granular guidance for the reasoning process. While in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, different tokens usually play distinct roles. Therefore, the current RL algorithms lack an effective mechanism to dynamically balance the exploration-exploitation trade-off during learning. To this end, we propose Hierarchical Token-level Objective Control Policy Optimization (HTPO), a novel RL algorithm that takes the divide-and-conquer idea to hierarchically partition the response tokens into specific functional groups from three aspects (i.e., prompt difficulty, answer correctness, and token entropy). Within each group, according to the contributions to exploration or exploitation, we design specialized optimization objectives to facilitate the effective execution of each token's expected functionality. In this way, HTPO can achieve a more balanced exploration-exploitation trade-off. Extensive experiments on challenging reasoning benchmarks validate the superiority of our HTPO algorithm, which significantly outperforms the strong DAPO baseline (e.g., +8.6% and +6.7% on AIME'24 and AIME'25, respectively). When scaling test-time compute, the HTPO-trained model maintains a consistent performance advantage over the DAPO baseline, and the gap widens as the sampling budget increases, validating that our adaptive token-level control method fosters effective exploration without sacrificing exploitation performance. Code will be at https://github.com/xcyao00/HTPO.
Authors: Hyunmog Kim
Abstract: We introduce a spectral-injection diagnostic for measuring which angular frequencies a trained equivariant force-field backbone preserves: inject a controlled angular-frequency perturbation into a molecular force field, attach a lightweight Spectral Prediction Network (SPN) to the frozen backbone, and read off which frequencies are recoverable. On aspirin, a quadratic SPN attached to an L = 2 NequIP backbone recovers the boundary signal at l = 4 but collapses at l = 5: a 11.7x cliff at the predicted drL boundary, with p dropping from 0.913 to 0.078. The same boundary-vs-above contrast persists across n = 4 independently trained backbones (raw-gain delta contrast, hierarchical cluster bootstrap) and is corroborated by a denominator-free injected-residual metric (R2_inj(4) = 0.374 versus R2_inj(5) = 0.006). A finite-degree span theorem calibrates the diagnostic: for a single marked direction, degree-d polynomials of degree-L spherical-harmonic features span exactly H less than or equal to dL with multiplicity-one saturation at the boundary (scoped to single-direction degree-bounded probes, not a function-class upper bound on multi-atom MPNNs). A synthetic C5 calibration plus capacity, activation, and cross-architecture controls rule out parameter count alone as the explanation.
Authors: Francesco Bacchiocchi, Matteo Castiglioni, Alberto Marchesi, Francesco Emanuele Stradi
Abstract: We study \emph{multi-armed bandits} (MABs) augmented with \emph{best-action queries}, in which the learner may additionally query an oracle that reveals the best arm in the current round. This setting was recently characterized by Russo et al. [2024] in the \emph{full-feedback} model, where the learner observes the rewards of all arms after each round. They show that, in both \emph{stochastic} and \emph{adversarial} environments, $k$ best-action queries reduce the optimal $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret to $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\min\{T/k,\sqrt{T}\})$. Whether this improvement extends to the more realistic \emph{bandit-feedback} model -- where the learner observes only the reward of the played arm -- was left as an open problem. We fully resolve this question. When rewards are stochastic but correlated among arms, we show that the full-feedback result does not carry over: any algorithm must incur regret at least $\Omega(\sqrt{T-k})$. This lower bound directly extends to adversarial environments. On the positive side, we show that $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\min\{T/k,\sqrt{T-k}\})$ regret is still achievable when rewards are stochastic and i.i.d., and establish a matching lower bound, up to logarithmic factors. Together, these results provide a complete characterization of the benefits of \emph{best-action queries} in the \emph{bandit-feedback} model.
Authors: Shih-Yu Lai, Hirozumi Yamaguchi, Shang-Tse Chen, Yu-Lun Liu, Bing-Yu Chen
Abstract: Device-free localization trains models from heterogeneous wireless and visual sensors (e.g., Wi-Fi, LiDAR) distributed across edge devices. Federated learning offers a privacy-respecting framework, but is brittle when clients differ in sensor modality and resolution, when their data distributions drift, and when privacy noise destroys the structural signal needed for localization. We propose UMEDA, a graph federated learning framework in which clients form nodes of a global graph that share a continuous integral operator, and aggregation is reformulated as spectral signal processing on this operator. Each client encodes its local sensors with a linear-attention layer whose kernel spectrum is low-rank filtered, suppressing modality-specific residuals so clients with different sensors align in a common low-rank subspace. The server then aggregates client updates via a diffusion model over the kernel's spectral coefficients, treating updates as discretizations of a shared operator rather than topology-bound weights -- this absorbs varying graph sizes and missing modalities without node-wise correspondence. To balance privacy and utility, we add an anisotropic differential-privacy mechanism that projects noise preferentially into the null space of the signal subspace, preserving dominant eigendirections while ensuring formal $(\epsilon, \delta)$-DP under gradient clipping. On MM-Fi and the RELI11D out-of-distribution benchmark, UMEDA outperforms state-of-the-art federated baselines in accuracy, convergence, and communication efficiency, particularly under high modality heterogeneity and tight privacy budgets.
Authors: Fan Zhang, Shiming Fan, Hua Wang
Abstract: Multivariate time series forecasting is critical in many real-world systems, and thus modeling cross-channel dependencies is essential. Although existing methods improve overall accuracy by enhancing representations and cross-channel interactions, it remains challenging to reliably capture inter-variable dependencies under specific conditions. We observe that dependencies in real data are often state-dependent and noisy; in such cases, dense interactions can amplify spurious correlations and lead to representation over-smoothing, which may yield unreliable predictions in certain scenarios. Motivated by this, we propose MS-FLOW, a sparse-bottleneck framework that explicitly models inter-variable interaction as capacity-limited information flow. Specifically, MS-FLOW replaces fully connected communication with selective sparse routing, retaining only a few critical dependency paths and injecting cross-variable signals under a strict communication budget, thereby suppressing redundant connections and spurious-correlation propagation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MS-FLOW learns more reliable multivariate correlations, achieving state-of-the-art forecasting accuracy on 12 real-world benchmarks while producing fewer yet more reliable dependencies, shifting multivariate forecasting from "more interaction" to "more effective interaction".
Authors: Kalana Kalupahana, Francesco Emanuele Stradi, Matteo Castiglioni, Alberto Marchesi
Abstract: We design the first regret guarantees for robust dynamic pricing that decouple the dependence on the corruption $C$ and the time horizon $T$. In dynamic pricing, a seller with unlimited supply of a good interacts with a stream of buyers over \( T \) rounds, with the goal of maximizing revenue. At each round $t$, the seller posts a price $p_t$, and the buyer purchases the good only if their unknown valuation $v^\star$ exceeds this price. The seller observes only the binary feedback $\mathbb{I} \left\{ p_t \leq v^\star \right\}$, indicating whether a sale occurred. In the \emph{robust} pricing setting, a malicious adversary is allowed to corrupt this feedback in at most $C$ rounds. Even if the learner knows the corruption $C$, the best known regret bound is $\mathcal{O}(C\log\log T)$ by Gupta et al. [2025]. This leaves as an open problem to ``decouple'' the dependence on $C$ and $T$. In this work, we resolve this open problem. In particular, we develop a robust variant of binary search that achieves regret $\mathcal{O}(C+\log T)$ when the corruption $C$ is known and $\mathcal{O}(C+\log^2 T)$ when the corruption is unknown.
Authors: Hyunmog Kim
Abstract: EDA problems are graph-structured, but not all graph-structured problems call for the same GNN computation. We argue that successful GNN-for-EDA methods are those whose propagation, aggregation, and supervision align with the native algebra of the target task. Concretely: static timing analysis is a max-plus/min-plus recurrence on a topologically ordered DAG, structurally aligned with asynchronous DAG-GNNs; placement is governed by hypergraph wirelength and density penalties and is exploited by differentiable placers rather than by message-passing GNNs alone; routing congestion is a sparse demand-supply field over a layout grid; switching-activity propagation is a probabilistic recurrence on a directed netlist; IR drop is a linear system on the power-delivery network; and analog symmetry extraction is a discrete constraint-prediction problem on schematic graphs. Through these task-by-task alignments we (i) review the GNN architectural toolkit relevant to circuits, (ii) formalize how circuit graphs differ from generic graphs (directed, heterogeneous, multi-scale, with sequential and clock structure), (iii) characterize where current methods succeed and where the algebra-architecture mismatch limits them, and (iv) identify failure modes--stage leakage, proxy-to-signoff gap, calibration, and design-distribution shift--that we believe are likely to dominate the next phase of work. We position the paper as a GNN-for-EDA, task-aligned analysis rather than a comprehensive AI-for-chip-design survey. Continuous SE(3)-equivariant geometric GNNs are usually mismatched to Manhattan digital layout, and LLM-for-RTL, HLS, and RL/diffusion-based topology generation are outside our scope.
Authors: Gleb Molodtsov, Alexander Miasnikov, Aleksandr Beznosikov
Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale capacity by routing each token to a small subset of experts. However, their routers exhibit a fundamental trade-off: strong load balancing can suppress expert specialization, while aggressive diversity often causes routing collapse. We propose Hi-MoE, a grouped MoE framework that decomposes routing control into two coupled levels: (i) inter-group balancing that enforces fair traffic across expert groups, and (ii) intra-group specialization that promotes complementary expert behaviors while preventing within-group collapse. Our analysis provides a principled explanation of how our hierarchical objectives reshape the router, thereby promoting stable specialization and mitigating collapse. We observe consistent improvements over recent sparse-routing and grouped-MoE baselines across NLP and vision benchmarks, and confirm robustness via scaling studies (model size, expert count) and targeted ablations. In large-scale pre-training on 58B tokens, Hi-MoE-7B achieves a 5.6% perplexity reduction and a 40% improvement in expert balance over OLMoE-7B across diverse evaluation domains.
Authors: Ming Liu
Abstract: While random demonstration labels barely hurt in-context learning (Min et al., 2022), we show that homogeneous labels--even semantically valid ones--collapse accuracy to <=12% across six models (Pythia, Llama, Qwen; 0.8B--8B) and four tasks. The trigger is label-slot content: the model treats tokens occupying the label position as an exhaustive answer vocabulary, with homogeneity as the maximally collapsed case. A novel set-level fixation finding confirms this: when demonstrations carry varied nonsense tokens from {foo,bar,vex,nit,orb}, the model places 42--67% of probability on the demonstrated set while P(dog) remains below 0.2%. This is inconsistent with latent-concept Bayesian accounts (Xie et al., 2022) and reveals that ICL output is constrained vocabulary retrieval--the model binds its output to the demonstrated token inventory regardless of semantic plausibility. The effect generalizes to 4-way classification (0% accuracy across three models, 1B--8B) and multi-token verbalizers ("very positive"), where we decompose fixation into format-level (template adoption) and content-level (polarity override) components that are experimentally dissociable. Mechanistically, per-item paired activation patching on Pythia-1B recovers 98.4% of the gap (95% CI [84%, 112%]), localizing fixation to a layer-7-centered circuit (rank 2/560, 99.8th percentile; 4-fold CV mean 103%). Cross-architecture logit lens on Llama-3.2-1B replicates the encode-then-override trajectory with causal confirmation (top-5 layers: 89% recovery).
Authors: Daning Cheng, Zeyu Liu, Jun Sun, Fen Xia, Boyang Zhang, Dongping Liu, Yunquan Zhang
Abstract: The scaling behavior, in which test performance often improves as model size and data increase, is a central empirical phenomenon in modern deep learning, yet its theoretical basis remains incomplete. In this paper, we study depth expansion in normalized residual networks: starting from a trained model in an old hypothesis class, we insert a new residual block at an intermediate layer and ask when such an expansion can yield a provable improvement in test risk. We develop a unified framework that decomposes this question into representational gain, optimization gain, and generalization transfer. First, under a first-order descent condition near zero initialization, we prove that the expanded hypothesis class contains an auxiliary jumpboard model with strictly smaller population risk than the original model. Second, under norm control tailored to post-normalized residual architectures, we establish a norm-based Rademacher complexity bound for the expanded model class. These ingredients lead to two complementary test-risk guarantees: one route passes through population risk and is tighter when a positive population margin is available, while the other works directly at the train/test level, avoids Hoeffding transfer, and is more robust in degenerate regimes. Together, these results provide a theorem-driven mechanism under which residual depth expansion can improve test performance in normalized residual networks. More broadly, they suggest that scaling is inherently joint: depth creates new improving directions, width enhances the finite-sample observability of weak signals, and data determines whether the statistical cost of expansion can be controlled.
Authors: Vasiliki Sideri-Lampretsa, Sophie Starck, Robbie Holland, Julian McGinnis, Daniel Rueckert
Abstract: Reusing the early layers of cohort-trained INRs as initialization for new signals has been shown to accelerate and improve signal fitting, yet it remains unclear which layers of the shared encoder learn transferable representations and what those representations encode. We address both questions for two standard backbones, SIREN and Fourier-feature MLPs (FFMLP). First, sweeping the freeze depth across the shared encoder at test time, we find that the optimum coincides with the layer of highest weight stable rank. Moreover, freezing at this depth matches or improves on the standard fine-tuning recipe across all our experiments. Second, identifying which layer transfers does not characterize what that layer encodes. To address this we adopt sparse autoencoders (SAEs), the dominant tool in mechanistic interpretability, and present the first SAE decomposition of INR activations into sparse dictionary atoms. Interestingly, SIREN and FFMLP achieve comparable cohort-fitting quality, but learn qualitatively different dictionaries. Cohort SIREN's atoms are localized, tiling the coordinate plane such that each atom fires in a confined region independent of cohort content. Cohort FFMLP's atoms are image-spanning, tracing the contours of memorized cohort signals. Single-atom ablations confirm causal use of these dictionaries: a single FFMLP atom out of 4096 can drop PSNR by up to 10.6 dB across the image, while SIREN ablations remain confined to where the atom fires. Together, these results give the first mechanistic account of what transfers in cohort-trained INRs and turn their activations into inspectable dictionary atoms. These tools open a path towards characterizing what INRs encode and towards architectures designed for generalization rather than memorization.
Authors: Andrea Gurioli, Federico Pennino, Maurizio Gabbrielli
Abstract: Embedding-based code retrieval often suffers when encoders overfit to surface syntax. Prior work mitigates this by using LLMs to rephrase queries and corpora into a normalized style, but leaves two questions open: how much representational shift helps, and when is the per-query LLM call justified? We study a hierarchy of three rewriting strategies: stylistic rephrasing, NL-enriched PseudoCode, and full Natural-Language transcription, under joint query-corpus (QC, online) and corpus-only (C, offline) augmentation, across six CoIR benchmarks, five encoders, and three rewriters spanning independent model families (Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral). We are the first to evaluate NL-enriched PseudoCode and snippet-level Natural Language as direct retrieval representations, rather than as transient intermediates. Full NL rewriting with QC yields the largest gains (+0.51 absolute NDCG@10 on CT-Contest for MoSE-18), while corpus-only rewriting degrades retrieval in 56 of 90 configurations, about 62%. We introduce two diagnostics, Delta H, token entropy, and Delta s, embedding cosine, and show that Delta H predicts retrieval gain under QC across all three rewriter families: pooled Spearman rho = +0.436, p < 0.001 on DeepSeek+Codestral; rho = +0.593 on Codestral alone; rho = +0.356 on Qwen. This establishes Delta H as a cheap, rewriter-agnostic proxy for deciding when rewriting pays off before running retrieval. Our analysis reframes LLM rewriting as a cost-benefit decision: it is most effective as a remediation layer for lightweight encoders on code-dominant queries, with diminishing returns for strong encoders or NL-heavy queries.
Authors: Abdulvahap Mutlu, \c{S}eng\"ul Do\u{g}an, T\"urker Tuncer
Abstract: Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) introduce a stability-motivated variant of multi stream residual mixing by constraining residual stream mixing matrices to the manifold of doubly stochastic matrices via Sinkhorn-Knopp projection. In his work, we study whether mHC-style constrained multi-stream residual topology transfers effectively to state space model (SSM) language modeling. We implement a static mHC mechanism around an SSM block by expanding the residual stream into multiple parallel streams, aggregating streams into a single SSM input through simplex-constrained pre-mixing, scattering the SSM output back to streams through simplex-constrained post-mixing, and applying Sinkhorn-projected residual stream mixing at each layer. We further introduce stream-specialized adapters that add lightweight stream-specific capacity through a shared bottleneck with per-stream scaling, applied both before stream aggregation and after the SSM output prior to scattering. We evaluate baseline single-stream SSM, static mHC SSM, and mHC SSM with adapters on WikiText-2 using identical training settings and report checkpoint-based validation loss, perplexity, throughput, and peak GPU memory. Under the reported fair checkpoint evaluation, static mHC improves validation loss from 6.3507 to 6.2448 and reduces perplexity from 572.91 to 515.35, while mHC with adapters further improves validation loss to 6.1353 and perplexity to 461.88. These gains are accompanied by modest throughput reductions from 1025.52 to 964.81 and 938.90 tokens per second, and increased peak memory from 2365 MB to 2568 MB and 3092 MB. The results suggest that mHC-inspired constrained multi-stream residual mixing can yield measurable quality improvements in SSM language models and that stream-specialized adapter capacity can further enhance performance with predictable efficiency tradeoffs.
Authors: Aditya Chattopadhyay, Elvis Nunez, Prannay Kaul, Benjamin Bowman, Evan Becker, Luca Zancato, David Thomas, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto
Abstract: Hybrid State-Space models combine Attention with recurrent State-Space Model (SSM) layers, balancing eidetic memory from Attention with compressed fading memory from SSMs. This yields smaller Key-Value caches and faster decoding than Transformers, along with a richer architectural design space. Exploring that design space at scale has so far required training from scratch, a barrier that has kept most large-model Hybrid research within a narrow range of architectures. We introduce Priming, a method that turns Hybrid architecture design from a pre-training problem into a knowledge transfer one. Priming initializes a Hybrid model from a pre-trained Transformer and, through short alignment and post-training phases, recovers downstream quality using less than 0.5% of the source model's pre-training token budget. Priming is agnostic to the source Transformer family (e.g., Qwen, Llama, Mistral), model class (dense or Mixture-of-Experts), and model scale. Priming enables us to run the first controlled comparison of SSM layer types at scale under identical conditions. We evaluate, Gated KalmaNet (GKA), Gated DeltaNet (GDN), and Mamba-2, and show that their expressiveness hierarchy, GKA>GDN>Mamba-2, directly predicts downstream performance on long-context reasoning tasks. We scale Priming to 8B/32B reasoning models with native 128K contexts. Our Hybrid GKA 32B improves over its source Qwen3-32B by +3.8 average reasoning points, while staying within 1% of a Transformer post-trained on the same data and enabling up to 2.3x higher decode throughput. To foster research on Hybrid architectures, we release a model zoo of primed Hybrid models for long-context reasoning and instruction following, together with the Priming training and inference code (Sequence Parallelism algorithms for long-context training, optimized GKA kernels, and vLLM serving plugin), all under Apache~2.0 License.
Authors: Wenbin Wei, Ruixiang Gao, Suyuan Yao, Xuanzhen Zhao, Cheng Huang, Hen-Wei Huang
Abstract: Real-world digital Parkinson's disease assessment faces challenges such as heterogeneous modalities, cross-device bias, and incomplete labeling. Existing methods often focus on average predictive performance, lacking the reliability mechanisms needed for retrospective reliability-aware assessment - namely, determining when the model is reliable, when to reject an assessment, when to retest, and from which symptom dimensions the predictions are based. This paper proposes SGC-RML, which maps speech, gait, wearable motion, mobility tasks, and clinical variables to a shared 8-dimensional symptom node space (7 clinical symptom nodes and 1 reliability_state auxiliary node), unifying motor and non-motor representations through a symptom atlas. By jointly introducing uncertainty estimation, conformal calibration, and selective decision routing, the model can not only predict symptoms and severity but also reject assessments or suggest retests when evidence is insufficient. We validate this framework on five real-world PD datasets, covering classification, regression, event detection, and longitudinal severity prediction. Experiments show that SGC-RML achieves an MAE of 4.579 / R^2 of 0.772 on PPMI, an AUC of 0.953 on mPower, and an AUC of 0.825 on PADS. Under leak-free temporal anchoring, as few as 5 subject-specific anchors transform UCI from an essentially non-predictive subject-independent setting (motor MAE 8.38, CCC 0.02) into a calibrated longitudinal assessment (motor MAE 3.24, CCC 0.756) with split-conformal coverage held at the 0.80 target. Under the Daphnet LOSO protocol, it achieves an F1 of 0.803 / AUC of 0.872. These results demonstrate that SGC-RML provides a unified paradigm for accurate, calibrated, auditable, and symptom-interpretable retrospective longitudinal assessment of PD under incomplete multimodal conditions.
Authors: Hung-Fu Chang, Tzu-Kang Lin, Yung-Li Cheng
Abstract: Accurate prediction of structural displacements under external loading is fundamental to structural health monitoring and seismic safety assessment. Although the finite element method (FEM) remains the prevailing approach because of its high accuracy, its considerable computational cost restricts its suitability for real-time monitoring applications. To address this limitation, this study proposes a data-driven framework based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), in which structural systems are represented as graphs with joints modeled as nodes and structural members as edges. By incorporating both geometric and mechanical properties into the graph representation, the proposed model learns the relationship between applied loads and structural responses directly from simulated data. A synthetic dataset was generated from a two-story frame structure using ANSYS, and both a conventional Neural Network (NN) and a GNN were trained for comparison. The results show that the proposed GNN framework predicts displacements and rotations with high accuracy and outperforms the NN model, demonstrating its potential as a fast and efficient alternative to traditional FEM-based analysis.
Authors: Siyu Wu, Yulong Ye, Zezhen Xiang, Pengzhou Chen, Gangda Xiong, Tao Chen
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) systems have been the frontier of AI in many application domains, leading to new challenges and opportunities for hyperparameter optimization (HPO) for the AutoML community. However, this type of system exhibits an unprecedented compound space of hyperparameter configuration from both the AI and non-AI components; rich and nonlinear implications from the fidelity factors; and diverse costs of measuring hyperparameter configurations, none of which have been fully captured in existing benchmarks. This paper presents the first (live) benchmark suite and datasets for HPO of real-world LLM systems, dubbed LLMSYS-HPOBench, covering data related to the inference objective values of hyperparameter configurations profiled from running the LLM systems. Currently, LLMSYS-HPOBench contains 364,450 hyperparameter configurations with a dimensionality of 12-23, 3-5 dimensions of fidelity factor leading to 932 settings, 3-9 inference objective metrics, and 2-10 cost metrics, together with generated logs from measuring the LLM systems. What we seek to advocate is not only a revalidation of the existing HPO algorithms over the frontier LLM systems, but also to provide an evolving platform for the AutoML community to explore new directions of research in this regard. The benchmark suite has been made available at: https://github.com/ideas-labo/llmsys-hpobench
Authors: Guolin Yin, Junqing Zhang, Guanxiong Shen, Simon L. Cotton
Abstract: Wi-Fi sensing detects human motions and activities by analysing the channel state information (CSI) derived from Wi-Fi transmissions. However, the impact of variable transmission traffic, which dictates the effective sampling rate and interval, is often overlooked. Existing Wi-Fi sensing systems are trained with fixed input size and sampling rate, which suffer from poor sampling rate generalisation. This paper proposes a novel Wi-Fi sensing approach for motion recognition applications, e.g., gesture and activity recognition, under variable traffic patterns. A sampling rate versatile neural network (SRV-NN) based on the transformer is proposed to efficiently handle variable input-sized sensing signals. A dynamic sampling rate augmentation is employed for variable sampling rates and intervals. To validate our approach, we have carried out extensive experimental evaluation, using two self-collected datasets, namely SRV activity and SRV gesture, as well as two publicly available datasets. Our method demonstrated exceptional performance and stability under variable sampling rates, with substantial improvements in average accuracy compared to baseline models without augmentation. The proposed approach significantly enhances stability by greatly reducing accuracy variance across different sampling rates.
Authors: Zhichao Liu, Wenbo Pan, Haining Yu, Ge Gao, Tianqing Zhu, Xiaohua Jia
Abstract: Browser agents are increasingly deployed in long-horizon tasks, which require executing extended action chains to accomplish user goals. However, this prolonged execution process provides attackers with more opportunities to inject malicious instructions. Existing prompt injection attacks against browser agents expose two key gaps: (1) low effectiveness, as attacks optimized for toy baselines fail to achieve end-to-end goals in real-world scenarios with complex environments and longer steps; (2) weak stealthiness, since most attacks pit the attack goal against the user goal, causing a significant drop in system usability under attack. To address these gaps, we propose WebTrap, a mid-task hijacking injection attack. It employs multi-step instruction fusion steering to seamlessly combine both goals, enabling the agent to resume the original user task after executing the attack goal. Furthermore, we design a context-grounded generation method to align the injected content with the task environment and system instructions, maximizing the hijacking success rate. Extensive experiments on two browser agent tasks, based on extended WASP and InjecAgent environments, demonstrate that our method achieves a high attack success rate while preserving the usability of the original system. We find that WebTrap exploits the agent's navigation vulnerabilities, binding the two goals so tightly that standard defense mechanisms cannot restore the system to normal operation. These findings reveal a critical vulnerability in agent systems during long-horizon tasks that they can be stealthily hijacked.
Authors: Ziyang You, Xiaoke Yang, Zhanling Fan, Feng Guo, Xiaogen Zhou, Xuxing Lu
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) rely on deterministic pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) for autoregressive sampling, creating a critical supply-chain attack surface overlooked by existing defenses. We present SeedHijack, a backdoor attack that manipulates PRNG outputs to force attacker-specified token selection without altering model logits. In a 540-trial benchmark on GPT-2 (124M), the attack achieves 99.6% exact token injection across 9 sampling configurations; it reaches 100% success on four aligned models (1.5B-7B, RLHF/SFT/reasoning distillation) and bypasses all alignment methods tested in this work. We further propose a defense based on a hardware quantum random number generator (QRNG), which neutralizes the attack in our evaluated threat model with negligible median overhead (+0.6% latency, +7.7 MB memory). Our work identifies a critical sampling-layer vulnerability and provides a practical, deployable QRNG-based defense.
Authors: Wenhao Wu, Zishan Shao, Kangning Cui, Jinhee Kim, Yixiao Wang, Hancheng Ye, Danyang Zhuo, Yiran Chen
Abstract: SVD-based Low-rank compression reduces transformer parameters and nominal FLOPs, but these savings often translate poorly into real LLM serving speedups. We show that this gap is largely a runtime problem: factorized checkpoints fragment execution paths, and the resulting overhead differs substantially between prefill and autoregressive decode. We present FlashSVD v1.5, a unified inference runtime for serving SVD-compressed transformers. FlashSVD v1.5 maps diverse public SVD compression families to a common factorized representation and combines phase-specific kernels with dense-KV decode, packed MLP execution, and per-layer CUDA-graph replay to reorganize the low-rank serving path into a thin runtime. Across representative decoder-serving settings, FlashSVD v1.5 achieves up to 2.55x decode and 2.39x end-to-end speedup, and it attains 1.48x average decode and 1.44x average end-to-end speedup across multiple popular SVD compression families. These results suggest that practical low-rank acceleration requires runtime co-design, not compression algorithms alone. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Zishan-Shao/FlashSVD.
Authors: Junkai Zhang, Hang Guo, Luca Benini, Yawei Li
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance across diverse tasks, but their inference with long input contexts is bottlenecked by memory size and bandwidth. The Key-Value (KV) cache size grows linearly with sequence length and needs to be re-read from off-chip high-bandwidth memory (HBM) to on-chip memory at every decoding step, resulting in memory-bound inference. Existing methods reduce the cache by either eviction or quantization, but typically treat the two in isolation. In this paper, we cast KV cache compression as a rate-distortion problem, under which eviction and quantization are two end-points of the same bit allocation scheme. This exposes the need to optimize them jointly, motivating our method, RDKV (Rate-Distortion KV cache compression). RDKV derives the weight of each token or channel from the distortion that compression induces on the attention computation. Based on these weights, it assigns each token or channel a bit-width ranging from full precision down to zero bits guided by reverse water-filling, applied once after the prefilling stage. Experiments on LongBench, RULER, and InfiniteBench show that RDKV outperforms the best evaluated baseline by 9.1% on average. On LongBench it recovers 97.81% of full-cache accuracy with only 2.48% cache retention. Compared with full-cache FlashAttention-2 decoding, it achieves 4.5x decode speedup and 1.9x peak memory reduction with 128K context length, while maintaining comparable performance.
Authors: Brandon Yee, Pairie Koh, Jack Rodriguez, Mihir Tekal
Abstract: We study the problem of \emph{architecture selection} for deep learning models trained to solve partial differential equations (PDEs), asking when transformer-based architectures with learned attention outperform Fourier-domain neural operators. We introduce the \textbf{Multi-Scale Attention Transformer} (\msat{}), a deep learning architecture that encodes spatiotemporal solution histories as token sequences and trains end-to-end via a composite supervised objective with optional physics-informed regularization terms. We conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation against nine baselines -- including physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), neural operators (FNO, DeepONet, GNOT), and state-space models (Mamba-NO) -- across five benchmark problems from the PINNacle suite, using identical train/test splits and reference data for all methods. \msat{} achieves state-of-the-art generalization on complex geometry problems ($L^2_\mathrm{rel} = 0.0101$ on Heat2D-CG, a $3.7\times$ improvement over FNO) at $34\,\mathrm{s}$ total inference vs.\ $120{,}812\,\mathrm{s}$ for Mamba-NO. Ablation studies over the physics regularization component reveal a precise inductive bias tradeoff: physics priors reduce test error on diffusion-dominated problems but degrade generalization on chaotic and recirculating-flow regimes, directly characterizing the prior misspecification boundary. Approximation error bounds as a function of domain boundary complexity $\kappa$ provide a theoretical basis for these empirical findings and a principled rule for architecture selection.
Authors: Timothy C. Cogan
Abstract: Mazocarta is a seeded procedural tactical deckbuilder implemented in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly for browser play, and executable natively for simulation. Its primary technical contribution is not the invention of a new deckbuilding genre, but the construction of an instrumented game-development reference artifact: the same rules engine supports interactive play, native command-line simulation, automated end-to-end tests, save/load fixtures, and local-area multiplayer. This paper describes Mazocarta's architecture, deterministic run model, reproducible balance probes, and QR-mediated WebRTC pairing for local multiplayer. An evaluation snapshot over 1,000 deterministic seeds shows that the simulation pipeline can produce reproducible development signals. In the evaluated configuration, single-player and two-player autoplay win rates were 36.1% and 34.9% over 1,000 deterministic seeds, respectively. These rates are not presented as final player-facing balance metrics, but as repeatable probes for future balance shifts and regressions. Mazocarta is positioned as a playable open-source reference artifact for instrumented game development: deterministic regression checks, automated playtesting workflows, balance probes for game mechanics, and browser-native local multiplayer all exercise one shared production rules core.
Authors: Lennart Wachowiak, Scott D. Blain, David Williams-King, Samuele Marro
Abstract: LLMs are increasingly capable of persuasion, which raises the question of how to protect users against manipulation. In a preregistered user study (N=120) across four decision-making scenarios, we find that an adversarial LLM with a hidden goal succeeds in steering users' decisions 65.4% of the time. We then introduce a "warden" model: a secondary LLM that monitors the human-AI interaction trace in real time and issues non-binding, private advisories to the user when it detects manipulation. Adding a warden more than halves the adversary's success rate to 30.4%, with a much smaller (8.6 percentage points) reduction for genuine interactions. To probe the mechanism behind these results, we release COAX-Bench, a simulation benchmark spanning 14 decision-making scenarios, including hiring, voting, and file access. Across 16,212 simulated multi-agent interactions, capable adversarial LLMs achieve their hidden goals in 34.7% of cases, which warden models reduce to 12.3%. Notably, even warden models substantially weaker than the adversary they oversee provide meaningful protection, suggesting a path for scalable oversight of more capable models.
Authors: Stepan Kulibaba, Kirill Labzin, Artem Dzhalilov, Roman Pakhomov, Oleg Svidchenko, Alexander Gasnikov, Aleksei Shpilman
Abstract: Sparse MoE models achieve a good balance between capacity and compute by routing each token to a small subset of experts. However, in most MoE architectures, once a token is routed, the selected experts process it independently and their outputs are combined via a weighted sum. This leaves open whether enabling communication among them could improve performance. While prior work has raised this question, direct interaction among the active routed experts remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose SDG-MoE (Signed Debate Graph Mixture-of-Experts), a novel architecture that adds a lightweight, iterative deliberation step before final aggregation. SDG-MoE introduces three components: (i) two learned interaction matrices over the active experts, a support graph $A^+$ and a critique graph $A^-$, capturing reinforcing and corrective influences; (ii) a signed message-passing step that updates expert representations before aggregation; and (iii) a disagreement-gated Friedkin-Johnsen-style anchoring that controls deliberation strength while preventing expert drift. Together, these enable a structured deliberation process where interaction strength scales with disagreement and specialization is preserved. We also provide a theoretical analysis establishing stability conditions on expert states and showing that deliberation adds only low-order overhead over the active set. In controlled three-seed pretraining experiments, SDG-MoE improves validation perplexity over both an unsigned graph communication baseline and vanilla MoE, outperforming the strongest baseline by 19.8%, and gives the best external perplexity on WikiText-103, C4, and Paloma among the compared systems.
Authors: Yue Lin, Pascal Poupart, Shuhui Zhu, Dan Qiao, Wenhao Li, Yuan Liu, Hongyuan Zha, Baoxiang Wang
Abstract: Communication is fundamental to sustaining reciprocity and cooperation in strategic interactions. We identify and formulate the influence attribution problem as the central optimization difficulty inherent in such dynamics for a learning agent: any action or signal the agent emits reshapes the reputations of many third parties along combinatorially branching paths before feeding back into its own future rewards, forcing the agent to account for all of these indirect channels at once when choosing every action. To address this, we introduce the reciprocity gradient, which explicitly backpropagates reward gradients through private estimators of opponents' policies trained from public observations. The gradient flows through the reputation chain itself analytically, rather than being estimated from sampled returns. It jointly optimizes actions and evaluative signals without intrinsic rewards or reward shaping. Empirically, the method recovers near-optimal context-sensitive policies, while sample-based baselines collapse into constant-output policies.
Authors: Debashis De, Mahua Nandy Pal, Dipankar Hazra
Abstract: Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a common complication of diabetes that can lead to blindness of people. Detecting DR at the earliest stage is essential to prevent irreversible eye damage. Microaneurysm dots are the first signs of DR. As the dots are tiny and of low contrast, detecting mild DR is a very challenging task. Federated learning (FL) preserves data privacy, which is a major concern for medical image processing. FL is a collaborative learning method, which shares only the model parameters with a server, without sharing the patient data to a central server. Inspired by classical FL, we propose a federated learning-based quantum neural network (federated QNN) for this task. We implemented the models with limited samples and few learnable parameters from the E-ophtha and Retina MNIST datasets. The crossevaluation efficiency of the proposed federated quantum neural network system for privacy-preserving early detection of diabetic retinopathy (FQPDR) in Kaggle dataset images indicates the robustness of the light weight learning models. FQPDR performances are inspiring while considering existing non-FL and FL methods.
Authors: Rajdeep Singh Hundal, Yan Xiao, Jin Song Dong, Manuel Rigger
Abstract: Many vision datasets now provide segmentation masks in addition to annotated images to support a wide range of tasks. In this work, we propose Class Activation Map Attention Learning (CAMAL), an efficient and scalable method that utilizes segmentation masks to improve attention alignment and faithfulness in vision models. Specifically, attention alignment refers to the degree to which a model's attention aligns with ground-truth discriminative regions, while attention faithfulness refers to the degree to which a model's attention influences its decision. Improving both attention alignment and faithfulness is essential for ensuring that model attention is both spatially accurate and causally meaningful. To improve attention alignment and faithfulness in vision models, CAMAL first extracts the model's attention for each image during training and then compares the attention to ground-truth discriminative regions obtained from the corresponding segmentation masks. CAMAL then acts as an auxiliary regularizer, encouraging attention that aligns with ground-truth discriminative regions, while suppressing attention elsewhere. We evaluated CAMAL across two learning paradigms -- Deep Learning (DL) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) -- and observed consistent, significant improvements in both attention alignment and faithfulness. In particular, CAMAL yields statistically significant gains in attention alignment across all settings, and improves attention faithfulness by over 35% compared to recent work. Moreover, we show that improved attention alignment and faithfulness enhance explainability, while yielding improved or comparable generalization performance without increasing inference cost. These findings demonstrate that the spatial information contained within segmentation masks can be effectively leveraged to guide model attention across learning tasks.
Authors: Peiran Yun, Wenxin Xu, Jiayuan Liu, Yihang Zhang, Liang Zeng, Lingkai Kong, Tonghan Wang
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) transition into conversational agents, generative advertising emerges as a crucial monetization strategy. However, embedding advertisements within unstructured LLM outputs introduces a critical trilemma: balancing advertiser payoffs, platform revenue, and user experience. Existing methods, such as prompt injection or rigid position slots, disrupt semantic coherence and lack a parametric framework for independent control, rendering rigorous mechanism design intractable. To bridge this gap, we introduce Neuron Auctions, a novel paradigm that shifts the auction object from the surface text space to the LLM's internal representations. Leveraging mechanistic interpretability, we identify brand-specific feed-forward network (FFN) neurons and demonstrate that competing brands activate within approximately orthogonal subspaces. This near-perfect independence allows us to define continuous, disentangled intervention budgets (specifically, neuron counts and amplification factors) as auctionable commodities. Building on this computational carrier, we design a continuous menu-based auction mechanism that naturally guarantees strategy-proofness and optimizes revenue for the platform. By explicitly incorporating a user utility penalty into the platform's optimization objective, our framework dynamically prices out overly aggressive interventions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Neuron Auctions effectively preserve natural discourse quality while achieving an optimal alignment between commercial incentives and user satisfaction.
Authors: Fei Xu Yu, Zuyuan Zhang, Mahdi Imani, Nathaniel D. Bastian, Tian Lan
Abstract: In structured decision-making workflows such as form filling, compliance checking, and maintenance reporting, LLM outputs must be locally correct, globally consistent, and auditable against task-specific rules. Existing refinement methods often rely on heuristic debate, self-play, or LLM-generated supervision, creating a second-order assurance problem. We propose DPA-GRPO (Dual Paired-Action Group-Relative Policy Optimization), a paired-action training method for a two-player generator--verifier game with structured verifier interventions. The generator proposes outputs and may revise them when challenged; the verifier either remains silent or raises a safety assurance case (SAC) containing a claim, argument, and evidence. These SAC/no-SAC and KEEP/REVISE decisions induce paired counterfactual action groups, which DPA-GRPO uses for role-specific KL-regularized GRPO updates. We analyze the unregularized game and show that positive probability on strictly lower-reward intervention or revision actions creates a profitable unilateral deviation. Under standard stochastic-approximation assumptions, DPA-GRPO tracks the corresponding game ODE, whose isolated asymptotically stable limit points are stationary and candidate local equilibria under role-wise local optimality. Experiments on TaxCalcBench TY24 show that DPA-GRPO improves structured decision accuracy over zero-shot generation and generator-only RL baselines across Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B. Training increases correct silent acceptance, reduces missed errors, and improves calibrated revision behavior, indicating gains for both generator and verifier.
Authors: Michael Mancini, Shabnam Sodagari
Abstract: Feedback-based adaptive quantum optimization (FALQON) is a promising approach for solving combinatorial problems on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, requiring only single circuit evaluations per layer. However, standard FALQON relies on fixed hyperparameters that severely limit convergence speed, requiring hundreds to thousands of layers for acceptable solutions. This paper proposes Optimal FALQON, an optimization-based formulation that treats the per-layer time step ($\delta_k$) and scaling factor ($M_k$) as decision variables optimized via classical methods. We present a comprehensive empirical study on all 94 non-isomorphic 3-regular graphs with 12 vertices, comparing Optimal FALQON with standard FALQON and multiple QAOA variants. Results demonstrate statistically significant improvements in success probability, evaluation efficiency, and depth-normalized cost across the evaluated benchmarks. Furthermore, initializing QAOA with parameters from Optimal FALQON yields superior warm-start performance compared to fixed initialization.
Authors: Pengzhou Chen, Tao Chen
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is sensitive to the vast hyperparameters of the retriever and generator, yet optimizing them using given queries is a challenging task due to the complex interactions and expensive evaluation costs. Existing algorithms are ineffective and slow in convergence, since they often treat RAG as a monolithic black box or only optimize partial hyperparameters. In this paper, we propose CDS4RAG, a framework that optimizes the full RAG hyperparameters using given queries via a new cyclic dual-sequential formulation. CDS4RAG is special in the sense that it distinguishes the hyperparameters of the retriever and generator, cyclically optimizing them in turn. Such a paradigm allows us to design fine-grained within-cycle budget provision and expedite the optimization via cross-cycle seeding when optimizing the generator. CDS4RAG is also an algorithm-agnostic framework that can be paired with diverse general algorithms. Through experiments on four common benchmarks and two backbone LLMs, we reveal that CDS4RAG considerably boosts the vanilla algorithms in 21/24 cases while significantly outperforming state-of-the-art algorithms in all cases with up to 1.54x improvements of generation quality and better speedup.
Authors: Geigh Zollicoffer, Minh Vu, Hongli Zhan, Raymond Li, Manish Bhattarai
Abstract: Hallucination detection methods for large language models increasingly operate on chain-of-thought reasoning traces, yet it remains unclear whether they evaluate the reasoning itself or merely exploit surface correlates of the final answer. We introduce a controlled-invariance methodology that exposes this distinction through two oracle tests: \textsc{Force}, which replaces each response's final answer with the ground truth while preserving the reasoning trace, and \textsc{Remove}, which strips answer-announcement steps while leaving the trajectory intact. This reveals if their predictive power derives from answer-level artifacts rather than from the structure or validity of intermediate reasoning. We further show that once these artifacts are controlled for, effective detection does not necessarily require complex learned representations: TRACT, a lightweight scorer built on lexical trajectory features (hedging trends, step-length dynamics, and cross-response vocabulary convergence), achieves strong robustness while remaining competitive with or outperforming existing baselines on unperturbed traces. These findings suggest that the current central challenge in reasoning-aware hallucination detection is not the absence of signal in the trace, but the failure to isolate it from endpoint cues.
Authors: M. Moein Esfahani, Sepehr Salem Ghahfarokhi, Mohammed Alser, Jingyu Liu, Vince Calhoun
Abstract: Recent advances in neuroimaging have deepened our understanding of the brain's complex functional and structural organization. Among these, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) - particularly resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) - has emerged as a tool for identifying biomarkers of intrinsic brain connectivity and delineating large-scale neural networks. These networks are typically represented as volumetric spatial maps that capture functionally coherent brain regions and reflect individual differences in brain activity and structure. The spatial resolution of these maps plays an important role, as it determines the ability to localize functional units with precision, perform reliable brain parcellation, and detect subtle, spatially specific neurobiological alterations associated with development, aging, or disease. Therefore, improving the effective resolution of neuroimaging-derived maps holds significant promise for enabling more detailed insights into brain architecture and its relationship to behavior and pathology. To address this need, we propose NeuroGAN-3D, a novel 3D generative super-resolution model tailored to the computational demands of volumetric neuroimaging. Our model leverages a generative adversarial network architecture to enhance the spatial resolution of rs-fMRI spatial maps, significantly outperforming a conventional baseline.
Authors: Guangchen Lan
Abstract: Reinforcement learning has become a powerful paradigm for improving the capability of intelligent systems, but its practical deployment faces two central challenges. First, reinforcement learning must scale efficiently in distributed environments where communication bandwidth is limited and computation is heterogeneous across agents. Second, as reinforcement learning is increasingly used in post-training large language models and autonomous agents, the optimized policies must also be aligned with human preferences and satisfy safety requirements such as privacy-aware information disclosure. This dissertation addresses both challenges through four complementary contributions spanning federated optimization, preference alignment, and contextual safety. The first part of the dissertation studies scalable reinforcement learning in federated settings. The second part of the dissertation studies trustworthy reinforcement learning for large language models. Together, these contributions advance reinforcement learning along two complementary dimensions. On the one hand, they make reinforcement learning more scalable through communication-efficient and asynchronous federated optimization. On the other hand, they make reinforcement learning more trustworthy by improving alignment with human preferences and by reducing contextually inappropriate information disclosure in language-based intelligent systems. As a whole, this dissertation argues that the next generation of intelligent systems will require both efficient optimization and trustworthy behavior, and that reinforcement learning provides a unifying framework for addressing both goals.
Authors: Junyu Huo, Ziqi Mao, Zihao Wan, Gouri Ginde
Abstract: AI agents are increasingly framed as software-engineering teammates, yet most research studies them inside human-centered workflows. Little is known about the software-engineering discourse autonomous AI agents produce when they interact primarily with one another. This paper examines what autonomous AI agents discuss in MoltBook, an AI-agents-only social network, how that discourse is organized, and how it differs from human developer discourse. We combine human open coding of a 500-post sample, a concentration-plus-check topic-analysis pipeline over 4,707 English-filtered MoltBook technology posts, and a matched-instrument comparison against 5,211 GitHub Discussions posts. MoltBook technology discourse spans 12 recurring themes and is led by Security and Trust (27.4%). At the community level, activity is highly concentrated: the largest submolt contains 63.5% of posts and the Gini coefficient is 0.88, yet a stability-aware BERTopic pipeline still yields 32 non-outlier sub-topics. Compared with the GitHub Discussions baseline, MoltBook discourse contains fewer concrete, context-rich cues such as code-formatted artifacts, environment details, runtime failures, and reproduction steps; social mimicry appears only in a limited way, while idealization is mainly reflected through lower hedging. Overall, AI-only technical discourse is coherent but selective. It repeatedly returns to concerns such as security and trust, memory and context management, tooling and APIs, debugging and error handling, workflow automation, and infrastructure/ops, while omitting much of the concrete runtime and project-local detail common in human developer discourse. This may be because MoltBook contains fewer environment-specific failures, reproduction steps, and other concrete grounding cues.
Authors: Mingyu Liu, Sihan Huang, Yijia Fan, Yinlin Yan, Quan Zhang, Jian-Fang Hu, Jianhuang Lai
Abstract: Zero-shot composed image retrieval (ZS-CIR) retrieves a target image from a reference image and a text modification without human-annotated CIR triplets. Projection-based ZS-CIR methods are attractive because they do not rely on LLMs at inference and remain lightweight, but they often underperform LLM-based approaches on complex semantic modifications. This gap reflects a semantic transition bottleneck in projection-based ZS-CIR: endpoint-level matching can let the edit text act as a target-side attribute cue rather than grounding it as a source-conditioned semantic transition. We further show that adding semantic transition supervision to the same text adapter creates an endpoint--transition conflict between endpoint alignment and semantic transition alignment. To address this conflict, DeCIR decouples endpoint and transition learning. It constructs paired forward/reverse edit tuples from image-caption pairs, trains separate low-rank text adapter branches for endpoint alignment and semantic transition alignment, and merges them with Low-Rank Directional Merge (LRDM) into one deployable adapter. Extensive experiments on CIRR, CIRCO, FashionIQ, and GeneCIS demonstrate that DeCIR consistently improves projection-based ZS-CIR without increasing inference complexity.
Authors: Junnan Liu, Linhao Luo, Thuy-Trang Vu, Gholamreza Haffari
Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, largely stimulated by Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). However, existing RL algorithms face a fundamental limitation: their exploration remains largely constrained by the inherent capability boundary of the policy model. Although recent methods introduce external expert demonstrations to extend this boundary, they typically rely on complete trajectory-level guidance, which is sample-inefficient, information-sparse, and may confine exploration to a static guidance space. Inspired by the potential of multi-agent systems, we propose $\textbf{AIPO}$, an enhanced reinforcement learning framework that improves LLM reasoning through active multi-agent interaction during exploration. Specifically, AIPO enables the policy model to proactively consult three functional collaborative agents, $\textit{Verify Agent}$, $\textit{Knowledge Agent}$, and $\textit{Reasoning Agent}$, when encountering reasoning bottlenecks, thereby receiving fine-grained and targeted guidance to actively expand its capability boundary during training. We further introduce a tailored importance sampling coefficient together with a clipping strategy to mitigate the off-policy bias and gradient vanishing issues that arise when learning from agent-provided feedback. After training, the policy model performs reasoning independently without relying on collaborative agents. Extensive experiments on diverse reasoning benchmarks, including AIME, MATH500, GPQA-Diamond, and LiveCodeBench, show that AIPO consistently improves reasoning performance, generalizes robustly across different policy models and RLVR algorithms, and effectively expands the reasoning capability boundary of the policy model.
Authors: Dongdong Wang, Deepak Balakrishnan, Ravi Srinivasan, Shenhao Wang
Abstract: This work investigates the use of large language models (LLMs) for tasks in smart cities. The core idea is to leverage remote sensing imagery to characterize the built environment, including design suggestions, constructability assessment, landuse patterns, and risk identification. We examine remote sensing imagery at multiple spatial scales as inputs for multimodal language modeling and evaluate their effects on built-environment-related reasoning. In addition, we compare state-of-the-art LLMs, including InternVL and Qwen, in terms of accuracy and reliability when generating built environment recommendations. The results demonstrate the potential of integrating remote sensing imagery with large language models to assist smart cities and decision-making.
Authors: Hanqi Zhou, Britt Besch, Charley M. Wu, Tobias Gerstenberg
Abstract: Explaining how to get from A to B can be challenging. It requires mentally simulating what the listener will do based on what they are told. To capture this process, we propose a computational model that converts utterances into action plans: a large language model translates an explanation into program-like guidance (a policy prior and value map), and a planning agent executes it under partial observability. We score explanations by the efficiency and reliability of the resulting paths, penalizing replanning. Across four preregistered experiments, we collect a corpus of 1,200 explanations over 24 maps, elicit helpfulness judgments, measure baseline navigation, and test behavior with explanations of differing quality. Higher-scored explanations are judged more helpful and improve navigation: participants with explanations outperform those without, and high-scoring explanations help more than low-scoring ones. Together, these results show procedural explanation as utility-guided communication shaped by how language can be grounded into action under uncertainty.
Authors: Xuanqiang Angelo Huang, Charlie Tharas, Samuele Marro, Van Q. Truong, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Emanuele La Malfa, Zhijing Jin
Abstract: Ensuring that AI agents behave safely and beneficially when interacting with other parties has emerged as one of the central challenges of modern AI safety. While mechanism design, as the theory of designing rules to align individual and collective objectives, can incentivize cooperative behavior, it is still an open question whether it alone is sufficient to maximize LLM agents' social welfare. This work proves that the answer is negative: drawing from incomplete contract theory, we formally show that when contracts cannot distinguish all relevant future contingencies, there is a strictly positive welfare loss that no realistic mechanism can eliminate. We show that prosocial agents, who weigh others' welfare alongside their own, can close this gap and achieve outcomes that are socially superior and individually beneficial. Experimentally, we show that in multi-agent resource-allocation environments and canonical social dilemmas where agents are powered by large language models, prosociality is beneficial. The implication for AI safety is clear: to enable cooperative interactions at scale, designing adequate mechanisms is not sufficient; agents must be built to be intrinsically prosocial.
Authors: Zhanliang Wang, Jiancong Xiao, Ruochen Jin, Shu Yang, Bojian Hou, Li Shen
Abstract: Calibration measures whether a model's predicted confidence aligns with its empirical accuracy, and is central to the reliable deployment of large language models (LLMs) in high-stakes domains such as medicine and law. While much recent work focuses on improving LLM calibration, the equally important question of how to evaluate it in realistic settings remains underdeveloped. Open-ended question answering (QA), the most common deployment setting for modern LLMs, is where existing evaluation methods fall short: logit-based metrics need restricted output formats and internal probabilities; verbalized confidence is self-reported and often overconfident; and sampling-based methods rely on task-specific extraction rules without a clear finite-sample target. We introduce Sem-ECE (Semantic-Sampling Expected Calibration Error), a calibration evaluation framework for open-ended QA that samples answers from the model, groups them into semantic classes, and uses the resulting frequencies as confidence. We study two estimators within this framework: Sem$_1$-ECE, the same-sample self-consistency score, and Sem$_2$-ECE, a held-out variant that separates answer selection from confidence evaluation. We prove both are asymptotically unbiased, and further show that they agree on easy questions but diverge on hard ones with Sem$_2$ achieving strictly smaller calibration error, so their gap also serves as a diagnostic for question difficulty. Experiments on three open-ended QA benchmarks across five leading commercial LLMs match our theoretical predictions and show that Sem-ECE outperforms verbalized confidence and existing sampling-based methods, while complementing logit-based evaluation when internal probabilities are unavailable.
Authors: Benjamin D. Shaffer, Brooks Kinch, M. Ani Hsieh, Nathaniel Trask
Abstract: We introduce a meshfree exterior calculus (MEEC) for learning structure-preserving descriptions of physics on point clouds, and use it to build MEEC-Net, a data-efficient surrogate that transfers across resolutions, geometries, and physical parameters. MEEC equips an $\varepsilon$-ball graph with virtual node and edge measures via a single sparse Schur complement solve; the resulting complex satisfies discrete conservation exactly, is end-to-end differentiable in the point positions, and exposes a direct geometry-to-physics link without the mesh-generation step required by conventional structure-preserving discretizations. MEEC-Net learns unknown physics as a shared edge-wise flux law in an SO($d$)-invariant local frame, so the same kernel produces compatible fluxes on any point cloud whose features lie in the training range. We prove a solution-error bound that splits into discretization and kernel-approximation terms which is independent of problem geometry, explaining the observed transfer from very few examples. We show that single-solution training transfers to unseen geometries, boundary conditions, and physical parameters. On five canonical PDE benchmarks MEEC-Net achieves 1-2 orders of magnitude lower out-of-distribution error than baseline neural-operator approaches. On the SimJEB structural-bracket benchmark it achieves competitive error while using substantially fewer training geometries.
Authors: Ramon Pires, Thales Sales Almeida, Celio Larcher Junior, Giovana Bon\'as, Hugo Abonizio, Marcos Piau, Roseval Malaquias Junior, Thiago Laitz, Rodrigo Nogueira
Abstract: Existing benchmarks for legal AI focus primarily on tasks where LLMs must produce legal arguments or documents, yet the capacity to \emph{judge} such arguments -- weighing competing claims, applying doctrine to facts, and rendering reasoned decisions -- is arguably as fundamental to a well-functioning legal system as advocacy itself. We introduce Magis-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs on magistrate-level writing tasks derived from recent Brazilian competitive examinations for judicial positions. Magis-Bench comprises 74 questions from eight examinations conducted between 2023 and 2025, including discursive legal analysis questions with multi-turn structure and practical exercises requiring the composition of complete civil and criminal judicial sentences. We evaluate 23 state-of-the-art LLMs using an LLM-as-a-judge methodology with four independent frontier models as evaluators. Our results show strong inter-judge agreement (Kendall's $W = 0.984$; pairwise Kendall's $\tau \ge 0.897$), with Google's Gemini-3-Pro-Preview achieving the highest average score (6.97/10), followed by Gemini-3-Flash-Preview (6.67) and Claude-4.5-Opus (6.46). Even the best-performing models score below 70\% of the maximum, indicating that judicial-level legal reasoning and writing remain challenging for current LLMs. We release the complete benchmark, model outputs, and evaluation code to support further research on legal AI capabilities.
Authors: Haoyu Hu, Xuandong Zhao, Xuhai "Orson'' Xu, Nori Jacoby
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) generates hundreds of thousands of tokens per training step, with rollout generation dominating the computational cost. The overall token budget can be controlled along two main dimensions: (i) deciding which prompts to allocate rollouts to, and (ii) deciding how long each rollout should be. Prior work has generally controlled only one of these dimensions at a time. We show that jointly tuning both decisions under a shared compute budget improves both reasoning quality and wall-clock training time. We instantiate this view as \textbf{DU}al-controlled tok\textbf{E}n alloca\textbf{T}ion (DUET), a computationally efficient layer over GRPO that uses a lightweight pre-rollout surrogate of prompt informativeness to set how many rollouts each prompt receives, and a marker-gated abort rule with importance reweighting to set when to stop them. On Qwen3-1.7B trained on MATH, DUET outperforms full-budget GRPO and the other three budget-aware baseline methods. DUET's advantage further generalizes to other benchmarks across math and coding, and is on par with the best baseline on the scientific Q\&A domain, while also achieving a $1.62\times$ wall-clock speedup. More notably, using only 50\% of the token budget, DUET still outperforms all baseline methods at their full budget, achieving an even higher $2.51\times$ speedup over full-budget GRPO. We verify the high performance of DUET on other backbone LLMs, including Qwen3-4B and Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct. Notably, the gap between DUET and the strongest baseline \emph{widens} as the budget tightens, contrary to the usual pattern in which efficient methods trade off quality as compute decreases. More broadly, these results suggest that DUET budget-aware control strategies are valuable not only for accelerating training, but also for improving the quality of the learning signal.
Authors: Jun Wen Leong
Abstract: Persistent memory attacks against LLM agents achieve high attack success rates against open-source models. In these attacks, malicious instructions injected via RAG-retrieved documents are stored in persistent memory and executed in later sessions. However, no systematic evaluation of defense effectiveness against this attack class exists. We evaluate six defenses across four architectural layers against delayed-trigger attacks on nine open-source models (5,040 runs, N=40 per condition). Four defenses fail at approximately baseline attack success rate: input-level filtering (Minimizer, Sanitizer) and retrieval-level filtering (RAG Sanitizer, RAG LLM Judge) achieve 88-89% ASR, statistically indistinguishable from the undefended baseline of 88.6%. Prompt Hardening partially fails at 77.8% ASR, with the reduction driven by two models at 0%: one genuine defense effect and one model-level refusal independent of the defense. The architectural explanation holds: input-level defenses cannot observe RAG-injected content, and retrieval-level classifiers are defeated by compliance-framed semantic masking. One defense, tool-gating at the memory layer (Memory Sandbox), reduces ASR to 0% for eight of nine models by removing the recall capability the attack requires. The exception inverts the defense entirely: a reasoning model that achieves 0% ASR under no defense via execution refusal inverts to 100% ASR under Memory Sandbox, because removing explicit recall forces the model onto the RAG pathway where its refusal mechanism does not activate. Memory Sandbox imposes zero utility cost in the absence of attack (BTCR = 100% across all conditions). These results provide the first systematic characterization of why each defense class fails against persistent memory attacks, enabling informed defense investment decisions.
Authors: Maxwell J. Jacobson, Yexiang Xue
Abstract: Imitation learning is effective for training agents when expert demonstrations are available, but collecting demonstrations for every complex task in an environment is costly. We study the long-horizon, goal-conditioned setting where a fixed demonstration dataset contains useful behavior, but not complete examples for every task the agent must solve. Existing imitation learning methods can learn strong policies from demonstrations, but when solving long-horizon tasks, small errors accumulate over long primitive-action trajectories and make zero-shot adaptation to new tasks unreliable. We introduce Zero-shot Agents from Latent Topologies (ZALT), an imitation-learning method that solves unseen start-goal tasks beyond those demonstrated during training. ZALT identifies latent hub states where trajectories converge or diverge, learns policies and a dynamics model over hub-to-hub transitions, and plans over the hub topology to complete new tasks. This topology makes demonstrated behaviors explicitly composable while compressing long tasks into shorter sequences of abstract transitions -- combined, these enable ZALT to perform zero-shot adaptation. In a complex 3D maze environment, ZALT achieves 55% zero-shot success on unseen tasks, compared to 6% for the strongest baseline.
Authors: Peter S\'uken\'ik, Cristina L\'opez Amado, Christoph H. Lampert, Marco Mondelli
Abstract: This paper studies the role of sinks and diagonal patterns as attention switch and anti-oversmoothing mechanisms. We analyze geometric conditions under which sinks can be represented, showing a necessary alignment between the embedding of the sink and all other embeddings. Next, we refine the current understanding of the role of sinks in oversmoothing prevention: we specify the conditions under which dense attention provably smooths more than sparse attention, and empirically verify that such conditions are often satisfied in practice. We further prove an equivalence between sinks and hard attention switch, in which the output of the attention is identically 0. Finally, we relax the hard attention switch by allowing token self-communication: we provide a quantitative comparison of the costs of representing sinks vs.\ diagonal patterns, showing why sinks are favored in pretrained transformers. The introduction and analysis of diagonal patterns and the generalization of the attention switch close the gap between what oversmoothing prevention requires and what sinks provide, while also establishing when and why attention layers act like MLPs if token communication is not necessary.
Authors: Yuxiang Luo, Andrew Perrault
Abstract: Recovering continuous-time dynamics from discrete observations is difficult because local supervision (e.g., pointwise regression targets, derivative approximations, or equation residuals) loses fidelity as the observation interval grows. We replace local supervision with a global structural constraint: any flow representing autonomous dynamics must satisfy the semi-group property under time translation. We train a time-conditioned secant velocity field whose deviation from this property, which we call Symmetry Rupture, serves two purposes. As a training regularizer, it confines the hypothesis space to flows that compose consistently across temporal scales. As an inference oracle, it lets the solver select the largest step size that preserves internal consistency, replacing the local truncation error that conventional adaptive solvers depend on. On the diffusion-reaction benchmark under time-informed inference, our method reduces rollout RMSE by 87\% while using 5x fewer function evaluations than a Neural ODE baseline. In the more demanding direct auto-regressive setting, where the model must predict distant future frames without intermediate temporal cues, our adaptive solver allocates compute based on local geometric complexity -- maintaining the lowest rollout RMSE on two of three PDE benchmarks while baselines either diverge or require up to an order of magnitude more function evaluations to remain stable.
Authors: Ziwen Cai, Yihe Zhang, Xiali Hei
Abstract: Since the official release of ChatGPT in 2022, large language models (LLMs) have rapidly evolved from chatbot-style interfaces into agentic systems that can delegate work through tools and newly spawned subagents. While these capabilities improve automation and scalability, they also pose new security risks in multi-agent networks. Existing research has studied how individual LLM-based agents can be compromised through prompt injection, jailbreaking, poisoned retrieval data, or malicious extensions. Less is known about what happens after one agent is compromised inside a multi-agent network. In particular, inherited memory from parent agents can carry malicious instructions, outdated states, or unintended behavioral rules into newly created subagents, allowing a local compromise to spread across agent boundaries. In this paper, we model contemporary multi-agent networks through the lens of subagent inheritance. Our analysis shows that current frameworks can violate trust boundaries through insecure memory inheritance, weak resource control, stale post-spawn state, and improper termination authority. We demonstrate these risks in real agent frameworks and propose defenses based on explicit security invariants. Our findings show that inheritance is not merely an implementation detail, but a central component influencing the security of multi-agent systems.
Authors: I. F. Atasoy, B. Mutlu, E. A. Sezer, A. Wahdan
Abstract: Hallucination remains a persistent challenge in Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in context-grounded settings such as RAG and agentic AI systems. This study focuses on contextual hallucination detection in summarization tasks. We analyze the QAGS-C and SummEval datasets by comparing original benchmark annotations with reason and span-based predictions from Gemini 2.5 Flash and GPT-5 Mini. To address systematic divergences between human labels and LLM judgments, we re-evaluated all conflicted samples through a human adjudication process involving 2 cross-cultural adjudicators. Following this re-evaluation, triple agreement (between human, GPT, and Gemini) increased by 6.38% for QAGS-C and 7.62% for SummEval. Similarly, model accuracy improved, with GPT increasing by 4.25% on QAGS-C and 2.34% on SummEval, while Gemini showed gains of 8.51% and 3.80%, respectively. Notably, adjudicators frequently sided with the models' judgments over original human annotations when LLMs provided explicit reasoning. Overall human adjudicator agreement ranged between 83% and 87%. These findings suggest that for ambiguity-prone tasks, single-pass annotations may be insufficient, and model-assisted re-evaluation yields more reliable benchmarks.
Authors: Mehmet Iscan
Abstract: Local LLM-based coding agents increasingly work in settings where correctness is earned through execution feedback, persistent state, and bounded repair, not through a single fluent answer. Static retrieval, long-context prompting, self-refinement, execution-feedback repair, and reinforcement learning over model weights each address part of this setting, but they do not jointly provide validation-grounded episodic memory, adaptive retrieval-action selection, delayed credit assignment, and structural skill reuse around a frozen local model. We introduce PYTHALAB-MERA, a lightweight external controller for local validation-conditioned code generation. The frozen language model proposes complete source files; the controller decides which memory records and AST-derived skills should enter the next prompt, validates each candidate through a fail-fast pipeline, converts validation outcomes into bounded shaped rewards, and propagates delayed credit through TD(lambda)-style eligibility traces. We evaluate the implementation as a local CLI artifact on reinforcement-learning coding tasks with strict validation gates. In the measured hard RL setting with three tasks, three repetitions, and a three-attempt budget, PYTHALAB-MERA passed 8/9 strict validations; the self-refinement baseline and the investigated GRACE extension each passed 0/9. These results support a deliberately bounded claim: in this recorded setting, the external memory-and-retrieval controller improved validation success. They do not establish general-purpose code synthesis, state-of-the-art performance, formal program correctness, or formal safety.
Authors: Mingsong Yan, Dongyang Li, Charles Kulick, Sui Tang
Abstract: Mechanistic accounts of in-context learning (ICL) have identified iterative algorithms for linear regression and related linear prediction tasks, often using linear or ReLU attention variants. For nonlinear ICL, prior work has related softmax and kernelized attention to functional-gradient-type dynamics, but it remains unclear whether a standard transformer with softmax attention can implement a convergent solver with an end-to-end prediction-error guarantee. In this paper, we study in-context kernel ridge regression (KRR) with Gaussian kernels and show that a standard softmax-attention transformer can approximate the KRR predictor during its forward pass by implementing preconditioned Richardson iteration on the associated kernel linear system. Under bounded-data assumptions, we construct a single-head transformer with $O(\log(1/\epsilon))$ blocks and MLP width $O(\sqrt{N/\epsilon})$ that achieves $\epsilon$-accurate prediction for prompts of length $N$. Our construction reveals a functional decomposition within the transformer architecture: softmax attention produces a row-normalized Gaussian-kernel operator needed for cross-token interactions, while ReLU MLP layers act locally to approximate the intra-token scalar arithmetic required by the update. Empirically, we train GPT-2-style transformers on Gaussian-process regression tasks to further test the preconditioned Richardson interpretation. Through linear probing, we compare the transformer's layer-wise predictions with the step-wise outputs of classical KRR solvers and find that its error profiles align most consistently with preconditioned Richardson iteration. Ablation studies further support this interpretation. Together, our theory and experiments identify preconditioned Richardson iteration as a concrete mechanism that softmax-attention transformers can realize for nonlinear in-context Gaussian-kernel regression.
Authors: Viresh Pati, Zhengyu Li, Piyush Jha, Rahul Garg, Yatharth Sejpal, Vijay Ganesh
Abstract: We introduce MathConstraint, a hard, adaptive benchmark for evaluating the combinatorial reasoning capabilities of LLMs. We combine constraint satisfaction problems with rigorous solver-based verification and design an adaptive generator to create instances that remain challenging as the LLMs improve in their reasoning capabilities. Unlike existing benchmarks that quickly saturate on fixed datasets or use LLM-as-a-judge for checking solutions,MathConstraint uses parameterized problem types that enable scalable generation of arbitrarily difficult and automatically verifiable instances. We release MathConstraint-Easy ($266$ instances), on which frontier models achieve between $72.6\%$ (gemini-3.1-flash-lite) and $87.6\%$ (gpt-5.5) accuracy, and MathConstraint ($329$ instances) on which the same models drop to between $18.5\%$ (claude-4.6-sonnet) and $66.9\%$ (gpt-5.5) accuracy, demonstrating the resilience of our benchmark generator against rapid progress in LLM reasoning capabilities. We evaluate 12 frontier and open-weight models with and without access to a sandboxed Python environment that includes generic SAT/SMT solvers. Tool access roughly doubles frontier accuracy on MathConstraint (mean $+28$pp; up to $+52$pp for claude-4.6-sonnet). Further, halving the tool-call budget from $8$ to $4$ rounds erases up to $37$ points -- a sensitivity that most single-budget benchmarks miss. We release the generator, dataset, and evaluation harness as a robust environment for studying combinatorial reasoning and tool-use behavior under adversarially-tunable difficulty.
Authors: Zhifei Hu, Feng Xia
Abstract: In recent years, the use of edge information provided by knowledge graphs together with the advantages of higher-order connectivity in graph neural networks for recommendation systems has become an important research direction. However, existing approaches are often limited by sparse labels, insufficient graph structure learning, and noisy entities in the knowledge graph, which reduce recommendation accuracy. To address these limitations, we propose a multi-view graph contrastive learning framework. The proposed method enhances user representations through multi-view knowledge graph distillation, enabling more accurate modeling of user preferences over entities and relations. The network aggregates neighborhood entity information to construct informative item representations. Furthermore, we design a multi-level self-supervised contrastive learning module that performs comparisons across three perspectives: Inter-Level, Intra-Level, and Interaction-Level. This design improves the model's ability to generalize across intra-class samples while increasing discrimination between inter-class samples, thereby enabling more effective multi-dimensional feature modeling. We conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets using both baseline and ablation settings. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of each module in the proposed model.
Authors: Giuseppe Bruno, Shi Chen, Zhengjiang Lin, Yury Polyanskiy, Philippe Rigollet
Abstract: We study the long-context limit of softmax self-attention with a fixed query and a random context of $n$ i.i.d. keys on the sphere, viewing the inverse temperature $\beta_n$ as the scaling parameter that decides whether attention degenerates into uniform averaging or collapses onto the single closest key. We show that the critical scale at which selectivity emerges is determined by the local exponent of the distance-to-query distribution near zero rather than by global features of the context, and scales like $\beta_n^\ast \asymp n^{2/(d-1)}$ for uniform keys on $\mathbb{S}^{d-1}$. Furthermore, we characterize the limiting laws of the ordered attention weights and of the attention output across all regimes of $\beta_n$: a subcritical regime in which the output reduces to a local average around $q$ with explicit deterministic bias and Gaussian fluctuations; a critical regime in which a finite collection of nearest keys retains macroscopic mass without single-key collapse; and a supercritical regime in which all mass concentrates on the closest key. Of notable interest is the subcritical case with identity value matrix where the attention map approximately implements a backward heat equation.
Authors: Hamid Kazemi, Atoosa Chegini, Maria Safi
Abstract: Safety alignment in language models operates through two mechanistically distinct systems: refusal neurons that gate whether harmful knowledge is expressed, and concept neurons that encode the harmful knowledge itself. By targeting a single neuron in each system, we demonstrate both directions of failure -- bypassing safety on explicit harmful requests via suppression, and inducing harmful content from innocent prompts via amplification -- across seven models spanning two families and 1.7B to 70B parameters, without any training or prompt engineering. Our findings suggest that safety alignment is not robustly distributed across model weights but is mediated by individual neurons that are each causally sufficient to gate refusal behavior -- suppressing any one of the identified refusal neurons bypasses safety alignment across diverse harmful requests.
Authors: Timothy Tin Long Yu, Gursimran Singh, Ge Shi, Hanieh Sadri, Yong Zhang, Zhenan Fan
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly in multi-turn agentic settings involving environment interaction like tool use. However, fine-tuning such models remains prohibitively expensive due to high computational requirements, limiting accessibility. We propose MARLaaS (Multi-tenant Asynchronous RL as a Service), a system for concurrent RL fine-tuning across multiple users and tasks. Our approach is based on two key ideas: (1) sharing a base model across tenants using lightweight LoRA adapters, and (2) a disaggregated asynchronous architecture that decouples rollout generation, environment interaction, and policy training into independently scheduled stages. This design enables tasks to progress through the RL pipeline at their own pace in an event-driven manner, reducing cross-task interference, idle time, and end-to-end latency. In multi-task settings (we report up to 32 concurrent tasks), MARLaaS achieves single-task state-of-the-art performance while improving accelerator utilization by up to 4.3x and reducing end-to-end training time by 85%.
Authors: Annan Yu, Dongwei Lyu, N. Benjamin Erichson
Abstract: Inductive biases influence the behavior and performance of sequential models. In this work, we study an underexplored inductive bias in sequential modeling: continuity in time. We ask a simple question: do models motivated by continuous-time formulations, such as state-space models, actually behave continuously in time, and does this translate into better performance on tasks with continuous temporal structure? To answer this, we formalize model continuity as convergence under temporal refinement, where a model is continuous if its predictions approach an underlying continuous trajectory as the temporal discretization is refined. We show that S4 exhibits stable continuous behavior, whereas S6 (the core of Mamba) can be more sensitive to input amplitude and selective dynamics, despite being derived from a continuous dynamical system. To study whether this distinction matters for learning, we also need a corresponding notion of task continuity. We therefore introduce a metric to quantify the continuity of datasets directly from their temporal structure. Across benchmarks, we find a clear empirical alignment between task continuity, model continuity, and model performance. Beyond an inductive bias, continuity also has practical consequences: we show that it enables a simple temporal subsampling strategy that improves both efficiency and performance.
Authors: Zichen Xie, Mrigank Pawagi, Yuxin Liu, Aaditi Rai, Lize Shao, John Berberian Jr., Sicong Che, Wenxi Wang
Abstract: Large language models can generate useful code from natural language, but their outputs come without correctness guarantees. Verifiable code generation offers a path beyond testing by requiring models to produce not only executable code, but also formal specifications and machine-checkable proofs. Progress in this direction, however, is difficult to measure: existing benchmarks are often small, focus on only one part of the pipeline, lack ground-truth proofs or rigorous specification validation, or target verification settings far from mainstream software development. We present VeriContest, a benchmark of 946 competitive-programming problems from LeetCode and Codeforces for verifiable code generation in Rust with Verus. Each problem pairs a natural language description with expert-validated formal specifications, judge-accepted Rust code, Verus-checked proofs, and positive and negative test suites. VeriContest is constructed through a three-phase pipeline that scales from manually verified seed problems to semi-automated expansion with human-in-the-loop review. To further strengthen benchmark quality, we use testing as an additional quality-assurance layer for validating postcondition completeness. VeriContest supports isolated and compositional evaluation of specification generation, code generation, proof generation, and end-to-end verified program synthesis. Evaluating ten state-of-the-art models reveals a sharp gap between coding ability and verifiable code generation: the strongest model reaches 92.18% on natural-language-to-code generation, but only 48.31% on specification generation, 13.95% on proof generation, and 5.29% end-to-end. These results identify proof and specification generation as the central bottlenecks for models and establish VeriContest as a rigorous platform for measuring and training future systems that generate code with machine-checkable correctness.
Authors: Salim Khazem, Ibrahim Mohamed Serouis, Zakaria Ezzahed
Abstract: Parameter-efficient adaptation of pretrained vision models is commonly performed through linear probes, prompts, low-rank updates, or lightweight residual modules. While effective, these methods usually treat adaptation as a discrete Euclidean perturbation of frozen representations, without explicitly modeling the geometry of the task-induced feature displacement. We propose \textsc{MC-RFM}, a mixed-curvature Riemannian flow-matching framework for few-shot adaptation of frozen visual backbones. The key idea is to represent adapted features on a product manifold combining a hyperbolic factor, which captures hierarchy-sensitive semantic structure, and a Euclidean factor, which preserves locally discriminative visual variation. Adaptation is formulated as a task-conditioned continuous transport from frozen features to support-set prototypes, trained with a flow-matching objective and coupled to a hybrid prototype-linear classifier. The method is lightweight, backbone-agnostic, and operates entirely on cached frozen features. Across seven visual recognition benchmarks, five frozen backbones, and 1/4/16-shot regimes, \textsc{MC-RFM} is the best-performing method in a majority of evaluated settings, with the strongest gains on Transformer backbones and fine-grained datasets. Ablations show that the mixed-curvature head, task conditioning, adaptive branch gating, prototype shrinkage, and discriminative supervision each contribute to performance. These results suggest that few-shot adaptation benefits not only from deciding which parameters to update, but also from modeling how representations should move through a geometry matched to the structure of the downstream task.
Authors: Hassan Shapourian, Kasra Hejazi, Olabode M. Sule, Beren Millidge
Abstract: We present ZAYA1-VL-8B, a compact mixture-of-experts vision-language model built upon our in-house language model, ZAYA1-8B. Despite its compact size, ZAYA1-VL achieves performance competitive with leading base models such as Molmo2-4B and InternVL3.5-4B, while surpassing models including Qwen2.5-VL-3B, PLM-3B, and MolmoE-1B across a range of image understanding, reasoning, and counting benchmarks. The architecture incorporates two key innovations: (1) vision-specific LoRA adapters integrated into the LLM to increase modality-specific capacity without increasing the number of experts, and (2) bidirectional attention over image tokens within the LLM to enhance visual understanding. We detail the full training pipeline including data composition at each stage, sequence packing, and the attention masking scheme. The model comprises 9.2B total parameters, with 1.4B active parameters including the vision encoder, and is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/Zyphra/ZAYA1-VL.
Authors: Jongseok Park, Sunga Kim, Zhenyu Gu, Ion Stoica, Alvin Cheung
Abstract: Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture has become the standard for state-of-the-art large language models, owing to its computational efficiency through sparse expert activation. However, sparsity through finer expert granularity is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve due to fundamental training challenges such as expert collapse and load imbalance. In this work, we explore and leverage intra-expert activation sparsity as a complementary and underexplored dimension of sparsity in MoE models. Surprisingly, substantial intra-expert sparsity is readily available in existing pre-trained MoE models, without any modification to the activation function or model parameters, providing up to 90% sparsity within each expert without significant accuracy loss. We explore intra-expert activation sparsity across eight off-the-shelf MoE models ranging from 1B to 400B parameters, and extend the MoE execution pipeline of vLLM to leverage intra-expert activation sparsity by skipping the computations of inactive neurons, on top of its existing optimizations, achieving up to 2.5 times speedup in MoE layer execution and 1.2 times end-to-end speedup compared to the original dense vLLM baseline.
Authors: Jooyeon Kim
Abstract: Developing generalist systems that retain human-like data efficiency is a central challenge. While world models (WMs) offer a promising path, existing research often conflates architectural mechanisms with the independent impact of model \emph{scale}. In this work, we use a minimalist transformer world model to analyze scaling behaviors on the Atari 100k benchmark, using fixed offline datasets derived from a presupposed expert policy. Our results reveal that environments fundamentally fall into distinct scaling regimes, even when constrained by identical offline data budgets and model capacities. For individual tasks, some environments naturally allow models to pass the interpolation threshold, yielding monotonic improvements in the overparameterized regime, while others remain trapped in the classical regime, where larger world models degrade fidelity. In the unified setting, i.e., a single transformer trained on a suite of 26 Atari environments, we uncover that joint training stabilizes scaling dynamics, ensuring monotonic gains across all environments, regardless of their distinct inherent scaling regimes. Finally, we demonstrate that improved fidelity translates directly to downstream control, with policies learned entirely within the simulated dynamics achieving a median expert-random-normalized score of 0.770. Our findings suggest that future progress lies as much in precise scaling strategies as in architectural innovation.
Authors: Zhuofu Chen, Rui Pan, Yinwei Dai, Ravi Netravali
Abstract: To cope with the large contexts that long-horizon LLM agents produce, modern frameworks increasingly rely on compaction -- invoking an LLM to rewrite the accumulated trajectory into a shorter summary that the agent resumes from. Today, compaction runs synchronously on the critical path of agent execution but this can unpredictably degrade accuracy due to a structural validation gap: the compactor must condense context but is fundamentally unaware of precisely what information the agent will need later. Further, because post-compaction agent steps are conditioned on the new summary, targeted validation criteria do not exist and errors silently propagate through coherent but incorrect behavior. Our key insight is that asynchronous compaction efficiently addresses this gap: by running the compactor in parallel with continued agent execution on the original context, the candidate summary and the agent's next steps are generated independently from the same pre-compaction state, yielding a validation signal independent of the summary itself. We build Slipstream, a trajectory-grounded compaction system that uses a judge to validate the candidate summary against the agent's continued reasoning, checking that it preserves both the agent's forward intent and the key facts and constraints it depends on. Across long-horizon coding (SWE-bench Verified) and web-browsing (BrowseComp) workloads, Slipstream improves task accuracy by up to 8.8 percentage points while reducing end-to-end latency by up to 39.7%.
Authors: Lujia Zhong, Yihao Xia, Shuo Huang, Jianwei Zhang, Yonggang Shi
Abstract: Deep learning models in medical imaging typically operate as parametric memory, diagnosing patients by recalling fixed knowledge learned during training. This contrasts sharply with clinical practice, where physicians employ analogical reasoning to diagnose new cases by referencing similar records from past exemplars. While In-Context Learning (ICL) frameworks such as Tabular Prior-Fitted Networks (TabPFN) offer a promising diagnosis-by-reference paradigm, they are designed with tabular-specific inductive priors and rely on non-differentiable preprocessing pipelines, leading to manifold mismatch and gradient fracture when applied to heterogeneous multimodal data. To address these limitations, we propose PromptDx, a novel diagnosis-by-reference framework that leverages a pre-trained TabPFN as an ICL engine while enabling seamless integration with multimodal representations. Our core contribution is a Differentiable Prompt Tuning (DPT) mechanism that aligns a Masked Multimodal Modeling module with the pre-trained ICL engine. By training a lightweight adapter as a differentiable surrogate for the engine's non-differentiable preprocessors, we enable an end-to-end optimization of multimodal prompts within the ICL paradigm. We validate our method on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset using 3D MRI and tabular biomarkers. Experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms traditional parametric baselines. Notably, our method achieves superior performance using only 1% context samples compared to 30% in standard ICL, demonstrating exceptional manifold condensation ability. We further validate the generalizability of our DPT framework across six tabular datasets with diverse scales. Overall, our method offers a more data-efficient and clinically aligned paradigm for Alzheimer's Disease diagnosis.
Authors: Jiaxuan Zou, Ruifeng Ren, Yong Liu
Abstract: Long-context language modeling remains central to modern sequence modeling, but the quadratic cost of Transformer attention makes scaling computationally prohibitive. Linear recurrent models address this bottleneck by compressing the context into a fixed-size state, making the rule that forgets, writes, and edits information a central design problem. To address state maintenance, Gated DeltaNet (GDN) combines gated state decay with delta-rule residual writes, using a learnable coefficient to balance forgetting and update magnitude. However, this coefficient is learned empirically rather than derived from the underlying objective, which can lead to suboptimal update magnitudes. We revisit the online-regression objective underlying GDN and, inspired by the Kaczmarz projection method, derive the key-norm-normalized dynamic step size $\beta_t = \eta_t / (\|k_t\|_2^2 + \epsilon)$ for residual updates. We propose Kaczmarz Linear Attention (KLA), a one-scalar modification of GDN that preserves the state shape, gates, linear recurrence, and chunkwise parallel algorithm. At the 0.4B scale with a 1B-token budget, KLA achieves the lowest validation perplexity among evaluated linear-time baselines, 8.09 versus 8.50 for GDN, and remains stable up to 65K tokens. On controlled tasks, KLA reaches 100% on single-needle-in-a-haystack retrieval, improves 8x multi-query associative recall by 7.03 points over GDN, and delivers 2.1x higher decode throughput at 32K context. These results suggest that the key-norm-normalized Kaczmarz coefficient is a first-order design axis for delta-rule sequence models: it improves accuracy, extrapolation, and decoding efficiency without changing the recurrent state or hardware kernel.
Authors: Shanshan Zhu, Han Zhang, J. Doris Chi, Subigya Nepal, Koustuv Saha
Abstract: LLMs are increasingly used to explain personal sensing data, translating traces of activity and mood into natural-language accounts of why an anomalous day may have occurred. However, such explanations can sound coherent and personally meaningful even when the underlying evidence is sparse or missing. We introduce epistemic overreach (EO) as a measure for cases where a generated explanation implies more than the available sensing evidence can justify. To audit how often and in what forms EO occurs, we obtained anomalous-day scenarios from three longitudinal sensing datasets of college students: StudentLife, GLOBEM, and CollegeExperience. Across activity, sleep, and affect anomalies, we generated 14,922 explanations using three LLM families -- Llama, Qwen, and GPT -- under two prompting conditions: one minimally constrained prompt and another prompt explicitly instructing models to bound claims to the data. For each scenario, we varied the amount of behavioral evidence available to the model to examine whether more evidence reduces EO. We evaluated each explanation using a structured rubric, decomposing EO into the dimensions of unsupported causal attribution, unacknowledged data gaps, overconfident language, temporal inconsistency, and diagnostic inference. We find that LLMs routinely attribute anomalous days to causes without sufficient support from the data, and that this pattern replicates across datasets, anomaly types, and model families. Further, providing richer context does not reliably reduce EO; bounded prompting helps but does not eliminate it. These findings suggest that evidential grounding should be a first-order evaluation criterion for LLM-generated personal sensing explanations, alongside fluency and plausibility. We argue that personal sensing explanations require evidential discipline: systems must distinguish what is observed, what is inferred, and what remains unknown.
Authors: Liam Davis, Leopold Haller, Alberto Alfarano, Mark Santolucito
Abstract: We introduce the Lattice Deduction Transformer (LDT), a recurrent transformer that approximates logically sound deduction by projecting its latent state through a lattice between forward passes. We train on-policy in a process that mirrors deduction in a search-based constraint solver and supervise training via a domain-agnostic, abstract-interpretation-based approximation of the set of solution candidates. An $800$K-parameter LDT achieves $100\%$ accuracy on Sudoku-Extreme and Snowflake Sudoku, at a fraction of the training cost of prior small recurrent reasoners, while remaining empirically sound: the model returns a correct answer or abstains. A $1.8$M-parameter variant reaches $99.9\%$ accuracy on Maze-Hard. Frontier LLMs score $0\%$ on all three benchmarks.
Authors: Md Atik Ahamed, Mihir Parmar, Palash Goyal, Chun-Liang Li, Qiang Cheng, Tomas Pfister, Jinsung Yoon
Abstract: Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) excel at numerical forecasting but operate as black boxes lacking qualitative reasoning. Conversely, applying LLMs directly to temporal data introduces a modality gap: text tokenizers fragment continuous numerical values, degrading mathematical relationships and exploding sequence lengths, leading to computational overhead. To resolve this, we introduce STRIDE (Strategic Time-series Reasoning Injected via Distilled Embeddings), a novel framework natively integrating LLM reasoning into the continuous embedding space of TSFMs. Instead of discrete tokens, STRIDE distills reasoning traces into a lightweight LLM, dynamically projecting its mean-pooled hidden states as a cross-modal prior into the target numerical encoder. The architecture is jointly optimized using cross-entropy and quantile losses. Evaluations demonstrate STRIDE establishes state-of-the-art numerical forecasting on GIFT-Eval (0.674 MASE, 0.454 CRPS) compared to TSFMs and exhibits superior in-domain and out-of-domain numerical as well as reasoning performance on TFRBench. Specifically, STRIDE acts as a plug-and-play enhancement, consistently improving diverse TSFMs (e.g., Chronos-2, Timer-S1) across various LLM configurations. Thus, injecting semantic reasoning as a continuous prior equips TSFMs with human-interpretable reasoning while fundamentally improving predictive accuracy.
Authors: Zihao An, Taichi Liu, Ziqiong Liu, Dong Li, Ruofeng Liu, Emad Barsoum
Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates Large Language Models (LLMs) inference by using a lightweight draft model to propose candidate tokens that are verified in parallel by the target model. However, existing draft model training objectives are not directly aligned with the inference-time goal of maximizing consecutive token acceptance. To address this issue, we reformulate the draft model optimization objective, shifting the focus from token prediction accuracy to the overall acceptance length. In this paper, we build upon PARD to propose PARD-2, a dual-mode speculative decoding framework with Confidence-Adaptive Token (CAT) optimization. This approach adaptively reweights each token to better align with the verification process. Notably, PARD-2 enables a single draft model to support both target-dependent and target-independent modes. Experiments across diverse models and tasks demonstrate that PARD-2 achieves up to 6.94$\times$ lossless acceleration, surpassing EAGLE-3 by 1.9$\times$ and PARD by 1.3$\times$ on Llama3.1-8B. Our code is available at https://github.com/AMD-AGI/PARD.
Authors: Yinwei Dai, Zhuofu Chen, Lijie Yang, Ravi Netravali
Abstract: State-of-the-art physical AI models generate a chunk of actions per inference through diffusion or flow matching, iteratively refining an initial noise sample into an action trajectory. Because this inference process is inherently stochastic, committing to a single trajectory per round is brittle, and this brittleness compounds across the many sequential rounds that comprise a complete episode. We introduce KeyStone, an inference-time self-consistency method for diffusion-based action generation that draws $K$ candidate action chunks in parallel from a shared model context, clusters them in continuous action space, and returns the medoid of the largest cluster -- no additional model required. Two properties make this practical. First, the compact nature of action trajectories makes diffusion inference memory-bandwidth bound, leaving spare compute capacity to run $K$ chains in parallel with no additional wall-clock latency. Second, unlike token or pixel spaces where distance carries no semantic meaning and selection requires a learned judge, action chunks are geometrically structured such that Euclidean distance directly reflects physical similarity, making selection principled and judge-free. Across diverse vision-language-action models (VLAs) and world-action models (WAMs), KeyStone improves task success rates by up to \textbf{13.3\%} over single-trajectory sampling with negligible latency overhead, while having on par accuracy with model-based selectors at no training cost. We open source KeyStone at https://github.com/dywsjtu/keystone.
Authors: Aritra Mazumder, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Nusrat Jahan Lia, Tanzila Khan, Kainat Raisa Hossain, Nehaa Shri, Shubhrangshu Debsarkar, Humayra Tasnim, Gour Gupal Talukder Shawon, Debjoty Mitra, Sumaiya Ahmed Rani, Al Jami Islam Anik, Al Nafeu Khan
Abstract: Multi-agent systems achieve state-of-the-art outcomes through peer collaboration. However, when an agent in the pipeline silently drops a constraint, the system's final output may look correct even though the reasoning chain was quietly corrupted, and existing outcome-based evaluations are blind to such multi-hop process failures. To make these vulnerabilities measurable before deployment, we introduce AgentCollabBench, a diagnostic benchmark of 900 human-validated tasks spanning software engineering, DevOps, and data engineering. Each task isolates one of four behavioral risks: instruction decay (does a constraint survive peer pressure?), false-belief contagion (does a falsehood spread through consensus?), context leakage (does information bleed between tasks?), and tracer durability (does marked data reach the final agent?). Evaluating four modern LLMs (GPT 4.1 mini, Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite, Qwen-3.5-35B-A3B, and Llama 3.1 8B Instruct), we expose model-specific vulnerability profiles invisible to outcome-only evaluation; Qwen-3.5-35B-A3B, for example, leads on tracer durability and instruction stability, while GPT 4.1 mini leads on leakage containment and false-belief resistance. Beyond per-model differences, communication topology emerges as a primary risk factor that explains 7-40% of the variance in multi-hop information survival. The effect traces to a synthesis bottleneck specific to converging-DAG nodes: an agent weighing competing parent inputs discards constraints carried by a minority branch, a bottleneck structurally absent from linear chains. AgentCollabBench demonstrates that suboptimal topology can silently erase the safeguards of highly capable models, arguing that multi-agent reliability is fundamentally a structural problem and that scaling model intelligence alone is no substitute for architecture.
Authors: Lei Wang, Wenxiang Diao, Andrew Busch, Jun Zhou, Yongsheng Gao
Abstract: Video anomaly detection (VAD) systems often prioritize accuracy while overlooking privacy concerns, limiting their suitability for real-world deployment. We propose the Orthogonal Projection Layer (OPL), a lightweight module that removes task-irrelevant variations to produce representations focused on anomaly-relevant cues. To address privacy risks in human-centered scenarios, we introduce Guided OPL (G-OPL), which suppresses facial attributes using weak supervision from face-presence signals while preserving non-identifying features such as pose and motion. A cosine alignment objective enforces consistent capture and removal of facial information without identity labels or adversarial training. We further present a privacy-aware evaluation framework that jointly assesses detection performance and privacy preservation, and enables analysis of how sensitive information is filtered. Experiments show that embedding privacy constraints into model design reduces sensitive information while maintaining or improving detection accuracy, supporting projection-based architectures as a principled approach for privacy-aware VAD.
Authors: Youngsung Kim
Abstract: We study learnable logic gate networks that stack layers of 2-input Boolean gates to build combinational circuits. Every 2-input gate has a unique multilinear polynomial with 4 coefficients, so the 16 Boolean gates form a codebook of prototypes in a 4-dimensional space, reducing training to a vector-quantization problem. The baseline method, Soft-Mix, learns a 16-dimensional softmax over gate identities, but the codebook has rank~4: 11 of 15 simplex directions carry nullspace gradient, and at uniform initialization the backward signal vanishes exactly. We prove that no affine product reparameterization fixes the resulting interaction-coefficient starvation under STE, and show that the covariance Jacobian of soft-VQ selection bypasses it by coupling the starved coefficient to the always-active constant channel. Working in the 4-dimensional polynomial space reduces each neuron from 16 to 4 parameters. On seven datasets, at least one 4-parameter method matches or exceeds Soft-Mix on every dataset; the CovJac advantage over STE grows monotonically with interaction demand across all seven datasets. At depth, Soft-Mix collapses ($-37.3$pp on CIFAR-10 at 12 layers) while CovJac holds ($-0.5$pp on CIFAR-10, stable on MNIST).
Authors: Shan Jiang, Zijian Yi, Chenguang Zhu
Abstract: SKETCHVERIFY is a within-tier cost-performance policy, not a universal accuracy improvement. The operational question: a practitioner stuck with a small, cheap code model (here, Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite) for latency, deployment, or budget reasons -- how should they spend a small amount of extra test-time compute? SKETCHVERIFY factorizes the search space: the LLM enumerates K distinct algorithmic strategies, writes a program sketch for each (a partial program with ?? holes), and fills each sketch M times, producing K x M structurally diverse candidates that are verified by execution and selected by fingerprint clustering. Each extra sketch is guaranteed to explore a different algorithm; each extra flat sample likely duplicates an existing one. Our central evidence is a cost-quality Pareto plot on HumanEval+ across three Gemini tiers (Lite, Flash, Pro), and a reanalysis of the 19 problems where Lite greedy fails. Two findings: (1) Within-tier, sketching dominates flat sampling at matched candidate count. On the hard subset, Lite Sketch K=2, M=5 recovers 11/19 (58%) vs. flat N=10 at 5/19 (26%, +32pp); Lite Sketch K=10, M=10 recovers 15/19 (79%) vs. flat N=100 at 10/19 (53%, +26pp). Flat cannot close the gap even at ~3x the budget: flat N=50 still loses to Sketch K=2, M=5 by +11pp. (2) Cross-tier, sketching does not replace upgrading. Pro greedy (89%) dominates Lite Sketch K=10, M=10 (79%) on both pass@1 and dollar cost. Practitioner rule: if a stronger tier is available, use greedy on it; otherwise sketching is the cost-effective way to spend extra compute. We characterize the K-vs-M trade-off via a Flash Lite scaling sweep, report HumanEval+ saturation on Flash and Pro, and show the method composes cleanly with execution-based selection from the concurrent Semantic Voting line of work.
Authors: Gautam Veldanda
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed not only to make decisions but to explain them. While AI decision fairness has been studied extensively, the fairness of AI explanations (whether LLMs justify decisions with equal quality, depth, tone, and linguistic sophistication across demographic groups) has received little attention. This paper introduces the Explanation Fairness Taxonomy (EFT), a framework comprising five formally defined, operationalizable dimensions: Verbosity Disparity, Sentiment Disparity, Epistemic Hedging Disparity, Decision-Linked Explanation Disparity, and Lexical Complexity Disparity. The taxonomy is instantiated in a controlled empirical study across 80 prompt templates, four consequential decision domains (hiring, medical triage, credit assessment, legal judgment), and five LLMs: GPT-4.1, Claude Sonnet, LLaMA 3.3 70B, GPT-OSS 120B, and Qwen3 32B. Two novel black-box metrics are introduced: the Hedging Density Score (HDS) and the Explanation Faithfulness Proxy (EFP), a heuristic indicator of decision-linked explanation variation. Across up to 400 prompt pairs, all eight EFT metrics show statistically significant disparities (Cohen's d ranging from small to large, all p_BH < 10^(-62)). Model choice is strongly associated with disparity magnitude: Qwen3 32B exhibits verbosity disparities 5.9x larger than LLaMA 3.3 70B. Two prompting-based mitigations show significant reductions in EFP disparity (78-95%) but no significant effect on stylistic dimensions, consistent with the hypothesis that stylistic explanation inequalities are encoded in pre-training distributions and are not resolvable through deployment-level instruction alone. A reproducible measurement framework is offered for explanation-level fairness auditing, with implications for AI regulation and deployment practice.
Authors: Chengcheng Sun, Chenhao Li, Xiang Lin, Tianji Zheng, Fanrong Meng, Xiaobin Rui, Zhixiao Wang
Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) aim to learn well-trained representations in a lower-dimension space for downstream tasks while preserving the topological structures. In recent years, attention mechanism, which is brilliant in the fields of natural language processing and computer vision, is introduced to GNNs to adaptively select the discriminative features and automatically filter the noisy information. To the best of our knowledge, due to the fast-paced advances in this domain, a systematic overview of attention-based GNNs is still missing. To fill this gap, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on recent advances in attention-based GNNs. Firstly, we propose a novel two-level taxonomy for attention-based GNNs from the perspective of development history and architectural perspectives. Specifically, the upper level reveals the three developmental stages of attention-based GNNs, including graph recurrent attention networks, graph attention networks, and graph transformers. The lower level focuses on various typical architectures of each stage. Secondly, we review these attention-based methods following the proposed taxonomy in detail and summarize the advantages and disadvantages of various models. A model characteristics table is also provided for a more comprehensive comparison. Thirdly, we share our thoughts on some open issues and future directions of attention-based GNNs. We hope this survey will provide researchers with an up-to-date reference regarding applications of attention-based GNNs. In addition, to cope with the rapid development in this field, we intend to share the relevant latest papers as an open resource at https://github.com/sunxiaobei/awesome-attention-based-gnns.
URLs: https://github.com/sunxiaobei/awesome-attention-based-gnns.
Authors: Shan Jiang, Zijian Yi, Chenguang Zhu
Abstract: LLM code-generation pipelines often sample multiple candidates and select one final answer without access to a complete oracle. Existing pipelines mix textual voting, ranking, and execution-based agreement, but the relative contribution of each component remains unclear. We study 18 configurations across different models, thinking levels, and benchmarks, comparing output-pattern majority voting, weighted voting, MBR-Exec, and SemanticVote - a method that clusters candidates by execution fingerprints on LLM-generated inputs. Three findings emerge. (1) The best execution-based selector exceeds output-pattern majority voting by 19-52 percentage points on every configuration, with every execution-based selector exceeding it by at least 18 points. (2) Once candidates are executed on diverse inputs, aggregation rule has limited effect: SemanticVote, weighted voting, and MBR-Exec are statistically indistinguishable across all 18 configurations. The largest factor is input quality: sketch-based input generation consistently outperforms direct LLM generation by 0.6-2.1 pp and random fuzzing by up to 11.3 pp. (3) Thinking level interacts differently with selection families: deeper thinking improves majority voting by 12 pp but execution-based methods stay flat or degrade as candidate diversity falls. These results frame inference-time code selection as a signal-quality problem rather than an aggregation-rule problem: when oracles are unavailable, the behavioral evidence matters more than the aggregation rule.
Authors: Haixiang, Yang Xu, Jiefu Zhang, Xudong Wu, Zihan Zhou, Jun He, Jiayu Chen
Abstract: We study solving large-scale fixed-point equation \(x^\star=\bar F(x^\star)\) with decomposition. Standard strict decomposition assigns each agent a disjoint block and evaluates updates using only owned coordinates. For most operators, however, a block update may depend on variables outside the block. Truncating these dependencies by strict decomposition changes the mean operator and creates structural bias that cannot be removed by more samples, smaller stepsizes, or additional consensus. We therefore propose Core-Halo decomposition, which separates write ownership from read-only evaluation context: each agent updates its own core and reads from an overlapping halo. By aligning the Core-Halo decomposition with the block-dependence structure of $\bar F$, the original fixed-point problem can be implemented faithfully in a decentralized multi-agent system. We further characterize the fundamental obstruction faced by strict decomposition through a Bellman closure condition and a blockwise bias lower bound, showing that local-only updates can alter the original fixed-point operator. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments across a range of application settings, and demonstrate that Core-Halo achieves near-centralized performance while retaining the parallelism benefits of decentralization.
Authors: Li Na, Yuanyun Zhang, Shi Li
Abstract: We propose a new class of waveform foundation models that departs from conventional sequence based representations by modeling physiological time series as realizations of latent event processes. Rather than treating signals as collections of local tokens or patches, our approach assumes that clinically meaningful structure arises from temporally extended, interacting events whose boundaries and dynamics are not directly observed. To capture this structure, we introduce a self supervised learning framework that enforces consistency across stochastic segmentations and time frequency projections of the same waveform, encouraging representations that are invariant to signal level perturbations while preserving event level organization. The resulting model combines a segmentation aware encoder with a latent interaction operator that captures dependencies among inferred events, and naturally extends to multimodal settings by aligning modalities through shared event representations. Across a range of physiological benchmarks, including arrhythmia classification, hemodynamic prediction, and waveform retrieval, the proposed method improves performance, robustness, and label efficiency relative to strong sequence based baselines. These results suggest that shifting from signal centric to event centric representations provides a more appropriate inductive bias for modeling physiological dynamics and offers a complementary path to scaling foundation models in healthcare.
Authors: Jingzhe Xu, Rui Wang, Jiannan Wang, Guoliang Li
Abstract: Data preparation is a central and time-consuming stage in data analysis workflows. Traditionally, commercial tools have relied on graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to simplify data preparation, allowing users to define transformations through visual operators and workflows. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) raise the possibility of a paradigm shift toward natural language (NL)-driven data preparation, in which users can specify preparation intents in NL directly. However, it remains unclear how far current LLM-based agents are from this paradigm shift in practice. Existing code generation benchmarks do not capture key characteristics of data preparation, including ambiguous user intents, imperfect real-world data, and the need to translate code into interpretable workflows for validation. To bridge this gap, we present PrepBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate NL-driven data preparation along three core capabilities: interactive disambiguation, prep-code generation, and code-to-workflow translation. We crawl data from the Preppin' Data Challenges, and then extend it into a systematically designed benchmark. The benchmark covers diverse domains, and each task involves 3 to 18 data preparation steps. Nearly half of the tasks require over 100 lines of Python code, and the longest solutions approach 300 lines. Our evaluation shows that, despite recent progress, realizing this paradigm shift remains challenging for state-of-the-art LLMs. PrepBench provides a principled benchmark for measuring this gap and helps identify key challenges toward realizing NL-driven data preparation.
Authors: Xiaodong He, Haolan He, Ruiyi Fang, Ming Sun, Zhao Kang
Abstract: Graph foundation models (GFMs) seek transferable representations across graph domains but are limited by structural heterogeneity and incompatible node feature spaces. We propose Structure-Centric Graph Foundation Models (SCGFM), which treat graph topology as the primary source of transferable knowledge. Modeling graphs as metric measure spaces, SCGFM introduces learnable geometric bases that define a shared structural coordinate system. Graphs are aligned to these bases via Gromov-Wasserstein distances, yielding structure-aligned latent representations that accommodate heterogeneous graph topologies. To address feature incompatibility, SCGFM employs a structure-aware feature re-encoding mechanism that unifies node representations without assuming a fixed feature dimensionality or requiring dataset-specific preprocessing. Experiments on graph- and node-level tasks demonstrate strong in-domain and cross-domain generalization, outperforming existing GFM approaches.
Authors: Guodong Ding, Angela Yao
Abstract: This paper tackles compositional personalization of vision-language models (VLMs). In this problem, multiple user-defined concepts must be recognized or described jointly at test time. We introduce Gate-and-Merge, a zero-shot framework that enables compositional personalization without the need for co-occurrence training. During personalization, each concept is learned independently as a lightweight LoRA adapter, paired with a concept token. The base model remains unchanged and concepts are kept disentangled. At inference, we enable composition by merging concept-specific LoRA updates directly in weight space. To suppress irrelevant activations and prevent interference, a gating mechanism is employed to estimate textual and visual cues and select only the modules that contribute to the prediction. We further stabilize composition by combining only the most meaningful and mutually consistent updates, helping preserve each concept's identity. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses show consistent gains in performance across multiple personalization tasks in both single-concept and compositional settings.
Authors: Changze Li, Zhe Chen, Shaoyu Chen, Lisen Mu, Yijian Li, Yuelong Yu, Qian Zhang, Qing Su, Ming Yang, Tong Qin
Abstract: In recent years, autonomous parking has made significant advances, yet parking tasks still face challenges in extreme scenarios such as mechanical and dead-end parking slots, often resulting in failures. This is mainly due to traditional parking methods adopting a multistage approach, lacking the ability to optimize the parking problem as a whole. End-to-end methods enable joint optimization across perception and planning modules to eliminate the accumulation of errors, enhancing algorithm performance in extreme scenarios. Although several end-to-end parking methods use imitation or reinforcement learning, the former is limited by data cost and distribution coverage, while the latter suffers from inefficient exploration. To address these challenges, we propose a Reinforcement learning End-to-end Autonomous Parking method (REAP). REAP employs Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) within an asymmetric reinforcement learning framework to improve training efficiency and inference performance. To accelerate model convergence, we distill the capabilities of a rule-based planner into the end-to-end network through behavior cloning. We further introduce a soft predictive collision penalty mechanism to reduce collision rates by penalizing obstacle-approaching actions. To ensure that the trained reinforcement learning network can directly transfer to real-world scenarios, we have established a Real2Sim2Real simulator. In the Real2Sim step, we use 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to transform real-world scenes into digital scenes. In the Sim2Real step, we deploy the end-to-end model onto the vehicle to bridge the Sim2Real gap. Trained in the 3DGS simulator and deployed on physical vehicles, REAP successfully parks in various types of parking spaces, especially demonstrating the feasibility of end-to-end RL parking in extremely narrow mechanical slots.
Authors: Boxuan Zhang, Jianing Zhu, Zeru Shi, Dongfang Liu, Ruixiang Tang
Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems are increasingly deployed on long-horizon tasks, but a single decisive error is often accepted by downstream agents and cascades into trajectory-level failure. Existing work frames this as \emph{post-hoc failure attribution}, diagnosing the responsible agent and step after the trajectory has ended. However, this paradigm forfeits any opportunity to intervene while trajectory is still unfolding. In this work, we introduce AgentForesight, a framework that reframes this problem as online auditing: at each step of an unfolding trajectory, an auditor observes only the current prefix and must either continue the run or alarm at the earliest decisive error, without access to future steps. To this end, we curate AFTraj-2K, a corpus of agentic trajectories across Coding, Math, and Agentic domains, in which safe trajectories are retained under a strict curation pipeline and unsafe trajectories are annotated at the step of their decisive error via consensus among multiple LLM judges. Built on that, we develop AgentForesight-7B, a compact online auditor trained with a coarse-to-fine reinforcement learning recipe that first equips it with a risk-anticipation prior at the failure boundary on adjacent safe/unsafe prefix pairs, then sharpens this prior into precise step-level localization under a three-axis reward jointly targeting the what, where, and who of an audit verdict. Across AFTraj-2K and an external Who\&When benchmark, AgentForesight-7B outperforms leading proprietary models, including GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek-V4-Pro, achieving up to +19.9% performance gain and 3$\times$ lower step localization error, opening the loop from post-hoc failures detection to enabling deployment-time intervention. Project page: https://zbox1005.github.io/agent-foresight/
Authors: Chenyu Zhao, Shenglin Zhang, Yihang Lin, Wenwei Gu, Zhimin Chen, Yongqian Sun, Dan Pei, Chetan Bansal, Saravan Rajmohan, Minghua Ma
Abstract: Software engineering agents are increasingly deployed in evaluable engineering environments, yet post-failure recovery remains costly, manual, and ad hoc. Existing systems expose traces or generate follow-up feedback, but they do not convert heterogeneous runtime evidence into grounded, bounded recovery guidance for a subsequent attempt. We present PROBE, a failure-anchored framework for structured recovery in software engineering agents. PROBE organizes failed-run telemetry into structured evidence, structured diagnosis, and bounded recovery guidance through a Telemetry Layer, a Diagnosis Layer, and a Guidance Gate. The Telemetry Layer preserves fine-grained runtime signals, the Diagnosis Layer fuses cross-signal evidence into grounded diagnoses, and the Guidance Gate produces diagnosis-derived guidance only when it is evidence-grounded, actionable, and within the scope of agent-side behavior. We evaluate PROBE across three settings: repository-level software repair, enterprise workflow recovery, and AIOps service mitigation. On 257 initially unresolved cases, PROBE achieves 65.37% Top-1 diagnosis accuracy and a 21.79% recovery rate, outperforming the strongest non-PROBE baseline by 43.58 and 12.45 percentage points. The results reveal a diagnosis-recovery gap: accurate diagnosis is necessary but insufficient unless translated into bounded guidance that a subsequent attempt can execute and verify. Beyond controlled evaluation, a Microsoft IcM prototype shows that PROBE can attach as a non-intrusive side channel to existing service-diagnosis workflows without changing the agent policy, toolset, or execution budget. These results suggest that telemetry-grounded, failure-anchored recovery can improve post-failure recoverability under realistic engineering constraints.
Authors: Jiaming Liang, Chi-Man Pun, Weisi Lin, Greta Seng Peng Mok
Abstract: Learned image compression (LIC) integrates deep neural networks (DNNs) to map high-dimensional images into compact latent representations, reducing redundancy and achieving superior rate-distortion (RD) performance in benign settings. Unfortunately, due to inherent vulnerabilities in DNNs, LIC systems are susceptible to adversarial perturbations that lead to downstream deterioration, compression rate degradation, untargeted distortion, and both local semantic manipulation (LSM) and low-resolution ($3\times28\times28$) global semantic manipulation (GSM). However, high-resolution GSM remains unexplored due to its intractability. Notably, the existing project gradient descent (PGD) method achieves near-perfect white-box attacks for classification, segmentation, and other tasks, yet fails to generalize to high-resolution GSM. Our theoretical and empirical analyses reveal that well-performing GSM drives adversarial examples from the Identity Region to the Amplification Region through the Lazying-Oscillating-Refining stages. General $\ell_{\infty}$-bounded attacks fail on high-resolution GSM because their step-size schedules cannot accommodate both the Oscillating and Refining stages. Based on this, we propose the Periodic Geometric Decay schedule that enables $\ell_{\infty}$-bounded high-resolution GSM. To verify our approach, we integrate it with PGD, yielding a minimal variant, PGD$^{2}$-GSM. Extensive experiments on the Kodak $(3\times768\times512)$ demonstrate that our PGD$^{2}$-GSM is the first to stably achieve high-resolution GSM, thereby exposing a novel threat to LIC systems. Code is available at https://github.com/chinaliangjiaming/PGD2-GSM.
Authors: Ziyun Liu, Fengmiao Bian, Jian-Feng Cai
Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) reparameterizes a weight update as a product of two low-rank factors, but the Jacobian $J_{G}$ of the generator mapping the factors to the weight matrix is rank-deficient, so the factor-space preconditioner $J_{G}^* {F}_t J_{G}$ induced by any ${W}$-space preconditioner ${F}_t$ is singular, and consequently the standard chain rule cannot be uniquely inverted to map a preconditioned ${W}$-space direction back to a factor-space update. We cast existing LoRA optimizers in a unified framework parameterized by two choices: (i) which invertible surrogate for $J_{G}^* {F}_t J_{G}$ to use, and (ii) which ${F}_t$ on ${W}$ to use. Existing methods occupy four families along these axes: factor-space adaptive updates, block-diagonal surrogates for $J_{G}^* J_{G}$, Frobenius-residual pseudoinverse methods, and Riemannian manifold constraint. Within this design space, a gradient-statistics-aware ${F}_t$ paired with a closed-form factor-space solve at ${O}((m+n)r)$ memory remains underexplored. We propose \textbf{AdaPreLoRA}, which fills this gap by adopting the Adafactor diagonal Kronecker preconditioner ${H}_t$ on ${W}$ and selecting from the resulting factor-space solution family the element minimizing an ${H}_t$-weighted imbalance between the two factor contributions; by construction, the resulting factor update is the closest LoRA approximation to the preconditioned ${W}$-space direction under the ${H}_t$-weighted norm. Across GPT-2 (E2E), Mistral-7B and Qwen2-7B (GLUE, ARC, GSM8K), and diffusion-model personalization, AdaPreLoRA is competitive with or improves over a representative set of LoRA optimizers while keeping peak GPU memory at the LoRA optimizer level.
Authors: Shengkun Tang, Zekun Wang, Bo Zheng, Liangyu Wang, Rui Men, Siqi Zhang, Xiulong Yuan, Zihan Qiu, Zhiqiang Shen, Dayiheng Liu
Abstract: Structured pruning and knowledge distillation (KD) are typical techniques for compressing large language models, but it remains unclear how they should be applied at pretraining scale, especially to recent mixture-of-experts (MoE) models. In this work, we systematically study MoE compression in large-scale pretraining, focusing on three key questions: whether pruning provides a better initialization than training from scratch, how expert compression choices affect the final model after continued training, and which training strategy is most effective. We have the following findings: First, across depth, width, and expert compression, pruning a pretrained MoE consistently outperforms training the target architecture from scratch under the same training budget. Second, different one-shot expert compression methods converge to similar final performance after large-scale continual pretraining. Motivated by this, we introduce a simple partial-preservation expert merging strategy that improves downstream performance across most benchmarks. Third, combining KD with the language modeling loss outperforms KD alone, particularly on knowledge-intensive tasks. We further propose multi-token prediction (MTP) distillation, which yields consistent gains. Finally, given the same training tokens, progressive pruning schedules outperform one-shot compression, suggesting that gradual architecture transitions lead to better optimization trajectories. Putting it all together, we compress Qwen3-Next-80A3B to a 23A2B model that retains competitive performance. These results offer practical guidance for efficient MoE compression at scale.
Authors: Nilesh Sarkar, Dawar Jyoti Deka
Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose transformer residual streams into interpretable feature dictionaries, yet the relationship between SAE width and causal influence on model output has not been systematically characterised. We introduce causal dimensionality kappa(L, M, T), defined as the effective rank of the expected Jacobian outer product at layer L, and show it can be estimated via the SAE width sweep paired with attribution patching. Across seven SAE widths from 16,384 to 1,048,576 features on Gemma-2-2B layer 12, representational capacity grows 15.6x while causal capacity grows only 4.35x: a robust separation we term the representational-causal wedge. A saturating fit yields kappa-hat approximately 1,990 with kappa-hat / d_model = 0.86 and participation-ratio lower bound kappa_PR approximately 280. Crucially, kappa is invariant to model scaling: Gemma-2-9B and Gemma-2-2B yield identical N_causal = 328 at the same SAE width despite a 3.46x parameter increase (the count is forced to 2% of SAE width by calibration; the substantive empirical claim is shape invariance of the AtP score distribution under matched seq=512 conditions). Across eight network depths kappa is constant while the absolute attribution threshold drops 20x from layer 1 to layer 23. Five controls (architecture invariance, threshold robustness, geometric privilege, synthetic ground-truth recovery, and a four-cell encoder/decoder ablation) pin down what kappa measures and what it does not. Our findings establish kappa as a measurable, model-intrinsic property of transformer layers: sub-linearly recoverable by SAE width, invariant to model scaling, and structured across network depth.
Authors: Donghoon Jung, Jiwoo Choi, Songeun Chae, Seohyon Jung
Abstract: This study proposes a quantitative framework for profiling LLM dispositions as stable, model-specific regularities in output under repeated, controlled elicitation. Using a structured narrative constraint-selection task administered across six frontier models and three instruction types, we operationalize disposition through two dimensions: "consistency", measured as cross-replication selection overlap via Jaccard similarity, and "diversity", measured as dispersion across options via the inverse Simpson index. We further introduce Narrative Landscape, a PCA-based visualization that maps each model's selection profile into a shared space for direct comparison. Results reveal a clear rigidity-exploration spectrum across model families and show that instruction types shift the geometry of selection spaces even when scalar metrics appear similar, indicating that comparable scores can mask qualitatively distinct selection topologies.
Authors: Dingdong Yang, Jian Liu, Biwen Lei, Haohan Weng, Zhuo Chen, Song Guo, Hao Richard Zhang, Ali Mahdavi Amiri, Chunchao Guo
Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) models can generate high-quality low-poly meshes from point clouds, but they still operate in an all-or-nothing manner: when a local region is unsatisfactory, the entire mesh must be regenerated, wasting computation and destroying satisfactory mesh structure elsewhere. We introduce MeshFIM, a Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) framework that regenerates a target region of a low-poly mesh conditioned on the surrounding context. MeshFIM addresses three mesh-specific challenges: enforcing exact attachment along the exposed boundary, preserving topological order in the context, and suppressing overflow beyond the intended region. It does so with five complementary design choices: boundary vertex markers, context positional embeddings, expanded context width, context augmentation, and a low-poly geometry encoder whose gated subtraction mechanism focuses generation on the missing region by leveraging the difference between the reference surface and the existing mesh. Detailed ablation studies are presented to show the effectiveness of every introduced component. Based on MeshFIM, we demonstrate two applications: interactive brush-based editing and automatic defect repair on low-poly mesh (see Figure 1). Last but not least, experiments show that MeshFIM outperforms a range of baselines in mesh refinement, mesh repair and whole mesh generation plus stitch-back scheme.
Authors: Emanuele Rossi, Emanuele Rodol\`a
Abstract: Natural language is widely used to describe, prompt, and control audio systems, but rarely serves as the representation carrying audio itself. We introduce lexical acoustic coding (LAC), a framework in which pre-trained LLM sender and receiver agents transmit sound through natural language. Under fixed system prompts, the agents write their own analysis and synthesis code, communicating only through a lexical sentence, shared vocabulary, and optional symbolic music structure. The sender analyzes an input waveform into interpretable, non-learned acoustic descriptors, quantizes each with a feature-specific interval vocabulary, and verbalizes the lexical code as English. The receiver parses the sentence back into lexical-acoustic constraints and renders a waveform through closed-loop refinement. The transmitted text serves as both a rich caption and as the transport representation itself. We frame LAC as a finite-rate lossy quantizer, exposing trade-offs between vocabulary size, rate, and fidelity. Experiments on short sounds and symbolic music transfer show that plain text preserves measurable acoustic structure while remaining interpretable, editable, and native to LLM-mediated communication.
Authors: Jiaxin Liu, Peng Yang, Yuping Li, Xinyue Xie
Abstract: Driven by the rapid expansion of e-commerce and small-batch production, the size of the intralogistics load unit of finished goods, semi-finished goods and raw materials is steadily shrinking. Totes are gradually replacing pallets as the primary handling and storage container. This shift has propelled tote-handling robotic systems to the forefront of automation order fulfillment centers. The order-fulfillment decisions of tote-handling robotic systems share a common order-tote-robot sequential decision-making nature. Existing studies primarily focus on decision mechanisms tailored to particular systems, making it difficult to generalize or transfer them to other contexts. We propose an Omni-scale Learning-based Sequential Decision Framework for Order Fulfillment of Tote-handling Robotic Systems (OLSF-TRS), a generalized and scalable sequential decision framework that combines structured combinatorial optimization with multi-agent reinforcement learning to coordinate order,tote, and robot decisions. On small-scale tote-handling robotic systems, OLSF-TRS achieves near-optimal performance with average optimality gaps below 3.5% across two distinct system configurations. In large-scale scenarios, OLSF-TRS consistently outperforms heuristic baselines across two different system types, reducing total tote movements by 8-12% and over 30% compared to SOTA rule-based approaches, while maintaining real-time responsiveness. These improvements translate into tangible operational benefits, including cost reduction, lower energy consumption, and enhanced throughput stability. The proposed framework delivers an efficient and unified order fulfillment decision-making framework for widely deployed tote-handling robotic systems,supporting high-quality order fulfillment in both e-commerce and industrial logistics sectors.
Authors: Renjie Gu, Jiazhen Du, Yihua Zhang, Sijia Liu
Abstract: Unlearning in large language models (LLMs) aims to remove harmful training data while preserving overall utility. However, we find that existing methods often hallucinate, generate abnormal token sequences, or behave inconsistently, raising safety and trust concerns. According to prior literature on LLM honesty, such behaviors are often associated with dishonesty. This motivates us to investigate the notion of honesty in the context of model unlearning. We propose a formal definition of unlearning honesty, which includes: (1) preserving both utility and honesty on retained knowledge, and (2) ensuring effective forgetting while encouraging the model to acknowledge its limitations and respond consistently to questions related to forgotten knowledge. To systematically evaluate the honesty of unlearning, we introduce a suite of metrics that cover utility, honesty on the retained set, effectiveness of forgetting, rejection rate and refusal stability in Q&A and MCQ settings. Evaluating 9 methods across 3 mainstream families shows that all current methods fail to meet these standards. After experimental and theoretical analyses, we present ReVa, a representation-alignment procedure that fine-tunes feature-randomized unlearned models to better acknowledge forgotten knowledge. On Q&A tasks from the forget set, ReVa achieves the highest rejection rate after two rounds of interaction, nearly doubling the performance of the second-best method. Remarkably, It also improves honesty on the retained set. We release our data and code at https://github.com/renjiegu.
Authors: Pragun Jaswal, L. Hemanth Krishna, B. Srinivasu
Abstract: Neural Networks (NNs) have been widely adopted due to their outstanding efficacy and adaptability across computer vision and deep learning applications. The optimization of NNs is necessary to enable their deployment on energy constrained embedded devices, where the limited available energy poses a significant challenge for efficient inference. This paper presents a runtime reconfigurable multiplier architecture integrated into the RISC-V core, targeting energy efficient neural network inference and edge AI applications. The proposed multiplier supports adaptability for exact and approximate computation with multiple configurable accuracy levels via a dedicated mulscr, enabling fine-grained energy accuracy control within a standard processor pipeline. The proposed design achieves 44%-52% and 62%-68% power reduction in exact and approximate modes respectively, while maintaining the computational performance of 1.89 DMIPS/MHz. Evaluations on error-tolerant workloads including 2d convolution and matrix multiplication demonstrate up to 63% reduction in energy consumption, with the proposed design achieving 1.21 pJ/instruction for matrix multiplication, confirming its effectiveness for energy-constrained edge AI deployments.
Authors: Yixuan Qiu
Abstract: Optimal transport (OT) has emerged as a fundamental tool in modern machine learning, yet its computational cost remains a significant bottleneck for large-scale applications. While harnessing the massive parallelism of modern GPU hardware is critical for efficiency, the de facto standard Sinkhorn algorithm, despite its ease of parallelization, often suffers from slow convergence in challenging problems. More recently, the sparse-plus-low-rank quasi-Newton method offers a balance between convergence rate and per-iteration complexity; however, its efficiency on GPUs is severely hindered by the serial nature of sparse matrix symbolic analysis and irregular memory access patterns. To bridge this gap, we present cuRegOT, a high-performance GPU solver tailored for entropic-regularized OT. We introduce a suite of algorithmic and architectural optimizations, including an amortized symbolic analysis strategy to mitigate CPU bottlenecks, an asynchronous Sinkhorn iterates generation mechanism, and a fused kernel for bandwidth-efficient gradient evaluation. These strategies are backed by rigorous theoretical guarantees ensuring algorithmic convergence. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that cuRegOT achieves significant speedups over state-of-the-art GPU-based solvers across a variety of benchmark tasks.
Authors: Xingyu Song, Yuan Mei, Naoya Takeishi
Abstract: Modern generative models can be understood as probability transport from a simple base distribution to a target data distribution. Deterministic transport models offer tractable velocity-field parameterizations, whereas stochastic generative models capture richer density evolution through drift and diffusion. Yet when stochastic dynamics are described through deterministic velocity fields, the effects of drift and diffusion are often compressed into a single effective field, obscuring the distinct roles of deterministic evolution and stochastic fluctuation. In this work, we show that the deterministic field \(b_t\) of a stochastic generative process admits a natural transport--osmotic decomposition that separates deterministic transport from stochastic, diffusion-induced effects: \(b_t = u_t + d_t\), where \(u_t\) governs marginal probability transport and \(d_t\) captures an osmotic effect induced by diffusion and determined by the marginal score. Based on this decomposition, we propose Bridge Matching, a flow-based framework for learning decomposed generative dynamics through both marginal and conditional formulations. In generative modeling experiments, we recombine the learned components as \(b_t = u_t + \lambda_d d_t\), showing that the proposed decomposition enables interpretable and controllable sampling by adjusting the osmotic contribution in probability transport.
Authors: Jiahui Guang, Zexun Zhan, Zhenlin Xu, Cuiyun Gao, Haiyan Wang, Jing Li, Zhaoquan Gu, Yanchun Zhang
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) may memorize sensitive cross-modal information during pretraining. However, existing MLLM unlearning benchmarks rely on synthetic knowledge injection or complete subject-level deletion, which fail to capture realistic, personalized deletion requests that require fine-grained factual control. In this paper, we introduce PPU-Bench, a real-world and fine-tuning-free benchmark for personalized partial unlearning in MLLMs. PPU-Bench contains 24K multimodal and unimodal samples derived from pre-existing knowledge of 500 public figures under three progressively challenging settings: Complete, Selective, and Personalized unlearning. The benchmark evaluates whether methods can remove target knowledge while preserving non-target facts, model utility, and cross-modal consistency. Extensive experiments show that Complete Unlearning often suppresses visual identity rather than factual knowledge, while Selective and Personalized Unlearning expose significant forget--retain trade-offs and challenges in intra-subject factual boundaries. Robustness analysis under cross-image and prompt-based attacks reveals distinct vulnerabilities across different unlearning settings. Motivated by these findings, we propose Boundary-Aware Optimization (BAO), which explicitly models intra-subject forget-retain boundaries. Experimental results on two representative methods demonstrate that BAO can effectively enforce intra-subject factual boundaries.
Authors: Ziyao He, Yingjie Liu, ZhangYangRui, Mingsong Chen, Xuan Tang, Xian Wei
Abstract: Accurate 3D scene description is fundamental to robotic navigation and augmented reality, yet current dense captioning methods face significant limitations in processing sparse point cloud data. % Existing approaches that apply Euclidean embedding spaces struggle to simultaneously preserve fine-grained local geometric details and model exponentially growing global semantic hierarchies, leading to either inaccurate localization or disjointed, shallow scene descriptions. % In this work, we propose a novel \textbf{\textsc{Curvature-Aware Captioning}} framework, integrating novel non-Euclidean geodesic attention mechanisms, to resolve the localization-contextualization conflict. % Specifically, self-attention within Oblique space enforces dimensional homogeneity while establishing long-range dependencies. Bidirectional geodesic cross-attention within Lorentz space models hierarchical semantic relationships across scene instances, enabling simultaneous precision in object localization and coherence in scene descriptions. % Theoretical analysis confirms that the curvature complementarity between the Oblique manifold and Lorentz hyperboloid resolves the Euclidean-hyperbolic conflict, ensuring feature stability via isotropic optimization while preserving inherent hierarchical relationships. Extensive experiments on ScanRefer and Nr3D benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with significant gains in both localization accuracy and descriptive richness.
Authors: Yan Sun, Guoxia Wang, Jinle Zeng, JiaBin Yang, Shuai Li, Li Shen, Dacheng Tao, DianHai Yu, Haifeng Wang
Abstract: Pretraining large language models (LLMs) with next-token prediction has led to remarkable advances, yet the context-dependent nature of token embeddings in such models results in high intra-class variance and inter-class similarity, thus hindering the efficiency of representation learning. While similarity-based regularization has demonstrated benefit in supervised fine-tuning and classification tasks, its application and efficacy in large-scale LLM pretraining remains underexplored. In this work, we propose the SimReg, an embedding similarity regularization loss that explicitly encourages token representations with the same ground-truth label within each sequence to be more similar, while enforcing separation from different-label tokens via a contrastive loss. Our analysis reveals that this mechanism introduces gains by enlarging multi-classification margins, thereby enabling more efficient classification. Extensive experiments across dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures demonstrate that SimReg consistently accelerates training convergence by over 30% and improves average zero-shot downstream performance by over 1% across standard benchmarks. Further ablation studies and analyses offer practical insights into hyperparameter tuning and loss effectiveness.
Authors: Yang Xiao, Huiyuan Chen, Kaiyuan Deng, Chao Jiang, Zinan Ling, Ruimeng Ye, Xiaolong Ma, Bo Hui
Abstract: We propose Compressed Video Aggregator (CVA), a lightweight micro-video recommendation module that decouples video information from preference learning. It aggregates frozen VFM embeddings, and uses latent reasoning without cross-attention projection, producing compact video embeddings for recommenders. Due to the redundancy in the frame count of the original benchmark and its overly coarse sampling, we used titles to re-select key frames based on CLIP. Experiments on MicroLens and Short-Video show consistent gains with orders-of-magnitude reductions in training time and GPU memory, and re-selected frames can further enhance the performance of all methods, including CVA. Furthermore, we also discussed the impact of several scenarios involving erroneous titles on our method. Code will be released soon.
Authors: Xinyu Yan, Boyang Chen, Jiaming Zhang, Tiantong Wu, Hong Xi Tae, Yichen He, Tiantong Wang, Yachun Mi, Yurong Hao, Yilei Zhao, Lei Xiao, Longtao Huang, Pengjun Xie, Wei Liu, Wei Yang Bryan Lim
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated images have become increasingly realistic and readily adaptable to concrete real-world claims, creating new challenges for verifying visual evidence. A concrete emerging risk is AI-generated refund fraud, in which manipulated or synthetic images are used to support claims about damaged products, poor delivery conditions, or service-related defects. Existing AI-generated image detection benchmarks mainly evaluate standalone authenticity classification, cross-generator transfer, or forensic localization, leaving claim-conditioned fraudulent evidence detection underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce FraudBench, a multimodal benchmark for detecting AI-generated fraudulent refund evidence. FraudBench is constructed from real-world user-review evidence across e-commerce, food delivery, and travel-service scenarios. We curate real evidence images together with their associated review and product metadata, identify genuine damaged and undamaged evidence through MLLM-assisted filtering and human annotation, and synthesize fake-damaged evidence from genuine undamaged reference images using six state-of-the-art image editing and generation models. Using FraudBench, we evaluate MLLMs, specialized AI-generated image detectors, and human participants under the same settings. Experiments show that current MLLMs often recognize real-damaged evidence but fail on many fake-damaged subsets, with fake-damage detection rates (TPR) far below the 50% baseline on most generator subsets. Specialized detectors generally perform better but remain inconsistent across generators and can produce false positives on real-damaged samples, revealing a clear gap between generic AI image detection and reliable claim-conditioned refund-evidence verification.
Authors: Rui Zhao, Jianlin Yu, Zhenhai Gao, Jiaqiao Liu, Fei Gao
Abstract: End-to-end autonomous driving requires models to understand traffic scenes, infer driving intent, and generate executable motion plans. Recent vision-language-action (VLA) models inherit semantic priors from large-scale vision-language pretraining, yet still face a coupling trade-off: fully shared backbones preserve multimodal interaction but may entangle language reasoning and trajectory prediction, whereas decou pled reasoning-action pipelines reduce task conflict but weaken semantic-motion coupling. We propose VECTOR-DRIVE, a tightly coupled VLA framework built on Qwen2.5-VL-3B. VECTOR-DRIVE keeps all tokens coupled through shared self attention and routes feed-forward computation according to token semantics. Vision and language tokens are processed by a Vision-Language Expert to preserve semantic priors, while target-point, ego-state, and noisy action tokens are routed to a Trajectory Expert for motion-specific computation. On the action-token pathway, a flow-matching planner refines noisy action tokens into future waypoints and speed profiles. This design couples semantic reasoning and motion planning within a single multimodal Transformer while separating task-specific FFN computation. On Bench2Drive, VECTOR-DRIVE achieves 88.91 Driving Score and outperforms representative end-to end and VLA-based baselines. Qualitative results and ablations further validate the benefits of shared attention, semantic-aware expert routing, progressive training, and flow-based action de coding.
Authors: Odysseas S. Chlapanis, Orfeas Menis Mastromichalakis, Christos H. Papadimitriou
Abstract: Abstract concepts - justice, theory, availability - have no single perceivable referent; in the human brain, their meaning emerges from a web of experiences, affect, and social context. Do large language models (LLMs) ground abstract concepts in a similar way? We study this by replicating property-generation experiments from cognitive science on 21 frontier and open-weight LLMs. Across models and experiments, we find a consistent pattern: when compared to humans, models rely too heavily on word associations, and underproduce properties tied to emotion and internal states. This yields a large and consistent grounding gap: no model exceeds a Pearson correlation r=0.37 with human responses, compared to a human-to-human ceiling above r=0.9. To better interpret this gap, we also replicate a rating experiment on grounding categories and find that here LLMs align more closely with human judgment, and alignment improves as models get larger. We then use sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to inspect whether this information is also reflected in the models' internal features, and we do identify features connected to grounding dimensions such as "sensorimotor" and "social". These findings suggest that current LLMs can recover grounding dimensions when explicitly queried, but do not recruit them in a human-like way when words are generated freely.
Authors: Jiayi Liu, Jiaxing Zhang, Bowen Jin, Jennifer Neville
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is widely used to augment large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge. However, many benchmark datasets, designed to test RAG performance, comprise many questions that can already be answered from an LLM's parametric memory. This leads to unreliable evaluation. We refer to this phenomenon as knowledge leakage: cases where RAG tasks are solvable without retrieval. This issue worsens over time due to benchmark aging. As benchmarks are reused for training, their contents are increasingly absorbed into model parameters, making them less effective for evaluating retrieval. We introduce SeedRG, a semi-synthetic benchmark generation pipeline that mitigates knowledge leakage and addresses the issue of benchmark aging. Starting from a seed benchmark dataset, SeedRG extracts a reasoning graph from question-context pairs to capture their underlying reasoning structure, and then generates new examples via type-constrained entity replacement. This process produces structurally similar but novel instances that are unlikely to exist in the model's parametric knowledge, while preserving the original reasoning patterns. To ensure quality, we incorporate two verification steps: (1) a reasoning-graph consistency check to maintain task difficulty, and (2) a knowledge-leakage filter to exclude instances answerable without retrieval.
Authors: Jialin Li, Zhuo Zhang, Yue Cao, Guipeng Lan, Jiabao Wen, Shuai Xiao, Jiachen Yang
Abstract: The scarcity of high-quality imaging data for coronary angiography (CAG) stenosis limits the clinical translation of automated stenosis detection. Synthetic stenosis data provides a practical avenue to augment training sets, improving data quality, diversity, and distributional coverage, and enhancing detection precision and generalization. However, diffusion-based editing commonly relies on soft guidance in a noise-initialized reverse process, offering limited pixel-level precision and structure preservation. We propose the OT-Bridge Editor, which reframes localized editing as a constrained entropic optimal transport (OT) problem and leverages geometric information to steer the generation path, enabling stronger geometric control. Extensive experiments show that our synthesized angiograms consistently improve downstream stenosis detection, yielding substantial relative gains of 27.8% on the public ARCADE benchmark and 23.0% on our multi-center dataset, supported by consistent qualitative results.
Authors: Yuhang Xu, Kaibin Tian, Yang Tian, Zhice Yang, Yifeng Yu, Yan Li, Shengzhong Liu, Fan Wu, Guihai Chen
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a cornerstone for improving the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, its rollout phase constitutes a significant efficiency bottleneck, mainly arising from the long-tail bubbles across data parallel ranks, particularly in long-context scenarios where faster GPUs remain idle while waiting for stragglers. Existing solutions, such as partial rollout or asynchronous RL, mitigate these bubbles by compromising the algorithm's strict synchronous nature. Instead, we propose BubbleSpec, a novel framework that accelerates RL rollouts while strictly keeping the mathematical exactness. Instead of attempting to eliminate bubbles, BubbleSpec exploits them. We exploit the idle time windows of faster ranks to pre-generate rollout results for subsequent steps, serving as drafts for speculative decoding. Unlike prior speculative methods that rely on historical epoch similarity and warm-ups, BubbleSpec is agnostic to dataset size and provides immediate acceleration from the onset of training. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that BubbleSpec reduces decoding steps by 50% and increases rollout throughput by up to 1.8x. Critically, BubbleSpec is seamlessly compatible with various RL frameworks and strategies as it sustains the strict synchronous property of RL algorithms.
Authors: Yu Chen, Yuanhao Liu, Qi Cao
Abstract: Aligned large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Recent mechanistic studies have identified latent features and representation shifts associated with jailbreak success, but they leave a more fundamental question open: why do aligned LLMs remain jailbreakable, and what structural vulnerabilities in the model make this possible? We study this question through a continuous input-transformation view. Our theoretical finding is that aligned models can still exhibit Refusal-Escape Directions (RED): local perturbation directions around a harmful input that shift the model's behavior from refusal to answering while preserving the model's harmful-semantics interpretation. From this perspective, a jailbreak is not only a successful discrete prompt construction, but can also be understood as a refusal-to-answer behavior transition induced by continuously perturbing a harmful input along RED. We then prove that RED can be exactly decomposed into contributions from operator-level sources across the model's operator structure, and identify normalization, residual-wiring, and terminal sources as analytically constrained operator-level sources. To eliminate RED, the shared expressive modules -- self-attention and MLP -- must eliminate the contributions from these analytically constrained sources while preserving the mechanisms that support benign responses. These competing requirements give rise to a conditional safety-utility trade-off. Experiments across multiple models and attack methods empirically analyze RED from two complementary perspectives and show that added token dimensions can expose RED, while successful jailbreaks exhibit refusal-to-answer shifts largely aligned with terminal-source contributions.
Authors: Yuzhuang Xu, Xu Han, Yuxuan Li, Pengzhan Li, Wanxiang Che
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance but incur high deployment costs, motivating extremely low-bit but lossy quantization. Existing quantization algorithms mainly focus on improving the numerical accuracy of forward computation to eliminate performance degradation. In this paper, we show that extremely quantized LLMs suffer from systematic smoothness degradation beyond numerical precision loss. Through a smoothness proxy, we observe that such degradation becomes increasingly severe as the quantization bit-width decreases. Furthermore, based on sequence neighborhood modeling, we find that quantized models exhibit a rapid reduction of effective token candidates within the prediction neighborhood, which directly leads to a sparser decoding tree and degraded generation quality. To validate it, we introduce a simple smoothness-preserving principle in both post-training quantization and quantization-aware training, and demonstrate that preserving smoothness brings additional gains beyond numerical accuracy. The core goal of this paper is to highlight smoothness preservation as an important design consideration for future extreme quantization methods. Code is available at https://github.com/xuyuzhuang11/FINE.
Authors: Zhuoyun Li, Boxuan Wang, Jinwei Hu, Xiaowei Huang, Yi Dong
Abstract: Robust adaptation of LLMs and VLMs is often evaluated by average accuracy or average consistency under perturbations. However, these averages can hide a structured failure mode: a prediction may remain correct while probability mass already flows from particular true classes toward systematic wrong competitors near the decision boundary. In this paper, we formalize this phenomenon as margin-aware error flow and introduce FragileFlow, a plug-in regularizer that uses a calibrated margin buffer to identify correct-but-fragile predictions and organize their off-class probability mass into a class-wise vulnerable-risk matrix. Theoretically, we provide the first PAC-Bayes upper bound for this margin-aware error-flow object, showing how empirical spectral control yields a conservative route to deterministic worst-class robustness under a stability condition. Experiments on multiple-choice LLM benchmarks and few-shot CLIP adaptation show that FragileFlow consistently improves the proposed theory-facing risk measures over matched baselines, yields perturbed worst-class accuracy gains in most settings, and preserves clean accuracy across comparisons.
Authors: Safa Alsaidi, Tom\'as Brogueira, Nizar Mahlaoui, Marc Vincent, Guilherme Pelegrina, Nicolas Garcelon, Adrien Coulet, Miguel Couceiro
Abstract: Activated PI3K8 Syndrome (APDS) is a rare genetic immune disorder caused by variants in PIK3CD or PIK3R1, with highly heterogeneous symptoms that often delay diagnosis. Early recognition is hampered by overlapping clinical presentations and limited clinician awareness, motivating systematic, data-driven approaches to detect APDS-associated phenotypic patterns in routine electronic health records. Traditional linear scoring systems cannot capture complex symptom interactions, while deep learning models, though expressive, often lack interpretability. To bridge this gap, we propose Shapley regression, a novel game-theoretic model replacing the linear predictor with a k-additive cooperative game, explicitly modeling co-occurrence of symptoms while maintaining the transparency and convexity of logistic regression. We carry out an empirical study of our lightweight method on eight public biomedical datasets, showing that a 2-additive model with $l_{2}$ regularization achieves an optimal trade-off between predictive power and noise robustness. We also apply it to a real-world cohort of 222 patients, on which Shapley regression accurately distinguished APDS cases from matched controls, confirming and validating phenotypes known to be associated with APDS, and facilitating the exploration of pairwise interactions between symptoms, validated by clinical experts.
Authors: Jiawei Lian, Jianhong Pan, Lefan Wang, Yi Wang, Tairan Huang, Shaohui Mei, Lap-Pui Chau
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly employ alignment techniques to prevent harmful outputs. Despite these safeguards, attackers can circumvent them by crafting adversarial prompts. Predominant token-level optimization methods primarily rely on optimizing for exact affirmative templates (e.g., ``\textit{Sure, here is...}''). However, these paradigms frequently encounter bottlenecks such as suboptimal convergence, compromised prompt naturalness, and poor cross-model generalization. To address these limitations, we propose Semantic Representation Attack (SRA), a novel LLM-agnostic paradigm that fundamentally reconceptualizes adversarial objectives from exact textual targeting to malicious semantic representations. Theoretically, we establish the semantic Coherence-Convergence Relationship and derive a Cross-Model Semantic Generalization bound, proving that maintaining semantic coherence guarantees both white-box semantic convergence and black-box transferability. Technically, we operationalize this framework via the Semantic Representation Heuristic Search (SRHS) algorithm, which preserves interpretability and structural coherence of the adversarial prompts during incremental discrete token chunk expansion. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our framework achieves a 99.71% average attack success rate across 26 open-source LLMs, with strong transferability and stealth.
Authors: Mengyuan Tian, Qiyan Zhao, Yanan Wang, Da-Han Wang
Abstract: In recent years, pre-trained visual-linguistic models have demonstrated tremendous potential, becoming a crucial foundational framework for numerous downstream tasks. However, the information density between text and images is not uniformly distributed. Existing methods often overlook the inherent and dynamic differences in information density and semantic scope between text tags and image blocks. These common uniform alignment strategies result in coarse-grained cross-modal interactions and loss of fine semantic details. Moreover, pursuing finer alignment typically requires substantial computational overhead, limiting practical model deployment. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel framework for dynamic cross-modal alignment with continuous detail introduction. First, we design a dynamically adaptive cross-modal matching mechanism that uses a learnable matching function to dynamically assign varying numbers and sizes of image tags to text tags of the same size but different information density, enabling more precise attention interaction. Second, we develop a continuous detail introduction module to progressively incorporate high-resolution visual feature enhancement into the alignment process. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements in the accuracy of various downstream tasks while reducing computational overhead.
Authors: Panteleimon Rodis
Abstract: This paper introduces a framework specifically designed for sparse and irregular time series {risk estimation}. It is based on a Transformer Autoencoder with local attention, which leverages the powerful pattern identification capabilities of transformers complemented by traditional data cleaning and normalization methods. It efficiently captures relevant patterns within irregular sequences suffering from sparse data collection, benefiting from the discriminative ability of the local attention mechanism. The proposed framework is applied to a real-world case study, on the risk estimation of non-technical losses in electrical power systems in a wide area in Greece. Non-technical losses in electrical power systems, primarily stemming from electricity theft, pose significant economic and operational challenges. Detecting these anomalies is particularly challenging due to the inherent sparse and irregular nature of real-world data collection practices. Traditional risk estimation methods struggle with effectively capturing long-range dependencies and robustly handling such data characteristics. We demonstrate that our approach effectively yields highly discriminative latent features, which results in more consistent risk estimation compared with existing state-of-the-art and widely used methods. It achieves high recall and precision, meeting the critical objectives of the problem. As such, our solution offers a robust and effective tool for risk detection in irregular time series datasets.
Authors: Wicaksono Leksono Muhamad, Joanito Agili Lopo, Tsamarah Rana Nugraha, Ahmad Cahyono Adi, Muhammad Oriza Nurfajri
Abstract: Lexical difficulty prediction is a fundamental problem in language learning and readability assessment, requiring models to estimate word difficulty across different first-language (L1) backgrounds. However, existing approaches rely on regression-only training with scalar supervision, which does not explicitly structure the representation space, limiting their ability to capture cross-lingual alignment and ordinal difficulty. To mitigate these issues, we propose Context-Aligned Contrastive Regression, which integrates Ridge regression ensemble with two complementary objectives, i.e., Cross-View Context and Ordinal Soft Contrastive Learning. Experiments on three L1 datasets show that (i) contrastive objectives improve cross-lingual representation alignment while preserving language-specific nuances, (ii) the learned representations capture the ordinal structure of lexical difficulty, and (iii) the ensemble effectively mitigates systematic biases of individual models, leading to more stable performance across difficulty levels.
Authors: Yang Qiao, Bo Pan, Hao-Wei Pang, Peter Zhiping Zhang, Liying Zhang, Liang Zhao
Abstract: Molecular optimization in drug discovery aims to discover molecules with improved target properties, but practical lead optimization often requires more than high predicted scores. A useful candidate should also be actionable: it should be reachable from known molecules through valid local structural transformations, so that it can be interpreted as a plausible revision within an evolving chemical series. Existing de novo and single-molecule optimization methods do not explicitly model such reachability, especially when both the target molecules and the intermediate molecules connecting them to known compounds are unknown. In this work, we formulate actionable molecular optimization as sequential expansion of a molecule-transfer graph, where nodes are molecules and edges encode valid local transformations. We propose MolWorld, a molecule world model-guided framework that treats the current molecule-transfer graph as an evolving search state. At each iteration, MolWorld selects local anchor contexts, generates candidate molecules conditioned on these contexts, evaluates their properties, and uses a learned world model to update the evolving molecule world by retaining admissible candidates and inserting them into the molecule-transfer graph. The expanded molecule world then guides subsequent optimization. Experiments on property optimization and docking-based tasks show that MolWorld discovers high-property molecules while maintaining substantially stronger structural connectivity, supporting actionable and sequential molecular design.
Authors: Said Harb, Mehdi Maboudi, Markus Gerke
Abstract: Computer-Aided Design is ubiquitous in todays world, as almost every manufactured object begins as a digital model across industries. At the same time, advances in 3D sensing have made point clouds a dominant form of raw 3D data. Recovering the CAD model of a physical object from its point cloud scan has two major applications: reverse engineering, where physical or hand-crafted prototypes need to be reconstructed automatically as editable digital models, and quality control, where recovering the CAD description of a manufactured object helps quantify and understand deviations introduced during the production process. Thus, converting unordered point clouds into structured CAD models is increasingly important for modern applications. Deep learning has enabled major progress in computer vision for both 2D and 3D data, and new datasets facilitate data-driven CAD reconstruction. Building on this foundation, we develop an end-to-end model that reconstructs CAD models from point clouds and introduce a segmentation approach that decomposes them into individual extrusions. These partial shapes increase data diversity, improving the generalization and robustness of deep learning models. Our strategy thereby provides a simple, yet effective way to increase reconstruction performance of deep learning models.
Authors: Tri Cao, Khoi Le, Thong Nguyen, Cong-Duy Nguyen, Quynh Vo, Anh Tuan Luu, Chunyan Miao, See-Kiong Ng, Shuicheng Yan, Bryan Hooi
Abstract: While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced video understanding, they remain highly prone to hallucinations in dynamic scenes. We argue this stems from a failure in spatio-temporal monitoring, the ability to persistently track object identities, states, and relations over time. Existing benchmarks obscure this deficit by relying on single final-answer evaluations for queries that can often be resolved via local visual cues or statistical priors. To rigorously diagnose this, we introduce STEMO-Bench (Spatio-TEmporal MOnitoring), a benchmark of human-verified object-centric facts that evaluates intermediate reasoning by decomposing queries into sub-questions, distinguishing genuine temporal understanding from coincidental correctness. To address failure modes exposed by STEMO, we propose STEMO-Track, a novel object-centric framework that explicitly constructs and reasons over structured object trajectories via chunk-wise state extraction and temporal aggregation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our object-centric framework significantly reduces hallucinated answers and improves spatio-temporal reasoning consistency over state-of-the-art MLLMs.
Authors: Amir Masoud Nourollah, Irtaza Khalid, Stefano Leoni, Steven Schockaert
Abstract: Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials play a fundamental role in computational chemistry and materials science, enabling applications from molecular dynamics simulations to drug design and materials discovery. While recent approaches can estimate inter-atomic forces with high precision, it remains unclear to what extent they can generalise to previously unseen molecules. Do they learn the compositional structure of chemistry, capturing how molecular fragments and their combinations determine properties, or do they primarily learn to interpolate patterns that are specific to the training examples? To address this question, we propose a benchmark consisting of four tasks that require some form of compositional generalisation. In each task, models are tested on molecules that were unseen during training, but the training data is chosen such that generalisation to the test examples should be feasible for models that learn the underlying physical principles. Our empirical analysis shows that the considered tasks are highly challenging for state-of-the-art models, with errors on out-of-distribution examples often an order of magnitude higher than on in-distribution examples, even when using foundation models that have been pre-trained on millions of molecules.
Authors: Lavsen Dahal, Joseph Y. Lo
Abstract: In this retrospective multi-institutional study, a quantitative phenotyping framework, CT-IDP (CT Image-Derived Phenotypes) was developed on the MERLIN abdominal CT benchmark (training, validation, and test sets- 15,175, 5,018, and 5,082 studies, respectively) and externally evaluated on two independent dataset: Duke-Abdomen (2,000) and AMOS (1,107). Multi-organ segmentations were generated with TotalSegmentator and used to derive over 900 organ and compartment-level descriptors spanning morphometry, attenuation, and contextual/burden findings. Sparse disease-specific logistic regression with elastic-net regularization was trained on MERLIN and externally validated under a frozen specification. Performance was compared against a DINOv3-based vision-transformer baseline using AUC and average precision (AP), supported by phenotype-stratified audits and coefficient-level inspection. Macro-AUC for CT-IDP versus the baseline was 0.897 versus 0.880 on MERLIN, 0.877 versus 0.857 on the Duke-Abdomen dataset, and 0.780 versus 0.756 on AMOS.
Authors: Ming Sun, Rui Wang, Xingrui Yu, Lihua Jing, Hangyu Du, Zhenglin Wan, Xu Pan, Ivor Tsang
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) support generalist robotic control by enabling end-to-end decision policies directly from multi-modal inputs. As trained VLAs are increasingly shared and adapted, protecting model ownership becomes essential for secure deployment and responsible open-source usage. In this paper, we present GuardVLA, the first backdoor-based ownership verification framework specifically designed for VLAs. GuardVLA embeds a stealthy and harmless backdoor watermark into the protected model during training by injecting secret messages into embodied visual data. For post-release verification, we propose a swap-and-detect mechanism, in which the trigger projector and an external classifier head are used to activate and detect the embedded backdoor based on prediction probabilities. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, model architectures, and adaptation settings demonstrate that GuardVLA enables reliable ownership verification while preserving benign task performance. Further results show that the embedded watermark remains detectable under post-release model adaptation.
Authors: Minmin Zhang, Sina Aghaei, Soroush Saghafian
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, yet their potential for sequential decision-making remains underexplored. In this paper, we study the ICL capabilities of LLMs in sequential decision-making settings, including Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), Partially Observable MDPs (POMDPs), and Ambiguous POMDPs (APOMDPs). We fine-tune pretrained LLMs to perform few-shot decision-making directly from offline, oracle-labeled trajectories. Our framework enables flexible imitation of policies through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Theoretically, we focus on linear MDPs and interpret a fine-tuned attention layer as implicitly estimating optimal Q-functions from in-context data. Building on this interpretation, we derive an end-to-end suboptimality bound for the induced policy that separates the in-context estimation error from the training-length bias. Empirically, across synthetic MDP, POMDP, and APOMDP settings, we find that fine-tuned LLMs achieve substantially smaller optimality gaps than in-context-only and random baselines, with especially large gains in longer-horizon, partially observed, and model-ambiguous environments. Together, these results show that supervised fine-tuning provides an effective route to endowing pretrained LLMs with sequential decision-making capabilities from offline data, which is an important advantage in domains such as healthcare where offline data are abundant.
Authors: Gianfranco Lombardo, Giuseppe Trimigno, Stefano Cagnoni
Abstract: We investigate the geometry of predictive information across the layers of large language models (LLMs). We repurpose representation lenses-learned affine maps trained to predict the next token from intermediate residual streams-as geometric diagnostic tools. Rather than asking what the model predicts at each layer, we ask where predictive information resides and how it evolves across depth. We define at each layer a predictive readout subspace as the dominant k-dimensional singular subspace of such a map on the d-dimensional residual stream (where k is a resolution parameter), and track its trajectory on the Grassmann manifold as a similarity profile across layers. The profile is well described by unimodal distributions exhibiting a rise, near-plateau, and descent; varying k from 1% to 50% of d traces a Pareto frontier between visibility and energy retention, yet the same structure emerges at all scales. Across eight models from two families (Qwen2.5 and OLMo2, 1B-32B), we identify three geometric phases. Updates are approximately orthogonal to the residual stream throughout; what distinguishes the phases is their effect on the effective rank, which expands, stabilizes, and concentrates. In the first, Seeding Multiplexing, feed-forward memories and attention layers seed a candidate set in superposition in family-specific proportions, with the final token rising as leading candidate from 20% to 35% of positions across this phase. In the second, Hoisting Overriding, updates override existing subspaces to concentrate the candidate distribution without expanding the rank. In the third, Focal Convergence, high-energy low-rank updates write the winner into a form aligned with the unembedding direction. Phases 1 and 3 grow slowly with model depth, while Phase 2 expands linearly. The additional capacity of deeper LLMs is largely absorbed by candidate disambiguation.
Authors: Zongmin Yu, Liu Yang
Abstract: We introduce Evolutionary Ensemble (EvE), a decentralized framework that organizes existing, highly capable coding agents into a live, co-evolving system for algorithmic discovery. Rather than reinventing the wheel within the "LLMs as optimizers" paradigm, EvE fixes the base agent substrate and focuses entirely on evolving the cumulative guidance and skills that dictate agent behaviors. By maintaining two co-evolving populations, namely functional code solvers and agent guidance states, the system evaluates agents through a synchronous race, updating their empirical Elo ratings based on the marginal gains they contribute to the current solver state. When applied to a research bottleneck in In-Context Operator Networks (ICON), EvE autonomously discovered a robust rescale-then-interpolate mechanism that enables reliable example-count generalization. Crucially, controlled ablations reveal the absolute necessity of stage-dependent agent adaptation to navigate the shifting search landscapes of complex codebases. Compared to variants driven by a fixed initial agent or even a frozen "best-evolved" agent, EvE uniquely avoids phase mismatch, demonstrating that organizing agents into a self-revising ensemble is the fundamental driver for breaking through static performance ceilings.
Authors: Pavan Manjunath, Thomas Prufer
Abstract: Reliable short horizon forecasting of solar and wind generation is a structural prerequisite of any modern power system yet most published forecasters are tuned and evaluated on a single climatic regime and most algorithmic novelty has been concentrated either on classical recurrent networks or on monolithic foundation models that combine forecasting and explanation We develop a four stage hybrid framework that separates these concerns The first stage acquires hourly generation irradiance and surface weather records through public application programming interfaces The second stage trains three classical baselines autoregressive integrated moving average gradient boosted regression trees and a two layer long short term memory network and produces a strong point forecast together with a residual error series The third stage corrects the residual through a quantum inspired variational kernel built on a six qubit hardware efficient ansatz with three repeated entangling layers The fourth stage uses generative artificial intelligence strictly as an explainability layer that reads the measured benchmark numbers and produces a structured natural language interpretation Across three regions drawn from open public archives Iberian solar North Sea wind and a mixed Texas trace the proposed configuration stays within one percentage point of the strongest classical baseline on the in domain forecasting task and the quantum inspired kernel separates calm and stormy weather regimes with a Fisher discriminant ratio approximately fifteen fold higher than a tuned radial basis kernel
Authors: Yang Luo, Zifeng Kang, Tiantian Ji, Xinran Liu, Yong Liu, Shuyu Li, Lingyun Peng
Abstract: Graph-based agent memory is increasingly used in LLM agents to support structured long-term recall and multi-hop reasoning, but it also creates a new poisoning surface: an attacker can inject a crafted relation into graph memory so that it is later retrieved and influences agent behavior. Existing agent-memory poisoning attacks mainly target flat textual records and are ineffective in graph-based memory because malicious relations often fail to be extracted, merged into the target anchor neighborhood, or retrieved for the victim query. We present SHADOWMERGE, a poisoning attack against graph-based agent memory that exploits relation-channel conflicts. Its key insight is that a poisoned relation can share the same query-activated anchor and canonicalized relation channel as benign evidence while carrying a conflicting value. To realize this, we design AIR, a pipeline that converts the conflict into an ordinary interaction that can be extracted, merged, and retrieved by the graph-memory system. We evaluate SHADOWMERGE on Mem0 and three public real-world datasets: PubMedQA, WebShop, and ToolEmu. SHADOWMERGE achieves 93.8% average attack success rate, improving the best baseline by 50.3 absolute points, while having negligible impact on unrelated benign tasks. Mechanism studies show that SHADOWMERGE overcomes the three key limitations of existing agent-memory poisoning attacks, and defense analysis shows that representative input-side defenses are insufficient to mitigate it. We have responsibly disclosed our findings to affected graph-memory vendors and open sourced SHADOWMERGE.
Authors: Napassorn Litchiowong
Abstract: One partner says "Fine" meaning "resolution"; the other hears "surrender." The word is shared; the affective uptake is not. We formalize this as affective meaning divergence (AMD), the total-variation distance between interlocutors' anchor-conditioned affect distributions. Building on speech-act theory, common-ground accumulation, and entropy-regularized game theory, we derive a logit best-response map whose dynamics undergo a saddle-node bifurcation: when $\beta\alpha > 4$, a monotone increase in AMD-driven load produces an abrupt, hysteretic collapse of repair coordination. On Conversations Gone Awry (CGA-Wiki; $N = 652$), derailing conversations exhibit critical-slowing-down (CSD) signatures across multiple levels: lexical divergence variance ($p < 0.001$, $d = 0.36$), AMD variance ($p = 0.001$, $d = 0.26$), and dialog-act repair variance ($p = 0.016$, $d = 0.20$), all significant after correction and stronger than toxicity and sentiment baselines. AMD provides a distinct temporal signature, with retrospectively measured variance peaking at the bifurcation point while toxicity variance peaks earlier, and is the only indicator grounded in the theoretical framework. Boundary-condition analysis on CGA-CMV ($N = 1,169$) yields mixed but directionally consistent evidence.
Authors: Quilee Simeon, Justin M. Wei, Yile Fan
Abstract: Recent agentic-robotics systems, from Code-asPolicies to modern vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models, presuppose that drivers, SDKs, or ROS-style primitives for the target hardware already exist. Writing those primitives is the dominant engineering cost of bringing up new hardware for agent control. We present Octopus Protocol, a system that collapses that cost to a single shell command. Given only raw OS access and a language-model API key, a coding agent executes a five-stage pipeline--PROBE, IDENTIFY, INTERFACE, SERVE, DEPLOY--to discover connected devices, infer their capabilities, generate a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server with typed tools, and deploy it as a live HTTP endpoint. A persistent daemon then monitors the system, heals broken code, and perceives physical state through the camera tools it generated for itself. Two architectural principles make this work: protocols are prompts, not code, and the coding agent is the runtime. We validate the system on three heterogeneous platforms (PC/WSL, Apple Silicon macOS, Raspberry Pi 4) and on a commercial 6-DOF robotic arm with USB camera feedback. One command onboards the hardware in ~10-15 minutes and exposes up to 30 MCP tools; an MCP-compliant client then performs closed-loop visual-motor control through tools no human wrote.
Authors: Carsten Maple, Abhishek Kumar, Riya Tapwal
Abstract: Many jailbreak attack research papers report attack success rates for a limited number of parameter settings, even though there are many combinations of parameter settings that could be used. Further, when new jailbreak papers are released, they often benchmark results against single configurations of existing attacks. This position paper argues such practices are fundamentally insufficient for characterising the threat posed by parameterised jailbreak attacks, and comparing attacks. Most jailbreak attacks expose multiple internal parameters, system prompt templates, conversation rounds, cipher dispersion, teaching shots, and ASR varies substantially across these parameters. Reporting only the best-case configuration discards two pieces of information that defenders genuinely need: how typical that performance is across the variant space, and how much of the attack surface is missed by selecting a single variant. We propose two new measures for jailbreak attacks: the Variant Sensitivity Measure (VSM) and Union Coverage (UC). VSM quantifies how far the best reported ASR deviates from the mean ASR across the tested variant space, UC is the total fraction of prompts resulting in unsafe responses across all tested configurations. We empirically demonstrate the importance of these measures using two attack families across three open-source target models. For PAIR, the best template reaches 69% ASR on Mistral-7B and 75% on Qwen3-0.6B, while UC rises to 88% and 93%, respectively. For bijection on Mistral-7B, the best variant reaches 81% ASR, but the 36-variant union covers 100% of HarmBench-100 prompts. We argue that distributional reporting, publishing VSM alongside ASR and enumerating variant coverage as fully as compute allows, should become the new minimum standard for parameterised jailbreak evaluation.
Authors: Haejoon Lee, Vincent-Daniel Yun, Hyeonho Oh, Dimitra Panagou, Sai Praneeth Karimireddy
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly collaborate over peer-to-peer networks to improve their reliability. However, these same interactions can also become a source of vulnerability, as unreliable or Byzantine agents may sway neighboring agents toward incorrect conclusions and degrade overall system performance. Existing methods rely on leader-based coordination or self-reported confidence, both of which are susceptible to adversarial manipulation. We study decentralized LLM multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS) and propose Self-Anchored Consensus (SAC), a fully decentralized iterative filter-and-refine protocol in which agents iteratively exchange responses, locally evaluate and filter unreliable messages, and refine their own outputs. We present $(F{+}1)$-robustness conditions for the communication graph that ensure honest agents preserve and propagate reliable information despite Byzantine influence. Experiments on mathematical and commonsense reasoning benchmarks show that SAC effectively suppresses Byzantine influence and consistently improves performance across diverse communication topologies, whereas prior methods degrade under adversarial conditions.
Authors: Karim Othman, Jonas Petersen, Matei Ignuta-Ciuncanu, Riccardo Maggioni, Camilla Mazzoleni, Federico Martelli, Philipp Petersen
Abstract: We introduce the first universal pretraining corpus for industrial time-series data: FactoryNet. 51M datapoints across 23k end-to-end task executions (13.3k real, 9.8k synthetic) on six embodiments, unified by a shared schema that enables robust zero-shot cross-embodiment transfer and highly parameter-efficient anomaly detection. We introduce a novel schema: Setpoint, Effort, Feedback, Context (S-E-F-C) underlying the whole pipeline that maps any actuated system into a common representational frame. The corpus spans 27 annotated anomaly types alongside healthy baselines and counterfactual pairs across robotic manipulation and machining domains. Cross-embodiment transfer experiments yield positive results: under bias-aware metrics our model demonstrates fair cross-embodiment transfer capabilities on the evaluated source-target pair, while 24 schema-aligned signals achieves competitive anomaly detection performance compared to high-dimensional baselines. We release FactoryNet as a growing, multi-embodiment dataset to drive progress toward industrial foundation models.
Authors: Abhishek Kumar, Riya Tapwal, Carsten Maple, Mark Hooper
Abstract: Digital identity verification systems used in remote onboarding rely on document images to authenticate users, making them vulnerable to localized manipulations of key identity fields such as facial photographs and textual information. Existing forgery detection methods, developed primarily for natural-image forensics, show limited transferability to structured identity documents. We propose FLiD, a lightweight field-localized framework that targets critical identity regions rather than processing full-document images. A fine-tuned object detector first localizes face and text fields; a frozen MobileNetV3-Small backbone then extracts compact field-level embeddings, which are classified by lightweight neural network with only 191K trainable parameters. FLiD achieves AUC scores of 0.880 (face), 0.954 (text), and 0.923 (both-field attacks), with corresponding EERs of 18.05%, 11.61%, and 15.16%, representing absolute reductions of 29-35 percentage points over a full-document baseline trained from scratch. FLiD also consistently outperforms general-purpose manipulation detectors (TruFor, MMFusion, UniVAD) across all attack scenarios while requiring 13x fewer parameters and 21x fewer FLOPs
Authors: Gabriele Lombardo, Luigi Maiorana, Liliana Lo Presti, Marco La Cascia
Abstract: Visual Grounding benchmarks assume that the object described by a referring expression is always present in the image, and grounding models are therefore rarely evaluated under semantically mismatched captions. In such cases, models frequently exhibit approximation behavior, producing a plausible bounding box that satisfies only part of the expression (\eg, preserving the original object while ignoring modified contextual cues). Because mismatched captions represent realistic edge cases, this behavior compromises reliability and raises concerns from an explainability perspective. Identifying its underlying causes is thus essential for improving model faithfulness and interpretability. Adopting a mechanistic interpretability viewpoint, this work examines whether embedding anisotropy contributes to counterfactual failures. A similarity-controlled counterfactual caption generation protocol is introduced to systematically perturb object or contextual components within predefined embedding similarity intervals, enabling a fine-grained analysis of grounding behavior as a function of alignment. Experiments on two Transformer-based models with markedly different embedding geometries (BERT-based TransVG and CLIP-based SwimVG) reveal no meaningful correlation between cosine similarity and approximation. These findings suggest that anisotropy alone does not account for counterfactual errors, and that robustness requires investigating finer-grained geometric properties of the embedding space.
Authors: Noam Mizrachi, Nadav Har-Tuv, Shai Shalev-Shwartz
Abstract: Selecting a coherent sequence or subset of elements is a fundamental problem in structured prediction, arising in tasks such as detection, trajectory forecasting, and representative subset selection. In many such settings, the target is inherently ambiguous: each input admits multiple valid outputs, while supervision provides only a single sampled instance. This induces a mismatch between the underlying multi-modal target distribution and the observed training signal. We propose Contextual Plackett-Luce (CPL), a structured probabilistic model for sequence selection that extends the classical Plackett-Luce model to a context-dependent setting following an Ising-style parameterization with unary and pairwise interaction terms. CPL can be viewed as a hybrid between fully autoregressive prediction and parallel sequence selection: autoregressive models effectively capture uncertainty but are computationally expensive on modern parallel hardware such as GPUs, while parallel methods are efficient but struggle to represent multi-modal dependencies. CPL combines the strengths of both by constructing the parameters of a probabilistic selection model in a fully parallel manner, followed by a lightweight autoregressive selection process in which each step applies incremental updates to contextual logits. This decoupling of parallel scoring and sequential selection enables efficient computation without sacrificing expressivity. We evaluate CPL on two structured selection tasks: multi-modal path prediction and representative subset selection. CPL achieves improved structural consistency and robustness under ambiguous supervision compared to strong parallel baselines.
Authors: Gal Engelberg, Leon Goldberg, Konstantin Koutsyi, Boris Plotnikov, Tiltan Gilat, Ben Benhemo
Abstract: Modern security environments generate fragmented signals across cloud resources, identities, configurations, and third-party security tools. Although AI-native security assistants improve access to this data, they remain largely reactive: users must ask the right questions and interpret disconnected findings. This does not scale in enterprise environments, where signal importance depends on exposure, exploitability, dependencies, and business context. Repeated AI queries may therefore produce unstable prioritization without a structured basis for comparing assets. This paper introduces AI-native asset intelligence, a framework that transforms heterogeneous security data into a structured intelligence layer for consistent, contextual, and proactive asset-level reasoning. The framework combines a modeling layer, representing assets, identities, relationships, controls, attack vectors, and blast-radius patterns, with a scoring layer that converts fragmented signals into a normalized measure of asset importance. The scoring system separates intrinsic exposure, based on misconfigurations and attack-vector evidence, from contextual importance, based on anomaly, blast radius, business criticality, and data criticality. AI contextualization refines severity and business/data classifications, while deterministic aggregation preserves consistency. We evaluate the scoring system on a production snapshot with 131,625 resources across 15 vendors and 178 asset types. Sensitivity analyses and ablations show that severity mappings control finding sensitivity, AI severity adjustment refines prioritization, attack-vector scoring responds to rare exploitability evidence, and contextual modulation selectively modifies exposed resources based on business or data importance. The results support AI-native asset intelligence as a foundation for stable prioritization and proactive security-posture reasoning.
Authors: Enoch Hyunwook Kang
Abstract: Personalized alignment aims to adapt large language models to heterogeneous user preferences, yet the precise theoretical conditions for its statistical efficiency have not been formally established. This paper characterizes the conditions under which personalized alignment achieves O(1) online regret and log(1/epsilon) offline sample complexity. We show that these optimal rates depend on a specific user-diversity condition: the population of user-specific heads must span the latent reward directions that can alter the optimal response. We prove that this condition is both necessary and sufficient. When it holds, simple greedy algorithms achieve benchmark efficiency; when it fails, every learner in a natural admissible class incurs at least logarithmic regret. Our results identify user diversity as the fundamental driver of personalized identifiability.
Authors: Hamed Omidvar, Vahideh Akhlaghi
Abstract: Agents built on large language models (LLMs) rely on a range of reliability techniques, including retry, majority voting, and self-consistency, that have been developed in parallel rather than within a common analytical framework. We observe that an LLM sampled at temperature $T$ is a discrete stochastic channel $p(y \mid x)$ in the sense of Shannon's coding theory, and use this identity as the entry point for such a framework grounded in communication theory. Each of these techniques is a special case of one of six classical reliability operators: diversity combining, hybrid retransmission, iterative generator-critic decoding, rateless sampling, structured redundant verification, and difficulty-adaptive routing. Within the framework we give two closed-form results: a noise-variance threshold above which uniform averaging beats quality-weighted averaging, and a contractivity criterion for generator-critic refinement, consistent with a contractive-to-divergent transition we observe between 3B- and 14B-parameter models. We further introduce a cost-aware semantic-nearest-neighbor router whose single Lagrangian knob traverses the quality-cost frontier without retraining. Across six channel configurations spanning local and cloud models on 69 hard tasks, no fixed model-technique-budget choice dominates, motivating per-task allocation. On a 300-item hard split of MMLU, GSM8K, and HumanEval, our router occupies the full empirical Pareto frontier: at matched quality, its normalized cost is ${\approx}56$\% lower than the strongest fixed technique; at matched normalized cost, it improves quality by ${\approx}7$\% ($26$\% over single-shot decoding). These results argue for consolidating these reliability techniques into a single tunable layer informed by channel coding.
Authors: Hershraj Niranjani, Ujwal Kumar, Phan Xuan Tan
Abstract: Multi-agent AI systems need behavioral constitutions, but it is unresolved whether such rules should emerge internally through agent self-governance or be discovered externally through optimization. We present the first controlled comparison of internal deliberation and external evolution across three social environments: a coordination grid-world, an iterated public goods game, and a bilateral trading market. Across 180 simulation runs, evolution significantly outperforms deliberation in collective-action settings (p < 0.01), while neither method improves outcomes in bilateral trading. A multiplier ablation reveals that evolution's advantage inverts when incentives shift: at pool multiplier (m = 0.75) the evolved constitution forces value-destroying cooperation and becomes the worst-performing method. Notably, no deliberation run across thirty trials ever proposed punishment -- the canonical cooperation-sustaining mechanism evolution reliably discovers -- suggesting external optimization wins on peaks while internal self-governance trades peaks for structural responsiveness.
Authors: Matthias Sch\"offel, Esteban Garces Arias
Abstract: Part-of-speech (POS) tagging for Medieval Romance languages remains challenging due to orthographic variation, morphological complexity, and limited annotated resources. This paper presents a systematic empirical evaluation of large language models (LLMs) for POS tagging across three medieval varieties: Medieval Occitan, Medieval Catalan, and Medieval French. We compare traditional rule-based and statistical taggers with modern open-source LLMs under zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, monolingual fine-tuning, and cross-lingual transfer learning settings. Experiments on historically grounded datasets show that LLM-based approaches consistently outperform traditional taggers, with fine-tuning and multilingual training yielding the largest improvements. In particular, cross-lingual transfer learning substantially benefits under-resourced varieties, while targeted bilingual training can outperform broader multilingual configurations for specific target languages. The results highlight the importance of linguistic proximity and dataset characteristics when designing transfer strategies for historical NLP. These findings provide empirical insights into the applicability of modern neural methods to medieval text processing and provide practical guidance for deploying LLM-based POS tagging pipelines in digital humanities research. All code, models, and processed datasets are released for reproducibility.
Authors: Weifan Zhang, Xiaofeng Zhao, Adel Bazzi, Mingrui Li, Yifan Wei, Dengfeng Sun
Abstract: Closed-loop traffic simulation requires agents that are both scalable and behaviorally realistic. Recent self-play reinforcement learning approaches demonstrate strong scalability, but their equilibrium strategies fail to capture the socially aware behaviors of real human drivers. We propose a hierarchical architecture that goes beyond self-play by combining high-level multi-agent interaction reasoning with low-level continuous trajectory realization. Specifically, a Stackelberg-style Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) module generates interaction-aware intention commands. These commands condition a low-level continuous motion module, translating the strategic intent into physically consistent, scene-responsive control sequences. To mitigate distribution shift in closed-loop deployment, we introduce a hybrid co-training scheme combining MARL with auxiliary recovery supervision. Experiments on a SUMO-based urban network demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves superior control smoothness and safety compared to self-play and passive imitation baselines, while maintaining competitive traffic efficiency.
Authors: Ahan Chatterjee, Matthias Sch\"offel, Matthias A{\ss}enmacher, Esteban Garces Arias
Abstract: The diachronic evolution from Latin to the Romance languages involved a restructuring of the grammatical gender system from a tripartite configuration (masculine, feminine, neuter) to a bipartite one (masculine, feminine). In this work, we introduce an interpretable deep learning framework to investigate this phenomenon at both lexical and contextual levels. First, we show that conventional tokenization strategies are insufficiently robust for this low-resource historical setting, and that our proposed tokenizer improves performance over these baselines. At the lexical level, we evaluate the contribution of morphological features to gender prediction. At the contextual level, we quantify the contributions of different part-of-speech categories to grammatical gender prediction. Together, these analyses characterize the distribution of gender information between the lemma and its sentential context. We make our codebase, datasets, and results publicly available.
Authors: Jiamin He, Samuel Neumann, Jincheng Mei, Adam White, Martha White
Abstract: Mixture policies theoretically offer greater flexibility than unimodal policies in continuous action reinforcement learning, but the practical benefits of this complexity remain elusive. Mixture policies are notably absent from most state-of-the-art algorithms, raising a fundamental question: Is the added representational overhead useful? We show that increased flexibility can theoretically enhance solution quality and entropy robustness. Yet standard algorithms like SAC do not leverage these advantages. A core issue is the lack of a low-variance reparameterization trick for mixtures, a luxury Gaussian policies enjoy. We propose a marginalized reparameterization (MRP) estimator to address this, proving it offers lower variance than the standard likelihood-ratio (LR) approach. Our experiments across Gym MuJoCo, DeepMind Control Suite, and MetaWorld show that MRP mixture policies significantly outperform their LR ones, and reach parity (sometimes better) with Gaussian counterparts. In addition, we do find several cases where MRP mixture policies exhibit clear empirical advantages. In this paper, we provide a clearer understanding of the trade-offs involved, elevating MRP mixture policies from theoretical curiosity to a practical tool.
Authors: Antonis Asonitis, Luca A. Lanzend\"orfer, Fr\'ed\'eric Berdoz, Roger Wattenhofer
Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) performs well for high-resource languages with abundant paired audio-transcript data, but its accuracy degrades sharply for most languages due to limited publicly available aligned data. To this end, we introduce WorldSpeech, a 24 kHz multilingual speech corpus comprising 65k hours of aligned audio-transcript data across 76 languages, collected from diverse public sources including parliamentary proceedings, international broadcasts, and public-domain audiobooks. For 37 languages, WorldSpeech provides more than 200 hours of aligned speech, with 28 exceeding 500 hours and 24 surpassing 1k hours. Fine-tuning existing ASR models on WorldSpeech results in an average relative Word-Error-Rate reduction of 63.5% across 11 typologically diverse languages.
Authors: Ankit Hemant Lade, Sai Krishna Jasti, Indar Kumar, Aman Chadha
Abstract: A Mamba state-space model trained only for next-step prediction appears to recover Granger-causal structure through a simple readout $S = |W_{out} W_{in}|$, with early experiments suggesting the phenomenon generalized across architectures and benefited from interventional data at $p < 10^{-5}$. We package the protocol used to test that claim -- standardized synthetic generators (VAR/Lorenz/CauseMe-style), three intervention semantics ($do(X=c)$, soft-noise, random-forcing), edge-provenance cards on three real datasets, and size-matched control arms -- as a reusable falsification benchmark, and walk the claim through it in five stages. The method-level claim does not survive: (i) a plain linear bottleneck does as well or better; (ii) tuned Lasso beats the bottleneck on synthetic CauseMe-style benchmarks, and on Lorenz-96 (the only real benchmark with unambiguous ground truth) classical PCMCI and Granger lead a tight cluster in which the bottleneck trails; (iii) the headline intervention advantage is roughly 60% a sample-size confound, and the residual disappears under standard $do(X=c)$ interventions, surviving only under a non-standard random-forcing scheme; (iv) even that residual reproduces, with a larger effect, in classical bivariate Granger -- the effect is method-agnostic. What survives is a narrow characterization result; the benchmark is the lasting artifact, and each stage above is one of its control arms.
Authors: Peng Cao, Zhijian Yang, Tennison Liu, Jonathan Wang, Jiang Wu, Magdalena Proszewska, Arvind Pillai, Mingwu Gao, Amir Farjadian, Lawrence Cai, Emily Blanchard, Daniel McDuff, Pramod Rudrapatna, Matthew Thompson, Anupam Pathak, Mark Malhotra, Shwetak Patel, Dina Katabi, Paolo Di Achille, Ming-Zher Poh
Abstract: Wearable sensors enable the continuous acquisition of high-resolution physiological waveforms, such as photoplethysmography and accelerometry, under free-living conditions. However, inferring health-related phenotypes from these signals presents significant challenges due to high sampling frequencies, multimodal dependencies, and extreme sequence lengths (e.g., weeks of recordings), compounded by a scarcity of ground-truth labels. To address these challenges, existing self-supervised learning (SSL) methodologies typically follow two paradigms: (1) learning rich morphological representations from short waveform segments while collapsing longitudinal dynamics through simple aggregation, or (2) modeling behavioral patterns from coarse, hand-crafted features (e.g. heart rate, step counts) spanning longer horizons but foregoing subtle, predictive signatures in raw waveforms. To bridge this gap, we propose WavesFM, a foundation model utilizing a two-stage SSL framework for longitudinal physiological data. Specifically, we decompose the learning problem into two stages: first, a segment-level encoder is pretrained to extract local embeddings from short waveforms; subsequently, a temporal encoder is trained to model the sequence of these embeddings across a multi-day horizon. This hierarchical approach overcomes the computational complexity of high-resolution, long-sequence data, allowing the overall model to capture both local signal semantics and the complex circadian and inter-day variations governing physiological dynamics. Pretrained on over 6.8M hours (N=324k individuals) of recordings for the first stage and 5.3M hours (N=10k) for the second stage, WavesFM demonstrates superior performance across 58 diverse tasks spanning demographics, lifestyle, health conditions, and medications.
Authors: Aditya Ranganath
Abstract: Training large language models requires optimization algorithms that are not only statistically effective, but also computationally and memory efficient at extreme scale. Although Adam remains the dominant optimizer for large-scale language-model pretraining and fine-tuning, recent work has revisited nearly every component of the optimization stack: adaptive moment estimation, decoupled weight decay, memory footprint, curvature approximation, sign-based updates, large-batch stability, low-rank gradient structure, and matrix-wise orthogonalized updates. This survey reviews optimizer design for large language models through a systems-and-optimization lens. We organize the literature into classical first-order optimizers, adaptive optimizers, memory-efficient variants, second-order and curvature-aware methods, sign-based and discovered optimizers, low-rank and projection-based methods, and matrix-based optimizers such as Muon. We also discuss benchmarking methodology, including hyperparameter fairness, scale dependence, wall-clock efficiency, token efficiency, memory overhead, and downstream evaluation. We argue that optimizer research for LLMs is entering a new phase: moving from single-algorithm speedup claims toward rigorous, scale-aware comparisons that jointly evaluate convergence, stability, memory, and implementation complexity.
Authors: Yang Zhou, Can Jin, Zihan Dong, Zhepeng Wang, Yanting Yang, Shiyu Zhao, Lei Li, Runxue Bao, Yaochen Xie, Dimitris N. Metaxas
Abstract: Reinforcement learning improves the reasoning ability of large language models but remains costly and sample-inefficient, as many rollouts provide weak learning signals. Difficulty-aware data selection methods attempt to address this by prioritizing moderately difficult prompts, yet our analysis reveals three limitations: difficulty estimates become inaccurate under policy drift, data selection alone yields limited final-performance gains, and inference efficiency remains largely unchanged. These findings suggest that efficient and effective RL requires more than filtering by difficulty: the policy should learn to solve hard tasks while producing concise responses for easy ones. To this end, we propose **Dare**, a unified framework that co-evolves difficulty estimation with the policy via self-normalized importance sampling, maintains diverse difficulty coverage through a symmetric Beta sampling distribution, and applies tailored training strategies across difficulty tiers with adaptive compute allocation. Extensive experiments across multiple models and domains demonstrate that **Dare** consistently outperforms existing methods in training efficiency, final effectiveness, and inference efficiency, producing more concise responses on easy tasks while improving correctness on hard ones. Code is available at https://github.com/EtaYang10th/DARE.
Authors: Zhiyang Dou, Minghao Guo, Haixu Wu, Doug Roble, Tuur Stuyck, Wojciech Matusik
Abstract: Learning-based simulation of multi-object rigid-body dynamics remains difficult because contact is discontinuous and errors compound over long horizons. Most existing methods remain tied to mesh connectivity and vertex-level message passing, which limits their applicability to mesh-free inputs such as point clouds and leads to high computational cost. Efficiently modeling high-fidelity rigid-body dynamics from mesh-free representations, therefore, remains challenging. We introduce RigidFormer, an object-centric Transformer-based model that learns mesh-free rigid-body dynamics with controllable integration step sizes. RigidFormer reasons at the object level and advances each object through compact anchors; Anchor-Vertex Pooling enriches these anchors with local vertex features, retaining contact-relevant geometry without dense vertex-level interaction. We propose Anchor-based RoPE to inject anchor geometry into attention while respecting the unordered nature of objects and anchors: object-token processing is permutation-equivariant, and the mean-pooled anchor descriptor is invariant to anchor reindexing while preserving shape extent. RigidFormer further enforces rigidity by projecting updates onto the rigid-body manifold using differentiable Kabsch alignment. On standard benchmarks, RigidFormer outperforms or matches mesh-based baselines using point inputs, runs faster, generalizes to unseen point resolutions and across datasets, and scales to 200+ objects; we also show a preliminary extension to command-conditioned articulated bodies by treating body parts as interacting object-level components.
Authors: Saeed Masiha, Zebang Shen, Negar Kiyavash, Niao He
Abstract: We study optimistic bilevel optimization when the lower-level problem has a non-isolated manifold of minimizers. In this setting, the hyper-objective may be non-differentiable because the upper-level criterion must choose among multiple lower-level solutions. Under a local Polyak--{\L}ojasiewicz (P{\L}) condition, we show that differentiability does not require the lower-level solution set to be a singleton: uniqueness of the optimistic selection is sufficient. This yields an explicit pseudoinverse-based hyper-gradient formula extending the classical singleton-minimizer result. We further characterize the regularity of the hyper-objective: non-degeneracy of the selected minimizer along the solution manifold yields local smoothness, while failure of uniqueness can create many non-differentiable points and failure of non-degeneracy can destroy all positive H\"older regularity of the hyper-gradient. Motivated by this theory, we propose HG-MS, a select-then-differentiate method combining explicit optimistic selection with efficient pseudoinverse-based hyper-gradient computation. Despite the nonconvex nature of optimistic selection over the lower-level solution manifold, we show that HG-MS converges to a stationary point of the optimistic objective with complexity governed by the intrinsic dimension of the solution manifold rather than its ambient dimension. Empirically, we test a practical variant of HG-MS for matched-budget LLM source reweighting. This variant preserves the select-then-differentiate principle and obtains the best GSM8K/MATH scores across the tested backbones, along with competitive or best MT-Bench instruction-following results.
Authors: Qingyue Zhao, Kaixuan Ji, Heyang Zhao, Quanquan Gu
Abstract: \emph{Kullback-Leibler} (KL) regularization is ubiquitous in reinforcement learning algorithms in the form of \emph{reverse} or \emph{forward} KL. Recent studies have demonstrated $\epsilon^{-1}$-type fast rates for decision making under reverse KL regularization, in contrast to the standard $\epsilon^{-2}$-type sample complexity. However, for forward-KL-regularized objectives, existing statistical analyses are either not applicable or result in $\tilde{O}(\epsilon^{-2})$ slow rates. We take the first step towards addressing this problem via a streamlined analysis of forward-KL-regularized offline CBs. We give the first $\tilde{O}(\epsilon^{-1})$ upper bounds in tabular and general function approximation settings, both under notions of \emph{single-policy concentrability}. In particular, our convex-analytical pipeline unifies these settings by exploiting the pessimism principle in a novel way and completely bypasses the proof routines in previous works based on the mean value theorem, which might be of independent interest. Moreover, we provide rate-optimal lower bounds, manifesting the tightness of our upper bounds in terms of statistical rates. Our lower bounds also demonstrate that the forward-KL-regularized sample complexity recovers the unregularized slow rate in the low-regularization regime, similarly to the reverse-KL regularization.
Authors: Sagar Bharadwaj, Ziyong Ma, Anurag Ghosh, Srinivasan Seshan, Anthony Rowe
Abstract: 3D scene understanding spans reasoning about free space, object grounding, hypothetical object insertions, complex geometric relationships, and integrating all of these with external tools and data sources. Existing 3D understanding methods typically rely on large-scale 3D-language training or focus on object grounding and simple spatial relationships. We argue that the broad generalization that motivates 3D-language training can be achieved at inference time, without 3D-specific training. We propose Flame3D, a training-free framework that represents scenes as editable visual-textual 3D memories and exposes them to an off-the-shelf MLLM through composable spatial tools. Flame3D also lets the agent synthesize custom spatial programs at inference time, enabling open-ended reasoning over layouts, empty space, and objects not yet present in the scene. External data and corrections can be added to the memory without retraining. In addition to showing competitive performance to finetuned 3D-LMM methods on ScanQA, we study multi-hop 3D reasoning capabilities of Flame3D by evaluating it on a curated compositional spatial-reasoning benchmark, Compose3D. We find that fixed tools fall short and that the agent's ability to synthesize spatial operations at inference time is essential. These results invite the question: should future progress in 3D scene understanding focus on richer scene memories and expressive compositional abstractions?
Authors: Daniel Matsui Smola, Alex Smola
Abstract: Fairness impossibility results often look like distinct scalar incompatibility statements. We show that several share one RKHS geometry: fairness criteria are linear constraints on conditional mean embeddings, and unequal base rates make the law of total expectation overdetermine those constraints. This view yields four results. The Kleinberg--Mullainathan--Raghavan dichotomy needs only group-conditional unbiasedness, not full calibration. The \emph{Pok\'emon theorem} shows that a distinct group pair satisfying any finite collection of linear mean-fairness criteria leaves a residual violation witnessed by the MMD, decaying at the Kolmogorov $m$-width rate under spectral regularity. The same tools prove an impossibility for fair feature learning: parity and class-conditional separation in representation space force class collapse under unequal base rates. The approximate relaxations yield signal and error frontiers, allowing a trade-off between real-world estimators and fairness goals. Experiments on standard fairness benchmarks are consistent with our bounds.
Authors: Lei Ma, Suhani Chaudhary, Ethan Shanbaum, Athanasios Tassiadamis, Peter M. VanNostrand, Dennis M. Hofmann, Haowen Xu, Elke Rundensteiner
Abstract: Logs are ubiquitous in modern systems. Unfortunately, their unstructured nature in flat sequences limits understanding of execution behaviors, hindering effective anomaly diagnosis. To address this, Krone introduces a novel hierarchical log abstraction that transforms flat log sequences into semantically coherent units across entity, action, and status levels. Building on this abstraction, Krone introduces a hierarchical orchestration framework that decomposes flat log sequences into hierarchical execution units and performs modular detection over them. It executes and optimizes the modular detection tasks across levels, enabling precise anomaly detection, localization, and explanation with selective invocation of LLM-based reasoning. In this work, we present Krone-viz, an interactive visualization system based on Krone, which makes hierarchical log analysis interpretable and actionable for software engineers and system operators. Demonstrated on the widely used HDFS benchmark dataset, Krone-viz supports: 1) examining hierarchical decompositions of flat log sequences, 2) inspecting detection results and abnormal segments identified by Krone with LLM-generated explanations, and 3) reusing, reviewing, and revising knowledge generated by LLMs with human-in-the-loop guardrails. The code of Krone-viz is available at https://github.com/LeiMa0324/KRONE_Demo_official, and we deploy a live demo at https://leima0324.github.io/KRONE_Demo_official.
URLs: https://github.com/LeiMa0324/KRONE_Demo_official,, https://leima0324.github.io/KRONE_Demo_official.
Authors: Ismail Hossain, Tanzim Ahad, Md Jahangir Alam, Sai Puppala, Syed Bahauddin Alam, Sajedul Talukder
Abstract: Jailbreak attacks -- adversarial prompts that bypass LLM alignment through purely linguistic manipulation -- pose a growing operational security threat, yet the field lacks large-scale, reproducible infrastructure for generating, categorizing, and evaluating them systematically. This paper addresses that gap with three contributions. (1) Large-scale compositional jailbreak dataset. We construct 114,000 adversarial prompts by applying 912 composing strategies to 125 harmful seed prompts from JailBreakV-28K. Every prompt is assigned to one of 14 cybersecurity attack categories (e.g., malware, phishing, privilege escalation) via a six-model majority-vote pipeline, and each strategy is ranked by effectiveness per category, enabling principled strategy selection grounded in concrete adversarial objectives. (2) Automated jailbreak generation. We instruction-fine-tune category-aware LLMs on Moderate and Optimal subsets, producing models that synthesize fluent jailbreak prompts from a harmful seed at inference time -- no templates, no gradient search. Our generators achieve perplexity 24-39 versus 40-140 for AutoDAN and AmpleGCG, with safety-filter evasion rates of 0.29-0.51 Mal (LlamaPromptGuard-2-86M), enabling controllable, scalable red-teaming under realistic adversarial conditions. (3) OPTIMUS: a training-free jailbreak evaluator. OPTIMUS is a continuous metric J(S,H) that jointly captures semantic similarity between the harmful seed and the jailbreak (S) and harmfulness probability (H) via calibrated penalty functions. Unlike binary attack success rate (ASR), OPTIMUS requires no task-specific training, generalizes across evolving strategies, and exposes a stealth-optimal regime (S*=0.57, H*=0.43) that ASR misses. Experiments across 114,000 prompts confirm that OPTIMUS separates Weak, Moderate, and Optimal jailbreaks with category-level evidence binary evaluation cannot supply.
Authors: Sepehr Harfi, Ahmad Salimi, Dongming Shen, Alex Smola
Abstract: Most LLM benchmarks score how well a model responds to explicit requests. They leave unmeasured a different conversational ability: noticing and acting on needs the user has implied but not said. We call this \emph{conversational proactivity}. ProactBench decomposes it into three phase-tied types: \textsc{Emergent}, inference from a single disclosed anchor; \textsc{Critical}, synthesis across multiple anchors; and \textsc{Recovery}, grounded forward-looking value after task completion. We operationalise the benchmark with three agents: a Planner, a User Agent, and an Assistant Model. Their information asymmetries defend against style-confounded scoring, rubric leakage, external-context contamination, and information dumps. The released corpus contains 198 curated dialogues with 624 trigger points across 24 communication styles drawn from a psychometric inventory and audited by an independent LLM judge. Across 16 frontier and open-weight models, \textsc{Recovery} is both difficult and weakly predicted by six standard benchmarks, making it a useful new evaluation signal.
Authors: Zilai Zeng, Mingdeng Cao, Zijie Li, Xiaochen Lian, Yichun Shi, Peihao Zhu, Chen Sun, Peng Wang
Abstract: Recent advances in visual generative models have enabled high-fidelity image editing guided by human instructions. However, these models often struggle with complex instructions involving combinatorial editing operations or inter-step dependencies. This difficulty stems from the limitations of two canonical paradigms: (1) single-turn editing, which attempts to apply all instructed edits in one pass, often fails to parse the complex instruction accurately and causes undesired edits; and (2) sequential editing can decompose the task into simpler steps but suffers from compounding errors introduced by the sequential execution, leading to low-fidelity results. To derive a robust solution for complex image editing, we examine editing behaviors of different paradigms under a unified in-context editing framework, and study how the benefits of sequential decomposition can be balanced against its error-accumulation drawbacks. We further develop a synthetic data pipeline that constructs editing tasks of varying instruction complexity, allowing us to curate a large-scale editing dataset with high-quality decomposed sequences. By finetuning on synthetic data, we discovered that with properly designed editing paradigms, sequential decomposition yields robust improvements even as task complexity increases. Furthermore, the decomposition skills learned from synthetic tasks can transfer to real images by co-training with real-world editing data, demonstrating the promise of sim-to-real generalization for tackling complex image editing across broader domains.
Authors: Juanwu Lu, Ziran Wang
Abstract: One-step generative modeling has emerged as a leading approach to amortize the inference cost of diffusion and flow-matching models. Among distillation-free methods, MeanFlow training is notoriously unstable, with non-decreasing loss and unbounded gradient variance. In this work, we establish a theory that attributes this pathology to a misuse of the conditional velocity field: it plays two distinct statistical roles in the loss, both as an unbiased regression target and as a Monte Carlo control variate inside a Jacobi-vector product, with the original loss assigning the wrong coefficient to the latter. We derive the optimal coefficient in closed form, and show that a family of fixes in concurrent works corresponds to different practical realizations of the same optimum. A controlled sweep of this coefficient on two-dimensional benchmarks and on a latent Diffusion Transformer recovers the predicted bias-variance ordering. The optimal coefficient yields up to a %54 improvement in sample quality on two-dimensional benchmarks and a monotone FID trend at every matched-step DiT checkpoint. Crucially, the same DiT measurement also reveals a quantitative FID-MSE landscape mismatch: although gradient variance is minimized at an interior coefficient value, the coefficient that minimizes FID prefers the direct use of conditional velocity.
Authors: Yu Wu, Ananth Mahadevan, Filip Ginter, Michael Mathioudakis, Mikko Tolonen
Abstract: While digitized corpora have transformed the study of intellectual transmission, current methods rely heavily on lexical text reuse detection, capturing verbatim quotations but fundamentally missing paraphrases and complex implicit engagement. This paper evaluates semantic search in 18th-century intellectual history through the reception of John Locke's foundational work. Using expert annotation grounded in a semantic taxonomy, we examine whether an off-the-shelf semantic search pipeline can surface meaning-level correspondences overlooked by lexical methods. Our results demonstrate that semantic search retrieves substantially more implicit receptions than lexical baselines. However, linguistic diagnostics also reveal a "lexical gatekeeping" effect, where retrieval remains partially constrained by surface vocabulary overlap. These findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of semantic retrieval for analyzing the circulation of ideas in large historical corpora. The data is available at https://github.com/COMHIS/locke-sim-data.
Authors: Yibang Li, Bihari Lal Pandey, Ravi Sah, Andi Han, Cyrus Mostajeran, Pratik Jawanpuria, Bamdev Mishra
Abstract: Muon and related norm-constrained matrix optimizers have become central to large-scale learning problems. They are formulated as a linear maximization oracle (LMO) over an ambient matrix-norm ball in unconstrained Euclidean space. However, these do not generalize cleanly to manifold-valued parameters such as low-rank factorizations, orthogonality constraints, or symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices. Naively restricting the Muon LMO to the tangent space (i) breaks quotient symmetries and (ii) couples the tangent-space constraint with an ambient norm bound, thereby obstructing closed-form solutions on various manifolds of interest. We resolve both issues with a single observation: every Riemannian metric canonically lifts a unitarily invariant Euclidean norm to an intrinsic norm on each tangent space, and the resulting intrinsic norm constrained LMO is symmetry preserving. Building on this, we introduce intrinsic Muon (iMuon), a unified framework that yields closed-form updates on the fixed-rank, SPD, Stiefel, and Grassmann manifolds for any unitarily invariant norm, including the spectral, Frobenius, and nuclear norms. We establish convergence guarantees for both deterministic and stochastic iMuon with rate constants that depend only on the manifold dimension. Notably, on the fixed-rank manifold this constant depends only on the rank, making the rate independent of factor conditioning and removing the runtime factor-rescaling required by prior work. Experiments on LoRA finetuning of LLMs, image classification, and subspace learning illustrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.
Authors: Kai Zhao, Dongliang Nie, Yuchen Lin, Zhehan Luo, Yixiao Gu, Deng-Ping Fan, Dan Zeng
Abstract: Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) provide a simpleframework for learning world models by predicting future latent representations.However, JEPA training is subject to a bias-variance tradeoff.Without sufficient structural constraints, excessive representationalvariance causes the model to collapse to trivial solutions.The recent LeWorldModel (LeWM) shows that this issue can be alleviated bysimply constraining latent embeddings with an isotropic Gaussian prior.However, latent representations inherently lie on low-dimensional manifoldswithin a high-dimensional ambient space, and enforcing an isotropic Gaussianprior directly in this ambient space introduces an overly strong bias.In this work, we propose ame, which seeks a favorable operatingpoint on the bias-variance frontier by applying Gaussian constraints inmultiple random subspaces rather than in the originalembedding space.This design relaxes the global constraint while preserving itsanti-collapse effect, leading to a better balance between trainingstability and representation flexibility.Extensive experiments across fourcontinuous-control environments demonstrate that consistentlyoutperforms LeWM with very clear margins.Our method is simple yet effective, and serves as a strong baseline for future JEPA-based world model research.fdefinedeeemodeThe code is available at https://github.com/intcomp/Sub-JEPA.
Authors: Yuxuan Jiang, Runchao Li, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Dawei Li, Zhao Yang
Abstract: While recent work in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has shown that a small subset of critical tokens disproportionately drives reasoning gains, an analogous token-level understanding of On-Policy Distillation (OPD) remains largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate high-loss tokens, a token type that--as the most direct signal of student-teacher mismatch under OPD's per-token KL objective--should progressively diminish as training converges according to existing studies; however, our empirical analysis shows otherwise. Even after OPD training reaches apparent saturation, a substantial subset of tokens continues to exhibit persistently high loss; these tokens, which we term Rock Tokens, can account for up to 18\% of the tokens in generated outputs. Our investigation reveals two startling paradoxes. First, despite their high occurrence frequency providing a disproportionately large share of total gradient norms, Rock Tokens themselves remain stagnant throughout training, resisting teacher-driven corrections. Second, through causal intervention, we find that these tokens provide negligible functional contribution to the model's actual reasoning performance. These findings suggest that a vast amount of optimization bandwidth is spent on structural and discourse residuals that the student model cannot or need not internalize. By deconstructing these dynamics, we demonstrate that strategically bypassing these ``stumbling blocks'' can significantly streamline the alignment process, challenging the necessity of uniform token weighting and offering a more efficient paradigm for large-scale model distillation.
Authors: Shuhei Kashiwamura, Timothee Leleu
Abstract: We introduce a use of the \(M\)-cover (or \(M\)-layer) transform for machine learning. The method replicates a model \(M\) times, but instead of coupling the copies through parameter averaging or an explicit attractive force, as in replicated SGD or Elastic SGD, it rewires the contexts in which local learning messages are computed. Each local loss is evaluated on a routed model whose parameters are drawn from different copies according to permutations sampled from a structured mixing kernel \(Q\). Training then uses the original local update rule, while the resulting learning messages are redistributed across the copies through these routed computational paths. Thus \(Q\) defines a topology for message transport and controls the long-loop structure of the lifted factor graph. We formulate this construction for perceptrons, committee machines, and multilayer perceptrons, showing that the same principle applies from discrete models to differentiable neural networks. The resulting framework provides a mechanism for improving generalization through structured message sharing rather than replica collapse or parameter-space coupling.
Authors: R. James Cotton, Pouyan Firouzabadi, Wendy Murray
Abstract: Accurate hand and finger tracking from video has significant clinical applications for monitoring activities of daily living and measuring range of motion, yet monocular video approaches for obtaining hand biomechanics remain under-developed. We present a method that combines the SAM 3D Body foundation model with inverse kinematics optimization in a full-body biomechanical model to extract anatomically-constrained finger joint angles from single-view video. We port SAM 3D Body from PyTorch to JAX for integration with MuJoCo-MJX, enabling GPU-accelerated optimization, and develop a novel mapping between the Momentum Human Rig (MHR) outputs and biomechanical model markers. Validation against 8-camera multiview reconstruction on 4,590 frames from 7 participants performing a variety of hand poses and object manipulation tasks shows finger joint angle errors of approximately 10 degrees and hand position errors of approximately 6 mm, after Procrustes alignment. Results were consistent across camera viewpoints and robust to different methods for producing reference values from multiview video. This work extends monocular biomechanical analysis to detailed finger tracking, expanding access to quantitative characterization of hand movement from readily available video.
Authors: Leduo Chen, Junchuan Zhao, Shengchen Li
Abstract: Timbre transfer aims to modify the timbral identity of a musical recording while preserving the original melody and rhythm. While single-instrument timbre transfer has made substantial progress, existing approaches to multi-instrument settings rely on separate-then-transfer pipelines that propagate source separation artifacts and produce incoherent synthesized timbres across stems. This paper proposes MixtureTT, to the best of our knowledge the first system for flexible per-stem timbre transfer directly from a polyphonic mixture. Given a mixture and a separate timbre reference for each target voice, MixtureTT jointly transfers all stems to the specified instruments through a shared diffusion process. Modeling the dependencies across the per-stem content and cross-stem harmonic, the proposed joint stem diffusion transformer eliminates cascaded separation error, reduces inference cost by a factor equal to the number of stems, and yields more coherent multi-stem outputs. Despite operating under a strictly harder input condition, evaluations on the SATB choral dataset show that MixtureTT outperforms single-instrument baselines on both objective and subjective metrics demonstrating the necessity of dedicated multi-instrument timbre transfer over the naive separate-then-transfer pipelines. As a result, this work confirms that the cross-stem modeling is essential for mixture-level timbre transfer as the proposed joint setting consistently exceeds an equivalent single-stem ablation.
Authors: Aditya Sinha, Harald Steck, Vito Ostuni, Matteo Rinaldi
Abstract: Users interacting with Large Language Models (LLMs) in a multi-turn conversation routinely refine their requests or pivot to new topics. LLMs, however, often miss these topic shifts and carry over irrelevant context from previous turns, leading to inaccurate responses. In this paper, we stress-test the multi-turn understanding of LLMs and study the following two sub-tasks: (1) detecting whether the user pivots or refines in the current turn, and (2) shortlisting relevant context from previous turns. To this end, we construct synthetic benchmarks based on real-world datasets from varied domains, as to simulate context shifts of different levels of difficulty. We then evaluate the zero-shot performance of ten LLMs (open-weight, closed-source and reasoning), and demonstrate that only some reasoning and strongly instructed LLMs are accurate in detecting pivots; open-weight LLMs struggle with the task and frequently carry stale context even with explicit cues; and all models suffer from a position bias. Based on the results, we discuss key takeaways for improving long-term robustness in multi-turn capabilities for LLMs.
Authors: Ruiying Peng, Mengyu Yang, Jing Lei, Xiaohui Li, Xueyu Wu, Xinlei Chen
Abstract: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is widely used for task-specific adaptation, yet recent work shows it systematically undermines reasoning generalization. We argue the root cause is not memorization itself, but its target: vanilla SFT drives models to exploit and memorize spurious surface correlations in problem-solution pairs, leaving them brittle to superficial input variations. To address this, we propose Theorem-SFT, which reorients supervision toward explicit theorem application by teaching models how rules are invoked rather than what answers look like. Theorem-SFT yields consistent gains across benchmarks and model families: +8.8% on MATH (LLaMA3.2-3B-Instruct) and +20.27% on GeoQA (Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct) without modality-specific re-training. Fine-tuning MLP layers alone matches full-layers performance, implicating feed-forward components as the primary locus of reasoning rules. Our findings reframe the debate: Generalization failures stem not from memorization as a mechanism, but from memorizing the wrong inductive targets.
Authors: Jiyeon Kim, Youngjoon Hong, Won-Yong Shin
Abstract: Mesh-based simulations provide high-fidelity solutions to partial differential equations (PDEs), but achieving such accuracy typically requires fine meshes, leading to substantial computational overhead. Super-resolution techniques aim to mitigate this cost by reconstructing high-resolution (HR), high-fidelity solutions from low-cost, low-resolution (LR) counterparts. However, training neural networks for super-resolution often demands large amounts of expensive HR supervision data. To address this challenge, we propose SuperMeshNet, an HR data-efficient super-resolution framework for mesh-based simulations aided by message passing neural networks (MPNNs). At its core, SuperMeshNet introduces complementary learning, a semi-supervised approach that effectively leverages both 1) a small amount of paired LR-HR data and 2) abundant unpaired LR data via two jointly trained, complementary MPNN-based models. Additionally, our model is enriched by inductive biases, which are empirically shown to further improve super-resolution performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SuperMeshNet requires 90% less HR data to achieve even lower root mean square error (RMSE) than that of the fully supervised benchmark without the inductive biases. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/jykim-git/SuperMeshNet.git.
Authors: Ethan Hsu, Hong Meng Yam, Ivan Ge
Abstract: Partial differential equation (PDE) solvers underpin scientific computing, but real-world deployment is bounded by compute. Classical Monte Carlo solvers such as Walk-on-Spheres (WoS) are unbiased and geometry-agnostic but are slow. Learned solvers are fast but biased and brittle under distribution shift. We present \textbf{MC$^2$}, a hybrid WoS-Neural Network (WoS-NN) PDE solver that treats a low-budget Monte Carlo solution as a structured estimator of the true field and learns a single-pass neural correction to recover a high-fidelity solution. MC$^2$ matches the accuracy of solutions using over $1000\times$ more Monte Carlo compute, outperforming all evaluated classical, denoising, and neural-operator baselines. To enable reproducible study of finite-compute PDE solving, we additionally release \textbf{PDEZoo}, the largest standardized elliptic PDE benchmark to date: 2M PDEs spanning five elliptic families and unlimited geometric compositions, with analytic ground truth and multi-budget Monte Carlo trajectories. Together \textbf{MC$^2$} and \textbf{PDEZoo} (1) empirically establish that finite-sample Monte Carlo error is structured, learnable, and correctable in a single forward pass, (2) show that we can solve PDEs $\sim$\textbf{1000x} faster than with just WoS, and (3) provide the evaluation infrastructure the field has so far lacked.
Authors: Muhammed Ustaomeroglu, Guannan Qu
Abstract: We propose Representational Effective Theory (RET), a framework for describing large language model computation in terms of learned macrostates rather than microscopic details. RET learns these macrostates from hidden-state trajectories using a BYOL/JEPA-style self-supervised objective, coarse-graining activations into macrovariables that preserve higher-level structure relevant for prediction and interpretation. We evaluate whether these macrovariables are practically relevant for interpretability: RET yields temporally consistent states that reveal "mental-state" trajectories of reasoning, capture high-level semantic structure, support early prediction of behavioral outcomes such as sycophancy, and provide causal handles for steering generations toward interpretable computational phases. Together, these results suggest that LLM computation admits useful effective descriptions via RET: high-level, dynamically meaningful variables that support interpretation, prediction, and intervention.
Authors: Boxuan Zhang, Jianing Zhu, Qifan Wang, Jiang Liu, Ruixiang Tang
Abstract: Recent generative models can produce images that appear highly realistic, raising challenges in distinguishing real and AI-generated images. Yet existing detectors based on pre-trained feature extractors tend to over-rely on global semantics, limiting sensitivity to the critical micro-defects. In this work, we propose Micro-Defects expose Macro-Fakes (MDMF), a local distribution-aware detection framework that amplifies micro-scale statistical irregularities into macro-level distributional discrepancies. To avoid localized forensic cues being diluted by plain aggregation, we introduce a learnable Patch Forensic Signature that projects semantic patch embeddings into a compact forensic latent space. We then use Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to quantify distributional discrepancies between generated and real images. Our theory-grounded analysis shows that patch-wise modeling yields provably larger discrepancies when localized forensic signals are present in generated images, enabling more reliable separation from real images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MDMF consistently outperforms baseline detectors across multiple benchmarks, validating its general effectiveness. Project page: https://zbox1005.github.io/MDMF-project/
Authors: Samuel J. K. Chin, Maximilian Schiffer
Abstract: The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) underpins modern last-mile logistics. Current Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) methods construct CVRP solutions autoregressively, inheriting sequential decoding bottlenecks, sensitivity to spatial symmetries, and brittle out-of-distribution behavior. We revisit the classical Cluster-First-Route-Second (CFRS) paradigm -- long known to be asymptotically optimal but largely overlooked by NCO -- and argue that it is structurally aligned with the core strengths of deep learning: similarity and assignment over global context, rather than the construction of long sequential tours. We introduce Neural CFRS, the first purely non-autoregressive one-shot neural CFRS framework for the CVRP. It enforces global fleet-capacity constraints end-to-end via a differentiable entropic Optimal Transport layer, producing a continuous transport plan to sparsify an exact capacitated assignment solver. We provide formal theoretical guarantees that our architecture intrinsically abstracts away $E(2)$ spatial, inter-route permutation, and intra-route traversal symmetries. By equipping the framework with a pre-trained spatial vocabulary, we unlock extreme parameter efficiency and zero-shot scaling. Designed primarily for real-world spatial distributions under a constant capacity setting, Neural CFRS scales robustly to out-of-distribution $N=1000$ instances with a < 4% gap -- retaining an approximate 5% gap at this scale even as an ultra-lightweight, single-layer architecture. Furthermore, when deployed out-of-the-box on standard benchmarks, we achieve a highly competitive 2.73% optimality gap on size-100 problems.
Authors: Seungwoo Kum
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel at relational reasoning but face two persistent challenges: the lack of interpretable attribution for heterogeneous node types, and the computational overhead of message passing over large, noisy graphs. We propose the Hierarchical Attention-based Heterogeneous GNN (HA-HeteroGNN), a framework that addresses both issues through a unied explainability-to-pruning pipeline. A two-tier attention mechanism separates sensor-level and context-level computation across 16 node types and 18 edge types, producing per-node relevance scores via an attention-based GNN Explainer without requiring gradient backpropagation. These relevance scores then serve as a principled pruning criterion: removing nodes identied as consistently uninformative yields a 27% reduction in graph edges while simultaneously improving classication accuracy by 2.46.1% across all model variants, challenging the conventional assumption that pruning necessarily trades accuracy for eciency. Experiments on a 50,000-record synthetic dataset spanning 11 report categories demonstrate 97.5% cross-strategy explanation stability and domain consistent sensor attribution, with training-time reductions of up to 43.9% and real-time inference latency of approximately 5860 ms per sample.
Authors: Jiyeon Kim, Byungju Lee, Won-Yong Shin
Abstract: Unlike most static material properties widely studied in the machine learning literature, ionic transport properties are inherently dynamic, making their fast and accurate prediction from static atomic structures challenging. The current standard approach, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, suffers from prohibitively high computational cost. Recent autoregressive learning-based MD acceleration methods requiring sequential inference remain slow and prone to error accumulation; in contrast, existing non-autoregressive material property prediction models are less accurate because they fail to exploit dynamics. Moreover, existing methods typically benefit from datasets either with or without atomic trajectories, but not both. To overcome these limitations, we propose a non-autoregressive learning framework based on auxiliary modality learning, which treats atomic trajectories as an auxiliary modality during training but does not require them at inference. This enables the predictor to learn dynamics without sequential inference while benefiting from both types of datasets. As a result, our framework achieves over 200 times speedup compared to autoregressive models on the dataset with atomic trajectories while substantially reducing prediction error relative to non-autoregressive benchmarks across both types of datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/jykim-git/MD.
Authors: Jeongho Bang, Marcin Paw{\l}owski
Abstract: Query-separated computation forces a representation to play an operational role: data are encoded before a query is known, and a later decoder can answer only through the intermediate interface. In this regime the representation functions as a message rather than merely as a feature map. We formalize this observation by embedding information causality (IC) into representation learning, obtaining a framework called neural information causality (Neural-IC). The revised formulation separates two logically distinct statements. First, every query-separated architecture induces a random-access communication experiment and obeys the embedding inequality $I_{\mathrm{N\text{-}RAC}}\le I(\vec a:H,B)$. Second, any independently certified physical capacity bound on the interface, such as a hard $m$-bit alphabet, a finite-precision register, or a power-constrained noisy channel, implies $I_{\mathrm{N\text{-}RAC}}\le C_H$. This separation avoids treating capacity as a post hoc definition and makes Neural-IC an operational diagnostic for query leakage, precision leakage, and episode-specific memory. We also provide an exact one-bit classical RAC benchmark, showing explicitly that the relevant quantum enhancement is not total information beyond the bottleneck, but fair query-conditioned access. For CHSH-type correlation layers, nested Neural-RAC protocols multiply correlation biases across depth; requiring stability of a one-bit bottleneck for arbitrary depth selects the Tsirelson threshold. We extend the analysis to asymmetric seed biases, to multi-capacity finite-depth phase diagrams, and to correlated data via a conditional information score. Controlled simulations, including straight-through binary bottlenecks and deliberately leaky ablations, verify that apparent violations are accounted for by broken query separation or undercounted capacity.
Authors: Luoxi Tang, Rupali Rajendra Vaje, Yuqiao Meng, Sakshi Sunil Narkar, Weicheng Ma, Zeyu Ding, Dazheng Zhang, Zhaohan Xi
Abstract: Agentic memory enables LLMs to persist information beyond a single context window and reuse it in later decisions, but it also introduces a new vulnerability: spurious correlations, where retrieved memory carries miscorrelated evidence and propagates erroneous reasoning into downstream decisions. Despite the widespread use of agentic memory, this risk remains largely underexplored. We address it from two aspects. First, we benchmark several canonical types of spurious patterns identified through causal structure and record them across trajectory-level memory. Diagnosing agentic memory systems on this benchmark reveals that memory improves reasoning on clean inputs but amplifies reliance on spurious patterns when they are present. Second, we propose CAMEL, a plug-and-play calibration method that operates across diverse memory architectures at both write and retrieval time. CAMEL consistently reduces reliance on spurious patterns across all three types while preserving or improving performance on clean inputs and staying robust under adaptive attacks targeting the calibration. Overall, CAMEL offers a principled and lightweight solution toward more reliable agentic memory deployment.
Authors: Elnara Kadyrgali, Nuray Toganas, Muragul Muratbekova, Pakizar Shamoi
Abstract: Human color categories are not uniformly distributed in perceptual space, yet most computational color models still assume fixed and evenly structured representations. In this paper, we present a focused analytical extension of the COLIBRI fuzzy color model by investigating perceptual asymmetry between hue categories. Using previously collected large-scale human color categorization data, we introduce quantitative measures of category extent and boundary uncertainty, namely Wideness and Boundary Width, derived from fuzzy membership functions at the {\alpha} = 0.5 level. The analysis reveals a strong imbalance between the two categories: yellow occupies a compact and sharply constrained region of the hue space, whereas green spans a substantially broader interval and exhibits a more extended transition structure. The results show that perceptual color categories are not only fuzzy, but also highly non-uniform in their geometric organization. This asymmetry suggests that some categories behave as narrow, highly specific perceptual labels, while others function as broad, tolerant regions of human color naming. These findings provide a new perspective on linguistic color categorization and extend the interpretability of the COLIBRI framework for perceptually grounded color modeling.
Authors: Xiaocheng Luo, Kang Wang, Zaifu Zhan, Yuechi Zhou, Xiangyu Duan
Abstract: The Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm, while enhancing the interpretability of Large Language Models (LLMs), is constrained by the inefficiencies and expressive limits of natural language. Latent Chain-of-Thought (latent CoT) reasoning, which operates in a continuous latent space, offers a promising alternative but faces challenges from structural complexities in existing multi-step or multi-model paradigms, such as error propagation and coordination overhead. In this paper, we introduce One-Model One-Step, a novel compression framework for Latent Reasoning with Rule-Based Priors(RuPLaR) to address this challenge. Our method trains an LLM to autonomously generate latent reasoning tokens in a single training stage, guided by rule-based prior probability distributions, thereby eliminating cascaded processes and inter-model dependencies. To ensure reasoning quality, we design a joint training objective that enforces answer consistency via cross-entropy, aligns soft tokens with rule-based priors via KL divergence (the Soft Thinking constraint), and adds a problem-thought semantic alignment constraint in the representation space. Extensive experiments show that our compression framework not only improves accuracy by 11.1% over existing latent CoT methods but also achieves this with minimal token usage, underscoring its effectiveness and extensibility. Code: https://github.com/xiaocen-luo/RuPLaR.
Authors: Shusaku Egami, Aoi Ohta, Tomoki Tsujimura, Masaki Asada, Tatsuya Ishigaki, Ken Fukuda, Masahiro Hamasaki, Hiroya Takamura
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) provide flexible natural language processing capabilities, while knowledge graphs (KGs) offer explicit and structured knowledge. Integrating these two in a complementary manner enables the development of reliable and verifiable AI systems. In particular, knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) has attracted attention as a means to reduce LLM hallucinations and to leverage knowledge beyond the training data. However, existing KGQA benchmark datasets are biased toward encyclopedic knowledge, limited to a single modality, and lack fine-grained spatiotemporal data, which limits their applicability to real-world scenarios targeted by Embodied AI. We introduce HOME-KGQA, a novel KGQA benchmark dataset built on a multimodal KG of daily household activities. HOME-KGQA consists of complex, multi-hop natural language questions paired with graph database query languages. Compared to existing benchmarks, it includes more challenging questions that involve multi-level spatiotemporal reasoning, multimodal grounding, and aggregate functions. Experimental results show that the LLM-based KGQA methods fail to achieve performance comparable to that on existing datasets when evaluated on HOME-KGQA. This highlights significant challenges that should be addressed for the real-world deployment of KGQA systems. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/aistairc/home-kgqa
Authors: Yash Vishe, Rohan Surana, Xunyi Jiang, Zihan Huang, Xintong Li, Nikki Lijing Kuang, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu
Abstract: Agentic large language models often rely on skills, reusable natural language procedures that guide planning, action, and tool use. In practice, skills are typically improved through prompt engineering or by aligning the task LLM itself, which is costly, model-specific, and often infeasible for closed-source models. Skill optimization is not a one-step problem but a recurrent process with two coupled levels of credit assignment: a useful skill must improve rollout quality under current conditioning, while a useful revision must turn observed outcomes into a better skill for the next round. We propose Skill-R1, a reinforcement learning framework for instance-level recurrent skill optimization from verifiable rewards. Rather than updating the task LLM, Skill-R1 trains a lightweight skill generator that conditions on the task context, prior rollouts, and their verified outcomes to produce skills that steer a frozen task LLM. This preserves black-box compatibility with both open- and closed-source models while making adaptation substantially cheaper than model-level updates. Skill-R1 proceeds over multiple generations: at each step, the current skill induces rollouts whose verified outcomes are fed back to produce the next revision. To optimize this recurrent process, we introduce a bi-level group-relative policy optimization objective combining intra-generation and inter-generation advantages. The intra-generation term compares rollouts under shared skill conditioning, while the inter-generation term rewards revisions that improve behavior across successive generations. Together, these provide a principled objective for directional skill evolution rather than one-shot self-refinement. Empirically, Skill-R1 achieves consistent gains over no-skill baselines and standard GRPO across benchmarks with verifiable rewards, with particularly strong improvements on complex, multi-step tasks.
Authors: Zhenghan Song, Yulong Liu, Cheng Wan, Chenjun Li, Lingfu Liu, Yunyi Li, Congcong Yuan
Abstract: Execution-based evaluation of LLM-generated code implicitly treats successful execution as a proxy for correctness. In scientific simulation, this proxy is insufficient: a generated input file can run, mesh, and converge while encoding governing equations that differ from the user's intent. We call this mismatch between intended physics and generated code the comprehension-generation gap. We instantiate this in MOOSE, where Kernel and BC objects map compositionally to weak-form residual terms, enabling deterministic reconstruction of the encoded PDE and comparison against an intended contract. We formalize this comparison as the Intent Fidelity Score (IFS), a structural metric covering governing terms, BCs, ICs, coefficients, and time scheme. Building on IFS, we develop a PDE-grounded refinement loop that uses deterministic violation reports to correct generated code iteratively. We evaluate on MooseBench, a 220-case multiphysics benchmark with PDE-level ground truth released with this work. On this benchmark, our method consistently improves mean IFS over direct generation, with gains concentrated on hard cases. On the subset where direct generation falls below IFS 0.7, refinement adds +0.22 to +0.41 absolute IFS. In the deployment audit, execution-only repair improves execution success while leaving 39-40% of all 220 cases runnable but still solving the wrong physics across the three main deployment-audit models, exposing executability and intent fidelity as separable failure modes. Static proof-of-concept experiments on four PDE-oriented DSLs (UFL/FEniCS, FreeFEM, FiPy, and Devito) suggest that the reconstruction-and-comparison pattern extends beyond MOOSE. These findings reinforce that executable simulation code should be verified against the mathematical structure it is intended to encode, not accepted on execution alone.
Authors: Daemyung Kang, Eunjin Hwang, Hanjeong Lee, HyeokJin Kim, Hyunhoi Koo, Jeongkyu Shin, Jeongseok Kang, Jihyun Kang, Joongi Kim, Junbum Lee, Jungseung Yang, Kyujin Cho, Youngsook Song
Abstract: Large-scale AI training is now fundamentally a distributed systems problem, and hardware failures have become routine operating conditions rather than rare exceptions. Public operational evidence from production training clusters, however, remains scarce. This technical report presents an empirical analysis of a 63-node NVIDIA B200 production cluster (504 GPUs), using 55 days of Prometheus time-series data and 73 days of operational logs covering 224 multi-node training sessions. The cluster operates within a cross-organizational environment in which five parties (SKT, Upstage, Lablup, NVIDIA Korea, and VAST Data) share a unified monitoring pipeline. This arrangement enabled joint diagnosis of a 60-node-scale storage I/O bottleneck that did not appear at 2-4-node scale, a production-scale phenomenon no single team could isolate alone. Drawing on a months-long pre-training campaign, we perform three quantitative analyses yielding four findings. First, statistical analysis over 751 Prometheus metrics and 10 XID-identified GPU failures achieves a 10/10 detection rate (2/10 pre-XID) at ~0.84 false positives per day. No single metric is consistently dominant across failure types, motivating a multi-signal detection strategy. Second, profiling 523 checkpoint events along the GPU VRAM to NFS path attributes the "bandwidth paradox" (1.4-10.4% utilization of 200 Gbps RoCE) to saturation of the 128-slot NFS RPC layer. Third, multi-node failure response shows concentrated exclusions (top 3 of 63 nodes account for >50% of all exclusions) and an auto-retry chain success rate of 33.3% over 12 chains (73 attempts), 2.7x the 12.5% manual recovery rate; the median retry interval is 11 min (IQR 10-11). All analyses are grounded in production infrastructure providing session-level workload management, GPU-centric scheduling, and unified observability.
Authors: Xinyi Wu, Jayant Teotia, Shuai Zhao, Erik Cambria
Abstract: Long-horizon video generation has advanced in visual quality, yet existing methods still struggle to maintain knowledge consistency and coherent pedagogical narratives across multi-shot instructional videos, especially in STEM domains. To address these challenges, we propose EduStory, a unified framework for reliable instructional video generation. EduStory integrates pedagogical state modeling to track persistent knowledge states, script-guided structured control to organize multi-shot narratives, and learning-oriented evaluation metrics to assess knowledge fidelity and constraint satisfaction. To support rigorous evaluation, we further introduce EduVideoBench, a diagnostic benchmark with multi-granularity annotations, including pedagogical storyboards, shot-level semantics, and knowledge state transitions, together with baseline tasks for controllable instructional video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that domain-aware state modeling and structured control substantially reduce narrative breakdown and improve alignment with instructional intent. These results highlight the significance of domain-specific structural constraints and tailored benchmarks for advancing reliable, controllable, and also trustworthy long-horizon video generation.
Authors: Runze Ma, Shunbo Jia, Haonan Lyu, Guo Liu, Caizhi Liao
Abstract: The reasoning gap between large and compact vision-language models (VLMs) limits the deployment of medical AI on portable clinical devices. Compact VLMs of 2--4B parameters can run on resource-constrained hardware but lack the multi-step reasoning capacity needed for interpretable clinical decision support. Existing knowledge distillation methods transfer answers without the reasoning process behind them. Medical visual question answering (VQA) serves as a testbed for this problem, as it requires models to integrate visual evidence with clinical knowledge through structured reasoning chains. We introduce LiteMedCoT-VL, a pipeline that transfers chain-of-thought reasoning from a 235B teacher model to 2B student models through LoRA-based fine-tuning on explanation-enriched training data. All inference is conducted without image captions by default, simulating the clinical scenario in which a physician interprets a medical image directly without an accompanying radiology report. On the PMC-VQA benchmark, LiteMedCoT-VL achieves 64.9% accuracy, exceeding the zero-shot Qwen3-VL-4B baseline of 53.9% by 11.0 percentage points and outperforming all published baselines. This result indicates that a 2B model with reasoning distillation can match or exceed models with twice the parameters. Visual grounding analysis shows that the model relies on image content rather than exploiting textual priors. Our code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LiteMedCoT-VL.
Authors: Dong Yang, Yiyi Cai, Haoyu Zhang, Yuki Saito, Hiroshi Saruwatari
Abstract: Metric-induced discrete flow matching (MI-DFM) exploits token-latent geometry for discrete generation, but its practical use is limited by two issues: heuristic schedulers requiring hyperparameter search, and finite-step path-tracking error from its first-order continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) solver. We address both issues. First, we derive a kinetic-optimal scheduler for prescribed scalar-parameterized probability paths, and instantiate it for MI-DFM as a training-free numerical schedule that traverses the path at constant Fisher-Rao speed. Second, we introduce a finite-step moment correction that adjusts the jump probability while preserving the CTMC jump destination distribution. We validate the resulting method, GibbsTTS, on codec-based zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS). Under controlled comparisons with a unified architecture and large-scale dataset, GibbsTTS achieves the best objective naturalness and is preferred in subjective evaluations over masked discrete generative baselines. Additionally, in comparison with the evaluated state-of-the-art TTS systems, GibbsTTS shows strong speaker similarity, achieving the highest similarity on three of four test sets and ranking second on the fourth. Project page: https://ydqmkkx.github.io/GibbsTTSProject
Authors: Gabriel Smithline, Chris Mascioli
Abstract: Architectural choices inside the Transformer feedforward network (FFN) block do not merely affect the block itself; they reshape the computations learned by the rest of the model. We study this effect in one-layer Transformers trained on digit addition with carry, modular arithmetic, and histogram counting. Comparing dense FFNs, gated linear units (GLUs), mixture-of-experts (MoE), and MoE-GLUs, we find that sparse MoE routing can shift computation from FFN to attention, with the strongest ablation-visible effect on carry-based addition. We decompose this redistribution into reduced per-token FFN capacity and sparse partitioning across experts. Critically, frozen random routing nearly matches learned routing, suggesting that redistribution is driven largely by architectural sparsity rather than router-learned specialization. As a secondary finding, GLU-style multiplicative gating rotates task-relevant Fourier structure out of the per-neuron basis and into distributed subspaces, making neuron-level interpretability less informative while preserving structured computation. We validate these conclusions with random-routing, narrow-FFN, and top-2 MoE controls, plus parameter-matching, activation-function, and width-scaling analyses. Together, these results show that local FFN design choices can have nonlocal consequences for Transformer computation.
Authors: Weijia Liufu, Xiaoyu Guo, Ruiyi Chen, Jingzhi Liu, Kaidong Zhang, Xiwen Liang, Jianqi Lin, Dawei Sun, Yuze Wang, Rongtao Xu, Bingqian Lin, Bowen Yang, Tongtong Cao, Bowen Peng, Dongyu Zhang, Guangrun Wang, Min Wang, Liang Lin, Xiaodan Liang
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remain brittle in long-horizon, contact-rich manipulation because success-only imitation provides little supervision for execution drift, while failed rollouts are often discarded. We introduce RePO-VLA, a recovery-driven policy optimization framework that assigns distinct roles to success, recovery, and failure trajectories. RePO-VLA first applies Recovery-Aware Initialization (RAI), slicing recovery segments and resetting history so corrective actions depend on the current adverse state rather than the preceding failure. It then learns a Progress-Aware Semantic Value Function (PAS-VF), aligning spatiotemporal trajectory features with instructions and successful references. The resulting labels salvage useful failure prefixes via reliability decay, while low-value labels mark drift and terminal breakdowns, teaching differences among nominal, failed, and corrective actions. The data engine turns adverse states into planner-generated or human-collected corrective rollouts, teaching recovery to the success manifold. Value-Conditioned Refinement (VCR) trains the policy to prefer high-progress actions. At deployment, a fixed high value ($v=1.0$) biases actions toward the learned success manifold without online failure detectors or heuristic retries. We introduce FRBench, with standardized error injection and recovery-focused evaluation. Across simulated and real-world bimanual tasks, RePO-VLA improves robustness, raising adversarial success from 20% to 75% on average and up to 80% in scaled real-world trials.
Authors: Yulin Xu, Chunqi Guo, Yuanzhen Shuai, Jianyuan Ni
Abstract: In this study, we tackle Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) via a Relational Retrieval perspective, explicitly coupling labeled and unlabeled data through bidirectional knowledge transfer. While existing methods treat these sources separately, missing valuable interaction opportunities, we propose Relational Pattern Consistency (RPC) that enables mutual enhancement. RPC employs One-vs-All classifiers for soft ID/OOD decomposition, then introduces two mechanisms: (i) for known-class preservation, we transfer semantic behavioral alignment; (ii) for category discovery, we leverage the insight that samples from the same category maintain invariant relationships with known-class prototypes, transforming unreliable pseudo-labeling into well-defined relational pattern matching. This bidirectional design allows labeled data to guide unlabeled learning while discovering novel categories through their collective relational signatures. Extensive experiments demonstrate RPC achieves state-of-the-art performance on both generic and fine-grained benchmarks.
Authors: Shogo Noguchi
Abstract: Recent conditional image generation methods can improve controllability by generating images that are faithful to conditions such as sketches, human poses, segmentation maps, and depth. By applying these techniques to image augmentation while preserving annotations, generated images can be used as additional training data and can improve recognition performance. However, for high-level driving tasks such as traffic-rule extraction and driving-behavior understanding, simply using annotations as conditions is insufficient. Instead, images must be augmented while preserving the detailed high-level structure of the original scene. One possible solution is to use multiple conditions so that generated images retain diverse structural cues after generation. However, when multiple conditions are used, conflicts among conditions can prevent reliable structure preservation. In this work, we input semantic segmentation, depth, and edges extracted from the original image into a multi-condition image generation model, thereby providing rich structural information as conditions. We further propose a modeling approach for handling conflicts among multiple conditions and show that it enables image generation with stronger structural preservation. We also build a generation framework and evaluation protocol for driving tasks, establishing a basis for comparison with prior and future models. As a result, this work contributes to image generation research by addressing condition conflicts in multi-condition generation and provides an important step toward mitigating data scarcity in high-level autonomous-driving tasks.
Authors: Jie Ma, Yihang Liu, Zhike Qiu, Jiayi Ji, Xiaoshuai Sun
Abstract: Are low-attention visual tokens truly redundant in vision-language reasoning? Existing pruning methods often assume so, ranking visual tokens by shallow text-to-image attention and discarding low-scoring patches to accelerate LVLM inference. We show that this scalar criterion is unreliable for compositional reasoning: tokens ignored in early layers can later become essential for resolving secondary objects, spatial relations, and contextual cues. Premature pruning can therefore induce Visual Aphasia, a failure mode in which the model loses visual grounding and falls back on language priors. We introduce COAST (COntrastive Adaptive Semantic Token Pruning), a training-free pruning framework that casts compression as adaptive semantic routing. COAST uses native cross-modal attention to identify query-specific anchors and estimate contextual dispersion via attention entropy, then adapts the retention trade-off between semantic evidence and spatial context. It further uses a contrastive routing score to preserve both anchor-aligned evidence and complementary spatial context. Across seven benchmarks, COAST reduces visual tokens by 77.8% and achieves a 2.15x latency speedup while retaining 98.64% of the original average performance. Beyond a single backbone or compression setting, COAST consistently outperforms strong pruning baselines across token budgets and generalizes across multiple LVLM families, showing that adaptive semantic routing is a robust alternative to one-shot scalar pruning
Authors: Yu Wang, Yingyun Li, Ying Qin, Haiyang Qian
Abstract: Clinical reports are often fragmented across healthcare institutions because privacy regulations and data silos limit direct information sharing. When patients seek care at a different hospital, they often carry paper or scanned reports from prior visits. This hinders EHR integration and longitudinal review, and downstream applications that depend on more complete patient records, such as patient management, follow-up care, real-world studies, and clinical-trial matching. Although OCR can digitize such reports, reliable extraction remains challenging because clinical documents are heterogeneous, OCR text is noisy, and many healthcare settings require low-cost on-premise deployment. We formulate this problem as canonical key-conditioned extractive question answering over OCR-derived clinical reports. Because the key fields are neither fixed nor known in advance, the key space is open. We maintain a canonical key inventory through iterative key mining, normalization, clustering, and lightweight human verification, and introduce key coverage as a metric to quantify inventory completeness. Using a 0.2B BERT-based model, experiments on real-world reports from more than 20 hospitals show performance improves monotonically with key coverage. The model achieves F1 scores of 0.839 and 0.893 under exact match and boundary-tolerant matching, respectively, once the Top-90 canonical keys are covered. These results show that key coverage is a dominant factor for end-to-end performance. At Top-90 coverage, our model outperforms a fine-tuned Qwen3-0.6B baseline under exact match. Although our annotated corpus is Chinese, the method relies on the language-agnostic key-value organization of semi-structured clinical reports and can be adapted to other settings given an appropriate canonical key inventory and alias mapping.
Authors: Shanwen Tan, Hao Li, Jingtao Zhang, Xiaosong Jia, Xue Yang, Shaofeng Zhang, Yanyong Zhang
Abstract: Streaming long-video generation faces a central challenge in continuous semantic switching, requiring adaptive memory to preserve coherent visual evolution. Current approaches rely on cache rebuilding at prompt boundaries or fixed memory budgets, but they introduce redundant computation and limit flexible semantic adaptation. This limitation arises from a mismatch between cached video history and prompt updates, as memory preserves visual continuity while prompt switches demand rapid semantic adaptation. Motivated by this observation, we present SWIFT, Semantic Windowing and Injection for Flexible Transitions, a training-free framework for multi-prompt long-video generation that enables efficient semantic switching while preserving temporal coherence in causal video diffusion models. SWIFT introduces a lightweight Semantic Injection Cache that augments cached video memory rather than reconstructing it from scratch at every prompt boundary. To avoid uniformly perturbing all attention channels, we further perform head-wise semantic injection, so that each attention head receives a prompt update proportional to its alignment with the current video state. In addition, we introduce an Adaptive Dynamic Window that allocates temporal memory according to prompt phase, using larger local context near switching boundaries and smaller windows during stable segments to reduce average inference cost. To preserve long-range semantic consistency under compressed local attention, we further maintain segment-level semantic anchors that summarize prompt-conditioned video history and reintroduce it as compact memory tokens. Compared with current state-of-the-art methods, SWIFT preserves generation quality while achieving 22.6 FPS on a single H100 GPU, establishing a substantially more efficient solution for multi-prompt long-video generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/ShanwenTan/SWIFT.
Authors: Riccardo Porcedda, Giuseppe Squillace, Bastian Epping, Andrea Vandin, Michael Schaub, Mirco Tribastone, Francesca Chiaromonte
Abstract: While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated significant efficacy in node classification tasks, where predictions rely on local neighborhood information, the performance of GNNs often drops when prediction tasks depend on long-range interactions. These limitations are attributed to phenomena such as oversquashing, where structural bottlenecks restrict signal propagation across the network topology. To address this challenge, we introduce RAwR, a computationally efficient rewiring framework that augments the input graph with a quotient graph derived from equitable partitions. This approach facilitates accelerated communication between nodes that share identical structural roles, as identified by the Weisfeiler-Leman graph coloring, and thereby reduces the total effective resistance of the system. Furthermore, by employing an approximate definition of the equitable partition, RAwR enables a controllable reduction of the quotient graph, which, in its most condensed state, recovers the conventional Master Node rewiring technique. Empirical evaluations across a diverse suite of benchmarks -- including homophilic, heterophilic, and synthetic long-range datasets -- demonstrate that RAwR achieves state-of-the-art results. Our contribution is further supported by an analytical investigation using a teacher-student model of linear GNNs, which elucidates the theoretical foundations of role-based rewiring. This analysis leads to the formulation of Spectral Role Lift (SRL), a metric designed to identify the optimal approximate equitable partition for maximizing predictive performance.
Authors: Dongqi Zheng
Abstract: Identity-preserved image generation is typically built on many-step diffusion backbones, making personalized generation expensive at deployment time. We show that this cost is often unnecessary for identity-conditioned FLUX generation. A frozen InfuseNet identity adapter trained with dev transfers directly to the distilled schnell backbone without retraining. This two-line replacement -- changing the backbone path and disabling classifier-free guidance -- reduces latency by 5.9x while improving ArcFace identity similarity by +0.028 and lpips by -0.016 over the standard 28-step dev baseline. To explain why this works, we analyze the denoising trajectory and find that identity fidelity enters an early effective regime, often within 4-8 steps, while later steps primarily refine visual detail, sharpness, and contrast. Adapter ablations confirm that identity formation depends on the identity adapter, while attention-stream norm probes suggest that the relative conditioning contribution decreases as sampling proceeds. Preliminary style-adapter and object-adapter sweeps on SDXL and SD1.5 show similar diminishing returns after intermediate steps. These results position distilled backbone replacement as a simple, training-free strategy for improving the efficiency-fidelity tradeoff of identity-preserved generation.
Authors: Kenji Hilasaca, Nouran Khallaf, Serge Sharoff
Abstract: Text simplification plays a crucial role in improving the accessibility and comprehensibility of written information for diverse audiences, including language learners and readers with limited literacy. Despite its importance, large-scale, high-quality datasets for training and evaluating text simplification models remain scarce for languages other than English. This paper reports an experimental study on the collection and processing of crowd-sourced simplification data from comparable corpora to construct a corpus suitable for both training and testing text simplification systems across multiple languages (Catalan, English, French, Italian and Spanish). We report mechanisms for sentence-level alignment from document-level data. The resulting dataset of the aligned sentence pairs is publicly available.
Authors: Yang Zheng, Jiahua Liu, Tongyao Pang, Wen Li, Zhaoqiang Liu
Abstract: Methods based on diffusion models (DMs) for solving inverse problems (IPs) have recently achieved remarkable performance. However, DM-based methods typically struggle against outliers, which are common in real-world measurements. In this work, to tackle IPs with outliers, we first refine the measurement via explicit noise estimation to mitigate the effect of noise. Subsequently, we formulate an iteratively reweighted least squares objective based on the Huber loss to address the outliers. We propose a method utilizing gradient descent to approximately solve the corresponding optimization problem for the robust objective. To avoid delicate tuning of the learning rate required by the gradient descent method, we further employ the conjugate gradient method with an efficient strategy for updating. Extensive experiments on multiple image datasets for linear and nonlinear tasks under various conditions demonstrate that our proposed methods exhibit robustness to outliers and outperform recent DM-based methods in most cases.
Authors: Pranava Madhyastha
Abstract: In this (work in progress) paper, we present Bounded Pragmatic Listener (or BPL), a cognitively grounded Bayesian framework for modelling susceptibility to information disorder. BPL extends Rational Speech Act theory with three cognitively motivated bounds derived from the bounded rationality literature with a) a recursion depth bound (that emphasises working memory limits);b) a prior compression parameter (which is oriented at capturing information bottleneck); and c) an availability sample size (that operationalises importance sampling with saliency-weighted proposals). This allows us to test predictions about misinformation susceptibility, annotator disagreement, and the differential vulnerability to mis-, dis-, and mal-information as defined in the Information Disorder framework. We validate BPL on the LIAR and MultiFC benchmarks showcasing competitive veracity classification and experimental support for the depth-mismatch paradox.
Authors: Zhan Li, Wuqing Yu, Yusen Wu, Chuan Wang
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNN) and Transformer-based architectures have achieved remarkable progress in graph learning, yet they still struggle to capture both global structural dependencies and model the dynamic information propagation. In this paper, we propose CTQWformer, a hybrid graph learning framework that integrates continuous-time quantum walks (CTQW) with GNN. CTQWformer employs a trainable Hamiltonian that fuses graph topology and node features, enabling physically grounded modeling of quantum walk dynamics that captures rich and intricate graph structure information. The extracted CTQW-based representations are incorporated into two complementary modules:(i) a Graph Transformer module that embeds final-time propagation probabilities as structural biases in the self-attention mechanism, and (ii) a Graph Recurrent Module that captures temporal evolution patterns with bidirectional recurrent networks. Extensive experiments on benchmark graph classification datasets demonstrate that CTQWformer outperforms graph kernel and GNN-based methods, demonstrating the potential of integrating quantum dynamics into trainable deep learning frameworks for graph representation learning. To the best of our knowledge, CTQWformer is the first hybrid CTQW-based Transformer, integrating CTQW-derived structural bias with temporal evolution modeling to advance graph learning.
Authors: Tianyu Zheng, Hong Wu, Jiaji Zhong
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often suffer from hallucinations due to error accumulation in autoregressive decoding, where suboptimal early token choices misguide subsequent generation. Although multi-path decoding can improve robustness by exploring alternative trajectories, existing methods lack principled strategies for determining when to branch and how to regulate inter-path interactions. We propose Adaptive Path-Contrastive Decoding (APCD), a multi-path decoding framework that improves output reliability through adaptive exploration and controlled path interaction. APCD consists of two components: (1) Entropy-Driven Path Expansion, which delays branching until predictive uncertainty - measured by Shannon entropy over top candidate tokens - indicates multiple plausible continuations; and (2) Divergence-Aware Path Contrast, which encourages diverse reasoning trajectories while dynamically attenuating inter-path influence as prediction distributions diverge. Experiments on eight benchmarks demonstrate improved factual accuracy while maintaining decoding efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/zty-king/APCD.
Authors: Hong Chen, Zixiang Tang, Yuanbao Chen, Yu Liu
Abstract: Unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) operate persistently in communication-constrained environments, thus requiring high-level autonomous fault-tolerant control under faulty operating conditions. Existing approaches rely heavily on predefined hard-coded rules and struggle to achieve effective fault-tolerant control against unforeseen faults. Although large language models (LLMs) possess powerful cognitive and reasoning capabilities, their inherent hallucinations remain a major obstacle to their application in UUV control systems. This paper proposes an intelligent control method based on the LASSA (LLM-based Agent with Solver, Sensor and Actuator) architecture. Within this architecture, an LLM identifies unknown faults and accomplishes task replanning via autonomous reasoning without hard-coded rules; the intelligent agent undertakes perception, scheduling and decision evaluation; the solver verifies physical boundary feasibility constraints prior to command transmission to the actuators. This architecture suppresses physically infeasible LLM hallucinations and ensures interpretable, verifiable decision-making. Moreover, it enables fast-slow dual closed-loop collaborative control, where the slow loop undertakes high-level dynamic decision-making and the fast loop guarantees high-frequency real-time control, simultaneously balancing decision intelligence and control timeliness. Lake experiments under normal and lower-rudder-fault conditions show that the framework detects trajectory tracking abnormalities, replans the route by adjusting the turning radius from 4m to 12m and reducing speed from 2kn to 1kn, passes all three solver constraints on the first invocation, and guides the UUV to complete the full mission; under normal conditions no false fault alarms are raised throughout the run.
Authors: Xianhe Chen, Hao Chen, Yingzhen Li
Abstract: Time series, spatial data, and images are natural applications of Neural Processes. However, when such data exhibit strong periodicity and quasi-periodicity, existing methods often suffer from underfitting and generalise poorly beyond the training distribution. In this work, we propose Spectral Transformer Neural Processes (STNPs), a frequency-aware extension of Transformer Neural Processes (TNPs). STNPs introduce a Spectral Aggregator that estimates an empirical context spectrum, compresses it into a spectral mixture, samples task-adaptive spectral features, and concatenates them with time-domain embeddings, thereby injecting a spectral-mixture-kernel bias into TNPs. This design reshapes the similarity geometry, allowing inputs that are distant in Euclidean space to remain close in an induced periodic manifold while enhancing time-frequency interactions. Extensive experiments on synthetic regression tasks, real-world time-series datasets, and an image dataset demonstrate that STNPs consistently improve predictive performance over existing baselines, extending Neural Processes beyond translation equivariance towards effective modelling of periodicity and quasi-periodicity.
Authors: Aojie Yuan, Zhiyuan Julian Su, Haiyue Zhang, Yi Nian, Yue Zhao
Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting assumes that generated reasoning reflects a model's internal computation. We show this assumption is wrong in a specific, measurable way: models internally detect their own reasoning errors but outwardly express confidence in them. A linear probe on hidden states predicts trace correctness with 0.95 AUROC -- from the very first reasoning step (0.79) -- while verbalized confidence for wrong traces is 4.55/5, nearly identical to correct ones (4.87/5). A text-surface classifier achieves only 0.59 on the same data, confirming a 0.20-point gap invisible in the generated text. This hidden error awareness holds across three model families (Qwen, Llama, Phi), 1.5B-72B parameters, and RL-trained reasoning models (DeepSeek-R1, 0.852 AUROC). The natural question is whether this signal can fix the errors it detects. It cannot. Four interventions -- activation steering, probe-guided best-of-N, self-correction, and activation patching -- all fail; patching destroys output coherence entirely. The signal is diagnostic, not causal: a readout of computation quality, not a lever to redirect it. This delineates a boundary for mechanistic interpretability: error representations during reasoning are fundamentally different from the factual knowledge representations that prior work has successfully edited.
Authors: Michael A. Riegler, Inga Str\"umke
Abstract: We present swarm-attack, an open-source adversarial testing framework in which multiple lightweight LLM agents coordinate through shared memory, parallel exploration, and evolutionary optimization. Together, our results demonstrate that both safety bypass of frontier models and software vulnerability discovery, i.e., the capability class that motivated restricted release of Anthropic's Mythos Preview, are achievable at effectively zero cost using commodity hardware and openly available models. We report two experiments. In the first, five instances of a 1.2 billion parameter model conducted 225 jailbreak attacks each against GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet~4. Against GPT-4o, the swarm achieved an Effective Harm Rate of 45.8%, producing 49 critical-severity breaches; against Claude Sonnet-4, the Effective Harm Rate was 0% despite a 40% technical success rate. In the second experiment, the same models performed combined source code analysis and binary fuzzing against a vulnerable C application with 9 planted CWEs. With a hand-crafted exploit seed corpus, regex pattern detection, and AddressSanitizer-based crash classification, the pipeline recovers 9 of 9 vulnerabilities (100% recall) in approximately four minutes on a consumer MacBook. With those scaffold components disabled, the same model recovers 0 of 9 by crash verification and 2 of 9 by citation. The capability class that motivated restricted release of Anthropic's Mythos Preview is therefore reproducible at effectively zero cost; the important enabler is the system scaffold itself, which compensates for the limited reasoning capacity of small individual models.
Authors: Ivan Ternovtsii, Yurii Bilak
Abstract: Standard Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) transformers route tokens to expert subnetworks within each layer, but the layer structure itself remains monolithic. We introduce Mixture of Layers (MoL), which replaces full-width transformer blocks (d_model) with K parallel thin blocks at reduced dimensionality (d_thin << d_model), connected via learned down/up projections and composed via top-k block routing. Scaling sparse block routing to many blocks creates an attention coverage problem, as each block sees fewer tokens. We address this by introducing hybrid attention, which pairs one shared softmax block for global context with Gated DeltaNet linear attention in routed blocks.
Authors: Jakob Sturm, Josef Pichlmeier, Christian Bernhard, Maka Karalashvili, Johannes Klepsch, Georg Groh, Andre Luckow
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in enterprise question-answering (QA) systems, requiring adaptation to domain-specific knowledge. Among the most prevalent methods for incorporating such knowledge are Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and fine-tuning (FT). Yet, from a cost-accuracy trade-off perspective, it remains unclear which approach best suits industry scenarios. This study examines the impact of RAG and FT on two closed datasets specific to the automotive industry, assessing answer quality and operational costs. We extend the Cost-of-Pass framework proposed by Erol et al. (arXiv:2504.13359) to jointly assess output quality, generation cost, and user interaction cost. Our findings reveal that while premium models perform best out of the box, open-source models can achieve comparable quality when enhanced with RAG. Overall, RAG emerges as the most effective and cost-efficient adaptation method for both closed- and open-source models.
Authors: Elyson A. De La Cruz, Rishikesh Sahay, Md Rasel Al Mamun
Abstract: Engineering managers increasingly must decide how to introduce generative artificial intelligence (AI), retrieval-augmented generation, and coding agents into high-risk operational functions without weakening accountability, privacy, cost discipline, or auditability. The central message of this study is that AI-assisted operational decision support should be managed as a governed engineering capability before it is scaled as automation. Security operations centers (SOCs) provide a suitable setting because they combine privileged telemetry, specialist expertise, software repositories, cloud services, and evidence-sensitive decisions. This study uses Kusto Query Language (KQL) and Microsoft Azure security capabilities as a bounded technical instantiation of that broader engineering management problem. KQL is read-only in ordinary query use, but read-only does not mean risk-free: AI-assisted queries can still create privacy, cost, performance, schema-validity, and decision-quality risks through broad scans, sensitive-field exposure, stale intelligence, and misleading interpretations. Using design science research, the study develops a governed AI query-broker artifact that separates AI planning from operational execution through schema-grounded retrieval, approved templates, policy validation, read-only adapters, normalized outputs, auditable agent traces, and engineering review board gates. The contribution is not a new KQL technique, security product, or detection algorithm. Rather, the study contributes a management framework for governing AI-assisted operational decision support in high-risk digital infrastructure by specifying design propositions, role accountability, maturity stages, quality gates, evaluation criteria, and evidence boundaries.
Authors: Haoyang Zhou, Li Kong, Shijie Ren, Xiting Wang, Shuang Liang, Guowei Wang, Zhenxuan Pan
Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a promising paradigm for parallel text generation, but in practice they face an accuracy-parallelism trade-off, where increasing tokens per forward (TPF) often degrades generation quality. Existing acceleration methods often gain speed at the cost of accuracy. To address this limitation, we propose TAD, a Temporal-Aware trajectory self-Distillation framework. During data construction, we condition a teacher model on both the prompt and the ground-truth response to generate decoding trajectories, recording the intermediate masked states throughout the process. Based on how many decoding steps remain before each masked token is revealed, we partition masked positions into near and distant subsets. For near tokens, we train the student with a hard cross-entropy loss using the teacher trajectory tokens as labels, encouraging confident predictions for tokens that are about to be decoded. For distant tokens, we apply a soft KL divergence loss between the teacher and student token distributions, providing softer supervision and preserving future planning knowledge. This temporal-aware partition naturally gives rise to two deployment configurations: a Quality model that prioritizes accuracy and a Speed model that favors more aggressive acceleration. Experiments show that TAD consistently improves the accuracy-parallelism trade-off. On LLaDA, it raises average accuracy from 46.2\% to 51.6\% with the Quality model and average AUP from 46.2 to 257.1 with the Speed model. Our code is available at: https://github.com/BHmingyang/TAD
Authors: Jihyun Lee, Changmin Lee, Donghwan Kim, Tae-Kyun Kim
Abstract: While existing methods for reconstructing hand-object interactions have made impressive progress, they either focus on rigid or part-wise rigid objects-limiting their ability to model real-world objects (e.g., cloth, stuffed animals) that exhibit highly non-rigid deformations-or model deformable objects without full 3D hand reconstruction. To bridge this gap, we present PhysHanDI (Physics-based Reconstruction of Hand and Deformable Object Interactions), a framework that enables full 3D reconstruction of both interacting hands and non-rigid objects. Our key idea is to physically simulate object deformations driven by forces induced from densely reconstructed 3D hand motions, ensuring that the reconstructed object dynamics are both physically plausible and coherent with the interacting hand movements. Furthermore, we demonstrate that such simulation of object deformations can, in turn, refine and improve hand reconstruction via inverse physics. In experiments, PhysHanDI outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline across reconstruction and future prediction.
Authors: Guanyi Du, Lintao Wang, Kun Hu, Ziyang Wang
Abstract: Sign language production from symbolic notation offers a scalable route to accessible sign animation. We present KANMultiSign, a multi-scale sequence generator that translates HamNoSys notation into two-dimensional human pose sequences. Our framework makes two complementary contributions. First, we introduce a coarse-to-fine generation strategy with multi-scale supervision: the model is first guided by an intermediate body--hand--face scaffold to encourage global structural coherence, and then refines fine-grained hand articulation to improve finger-level detail. Second, we investigate integrating Kolmogorov--Arnold Network modules into a Transformer backbone, using learnable univariate function primitives to model the highly non-linear mapping from discrete phonological symbols to continuous body kinematics with a compact parameterization. Experiments on multiple public corpora spanning Polish, German, Greek, and French sign languages show consistent reductions in dynamic time warping based joint error compared with a strong notation-to-pose baseline, while using substantially fewer parameters. Controlled ablations further indicate that KAN-based variants substantially reduce parameter count while maintaining competitive performance when coupled with multi-scale supervision, rather than serving as the main driver of accuracy gains. These findings position multi-scale supervision as the key mechanism for improving notation-conditioned pose generation, with KAN offering a compact alternative for efficient modeling. Our code will be publicly available.
Authors: Zhangdaihong Liu, Chang Liu, Fenglin Liu, Yixuan Chen, Yang Yang, David A. Clifton, Xiao Gu
Abstract: Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of global mortality, yet scalable cardiac monitoring is hindered by the gap between diagnostic-rich ECG and ubiquitous wearable PPG. Bridging this gap requires representations that are compact, transferable across modalities and devices, and deployable without task-specific retraining. Here we introduce biosignal fingerprints: compact latent representations of cardiovascular state derived from a cross-modal foundation model, the Multi-modal Masked Autoencoder (M2AE), trained on over 3.4 million paired ECG and PPG signals. M2AE integrates modality-specific encoders with a shared bottleneck and dual decoders, jointly optimized using reconstruction and cross-modal contrastive objectives, yielding generalizable fingerprints that retain intra- and inter-modality features. Like a biometric fingerprint, these representations uniquely encode an individual's cardiovascular state in a modality-agnostic, privacy-preserving form reusable across clinical tasks without exposing raw waveform data or requiring model retraining. Across 7 downstream tasks, spanning cross-modal reconstruction, cardiovascular disease classification, hypertension detection, mortality prediction, and demographic inference, biosignal fingerprints achieve competitive or superior performance compared to leading domain-specialist foundation models in frozen settings, including an AUROC of 0.974 for five-class CVD classification and 0.877 for hypertension detection, with a maximum improvement of 27.7% in AUROC across 5 classification tasks. Critically, strong performance is maintained with only a single modality, enabling deployment in resource-constrained, single-sensor environments typical of real-world wearable monitoring, with direct implications for continuous cardiovascular monitoring across clinical and consumer health settings.
Authors: Aishik Nagar, Arun-Kumar Kaliya-Perumal, Yu-Hsuan Han, Andrew Sheng-Han Huang, Kristen Kee, Yushi Cao, Yiming Chen, Hongchao Jiang
Abstract: Inpatient clinical reasoning is a sequential decision under partial observability: the clinician sees the admission so far and must choose the next action whose downstream consequences are not yet visible. Existing clinical-LLM evaluations and RL rewards signals collapse this into closed-form retrieval, clinical journey leakage, or unanchored LLM-as-judge scoring. We introduce CLR-voyance, a framework that reformulates inpatient reasoning as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) and supervises it with rewards that are simultaneously outcome-grounded and clinician-validated. We instantiate the formulation as CLR-POMDP, which partitions successful patient journeys into a policy-visible past and an oracle-only future. Using the past information, an oracle LLM generates a case-specific query-answer pair, and the first adaptive rubric for clinical reasoning which is verifiable in the future of the patient journey. These rubrics are used for both post-training and evaluation of models for inpatient clinical reasoning. We post-train Qwen3-8B and MedGemma-4B with GRPO followed by model merging, yielding state-of-the-art inpatient clinical reasoning while retaining generalist capabilities. CLR-voyance-8B achieves 84.91% on CLR-POMDP, ahead of frontier medical reasoning models like GPT-5 (77.83%) and MedGemma-27B (66.66%) and has comparable or better performance on existing medical benchmarks. To ensure a clinically meaningful setting, we conduct a large-scale clinician alignment study, where physicians curate per-case rubrics, grade candidate responses, and provide blinded pairwise preferences of model reasoning. This study provides insights on clinical LLM-as-a-judge and clinical preference-model selection, which can inform the community at large. CLR-voyance has been deployed for 6+ months at a partner public hospital, drafting thousands of reasoning-heavy inpatient notes.
Authors: Tzeh Yuan Neoh, Nicholas Teh, Je Qin Chooi, Paul W. Goldberg, Milind Tambe
Abstract: Organizations increasingly deploy multiple AI systems across task domains, but selecting a small, high-performing ensemble can require costly model calls, benchmark runs, and human evaluation. We study this selection problem as a distributional variant of multiwinner voting: tasks are drawn from an unknown domain distribution, each task induces feedback over candidate experts, and a committee's value on a task is determined by its best-performing member. We analyze both binary feedback, for tasks with correct/incorrect outcomes, and pairwise feedback, for tasks where candidate outputs are compared by preference. In the binary setting, the induced objective is coverage. We give exhaustive-elicitation baselines and matching worst-case query lower bounds, and we design a failure-conditioned greedy algorithm that preserves the standard $(1-1/e)$ guarantee while obtaining instance-dependent query savings. In the pairwise setting, we study $\theta$-winning committees. We show that full-information optimization admits a PTAS but no EPTAS under Gap-ETH, and that the objective is monotone but not submodular. This motivates a weighted ordinal coverage relaxation, which is submodular and supports a failure-conditioned greedy oracle under pairwise feedback. We then convert this oracle back into $\theta$-type guarantees through finite-family auditing or a minimax wrapper. We also provide small-scale LLM experiments illustrating the predicted query savings and the role of complementarity in committee selection.
Authors: Abhinav Goel, Agostino Capponi, Alfio Gliozzo, Chaitya Shah
Abstract: We introduce SmartEval, a benchmark for systematically evaluating the quality of Solidity smart contracts generated by large language models (LLMs) from natural language specifications. SmartEval provides a corpus of 9,000 generated contracts paired with expert-written ground-truth implementations drawn from the FSMSCG dataset, a five-dimensional evaluation rubric covering functional completeness, variable fidelity, state-machine correctness, business-logic fidelity, and code quality, and a reproducible generation-and-evaluation pipeline. To validate the benchmark's reliability, we conduct three independent empirical studies: a five-condition ablation study (N=300 per condition) isolating the contribution of each pipeline component, a human expert evaluation by three Columbia University PhD researchers confirming automated scores align with expert judgment to within 0.34 points, and external security analysis via the Slither static analyzer confirming 79.4% agreement between the LLM auditor and a non-LLM rule-based tool. Systematic analysis of 9,000 generated contracts reveals characteristic failure modes (logic omissions at 35.3%, state transition errors at 23.4%, and complexity-driven degradation) and quantifies a +8.29 composite-score advantage of generated contracts over ground-truth implementations, attributable to LLMs' literal specification-following behavior. SmartEval establishes a reproducible, validated foundation for empirical research on LLM smart contract synthesis quality, with all data, evaluation code, and generated contracts publicly released.
Authors: Yuhan Wang, Zihan Li, Han Liu, Simon Arberet, Martin Kraus, Yuyin Zhou, Florin-Cristian Ghesu, Dorin Comaniciu, Ali Kamen, Riqiang Gao
Abstract: Voxel-wise dose prediction is a critical yet challenging task in practical radiotherapy (RT) planning, as bespoke models trained from scratch often struggle to generalize across diverse clinical settings. Meanwhile, generative models trained on billion-scale datasets from vision domains have achieved impressive performance. Herein, we propose DiffKT3D, a unified Any2Any 3D diffusion framework that leverages prior knowledge from pretrained video diffusion models for efficient and clinically meaningful dose prediction. To enable flexible conditioning across multiple clinical modalities (CT, anatomical structures, body, beam settings, etc.), we introduce an Any2Any conditional paradigm utilizing modality-specific embeddings without cross-attention overhead. Further, we design a novel reinforcement learning (RL) post-training mechanism guided by a clinically-informed Scorecard explicitly tailored to institutional treatment preferences. Compared with winner of GDP-HMM challenge, DiffKT3D sets a new state-of-the-art in dose prediction by reducing voxel-level MAE from 2.07 to 1.93. In addition, DiffKT3D achieves superior image quality and preference match. These results demonstrate that transferring diffusion priors via modality-aware conditioning and clinically aligned RL post-training can provide a robust and generalizable solution for RT planning across various clinical scenarios.
Authors: Akuen Akoi Deng, Eimantas Butkus, Alfreds Lapkovskis, Praveen Kumar Donta
Abstract: In recent years, the use of artificial intelligence on resource-constrained IoT devices has grown significantly. However, existing approaches to DNN partitioning and offloading across the edge-cloud continuum typically rely on static methods that ignore runtime dynamics. Furthermore, they are often evaluated in simulated environments rather than on real hardware. To address this gap, we propose a framework that dynamically splits neural network layers across the heterogeneous continuum. The framework profiles the model at startup, measures network link conditions between nodes, and periodically re-evaluates the partition to adapt to environmental changes. We created a physical testbed comprising a Raspberry Pi edge device, a laptop fog, and a high-performance desktop PC as the cloud. We evaluated the framework over three widely adopted convolutional neural networks: VGG16, AlexNet, and MobileNetV2. Our results show that the framework achieves reductions in energy and end-to-end latency of 27.09--35.82% and 6.34--22.92%, respectively, compared to a static partitioning baseline. These findings confirm the superiority of adaptive to static partitioning.
Authors: Dikshant, Dikshit Chauhan, Chen Hao, Anupam Trivedi, Harikumar Kandath, Senthilnath Jayavelu
Abstract: We extend RDEx-CSOP with 3 changes that target stagnation & late-stage variance, plus minor parameter tuning. The second scale factor in the standard branch is sampled independently from a truncated Cauchy. A small feasible-only JADE-style archive (|A|_max = 50) is added & sampled with probability |A|/(|A|+|P|). Per-individual stagnation counter triggers, after 180 no-improvement generations, three local overrides on standard branch: pull toward the global best, lift the archive sampling floor to 0.65, & saturate CR to 0.95 when population success rate is below 0.10. The exploitation biased branch & every other RDEx component are left untouched. On CEC CSOP suite (D=30, 25 runs), RDEx-CASK is competitive with RDEx, UDE-III, & CL-SRDE in feasibility-aware quality & improves time-to-target on most problems.
Authors: Huy Hoang Ha, Benoit Favre, Francois Portet
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have saturated standard medical benchmarks that test factual recall, yet their ability to perform higher-order reasoning, such as synthesizing evidence from multiple sources, remains critically under-explored. To address this gap, we introduce MedMeta, the first benchmark designed to evaluate an LLM's ability to generate conclusions from medical meta-analyses using only the abstracts of cited studies. MedMeta comprises 81 meta-analyses from PubMed (2018--2025) and evaluates models using two distinct workflows: a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Golden-RAG) setting with ground-truth abstracts, and a Parametric-only approach relying on internal knowledge. Our evaluation framework is validated by a well-structured analysis showing our LLM-as-a-judge protocol strongly aligns with human expert ratings, as evidenced by high Pearson's r correlation (0.81) and Bland-Altman analysis revealing negligible systematic bias, establishing it as a reliable proxy for scalable evaluation. Our findings underscore the critical importance of information grounding: the Golden-RAG workflow consistently and significantly outperforms the Parametric-only approach across models. In contrast, the benefits of domain-specific fine-tuning are marginal and largely neutralized when external material is provided. Furthermore, stress tests show that all models, regardless of architecture, fail to identify and reject negated evidence, highlighting a critical vulnerability in current RAG systems. Notably, even under ideal RAG conditions, current LLMs achieve only slightly above-average performance (~2.7/5.0). MedMeta provides a challenging new benchmark for evidence synthesis and demonstrates that for clinical applications, developing robust RAG systems is a more promising direction than model specialization alone.
Authors: Julien Lafrance, Richard Khoury, V\'eronique Tremblay
Abstract: Machine learning classifiers in dynamic environments face concept drift -- changes in the data-generating process that degrade performance. Conventional evaluation via static test sets or noise perturbations fails to preserve causal dependencies in tabular data, often producing causally invalid assessments. Post-hoc tools like SHAP and LIME offer correlational insights that may not reflect the causal mechanisms driving model failure. We propose a framework that complements existing drift detection by leveraging Structural Causal Models as "Digital Twins" of data-generating processes, enabling precise causal interventions while preserving structural dependencies. Our technique, Causal Parametric Drift Simulation, stress-tests classifiers to identify vulnerabilities before deployment. Experiments on the Open Sourcing Mental Illness (OSMH) dataset demonstrate that this approach exposes latent vulnerabilities invisible to standard statistical monitors.
Authors: Jingze Song, Zihao Chen, Wenqing Chen, Zibin Zheng
Abstract: Data selection is a key component of efficient instruction tuning for large language models, as recent work has shown that data quality often matters more than data quantity. Accordingly, prior studies have introduced various multi-dimensional heuristics to evaluate and filter instruction data. However, most existing methods rely on static task-agnostic and model-agnostic weighting schemes, which overlook the varying requirements of specific downstream tasks and the differing pre-existing capabilities of models. In this paper, we propose a framework for learning multi-indicator weights that jointly adapts data selection to both the downstream task and the specific model. Our method identifies optimal weight configurations without full-scale fine-tuning by utilizing in-context learning (ICL) signals on compact tiny-validation sets. These signals serve as efficient performance proxies that ensure high-fidelity evaluation at minimal computational cost. Experiments across multiple benchmarks and model families, including Mistral, Qwen, and Llama, show that the approach achieves performance comparable to or exceeding full-dataset tuning while using only 30\% of the training samples on GSM8K. Furthermore, our analysis reveals a trade-off between semantic diversity and logical complexity in reasoning tasks, highlighting the necessity of joint task-model adaptation.
Authors: Abdul Basit, Ashir Rashid, Muhammad Abdullah Hanif, Muhammad Shafique
Abstract: Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a chronic autoimmune disease that can significantly reduce the quality of life of a patient. Existing treatment options can only help slow down the progression of the disease. Therefore, early detection and precise monitoring of disease progression are important. Deep learning offers state-of-the-art models for detecting and segmenting MS lesions in brain MRI scans. However, most of these models are evaluated using the Dice score, without accounting for lesion-wise detection and segmentation performance or other metrics that quantify model performance in cases that are complex or confusing for human annotators, or in cases that are essential for disease detection and progression monitoring. In this paper, we highlight the need to rethink the evaluation of MS lesion segmentation models. In this context, we first present problem fingerprinting in detail to highlight what neurologists look for in brain MRI scans for MS detection and progression monitoring, and which metrics are required to properly quantify model performance in these contexts. Additionally, we present an analysis of state-of-the-art models on two open-source datasets using these metrics to highlight their usability for real-world deployment in hospitals.
Authors: Albert Heruth
Abstract: We present S2P-Net (Spectral-Spatial Polar Network), a compact deep learning architecture that achieves mathematically guaranteed rotation invariance without data augmentation. In this Paper, we also made a comparison to other neural network architectures (CNN`s). Have a look at the results and feel free to contact me for any questions. This is my first paper:) Made by Hackbert
Authors: Henok Tenaw Moges, Charalampos Skokos, Deshendran Moodley
Abstract: Spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) are widely used for short-term forecasting in dynamic physical systems such as traffic and weather. However, the prevailing evaluation practice uses real world benchmark data sets in a single domain with a single fixed holdout splits, making it difficult to compare architectures across different dynamical regimes. We introduce ChaosNetBench (CNB), a synthetic benchmark dataset and evaluation framework for studying STGNN performance under controlled multidimensional chaotic dynamics. CNB is built on a lattice of coupled standard maps with independently tunable local chaos ($K$), coupling strength ($\varepsilon$), and system size ($N$), providing known topology and known dynamics across 96 system instances and 9{,}600 trajectories. We introduce chaos indicators, evaluation metrics and a protocol to analyze and compare the capacity of STGNN architectures to deal with different levels of local and global chaos. We illustrate the usage of the framework by analyzing 13 architectures (5 STGNNs and 8 non-graph baselines). The results reveal a regime dependent transition in which non-graph baselines (TCN, N-BEATS, iTransformer) remain competitive when there is low local chaos, while STGNNs (e.g., Graph WaveNet, D2STGNN, STAEformer) are generally more resilient to higher levels of local and global chaos. CNB provides a practical, reusable testbed for systematically comparing and analyzing the capacity of STGNN architectures to handle different levels of local and global chaos.
Authors: Yixiong Chen, Wenjie Xiao, Pedro R. A. S. Bassi, Boyan Wang, Liang He, Xinze Zhou, Sezgin Er, Ibrahim Ethem Hamamci, Zongwei Zhou, Alan Yuille
Abstract: Medical vision-language models (VLMs) and AI agents have made significant progress in learning to analyze and reason about clinical images. However, existing medical visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks collapse model capabilities into a single accuracy score, obscuring where and why models fail. We propose DeepTumorVQA, a hierarchical benchmark that follows the multi-stage evidence chain in tumor diagnosis and decomposes 3D CT reasoning into four stages: recognition, measurement, visual reasoning, and medical reasoning. Higher-level questions remain independently scorable, while their ground-truth evidence chains are defined over lower-level primitives. The benchmark contains 476K questions across 42 clinical subtypes on 9,262 3D CT volumes. In addition to a direct reasoning mode for VLMs, DeepTumorVQA provides tool-interaction environments for agent evaluation, where a model can call external tools, including segmentation models, measurement programs, and medical knowledge modules, before answering the question. Evaluating over 30 model configurations, we find that reliable quantitative measurement is the primary bottleneck, making later-stage visual and medical reasoning harder for VLMs, while tool augmentation substantially mitigates this issue. When tools are available, leveraging medical knowledge and tools to reason about medical images becomes a new challenge. We further show that ground-truth step-by-step tool-use traces from DeepTumorVQA can supervise agents and reduce tool-use and reasoning failures. This stage-wise progression from recognition to measurement to visual and medical reasoning provides a concrete roadmap for future medical VLM and AI agent studies. All data and code are released at https://github.com/Schuture/DeepTumorVQA.
Authors: Monika Jotautait\.e, Maria Angelica Martinez, Ollie Matthews, Tyler Tracy
Abstract: We introduce a red-teaming methodology that exposes harder-to-catch attacks for coding-agent monitors, suggesting that current practices may under-elicit attacks and overstate monitor performance. We identify three challenges with current red-teaming. First, mode collapse in attack generation, which we reduce with a novel attack taxonomy for broader coverage. Second, a conceive-execute gap: frontier LLMs can propose strong attack ideas or execute them, but not all at once. We mitigate this by decomposing attack construction into strategy generation, execution, and post-hoc trajectory refinement. Third, manual elicitation is costly to scale, which we address with our semi-automated red-teaming pipeline. Applied to BashArena, an AI control setting for tool-using coding agents, this pipeline produces MonitoringBench, a benchmark of 2,644 attack trajectories for evaluating monitor capabilities and failure modes. Our pipeline produces more diverse and stronger attacks: Opus-4.5 monitor's catch rate falls from 94.9\% on elicited-only Opus attacks to 60.3\% on our best refined attacks, with larger drops for several mid-tier monitors. Attacks optimized against three development monitors generalize to ten held-out monitors, with catch rates generally increasing with monitor capability. Using this benchmark, we provide a snapshot of the current monitor capabilities and find that frontier monitors often detect suspicious actions but fall for persuasion or fail to calibrate suspiciousness scores appropriately, suggesting tractable paths for improvement. MonitoringBench provides both a static benchmark for current tool-use monitors and a reusable methodology for refreshing these evaluations as agents and monitors improve.
Authors: Prithul Sarker, Sushmita Sarker, Nicholas G. Murray, Alireza Tavakkoli
Abstract: The core challenge in unsupervised anomaly detection is identifying abnormal patterns without prior knowledge of their characteristics. While existing methods have addressed aspects of this problem, they often struggle to learn a robust representation of the normal data distribution that is distinct from anomalous patterns. In this paper, we present a novel framework, Unified Unsupervised Anomaly Detection ($\text{U}^2\text{AD}$), that comprehensively addresses anomaly detection in multivariate time series. Our approach learns the underlying data distribution of normal samples by utilizing score-based generative modeling. We introduce a novel time-dependent score network and a unified training objective that together delineate the manifold of normal data while considering both local and global temporal contexts. Reconstruction is then performed via a deterministic sampling process using an ordinary differential equation solver. Our extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that $\text{U}^2\text{AD}$ not only outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in detection accuracy but also identifies anomalies at significantly earlier stages of their occurrence.
Authors: Santhosh Kumar Ramakrishnan, Carl Vondrick, Raja Giryes, Philipp Kr\"ahenb\"uhl, Vladlen Koltun
Abstract: Yes. We find that large multimodal models develop mental imagery when solving spatial puzzles, and they do imagine sheep when solving sheep puzzles. We fine-tune a Qwen3.5 VLM to solve twelve diverse visual reasoning tasks -- including tangram, jigsaw, sokoban, 3D mental rotation, and rush hour -- that require understanding geometry, spatial relationships, and the consequences of actions. By supervising the model to predict the open-loop sequence of actions to solve a puzzle from an initial state, we show that the model's activations after each action encode meaningful visual information about the intermediate state. This finding suggests that an imperfect visual world model begins to form as a byproduct of learning to select correct actions, in the absence of any explicit visual supervision. Building on this observation, we propose two ways to sharpen and use the mental images formed by the model. We find that integrating as few as sixteen visual tokens per step into the chain of thought improves the average solve rate from 83% to 89%, with particularly strong gains on reasoning-heavy tasks such as jigsaw and 3D mental rotation.
Authors: Siteng Kang, Xinhua Zhang
Abstract: Training neural networks to satisfy universal constraints over continuous domains poses unique challenges. Common examples include Lyapunov Neural Networks (Lyapunov NNs) and Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), where analytical solutions are generally either unavailable or overly restrictive. Sample-based methods are therefore commonly used to enforce these constraints, and the choice of samples has a substantial impact on convergence speed, stability, and solution quality. Most existing methods rely on fixed heuristics or handcrafted rules, and are suboptimal in practice. In this paper, we aim to improve upon them by learning, from data and experience, how to dynamically and iteratively adjust the samples in response to the model's evolving learning performance. Trained by reinforcement learning, the learned policy improves empirical constraint satisfaction on test problems while significantly improving efficiency. We validate the approach on both Lyapunov NNs and PINNs, and demonstrate its broader applicability to domains where adaptive input selection is essential for effective training.
Authors: V\'ictor Gallego
Abstract: We present Metal-Sci, a 10-task benchmark of scientific Apple Silicon Metal compute kernels spanning six optimization regimes (stencils, all-pairs in $n$-body problems, multi-field Boltzmann, neighbor-list molecular dynamics, multi-kernel PDE, FFT). Each task ships a CPU reference, a roofline-anchored fitness function, and a held-out generalization size. We pair the benchmark with a lightweight harness for automatic kernel search that runtime-compiles each candidate, scores it against the roofline across multiple sizes, and feeds structured compile and per-size correctness diagnostics back to a frozen LLM driving a $(1{+}1)$ evolutionary loop. We report matched single-model sweeps of Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT 5.5 on M1 Pro: in-distribution self-speedups span $1.00\times$ to $10.7\times$. Beyond raw speedup, our central methodological claim is structural: the held-out gate scoring function $\Phi_\mathcal{T}$ (evaluated once at end-of-run on a configuration the agent never sees during search) functions as a cheap mechanical oversight primitive on this automatic search loop, catching e.g. an Opus template
Authors: Alaa Asfour, Christopher Indris, Leihan Chen, Tejas Vyas, Guanghui Wang
Abstract: Large-scale 3D vision-language models (VLMs) like LLaVA-3D offer strong spatial reasoning but are difficult to deploy due to high computational costs. We propose a knowledge distillation framework that transfers spatial reasoning from a 7B teacher to a 2.29B student model. Our approach achieves 8.7x lower inference latency and a 3x reduction in model size while retaining 54-72% of the teacher's performance. The framework utilizes VGGT as the vision encoder and a multi-task distillation pipeline with uncertainty-aware loss weighting. To improve reasoning without chain-of-thought (CoT) data, we introduce "Hidden CoT": learnable latent tokens that serve as an internal scratchpad before answer generation. This is the first use of latent scratchpad reasoning in distilled 3D VLMs. The student model jointly performs spatial description, depth estimation, and object detection. Experiments on ScanNet and 3D-FRONT show strong spatial understanding, reaching 68-72% accuracy on proximity and contact tasks. Our framework enables efficient 3D scene QA on resource-constrained platforms.
Authors: Hardik Goel
Abstract: Tool-enabled AI agents are increasingly deployed in cloud-hosted environments and offered as services, where they perform side-effecting operations through privileged tools within execution environments. While such agents enable powerful automation, the security implications of hosting autonomous agents in privileged execution environments are not yet fully explored. This paper presents a structured analysis of security risks associated with cloud-hosted AI agents. We introduce a taxonomy of risk categories, illustrate these risks through three representative agent scenarios, and discuss mitigation strategies along with their tradeoffs. A small controlled experiment empirically illustrates risk manifestation and the effect of lightweight mitigations in this setup. Our analysis suggests that many risks in autonomous cloud agents arise not from novel vulnerabilities, but from over-privileged tools, capability-intent mismatches, and ambient authority leakage in execution environments. Based on these findings, we derive practical design guidelines for deploying AI agents in the cloud more securely.
Authors: Bowen He, Juncheng Dong, Lin Lin, Xiang Cheng
Abstract: A central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is to learn models that generalize beyond the tasks on which they are trained, a goal traditionally pursued through multi-task and meta RL. Recently, transformer architectures have emerged as a promising approach, enabling adaptation to new tasks via in-context learning without explicit parameter updates. From a functional perspective, a transformer can be viewed as a functional operator that maps a context to a task-specific function. It is thus fundamental to understand and design this operator to support stronger generalization in RL. In this work, we address this resulting question of generalization from a kernel-based perspective by establishing a connection between non-linear transformers and kernel-based temporal difference learning. By interpreting the transformer as performing regression in a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), we show that value functions from different domains can be represented using a shared set of weights, provided they lie within the same RKHS. Experiments on multiple MetaWorld domains support this interpretation, demonstrating convergence of the temporal-difference objective.
Authors: Vishnu Vardhan Reddy, Sagnik Chatterjee, Soumik Bhatta
Abstract: Most language-model training data shows final artifacts, not the process that produced them. We study a tractable version of this question in tool use: when a model learns a stream of new API domains, does keeping tool-use trajectories help compared with stripping the intermediate API trace? We fine-tune Llama 3.1 8B Instruct with QLoRA on API-Bank using four sequential domain blocks. Condition A strips previous API request/response lines from the prompt and trains the model to predict the next API call. Condition B keeps the trajectory context. In a single-seed pilot, full held-out generation evaluation shows that Condition B reaches 56.9\% final exact full-call accuracy compared with 39.2\% for Condition A. B also improves final API-name accuracy by 7.7 points. However, B uses 25.1\% more training tokens, the run uses one seed, and the task is next-call prediction rather than full dialogue success.
Authors: Zhiqing Zhong, Zhijing Ye, Jian Zhang, Weijian Zheng, Bolun Sun, Xiaodong Yu
Abstract: Static-graph LLM decoders provide predictable launches, fixed tensor shapes, and low submission overhead, but online decoding exposes highly irregular KV-cache behavior: request lengths differ, EOS events arrive asynchronously, and logical histories fragment over time. Dynamic runtimes recover flexibility through paged KV management and step-level scheduling, while static-graph executors often over-reserve memory and suffer burst-time latency outliers. This paper studies whether much of this variability can be absorbed below a fixed decode interface. We present KV-RM, a runtime design that regularizes KV-cache movement beneath a static-graph LLM decoder. KV-RM decouples logical KV histories from physical storage, tracks active KV state through a block pager, and materializes each decode step through a single committed descriptor. A merge-staged transport path coalesces non-contiguous KV mappings into a small number of large transfer groups before a fixed-shape attention kernel consumes them. Optional bounded far-history summaries can be enabled under the same interface, but the core design does not depend on them. On a 2-GPU NVIDIA A100 node, KV-RM improves mixed-length decoding throughput and tail latency relative to a static-graph baseline, reduces reserved KV memory across workload families, and removes severe burst-time latency spikes under production-trace replay. These results suggest that KV-cache movement, rather than kernel shape, can be an effective boundary for recovering runtime flexibility in static-graph LLM serving.
Authors: Sanket Badhe, Priyanka Tiwari, Deep Shah
Abstract: Large Language Models are increasingly used as zero-shot classifiers in complex reasoning tasks. However, standard constrained decoding suffers from a phenomenon we define as Renormalization Bias. When a model is restricted to a small set of target labels, the standard softmax operation discards the probability mass assigned to semantic synonyms in the original distribution. This loss of information, which we call the Silent Vote, results in artificial overconfidence and poor calibration. We propose Semantic Softmax, an inference-time layer that recovers this lost information by aggregating the scores of the semantic neighborhood surrounding each target label. We evaluate this approach on Qwen-3 and Phi-4-mini models using GoEmotions and Civil Comments datasets. Our results demonstrate consistent improvements across all evaluation metrics: Semantic Softmax substantially reduces Expected Calibration Error (ECE) and Brier Score, while simultaneously enhancing discriminative performance in terms of AUROC and Macro-F1. By accounting for linguistic nuances, our method provides a more calibrated and accurate alternative for zero-shot classification.
Authors: Taylan Soydan, Miguel A. Bessa, Dirk Mohr, Rui Barreira
Abstract: Selective state space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, achieve strong per-token expressivity by making the time discretization step $\Tilde{\Delta}$ a learned function of the input. However, in doing so, $\Tilde{\Delta}$ ceases to represent a physical sampling interval, limiting its irregular time series modeling capability. Continuous-time SSMs, such as S5, preserve the physical meaning of $\Tilde{\Delta}$ and handle irregular timestamps natively ($\Tilde{\Delta}\equiv\Delta)$, but their dynamics remain linear time-invariant (LTI), limiting per-token expressivity. We propose \textbf{TIDES}, a selective SSM variant that reconciles selective and continuous architectures by moving input-dependence off the step size and onto the diagonal state matrix. As a result, $\Tilde{\Delta}$ retains its physical meaning, tied to the state discretization, allowing the model to handle irregular timestamps natively without sacrificing the per-token expressivity that makes selective SSMs effective. We show this on a novel \emph{Fading Flash} experimental benchmark, a compact controlled diagnostic for sequence models that jointly tests input-dependence and extrapolation to out-of-distribution $\Delta$ values, and isolates the distinct failure modes of current state-of-the-art architectures that TIDES avoids by construction. On large-scale benchmarks, TIDES sets the new state-of-the-art average rank on UEA time-series classification and the Physiome-ODE regression benchmark. Code available at: https://github.com/TaylanSoydan/TIDES.
Authors: Benjamin Patrick Evans, Sumitra Ganesh, Leo Ardon
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable generative performance, yet their output quality is dependent on the decoding strategy. While sampling-based methods (e.g., top-k, nucleus) and search-and-select based methods (e.g., beam search, best-of-n, majority voting) can improve upon greedy decoding, both approaches suffer from limitations: sampling generally commits to a single path, while search often expends excessive computation regardless of task complexity. To address these, we introduce Entropy-informed decoding (EDEN), a plug-and-play, model-agnostic decoding framework that adaptively allocates computation based on the model's own uncertainty, approximating higher-width beam search with fewer expansions. At each generation step, EDEN estimates the entropy of the output token distribution and adjusts the branching factor monotonically with the entropy, expanding more candidates in high-entropy regions and following a greedier path in low-entropy regions, improving token efficiency. Experiments across complex tasks, including mathematical reasoning, code generation, and scientific questions, demonstrate that EDEN consistently improves output quality over existing decoding strategies, achieving better accuracy-expansion trade-offs than fixed-width beam search. By treating next-token selection as a noisy maximisation problem, we prove that branching factors monotone in entropy are guaranteed to find better (i.e. more probable) continuations than any fixed branching factor within the same total expansion budget, and derive explicit regret rates characterising the benefit of the adaptive allocation.
Authors: Arsalaan Ahmad, Oktay Karakus, Paul L. Rosin
Abstract: Landslide detection from satellite imagery has advanced through deep learning, yet most models rely on large, highly correlated spectral-topographic inputs whose contributions remain poorly understood. The question of which channels are actually necessary has received surprisingly little attention. This matters: redundant or correlated inputs obscure physical interpretability, inflate computational overhead, and can actively degrade model performance through the Hughes Phenomenon. We present a systematic, explainable channel-selection framework for the Landslide4Sense benchmark, combining Sentinel-2 multispectral and ALOS PALSAR terrain data with 16 engineered spectral and structural indices. Rather than relying on conventional single-band drop tests, which evaluate channels in isolation and miss interaction effects, we apply Sequential Forward Floating Selection (SFFS) to iteratively build and prune a candidate feature pool using a lightweight U-Net++ proxy model. Beyond identifying a compact 8-channel subset that matches or exceeds the segmentation F1 of configurations using up to 30 channels, we use the selection process itself to interrogate which spectral and topographic features landslide models genuinely rely on, and what this reveals about the physical cues driving their predictions. We argue that SFFS represents a principled feature selection approach to input design in Earth observation, in contrast to the prevailing practice of appending every available band and hoping the model learns what to ignore.
Authors: Temoor Tanveer
Abstract: LLM-guided evolutionary methods such as AlphaEvolve have proven effective in domains like math, systems research, and algorithmic discovery, but their reliance on frontier models makes each run expensive. We argue this is largely an artifact of how existing frameworks allocate search: archives that fail to preserve solution diversity force compensation through stronger mutation models; blind model use spends frontier dollars on local edits a smaller model could handle; and full-set evaluation wastes rollouts on redundant examples. We introduce LEVI, a harness-first evolutionary framework built on the bet that stronger search architectures can substitute for or even outperform larger LLMs in evolutionary search. LEVI improves on three core components of evolutionary search: a solution database that establishes diversity from the beginning, and then maintains it throughout the run; a smarter mutation router that plays into the strengths of large and small LLMs; and a rank-preserving proxy benchmark for rollout-heavy settings. Across systems-research benchmarks LEVI attains the highest score on a budget 3.3-6.7x smaller than the published frontier-model runs of existing frameworks like ShinkaEvolve, GEPA, and AdaEvolve; on one problem, LEVI matches the existing best at a 35x lower cost. On prompt optimization, LEVI matches or exceeds GEPA at less than half of its rollout budget on four different benchmarks. LEVI is available as an open-source framework at https://github.com/ttanv/levi.
Authors: Ruan Dong, Yuanyun Zhang, Shi Li
Abstract: Representation learning in electronic health records (EHR) has largely followed paradigms inherited from natural language processing, relying on sequence modeling and reconstruction based objectives that treat clinical labels as ground truth. However, real world clinical supervision is inherently weak, arising from heterogeneous, noisy, and institution specific labeling processes such as billing codes, heuristic phenotypes, and incomplete annotations. In this work, we propose WISTERIA, a weakly supervised representation learning framework that models labels as stochastic observations of an underlying latent clinical state. Instead of optimizing against a single supervision signal, WISTERIA constructs multiple weak supervision operators and learns representations by enforcing consistency across their induced label distributions. This multi view formulation induces an implicit denoising mechanism, allowing the model to recover clinically meaningful structure by reconciling disagreement between noisy labelers. We further incorporate ontology aware regularization in the label space to impose semantic structure over supervision signals. Empirically, WISTERIA improves predictive performance across standard EHR benchmarks, demonstrates strong robustness to label noise, and exhibits superior cross institutional generalization compared to sequence based pretraining objectives. These results suggest that explicitly modeling the supervision process rather than treating labels as fixed targets provides a more appropriate inductive bias for learning robust and clinically meaningful representations from EHR data.
Authors: Cameron Berg, Roshni Lulla
Abstract: We use sparse autoencoder (SAE) feature steering to amplify Dark Triad personality traits (Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy) in Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct and evaluate the resulting behavioral changes across five psychological instruments. The steered model becomes substantially more exploitative, aggressive, and callous on novel behavioral scenarios (d=10.62) while its cognitive empathy remains intact, reproducing the empathy dissociation characteristic of human Dark Triad populations. Critically, strategic deception is completely unaffected across all features, suggesting that exploitation and deception may operate through dissociable computational pathways in large language models. Individual feature analysis reveals non-redundant encoding, with each feature driving distinct antisocial mechanisms through separable computational pathways. We also show that feature discovery method itself modulates intervention depth: contrastively-discovered features change both self-report and behavior, while semantically-searched features change only self-report (d=12.65 between methods on behavior). These findings suggest that antisocial tendencies in at least one large language model comprise dissociable components rather than a unified construct, with implications for how such tendencies should be detected, measured, and controlled.
Authors: Dongxin Guo, Jikun Wu, Siu Ming Yiu
Abstract: Gradient-based preference optimization methods for large language model (LLM) alignment suffer from preference collapse, converging to narrow behavioral modes while neglecting preference diversity. We introduce EvoPref, a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm that maintains populations of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters optimized across helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty objectives using Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) selection with archive-based diversity preservation. Our primary contribution is demonstrating that population-based methods discover substantially more diverse alignments than gradient descent. On standard benchmarks, EvoPref improves preference coverage by 18% (median 82.5% vs. 70.0% for ORPO, $p<0.001$, Wilcoxon, $n=30$) and reduces collapse rates by 47% (11.0% vs. 20.6%, $p<0.001$), while achieving competitive alignment quality (median 75.5% RewardBench vs. 75.0% for ORPO, $p<0.05$). We provide theoretical motivation extending recent multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) runtime analysis (Dang et al., 2025) suggesting why archive-based methods escape collapse more effectively than single-trajectory optimization. Comprehensive comparisons against MOEA/D, SMS-EMOA, CMA-ES, and gradient baselines (DPO, IPO, KTO, ORPO) with rigorous statistical testing (Friedman with Holm correction, Vargha-Delaney effect sizes, median with IQR) confirm that multi-objective selection with diversity preservation is essential. This work establishes evolutionary optimization as a principled paradigm for diverse LLM alignment.
Authors: Dongxin Guo, Jikun Wu, Siu Ming Yiu
Abstract: Large Language Models exhibit mode collapse, producing homogeneous outputs that fail to explore valid solution spaces. We present QD-LLM, a framework for parameter-efficient neuroevolution that evolves prompt embeddings, compact neural interfaces (~32K parameters) that steer generation in frozen LLMs (70B+ parameters), within a Quality-Diversity (QD) optimization framework. Our contributions: (1) evolved prompt embeddings via gradient-free optimization enabling behavioral steering without model fine-tuning; (2) hybrid behavior characterization combining semantic and explicit features with formal coverage bounds (Theorem 1) under validated near-independence (NMI $= 0.08 \pm 0.02$); (3) co-evolutionary variation operators including targeted behavioral mutation via finite-difference gradient estimation. On HumanEval (164 problems), MBPP, and creative writing benchmarks, QD-LLM achieves 46.4% higher coverage and 41.4% higher QD-Score than QDAIF ($p<0.001$, 30 runs, Vargha-Delaney $A=0.94$). We demonstrate downstream utility: diverse archives improve test generation (34% more edge cases) and fine-tuning data quality (8.3% accuracy gain). We validate across open-source LLMs (Llama-3-70B, Mistral-Large) with full embedding access, establishing prompt embedding evolution as an effective paradigm bridging neuroevolution and modern LLMs.
Authors: Yong Fu
Abstract: Detecting orbital anomalies, such as maneuvers, atmospheric decay, and attitude upsets, across the rapidly growing population of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites is a prerequisite for collision avoidance, decay forecasting, and conjunction screening. The bottleneck is not modeling capacity but labels: there is no public ground-truth corpus of orbital anomalies, manual review does not scale to approximately 10^4 active satellites, and pure rule-based detectors trade recall for precision so aggressively that they are blind to most behavioral anomalies. We present a multi-tier labeling cascade that composes three weak supervision sources of increasing fidelity: a fast physics rule set (rule_v1), an Interacting Multiple Model Unscented Kalman Filter (IMM-UKF) bank, and a supplemental-element calibration step (supGP), to produce labels at a scale unavailable from any single source. Applied to 232M Two-Line Element (TLE) records spanning 60 years, the cascade yields 8.6M labeled sequences of length 50 (430M timesteps) over 11 features that include explicit time encoding and full mean-element state. On overlapping satellites, IMM-UKF surfaces 42.6x more anomalies than rule_v1 alone. We train a 6.5M-parameter Transformer in two stages, achieving a maneuver recall of 55.4% and decay recall of 62.8% on a held-out test set. An ablation on the time-delta feature alone yields a 107% relative improvement in decay recall. We frame the resulting model as a high-recall triage classifier whose role is to surface candidate events for downstream filtering, not to issue final attributions, and discuss the path toward a Neural-ODE-based orbital world model.
Authors: Zhipeng Liu, Chunbo Luo
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) enable text-guided object detection but degrade severely under cross-view scenarios where ground and aerial viewpoints differ in altitude, scale, and spatial layout. These geometric changes introduce systematic complexity variations between viewpoints, e.g., ground view images contain dense and highly occluded structures, while aerial images are sparse and globally organized. Fixed VLM fusion mechanisms cannot handle this discrepancy. We propose CrossVL, a framework combining Complexity-Aware Pathway Aggregation (CPA) and Paired Curriculum Learning (PCL) for enhanced cross-view detection for VLM. CPA estimates scene complexity from multimodal statistics and routes visual features through multiple pathways to obtain view-specific representations. PCL leverages semantic consistency of synchronized ground-aerial pairs to provide stable early supervision and then gradually shifts toward randomized sampling. On MAVREC, CrossVL improves Florence-2's aerial mAP from 58.66% to 61.03% and reduces the ground-aerial performance gap from 8.63pp to 6.65pp, while also achieving a 3.3x reduction in variance across random seeds. CPA provides stable complexity-aware feature aggregation, and PCL enhances optimization dynamics. Together, they demonstrate that coordinated architectural and training adaptations are crucial for robust cross-view VLM detection.
Authors: Joshua Owusu Ansah, Anuj Kapoor, Ayush Khanna, Manvika Vinod, Precious Njeck, Shuai Gao
Abstract: This research paper addresses the limitations of current mobile accessibility services like TalkBack, which provide manual gesture-based sequential feedback to BVI users. Motivated by the promise of large language models (LLMs), this paper introduces Insight, an Android accessibility service that provides natural language interaction and real-time summarization of the screen. The paper performs a within-subject experimental study with users to compare Insight and TalkBack on usability factors. Results show Insight reduced mental effort and task time, and was preferred because of its dialogue interface, but users felt the need for interruption management. Results show LLM-based interfaces can significantly improve mobile accessibility, and describe the potential of hybrid solutions combining gesture and dialogue modalities towards more inclusive design.
Authors: Songtao Wei, Yi Li, Zhikai Li, Xu Hu, Yuede Ji, Guanpeng Li, Feng Chen, Carl Yang, Zhichun Guo, Bingzhe Li
Abstract: Large reasoning models, such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1, tend to become increasingly verbose as their reasoning capabilities improve. These inflated Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories often exceed what the underlying problems require, wasting compute, latency, and context budgets. While introducing length-based efficiency rewards during reinforcement learning offers a natural remedy, existing methods struggle with two fundamental challenges: the optimal balance between correctness and efficiency is non-stationary throughout training, and intrinsic reasoning budgets vary drastically across problems. Relying on static reward weights and global length constraints inevitably forces a compromise between degraded accuracy and unrealized compression. To overcome these limitations, we propose LEAD (Length-Efficient Adaptive and Dynamic reasoning), a method that replaces static heuristics with online, self-adaptive mechanisms. LEAD dynamically calibrates the correctness-efficiency trade-off at each step using a Potential-Scaled Instability, directing optimization capacity to the most informative learning signal. Furthermore, it estimates an adaptive per-problem target length online based on the model's own correct rollouts, applying a symmetric efficiency reward that penalizes both overthinking and over-compression. Evaluated on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks, LEAD achieves the highest accuracy and Accuracy-Efficiency Score among RL-trained efficient-reasoning methods while producing substantially shorter outputs than the base model.
Authors: Ben Kereopa-Yorke, Guillermo Diaz, Holly Wright, Reagan Johnston, Ron F. Del Rosario, Timothy Lynar
Abstract: We define Oracle Poisoning, an attack class in which an adversary corrupts a structured knowledge graph that AI agents query at runtime via tool-use protocols, causing incorrect conclusions through correct reasoning. Unlike prompt injection, Oracle Poisoning manipulates the data agents reason over, not their instructions. We demonstrate six attack scenarios against a production 42-million-node code knowledge graph, providing the first empirical demonstration of knowledge graph poisoning against a production-scale agentic system, distinct from CTI embedding poisoning. Primary evaluation uses real SDK tool-use across nine models from three providers (N=30 per model), where models autonomously invoke a graph query tool and reason from results. The result is unambiguous: every tested model trusts poisoned data at 100% at moderate attacker sophistication(L2), with 269 valid trials (of 270) accepting fabricated security claims under directed queries. Under open-ended prompts, trust drops to 3-55%, confirming prompt framing as a confound; we report both conditions. An attacker sophistication gradient reveals discrete break points, a minimum skill at which trust flips from 0% to 100%, reframing the attack as a question not of whether but of how much. A controlled delivery-mode comparison shows that inline evaluation produces false negatives: GPT-5.1 shows 0% trust inline but 100% under both simulated and real agentic tool-use, demonstrating that delivery mode is a first-order confound. We evaluate five defences; read-only access control eliminates the direct mutation vector, while the remaining four are partial and model-dependent. Analysis of four additional platforms suggests the attack may generalise across the knowledge-graph ecosystem.
Authors: Chelsea Zou, Yiheng Yao, Selena She, Robert D. Hawkins
Abstract: We introduce CalBench, a controlled evaluation environment for studying multi-agent coordination through calendar scheduling. In CalBench, N agents each manage a private calendar containing pre-existing commitments and must coordinate to schedule a stream of M incoming meetings while minimizing disruption costs. Because agents observe only their own calendars, successful scheduling requires communication across private information boundaries. Each scenario is generated with an oracle solution, enabling precise measurement of coordination quality via realized-to-optimal cost, as well as a Distributed Constraint Optimization (DCOP) baseline to provide a fair comparison under the same private-information constraints. CalBench enables precise verification of task success, communication efficiency, and fairness in the distribution of disruption costs. Our environment also studies privacy-preserving coordination by augmenting calendar entries with private semantic contexts of varying sensitivity and measuring whether agents reveal task-irrelevant private information during negotiation. Unlike multi-agent benchmarks where a single capable agent can often substitute for the group, CalBench is inherently decentralized: no agent has access to another agent's private calendar, yet agents must still reach mutually consistent decisions over shared meeting scheduling. CalBench therefore provides a practical and verifiable setting for studying coordination protocols, communication efficiency, negotiation strategies, fairness, and privacy leakage in multi-agent systems.
Authors: Musa Cim, Poovaiah Palangappa, Miro Hodak, Ravi Dwivedula, Meena Arunachalam, Mahmut Taylan Kandemir
Abstract: Why does full-pipeline FP4 training of large language models often diverge, even when forward activations and activation gradients remain stable? We address this question through a controlled study of MXFP4 quantization in transformer training, progressively enabling FP4 across forward propagation (Fprop), activation gradients (Dgrad), and weight gradients (Wgrad) while holding all other factors fixed. In full pretraining of Llama 3.1-8B on the C4 dataset, we observe that quantizing Wgrad is the primary driver of convergence degradation, whereas FP4 in Fprop and Dgrad alone introduces only modest additional token requirements. To interpret this behavior, we evaluate both structured and stochastic interventions under a controlled experimental setting. We find that stochastic rounding and randomized Hadamard rotations fail to stabilize training once Wgrad is quantized, whereas deterministic Hadamard rotations consistently restore stable optimization. These results suggest that FP4 training instability is driven by structured micro-scaling errors along sensitive gradient paths, rather than by insufficient stochasticity. We run experiments with native MXFP4 support on AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs, enabling controlled investigation of these effects without reliance on software emulation.
Authors: Anushree Berlia
Abstract: We present Fashion Florence, a Florence-2 vision-language model fine-tuned with LoRA to extract structured fashion attributes from clothing images. Given a single photograph, the model generates a JSON object containing category, color, material, style tags, and occasion tags, structured output suitable for direct programmatic consumption by downstream recommendation and retrieval systems. Fine-tuning data is derived from the iMaterialist Fashion dataset (228 labels), where we collapse fine-grained annotations into a compact 6-category, 16-color, 19-style schema via rule-based label engineering. We apply LoRA (r=16, alpha=32) to all decoder linear layers, training for 3 epochs on 3,688 examples. On a held-out test set of 461 images, Fashion Florence achieves 94.6% category accuracy and 63.0% material accuracy, compared to 89.3% / 43.3% for GPT-4o-mini and 87.4% for Gemini 2.5 Flash. Fashion Florence produces valid JSON in 99.8% of outputs while running at 0.77B parameters on a single GPU at zero marginal inference cost. Style tag F1 reaches 0.753 vs. 0.612 (Gemini) and 0.398 (GPT-4o-mini). The model is deployed as a Hugging Face Space and integrated into Loom, an open-source outfit recommendation system.
Authors: Cheol Young Park, Shou Matsumoto
Abstract: We introduce the Free Energy Manifold (FEM), a score-trained conditional energy model specialized for inference in hybrid Bayesian networks with discrete and continuous variables. FEM represents each conditional factor as an energy landscape over learned discrete-parent embeddings and continuous observations, enabling posterior evaluation, generative sampling, and compositional inference across multiple continuous leaves by energy addition under conditional independence. A central finding is the mode-bridge artifact: standard conditional energy models can create low-energy ridges between separated modes of the same class, producing overconfident posteriors at off-data interior points. We analyze this failure and propose valley regularization, an off-data calibration term that restores near-uniform posteriors in such regions while preserving in-data fit. Across synthetic multimodal hybrid-BN benchmarks, FEM substantially reduces KL divergence relative to classical baselines and a vanilla conditional EBM, including large gains at mode-bridge midpoint queries and in multi-leaf evidence composition. We also evaluate high-cardinality discrete-parent settings and a UCI Breast Cancer sanity check, showing that FEM is most useful when multimodal or compositional Bayesian-network inference is required, while discriminative classifiers remain preferable for closed-world classification tasks.
Authors: Yakun Liu, Hai Luan, Dong Liu, Zhiyu Jin
Abstract: In new media art creation, the mapping between vision and hearing is often subjective. As a classic carrier of sound visualization, Chladni patterns have great potential in building audio-visual mapping mechanisms. However, existing tools face pain points: high technical barriers for simulation, offline computing failing real-time interaction, and uncontrollable mapping rules in general sonification tools. To address these, this paper proposes ChladniSonify, a real-time visual-acoustic mapping method for Chladni patterns. Based on Kirchhoff-Love plate theory, we build a paired dataset via numerical programming and calibrate it using ANSYS finite element simulation. Focusing on the slender nodal lines of Chladni patterns, we adopt a lightweight CNN with CBAM to achieve high-precision, low-latency pattern classification. Finally, we build an end-to-end system in Python and Max/MSP, mapping recognized patterns to corresponding sine wave frequencies. Results show the system has excellent usability: the classification module achieves 99.33% accuracy on the test set with 7.03 ms inference latency; the mapped frequency matches the theoretical value with zero deviation; the average end-to-end latency is under 50 ms, meeting real-time interactive needs. This work provides a reproducible engineering prototype for Chladni audio-visual art creation.
Authors: Wenhao Liang, Lin Yue, Wei Emma Zhang, Miao Xu, Mingyu Guo, Olaf Maennel, Weitong Chen
Abstract: Post-hoc calibration is usually evaluated as a function of logits or softmax confidence alone, even as routing-augmented architectures increasingly accompany predictions with sample-specific internal routing traces and pair them with claims of calibration-relevant uncertainty. We ask a basic question: do these traces provide stable routing-specific evidence for post-hoc calibration beyond confidence? We study this in Attention-Residual transformers (Kimi Team, 2026) through a matched-confidence diagnostic suite that stratifies examples by routing-derived state, compares subgroup gaps against within-bin routing-permutation nulls, and evaluates matched post-hoc probes differing only in their auxiliary feature. Across our completed AR runs, scalar routing summaries do not provide stable evidence of routing-conditional miscalibration: weighted gaps remain small or seed-sensitive, and only $1$ of $30$ within-bin permutation tests rejects the conditional-null at $\alpha=0.05$ (only on one seed; not stable across seeds in that cell). AR-CondCal, a minimal $2$-D Nadaraya--Watson probe on confidence and routing-depth variance, lies within the seed-variance band of matched confidence-only and predictive-entropy controls and does not reliably improve worst-routing-tertile ECE; bandwidth-sensitivity checks (Scott multiples, CV-NLL, global-ECE oracle) do not change this. A full-vector MLP over $(c, H_1, \ldots, H_L)$ can appear to improve over a linear confidence baseline, but the apparent gain disappears once a capacity-matched confidence-only MLP is included as a control, and shuffled routing profiles achieve comparable performance. Apparent routing-aware calibration gains in this AR setting should not be read as internal-state calibration until matched-confidence, bandwidth, capacity, and permutation controls rule out common confounds.
Authors: Tao Tang, Hong Liu, Xinshun Wang, Wanruo Zhang
Abstract: Although recent studies have made remarkable progress in human mesh recovery, they still exhibit limited robustness to occlusions and often produce inaccurate poses and severe motion jitter due to the insufficient spatial features for occluded body parts. Inspired by the rapid advancements in human motion prediction, we discover that compared to occluded image features, pose sequence inherently contains reliable motion prior for estimating occluded body parts. In this paper, we incorporate Motion Prior for Occluded human mesh recovery, called MoPO. Our MoPO mainly consists of two components: 1) The motion de-occlusion module, where we propose a spatial-temporal occlusion detector to detect joint visibility, and then we propose a lightweight motion predictor to complete the occluded body parts by predicting the most plausible joint positions based on history poses. 2) The motion-aware fusion and refinement module, which fuses the completed joint sequence with image features to estimate human shape and initial human pose. Moreover, the completed joint sequence is further used to refine the final human pose through inverse kinematics, which provides the occlusion-free motion prior for regressing human poses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on both occlusion-specific and standard benchmarks, significantly enhancing the accuracy and temporal consistency of occluded human mesh recovery. Our code and demo can be found in the supplementary material.
Authors: Jingchuan Xiao, Xinyi Sui, Cihan Ruan
Abstract: Alignment, the tendency of adjacent weight matrices in deep networks to develop compatible subspace orientations, underlies gradient flow, Neural Collapse, and representation similarity across architectures. Despite extensive empirical documentation, these phenomena have resisted unified theoretical treatment: existing explanations are post-hoc, each fitted to a specific observation with whatever mathematics is at hand. We reverse this direction by deriving the mathematical structure that layerwise alignment inherently demands. Using geometric invariant theory, we prove that alignment geometry has a canonical closed, polystable stratum given by a flag variety, and that subspace intersection dimension is its unique reparameterization-invariant observable, establishing that subspace metrics are not empirical conventions but mathematical necessities. This unified framework yields two dynamical consequences: ridge regularization drives subspace alignment at an exponential rate set by weight decay, whereas nonlinear activations induce a commutator obstruction to exact basis alignment, generically present in nonlinear networks and absent in linear ones. Together these give a geometric explanation of the Level-2/3 hierarchy in Neural Collapse from first principles rather than post-hoc analysis. The commutator magnitude and head subspace overlap further serve as weight-space windows into internal alignment structure, requiring no forward passes. Experiments on multilayer perceptrons, residual networks, and pretrained language models support the proposed diagnostics and delineate their scope.
Authors: Danhui Zhang, Zhe Wang, Qing Qing, Jiarui Liu, Wentao Gao, Ziqi Xu, Mingliang Hou, Xikun Zhang, Renqiang Luo
Abstract: Graph learning research has increasingly shifted toward continual graph learning (CGL), which better reflects real-world scenarios where graphs evolve over time. However, existing CGL methods largely assume clean supervision and overlook a critical challenge: the newly arriving portions of the graph are often noisy, due to annotation errors or adversarial corruption. This mismatch limits their applicability in practice. In this work, we study robust continual graph learning, where models must simultaneously handle catastrophic forgetting and noisy supervision in evolving graph data. We show that label noise introduces a new failure mode, catastrophic remembering, where models persistently reinforce corrupted knowledge across tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a Unified Flow-Oriented framework (UFO). First, UFO models conditional feature distributions via flow-based generative modeling and produces replay representations, mitigating forgetting without storing historical data. Second, UFO estimates instance-level reliability scores to distinguish clean from noisy nodes, reducing the impact of corrupted supervision and alleviating catastrophic remembering. Extensive experiments on four benchmark graph datasets under varying noise ratios demonstrate that UFO consistently outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and forgetting metrics. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UFO.
Authors: Chunxiao Wang
Abstract: Production LLM coding agents drift over long sessions: they forget user-specified constraints, slip into mistakes the user already flagged, and confabulate prior agreements. White-box approaches such as persona vectors require model weights and so cannot be applied to closed APIs (Claude, GPT-4) that most users actually interact with. We present Nautilus Compass, a black-box persona drift detector and agent memory layer for production coding agents. The method operates entirely at the prompt-text layer: cosine similarity between user prompts and behavioral anchor texts, aggregated by a weighted top-k mean using BGE-m3 embeddings. Compass is, to our knowledge, the only public agent memory layer (among Mem0, Letta, Cognee, Zep, MemOS, smrti verified May 2026) that does not call an LLM at index time to extract facts or build a graph; raw conversation text is embedded directly. The system ships as a Claude Code plugin, an MCP 2024-11-05 A2A server (Cursor, Cline, Hermes), a CLI, and a REST API on one daemon, with a Merkle-chained audit log for tamper-evident anchor updates. On a held-out test set built from real Claude Code session traces and labeled by an independent LLM judge, Compass reaches ROC AUC 0.83 for drift detection. The embedded retrieval pipeline scores 56.6% on LongMemEval-S v0.8 and 44.4% on EverMemBench-Dynamic (n=500), topping the four published EverMemBench Table 4 baselines. LongMemEval-S 56.6% is ~30 points below recent white-box leaders (90+%); we treat that as the architectural ceiling of the no-extraction design. End-to-end reproduction cost is $3.50 (~14x cheaper than GPT-4o-judged stacks). A paired cross-vendor behavior A/B accompanies these numbers as preliminary system-level evidence. Code, anchors, frozen test data, and audit-log tooling are MIT-licensed at github.com/chunxiaoxx/nautilus-compass.
Authors: Emile Anand, Abdullah Ateyeh, Xinyuan Cao, Max Dabagia
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a strong capacity for in-context learning: Given labeled examples, they can generate good predictions without parameter updates. However, many interactive settings go beyond static prediction to online decision-making, in which effective behavior demands adaptation over long multi-turn horizons in response to feedback, and efficient algorithms in these domains must use compact representations of what they have learned. Recently, continuous transformer architectures with latent chain of thought have shown promise for offline iterative tasks such as directed graph-reachability. Motivated by this, we study whether continuous latent context tokens equip transformers to more effectively realize online learning. We give explicit constructions of constant-depth transformers that implement two foundational online decision-making procedures -- the weighted majority algorithm and $Q$-learning -- by storing their algorithmic state as linear combinations of feature embeddings, using a small number of latent context tokens. We further train a small GPT-2-style transformer with latent contexts using a multi-curriculum objective that does not directly supervise the latent states. On long synthetic online prediction sequences, this model outperforms larger and more complex LLMs, including Qwen-3-14B and DeepSeek-V3. Our results suggest that continuous latent contexts provide a simple and effective persistent state for transformers to implement online learning algorithms.
Authors: Tsuyoshi Okita
Abstract: We propose SVAR-FM (Structural VAR with Flow Matching), a framework for time series causal discovery that treats a physics-based simulator as a mechanical realization of Pearl's do operator. Clamping a variable inside the simulator physically severs confounding paths, producing interventional data by construction. Conditional Flow Matching then learns the nonlinear interventional conditionals. Theoretically, we prove that the full structural VAR becomes identifiable under a coverage condition on the simulator-clampable variables, and derive an end-to-end error bound that decomposes into Monte Carlo, simulator fidelity, and Flow Matching terms. A sign-flip corollary predicts that when simulator accuracy falls below a threshold, the estimated causal effect reverses sign. Empirically, a benchmark across four scientific domains confirms that SVAR-FM recovers the correct causal sign where observational methods produce sign-reversed estimates due to confounding. A case study in ultrafast laser physics verifies the sign-flip prediction by physically varying the accuracy level of a first-principles quantum solver: the low-accuracy setting reverses the causal sign, while the high-accuracy setting recovers the correct direction (R-squared = 0.983, zero bias).
Authors: Ziyang Wang, Yue Zhang, Shoubin Yu, Ce Zhang, Zengqi Zhao, Jaehong Yoon, Hyunji Lee, Gedas Bertasius, Mohit Bansal
Abstract: Next-generation visual assistants, such as smart glasses, embodied agents, and always-on life-logging systems, must reason over an entire day or more of continuous visual experience. In ultra-long video settings, relevant information is sparsely distributed across hours or days, making memory a fundamental challenge: models must accumulate information over time, recall prior states, track temporal order, and abstract recurring patterns. However, existing week-long video benchmarks are primarily designed for perception and recognition, such as moment localization or global summarization, rather than reasoning that requires integrating evidence across multiple days. To address this gap, we introduce EgoMemReason, a comprehensive benchmark that systematically evaluates week-long egocentric video understanding through memory-driven reasoning. EgoMemReason evaluates three complementary memory types: entity memory, tracking how object states evolve and change across days; event memory, recalling and ordering activities separated by hours or days; and behavior memory, abstracting recurring patterns from sparse, repeated observations over the whole week period. EgoMemReason comprises 500 questions across three memory types and six core challenges, with an average of 5.1 video segments of evidence per question and 25.9 hours of memory backtracking. We evaluate EgoMemReason on 17 methods across MLLMs and agentic frameworks, revealing that even the best model achieves only 39.6% overall accuracy. Further analysis shows that the three memory types fail for distinct reasons and that performance degrades as evidence spans longer temporal horizons, revealing that long-horizon memory remains far from solved. We believe EgoMemReason establishes a strong foundation for evaluating and advancing long-context, memory-aware multimodal systems.
Authors: Daniel Goldstein, Eugene Cheah
Abstract: We present Key-Value Means ("KVM"), a novel block-recurrence for attention that can accommodate either fixed-size or growing state. Equipping a strong transformer baseline with fixed-size KVM attention layers yields a strong $O(N)$ chunked RNN, while adding only an insignificant number of new parameters. We train a transformer with a growable KVM cache and show it performs competitively on long-context tests with only subquadratic prefill time and sublinear state growth. KVM is implementable with standard operations and without custom kernels, and supports chunk-wise parallelizable training and prefill. It provides many of the benefits of both traditional transformers (expandable context memory, chunk-wise parallelizable training and prefill) and linear RNNs in a single unified package. It can be used on every layer, saving KV-cache memory, and allowing a continuous range of choices of prefill time complexity between $O(N)$ and $O(N^2)$. It can also be implemented in a hybrid solution in tandem with LRNN layers in place of traditional attention, to supplement the LRNN with improved sublinear memory growth context length usage and long context decoding. We release our code at https://github.com/recursal/KVM-paper and trained models at https://huggingface.co/collections/recursal/key-value-means under the Apache 2.0 license.
URLs: https://github.com/recursal/KVM-paper, https://huggingface.co/collections/recursal/key-value-means
Authors: Xia Hu, Zhenrui Yue, Brian Potetz, Howard Zhou, Leonidas Guibas, Chun-Ta Lu, Zhicheng Wang
Abstract: As current Multimodal Large Language Models rapidly saturate canonical visual reasoning benchmarks, a key question emerges: do these strong scores genuinely reflect robust visual understanding? We identify a pervasive vulnerability, the \textbf{Cartesian Shortcut}: visual reasoning benchmarks prevalently build on orthogonal grid-based layouts that can be readily discretized into explicit textual coordinates. Models systematically exploit this property, heavily leveraging text-based deductive reasoning to assist visual problem-solving. To systematically dismantle this shortcut, we introduce \textbf{Polaris-Bench}, which re-formulates 53 visual reasoning tasks in Polar coordinate space with paired Cartesian counterparts as reference, while preserving consistent logical constraints and task semantics -- thus fundamentally breaking the orthogonal prior that models exploit. Comprehensive evaluation across $14$ state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals that frontier models achieving $70$--$83\%$ on Cartesian layouts collapse to $31$--$39\%$ on Polar equivalents, with degradation persisting even under complete logical equivalence. Moreover, reasoning gains observed on Cartesian layouts are severely diminished on Polar equivalents. These findings expose a critical deficiency in current MLLMs: the lack of topology-invariant visual reasoning.
Authors: Eslam Zaher, Maciej Trzaskowski, Quan Nguyen, Fred Roosta
Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) operationalise the linear representation hypothesis: they reconstruct model activations as sparse linear combinations of interpretable dictionary atoms, on the implicit assumption that activation space is well approximated by a globally linear structure. Their reconstruction error varies sharply across layers in ways that existing scaling laws, fitted at single layers, do not explain. We argue that this variation is the empirical trace of a geometric mismatch: where the activation manifold is curved and its intrinsic dimension varies across layers, no sparse linear dictionary can match it uniformly, and the SAE's width-sparsity scaling becomes a layer-dependent function of manifold structure rather than a single universal law. We conduct the first cross-layer SAE scaling study, fitting and regressing on 844 residual-stream Gemma Scope SAE checkpoints across 68 layers of Gemma 2 2B and 9B. Stage 1 fits a per-layer scaling-law surface; Stage 2 regresses the fitted parameters and the derived per-layer width exponents on four layerwise geometric summaries. We find that manifold geometry predicts the per-layer width exponent in both models, and that the same regression coefficients learnt on one model predict the other model's per-layer exponents under cross-model transfer, indicating a transferable geometric law. At the showcase layers where richer width grids permit identification of the asymptotic floor, we find that the fitted floor tracks the layerwise geometric ordering: higher curvature and intrinsic dimension correspond to higher floor, consistent with the irreducible second-order residual that any sparse linear approximation of a curved manifold must leave behind. SAEs thus encounter not a finite-resource ceiling but a geometry-dependent wall, set by the manifold they are trying to reconstruct.
Authors: Sushrita Rakshit, Hanwen Zhang, Hua Shen
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often evaluated based on their stated values, yet these do not reliably translate into their actions, a discrepancy termed "value-action gap." In this work, we argue that this gap persists even under explicit reasoning, revealing a deeper failure mode we call "Pseudo-Deliberation": the appearance of principled reasoning without corresponding behavioral alignment. To study this systematically, we introduce VALDI, a framework for measuring alignment between stated values and generated dialogue. VALDI includes 4,941 human-centered scenarios across five domains, three tasks that elicit value articulation, reasoning, and action, and five metrics for quantifying value adherence. Across both proprietary and open-source LLMs, we observe consistent misalignment between expressed values and downstream dialogues. To investigate intervention strategies, we propose VIVALDI, a multi-agent value auditor that intervenes at different stages of generation.
Authors: Kanglin Ning, Wenrui Li, Houde Quan, Qifan Li, Xingtao Wang, Xiaopeng Fan
Abstract: Cross-modal knowledge distillation has emerged as an effective strategy for integrating point cloud and image features in 3D perception tasks. However, the modality heterogeneity, spatial misalignment, and the representation crisis of multiple modalities often limit the efficient of these cross-modal distillation methods. To address these limitations in existing approaches, we propose a hyperbolic constrained cross-modal distillation method for multimodal 3D object detection (HGC-Det). The proposed HGC-Det framework includes an image branch and a point cloud branch to extract semantic features from two different modalities. The point cloud branch comprises three core components: a 2D semantic-guided voxel optimization component (SGVO), a hyperbolic geometry constrained cross-modal feature transfer component (HFT), and a feature aggregation-based geometry optimization component (FAGO). Specifically, the SGVO component adaptively refines the spatial representation of the 3D branch by leveraging semantic cues from the image branch, thereby mitigating the issue of inadequate representation fusion. The HFT component exploits the intrinsic geometric properties of hyperbolic space to alleviate semantic loss during the fusion of high-dimensional image features and low-dimensional point cloud features. Finally, the FAGO compensates for potential spatial feature degradation introduced by the 2D semantic-guided voxel optimization component. Extensive experiments on indoor datasets (SUN RGB-D, ARKitScenes) and outdoor datasets (KITTI, nuScenes) demonstrate that our method achieves a better trade-off between detection accuracy and computational cost.
Authors: Guisong Liu, Xin Gao, Martin Dresler, Jiansong Zhang, Pengfei Wei
Abstract: Automatic sleep staging commonly adopts Transformers under the assumption that they learn complex long-range dependencies. We challenge this view by revealing a neglected property of sleep sequences: strong local temporal continuity. We show that a randomly initialized Transformer, without any training, substantially improves sleep staging performance and consistently outperforms heuristic smoothing. We formalize this effect via a Random Attention Prior Kernel (RAPK), showing that random self-attention acts as an adaptive smoother by balancing global averaging and content-based similarity while preserving stage transitions. Using two metrics, the Local Smoothness Influence Index (LSII) and the Weighted Transition Entropy (WTE), we provide evidence that most performance gains in Transformer-based sleep staging arise from architectural inductive bias rather than parameter learning. Our results suggest that sleep staging can be effectively addressed with structure-driven smoothing mechanisms rather than complex dependency modeling, enabling more efficient and edge-deployable healthcare systems for large-scale physiological monitoring.
Authors: Oleksii Abramenko, Noah D. Stein, Colin Vaz
Abstract: Current approaches to detecting depression and anxiety from speech primarily rely on machine learning techniques that utilize hand-engineered paralinguistic features and related acoustic descriptors derived from time- and frequency-domain representations of speech signals. Applying deep learning methods directly to raw speech signals has the potential to produce biomarker representations with substantially greater predictive power. However, these approaches typically require large volumes of carefully annotated data to learn robust and clinically meaningful representations of the underlying biomarkers. In this paper, we describe our efforts toward developing a deep learning model trained on a large-scale proprietary dataset comprising ~65,000 utterances collected from more than 23,000 subjects representative of relevant United States demographics. We present the techniques employed and analyze their impact on model performance. Our results demonstrate that the proposed models can extract content-agnostic biomarker information, which, when combined with lexical features extracted from audio, yields improved predictive performance in production settings. Our models are evaluated on ~5000 unique subjects and achieve performance of 71% in terms of sensitivity and specificity. To foster further research in mental health assessment from speech, we release the best-performing model described in this paper on HuggingFace.
Authors: Rong Shan, Te Gao, Hang Zheng, Yunjia Xi, Jiachen Zhu, Zeyu Zheng, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang, Jianghao Lin
Abstract: The implicit policy of maintaining relatively stable acceptance rates at top AI conferences, despite exponentially growing submissions, introduces a critical structural vulnerability. This position paper characterizes a new systemic threat we term Agentic Denominator Gaming, in which a malicious actor deploys AI agents to generate and submit a large volume of superficially plausible but low-quality papers. Crucially, their objective is not the acceptance of low-quality papers, but rather to inflate the submission denominator and overwhelm reviewing capacity. Under a relatively stable acceptance rate, this dilution can systematically increase the publication probability of a small, targeted set of legitimate papers. We analyze the practical feasibility of this threat and its broader consequences, including intensified reviewer burnout, degraded review quality, and the emergence of industrialized automated agent mills. Finally, we propose and evaluate a range of mitigation strategies, and argue that durable protection will require system-level policy and incentive reforms, rather than relying primarily on technical detection alone.
Authors: Yihang Zhang, Zimeng Huang, Ren Zhai, Yipeng Kang, Tonghan Wang
Abstract: Reconciling platform revenue with user experience in LLM advertising motivates a data-centric foundation. We introduce NaiAD, the first comprehensive dataset for LLM-native advertising comprising 58,999 carefully constructed ad-embedded responses paired with user queries. NaiAD is organized around theoretically grounded evaluation metrics that separately and comprehensively capture user and commercial utility. To mitigate the dimensional collinearity of aligned LLMs, we propose a decoupled generation pipeline that produces structurally diverse samples, ranging from responses that explicitly disentangle stakeholder utilities to responses that are uniformly strong or weak across dimensions. We further provide score labels calibrated by a Variance-Calibrated Prediction-Powered Inference (VC-PPI) framework, aligning automated scoring with human annotations. Mechanistic analyses reveal that successful ad integration relies on reasoning paths that cluster into four distinct semantic strategies. Models leveraging NaiAD internalize these strategies to simultaneously improve user and commercial utility, while enabling independent control over these distinct objectives via in-context learning. Together, these results position NaiAD as a foundational infrastructure for developing future LLM-native ad systems.
Authors: Xuexiang Wen, Hang Yu, Linchao Zhu, Gaoang Wang
Abstract: While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently emerged as a promising post-training paradigm for Large Language Models (LLMs), its dependency on the gold label or domain-specific verifiers limits its scalability to new tasks and domains. In this work, we propose Verifier-free Intrinsic Gradient-Norm Reward (VIGOR), a simple reward that uses only the policy model itself. Given a prompt, VIGOR samples a group of completions and assigns higher within-group rewards to outputs that induce smaller $\ell_2$ norms of the teacher-forced negative log-likelihood gradients under the current parameters. Intuitively, lower gradient norms suggest the completion aligns better with the current policy, serving as an intrinsic preference signal for policy optimization. To make this intrinsic signal practical for RL, we correct the systematic length bias of averaged token-level gradients with a $\sqrt{T}$ scaling, and apply group-wise rank shaping to stabilize reward scales across prompts. Across mathematical reasoning benchmarks, VIGOR outperforms the state-of-the-art Reinforcement Learning from Internal Feedback (RLIF) baseline, and it also exhibits cross-domain transfer to code benchmarks when trained only on math data. For instance, on Qwen2.5-7B-Base post-trained on MATH, VIGOR improves the average math accuracy by +3.31% and the average code accuracy by +1.91% over this baseline, while exhibiting more stable training dynamics. The code is available at https://github.com/ZJUSCL/VIGOR.
Authors: Wu Li, Yigeng Zhou, Zesheng Shi, Yequan Wang, Min Zhang, Jing Li
Abstract: While recent self-training approaches have reduced reliance on human-labeled data for aligning LLMs, they still face critical limitations: (i) sensitivity to synthetic data quality, leading to instability and bias amplification in iterative training; (ii) ineffective optimization due to a diminishing gap between positive and negative responses over successive training iterations. In this paper, we propose Team-based self-Play with dual Adaptive Weighting (TPAW), a novel self-play algorithm designed to improve alignment in a fully self-supervised setting. TPAW adopts a team-based framework in which the current policy model both collaborates with and competes against historical checkpoints, promoting more stable and efficient optimization. To further enhance learning, we design two adaptive weighting mechanisms: (i) a response reweighting scheme that adjusts the importance of target responses, and (ii) a player weighting strategy that dynamically modulates each team member's contribution during training. Initialized from a SFT model, TPAW iteratively refines alignment without requiring additional human supervision. Experimental results demonstrate that TPAW consistently outperforms existing baselines across various base models and LLM benchmarks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/lab-klc/TPAW.
Authors: Luan Zhang, Dandan Song, Zhijing Wu, Zhengyu Chen, Chen Zhang, Yuhang Tian, Huipeng Ma, Chenhao Li, Changzhi Zhou, Xudong Li, Shuhao Zhang
Abstract: Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) enables large language models (LLMs) to enhance their capabilities by interacting with external tools, such as code interpreters (CI). Most recent studies focus on exploring various methods to equip LLMs with the ability to use tools. However, how to further boost the reasoning ability of already tool-capable LLMs at inference time remains underexplored. Improving reasoning at inference time requires no additional training and can help LLMs better leverage tools to solve problems. We observe that, during tool-capable LLM inference, both the number and the proportion of erroneous tool calls are negatively correlated with answer correctness. Moreover, erroneous tool calls are typically resolved successfully within a few subsequent turns. If not, LLMs often struggle to resolve such errors even with many additional turns. Building on the above observations, we propose PruneTIR, a rather effective yet efficient framework that enhances the tool-integrated reasoning at inference time. During LLM inference, PruneTIR prunes trajectories, resamples tool calls, and suspends tool usage through three components: Success-Triggered Pruning, Stuck-Triggered Pruning and Resampling, and Retry-Triggered Tool Suspension. These three components enable PruneTIR to mitigate the negative impact of erroneous tool calls and prevent LLMs from getting stuck in repeated failed resolution attempts, thereby improving overall LLM performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of PruneTIR, which significantly improves Pass@1 and efficiency while reducing the working context length for tool-capable LLMs.
Authors: Xurui Li, Zhiguo Gan, Jiaming Zhang, Zheng Liu, Diannan Lu
Abstract: Most feature selection algorithms, especially wrapper methods, run inefficiently on CPU based platforms because of their high computational complexity. This inefficiency makes them unsuitable for processing large scale datasets. To address this challenge, the present study proposed two GPU accelerated versions of the Boruta feature selection procedure, in which Boruta-Permut relies on permutation based feature importance and Boruta-TreeImp employs importance based on impurity reduction. To evaluate these methods we conducted experiments on both a self constructed dataset and several publicly available datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed GPU accelerated algorithms greatly improve computational efficiency while preserving feature selection accuracy comparable to the original Boruta algorithm. In our analysis we also observe that the impurity reduction based version can overestimate the importance of some features. Overall these findings suggest that performing Boruta feature selection on GPUs offers an effective and cost efficient solution for large scale data analysis, which is a good deal.
Authors: Peng Jia, Zhen Xiao, Jia Li, Xueliang Liu, Zhenzhen Hu, Lingyun Yu
Abstract: High-quality, real-time talking head synthesis remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Existing reconstruction- and rendering-based methods typically rely on identity-specific models, limiting cross-identity generalization. To address this issue, we propose SDTalk, a one-shot 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)-based framework that generalizes to unseen identities without personalized training or fine-tuning. Our framework comprises two modules with a two-stage training strategy. In the first stage, we incorporate structured facial priors into the reconstruction module and separately predict 3DGS parameters for visible and occluded regions, enabling complete head reconstruction from a single image. In the second stage, we introduce a dual-branch motion field to model coarse and fine facial dynamics, improving detail fidelity and lip synchronization. Experiments demonstrate that SDTalk surpasses existing methods in both visual quality and inference efficiency.
Authors: Chengsong Huang, Haolin Liu, Tong Zheng, Runpeng Dai, Langlin Huang, Jinyuan Li, Zongxia Li, Zhepei Wei, Yu Meng, Jiaxin Huang
Abstract: Self-evolving LLMs excel in verifiable domains but struggle in open-ended tasks, where reliance on proxy LLM judges introduces capability bottlenecks and reward hacking. To overcome this, we introduce G-Zero, a verifier-free, co-evolutionary framework for autonomous self-improvement. Our core innovation is Hint-$\delta$, an intrinsic reward that quantifies the predictive shift between a Generator model's unassisted response and its response conditioned on a self-generated hint. Using this signal, a Proposer model is trained via GRPO to continuously target the Generator's blind spots by synthesizing challenging queries and informative hints. The Generator is concurrently optimized via DPO to internalize these hint-guided improvements. Theoretically, we prove a best-iterate suboptimality guarantee for an idealized standard-DPO version of G-Zero, provided that the Proposer induces sufficient exploration coverage and the data filteration keeps pseudo-label score noise low. By deriving supervision entirely from internal distributional dynamics, G-Zero bypasses the capability ceilings of external judges, providing a scalable, robust pathway for continuous LLM self-evolution across unverifiable domains.
Authors: Jiahao Xiong, Fei Wang, Anran Xu, Pinzhi Huang, Tao Wen, Lijia Pan, Cai Chen
Abstract: Text-to-vibration generation converts natural language into haptic feedback, enabling vibration-effect designers to get scenarios-fitted vibrations more efficiently, which shows great potentials in application fields such as metaverse, games, and film to enrich the user experience in interactive scenarios. The core challenge in this field is how to generate accurate, consistent, and complete vibrations according to textual semantics. Very recent autoregressive (AR) approaches (e.g., HapticGen) exhibit limited capacity in fully capturing global dependencies, owing to the inherent sequential nature of their modeling and prevailing data constraints. In this paper, we proposed HapticLDM, the first text-to-vibration generative model built upon Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs). Firstly, with respect to the data, we introduced a text-processing strategy that emphasizes dynamic characteristics to curate high-quality data pairs for fine-grained dynamic modeling. Secondly, HapticLDM incorporates a global denoising mechanism that regulates coherent and stable variations in the temporal envelope. Furthermore, we conduct extensive evaluations, including A/B testing against the state-of-the-art baseline and a user study involving 30 participants. The results demonstrate that our model enhances realism and semantic alignment. Qualitative feedback further indicates that HapticLDM simplifies the haptic design workflow while generating diverse, subtle, and physically precise vibrations.
Authors: Urchade Zaratiana, Ash Lewis, George Hurn-Maloney
Abstract: Reliable detection of personally identifiable information (PII) is increasingly important across modern data-processing systems, yet the task remains difficult: PII spans are heterogeneous, locale-dependent, context-sensitive, and often embedded in noisy or semi-structured documents. We present GLiNER2-PII, a small 0.3B-parameter model adapted from GLiNER2 and designed to recognize a broad taxonomy of 42 PII entity types at character-span resolution. Training such systems, however, is constrained by the scarcity of shareable annotated data and the privacy risks associated with collecting real PII at scale. To address this challenge, we construct a multilingual synthetic corpus of 4,910 annotated texts using a constraint-driven generation pipeline that produces diverse, realistic examples across languages, domains, formats, and entity distributions. On the challenging SPY benchmark, GLiNER2-PII achieves the highest span-level F1 among five compared systems, including OpenAI Privacy Filter and three GLiNER-based detectors. We publicly release the model on Hugging Face to support further research and practical deployment of open PII detection systems.
Authors: Nabin Giri, Steven Farrell, Kristofer E. Bouchard
Abstract: Multimodal models that jointly reason over protein sequences, structures, and function annotations within a unified representation hold immense potential for integrating multimodal data and generating new proteins with designed functional properties. To utilize transformer architectures, such models require a tokenizer that converts protein structure from continuous atomic coordinates into discrete representations suitable for scalable multimodal training. The quality of such models are fundamentally upper bounded by the fidelity and expressiveness of the underlying tokenized structure. However, existing tokenizers prioritize reconstruction over generative abilities. To address these gaps, we introduce Yeti, a simple and compact protein structure tokenizer based on lookup free quantization and trained end to end with a flow matching objective for multimodal learning. Compared to existing models, Yeti generally achieves the best codebook utilization and token diversity, and second best reconstruction accuracy (with 10x fewer parameters than ESM3) on diverse datasets. To validate Yeti's generative capability, we trained a compact multimodal model jointly over its structure tokens and amino acid sequence entirely from scratch, with no pretrained initialization. The resulting multimodal model generates plausible structures under unconditional cogeneration of protein sequence and structures, achieving comparable results to 10x larger models. Together, these results demonstrate that Yeti is a compact and expressive protein structure tokenizer suitable for training multimodal models that cogenerates highly plausible sequences and structures.
Authors: Sunwoo Park, Taesung Kwon, Jong Chul Ye
Abstract: Recent 4D generation methods complete scene-level missing information using generative models and reconstruct the scene into radiance-based representations. However, these pipelines often present geometric inconsistencies in the generated content, and the radiance-based reconstruction requires expensive optimization. Furthermore, radiance-based representations often absorb these geometric inconsistencies into their view-dependent nature, failing to enforce the grounded geometric consistency. To address these issues, we propose Geometric 4D Stitching, an efficient framework that explicitly identifies missing geometric regions and complements them with geometrically grounded 4D stitches. As a result, our method constructs 4D scene representations in under 10 minutes on a single NVIDIA RTX 5090 GPU per one-step scene expansion, while improving geometric consistency. Moreover, we demonstrate that our explicit 4D stitching supports interative expansion of 4D mesh as well as 4D scene editing.
Authors: Do\u{g}a\c{c} Eldenk, Payal Mohapatra, Yigitcan Comlek, Kaan Oktay, Hongyang Zhang, Stephen Xia
Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by drafting future tokens with a small model, but drafter models degrade sharply under template perturbation and long-context inputs. We identify a previously-unreported phenomenon we call \textbf{attention drift}: as the drafter generates successive tokens within a speculation chain, attention progressively moves from the prompt onto its own recently-generated tokens. We observe this across both \emph{EAGLE3} drafters and \emph{MTP heads}, suggesting drift is a property of drafter designs. We trace this to the un-normalized residual path between chain steps: the drafter's hidden state magnitude grows monotonically with chain depth, which exhibits dynamics consistent with additional pre-norm transformer layers stacked on the target rather than as a standalone autoregressive predictor. In order to limit the growth, we propose two architectural changes: Post-norm on the drafter hidden states and per-hidden-state RMSNorm after capturing target hidden states. Our interventions improve acceptance length over the current leading model, pre-norm EAGLE3, by up to $2\times$ under template perturbation, $1.18\times$ on long-context tasks, and $1.10\times$ on seven standard benchmarks spanning multi-turn chat, math, and coding. Our changes also allow shorter train-time-test depths to generalize over longer drafting sequences.
Authors: Seth Karten, Joel Zhang, Tersoo Upaa Jr, Ruirong Feng, Wenzhe Li, Chengshuai Shi, Chi Jin, Kiran Vodrahalli
Abstract: Coding harnesses such as Claude Code and OpenHands wrap foundation models with tools, memory, and planning, but no equivalent exists for embodied agents' long-horizon partial-observability decision-making. We first report our Gemini Plays Pokemon (GPP) experiments. With iterative human-in-the-loop harness refinement, GPP became the first AI system to complete Pokemon Blue, Yellow Legacy on hard mode, and Crystal without a lost battle. In the hardest stages, the agent itself began iterating on its strategy through long-context memory, surfacing emergent self-improvement signals alongside human-in-the-loop refinement. Continual Harness removes the human fully from this loop: a reset-free self-improving harness for embodied agents that formalizes and automates what we observed. Starting from only a minimal environment interface, the agent alternates between acting and refining its own prompt, sub-agents, skills, and memory, drawing on any past trajectory data. Prompt-optimization methods require episode resets; Continual Harness adapts online within a single run. On Pokemon Red and Emerald across frontier models, Continual Harness starting from scratch substantially reduces button-press cost relative to the minimalist baseline and recovers a majority of the gap to a hand-engineered expert harness, with capability-dependent gains, despite starting from the same raw interface with no curated knowledge, no hand-crafted tools, and no domain scaffolding. We then close the loop with the model itself: an online process-reward co-learning loop, in which an open-source agent's rollouts through the refining harness are relabeled by a frontier teacher and used to update the model, drives sustained in-game milestone progress on Pokemon Red without resetting the environment between training iterations.
Authors: Wolfgang Grieskamp, Teng Zhang, Vineeth Kashyap
Abstract: In this paper, we describe early work on a specification inference tool for the Move Prover that combines a weakest-precondition (WP) analysis over Move bytecode with an agentic coding CLI such as Claude Code. Specification inference reduces the boilerplate of writing specifications in Move: in order to verify a high-level property such as a global state invariant, pre- and post-conditions for the supporting functions typically have to be written by hand, which is tedious. In our setting, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) service exposes the WP analysis and the prover itself to the coding agent. The WP analysis provides a sound, mechanical baseline for inference; the AI is used precisely where WP is weakest -- for loop invariants and high-level idiomatic specifications such as monotonicity, conservation, and structural invariants. The Move Prover serves as the oracle that decides whether the generated specs are valid, and the agent is equipped to generate proof hints and to refine the inferred specification until verification succeeds. The tool has been applied to a corpus of canonical Move code, including code that uses higher-order functions, dynamic dispatch, global state, references, and various forms of loops.
Authors: Binxu Wang, Emma Lucia Byrnes Finn, Bingbin Liu
Abstract: Generative models trained on finite data face a fundamental tension: their score-matching or next-token objective converges to the empirical training distribution rather than the population distribution we seek to learn. Using rule-valid synthetic tasks, we trace this tension across two training timescales: $\tau_{\mathrm{rule}}$, the step at which generations first become rule-valid, and $\tau_{\mathrm{mem}}$, the step at which models begin reproducing training samples. Focusing on parity and extending to other binary rules and combinatorial puzzles, we characterize how these two clocks, $\tau_{\mathrm{rule}}$ and $\tau_{\mathrm{mem}}$, depend on key aspects of the learning setup. Specifically, we show that $\tau_{\mathrm{rule}}$ increases with rule complexity and decreases with model capacity, while $\tau_{\mathrm{mem}}$ is approximately invariant to the rule and scales nearly linearly with dataset size $N$. We define the \emph{innovation window} as the interval $[\tau_{\mathrm{rule}}, \tau_{\mathrm{mem}}]$. This window widens with increasing $N$ and narrows with rule complexity, and may vanish entirely when $\tau_{\mathrm{rule}} \geq \tau_{\mathrm{mem}}$. The same two-clock structure arises in both diffusion (DiT) and autoregressive (GPT) models, with architecture-dependent offsets. Dissecting the learned score of DiT models reveals a corresponding evolution of the optimization landscapes, where rule-valid samples' basins expand substantially around $\tau_{\mathrm{rule}}$, while training samples' basins begin to dominate around $\tau_{\mathrm{mem}}$. Together, these results yield a unified and predictive account of when and how generative models exhibit genuine innovation.
Authors: Yuna Haseyama, Tomoki Ito, Hiroki Sakaji, Itsuki Noda
Abstract: In high-stakes domains such as healthcare, the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical, particularly when generating clinical insights from incident reports. This study proposes a tag-based few-shot example selection method for prompting LLMs to generate background/causal factors and preventive measures from details of the medical incidents. For our experiments, we use the Japanese Medical Incident Dataset (JMID), a structured dataset of 3,884 real-world medical accident and near-miss reports. These reports are variably annotated with a wide range of tags--some include descriptive information (e.g., "medications," "blood transfusion therapy"). We compare three few-shot example selection strategies--random sampling, cosine similarity-based selection, and our proposed tag-based method--using GPT-4o and LLaMA 3.3. Results show that the tag-based approach achieves the highest precision and most stable generation behavior, while similarity-based selection often leads to unintended outputs and safety filter activation. These findings suggest that selecting examples based on human-interpretable dataset tags can improve generation precision and stability in clinical LLM applications.
Authors: Terumi Chiba, Yang Luo, Ziyun Cui, Yongsheng Tong, Chao Zhang
Abstract: Psychological support hotlines provide critical support for individuals experiencing mental health emergencies, yet current assessments largely rely on human operators whose judgments may vary with professional experience and are constrained by limited staffing resources. This paper proposes a large language model (LLM)-based framework for automated crisis level classification, a key indicator that supports many downstream tasks and improves the overall quality of hotline services. To better capture emotional signals in spoken conversations, we introduce a paralinguistic injection method that inserts identified non-verbal emotional cues into speech transcripts, enabling LLM-based reasoning to incorporate critical acoustic nuances. In addition, we propose a reasoning-enhanced training strategy that trains the model to generate diagnostic reasoning chains as an auxiliary task, which serves as a regulariser to improve classification performance. Combined with data augmentation, our final system achieves a macro F1-score of 0.802 and an accuracy of 0.805 on the three-class classification task under 5-fold cross-validation.
Authors: Xijun Wang, Zhaoyang Liu, Chenyuan Feng, Xiang Chen, Howard H. Yang, Tony Q. S. Quek
Abstract: As 6G evolves, the radio access network must transcend traditional automation to embrace agentic AI capable of perception, reasoning, and evolution. A fundamental cognitive gap persists in current disaggregated architectures, where interfaces force the physical layer to compress high-dimensional states into low-dimensional metrics, trapping reasoning agents behind a semantic bottleneck. This article envisions a shift from interface-bound to memory-centric architectures. We propose a unified memory paradigm that dissolves the boundaries between sensing and reasoning by mapping biological memory hierarchies onto heterogeneous computing fabrics. Enabled by emerging coherent interconnects, this approach creates a cognitive continuum where microsecond-level reflexes, millisecond-level reasoning, and long-term evolution share state across time scales. By replacing message passing with zero-copy observability, we empower AI agents to bridge the gap between real-time responsiveness and long-horizon context for truly autonomous 6G networks.
Authors: Xilai Ma, Liye Zhao, Weijun Yao, Haibing Di, Wenya Wang, Jing Li
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) personalization aims to align model behaviors with individual user preferences. Existing methods often focus on isolated user histories, neglecting the essential role of inter-user differences. We propose C-BPO, a framework that personalizes LLMs via preference-calibrated binary signals. By treating target user data as positive feedback and other users' data as an auxiliary set of implicit negative signals, C-BPO captures distinct inter-user differences. To mitigate the preference overlap issue, where shared task knowledge is erroneously penalized, we derive an objective grounded in Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning theory. This approach purifies negative signals by subtracting ``positive bias'', ensuring alignment with unique idiosyncrasies without compromising general helpfulness. Empirical experiments across various personalization tasks and backbone LLMs show C-BPO consistently outperforms baselines, demonstrating the efficacy of preference-calibrated binary signals in modeling inter-user differences.
Authors: Yongjae Shin, Jongseong Chae, Seongmin Kim, Jongeui Park, Youngchul Sung
Abstract: Action chunking emerged as a pivotal technique in imitation learning, enabling policies to predict cohesive action sequences rather than single actions. Recently, this approach has expanded to reinforcement learning (RL), enhancing behavioral consistency and reducing bootstrapping errors in value function estimation. However, existing methods rely on a fixed chunk length, creating a performance bottleneck as the optimal length varies across states and tasks. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Action CHunking (ACH), a novel offline-to-online RL algorithm that dynamically modulates chunk length during both training and inference. To find the optimal chunk length for a dynamically varying current state, we simultaneously estimate action-values for all candidate chunk lengths in a single forward pass, using a Transformer-based architecture. Our mechanism allows the agent to select the most effective chunk length adaptively based on the current state. Evaluated on 34 challenging tasks, ACH consistently outperforms fixed-length baselines, demonstrating superior generalization and learning efficiency in complex environments.
Authors: Jinping Wang, Zixin Tong, Zhiwu Xie, Zhiqiang Gao
Abstract: Loss reweighting is a widely used strategy for long-tailed classification, but existing reweighting strategies often rely on heuristics and rarely define a well-specified target. Inspired by Neural Collapse (NC), the ideal simplex Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF) terminal geometry suggests equal per-class average loss as a reasonable target for reweighting. Based on the ideal equal loss objective, we consider loss reweighting as an inverse problem and propose an inverse-view reweighting strategy that infers class weights dynamically to match this ideal objective. Empirically, NC metrics suggest our method can effectively reduce the loss imbalance coefficient and closer alignment with NC geometry while consistently outperforming strong long-tailed baselines on different datasets.
Authors: Puming Jiang, Meiyi Wang, Kelvin Lin, Ce Hao, Harold Soh
Abstract: Inference-time guidance is essential for steering generative robot policies toward dynamic objectives without retraining, yet existing methods are largely confined to chunk-based architectures that exhibit high latency and lack the reactivity needed for test-time preference alignment or obstacle avoidance. In this work, we formally derive the optimal guidance term for Stochastic Interpolants (SI) by analyzing the value function's time evolution via the Backward Kolmogorov Equation, establishing a modified drift that theoretically guarantees sampling from a target distribution. We apply this framework to real-time control through the Streaming Stochastic Interpolant Policy (SSIP), which generalizes the deterministic Streaming Flow Policy (SFP). Unifying this guidance law with the streaming architecture enables fast and reactive control. To support diverse deployment needs, we propose two complementary mechanisms: training-free Stochastic Trajectory Ensemble Guidance (STEG) that computes gradients on-the-fly for zero-shot adaptation, and training-based Conditional Critic Guidance (CCG) for amortized inference. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our guided streaming approach significantly outperforms conventional chunk-based policies in reactivity and provides superior, physically valid guidance for dynamic, unstructured environments.
Authors: Xinyu Zhang, Zhicheng Dou, Deyang Li, Jianjun Tao, Shuo Cheng, Ruifeng Shi, Fangchao Liu, Enrui Hu, Yangkai Ding, Hongbo Wang, Qi Ye, Xuefeng Jin, Zhangchun Zhao
Abstract: As artificial intelligence engineering paradigms shift from single-agent Prompt and Context Engineering toward multi-agent \textbf{Coordination Engineering}, the ability to codify and systematically improve how multiple agents collaborate has emerged as a critical bottleneck. While single-agent skills can now be distributed as portable assets, multi-agent coordination protocols remain locked within framework-internal code or static configurations, preventing them from being shared across systems or autonomously improved over time. We propose \textbf{Swarm Skills}, a portable specification that extends the Anthropic Skills standard with multi-agent semantics. Swarm Skills turns multi-agent workflows into first-class, distributable assets that consist of roles, workflows, execution bounds, and a built-in semantic structure for self-evolution. To operationalize the specification's evolving nature, we present a companion self-evolution algorithm that automatically distills successful execution trajectories into new Swarm Skills and continuously patches existing ones based on multi-dimensional scoring (Effectiveness, Utilization, and Freshness), eliminating the need for human-in-the-loop oversight during the refinement process. Through an architectural compatibility analysis and a comprehensive qualitative case study using the open-source JiuwenSwarm reference implementation, we demonstrate how Swarm Skills achieves zero-adapter cross-agent portability via progressive disclosure, enabling agent teams to self-evolve their coordination strategies without framework lock-in.
Authors: R. Thomas McCoy
Abstract: Futrell and Mahowald (2025) frame the success of neural language models (LMs) as supporting gradient, usage-based linguistic theories. I argue that LMs can also instantiate theories based on formal structures - the types of theories seen in the generative tradition. This argument expands the space of theories that can be tested with LMs, potentially enabling reconciliations between usage-based and generative accounts.
Authors: Hyundong Jin, Yo-Sub Han
Abstract: Controlling Large Language Models (LLMs) to prevent the generation of undesirable content, such as profanity and personally identifiable information (PII), has become increasingly critical. While earlier approaches relied on post-processing or resampling, recent research has shifted towards constrained decoding methods that control outputs during generation to mitigate high computational costs and quality degradation. However, preventing multiple forbidden hard constraints or regex constraints from appearing anywhere in the output is computationally challenging. A straightforward solution is to convert these constraints into a single automaton that tracks all forbidden patterns during decoding, but this often becomes impractically large. Standard regex engines also do not readily support the operations needed to build such a constraint, such as complement and intersection. In order to address these limitations, we propose NCO, a decoding strategy that performs online pattern matching over finite hard constraints and regex constraints, reducing computational overhead without inducing state explosion. NCO is fully compatible with standard inference strategies, including various sampling methods and beam search, while also supporting soft masking for probabilistic suppression. We empirically demonstrate its effectiveness across practical tasks, including PII and profanity suppression. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/hyundong98/NCO-Decoding.git .
Authors: Huilin Zhou, Jian Zhao, Yilu Zhong, Zhen Liang, Xiuyuan Chen, Yuchen Yuan, Tianle Zhang, Chi Zhang, Lan Zhang, Xuelong Li
Abstract: Red teaming is critical for uncovering vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). While automated methods have improved scalability, existing approaches often rely on static heuristics or stochastic search, rendering them brittle against advanced safety alignment. To address this, we introduce Metis, a framework that reformulates jailbreaking as inference-time policy optimization within an adversarial Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). Metis employs a self-evolving metacognitive loop to perform causal diagnosis of a target's defense logic and leverages structured feedback as a semantic gradient to refine its policy, offering enhanced interpretability through transparent reasoning traces. Extensive evaluations across 10 diverse models demonstrate that Metis achieves the strongest average Attack Success Rate (ASR) among compared methods at 89.2%, maintaining high efficacy on resilient frontier models (e.g., 76.0% on O1 and 78.0% on GPT-5-chat) where traditional baselines exhibit substantial performance degradation. By replacing redundant exploration with directed optimization, Metis reduces token costs by an average of 8.2x and up to 11.4x. Our analysis reveals that current defenses remain vulnerable to internally-steered, closed-loop reasoning trajectories under the tested settings, highlighting a critical need for next-generation defenses capable of reasoning about safety dynamically during inference.
Authors: Alejandro Luebs, Mithilesh Vaidya, Ishaan Kumar, Sumukh Badam, Stephen W. Bailey, Matthew Bendel, Jose Sotelo, Xingzhe He
Abstract: The performance of audio latent diffusion models is primarily governed by generator expressivity and the modelability of the underlying latent space. While recent research has focused primarily on the former, as well as improving the reconstruction fidelity of audio codecs, we demonstrate that latent modelability can be significantly improved through explicit factor disentanglement. We present PoDAR (Power-Disentangled Audio Representation), a framework that utilizes a randomized power augmentation and latent consistency objective to decouple signal power from invariant semantic content. This factorization makes the latent space easier to model, which both accelerates the convergence of downstream generative models and improves final overall performance. When applied to a Stable Audio 1.0 VAE with an F5-TTS generator, PoDAR achieves about a $2\times$ acceleration in convergence to match baseline performance, while increasing final speaker similarity by 0.055 and UTMOS by 0.22 on the LibriSpeech-PC dataset. Furthermore, isolating power into dedicated channels enables the application of CFG exclusively to power-invariant content, effectively extending the stable guidance regime to higher scales.
Authors: Jianchao Zhao, Huoren Yang, Yusong Hu, Yuyang Gao, Qiguan Ou, Cong Wan, SongLin Dong, Zhiheng Ma, Yihong Gong
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models show strong potential for general-purpose robotic manipulation, yet their closed-loop reliability often degrades under local deployment conditions. Existing evaluations typically treat test episodes as independent zero-shot trials. However, real robots often operate repeatedly in the same or slowly changing environments, where successful executions provide environment-verified evidence of reliable behavior patterns. We study this persistent-deployment setting, asking whether a partially competent frozen VLA can improve its reliability by reusing its successful test-time experience. We propose an online success-memory guided test-time adaptation framework for generative VLAs. During deployment, the robot stores progress-calibrated successful observation-action segments in a long-term memory. At inference, it retrieves state-relevant action chunks, filters inconsistent candidates via trajectory-level consistency, and aggregates them into an elite action prior. To incorporate this prior into action generation, we introduce confidence-adaptive prior guidance, which injects the elite prior into an intermediate state of the flow-matching action sampler and adjusts the guidance strength based on retrieval confidence. This design allows the frozen VLA to exploit environment-specific successful experience while preserving observation-conditioned generative refinement. This retrieve-then-steer mechanism enables lightweight, non-parametric test-time adaptation without requiring parameter updates. Simulation and real-world experiments show improved task success and closed-loop stability, especially in long-horizon and multi-stage tasks.
Authors: Vinduja T., Ashish M., Ajay Waghumbare, Upasna Singh
Abstract: We introduce HYPERPOSE, a novel 3D human pose estimation framework that performs spatio-temporal reasoning entirely within the Lorentz model of hyperbolic space $\mathbb{H}^d$ to natively preserve the hierarchical tree topology of the human skeleton. Current state-of-the-art pose estimators aim to capture complex joint dynamics by relying on transformers and graph convolutional networks. Since these architectures operate exclusively in Euclidean space which fundamentally mismatches the inherent tree structure of the human body, these methods inevitably suffer from exponential volume distortion and struggle to maintain structural coherence. To this end, we depart from flat spaces and aim to improve geometric fidelity with Hyperbolic Kinematic Phase-Space Attention (HKPSA), natively embedding complex joint relationships without distortion, alongside a multi-scale windowed hyperbolic attention mechanism that efficiently models temporal dynamics in $O(TW)$ complexity. Furthermore, to overcome the well-known instability of training non-Euclidean manifolds, HYPERPOSE introduces a novel Riemannian loss suite and an uncertainty-weighted curriculum, enforcing physical geodesic constraints like bone length and velocity consistency. Extensive evaluations on the Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP datasets demonstrate that HYPERPOSE achieves state-of-the-art structural and temporal coherence, significantly reducing both volume distortion and velocity error, while establishing new state-of-the-art benchmarks in overall positional accuracy.
Authors: Tingshu Mou, Jiabo He, Renying Wang, Ce Liu, Hao Yang, Tiehua Zhang, Jingjing Chen, Xingjun Ma
Abstract: Recent advances in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) target 3D spatial intelligence, yet the progress has been largely driven by post-training on curated benchmarks, leaving the inference-time approach relatively underexplored. In this paper, we take a training-free perspective and introduce ViSRA, a human-aligned Video-based Spatial Reasoning Agent, as a framework to probe the spatial reasoning mechanism of MLLMs. ViSRA elicits spatial reasoning in a modular and extensible manner by leveraging explicit spatial information from expert models, enabling a plug-and-play flexible paradigm. ViSRA offers two key advantages: (1) human-aligned and transferable 3D understanding rather than task-specific overfitting; and (2) no post-training computational cost along with heavy manual curation of spatial reasoning datasets. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvement across a set of MLLMs on both existing benchmarks and unseen 3D spatial reasoning tasks, with ViSRA outperforming baselines by up to a 15.6% and 28.9% absolute margin respectively.
Authors: Xiangkai Wang, Yun Zhao, Dongyi He, Qingling Xia, Gen Li, Xinlai Xing, Yuchi Pan, Bin Jiang
Abstract: Motor imagery electroencephalography (MI-EEG) decoding offers a non-invasive route for post-stroke rehabilitation, but cross-patient use remains difficult because pathological neural reorganization changes task-related EEG dynamics, aperiodic activity, local excitability, cross-regional coordination, and trial-level brain-state context. This makes source-learned MI representations unreliable for unseen patients. To address this problem, we propose CFSPMNet, a cross-patient adaptation framework that models post-stroke MI-EEG as latent neural-state organization. CFSPMNet combines a Fourier-Reorganized State Mamba Network (FRSM) with Shared-Private Prototype Matching (SPPM). FRSM represents each trial as a latent physiological token sequence, reorganizes token states in the Fourier domain, and uses Fourier-derived trial context to guide Mamba state-space propagation. SPPM improves target pseudo-label updating by combining semantic confidence with shared-private physiological consistency, filtering confident but physiologically inconsistent target predictions. Leave-one-subject-out experiments on two stroke MI-EEG datasets show that CFSPMNet outperforms representative CNN-, Transformer-, Mamba-, and adaptation-based baselines, achieving average accuracies of 68.23% on XW-Stroke and 73.33% on 2019-Stroke, with gains of 5.63 and 8.25 percentage points over the strongest competitors. Ablation, sensitivity, feature-alignment, pseudo-label selection, and neurophysiological visualization analyses further support the roles of Fourier-domain token-state reorganization and calibrated pseudo-label updating. These results suggest that latent neural-state modeling can improve rehabilitation-oriented cross-patient BCI decoding. Code is available at https://github.com/wxk1224/CFSPMNet.
Authors: Donghyun Kim, Jaehyoung Park
Abstract: Autonomous driving scenes range from empty highways to dense intersections with dozens of interacting road users, yet current 3D detection models apply a fixed computation budget to every frame, wasting resources on simple scenes while lacking capacity for complex ones. Existing approaches compound this problem: Transformer-based interaction models scale quadratically with the number of detected objects, and frame-by-frame processing causes the system to immediately forget objects the moment they become occluded. We propose Enhanced HOPE, an adaptive perception architecture that measures the geometric complexity of each incoming LiDAR frame using an unsupervised statistical estimator and routes it through a shallow or deep processing path accordingly, requiring no manual scene labels. To keep interaction modeling efficient, we replace quadratic pairwise attention with a linear-time subspace-based network that groups nearby objects into clusters and processes them jointly. The computational savings from these two mechanisms free up resources for a persistent temporal memory module that retains previously detected objects and traffic rules across frames, enabling the system to recall occluded objects seconds after they disappear from view. On the nuScenes and CARLA benchmarks, Enhanced HOPE reduces latency by 38% on simple scenes with no accuracy loss, improves mean Average Precision by 2.7 points on rare long-tail scenarios, and tracks objects through occlusions lasting over 5 seconds, where all tested baselines fail.
Authors: Manyu Li, Ruian He, Chenxi Ma, Weimin Tan, Bo Yan
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show remarkable potential for scientific reasoning, yet their performance in specialized domains such as microscopy remains limited by the scarcity of domain-specific training data and the difficulty of encoding fine-grained expert knowledge into model parameters. To bridge the gap, we introduce MicroWorld, a framework that constructs a multimodal attributed property graph (MAPG) from large-scale scientific image--caption corpora and leverages it to augment MLLM reasoning at inference time without any domain-specific fine-tuning. MicroWorld extracts biomedical entities and relations via scispaCy or LLM-based triplet mining, aligns images and entities in a shared embedding space using Qwen3-VL-Embedding, and assembles a knowledge graph comprising approximately 111K nodes and 346K typed edges spanning eight relation categories. At inference time, a graph-augmented retrieval pipeline matches query entities to the MAPG and injects structured knowledge context into the MLLM prompt. On the MicroVQA benchmark, MicroWorld improves the reasoning performance of Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct by 37.5%, outperforming GPT-5 by 13.0% to achieve a new state-of-the-art. Furthermore, it yields a 6.0% performance gain on the MicroBench benchmark. Extensive experiments demonstrate the enhanced generalization capability introduced by MicroWorld. A qualitative case study further reveals both the mechanisms through which structured knowledge improves reasoning and the failure modes that point to promising future directions. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ieellee/MicroWorld.
Authors: Christian Oliva, Vinicio Changoluisa, Francisco B Rodr\'iguez, Luis F Lago-Fern\'andez
Abstract: Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) based on P300 event-related potentials offer promising applications in health, education, and assistive technologies. However, challenges related to inter- and intra-subject variability and the explainability of Deep Learning (DL) models limit their practical deployment. In this work, we present the Post-Recurrent Module (PRM), an additional layer designed to improve both performance and transparency, incorporated into a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architecture for classifying P300 signals from EEG data. Our approach enables a dual analysis of spatio-temporal signals through both global and local explainability techniques, allowing us not only to identify the most relevant brain regions and critical time intervals involved in classification, but also to interpret model decisions in terms of spatio-temporal EEG patterns consistent with well-stablished neurophysiological descriptions of the P300. Experimental results show a 9\% improvement in performance over state of the art, while also revealing the importance of inter- and intra-subject variability, in alignment with established neuroscience literature. By making model decisions transparent and efficient, we present a framework for explainable EEG-based models. This framework is not limited to more efficient P300 detection, but can be generalized to a wide range of EEG-based tasks. Its ability to identify key spatial and temporal features makes it suitable for applications such as motor imagery, steady-state visual evoked potentials, and even cognitive workload assessment.
Authors: Mateusz Cedro, Marcin Chlebus
Abstract: Artificial intelligence models are increasingly scaled to improve predictive accuracy, yet it remains unclear whether scale improves the quality of post-hoc explanations. We investigate this relationship by evaluating 11 computer vision models representing increasing levels of depth and complexity within the ResNet, DenseNet, and Vision Transformer families, trained from scratch or pretrained, across three image datasets with ground-truth segmentation masks. For each model, we generate explanations using five post-hoc explainable AI methods and quantify mask alignment using two localisation metrics: Relevance Rank Accuracy (Arras et al., 2022) and the proposed Dual-Polarity Precision, which measures positive attributions inside the class mask and negative attributions outside it. Across datasets and methods, increasing architectural depth and parameter count does not improve explanation quality in most statistical comparisons, and smaller models often match or exceed deeper variants. While pretraining typically improves predictive performance and increases the dependence of explanations on learned weights, it does not consistently increase localisation scores. We also observe scenarios in which models achieve strong predictive performance while localisation precision is near zero, suggesting that performance metrics alone may not indicate whether predictions are based on the annotated regions. These results indicate that larger models do not reliably provide higher-quality explanations, and that explainability should therefore be assessed explicitly during model selection for safety-sensitive deployments.
Authors: Francisco Madaleno, Francisco C Pereira, Alex Markham
Abstract: Recent work on causal abstraction, in particular graphical approaches focusing on causal structure between clusters of variables, aims to summarize a high-dimensional causal structure in terms of a low-dimensional one. Existing methods for learning such summaries from data assume that both the high- and low-dimensional structures are acyclic, which is helpful for causal effect identification and reasoning but excludes many high-dimensional models and thus limits applicability. We show that in the linear non-Gaussian (LiNG) setting, the high-dimensional acyclicity assumption can be relaxed while still allowing recovery of a low-dimensional causal directed acyclic graph (DAG). We further connect identifiability of this low-dimensional DAG to existing results: LiNG models with cycles are observationally identifiable only up to an equivalence class whose members differ by reversals of directed cycles; our low-dimensional DAG, which is invariant across all members of a given equivalence class, thus forms a natural representative of the class. While existing approaches for learning this observational equivalence class over high-dimensional variables have exponential time complexity, our low-dimensional summary is learned in worst-case cubic time and comes with explicit bounds on the sample complexity. We provide open source code and experiments on synthetic data to corroborate our theoretical results.
Authors: Inhyuk Park, Doohyun Park
Abstract: Noisy labels are common in large-scale medical imaging datasets due to inter-observer variability and ambiguous cases. We propose a statistically grounded and task-agnostic framework, Standardized Loss Aggregation (SLA), for detecting noisy labels at the sample level. SLA quantifies label reliability by aggregating standardized fold-level validation losses across repeated cross-validation runs. This formulation generalizes discrete hard-counting schemes into a continuous estimator that captures both the frequency and magnitude of performance deviations, yielding interpretable and statistically stable noisiness scores. Experiments on a public fundus dataset demonstrate that SLA consistently outperforms the hard-counting baseline across all noise levels and converges substantially faster, especially under low noise ratios where subtle loss variations are informative. Samples with high SLA scores indicate potentially ambiguous or mislabeled cases, guiding efficient re-annotation and improving dataset reliability for any classification task.
Authors: Sandeep Kumar, Yash Kamdar, Abid Hossain, Bharti Kumari, Tanik Saikh, Asif Ekbal
Abstract: Scientific peer reviews frequently contain conflicting expert judgments, and the increasing scale of conference submissions makes it challenging for Area Chairs and editors to reliably identify and interpret such disagreements. Existing approaches typically frame reviewer disagreement as binary contradiction detection over isolated sentence pairs, abstracting away the review-level context and obscuring differences in the severity of evaluative conflict. In this work, we introduce a fine-grained formulation of reviewer contradiction analysis that operates over full peer reviews by explicitly identifying contradiction evidence spans and assigning graded disagreement intensity scores. To support this task, we present RevCI, an expert-annotated benchmark of peer-review pairs with evidence-level contradiction annotations with graded intensity labels. We further propose IMPACT, a structured multi-agent framework that integrates aspect-conditioned evidence extraction, deliberative reasoning, and adjudication to model reviewer contradictions and their intensity. To support efficient deployment, we distill IMPACT into TIDE, a small language model that predicts contradiction evidence and intensity in a single forward pass. Experimental results show that IMPACT substantially outperforms strong single-agent and generic multi-agent baselines in both evidence identification and intensity agreement, while TIDE achieves competitive performance at significantly lower inference cost.
Authors: Farzad Nourmohammadzadeh Motlagh, Mehrdad Hajizadeh, Mehryar Majd, Pejman Najafi, Feng Cheng, Christoph Meinel
Abstract: Natural language interfaces to structured databases are becoming increasingly common, largely due to advances in large language models (LLMs) that enable users to query data using conversational input rather than formal query languages such as SQL. While this paradigm significantly improves usability and accessibility, it introduces new security risks, particularly the amplification of SQL injection vulnerabilities through the prompt-to-SQL translation process. Malicious users can exploit these mechanisms by crafting adversarial prompts that manipulate model behavior and generate unsafe queries. In this work, we propose a multi-layered security framework designed to detect and mitigate LLM-mediated SQL injection attacks. The framework integrates a front-end security shield for prompt sanitization, an advanced threat detection model for behavioral and semantic anomaly identification, and a signature-based control layer for known attack patterns. We evaluate the proposed framework under diverse and realistic attack scenarios, including prompt injection, obfuscated SQL payloads, and context-manipulation attacks. To ensure robustness, we generate and curate a comprehensive benchmark dataset of adversarial prompts and assess performance across a fine-tuned LLM configuration. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves high detection accuracy while maintaining low false-positive rates, significantly improving the secure deployment of LLM-powered database applications.
Authors: Guangli Chen, Dianzhao Li, Wenjian Zhong, Bangquan Xie, Ostap Okhrin
Abstract: Robust urban autonomous driving requires reliable 3D scene understanding and stable decision-making under dense interactions. However, existing end-to-end models lack interpretability, while modular pipelines suffer from error propagation across brittle interfaces. This paper proposes MTA-RL, the first framework that bridges perception and control through Multi-modal Transformer-based 3D Affordances and Reinforcement Learning (RL). Unlike previous fusion models that directly regress actions, RGB images and LiDAR point clouds are fused using a transformer architecture to predict explicit, geometry-aware affordance representations. These structured representations serve as a compact observation space, enabling the RL policy to operate purely on predicted driving semantics, which significantly improves sample efficiency and stability. Extensive evaluations in CARLA Town01-03 across varying densities (20-60 background vehicles) show that MTA-RL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Trained solely on Town03, our method demonstrates superior zero-shot generalization in unseen towns, achieving up to a 9.0% increase in Route Completion, an 11.0% increase in Total Distance, and an 83.7% improvement in Distance Per Violation. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm that our multi-modal fusion and reward shaping are critical, significantly outperforming image-only and unshaped variants, demonstrating the effectiveness of MTA-RL for robust urban autonomous driving.
Authors: Mengzhou Gao, Kaiwei Wang, Pengfei Jiao
Abstract: Neural Flows efficiently model irregular multivariate time series by directly learning ODE solution trajectories with neural networks, bypassing step-by-step numerical solvers. Despite their efficiency, many existing approaches treat variables independently, leaving inter-variable interactions underexplored. Moreover, their one-step mapping makes interaction modeling inherently challenging, as it removes the iterative refinement of interactions during learning. To address this challenge, we propose one-step Graph-Structured Neural Flows (GSNF), which introduce two auxiliary-trajectory self-supervision strategies to strengthen interaction learning: (i) interaction-aware trajectory generation via re-initialization, which induces trajectory divergence to expose graph-induced interactions, with a theoretically derived lower bound on divergence; and (ii) reverse-time trajectory generation, which enforces forward-backward consistency to regularize graph learning, enabled by flow invertibility. Experiments on five real-world datasets show that GSNF achieves state-of-the-art classification performance with highly competitive training time and memory usage.
Authors: Jihyeon Baek, Seunghoon Lee, Gitaek Kwon, Doohyun Park
Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential for building reliable AI systems, as models that produce outputs for invalid inputs cannot be trusted. Although deep learning (DL) is often assumed to outperform traditional machine learning (ML), medical imaging data are typically acquired under standardized protocols, leading to relatively constrained image variability in OOD detection tasks. This motivates a direct comparison between ML and DL approaches in this setting. The two approaches are evaluated on open datasets comprising over 60,000 fundus and non-fundus images across multiple resolutions. Both approaches achieved an AUROC of 1.000 and accuracies between 0.999 and 1.000 on internal and external validation sets, showing comparable detection performance. The ML approach, however, exhibited substantially lower end-to-end latency while maintaining equivalent accuracy, indicating greater computational efficiency. These results suggest that for OOD detection tasks of limited visual complexity, lightweight ML approaches can achieve DL-level performance with significantly reduced computational cost, supporting practical real-world deployment.
Authors: Paul Vermeeren, Heysem Kaya
Abstract: We develop a foundation model using 1.2m high resolution satellite images of the Netherlands. By combining a Convolutional Neural Network and a Vision Transformer, the model captures both low- and high-frequency landscape features, such as fine textures, edges, and small objects as well as large terrain structures, elevation patterns, and land-cover distributions. Leveraging temporal data as input, the model learns from broader contextual information across time, allowing the model to exploit the temporal dependencies, such as topographic features, land-cover changes, and seasonal dynamics. These additional constraints reduce feature ambiguity, improve representation learning, and enable better generalization with fewer labeled samples. The foundation model is evaluated on multiple downstream tasks, ranging from use cases within the Netherlands to global benchmarking datasets. On the vegetation monitoring dataset of the Netherlands, the model shows clear performance improvements by incorporating temporal information instead of relying on a single time point. Despite using a smaller model and less pretraining data limited to the Netherlands, it achieves competitive results on global benchmarks when compared to state-of-the-art models. These results demonstrate that the model can learn rich, generalizable representations from limited data, achieving competitive performance on global benchmarks while using a fraction of the parameters of larger state-of-the-art remote sensing models. To maximize reproducibility and reuse, we made the scripts and the model accessible on GitHub.
Authors: Vittorio Palladino, Ahmet Enis Cetin
Abstract: Ghost imaging reconstructs spatial information from a single-pixel bucket detector by correlating structured illumination patterns with scalar intensity measurements. While deep learning approaches have achieved promising results on static scenes, two critical limitations remain unaddressed: existing architectures fail to exploit temporal coherence across frames, leaving dynamic ghost imaging largely unsolved, and they assume additive Gaussian noise models that do not reflect the true Poissonian statistics of real single-photon hardware. We present DynGhost (Dynamic Ghost Imaging Transformer), a transformer architecture that addresses both limitations through alternating spatial and temporal attention blocks. Our quantum-aware training framework, based on physically accurate detector simulations (SNSPDs, SPADs, SiPMs) and Anscombe variance-stabilizing normalization, resolves the distribution shift that causes classical models to fail under realistic hardware constraints. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that DynGhost outperforms both traditional reconstruction methods and existing deep learning architectures, with particular gains in dynamic and photon-starved settings.
Authors: Sijia Chen, Hang Yin, Shunfan Zhou
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into legal drafting and research workflows, where incorrect citations or fabricated precedents can cause serious professional harm. Existing legal benchmarks largely emphasize statutory reasoning, contract understanding, or general legal question answering, but they do not directly study a central common-law failure mode: when asked to provide case authorities without external grounding, models may return plausible-looking but incorrect citations or cases. We introduce LegalCiteBench, a benchmark for studying closed-book citation recovery, citation verification, and case matching in legal language models. LegalCiteBench contains approximately 24K evaluation instances constructed from 1,000 real U.S. judicial opinions from the Case Law Access Project. The benchmark covers five citation-centric tasks: citation retrieval, citation completion, citation error detection, case matching, and case verification and correction. Across 21 LLMs, exact citation recovery remains highly challenging in this closed-book setting: even the strongest models score below 7/100 on citation retrieval and completion. Within the evaluated models, scale and legal-domain pretraining provide limited gains and do not resolve this difficulty. Models also frequently provide concrete but incorrect or low-overlap authorities under our evaluation protocol, with Misleading Answer Rates (MAR) exceeding 94% for 20 of 21 evaluated models on retrieval-heavy tasks. A prompt-only abstention experiment shows that explicit uncertainty instructions reduce some confident fabrication but do not improve citation correctness. LegalCiteBench is intended as a diagnostic framework for studying authority generation failures, verification behavior, and abstention when external grounding is absent, incomplete, or bypassed.
Authors: Yulin Zhang, He Cao, Zihao Jiang, Chenyi Zi, Zhipeng Zhou, Zijing Liu, Yu Li, Jia Li, Ziqi Gao
Abstract: Designing proteins with desired functions or properties represents a core goal in synthetic biology and drug discovery. Recent advances in protein language models (PLMs) have enabled the generation of highly designable protein sequences, while preference alignment provides a promising way to steer designs toward desired functions and properties. Nevertheless, they often trigger catastrophic forgetting of pretrained knowledge, degrading basic designability and failing to balance multiple competing objectives. To address these issues, we draw inspiration from On-Policy Distillation (OPD), an advanced post-training method renowned for mitigating catastrophic forgetting through its mode-seeking nature. In this work, we propose ProteinOPD, a multi-objective preference alignment framework that can effectively balance multiple preference objectives while maintaining the inherent designability of PLMs. ProteinOPD adapts a pretrained PLM into preference-specific teachers and distills their knowledge into a shared student via token-level OPD on the student's own trajectories. During this process, the student is aligned to a unique normalized geometric consensus of weighted teachers while ensuring bounded optimization under conflicts. This bridges the gap for OPD in multi-objective/teacher alignment. Extensive experiments show that ProteinOPD achieves substantial gains on target preference objectives without compromising the designability, with an 8x training speedup over RL-based alignment competitors.
Authors: Nicola Novello, Andrea M. Tonello
Abstract: Erasing specific concepts from text-to-image diffusion models is essential for avoiding the generation of copyrighted and explicit content. Closed-form concept erasure methods offer a fast alternative to backpropagation-based techniques, but they become less effective when scaling from smaller models such as Stable Diffusion 1.5 to larger models like Stable Diffusion XL. To maintain erasure effectiveness in these larger-scale architectures, we propose SParse cross-Attention-based Concept Erasure (SPACE). SPACE iteratively modifies the cross-attention parameters of a model with a closed-form update that jointly induces sparsity and erases target concepts. By concentrating the concept mapping to a lower-dimensional subspace, SPACE achieves superior erasure efficacy compared to dense baselines. Extensive experimental results show improvements in erasure effectiveness and robustness against adversarial prompts. Furthermore, SPACE achieves 80\%-90\% cross-attention sparsity, reducing the storage requirements for saving the modified parameters by 70\%, demonstrating its memory efficiency.
Authors: Zhenhao Shen, Zeming Yang, Yue Chen, Yuran Wang, Shengqiang Xu, Mingleyang Li, Hao Dong, Ruihai Wu
Abstract: Generalizable manipulation involving cross-type object interactions is a critical yet challenging capability in robotics. To reliably accomplish such tasks, robots must address two fundamental challenges: "where to manipulate" (contact point localization) and "how to manipulate" (subsequent interaction trajectory planning). Existing foundation-model-based approaches often adopt end-to-end learning that obscures the distinction between these stages, exacerbating error accumulation in long-horizon tasks. Furthermore, they typically rely on a single uniform model, which fails to capture the diverse, category-specific features required for heterogeneous objects. To overcome these limitations, we propose HeteroGenManip, a task-conditioned, two-stage framework designed to decouple initial grasp from complex interaction execution. First, Foundation-Correspondence-Guided Grasp module leverages structural priors to align the initial contact state, thereby significantly reducing the pose uncertainty of grasping. Subsequently, Multi-Foundation-Model Diffusion Policy (MFMDP) routes objects to category-specialized foundation models, integrating fine-grained geometric information with highly-variable part features via a dual-stream cross-attention mechanism. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that HeteroGenManip achieves robust intra-category shape and pose generalization. The framework achieves an average 31% performance improvement in simulation tasks with broad type setting, alongside a 36.7% gain across four real-world tasks with different interaction types.
Authors: Maik Larooij, David Graus
Abstract: Government transparency laws, like the Freedom of Information (FOIA) acts in the United States and United Kingdom, and the Woo (Open Government Act) in the Netherlands, grant citizens the right to directly request documents from the government. As these documents might contain sensitive information, such as personal information or threats to national security, the laws allow governments to redact sensitive parts of the documents prior to release. We build on prior research to perform automatic sensitivity classification for the FOIA Exemption 5 deliberative process privilege using Large Language Models (LLMs). However, processing documents not yet cleared for review via third-party cloud APIs is often legally or politically untenable. Therefore, in this work, we perform sensitivity classification with a small, local model, deployable on consumer-grade hardware (Qwen3.5 9B). We compare eight variants of applying LLMs for sentence classification, using well-known prompting techniques, and find that a combination of Chain-of-Thought prompting and few-shot prompting with error-based examples outperforms classification models of earlier work in terms of recall and F2 score. This method also closely approaches the performance of a widely-used, cost-efficient commercial model (Gemini 2.5 Flash). In an additional analysis, we find that sentences that are predicted as deliberative contain more verbs that indicate the expression of opinions, and are more often phrased in in first-person. Above all, deliberativeness seems characterized by the presence of a combination of multiple indicators, in particular the combination of first-person words with a verb for expressing opinion.
Authors: Michal Korniak, Miko{\l}aj Czarnecki, Yarden As, Piotr Mi{\l}o\'s, Pieter Abbeel, Michal Nauman
Abstract: Modern off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms often rely on simple uniform replay sampling and it remains unclear when and why non-uniform replay improves over this strong baseline. Across diverse RL settings, we show that the effectiveness of non-uniform replay is governed by three factors: replay volume, the number of replayed transitions per environment step; expected recency, how recent sampled transitions are; and the entropy of the replay sampling distribution. Our main contribution is clarifying when non-uniform replay is beneficial and providing practical guidance for replay design in modern off-policy RL. Namely, we find that non-uniform replay is most beneficial when replay volume is low, and that high-entropy sampling is important even at comparable expected recency. Motivated by these findings, we adopt a simple Truncated Geometric replay that biases sampling toward recent experience while preserving high entropy and incurring negligible computational overhead. Across large-scale parallel simulation, single-task, and multi-task settings, including three modern algorithms evaluated on five RL benchmark suites, this replay sampling strategy improves sample efficiency in low-volume regimes while remaining competitive when replay volume is high.
Authors: Wei Huang, Hezhe Qiao, Kailai Zhang, Zaisheng Ye, Yu-Ming Shang, Xiangling Fu
Abstract: Unsupervised tabular anomaly detection methods typically learn feature patterns from normal samples during training and subsequently identify samples that deviate from these patterns as anomalies during testing. However, in practical scenarios, the limited scale and diversity of training data often lead to an incomplete characterization of normal patterns. While test-time adaptation offers a remedy, its isolated focus on test-time optimization ignores the critical synergy with training-phase learning. Furthermore, indiscriminate adaptation to unlabeled test data inevitably triggers anomaly contamination, preventing the model from fully realizing its discriminative capability between normal and anomalous samples. To address these issues, we propose RTTAD, a Risk-aware Test-time adaptation method for unsupervised Tabular Anomaly Detection. RTTAD holistically tackles normality shifts via a synergistic two-stage mechanism. During training, collaborative dual-task learning captures multi-level representations to establish a robust normal prior. During testing, a Test-Time Contrastive Learning (TTCL) module explicitly accounts for adaptation risk by selectively updating the model using high-confidence pseudo-normal samples while constraining anomalous ones. Additionally, TTCL incorporates a k-nearest neighbor-based contrastive objective to refine embedding distributions, thereby further enhancing the model's discriminative capacity. Extensive experiments on 15 tabular datasets demonstrate that RTTAD achieves state-of-the-art overall detection performance.
Authors: Peiru Yang, Haoran Zheng, Tong Ju, Shiting Wang, Wanchun Ni, Jiajun Liu, Shangguang Wang, Yongfeng Huang, Tao Qi
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a widely adopted paradigm for enhancing LLMs in medical applications by incorporating expert multimodal knowledge during generation. However, the underlying retrieval databases may naturally contain, or be intentionally injected with, adversarial knowledge, which can perturb model outputs and undermine system reliability. To investigate this risk, prior studies have explored knowledge poisoning attacks in medical RAG systems. Nevertheless, most of them rely on the strong assumption that adversaries possess prior knowledge of user queries, which is unrealistic in deployments and substantially limits their practical applicability. In this paper, we propose M\textsuperscript{3}Att, a knowledge-poisoning framework designed for medical multimodal RAG systems, assuming only limited distribution knowledge of the underlying database. Our core idea is to inject covert misinformation into textual data while using paired visual data as a query-agnostic trigger to promote retrieval. We first propose a unified framework that introduces imperceptible perturbations to visual inputs to manipulate retrieval probabilities. Besides, due to the prior medical knowledge in LLMs, naively poisoned medical content with explicit factual errors can be corrected during generation. Thus, we leverage the inherent ambiguity of medical diagnosis and design a covert misinformation injection strategy that degrades diagnostic accuracy while evading model self-correction. Experiments on five LLMs and datasets demonstrate that M\textsuperscript{3}Att consistently produces clinically plausible yet incorrect generations. Codes: https://github.com/ypr17/M3Att.
Authors: Dimos Makris, Andr\'as Barj\'ak, Maximos Kaliakatsos-Papakostas
Abstract: Most recent advances in audio dereverberation focus almost exclusively on speech, leaving percussive and drum signals largely unexplored despite their importance in music production. Percussive dereverberation poses distinct challenges due to sharp transients and dense temporal structure. In this work, we propose a cold diffusion framework for dereverberating stereo drum stems (downmixes), modeling reverberation as a deterministic degradation process that progressively transforms anechoic signals into reverberant ones. We investigate two reverse-process parameterizations, Direct (next-state) and a Delta-normalized residual (velocity-style) prediction, and implement the framework using both a UNet and a diffusion Transformer backbone. The models are trained and evaluated on curated datasets comprising both acoustic and electronic drum recordings, with reverberation generated using a combination of synthetic and real room impulse responses. Extensive experiments on in-domain and fully out-of-domain test sets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms strong score-based and conditional diffusion baselines, evaluated using signal-based and perceptual metrics tailored to percussive audio.
Authors: Baibei Ji, Xiaoyang Weng, Juntao Li, Zecheng Tang, Yihang Lou, Min Zhang
Abstract: To tackle long-context reasoning tasks without the quadratic complexity of standard attention mechanisms, approaches based on agent memory have emerged, which typically maintain a dynamically updated memory when linearly processing document chunks. To mitigate the potential loss of latent evidence in this memorize-while-reading paradigm, recent works have integrated retrieval modules that allow agents to recall information previously discarded during memory overwriting. However, retrieval-based recall suffers from both evidence loss during memory formation and interference induced by invalid queries. To overcome these limitations, we propose MemReread. Built upon streaming reading, MemReread circumvents intermediate retrieval. It triggers question decomposition and rereading when the final memory is insufficient, enabling the recovery of indirect facts that were prematurely discarded. This design supports non-linear reasoning while preserving the inherent logical flow of document comprehension. To further enhance practicality, we introduce a reinforcement learning framework that enhances length extrapolation capability while dynamically determining the number of rereading passes based on task complexity, thereby flexibly controlling computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MemReread consistently outperforms baseline frameworks on long-context reasoning tasks, while maintaining linear time complexity with respect to context length.
Authors: Haaris Mehmood, Jie Xu, Karthikeyan Saravanan, Rogier Van Dalen, Mete Ozay
Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables the collaborative training of large-scale language models (LLMs) across edge devices while keeping user data on-device. However, FL still exposes sensitive information through client-provided gradients. Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) mitigates this risk by clipping each client's contribution to a threshold $C$ and adding noise proportional to $C$. Existing adaptive clipping techniques dynamically adjust $C$ but demand tedious hyperparameter tuning, which can erode the privacy budget. In this paper, we introduce DP-LAC, a method that first estimates an initial clipping threshold within an order of magnitude of the optimum using private histogram estimation, and then adapts this threshold during training without consuming additional privacy budget or introducing new hyperparameters. Empirical results show that DP-LAC outperforms both state-of-the-art adaptive clipping methods and vanilla DP-SGD, achieving an average accuracy gain of $6.6\%$.
Authors: Konstantinos Soiledis, Maximos Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, Dimos Makris, Konstantinos Tsamis
Abstract: Generating realistic drum audio directly from symbolic representations is a challenging task at the intersection of music perception and machine learning. We propose a system that transforms an expressive drum grid, a time-aligned MIDI representation with microtiming and velocity information, into drum audio by predicting discrete codes of a neural audio codec. Our approach uses a Transformer-based model to map the drum grid input to a sequence of codec tokens, which are then converted to waveform audio via a pre-trained codec decoder. We experiment with multiple state-of-the-art neural codecs, namely EnCodec, DAC, and X-Codec, to assess how the choice of audio representation impacts the quality of the generated drums. The system is trained and evaluated on the Expanded Groove MIDI Dataset, E-GMD, a large collection of human drum performances with paired MIDI and audio. We evaluate the fidelity and musical alignment of the generated audio using objective metrics. Overall, our results establish codec-token prediction as an effective route for drum grid-to-audio generation and provide practical insights into selecting audio tokenizers for percussive synthesis.
Authors: Hyunso Kim, Hyo Kang, Jaeyong Song
Abstract: Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping who enters entrepreneurship, but not who reaches the top of the quality distribution. Using data on over 160,000 product launches on Product Hunt, we find that entrepreneurial entry increased sharply following the public release of ChatGPT-3.5, driven disproportionately by solo entrepreneurs. This shift toward solo entry is particularly pronounced in categories that historically favored team-based ventures. However, much of this growth reflects low-commitment, experimental entry and does not translate into greater representation among the highest-quality outcomes. Team-based ventures are increasingly dominant in the top tiers of platform rankings. These findings suggest that generative AI lowers barriers to solo entrepreneurship while reinforcing team-based advantages.
Authors: Sheng Pan, Ming Jin, Bo Du, Shirui Pan
Abstract: Time series forecasting serves as an essential tool for many real-world applications, supporting tasks such as resource optimization and decision-making. Despite significant architectural advancements, most modern models still treat forecasting task as a fixed mapping from history to target horizons. This induces temporal decoupling across future time points and limits the model's ability to adapt to the evolving context as forecasting progresses. In this work, we present LeapTS, a novel framework that reformulates time series forecasting as a dynamic scheduling process over the prediction horizon. Specifically, LeapTS organizes the forecasting process into multi-level decisions using: (1) the hierarchical controller to dynamically select the optimal prediction scale and advancement length at each step, and (2) continuous-time state evolution driven by neural controlled differential equations. Within this process, the controlled update mechanism explicitly couples the irregular temporal dynamics with discrete scheduling feedback. Extensive evaluations on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that LeapTS improves overall forecasting performance by at least 7.4% while achieving a 2.6$\times$ to 5.3$\times$ inference speedup over representative Transformer-based models. Furthermore, by explicitly tracing the scheduling trajectories, we reveal how the model autonomously adapts its forecasting behavior to capture non-stationary dynamics.
Authors: Maris F. L. Galesloot, Thomas Rhemrev, Nils Jansen
Abstract: In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we learn policies from fixed datasets without environment interaction. The major challenges are to provide guarantees on the (1) performance and (2) safety of the resulting policy. A technique called safe policy improvement (SPI) provides a performance guarantee: with high probability, the new policy outperforms a given baseline policy, which is assumed to be safe. Orthogonally, in the context of safe RL, a shield provides a safety guarantee by restricting the action space to those actions that are provably safe with respect to a given safety-relevant model. We integrate these paradigms by extending shielding to offline RL, relying solely on the available dataset and knowledge of safe and unsafe states. Then, we shield the policy improvement steps, guaranteeing, with high probability, a safe policy. Experimental results demonstrate that shielded SPI outperforms its unshielded counterpart, improving both average and worst-case performance, particularly in low-data regimes.
Authors: Anton Bazdyrev, Ivan Bashtovyi, Ivan Havlytskyi, Oleksandr Kharytonov, Artur Khodakovskyi
Abstract: We participated in the Fifth UNLP shared task on multi-domain document understanding, where systems must answer Ukrainian multiple-choice questions from PDF collections and localize the supporting document and page. We propose a retrieval-augmented pipeline built around three ideas: contextual chunking of PDFs, question-aware dense retrieval and reranking conditioned on both the question and answer options, and constrained answer generation from a small set of reranked passages. Our final system uses Qwen3-Embedding-8B for retrieval, a fine-tuned Qwen3-Reranker-8B for passage ranking, and Qwen3-32B for answer selection. On a held-out split, reranking improves Recall@1 from 0.6957 to 0.7935, while using the top-2 reranked passages raises answer accuracy from 0.9348 to 0.9674. Our best leaderboard run reached 0.9452 on the public leaderboard and 0.9598 on the private leaderboard. Our results suggest that, under strict code-competition constraints, preserving document structure and making relevance estimation aware of the answer space are more effective than adding complex downstream heuristics.
Authors: Zheyu Zhang, Shuo Yang, Bardh Prenkaj, Gjergji Kasneci
Abstract: Generative tabular augmentation is appealing in data-scarce domains, yet the prevailing focus on distributional fidelity does not reliably translate into better downstream models. We formalize a fidelity-utility gap: common generative objectives prioritize distributional plausibility, whereas augmentation succeeds only when injected samples reduce the current learner's held-out evaluation loss. This gap motivates learning not just how to generate, but what to generate and when to inject as training evolves. We propose TAP (Tabular Augmentation Policy), which couples diffusion inpainting with a lightweight, learner-conditioned policy to steer generation toward high-utility regions and controls safe injection via explicit gating and conservative windowed commitment. Under severe data scarcity, TAP consistently outperforms strong generative baselines on seven real-world datasets, improving classification accuracy by up to 15.6 percentage points and reducing regression RMSE by up to 32%.
Authors: Sayan Kumar Chaki
Abstract: Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models typically represent each relation as an operator on entity embeddings. In this work, we identify three structural axioms that any principled relation operator must satisfy, linearity, trace preservation, and complete positivity, and show that they characterize a Kraus channel structure via the Kraus representation theorem. The completeness constraint defining this family is equivalent to these axioms, providing a principled foundation rather than an externally imposed condition. Under this formulation, most existing operator-based KGE models are recoverable as special cases with Kraus rank $\kappa = 1$ under specific embedding choices. We further generalize this characterization to arbitrary metric geometries by introducing \mbox{w-Kraus} channels, which satisfy completeness by construction within their respective spaces. Building on this theory, we propose \textsc{KrausKGE}, a principled KGE model that naturally handles $1$-to-$N$ and $N$-to-$N$ relations, supports $k$-hop reasoning without requiring explicit path encoders, and eliminates the need for norm constraints on entity embeddings. Additionally, our framework yields the first theoretically grounded per-relation complexity measure in the KGE literature, with a provable lower bound in terms of the empirical relation matrix rank. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that \textsc{KrausKGE} consistently outperforms strong baselines on $N$-to-$N$ relations, with performance gains that increase monotonically with relation fan-out, in alignment with theoretical predictions.
Authors: Sean Feeney, Pooja Rao, Andreas Klappenecker, Reuben Tate, Yuri Alexeev, Stefano Mensa, Elica Kyoseva, Stephan Eidenbenz
Abstract: In this paper, we present SCALAR (Symbolic Conjecture and LLM-Assisted Reasoning), a neurosymbolic framework for automated conjecture generation in quantum circuit analysis built on top of the CUDA-Q open source framework. The system integrates quantum simulation, symbolic conjecture generation, and LLM-based interpretation. We evaluate SCALAR on 82 MaxCut instances from the MQLib benchmark dataset and extend the analysis to 2,000 randomly generated graphs across four topologies: regular, Erdos-Renyi, Barabasi-Albert, and Watts-Strogatz. The framework generates conjectured bounds relating optimal QAOA parameters to graph invariants, including known relationships such as periodicity constraints on the phase separation parameter $\gamma$. SCALAR also recovers previously reported parameter transfer phenomena across structurally similar instances. Additionally, the system identifies correlations between graph structural features and optimization landscape properties, which we characterize through invariant-based descriptors. Using CUDA-Q tensor network simulator, we scale experiments to instances of up to 77 qubits. We discuss the accuracy, generality, and limitations of the generated conjectures, including sensitivity to graph class and quantum circuit depth.
Authors: Yao Lu, Dengdong Fan, Shixun Zhang, Yonghong Tian
Abstract: Adaptive optimizers, most notably Adam, have become the default standard for training large-scale neural networks such as Transformers. These methods maintain running estimates of gradient first and second moments, incurring substantial memory overhead. We introduce PowerStep, a memory-efficient optimizer that achieves coordinate-wise adaptivity without storing second-moment statistics. Motivated by steepest descent under an $\ell_p$-norm geometry, we show that applying a nonlinear transform directly to a momentum buffer yields coordinate-wise adaptivity. We prove that PowerStep converges at the optimal $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ rate for non-convex stochastic optimization. Extensive experiments on Transformer models ranging from 124M to 235B parameters demonstrate that PowerStep matches Adam's convergence speed while halving optimizer memory. Furthermore, when combined with aggressive \texttt{int8} quantization, PowerStep remains numerically stable and reduces optimizer memory by $\sim\!8\times$ compared to full-precision Adam. PowerStep thus provides a principled, scalable and resource-efficient alternative for large-scale training. Code is available at https://github.com/yaolubrain/PowerStep.
Authors: Zichen Wen, Boxue Yang, Junlong Ke, Jiajie Huang, Chenfei Liao, Junxi Wang, Xuyang Liu, Linfeng Zhang
Abstract: Streaming video understanding demands more than watching longer videos: assistants must decide when to speak in real time, balancing responsiveness against verbosity. Yet most video-language models (VideoLLMs) are trained for offline inference, and existing streaming benchmarks externalize this timing decision to the evaluator. We address this gap with RealStreamEval, a frame-level multi-turn evaluation protocol that exposes models to sequential observations and penalizes unnecessary responses. Under this protocol, we observed that strong offline VideoLLMs retain useful visual understanding but lack an interaction policy for deciding when to respond. Motivated by this observation, we propose EvoStreaming, a self-evolved streaming adaptation framework in which the base model itself acts as data generator, relevance annotator, and roll-out policy to synthesize streaming trajectories without external supervision. With only $1{,}000$ self-generated samples ($139\times$ less than the leading streaming instruction-tuning approach) and no architectural changes, EvoStreaming consistently improves the overall RealStreamEval score by up to $10.8$ points across five open VideoLLM backbones (Qwen2/2.5/3-VL, InternVL-3.5, MiniCPM-V4.5) while largely preserving offline video performance. These results suggest that data-efficient interaction tuning is a practical path for adapting existing VideoLLMs to streaming assistants.
Authors: Rashi Sharma, Justin Timothy C. Bersamin, Karthikk Subramanian
Abstract: Annotating bounding boxes is costly and limits the scalability of object detection. This challenge is compounded by the need to preserve high accuracy while minimizing manual effort in real-world applications. Prior active learning methods often depend on model features or modify detector internals and training schedules, increasing integration overhead. Moreover, they rarely jointly exploit the benefits of image-level signals, class-imbalance cues, and instance-level uncertainty for comprehensive selection. We present Portable Active Learning (PAL), a detector-agnostic, easily portable framework that operates solely on inference outputs. PAL combines class-wise instance uncertainty with image-level diversity to guide data selection. At each round, PAL trains lightweight class-specific logistic classifiers to distinguish true from false positives, producing entropy-based uncertainty scores for proposals. Candidate images are then refined using global image entropy, class diversity, and image similarity, yielding batches that are both informative and diverse. PAL requires no changes to model internals or training pipelines, ensuring broad compatibility across detectors. Extensive experiments on COCO, PASCAL VOC, and BDD100K demonstrate that PAL consistently improves label efficiency and detection accuracy compared to existing active learning baselines, making it a practical solution for scalable and cost-effective deployment of object detection in real-world settings.
Authors: Danni Xu, Shaojing Fan, Harry Cheng, Mohan Kankanhalli
Abstract: Multimodal misinformation increasingly leverages visual persuasion, where repurposed or manipulated images strengthen misleading text. We introduce \textbf{RW-Post}, a post-aligned \textbf{text--image benchmark} for real-world multimodal fact-checking with \emph{auditable} annotations: each instance links the original social-media post with reasoning traces and explicitly linked evidence items derived from human fact-check articles via an LLM-assisted extraction-and-auditing pipeline. RW-Post supports controlled evaluation across closed-book, evidence-bounded, and open-web regimes, enabling systematic diagnosis of visual grounding and evidence utilization. We provide \textbf{AgentFact} as a reference verification baseline and benchmark strong open-source LVLMs under unified protocols. Experiments show substantial headroom: current models struggle with faithful evidence grounding, while evidence-bounded evaluation improves both accuracy and faithfulness. Code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/xudanni0927/AgentFact.
Authors: Team Phoenix, :, Arka Ray, Askar Ali Mohamed Jawad, Biondi Lee, Elijah Seah, Eva Lim, Fiona Teo, Grace Toh, Guang Xiang Teo, Jun En Tan, Jia Hui Bong, Jiale Wang, Jonathan Ng, Justin Tan, Kai Zhe Yew, Matthew Ong, Shun Yi Yeo, Wen Jett Lam, Wen Xiu Tan, Ze Yu Zhang, Gee Wah Ng, Chee Wee Ang, Mistral AI, :, Adrien Sad\'e, Guillaume Kunsch, Jia Sin Loh, Nicolas Schuhl, Rupert Menneer, Umar Jamil, Vincent Maladi\`ere, Yimu Pan
Abstract: We introduce Phoenix-VL 1.5 Medium, a 123B-parameter natively multimodal and multilingual foundation model, adapted to regional languages and the Singapore context. Developed as a sovereign AI asset, it demonstrates that deep domain adaptation can be achieved with minimal degradation to broad-spectrum intelligence and alignment. Continued pretraining was performed on Mistral Medium 3.1 using a localized 1-trillion tokens multimodal corpus, followed by a 250-billion tokens long-context extension phase. Subsequent post-training incorporated a novel human-annotated Singapore multimodal dataset and curated textual corpus on Singapore culture, knowledge, and legislation, totaling 22-billion tokens. An additional 5 billion tokens of model alignment was performed through Online Direct Preference Optimization. Phoenix-VL 1.5 Medium achieves state-of-the-art performance for its size on Singapore multimodal, legal, and government policy benchmarks while remaining globally competitive on general multimodal intelligence, multilingual, and STEM benchmarks. We also introduce a novel evaluation suite encompassing localized knowledge benchmarks and an institutionally aligned model behavior and safety framework. We report the data curation principles, training methodology, and highlight benchmark and inference performance.
Authors: Xi Jiang, Yinjie Zhao, Zesheng Yang, Feng Zheng
Abstract: Visual anomaly detection (VAD) is crucial in many real-world fields, such as industrial inspection, medical imaging, infrastructure monitoring, and remote sensing. However, the specific anomaly definitions, data modalities, and annotation standards across different domains make it difficult to transfer single-domain trained VAD models. Vision-language models (VLMs), pre-trained on large-scale cross-domain data, can perform visual perception under task instructions, offering a promising solution for cross-domain VAD. However, single-inference VLM judgments are unreliable, since they rely more on prior knowledge than on normal-sample references or fine-grained feature evidence. We therefore present AnomalyClaw, a training-free VAD agent that turns anomaly judgment into a multi-round refutation process. In each round, the agent proposes candidate anomalies and refutes each against normal-sample references, drawing on a 13-tool library for visual verification, reference parsing, and frozen expert probing. On the CrossDomainVAD-12 benchmark (12 datasets), AnomalyClaw achieves consistent macro-AUROC improvements over single-step direct inference with +6.23 pp on GPT-5.5, +7.93 pp on Seed2.0-lite, and +3.52 pp on Qwen3.5-VL-27B. We further introduce an optional verbalized self-evolution extension. It builds an online rulebook from internal-branch disagreement without oracle labels. On Qwen3.5-VL-27B, it delivers a +2.09 pp mean gain, comparable to a K = 10 oracle-label supervised baseline (+1.99 pp). These results show that agentic refutation improve anomaly understanding and reasoning of VLMs, rather than merely aggregating tool outputs.
Authors: Marc Lackenby
Abstract: A finite presentation < X | R > of a finite group is called `just finite' if removing any relation from R results in a presentation for an infinite group. It has been an open question (Kourovka Notebook, Problem 21.10) whether every finite group admits such a presentation. We resolve this conjecture in the affirmative.
Authors: Andreas Xenofontos, Pavlos Fafalios
Abstract: This paper investigates the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in answering questions over datasets. We examine their performance in two scenarios: (a) directly answering questions given a dataset file as input, and (b) generating SQL queries to answer questions given the schema of a relational database. We also evaluate the impact of different prompting strategies on model performance. The study includes both state-of-the-art LLMs and smaller language models that require fewer resources and operate at lower computational and financial cost. Experiments are conducted on two datasets containing questions of varying difficulty. The results demonstrate the strong performance of large LLMs, while highlighting the limitations of smaller, more cost-efficient models. These findings contribute to a better understanding of how LLMs can be utilized in data analytics tasks and their associated limitations.
Authors: Jiaqi W. Ma
Abstract: AI systems can now cheaply generate plausible scientific artifacts such as papers, reviews, and surveys. This creates a risk of \emph{epistemic pollution} in our scientific systems, where unreliable but plausible-looking artifacts can accumulate faster than the system can filter them out. The problem is structural: the epistemic infrastructure of science was calibrated to a world where producing a plausible artifact required substantial expertise, labor, and time, so generation cost itself served as a rough filter; AI weakens that filter without comparably lowering verification cost. We argue that \textbf{AI-era science should treat this as an engineering problem: redesigning epistemic infrastructure to rebalance the costs of generation and verification}. The current paper-centered system makes verification expensive: papers compress long-context scientific logic into prose, forcing reviewers, human or AI, to reconstruct underlying argument structure before they can evaluate it. As one step in this direction, we propose \textbf{blueprints} as preliminary epistemic infrastructure: structured, decomposed research artifacts that represent claims, evidence, assumptions, and definitions as typed graph components. Blueprints are designed to trade an upfront generation cost for cheaper, more local, more distributed verification downstream. We have instantiated the proposal in a proof-of-concept prototype.
Authors: Minqing Huang, Yujiao Xiang, Zihan Liang, Jiajie Huang, Jingqi Wang, Zhi Xu, Feiyang Tan, Hangning Zhou, Mu Yang, Gong Che
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving. However, existing reasoning mechanisms still struggle to provide planning-oriented intermediate representations: textual Chain-of-Thought (CoT) fails to preserve continuous spatiotemporal structure, while latent world reasoning remains difficult to use as a direct condition for action generation. In this paper, we propose CoWorld-VLA, a multi-expert world reasoning framework for autonomous driving, where world representations serve as explicit conditions to guide action planning. CoWorld-VLA extracts complementary world information through multi-source supervision and encodes it into expert tokens within the VLA, thereby providing planner-accessible conditioning signals. Specifically, we construct four types of tokens: semantic interaction, geometric structure, dynamic evolution, and ego trajectory tokens, which respectively model interaction intent, spatial structure, future temporal dynamics, and behavioral goals. During action generation, CoWorld-VLA employs a diffusion-based hierarchical multi-expert fusion planner, which is coupled with scene context throughout the joint denoising process to generate continuous ego trajectories. Experiments show that CoWorld-VLA achieves competitive results in both future scene generation and planning on the NAVSIM v1 benchmark, demonstrating strong performance in collision avoidance and trajectory accuracy. Ablation studies further validate the complementarity of expert tokens and their effectiveness as planning conditions for action generation. Code will be available at https://github.com/potatochip1211/CoWorld-VLA.
Authors: Jiebin Fang, Zidi Yan, Churu Mao, Yongjun Jiang, Xinyi Tang, Lei Miao, Dan Lu, Yun Huang, Wanjing Ding, Zhongjun Ma
Abstract: Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy provides an experimental readout of local chemical environments, but its use in molecular representation learning has been constrained by heterogeneous data and incomplete atom-level assignments. Here we construct complementary high-fidelity experimental and computational 13C NMR resources, which reveal a recurrent form of representational collapse: atoms that are equivalent in molecular topology can remain experimentally distinct in their real chemical environments, whereas explicit 3D descriptions are further limited by static conformations in dynamic regimes. To alleviate this bottleneck, we develop CLAIM (Contrastive Learning for Atom-to-molecule Inference of Molecular NMR), a framework that aligns efficient topological molecular inputs with atom-resolved NMR observables. Through hierarchical chemical priors and cross-level contrastive learning, CLAIM restores lost chemical resolution and markedly improves atom-level molecule-spectrum retrieval. CLAIM remains robust in flexible and tautomeric systems for 13C NMR prediction, improves stereoisomer discrimination without explicit 3D modelling, and transfers to broader molecular property tasks including ADMET prediction and fluorescence estimation. These results establish physically grounded spectral alignment as an effective strategy for alleviating chemical-environment collapse and for guiding experimentally grounded molecular representation learning.
Authors: George Panagopoulos
Abstract: Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects with machine learning has attracted substantial attention in both academic research and industrial practice. However, the two communities often evaluate models under markedly different conditions. Methodological work typically relies on semi-simulated benchmarks and metrics that require counterfactual outcomes, whereas real-world applications rely on observable metrics based on ranking or test outcomes. Despite the well-known gap between methodological progress and practical deployment, the relationship between these evaluation regimes has not been examined systematically. We conduct a large-scale empirical study of treatment effect evaluation across standard semi-simulated benchmark families and real-world datasets. Our benchmark covers meta-learners paired with multiple base learners, as well as specialized causal machine learning models. We evaluate these methods using observable metrics common in application-oriented literature, alongside counterfactual metrics commonly used in methods papers. Our results reveal two complementary gaps. First, counterfactual metrics do not reliably recover the estimators preferred by observable metrics, even on the same semi-simulated benchmarks. Second, rankings obtained on semi-simulated benchmarks do not transfer to real datasets. We further find that simple meta-learners with strong base models are consistently competitive, in contrast to specialized causal models. Overall, our findings suggest that progress in treatment effect estimation research should not be assessed solely through counterfactual metrics and semi-simulated benchmarks, but it would benefit from incorporating observable metrics and real-data validation.
Authors: Pierre Le Jeune, \'Etienne Duchesne, Weixuan Xiao, Stefano Palminteri, Bazire Houssin, Beno\^it Mal\'ezieux, Matteo Dora
Abstract: Multilingual studies of social bias in open-ended LLM generation remain limited: most existing benchmarks are English-centric, template-based, or restricted to recognizing pre-specified stereotypes. We introduce StereoTales, a multilingual dataset and evaluation pipeline for systematically studying the emergence of social bias in open-ended LLM generation. The dataset covers 10 languages and 79 socio-demographic attributes, and comprises over 650k stories generated by 23 recent LLMs, each annotated with the socio-demographic profile of the protagonist across 19 dimensions. From these, we apply statistical tests to identify more than 1{,}500 over-represented associations, which we then rate for harmfulness through both a panel of humans (N = 247) and the same LLMs. We report three main findings. \textbf{(i)} Every model we evaluate emits consequential harmful stereotypes in open-ended generation, regardless of size or capabilities, and these associations are largely shared across providers rather than isolated misbehaviors. \textbf{(ii)} Prompt language strongly shapes which stereotypes appear: rather than transferring as a shared set of biases, harmful associations adapt culturally to the prompt language and amplify bias against locally salient protected groups. \textbf{(iii)} Human and LLM harmfulness judgments are broadly aligned (Spearman $\rho=0.62$), with disagreements concentrating on specific attribute classes rather than specific providers. To support further analyses, we release the evaluation code and the dataset, including model generations, attribute annotations, and harmfulness ratings.
Authors: Stefano Blando, Giorgio Fagiolo, Mauro Napoletano, Tania Treibich, Andrea Vandin
Abstract: Agent-based models (ABMs) are increasingly used in macroeconomics, but their analysis still often relies on ad hoc Monte Carlo campaigns with heterogeneous statistical effort across parameter settings. We show how statistical model checking (SMC), implemented through MultiVeStA, can provide a principled analysis layer for a realistic macroeconomic ABM without rewriting the simulator in a dedicated formalism. Our case study is the heuristic-switching Keynes+Schumpeter(K+S) model, analysed hrough a transient sensitivity campaign over one-parameter sweeps, two macro observables (unemployment and GDP growth), and one auxiliary micro-level probe (market share) on the post-warmup phase of a 600-step horizon. The analysis is driven by reusable temporal queries, observable-specific precision targets, and confidence-based stopping rules that automatically determine the simulation effort required by each configuration. Results show a clear contrast across parameter families: macro-financial and structural sweeps produce the strongest transient effects, whereas several heuristic-rule sweeps remain much weaker under the same precision policy. More broadly, the paper shows that SMC can support reproducible and informative quantitative analysis of substantively rich economic ABMs, while making uncertainty estimates and simulation cost explicit parts of the reported results.
Authors: Kamil Wereszczy\'nski (0000-0003-1686-472X), J\'ozef Cyran (0009-0006-5205-8986), Adam Brzezowski (0009-0004-6997-445X), Dawid Za{\l}u\.zny (0009-0003-5106-0855), Robert Potoniec (0009-0005-7477-3625), Kasper Wi\'sniowski (0009-0004-6696-9778), Agnieszka Michalczuk (0000-0002-8963-1030)
Abstract: We introduce a cavity-enhanced optical architecture for collective quantum processing in which logical qubits are encoded in the polarization subspace of recirculating intracavity modes. The physical carrier and computational degree of freedom are explicitly separated: harmonic cavity bundles provide a stable resonant substrate, while programmable polarization transformations implement single-qubit operations. A polarization-selective nonlinear interaction in the entanglement region generates tunable controlled-phase gates, enabling a universal gate set. A parameter-scaling analysis shows that order-unity conditional phases are attainable in centimeter-scale cavities using experimentally accessible solid-state nonlinear media, without requiring extreme nonlinear coefficients, millisecond photon lifetimes, or sub-hertz laser stabilization. The results indicate that resonant recirculation provides a physically plausible platform for cavity based collective quantum architectures.
Authors: Yasmine Abu-Haeyeh, Tobias Ladner, Matthias Althoff, Lars Hedrich
Abstract: Analog neural networks are gaining attention due to their efficiency in terms of power consumption and processing speed. However, since analog neural networks are implemented as physical circuits, they are highly sensitive to manufacturing process variations, which can cause large deviations from the nominal model. We present a polynomial-based model that resembles the performance of the neuron circuit under process variations. Then, we formally verify the behavior of the circuit-level model using reachability analysis with polynomial zonotopes, thus, avoiding conventional, time-consuming Monte Carlo simulations. We evaluate our proposed verification approach on three different datasets, verifying both fully-connected and convolutional analog neural networks. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our verification approach by reducing the verification time from days to seconds while enclosing 99% of the variation samples.
Authors: Haoyu Huang, Jiaxin Bai, Shujie Liu, Yang Wei, Hong Ting Tsang, Yisen Gao, Zhongwei Xie, Yufei Li, Yangqiu Song
Abstract: Agent-compiled knowledge bases provide persistent external knowledge for large language model (LLM) agents in open-ended, knowledge-intensive downstream tasks. Yet their quality is systematically limited by \emph{incompleteness}, \emph{incorrectness}, and \emph{redundancy}, manifested as missing evidence or cross-document links, low-confidence or imprecise claims, and ambiguous or coreference resolution issues. Such defects compound under iterative use, degrading retrieval fidelity and downstream task performance. We present \textbf{DeepRefine}, a general LLM-based reasoning model for \emph{agent-compiled knowledge refinement} that improves the quality of any pre-constructed knowledge bases with user queries to make it more suitable for the downstream tasks. DeepRefine performs multi-turn interactions with the knowledge base and conducts abductive diagnosis over interaction history, localizes likely defects, and executes targeted refinement actions for incremental knowledge base updates. To optimize refinement policies of DeepRefine without gold references, we introduce a Gain-Beyond-Draft (GBD) reward and train the reasoning process end-to-end via reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent downstream gains over strong baselines.
Authors: Marius Miron, David Robinson, Masato Hagiwara, Titouan Parcollet, Jules Cauzinille, Gagan Narula, Milad Alizadeh, Ellen Gilsenan-McMahon, Sara Keen, Emmanuel Chemla, Benjamin Hoffman, Maddie Cusimano, Diane Kim, Felix Effenberger, Jane K. Lawton, Aza Raskin, Olivier Pietquin, Matthieu Geist
Abstract: Probing heads map the representations learned from audio by a machine learning model to downstream task labels and are a key component in evaluating representation learning. Most bioacoustic benchmarks use a fixed, low-capacity probe, such as a linear layer on the final encoder layer. While this standardization enables model comparisons, it may bias results by overlooking the interaction between encoder features and probe design. In this work, we systematically study different probing strategies across two bioacoustic benchmarks, BEANs and BirdSet. We evaluate last- and multi-layer probing, across linear and attention probes. We show that larger probe heads that leverage time information have superior performance. Our results suggest that current benchmarks may misrepresent encoder quality when relying on a last-layer probing setup. Multi-layer probing improves downstream task performance across all tested models, while attention probing has superior performance to linear probing for transformer models.
Authors: Heegeon Yoon, Heeyoung Kim
Abstract: Long-tailed distributions in class-imbalanced data present a fundamental challenge for deep learning models, which tend to be biased toward majority classes. While recent methods for long-tailed recognition have mitigated this issue, they are largely restricted to single-modal inputs and cannot fully exploit complementary information from diverse data sources. In this work, we introduce a new framework for long-tailed recognition that explicitly handles multi-modal inputs. Our approach extends multi-expert architectures to the multi-modal setting by fusing heterogeneous data into a unified representation while leveraging modality-specific networks to estimate the informativeness of each modality. These confidence-guided weights dynamically modulate the fusion process, ensuring that more informative modalities contribute more strongly to the final decision. To further enhance performance, we design specialized training and test procedures that accommodate diverse modality combinations, including images and tabular data. Extensive experiments on benchmark and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach not only effectively integrates multi-modal information but also outperforms existing methods in handling long-tailed, class-imbalanced scenarios, highlighting its robustness and generalization capability.
Authors: Yousef A. Radwan, Yao Li, Qing Qing, Ziqi Xu, Qixin Zhang, Yongcheng Jing, Renqiang Luo, Xikun Zhang
Abstract: Biomedical knowledge graphs are increasingly large, dynamic, and multimodal, driven by rapid advances in biotechnology such as high-throughput sequencing. Machine learning models can infer previously unobserved biomedical relationships and characterize biomedical entities in these graphs, but existing knowledge graph embedding methods and their continual learning extensions either assume static graph structure or fail to exploit multimodal information under evolving data distributions. They also apply uniform regularization across all model parameters, ignoring that different modalities may exhibit distinct forgetting dynamics as the graph evolves. We propose the Continual Multimodal Knowledge Graph Learner (CMKL), a CL framework for biomedical KGs that natively encodes structure, text, and molecules, fuses them through a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) router, and protects previously learned knowledge with standard EWC regularization and a K-means-diverse multimodal replay buffer. We evaluate CMKL on a 129K-entity biomedical continual benchmark with 10 tasks. On continual biomedical entity classification, CMKL reaches AP 0.591 versus 0.370 for the strongest structural baseline, a 60% gain that is driven by access to multimodal features and preserved across the sequence with near-zero forgetting (AF 0.008). On continual relationship prediction, CMKL reaches AP $0.062$, matching Naive Sequential and EWC (0.058) within seed noise and outperforming Joint Training (0.047, p=0.045) and LKGE (0.039). A frozen-text ablation reaches AP 0.136, more than double any jointly trained model, yet that signal is unreachable by margin-ranking gradients: the greedy-modality asymmetry lives at the representation level, not the fusion level, and MoE routing manages it by suppressing the unreachable modality without forcing it through a learned bottleneck. Code: github.com/yradwan147/cmkl-neurips2026
Authors: Ali Irzam Kathia, Yimika Erinle, Abylay Satybaldy, Paolo Tasca, Nikhil Vadgama, Marco Alberto Javarone
Abstract: The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has become a growing research area, yet contributions tend to cluster around specific application domains or examine only one direction of the integration, leaving the broader architectural interplay between the two technologies poorly understood. This work addresses that gap through a structured, bidirectional review of peer-reviewed studies published between 2020 and 2025. We classify contributions along two directions: AI-enhanced DLT, and DLT-enhanced AI. In the first case, we examine how AI techniques improve DLT systems across five layers: data, network, consensus, execution, and application layers. In the second case, we analyse how DLT supports AI systems across five layers: infrastructure, data, model, inference, and application layers, with particular attention to federated learning, model evaluation, and multi-agent coordination. The analysis reveals that most works concentrate on a small subset of layers: execution and consensus for AI-enhanced DLT, data and model for DLT-enhanced AI. Other layers remain comparatively neglected. Despite reported improvements in controlled settings, no study demonstrates deployment at production scale, and the field has not yet offered satisfying answers to fundamental questions around scalability, interoperability, and verifiable execution. We argue that progress will require cross-layer co-design and empirical validation in real-world settings.
Authors: Jaehoon Yoo, Wonjung Kim, Chanhyuk Lee, Seunghoon Hong
Abstract: Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models in language modeling, offering the advantages of parallel decoding and bidirectional context processing within a simple yet effective framework. Specifically, their explicit distinction between masked tokens and data underlies their simple framework and effective conditional generation. However, MDMs typically require many sampling iterations due to factorization errors stemming from simultaneous token updates. We observe that a theoretical lower bound of the factorization error exists, which standard MDMs cannot reduce due to their use of a deterministic single-state mask. In this paper, we propose the Infinite Mask Diffusion Model (IMDM), which introduces a stochastic infinite-state mask to mitigate the theoretical bound while directly inheriting the benefits of MDMs, including the compatibility with pre-trained weights. We empirically demonstrate that MDM fails to perform few-step generation even in a simple synthetic task due to the factorization error bound, whereas IMDM can find an efficient solution for the same task. Finally, when equipped with appropriate distillation methods, IMDM surpasses existing few-step distillation methods at small step counts on LM1B and OpenWebText. Code is available at https://Ugness.github.io/official_imdm.
Authors: Yiqi Tian, Sangjoon Park, Bo Zeng, Pengfei Jin, Yujin Oh, Quanzheng Li
Abstract: Medical image segmentation models can perform unevenly across subgroups. Most existing fairness methods focus on improving average subgroup performance, implicitly treating each subgroup as internally homogeneous. However, this can hide difficult cases within a subgroup, where high-loss samples are obscured by the subgroup mean. We call this problem \textbf{intra-group hidden failure}. To solve this, we propose \textbf{DuetFair} mechanism, a dual-axis fairness framework that jointly considers inter-subgroup adaptation and intra-subgroup robustness. Based on DuetFair, we introduce \textbf{FairDRO}, which combines distribution-aware mixture-of-experts (dMoE) with subgroup-conditioned distributionally robust optimization (DRO) loss aggregation. This design allows the model to adapt across subgroups while also reducing hidden failures within each subgroup. We evaluate FairDRO on three medical image segmentation benchmarks with varying degrees of within-group heterogeneity. FairDRO achieves the best equity-scaled performance on Harvard-FairSeg and improves worst-case subgroup performance on HAM10000 under both age- and race-based grouping schemes. On the 3D radiotherapy target cohort, FairDRO further improves worst-group Dice by 3.5 points ($\uparrow 6.0\%$) under the tumor-stage grouping and by 4.1 points ($\uparrow 7.4\%$) under the institution grouping over the strongest baseline.
Authors: Honghan Wu, Tianyan Wang, Jiacong Mi, Zhoyang Jiang, Yunsoo Kim
Abstract: Rare semantic innovations in high-dimensional, mission-critical domains are often obscured by dense background contexts, a challenge we define as \textit{feature density conflict}. We introduce the \textbf{Hybrid Hierarchical SAE (HH-SAE)} to resolve this by factorizing manifolds into a nested hierarchy of \textbf{Contextual} ($L_0$), \textbf{Atomic} ($f_1$), and \textbf{Compository} ($f_2$) tiers. Evaluating across disparate manifolds, HH-SAE demonstrates superior resolution by \textbf{``fracturing'' administrative clinical labels into physiological modes} and achieving a peak \textbf{cross-domain zero-shot AUC of 0.9156 in fraud detection}. Path ablation confirms the architecture's structural necessity, revealing a 13.46\% utility collapse when contextual subtraction is removed. Finally, knowledge-steered synthesis achieves a +9.9\% AUPRC lift over state-of-the-art generators, proving that HH-SAE effectively prioritizes high-order mechanistic innovation over environmental proxies to enable high-precision discovery in high-stakes environments.
Authors: Davide Bruni, Carlo Bardazzi, Maurizio Tesconi
Abstract: Threat detection in Natural Language Processing lacks consistent definitions and standardized benchmarks, and is often conflated with broader phenomena such as toxicity, hate speech, or offensive language. In this work, we introduce ThreatCore, a public available benchmark dataset for fine-grained threat detection that distinguishes between explicit threats, implicit threats, and non-threats. The dataset is constructed by aggregating multiple publicly available resources and systematically re-annotating them under a unified operational definition of threat, revealing substantial inconsistencies across existing labels. To improve the coverage of underrepresented cases, particularly implicit threats, we further augment the dataset with synthetic examples, which are manually validated using the same annotation protocol adopted for the re-annotation of the public datasets, ensuring consistency across all data sources. We evaluate Perspective API, zero-shot classifiers, and recent language models on ThreatCore, showing that implicit threats remain substantially harder to detect than explicit ones. Our results also indicate that incorporating Semantic Role Labeling as an intermediate representation can improve performance by making the structure of harmful intent more explicit. Overall, ThreatCore provides a more consistent benchmark for studying fine-grained threat detection and highlights the challenges that current models still face in identifying indirect expressions of harmful intent.
Authors: Phongsakon Mark Konrad, Toygar Tanyel, Serkan Ayvaz
Abstract: Safe fine-tuning defenses are often endorsed on the basis of a held-out gap reduction, but the same reduction can come from sampling noise, subject artifacts, capability loss, or a mechanism that does not transfer. We introduce Acceptance Cards: an evaluation protocol, a documentation object, an executable audit package, and a claim-specific evidential standard for safe fine-tuning defense claims. The protocol checks statistical reliability, fresh semantic generalization, mechanism alignment, and cross-task transfer before treating a gap reduction as a full-card pass. Re-scored under this installed-gap protocol, SafeLoRA fails the full-card pass on Gemma-2-2B-it: under strict mechanism-class coding it fails all four diagnostics, and under a permissive shrinkage relabel it still fails three of four. This is a narrow installed-gap audit on one model family, not a global judgment of SafeLoRA's effectiveness. In a 46-cell audit, no cell satisfies the strict conjunction. The closest family is a near miss that passes reliability and mechanism checks where the required data are available, but fails the fresh-subject threshold, lacks a strict transfer pass, and carries a measurable deployment-accuracy cost.
Authors: Chen Zhong, Xiao An, Jiaxing Sun, Zihan Gui, Guangyi Yang, Wei He
Abstract: Low-level visual perception underpins reliable remote sensing (RS) image analysis, yet current image quality assessment (IQA) methods output uninterpretable scalar scores rather than characterizing physics-driven RS degradations, deviating markedly from the diagnostic needs of RS experts. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) present a compelling alternative by delivering language-grounded IQA, their visual priors are heavily biased toward ground-level natural images. Consequently, whether VLMs can overcome this domain gap to perceive and articulate RS artifacts remains insufficiently studied. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{SenseBench}, the first dedicated diagnostic benchmark for RS low-level visual perception and description. Driven by a physics-based hierarchical taxonomy that unifies both non-reference and reference-based paradigms, SenseBench features over 10K meticulously curated instances across 6 major and 22 fine-grained RS degradation categories. Specifically, two complementary protocols are designed for evaluation: objective low-level visual \textit{perception} and subjective diagnostic \textit{description}. Comprehensive evaluation of 29 state-of-the-art VLMs reveals not only skewed domain priors and multi-distortion collapse, but also \textit{fluency illusion} and a \textit{perception-description inversion} effect. We hope SenseBench provides a robust evaluation testbed and high-quality diagnostic data to advance the development of VLMs in RS low-level perception. Code and datasets are available \href{https://github.com/Zhong-Chenchen/SenseBench}{\textcolor{blue}{here}}.
Authors: Zheng Lin, Zhenxing Niu, Haoxuan Ji, Haichang Gao
Abstract: This paper proposes a guaranteed defense method for large language models (LLMs) to safeguard against jailbreaking attacks. Drawing inspiration from the denoised-smoothing approach in the adversarial defense domain, we propose a novel smoothing-based defense method, termed Disrupt-and-Rectify Smoothing (DR-Smoothing). Specifically, we integrate a two-stage prompt processing scheme-first disrupting the input prompt, then rectifying it-into the conventional smoothing defense framework. This disrupt-and-rectify approach improves upon previous disrupt-only approaches by restoring out-of-distribution disrupted prompts to an in-distribution form, thereby reducing the risk of unpredictable LLM behavior. In addition, this two-stage scheme offers a distinct advantage in striking a balance between harmlessness and helpfulness in jailbreaking defense. Notably, we present a theoretical analysis for generic smoothing framework, offering a tight bound for the defense success probability and the requirements on the disruption strength. Our approach can defend against both token-level and prompt-level jailbreaking attacks, under both established and adaptive attacking scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach surpasses current state-of-the-art defense methods in terms of both harmlessness and helpfulness.
Authors: Yiming Dong, Yacheng Kang, Junjie Zhao, Xinyuan Zhu, Ziming Wang, Lijing Shao
Abstract: With the detection of gravitational waves (GWs), multi-messenger astronomy has opened a new window for advancing our understanding of astrophysics, dense matter, gravitation, and cosmology. The GW sources detected to date are from mergers of compact object binaries, which possess the potential to generate detectable electromagnetic (EM) counterparts. Searching for associations between GW signals and their EM counterparts is an essential step toward enabling subsequent multi-messenger studies. In the era of next-generation GW and EM detectors, the rapid increase in the number of events brings not only unprecedented scientific opportunities, but also substantial challenges to the existing data analysis paradigm. To help address these challenges, we develop GW-Eyes, an agentic framework powered by large language models (LLMs). For the first time, GW-Eyes integrates domain-specific tools and autonomously performs counterpart association tasks between GW and candidate EM events. It supports natural language interaction to assist human experts with auxiliary tasks such as catalog management, skymap visualization, and rapid verification. Our framework leverages the complex decision-making capabilities of LLMs and their traceable reasoning processes, offering a new perspective to the multi-messenger astronomy.
Authors: Isaac David, Arthur Gervais
Abstract: Benchmarks for coding agents increasingly measure source-level software repair, and cybersecurity benchmarks increasingly measure broad capture-the-flag performance. Classical binary reverse engineering remains less precisely specified: given only an executable, can an agent recover validation logic and produce an input, serial, artifact, or key generator accepted by the program? We introduce CrackMeBench, a benchmark for evaluating language-model agents on educational CrackMe-style reverse-engineering tasks. CrackMeBench focuses on deterministic binary validation problems with executable oracles, symbol-poor binaries, explicit local tool access, and externally scored submissions rather than free-form explanations. The v0 benchmark combines eight public calibration CrackMes with twelve generated main-score tasks built from seeded C, Rust, and Go templates, and agents run through an equal shell interface in a no-network Linux Docker sandbox with standard reverse-engineering tools. In a three-model evaluation with a five-minute budget and three scored submissions per task, pass@3 on the generated split is 11/12 tasks (92%) for GPT-5.5, 7/12 (58%) for Claude Opus 4.7, and 5/12 (42%) for Kimi K2. The harder generated half separates the models more sharply, with pass@3 of 5/6, 2/6, and 1/6, respectively; on the eight-task public calibration split, pass@3 is 3/8, 2/8, and 1/8. CrackMeBench records pass@1 and pass@3, scored submissions, wall-clock time, command traces, tool categories, provider-reported token usage, estimated cost, and qualitative failure labels, providing a reproducible testbed for measuring progress from source-code reasoning toward autonomous binary analysis while restricting scope to educational, purpose-built programs.
Authors: Mieke Wilms, Christoph Heitz
Abstract: Designing fair algorithmic decision systems requires balancing model performance with fairness toward affected individuals: More fairness might require sacrificing some performance and vice versa, yet the space of possible trade-offs is still poorly understood. We investigate fairness in binary prediction-based decision problems by conceptualizing decision making as a multi-objective optimization problem that simultaneously considers decision-maker utility and group fairness. We investigate the set of Pareto-optimal decision rules for arbitrary utility functions for decision maker, arbitrary population distributions, and a wide range of group fairness metrics. We find that the Pareto frontier consists of deterministic, group-specific threshold rules applied to individuals' success probability. This complements existing optimality theorems from literature which, for specific fairness constraints, posit lower-bound threshold rules only. However we also show that, depending on the used fairness metric, the Pareto frontier may include upper-bound threshold rules, thus preferring individuals with lower success probabilities. We show that the location of the Pareto frontier depends only on population characteristics, utility functions and fairness score, but not on the technical design of the algorithm - our findings hold for pre-, in-, and post-processing approaches alike. Our results generalize existing optimality theorems for fairness-constrained classification and extend them to generalized fairness metrics and fairness principles, and to partial fairness regimes. This paper connects formal fairness research with legal and ethical requirements to search for less discriminatory alternatives, offering a principled foundation for evaluating and comparing algorithmic decision systems.
Authors: Benjamin Icard, Lila Sainero, Alice Breton, Evangelia Zve, Jean-Gabriel Ganascia
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can convincingly imitate human writing styles, yet it remains unclear how much stylistic information is encoded in embeddings from any language model and retained after LLM rewriting. We investigate these questions in French, using a controlled literary dataset to quantify the effect of stylistic variation via changes in embedding dispersion. We observe that embeddings reliably capture authorial stylistic features and that these signals persist after rewriting, while also exhibiting LLM-specific patterns. These analytical results offer promising directions for authorship imitation detection in the era of language models.
Authors: Zheng Lin, Zhenxing Niu, Haoxuan Ji, Yuzhe Huang, Haichang Gao
Abstract: This paper proposes a jailbreaking prompt detection method for large language models (LLMs) to defend against jailbreak attacks. Although recent LLMs are equipped with built-in safeguards, it remains possible to craft jailbreaking prompts that bypass them. We argue that such jailbreaking prompts are inherently fragile, and thus introduce an embedding disruption method to re-activate the safeguards within LLMs. Unlike previous defense methods that aim to serve as standalone solutions, our approach instead cooperates with the LLM's internal defense mechanisms by re-triggering them. Moreover, through extensive analysis, we gain a comprehensive understanding of the disruption effects and develop an efficient search algorithm to identify appropriate disruptions for effective jailbreak detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach effectively defends against state-of-the-art jailbreak attacks in white-box and black-box settings, and remains robust even against adaptive attacks.
Authors: Bruno Gatti, Giuliano Martinelli, Roberto Navigli
Abstract: Coreference resolution is typically evaluated using aggregate statistical metrics such as CoNLL-F1, which measure structural overlap between predicted and gold clusters. While widely used, these metrics offer limited diagnostic insights, penalizing errors without revealing whether a system struggles with specific semantic categories, such as people, locations, or events, and making it difficult to interpret model capabilities or derive actionable improvements. We address this gap by introducing a semantically-enhanced evaluation framework for coreference resolution. Our approach overlays Concept and Named Entity Recognition (CNER) onto coreference outputs, assigning semantic labels to nominal mentions and propagating them to entire coreference clusters. This enables the computation of typed scores aimed at evaluating mention extraction and linking capabilities stratified by semantic class. Across our experiments on OntoNotes, LitBank, and PreCo, we show that our framework uncovers systematic weaknesses that remain obscured by aggregate metrics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that these diagnostics can be used to design targeted, low-cost data augmentation strategies, achieving measurable out-of-domain improvements.
Authors: Krishak Aneja, Manas Mittal, Anmol Goel, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Vamshi Krishna Bonagiri
Abstract: Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on benign narrow data can sometimes induce broad harmful behaviors, a vulnerability termed emergent misalignment (EM). While prior work links these failures to specific directions in the activation space, their relationship to the model's broader persona remains unexplored. We map the latent personality space of LLMs through established psychometric profiles like the Big Five, Dark Triad, and LLM-specific behaviors (e.g. evil, sycophancy), and show that the semantic geometry is highly stable across aligned models and their corrupted fine-tunes. Through causal interventions, we find that directions isolating social valence, such as the 'Evil' persona vector, and a Semantic Valence Vector (SVV) that we introduce, function as intrinsic guardrails: ablating them drives the misalignment rates above $40$%, while amplifying them suppresses the failure mode to less than $3$%. Leveraging the structural stability of the personality space, we show that vectors extracted $\textit{a priori}$ from an instruct-tuned model transfer zero-shot to successfully regulate EM in corrupted fine-tunes. Overall, our findings suggest that harmful fine-tuning does not overwrite a model's internal representation of personality, allowing conserved representations to serve as robust, cross-distribution guardrails.
Authors: Haoyu Wang, Yifan Shang, Zhongxiang Sun, Weijie Yu, Xiao Zhang, Jun Xu
Abstract: Continual Pre-Training (CPT) is essential for enabling Language Models (LMs) to integrate new knowledge without erasing old. While classical CPT techniques like data replay have become the standard paradigm, the mechanisms underlying how LMs acquire and retain facts over time, termed as continual Factual Knowledge Acquisition (cFKA), remain unclear. In this work, we present a theoretical framework that characterizes the training dynamics of cFKA using a single-layer Transformer, offering a unified explanation for the behavior of representative CPT methods. Our analysis reveals that regularization-based methods merely adjust the convergence rate of parameters without altering the inherent forgetting tendency, whereas data replay methods succeed in shifting convergence dynamics and stabilizing pretrained knowledge. Building on these insights, we propose a novel generative data replay approach, called \textbf{S}electing \textbf{T}okens via attenti\textbf{O}n \textbf{C}ontribution~(STOC), which identifies influential factual snippets to guide replay data generation. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate our findings and demonstrate that STOC effectively enhances cFKA by mitigating catastrophic forgetting.
Authors: Nikolaos Gkalelis, Vasileios Mezaris
Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are successful in addressing a multitude of vision-language understanding tasks, such as Visual Question Answering (VQA), but their memory and compute requirements remain a concern for practical deployment. A promising class of techniques for mitigating this concern is Knowledge Distillation, where knowledge from a high-capacity Teacher network is transferred to a considerably smaller Student network. However, the capacity gap between the two networks is both a blessing and a curse: the smaller the Student network, the better its efficiency, and the larger the Teacher, the more knowledge it carries; yet, beyond a point, the larger capacity gap between the two leads to worse knowledge transfer. To counter this effect, we propose a bottom-up cascaded knowledge distillation (CKD) framework. Instead of treating knowledge transfer as an activity involving one high-capacity Teacher (or an ensemble of such), inspired by human formal education systems, we introduce one (potentially, more) additional Teacher(s) of intermediate capacity that gradually bring the Student network to the next level, where the next (higher-capacity) Teacher can take over. We provide a theoretical analysis in order to study the effect of cascaded distillation in the generalization performance of the Student. We apply the proposed framework on models build upon the LLaVA methodology and evaluate the derived models on seven standard, publicly available VQA benchmarks, demonstrating their SotA performance.
Authors: Zheng Li, Feng Xie, Shenglan Nie, Xichen Guo, Ruxin Wang, Hao Zhang
Abstract: Constraint-based causal discovery is widely used for learning causal structures, but heavy reliance on conditional independence (CI) testing makes it computationally expensive in high-dimensional settings. To mitigate this limitation, many divide-and-conquer frameworks have been proposed, but most assume causal sufficiency, i.e., no latent variables. In this paper, we show that divide-and-conquer strategies can be theoretically generalized beyond causal sufficiency to settings with latent variables. Specifically, we propose a recursive decomposition framework, termed DiCoLa, that enables divide-and-conquer causal discovery in the presence of latent variables. It recursively decomposes the global learning task into smaller subproblems and integrates their solutions through a principled reconstruction step to recover the global structure. We theoretically establish the soundness and completeness of the proposed framework. Extensive experiments on synthetic data demonstrate that our approach significantly improves computational efficiency across a range of causal discovery algorithms, while experiments on a real-world dataset further illustrate its practical effectiveness.
Authors: Jixiang Qing, Henry Moss, Matthias Sachs
Abstract: We consider the active learning problem where the goal is to learn an unknown function with low prediction error under an unknown Boltzmann distribution induced by the function itself. This self-induced weighting arises naturally in problems such as potential energy surface (PES) modeling in computational chemistry, yet poses unique challenges as the target distribution is unknown and its partition function is intractable. We propose \texttt{AB-SID-iVAR}, a Gaussian Process-based acquisition function that approximates the intractable Bayesian target distribution in closed form while avoiding partition function estimation, and is applicable to both discrete and continuous input domains. We also analyze a Thompson sampling alternative (\texttt{TS-SID-iVAR}) as a higher variance Monte Carlo variant. Despite the unknown target, under mild conditions, we establish that the terminal prediction error vanishes with high probability, and provide a tighter average-case guarantee. We demonstrate consistent improvements over existing approaches in this setting on synthetic benchmarks and real-world PES modeling and drug discovery tasks.
Authors: Mumin Jia, Yilin Chen, Divya Sharma, Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez
Abstract: Digital personas powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed as substitutes for human survey respondents, yet it remains unclear when they can reliably approximate human survey findings. We answer this question using the LISS panel, constructing personas from respondents' background variables and pre-2023 survey histories, then testing them against the same respondents' held-out post-cutoff answers. Across four persona architectures, three LLMs, and two prediction tasks, we assess performance at the question, respondent, distributional, equity, and clustering levels. Digital personas improve alignment with human response distributions, especially in domains tied to stable attributes and values, but remain limited for individual prediction and fail to recover multivariate respondent structure. Retrieval-augmented architectures provide the clearest gains, but performance depends more on human response structure than on model choice: personas perform best for low-variability questions and common respondent patterns, and worst for subjective, heterogeneous, or rare responses. Our results provide practical guidance on when digital personas could be appropriate for survey research and when human validation remains necessary.
Authors: Michal Byra, Pawel Olszowiec, Grzegorz Stefanski, Grzegorz Gruszczynski, Alberto Presta
Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViTs) are built by stacking independently parameterized blocks, but it remains unclear how much of this depth requires layer specific transformations and how much can be realized through recurrent computation. We study this question with bViT, a single-block recurrent ViT in which one transformer block is applied repeatedly to process an image. This architecture preserves the iterative structure of a deep ViT while removing layer specific block parameterization, providing a controlled setting for studying recurrence in vision. On ImageNet-1K, a 12-step bViT-B achieves accuracy comparable to standard ViT-B under the same training recipe and computational budget, while using an order of magnitude fewer parameters. We observe that recurrent performance improves with representation width, with wider bViTs recovering much more of the performance of standard ViTs than narrow variants. We interpret this behavior as implicit depth multiplexing, where a shared block expresses multiple step-dependent computations through the evolving hidden state. Beyond ImageNet classification, bViT transfers competitively to downstream tasks and enables parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Mechanistic analyses of activations, attention and step-specific pruning show that the shared block changes its effective behavior across recurrent steps rather than simply repeating the same computation. Our results suggest that a large fraction of ViT depth can be implemented through recurrent reuse, provided that the representation space is sufficiently wide.
Authors: Diancheng Kang, Zheyuan Liu, Ningshan Ma, Yue Huang, Zhaoxuan Tan, Meng Jiang
Abstract: Activation steering controls language model behavior by adding directions to internal representations at inference time, but standard residual-stream steering can fail in stateful dialogue. We identify KV-cache contamination as a key failure mode: steered token states are stored and repeatedly reused, turning a local perturbation into cumulative coherence degradation. To address this challenge, we propose Gated Cropped Attention-Delta steering (GCAD), which extracts steering signals from system-prompt contributions to self-attention and applies them with token-level gating. Across persona-steering experiments, GCAD preserves trait control while substantially improving long-horizon coherence. On the main multi-turn benchmark, GCAD improves average coherence drift from -18.6 to -1.9 and raises turn-10 trait expression from 78.0 to 93.1. These results suggest that activation steering becomes more reliable when interventions follow the prompt-mediated pathways that models already use for behavioral control.
Authors: Igor Slinko, Ilia Zavidnyi, Egor Bogomolov, Yaroslav Zharov
Abstract: Rejection Fine-Tuning (RFT) is a standard method for training LLM agents, where unsuccessful trajectories are discarded from the training set. In the context of SWE-bench tasks, this corresponds to filtering out runs where the submitted patch does not pass the tests. However, this approach discards unresolved trajectories, even though they form a large portion of all trajectories for hard tasks and even then may be partially correct. In this work, we propose Step Rejection Fine-Tuning (SRFT) - a practical way to leverage these unresolved trajectories. For this, we employ a critic LLM to assess the correctness of each step in a trajectory. Consequently, during training, we mask the loss for erroneous steps while retaining them in the context window. This way we ensure the model learns to recover from errors without reproducing them. Evaluation on SWE-bench Verified shows that while RFT improves the resolution rate by 2.4% by excluding unresolved trajectories, SRFT improves it by 3.7% by filtering them instead of discarding completely, reaching the total resolution rate of 32.2%.
Authors: Xiao Tian, Jue Fan, Rachael Hwee Ling Sim, Zixuan Wang, Nancy F. Chen, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
Abstract: Data selection studies the problem of identifying high-quality subsets of training data. While some existing works have considered selecting the subset of data with top-$m$ Data Shapley or other semivalues as they account for the interaction among every subset of data, other works argue that Data Shapley can sometimes perform ineffectively in practice and select subsets that are no better than random. This raises the questions: (I) Are there certain "Shapley-informative" settings where Data Shapley consistently works well? (II) Can we strategically utilize these settings to select high-quality subsets consistently and efficiently? In this paper, we propose a novel data selection framework, NASH (Non-linear Aggregation of SHapley-informative components), which (I) decomposes the target utility function (e.g., validation accuracy) into simpler, Shapley-informative component functions, and selects data by optimizing an objective that (II) aggregates these components non-linearly. We demonstrate that NASH substantially boosts the effectiveness of Shapley/semivalue-based data selection with minimal additional runtime cost.
Authors: Dahlia Shehata, Ming Li
Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) assume that collaborating inherently improves Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning. We challenge this by demonstrating that simulated social pressure triggers an algorithmic ``Bystander Effect,'' inducing severe cognitive loafing. By evaluating 22,500 deterministic trajectories across 3 dataset contexts (GAIA, SWE-bench, Multi-Challenge) with 3 state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, we semantically audit internal reasoning traces against external outputs. We formalize the \textit{Interaction Depth Limit} ($D_L$), the exact plurality threshold where an agent's logical sovereignty collapses into social compliance. Crucially, we uncover the \textit{Sovereignty Gap}: models frequently compute the correct derivation internally but suffer ``Alignment Hallucinations'' -- actively subjugating empirical evidence to sycophantically appease a simulated swarm. We prove that multi-agent social load is strictly non-commutative; the "brand" identity of the ``Lead Anchor'' auditor disproportionately dictates the swarm's integrity. These findings expose architectural vulnerabilities, proving that unstructured multi-agent topologies can degrade independent reasoning.
Authors: Fred Philippy, Siwen Guo, Jacques Klein, Tegawend\'e F. Bissyand\'e
Abstract: Cross-lingual transfer has become a central paradigm for extending natural language processing (NLP) technologies to low-resource languages. By leveraging supervision from high-resource languages, multilingual language models can achieve strong task performance with little or no labeled target-language data. However, it remains unclear to what extent cross-lingual transfer can substitute for language-specific efforts. In this paper, we synthesize prior research findings and data collection results on Luxembourgish, which, despite its typological proximity to high-resource languages and its presence in a multilingual context, remains insufficiently represented in modern NLP technologies. Across findings, we observe a fundamental interdependence between cross-lingual transfer and language-specific efforts. Cross-lingual transfer can substantially improve target-language performance, but its success depends critically on the availability of sufficiently high-quality, task-aligned target-language data. At the same time, such resources, particularly in low-resource settings, are typically too limited in scale to drive strong performance on their own. Instead, such resources reach their full potential only when leveraged within a cross-lingual framework. We therefore argue that cross-lingual transfer and language-specific efforts should not be viewed as competing alternatives. Instead, they function as complementary components of a sustainable low-resource NLP pipeline. Based on these insights, we provide practical guidelines for integrating and balancing cross-lingual transfer with language-specific development in sustainable low-resource NLP pipelines.
Authors: Suvi De Silva, Alfreds Lapkovskis, Alaa Saleh, Sasu Tarkoma, Praveen Kumar Donta
Abstract: Grey failures in the computing continuum produce ambiguous overlapping symptoms that existing approaches fail to diagnose reliably, either due to a lack of causal awareness or acting under high epistemic uncertainty, risking destructive interventions. This paper presents an uncertainty-aware resilience micro-agent for causal observability (AURORA), a lightweight framework for diagnosing and mitigating grey failures in edge-tier environments. The framework employs parallel micro-agents that integrate the free-energy principle, causal do-calculus, and localized causal state-graphs to support counterfactual root-cause analysis within each fault's Markov blanket. Restricting inference to causally relevant variables reduces computational overhead while preserving diagnostic fidelity. AURORA further introduces a dual-gated execution mechanism that authorizes remediation only when causal confidence is high and predicted epistemic uncertainty is bounded; otherwise, it abstains from local intervention and escalates the diagnostic payload to the fog tier. Our experiments demonstrate that AURORA outperforms baselines, achieving a 0% destructive action rate, while maintaining 62.0% repair accuracy and a 3ms mean time to repair.
Authors: Huimin Wang, Leilei Ouyang, Chang Xia, Yongqi Kang, Yu Fu, Yuqi Ouyang
Abstract: Generating long-horizon music videos (MVs) is frequently constrained by prohibitive computational costs and difficulty maintaining cross-shot consistency. We propose AllocMV, a hierarchical framework formulating music video synthesis as a Multiple-Choice Knapsack Problem (MCKP). AllocMV represents the video's persistent state as a compact, structured object comprising character entities, scene priors, and sharing graphs, produced by a global planner prior to realization. By estimating segment saliency from multimodal cues, a group-level MCKP solver based on dynamic programming optimally allocates resources across High-Gen, Mid-Gen, and Reuse branches. For repetitive musical motifs, we implement a divergence-based forking strategy that reuses visual prefixes to reduce costs while ensuring motif-level continuity. Evaluated via the Cost-Quality Ratio (CQR), AllocMV achieves an optimal trade-off between perceived quality and resource expenditure under strict budgetary and rhythmic constraints.
Authors: Kaicong Huang, Weiheng Oh, Thomas Guggisberg, Ruimin Ke
Abstract: Automated transit payment analysis is vital for scalable fare auditing and passenger analytics, yet practice still relies on limited manual inspection. Prior vision- and skeleton-based methods remain brittle under noisy onboard surveillance and often depend on poorly generalizable handcrafted features. Building on the success of graph convolutional networks in human action recognition, we observe that skeleton features excel at modeling global spatiotemporal dependencies but tend to underemphasize the subtle local relative motions that distinguish payment actions. In contrast, RGB features preserve fine-grained spatial details yet often lack reliable temporal continuity in surveillance footage. To bridge both system-level deployment needs and model-level design challenges, we present iPay, an integrated payment action recognition framework for onboard transit surveillance system. iPay adopts a multimodal mixture-of-experts architecture with four tightly coupled streams: (1) an RGB expert stream emphasizing local evidence via region-focused computation; (2) a skeleton expert stream modeling articulated motion with a graph convolutional backbone; (3) a dual-attention fusion stream enabling skeleton-to-RGB temporal transfer and RGB-to-skeleton spatial enhancement; and (4) a prior-driven Spatial Difference Discriminator (SDD) that explicitly models hand-to-anchor relative motion to improve task-specific discriminability. We also collaborate with local transit agencies to collect over 55 hours of real onboard surveillance footage, yielding 500+ payment clips. Experiments show that iPay outperforms prior methods and achieves 83.45\% recognition accuracy with competitive computational efficiency, making it suitable for edge deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/ccoopq/iPay.
Authors: David F. Ramirez, Tim Overman, Kristen Jaskie, Andreas Spanias
Abstract: We introduce SMART-HC-VQA, a Sentinel-2-based visual question answering dataset derived from the IARPA SMART Heavy Construction dataset, designed for spatiotemporal analysis of human activity. The dataset transforms construction-site annotations, construction-type labels, temporal-phase labels, geographic metadata, and observation relationships into natural language question-answer triplets. This approach redefines the existing dataset as a temporally extended automatic target recognition and visual question answering (VQA) challenge, considering a fixed geospatial site as a target whose attributes and activity states evolve across sparse satellite observations. Currently, SMART-HC-VQA comprises 21,837 accessible Sentinel-2 image chips, 65,511 single-image VQA examples, and approximately 2.3 million two-image temporal comparison examples generated via our novel Image-Pairwise Combinatorial Augmentation. We detail the workflow for retrieving and processing Sentinel-2 imagery, segmenting large satellite tiles into site-centered images, maintaining traceability to SMART-HC annotations, and analyzing the distributions of site size, observation count, temporal coverage, construction type, and phase labels. Additionally, we describe an implemented multi-image MLLM training framework based on LLaVA-NeXT Mistral-7B, adapted to accept multiple dated image inputs and train on metadata-derived VQA examples. This work offers a reproducible foundation for understanding language-guided remote sensing activities, aiming not only to detect change but also to reason about the ongoing processes, their progression, and potential future developments.
Authors: Li Shen, Xiaolei Hao, Qinglun Li, Xiaochun Cao, Zhifeng Hao, Xun Yang
Abstract: One-Shot Federated Learning, where a central server learns a global model in a single communication round, has emerged as a promising paradigm. However, under extremely non-IID settings, existing data-free methods often generate low-quality data that suffers from severe semantic misalignment with ground-truth labels. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel Federated Model Inversion and Token Relabel (FedMITR) framework, which trains the global model by fully exploiting all patches of synthetic images. Specifically, FedMITR employs sparse model inversion during data generation, selectively inverting semantic foregrounds while halting the inversion of uninformative backgrounds. To address semantically meaningless tokens that hinder ViT predictions, we implement a differentiated strategy: patches with high information density utilize generated pseudo-labels, while patches with low information density are relabeled via ensemble models for robust distillation. Theoretically, our analysis based on algorithmic stability reveals that Sparse Model Inversion eliminates gradient instability arising from background noise, while Token Relabel effectively reduces gradient variance, collectively guaranteeing a tighter generalization bound. Empirically, extensive experimental results demonstrate that FedMITR substantially outperforms existing baselines under various settings.
Authors: Mohamed Eltahir, Lama Ayash, Ali Habibullah, Tanveer Hussain, Naeemullah Khan
Abstract: Long-video understanding in VLMs is bottlenecked by a single monolithic forward pass over thousands of frames at quadratic attention cost. A common mitigation is to first select a small subset of informative frames before the forward pass; common for training-free selectors via auxiliary encoder-space similarities. Such signals are capped by contrastive pretraining, which usually fails on reasoning-heavy queries (negation, cross-frame counting, holistic summarization). We propose GridProbe, an efficient training-free posterior-probing inference paradigm that scores evidence in answer space using a frozen VLM's own reasoning and then selects question-relevant frames adaptively, resulting in sub-quadratic attention cost with little to no accuracy loss. We arrange frames on a $K{\times}K$ grid and run lightweight row R and column C probes, where each probe reads its peak posterior as a query-conditioned confidence. The outer product of R and C yields an interpretable importance map whose skewness and kurtosis drive Shape-Adaptive Selection, a closed-form rule that reliably replaces the fixed frame budget $M$ with a per-question $M_{\mathrm{eff}}$. We show empirically that $M_{\mathrm{eff}}$ tracks intrinsic question difficulty without ever seeing the answer, a sign of test-time adaptive compute. On Video-MME-v2, GridProbe matches the monolithic baseline within $1.6$ pp Avg Acc at $3.36\times$ TFLOPs reduction, while on LongVideoBench it Pareto-dominates the baseline ($+0.9$ pp at $0.35\times$ compute). Because the selector and QA models can be decoupled, pairing a small 2B selector with a stronger 4B or 8B QA is strictly Pareto-dominant over the 2B monolithic baseline (up to $+4.0$ pp at $0.52\times$ compute, on average), with no retraining. Finally, the interpretability of the importance maps opens future avenues for behavioral diagnostics, grounding, and frame-selection distillation.
Authors: Mengqi He, Xinyu Tian, Xin Shen, Shu Zou, Jinhong Ni, Zhaoyuan Yang, Weikang Li, Xuesong Li, Jing Zhang
Abstract: Recent studies show that gradient-based universal image jailbreaks on vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit little or no cross-model transferability, casting doubt on the feasibility of transferable multimodal jailbreaks. We revisit this conclusion under a strictly untargeted threat model without enforcing a fixed prefix or response pattern. Our preliminary experiment reveals that refusal behavior concentrates at high-entropy tokens during autoregressive decoding, and non-refusal tokens already carry substantial probability mass among the top-ranked candidates before attack. Motivated by this finding, we propose Untargeted Jailbreak via Entropy Maximization(UJEM)-KL, a lightweight attack that maximizes entropy at these decision tokens to flip refusal outcomes, while stabilizing the remaining low-entropy positions to preserve output quality. Across three VLMs and two safety benchmarks, UJEM-KL achieves competitive white-box attack success rates and consistently improves transferability, while remaining effective under representative defenses. Our experimental results indicate that the limited transferability primarily stems from overly constrained optimization objectives.
Authors: Tao Hu, Da-Wei Zhou
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance through instruction tuning, yet real-world deployment often requires continual capability expansion across sequential tasks. In such scenarios, Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT) aims to acquire new capabilities while limiting catastrophic forgetting. Existing methods mainly follow a module-composition paradigm: they maintain task-level prompts or LoRA experts and dynamically route or aggregate a subset of them at inference. However, samples within the same task can still differ substantially in visual scenes, question intents, and reasoning demands. This motivates instance-level adaptation to individual query-image pairs rather than only selecting or combining task-level modules. To this end, we propose DRAPE (Dynamic Cross-Modal Prompt Generation), a prompt-learning framework that synthesizes continuous instance-specific soft prompts for MCIT. Instead of selecting prompts from a fixed pool, DRAPE derives prompt queries from the textual instruction and cross-attends to visual patch features, producing query-image conditioned prompts that are prepended to the frozen LLM. To mitigate forgetting during sequential updates, DRAPE applies null-space gradient projection to the shared projector and uses CLIP-based prototype routing for task-label-free generator selection at inference. Extensive experiments on MCIT benchmarks show that DRAPE achieves state-of-the-art performance among representative prompt-based and LoRA-based continual-learning baselines.
Authors: Ziyi Wang, Xianping Ma, Ziyao Wang, Hongyang Zhang, Man On Pun
Abstract: The multimodal fusion of images and scene captions has been extensively explored and applied in various fields. However, when dealing with complex remote sensing (RS) scenes, existing studies have predominantly concentrated on architectural optimizations for integrating textual semantic information with visual features, while largely neglecting the generation of high-quality RS captions and the investigation of their effectiveness in multimodal semantic fusion.In this context, we propose the Dynamic MLLM Mixture-of-Experts Perception-Guided Remote Sensing Scene Segmentation, referred to as MPerS.We design multiple prompts for MLLMs to generate high-quality RS captions, enabling MLLMs to perceive RS scenes from diverse expert perspectives. DINOv3 is employed to extract dense visual representations of land-covers.We design a Dynamic MixExperts module that adaptively integrates the most effective textual semantics. Linguistic Query Guided Attention is constructed to utilize textual semantic information to guide visual features for precise segmentation. The MLLMs include LLaVA, ChatGPT, and Qwen. Our method achieves superior performance on three public semantic segmentation RS datasets.
Authors: David F. Ramirez, Tim L. Overman, Kristen Jaskie, Marv Kleine, Andreas Spanias
Abstract: Large language-vision models (LLVM), such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4, have gained prominence as powerful tools for analyzing text and imagery. The merging of these data domains represents a significant paradigm shift with far-reaching implications for automatic target recognition (ATR). Recent transformer-based LLVM research has shown substantial improvements for geospatial perception tasks. Our study examines the application of LLVM to remote sensing image captioning and visual question-answering (VQA), with a specific focus on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. We examine newly published LLVM methods, including CLIP and LLaVA neural network transformer architectures. We have developed a work-in-progress SAR training and evaluation benchmark derived from the MSTAR Public Dataset. This has been extended to include descriptive text captions and question-answer pairs for VQA tasks. This challenge dataset is designed to push the boundaries of an LLVM in identifying nuanced ATR details in SAR imagery. Utilizing parameter-efficient fine-tuning, we train an LLVM method to identify fine-grained target qualities at 98% accuracy. We detail our data setup and experiments, addressing potential pitfalls that could lead to misleading conclusions. Accurately identifying and differentiating military vehicle types in SAR data poses a critical challenge, especially under complex environmental conditions. Mastering this target recognition skill may require a human analyst months of training and years of practice. This research represents a unique effort to apply LLVM to SAR applications, advancing machine-assisted remote sensing ATR for military and intelligence contexts.
Authors: Xuanyu Zhu, Yan Bai, Yang Shi, Yihang Lou, Yuanxing Zhang, Jing Jin, Yuan Zhou
Abstract: Representation autoencoders that reuse frozen pretrained vision encoders as visual tokenizers have achieved strong reconstruction and generation quality. However, existing methods universally extract features from only the last encoder layer, discarding the rich hierarchical information distributed across intermediate layers. We show that low-level visual details survive in the last layer merely as attenuated residuals after multiple layers of semantic abstraction, and that explicitly fusing multi-layer features can substantially recover this lost information. We propose DRoRAE (Depth-Routed Representation AutoEncoder), a lightweight fusion module that adaptively aggregates all encoder layers via energy-constrained routing and incremental correction, producing an enriched latent compatible with a frozen pretrained decoder. A three-phase decoupled training strategy first learns the fusion under the implicit distributional constraint of the frozen decoder, then fine-tunes the decoder to fully exploit the enriched representation. On ImageNet-256, DRoRAE reduces rFID from 0.57 to 0.29 and improves generation FID from 1.74 to 1.65 (with AutoGuidance), with gains also transferring to text-to-image synthesis. Furthermore, we uncover a log-linear scaling law ($R^2{=}0.86$) between fusion capacity and reconstruction quality, identifying \textit{representation richness} as a new, predictably scalable dimension for visual tokenizers analogous to vocabulary size in NLP.
Authors: Ari Holtzman, Peter West
Abstract: Language models are deployed in settings that require compartmentalization: system prompts should not be disclosed, chain-of-thought reasoning is hidden from users, and sensitive data passes through shared contexts. We test whether models can keep prompted information out of their writing. We give each model a secret word with instructions not to reveal it, then ask it to write a story. A second model tries to identify the secret from the story in a binary discrimination test. The secret word never appears literally in any output, but all five frontier models we test leak it thematically -- through topic choice, imagery, and setting--6hy-at rates significantly different from chance, up to 79\%. When told to actively hide the secret, models write \emph{away from} it, and this avoidance is itself detectable. The leakage is cross-model readable, scales sharply with model size within two model families, and disappears entirely for short-form writing like jokes. Giving the model a decoy concept to ``focus on instead'' partially redirects the leakage from the real secret to the decoy. Attending to a secret appears to open up an information channel that frontier LLMs cannot close, even when instructed to.
Authors: Gabriel Garcia
Abstract: Corruption studies, the primary tool for evaluating chain-of-thought (CoT) faithfulness, identify which chain positions are "computationally important" by measuring accuracy when steps are replaced with errors. We identify a systematic confound: for chains with explicit terminal answer statements, the dominant format in standard benchmarks, corruption studies detect where the answer text appears, not where computation occurs. A within-dataset format ablation provides the key evidence: on standard GSM8K chains ending with "the answer is X," removing only the answer statement, preserving all reasoning, collapses suffix sensitivity ~19x at 3B (N=300, p=0.022). Conflicting-answer experiments quantify the causal mechanism: at 7B, CC accuracy drops to near-zero (<=0.02) across five architecture families; the followed-wrong rate spans 0.63-1.00 at 3B-7B and attenuates at larger scales (0.300 at Phi-4-14B, ~0.01 at 32B). A within-stable 7B replication (9.3x attenuation, N=76, p=7.8e-3; Qwen3-8B N=299, p=0.004) provides converging evidence, and the pattern replicates on MATH (DeepSeek-R1-7B: 10.9x suffix-survival recovery). On chains without answer suffixes the same protocol identifies the prefix as load-bearing (Delta=-0.77, p<10^-12). Generation-time probes confirm a dissociation: the answer is not early-determined during generation (early commitment <5%), yet at consumption time model outputs systematically follow the explicit answer text. The format-determination effect persists through 14B (8.5x ratio, p=0.001) and converges toward zero at 32B. We propose a three-prerequisite protocol (question-only control, format characterization, all-position sweep) as a minimum standard for corruption-based faithfulness studies.
Authors: Juyi Lin, Arash Akbari, Yumei He, Lin Zhao, Haichao Zhang, Arman Akbari, Xingchen Xu, Zoe Y. Lu, Enfu Nan, Hokin Deng, Edmund Yeh, Sarah Ostadabbas, Yun Fu, Jennifer Dy, Pu Zhao, Yanzhi Wang
Abstract: Generative world models are increasingly used for video generation, where learned simulators are expected to capture the physical rules that govern real-world dynamics. However, evaluating whether generated videos actually follow these rules remains challenging. Existing physics-focused video benchmarks have made important progress, but they still face three key challenges, including the coarse evaluation frameworks that hide law-specific failures, response biases and fatigue that undermine the validity of annotation judgments, and automated evaluators that are insufficiently physics-aware or difficult to audit. To address those challenges, we introduce PhyGround, a criteria-grounded benchmark for evaluating physical reasoning in video generation. The benchmark contains 250 curated prompts, each augmented with an expected physical outcome, and a taxonomy of 13 physical laws across solid-body mechanics, fluid dynamics, and optics. Each law is operationalized through observable sub-questions to enable per-law diagnostics. We evaluate eight modern video generation models through a large-scale, quality-controlled human study, grounded on social science lab experiment design. A total of 459 annotators provided 5,796 complete annotations and over 37.4K fine-grained labels; after quality control, the retained annotations exhibited high split-half model-ranking correlations (Spearman's rho > 0.90). To support reproducible automated evaluation, we release PhyJudge-9B, an open physics-specialized VLM judge. PhyJudge-9B achieves substantially lower aggregate relative bias than Gemini-3.1-Pro (3.3% vs. 16.6%). We release prompts, human annotations, model checkpoints, and evaluation code on the project page https://phyground.github.io/.
Authors: Saba Pourhanifeh, AbdulAziz AbdulGhaffar, Ashraf Matrawy
Abstract: Large Language Models(LLMs) are increasingly explored for cybersecurity applications such as vulnerability detection. In the domain of threat modelling, prior work has primarily evaluated a number of general-purpose Large Language Models under limited prompting settings. In this study, we extend the research area of structured threat modelling by systematically evaluating domain-adapted language models of different sizes to their general counterparts. We use both LLMs and Small Language Models(SLMs) that were domain adapted to telecommunications and cybersecuirty. For the structured threat modelling, we selected the widely used STRIDE approach and the application area is 5G security. We present a comprehensive empirical evaluation using 52 different configurations (on 8 different language models) to analyze the impact of 1) domain adaptation, 2) model scale, 3) decoding strategies (greedy vs. stochastic sampling), and 4) prompting technique on STRIDE threat classification. Our results show that domain-adapted models do not consistently outperform their general-purpose counterparts, and decoding strategies significantly affect model behavior and output validity. They also show that while larger models generally achieve higher performance, these gains are neither consistent nor sufficient for reliable threat modelling. These findings highlight fundamental limitations of current LLMs for structured threat modelling tasks and suggest that improvements require more than additional training data or model scaling, motivating the need for incorporating more task-specific reasoning and stronger grounding in security concepts. We present insights on invalid outputs encountered and present suggestions for prompting tailored specifically for STRIDE threat modelling.
Authors: Donghwan Lee
Abstract: This paper develops a joint spectral radius (JSR) framework for analyzing rank-one deflated Q-value iteration (Q-VI) in discounted Markov decision process control. Focusing on an all-ones residual correction, we interpret the resulting algorithm through the geometry of switching systems and, to the best of our knowledge, give the first JSR-based convergence analysis of deflated Q-VI for policy optimization problems. Our analysis reveals that the standard Q-VI switching system model has JSR exactly the discount factor $\gamma\in (0,1)$, since all admissible subsystems share the all-ones vector as an invariant direction. By passing to the quotient space that removes this direction, we obtain a projected switching system model whose JSR governs the relevant error dynamics and may be strictly smaller than $\gamma$. Therefore, the deflated Q-VI admits a potentially sharper convergence-rate characterization than the ambient-space $\gamma$-bound. Finally, we prove that the correction is equivalent to a scalar recentering of standard Q-VI. Hence, the projected trajectory, and therefore the greedy-policy sequence, is unchanged relative to standard Q-VI initialized from the same point. The benefit of deflation is not a change in the induced decision-making problem, but a more precise JSR-based description of the convergence geometry after the redundant all-ones component is removed.
Authors: Avik Kar, Siddharth Chandak, Rahul Singh, Soumitra Sinhahajari, Eric Moulines, Shalabh Bhatnagar, Nicholas Bambos
Abstract: We study policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning in non-Markovian decision processes (NMDPs), where observations and rewards depend on the entire interaction history. To handle this dependence, the agent maintains an internal state that is recursively updated to provide a compact summary of past observations and actions. In contrast to approaches that treat the agent state dynamics as fixed or learn it via predictive objectives, we propose a reward-centric formulation that jointly optimizes the agent state dynamics and the control policy to maximize the expected cumulative reward. To this end, we consider a class of Agent State-Markov (ASM) policies, comprising an agent state dynamics and a control policy that maps the agent state to actions. We establish a novel policy gradient theorem for ASM policies, extending the classical policy gradient results from the Markovian setting to episodic and infinite-horizon discounted NMDPs. Building on this gradient expression, we propose the Agent State-Markov Policy Gradient (ASMPG) algorithm, which leverages the recursive structure of the agent state dynamics for efficient optimization. We establish finite-time and almost sure convergence guarantees, and empirically demonstrate that, on a range of non-Markovian tasks, ASMPG outperforms baselines that learn state representations via predictive objectives.
Authors: Zuojin Tang, Haoyun Liu, Xinyuan Chang, Changjie Wu, Dongjie Huo, Yandan Yang, Bin Liu, Zhejia Cai, Feng Xiong, Mu Xu, jiachen Luo, De Ma, Zhiheng Ma, Gang Pan
Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models remain constrained by the scarcity of action-labeled robot data, whereas action-free videos provide abundant evidence of how the physical world changes. Latent action models offer a promising way to extract such priors from videos, but reconstruction-trained latent codes are not necessarily suitable for policy generation: they may predict future observations while lacking the structure needed to be reused or generated coherently with robot actions. We introduce ALAM (Algebraic Latent Action Model), an Algebraically Consistent Latent Action Model that turns temporal relations in action-free video into structural supervision. Given frame triplets, ALAM learns latent transitions that are grounded by reconstruction while being regularized by composition and reversal consistency, encouraging a locally additive transition space. For downstream VLA learning, we freeze the pretrained encoder and use its latent transition sequences as auxiliary generative targets, co-generated with robot actions under a joint flow-matching objective. This couples structured latent transitions with flow-based policy generation, allowing the policy to exploit ALAM's locally consistent transition geometry without requiring latent-to-action decoding. Representation probes show that ALAM reduces additivity and reversibility errors by 25-85 times over unstructured latent-action baselines and improves long-horizon cumulative reconstruction. When transferred to VLA policies, ALAM raises the average success rate from 47.9% to 85.0% on MetaWorld MT50 and from 94.1% to 98.1% on LIBERO, with consistent gains on real-world manipulation tasks. Ablations further confirm that the strongest improvements arise from the synergy between algebraically structured latent transitions and joint flow matching.
Authors: Mingxu Zhang, Yuhan Li, Lujundong Li, Dazhong Shen, Hui Xiong, Ying Sun
Abstract: Large language models possess strong chemical reasoning capabilities, making them effective molecular editors. However, property-relevant information is implicitly entangled across their dense hidden states, providing no explicit handle for property control: a substantial fraction of edits fail to improve or even degrade target properties. To address these issues, we propose SLIM (Sparse Latent Interpretable Molecular editing), a plug-and-play framework that decomposes the editor's hidden states into sparse, property-aligned features via a Sparse Autoencoder with learnable importance gates. Steering in this sparse feature space precisely activates property-relevant dimensions, improving editing success rate without modifying model parameters. The same sparse basis further supports interpretable analysis of editing behavior. Experiments on the MolEditRL benchmark across four model architectures and eight molecular properties show consistent gains over baselines, with improvements of up to 42.4 points.
Authors: Xiran Zhao, Jing Jin, Yan Bai, Zhongan Wang, Yifeng Sun, Yihang Lou, Xuanyu Zhu, Tao Feng, Yingna Wu
Abstract: Industrial anomaly detection is critical for manufacturing quality control, yet existing datasets mainly focus on static images or sparse views, which do not fully reflect continuous inspection processes in real industrial scenarios. We introduce MMVIAD (Multi-view Multi-task Video Industrial Anomaly Detection), to the best of our knowledge the first continuous multi-view video dataset for industrial anomaly detection and understanding, together with a benchmark for multi-task evaluation. MMVIAD contains object-centric 2-second inspection clips with approximately 120 degrees of camera motion, covering 48 object categories, 14 environments, and 6 structural anomaly types. It supports anomaly detection, defect classification, object classification, and anomaly visible-time localization. Systematic evaluations on MMVIAD show that current commercial and open-source video MLLMs remain far below human performance, especially for fine-grained defect recognition and temporal grounding. To improve transferable anomaly understanding, we further develop a two-stage post-training pipeline where PS-SFT (Perception-Structured Supervised Fine-Tuning) initializes perception-structured reasoning and VISTA-GRPO (Visibility-grounded Industrial Structured Temporal Anomaly Group Relative Policy Optimization) refines the model with semantic-gated defect reward and visibility-aware temporal reward, producing the final model VISTA. On MMVIAD-Unseen, VISTA improves the base model's average score across the four tasks from 45.0 to 57.5, surpassing GPT-5.4. Source code is available at https://github.com/Georgekeepmoving/MMVIAD.
Authors: Yixuan Yang, Mehak Arora, Ryan Zhang, Baraa Abed, Junseob Kim, Tilendra Choudhary, Md Hassanuzzaman, Kevin Zhu, Ayman Ali, Chengkun Yang, Alasdair Edward Gent, Victor Moas, Rishikesan Kamaleswaran
Abstract: We present Clin-JEPA, a multi-phase co-training framework for joint-embedding predictive (JEPA) pretraining on EHR patient trajectories. JEPA architectures have enabled latent-space planning in robotics and high-quality representation learning in vision, but extending the paradigm to EHR data -- to obtain a single backbone that simultaneously forecasts patient trajectories and serves diverse downstream risk-prediction tasks without per-task fine-tuning -- remains an open challenge. Existing JEPA frameworks either discard the predictor after pretraining (I-JEPA, V-JEPA) or train it on a frozen pretrained encoder (V-JEPA 2-AC), leaving the encoder unaware of the rollout signal that the retained predictor must use at inference; co-training the encoder and predictor under a shared JEPA prediction objective would supply this grounding, but na\"ive co-training is unstable, with representation collapse and online/target drift causing autoregressive rollout to diverge. Clin-JEPA's five-phase pretraining curriculum -- predictor warmup, joint refinement, EMA target alignment, hard sync, and predictor finalization -- addresses each failure mode by phase, stably co-training a Qwen3-8B-based encoder and a 92M-parameter latent trajectory predictor. On MIMIC-IV ICU data, three independent evaluations support the framework: (1) latent $\ell_1$ rollout drift uniquely converges ($-$15.7%) over 48-hour horizons while baselines and ablations diverge (+3% to +4951%); (2) the encoder learns a clinically discriminative latent geometry (deteriorating-patient cohorts displace 4.83$\times$ further than stable patients in latent space, vs $\leq$2.62$\times$ for baseline encoders); (3) a single backbone outperforms strong tabular and sequence baselines on multi-task downstream evaluation. Clin-JEPA achieves mean AUROC 0.851 on ICareFM EEP and 0.883 on 8 binary risk tasks (+0.038 and +0.041 vs baseline average).
Authors: Huynh Trung Kiet, Dao Sy Duy Minh, Tuan Nguyen, Chi-Nguyen Tran, Phu-Hoa Pham, Nguyen Lam Phu Quy, The Anh Han, Long Tran-Thanh
Abstract: Large language models increasingly mediate decisions that turn on moral judgement, yet a growing body of evidence shows that their implicit preferences are not culturally neutral. Existing cultural alignment methods either require per-country preference data and fine-tuning budgets or assume white-box access to model internals that commercial APIs do not expose. In this work, we focus on this realistic black-box, public-data-only regime and observe that within-country sociodemographic disagreement, not consensus, is the primary steering signal. We introduce DISCA (Disagreement-Informed Steering for Cultural Alignment), an inference-time method that instantiates each country as a panel of World-Values-Survey-grounded persona agents and converts their disagreement into a bounded, loss-averse logit correction. Across 20 countries and 7 open-weight backbones (2B--70B), DISCA reduces cultural misalignment on MultiTP by 10--24% on the six backbones >=3.8B, and 2--7% on open-ended scenarios, without changing any weights. Our results suggest that inference-time calibration is a scalable alternative to fine-tuning for serving the long tail of global moral preferences.
Authors: Tz-Huan Hsu, Jheng-Hong Yang, Jimmy Lin
Abstract: Does a lexical retriever suffice as large language models (LLMs) become more capable in an agentic loop? This question naturally arises when building deep research systems. We revisit it by pairing BM25 with frontier LLMs that have better reasoning and tool-use abilities. To support researchers asking the same question, we introduce Pi-Serini, a search agent equipped with three tools for retrieving, browsing, and reading documents. Our results show that, on BrowseComp-Plus, a well-configured lexical retriever with sufficient retrieval depth can support effective deep research when paired with more capable LLMs. Specifically, Pi-Serini with gpt-5.5 achieves 83.1% answer accuracy and 94.7% surfaced evidence recall, outperforming released search agents that use dense retrievers. Controlled ablations further show that BM25 tuning improves answer accuracy by 18.0% and surfaced evidence recall by 11.1% over the default BM25 setting, while increasing retrieval depth further improves surfaced evidence recall by 25.3% over the shallow-retrieval setting. Source code is available at https://github.com/justram/pi-serini.
Authors: Ishpuneet Singh, Gursmeep Kaur, Uday Pratap Singh Atwal, Guramrit Singh, Gurjot Singh, Maninder Singh
Abstract: Continuous authentication in high-stakes digital environments requires datasets with fine-grained behavioral signals under realistic cognitive and motor demands. But current benchmarks are often limited by small scale, unimodal sensing or lack of synchronised environmental context. To address this gap, this paper introduces BEACON ( Behavioral Engine for Authentication \& Continuous Monitoring), a large-scale multimodal dataset that captures diverse skill tiers in competitive \textit{Valorant} gameplay. BEACON contains approximately 430 GB of synchronised modality data (461 GB total on-disk including auxiliary \textit{Valorant} configuration captures) from 79 sessions across 28 distinct players, estimated at 102.51 hours of active gameplay, including high-frequency mouse dynamics, keystroke events, network packet captures, screen recordings, hardware metadata, and in-game configuration context. BEACON leverages the high precision motor skills and high cognitive load that are inherent to tactical shooters, making it a rigorous stress test for the robustness of behavioral biometrics. The dataset allows for the study of continuous authentication, behavioral profiling, user drift and multimodal representation learning in a high-fidelity esports setting. The authors release the dataset and code on Hugging Face and GitHub to create a reproducible benchmark for evaluating next-generation behavioral fingerprinting and security models
Authors: Timothy Oladunni, Farouk Ganiyu Adewumi
Abstract: This work proposes Attractor-Vascular Coupling Theory (AVCT), a mathematical framework showing that cardiac attractor geometry encodes blood pressure (BP) information sufficient for AAMI-standard estimation, and validates the theory through a calibrated cuffless BP model using photoplethysmography (PPG). AVCT is grounded in Cardiac Stability Theory and operationalized using Takens delay embedding and attractor morphology extraction. Two theorems, one proposition, and one corollary formally justify the use of PPG attractor features for BP estimation and predict the feature-importance hierarchy. A LightGBM model trained on pulse transit time (PTT) and Cardiac Stability Index (CSI) attractor features under single-point calibration was evaluated using strict leave-one-subject-out cross-validation (LOSO-CV) on 46 subjects from BIDMC ICU (n = 9) and VitalDB surgical data (n = 37), comprising 29,684 windows. The model achieved systolic BP (SBP) mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.05 mmHg and diastolic BP (DBP) MAE of 1.67 mmHg, with correlations r = 0.990 and r = 0.991, satisfying the AAMI/IEEE SP10 requirement of MAE below 5 mmHg. Median per-subject MAE was 1.87/1.54 mmHg, and 70%/76% of subjects individually satisfied AAMI criteria. A PPG-only ablation using nine smartphone attractor features matched the ECG+PPG model within 0.05 mmHg, demonstrating that clinical-grade BP tracking is achievable using only a smartphone camera while surpassing prior generalized LOSO-CV results using fewer sensors. All four AVCT predictions were quantitatively confirmed, with 91.5% error reduction from uncalibrated to calibrated estimation (epsilon_cal = 0.915). Unlike post-hoc explainable AI methods, AVCT predicts features satisfying the architectural faithfulness criterion of the Explainable-AI Trustworthiness (EAT) framework and grounding BP estimation in nonlinear dynamical systems theory.
Authors: Anna C. Doris, Jacob Thomas Sony, Ghadi Nehme, Era Syla, Amin Heyrani Nobari, Faez Ahmed
Abstract: Recovering editable CAD programs from images or 3D observations is central to AI-assisted design, but progress is difficult to measure because existing evaluations are fragmented across datasets, modalities, and metrics. We introduce CADBench, a unified benchmark for multimodal CAD program generation. CADBench contains 18,000 evaluation samples spanning six benchmark families derived from DeepCAD, Fusion 360, ABC, MCB, and Objaverse; five input modalities including clean meshes, noisy meshes, single-view renders, photorealistic renders, and multi-view renders; and six metrics covering geometric fidelity, executability, and program compactness. STEP-based families are stratified by B-rep face count and all families are diversity-sampled to support controlled analysis across complexity and object variation. We benchmark eleven CAD-specialized and general-purpose vision-language systems, generating more than 1.4 million CAD programs. Under idealized inputs, specialized mesh-to-CAD models substantially outperform code-generating VLMs, which remain far from reliable CAD program reconstruction. CADBench further reveals three recurring failure modes: reconstruction quality degrades with geometric complexity, CAD-specialized models can be brittle under modality shift, and model rankings change across metrics. Together, these results position CADBench as a diagnostic testbed for measuring progress in editable 3D reconstruction and multimodal CAD understanding. The benchmark is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/DeCoDELab/CADBench.
Authors: Edward De Brouwer, Carl Edwards, Alexander Wu, Jenna Collier, Graham Heimberg, Xiner Li, Meena Subramaniam, Ehsan Hajiramezanali, David Richmond, Jan-Christian H\"utter, Sara Mostafavi, Gabriele Scalia
Abstract: Recent advances in machine learning and large-scale biological data collections have revived the prospect of building a virtual cell, a computational model of cellular behavior that could accelerate biological discovery. One of the most compelling promises of this vision is the ability to perform in silico phenotypic screens, in which a model predicts the effects of cellular perturbations in unseen biological contexts. This task combines heterogeneous textual inputs with diverse phenotypic outputs, making it particularly well-suited to LLMs and agentic systems. Yet, no standard benchmark currently exists for this task, as existing efforts focus on narrower molecular readouts that are only indirectly aligned with the phenotypic endpoints driving many real-world drug discovery workflows. In this work, we present AssayBench, a benchmark for phenotypic screen prediction, built from 1,920 publicly available CRISPR screens spanning five broad classes of cellular phenotypes. We formulate the screen prediction task as a gene rank prediction for each screen and introduce the adjusted nDCG, a continuous metric for comparing performance across heterogeneous assays. Our extensive evaluation shows that existing methods remain far from empirically estimated performance ceilings and zero-shot generalist LLMs outperform biology-specific LLMs and trainable baselines. Optimization techniques such as fine-tuning, ensembling, and prompt optimization can further improve LLM performance on this task. Overall, AssayBench offers a practical testbed for measuring progress toward in silico phenotypic screening and, more broadly, virtual cell models.
Authors: Liang Luo, Yinbin Ma, Quanyu Zhu, Vasiliy Kuznetsov, Yuxin Chen, Jian Jiao, Jiecao Yu, Buyun Zhang, Tongyi Tang, Xiaohan Wei, Yanli Zhao, Zeliang Chen, Yuchen Hao, Venkatesh Ranganathan, Sandeep Parab, Yantao Yao, Maxim Naumov, Chunzhi Yang, Shen Li, Ellie Wen, Wenlin Chen, Santanu Kolay, Chunqiang Tang
Abstract: Recent GPU generations deliver significantly higher FLOPs using lower-precision arithmetic, such as FP8. While successfully applied to large language models (LLMs), its adoption in large recommendation models (LRMs) has been limited. This is because LRMs are numerically sensitive, dominated by small matrix multiplications (GEMMs) followed by normalization, and trained in communication-intensive environments. Applying FP8 directly to LRMs often degrades model quality and prolongs training time. These challenges are inherent to LRM workloads and cannot be resolved merely by introducing better FP8 kernels. Instead, a system-model co-design approach is needed to successfully integrate FP8. We present LoKA (Low-precision Kernel Applications), a framework that makes FP8 practical for LRMs through three principles: profile under realistic distributions to know where low precision is safe, co-design model components with hardware to expand where it is safe, and orchestrate across kernel libraries to maximize the gains. Concretely, LoKA Probe is a statistically grounded, online benchmarking method that learns activation and weight statistics, and quantifies per-layer errors. This process pinpoints safe and unsafe, fast and slow sites for FP8 adoption. LoKA Mods is a set of reusable model adaptations that improve both numerical stability and execution efficiency with FP8. LoKA Dispatch is a runtime that leverages the statistical insights from LoKA Probe to select the fastest FP8 kernel that satisfies the accuracy requirements.
Authors: Linus Heck, Filip Mac\'ak, Roman Andriushchenko, Milan \v{C}e\v{s}ka, Sebastian Junges
Abstract: Shielding is a prominent model-based technique to ensure safety of autonomous agents. Classical shielding aims to ensure that nothing bad ever happens and comes with strong guarantees about safety and maximal permissiveness. However, shielding systems for probabilistic safety, where something bad is allowed to happen with an acceptable probability, has proven to be more intricate. This paper presents a formal framework that conservatively extends classical shields to probabilistic safety. In this framework, we (i) demonstrate the impossibility of preserving the strong guarantees on safety and permissiveness, (ii) provide natural shields with weaker guarantees, and (iii) introduce offline and online shield constructions ensuring strong safety guarantees. The empirical evaluation highlights the practical advantages of the new shields, as well as their computational feasibility.
Authors: Mohammadreza Armandpour, Fatih Ilhan, David Harrison, Ajay Jaiswal, Duc N. M Hoang, Fartash Faghri, Yizhe Zhang, Minsik Cho, Mehrdad Farajtabar
Abstract: On-policy distillation offers dense, per-token supervision for training reasoning models; however, it remains unclear under which conditions this signal is beneficial and under which it is detrimental. Which teacher model should be used, and in the case of self-distillation, which specific context should serve as the supervisory signal? Does the optimal choice vary from one token to the next? At present, addressing these questions typically requires costly training runs whose aggregate performance metrics obscure the dynamics at the level of individual tokens. We introduce a training-free diagnostic framework that operates at the highest resolution: per token, per question, and per teacher. We derive an ideal per-node gradient defined as the parameter update that maximally increases the student's probability of success. We then develop a scalable targeted-rollout algorithm to estimate this gradient efficiently, even for long chains of intermediate thoughts. The gradient alignment score, defined as the cosine similarity between this ideal gradient and any given distillation gradient, quantifies the extent to which a particular configuration approximates the ideal signal. Across a range of self-distillation settings and external teacher models, we observe that distillation guidance exhibits substantially higher alignment with the ideal on incorrect rollouts than on correct ones, where the student already performs well and the teacher's signal tends to become noisy. Furthermore, we find that the optimal distillation context depends jointly on the student model's capacity and the target task, and that no single universally effective configuration emerges. These findings motivate the use of per-task, per-token diagnostic analyses for distillation.
Authors: Yaxin Du, Xiyuan Yang, Zhifan Zhou, Wanxu Liu, Zixing Lei, Zimeng Chen, Fenyi Liu, Haotian Wu, Yuzhu Cai, Zexi Liu, Xinyu Zhu, WenHao Wang, Linfeng Zhang, Chen Qian, Siheng Chen
Abstract: As model families, training recipes, and compute budgets become increasingly standardized, further gains in machine learning systems depend increasingly on data. Yet data engineering remains largely manual and ad hoc: practitioners repeatedly search for external datasets, adapt them to existing pipelines, validate candidate data through downstream training, and carry forward lessons from prior attempts. We study task-conditioned autonomous data engineering, where an autonomous agent improves a fixed learning algorithm by optimizing only the data side, including external data discovery, data selection and composition, cleaning and transformation. The goal is to obtain a stronger downstream solution while leaving the learning algorithm unchanged. To address the open-ended search space, branch-dependent refinement, and delayed validation inherent in autonomous data engineering, we propose DataMaster, a data-agent framework that integrates tree-structured search, shared candidate data, and cumulative memory. DataMaster consists of three key components: a DataTree that organizes alternative data-engineering branches, a shared Data Pool that stores discovered external data sources for reuse, and a Global Memory that records node outcomes, artifacts, and reusable findings. Together, these components allow the agent to discover candidate data, construct executable training inputs, evaluate them through downstream feedback, and carry useful evidence across branches. We evaluate DataMaster on two types of benchmarks, MLE-Bench Lite and PostTrainBench. On MLE-Bench Lite, it improves medal rate by 32.27% over the initial score; on PostTrainBench, it surpasses the instruct model on GPQA (31.02% vs 30.35%).
Authors: Roxana Geambasu, Mariana Raykova, Pierre Tholoniat, Trishita Tiwari, Lillian Tsai, Wen Zhang
Abstract: The dominant paradigm for AI agents is an "on-the-fly" loop in which agents synthesize plans and execute actions within seconds or minutes in response to user prompts. We argue that this paradigm short-circuits disciplined software engineering (SE) processes -- iterative design, rigorous testing, adversarial evaluation, staged deployment, and more -- that have delivered the (relatively) reliable and secure systems we use today. By focusing on rapid, real-time synthesis, are AI agents effectively delivering users improvised prototypes rather than systems fit for high-stakes scenarios in which users may unwittingly apply them? This paper argues for the need to integrate rigorous SE processes into the agentic loop to produce production-grade, hardened, and deterministically-constrained agent *workflows* that substantially outperform the potentially brittle and vulnerable results of on-the-fly synthesis. Doing so may require extra compute and time, and if so, we must amortize the cost of rigor through reuse across a broad user community. We envision an *AI Workflow Store* that consists of hardened and reusable workflows that agents can invoke with far greater reliability and security than improvised tool chains. We outline the research challenges of this vision, which stem from a broader flexibility-robustness tension that we argue requires moving beyond the ``on-the-fly'' paradigm to navigate effectively.
Authors: Md. Sultan Al Rayhan
Abstract: Recognition of handwritten Bangla compound characters remains a challenging problem due to complex character structures, large intra-class variation, and limited availability of high-quality annotated data. Existing Bangla handwritten character recognition systems often struggle to generalize across diverse writing styles, particularly for compound characters containing intricate ligatures and diacritical variations. In this work, we propose a confidence-guided diffusion augmentation framework for low-resolution Bangla compound character recognition. Our framework combines class-conditional diffusion modeling with classifier guidance to synthesize high-quality handwritten compound character samples. To further improve generation quality, we introduce Squeeze-and-Excitation enhanced residual blocks within the diffusion model's U-Net backbone. We additionally propose a confidence-based filtering mechanism where pre-trained classifiers act as quality gates to retain only highly class-consistent synthetic samples. The filtered synthetic images are fused with the original training data and used to retrain multiple classification architectures. Experiments conducted on the AIBangla compound character dataset demonstrate consistent performance improvements across ResNet50, DenseNet121, VGG16, and Vision Transformer architectures. Our best-performing model achieves 89.2\% classification accuracy, surpassing the previously published AIBangla benchmark by a substantial margin. The results demonstrate that quality-aware diffusion augmentation can effectively enhance handwritten character recognition performance in low-resource script domains.
Authors: Yaman Kindap, Manfred Opper, Benjamin Dupuis, Umut Simsekli, Tolga Birdal
Abstract: Modelling extreme events and heavy-tailed phenomena is central to building reliable predictive systems in domains such as finance, climate science, and safety-critical AI. While L\'evy processes provide a natural mathematical framework for capturing jumps and heavy tails, Bayesian inference for L\'evy-driven stochastic differential equations (SDEs) remains intractable with existing methods: Monte Carlo approaches are rigorous but lack scalability, whereas neural variational inference methods are efficient but rely on Gaussian assumptions that fail to capture discontinuities. We address this tension by introducing a neural exponential tilting framework for variational inference in L\'evy-driven SDEs. Our approach constructs a flexible variational family by exponentially reweighting the L\'evy measure using neural networks. This parametrization preserves the jump structure of the underlying process while remaining computationally tractable. To enable efficient inference, we develop a quadratic neural parametrization that yields closed-form normalization of the tilted measure, a conditional Gaussian representation for stable processes that facilitates simulation, and symmetry-aware Monte Carlo estimators for scalable optimization. Empirically, we demonstrate that the method accurately captures jump dynamics and yields reliable posterior inference in regimes where Gaussian-based variational approaches fail, on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
Authors: Keya Hu, Linlu Qiu, Yiyang Lu, Hanhong Zhao, Tianhong Li, Yoon Kim, Jacob Andreas, Kaiming He
Abstract: Diffusion and flow-based models have become the de facto approaches for generating continuous data, e.g., in domains such as images and videos. Their success has attracted growing interest in applying them to language modeling. Unlike their image-domain counterparts, today's leading diffusion language models (DLMs) primarily operate over discrete tokens. In this paper, we show that continuous DLMs can be made effective with minimal adaptation to the discrete domain. We propose Embedded Language Flows (ELF), a class of diffusion models in continuous embedding space based on continuous-time Flow Matching. Unlike existing DLMs, ELF predominantly stays within the continuous embedding space until the final time step, where it maps to discrete tokens using a shared-weight network. This formulation makes it straightforward to adapt established techniques from image-domain diffusion models, e.g., classifier-free guidance (CFG). Experiments show that ELF substantially outperforms leading discrete and continuous DLMs, achieving better generation quality with fewer sampling steps. These results suggest that ELF offers a promising path toward effective continuous DLMs.
Authors: Himanshu Gupta, Shreyas Verma, Ujjwala Anantheswaran, Kevin Scaria, Mihir Parmar, Swaroop Mishra, Chitta Baral
Abstract: Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit impressive problem-solving abilities in various domains, but their visual comprehension and abstract reasoning skills remain under-evaluated. To this end, we present PolyMATH, a challenging benchmark aimed at evaluating the general cognitive reasoning abilities of MLLMs. PolyMATH comprises 5,000 manually collected high-quality images of cognitive textual and visual challenges across 10 distinct categories, including pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, and relative reasoning. We conducted a comprehensive, and quantitative evaluation of 15 MLLMs using four diverse prompting strategies, including Chain-of-Thought and Step-Back. The best scores achieved on PolyMATH are ~41%, ~36%, and ~27%, obtained by Claude-3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5 Pro respectively - highlighting the logical and visual complexity of these questions. A further fine-grained error analysis reveals that these models struggle to understand spatial relations and perform drawn-out, high-level reasoning. This is further strengthened by our ablation study estimating MLLM performance when given textual descriptions in place of diagrams. As evidenced by ~4% improvement over textual descriptions as opposed to actual images, we discover that models do not truly comprehend visual diagrams and the spatial information therein, and are thus prone to logical errors. Finally, we evaluate the OpenAI o1 models and find that their performance only matches the human baseline, highlighting the difficulty of the benchmark. The results on PolyMATH highlight the room for improvement in multi-modal reasoning and provide unique insights to guide the development of future MLLMs.
Authors: Wenjie Tang, Yuan Zhou, Erqiang Xu, Keyan Cheng, Minne Li, Liquan Xiao
Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly applied to complex strategic environments that demand long-horizon reasoning, multi-agent interaction, and decision-making under uncertainty. However, common existing benchmarks either assess isolated skills, lack environmental diversity, or rely on broad overall metrics. To address these issues, we introduce DSGBench, a more rigorous evaluation platform for strategic decision-making tasks. Firstly, it incorporates six complex strategic games which serve as ideal testbeds due to their long-term and multi-dimensional decision-making demands and flexibility in customizing tasks with various difficulty levels and targets. Secondly, DSGBench employs a fine-grained evaluation scoring system which examines the decision-making capabilities by looking into the performance in five specific dimensions, offering a comprehensive assessment in a better-designed fashion. Furthermore, DSGBench also incorporates an automated decision-tracking mechanism which enables in-depth analysis of agent behaviour patterns and the turning points in their strategies. We evaluate six popular LLM agents, including open-source and closed-source models, and observe distinct strengths and limitations among various tasks. Through decision trajectory analysis, we further identify systemic limitations in different LLMs. These findings offer valuable insights for model selection and future LLM-based agent development.
Authors: Matthew T. Dearing, Yiheng Tao, Xingfu Wu, Zhiling Lan, Valerie Taylor
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for generating parallel scientific codes, with a primary focus on generating functionally correct code. Recent work has focused on generating performant code, with an emphasis on its execution time. However, energy efficiency is now recognized as a critical objective, given the significant power demands of large-scale compute systems. This paper addresses the research question of whether LLMs can generate energy-efficient parallel scientific codes when guided by empirical execution feedback. To answer this question, we propose LASSI-EE, an automated LLM-based refactoring framework that generates energy-efficient parallel codes through a multi-stage, iterative approach integrating runtime power profiling, energy-aware prompting, self-correcting feedback loops, and an LLM-as-a-Judge agent for screening generated code. We evaluate LASSI-EE using twenty-two representative scientific benchmarks and applications on NVIDIA A100 and AMD MI100 GPUs. The results indicate an average energy reduction of 36% for MI100 and 34% for A100, across trials that produced passing energy-reducing refactorings.
Authors: Haorui Wang, Jeff Guo, Lingkai Kong, Rampi Ramprasad, Philippe Schwaller, Yuanqi Du, Chao Zhang
Abstract: Retrosynthesis, the process of breaking down a target molecule into simpler precursors through a series of valid reactions, stands at the core of organic chemistry and drug development. Although recent machine learning (ML) research has advanced single-step retrosynthetic modeling and subsequent route searches, these solutions remain restricted by the extensive combinatorial space of possible pathways. Concurrently, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable chemical knowledge, hinting at their potential to tackle complex decision-making tasks in chemistry. In this work, we explore whether LLMs can successfully navigate the highly constrained, multi-step retrosynthesis planning problem. We introduce an efficient scheme for encoding reaction pathways and present a new route-level search strategy, moving beyond the conventional step-by-step reactant prediction. Through comprehensive evaluations, we show that our LLM-augmented approach excels at retrosynthesis planning and extends naturally to the broader challenge of synthesizable molecular design.
Authors: Chunhui Zhang, Zhongyu Ouyang, Kwonjoon Lee, Nakul Agarwal, Sean Dae Houlihan, Soroush Vosoughi, Shao-Yuan Lo
Abstract: Theory-of-Mind (ToM) enables humans to infer mental states-such as beliefs, desires, and intentions-forming the foundation of social cognition. However, existing computational ToM methods rely on structured workflows with ToM-specific priors or deep model fine-tuning, which struggle with scalability in multimodal environments and fail to generalize as task complexity increases. To address these limitations, we propose a scalable Bayesian ToM planner that decomposes ToM reasoning into stepwise Bayesian updates. Our framework introduces weak-to-strong control, allowing smaller language models (LMs) to specialize in ToM-specific likelihood estimation and transfer their reasoning behaviors to larger LMs (7B to 405B) for integration with social and world knowledge. This synergistic approach aligns large-model inference of human mental states with Bayesian principles. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves a 4.6% accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art techniques on multimodal ToM benchmarks, including challenging unseen scenarios, thereby establishing a new standard for modeling human mental states in complex environments.
Authors: Byeongchan Lee, Jonghoon Lee, Dongyoung Kim, Jaehyung Kim, Kyungjoon Park, Dongjun Lee, Jinwoo Shin
Abstract: Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance, ranging from simple to complex tasks. However, while large models achieve remarkable results across diverse tasks, they often incur substantial monetary inference cost, making frequent use impractical for many applications. In contrast, small models are often freely available and easy to deploy locally, but their performance on complex tasks remains limited. This trade-off raises a natural question: how can small and large models efficiently collaborate to combine their complementary strengths? To bridge this trade-off, we propose COPE, a test-time collaboration framework. A planner model first generates a plan that serves as a lightweight intermediate that guides a downstream executor model. Small and large models take turns acting as planner and executor, exchanging plans in a multi-stage cascade to collaboratively solve tasks. Through comprehensive experiments on benchmarks spanning mathematical reasoning, code generation, open-ended tasks, and agent tasks, we demonstrate that COPE achieves performance comparable to large proprietary models, while drastically reducing the inference API cost. These results highlight planning as an effective prior for cost-efficient inference.
Authors: Shufan Jiang, Sizhou Chen, Chios Chen, Chi Zhang, Xiao-Lei Zhang, Xuelong Li
Abstract: Creating an immersive and interactive theatrical experience is a long-term goal in the field of interactive narrative. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) provides a new path to achieve this goal. However, existing drama generation methods often produce LLMs that lack initiative and cannot interact with the physical scene, while typically requiring detailed input that diminishes the immersion of live performance. To address these challenges, we propose HAMLET, a hierarchical adaptive multi-agent framework focused on drama creation and real-time online performance. Given a simple topic, the framework initially generates a narrative blueprint to guide the subsequent improvisational performance. During online performance, each actor is equipped with an adaptive reasoning module that enables decision-making based on their personas, memories, goals during complex group chat scenarios. Beyond dialogue, actor agents engage in embodied interactions by changing the state of scene props through actions such as opening a letter or picking up a weapon, which are broadcast to update the global environmental context. To objectively assess the quality of live embodied theatrics, we establish a comprehensive evaluation method and introduce HAMLETJudge, a specialized critic model for automated evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that HAMLET excels in creating expressive, coherent, and physically interactive theatrical experiences in an autonomous manner.
Authors: Zahra Khotanlou, Kate Larson, Amir-Hossein Karimi
Abstract: Decision makers are increasingly relying on machine learning in sensitive situations. Algorithmic recourse aims to provide individuals with actionable and minimally costly steps to reverse unfavorable AI-driven decisions. While existing research focuses on single-individual (i.e., seeker) and single-model (i.e., provider) scenarios, real-world applications involve multiple stakeholders. Optimizing outcomes for seekers under an individual welfare approach overlooks the multi-agent nature of real-world systems, with competition for limited resources. Accordingly, we extend algorithmic recourse to a many-to-many setting with capacity constraints, where individually computed recourse recommendations no longer compose independently and stakeholder interactions affect recourse validity. We model this multi-agent algorithimc recourse as a capacitated weighted bipartite matching problem, based on recourse cost and provider capacity. Edge weights, reflecting recourse costs, are optimized for social welfare while quantifying the welfare gap between individual welfare and this collectively feasible outcome. We propose three optimization layers: capacitated matching, optimal capacity redistribution, and cost-aware optimization. We further model inequality-averse objectives through a concave social-welfare formulation that prioritizes the most disadvantaged seekers. Experiments demonstrate that our framework enables the many-to-many algorithmic recourse to achieve near-optimal welfare with minimum modification in system settings. Our results also show how recourse systems can be designed to balance aggregate welfare with distributive considerations. We extend algorithmic recourse from individual recommendations to system-level design, providing a tractable path toward higher social welfare while maintaining individual actionability.
Authors: Pratik Jayarao, Himanshu Gupta, Neeraj Varshney, Chaitanya Dwivedi
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as automated judges in benchmarking and reward modeling, ensuring their reliability, efficiency, and robustness has become critical. In this work, we present a systematic comparison of "thinking" and "non-thinking" LLMs in the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm using open-source Qwen 3 models of relatively small sizes (0.6B, 1.7B, and 4B parameters). We evaluate both accuracy and computational efficiency (FLOPs) on RewardBench tasks, and further examine augmentation strategies for non-thinking models, including in-context learning, rubric-guided judging, reference-based evaluation, and n-best aggregation. Our results show that despite these enhancements, non-thinking models generally fall short of their thinking counterparts. Our results show that thinking models achieve approximately 10% points higher accuracy with little overhead (under 2x), in contrast to augmentation strategies like few-shot learning, which deliver modest gains at a higher cost (>8x). Bias and robustness analyses further demonstrate that thinking models maintain significantly greater consistency under a variety of bias conditions such as positional, bandwagon, identity, diversity, and random biases (6% higher on average). We further extend our experiments to the multilingual setting and our results confirm that explicit reasoning extends its benefits beyond English. Overall, our work results in several important findings that provide systematic evidence that explicit reasoning offers clear advantages in the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm not only in accuracy and efficiency but also in robustness.
Authors: Yuanyi Wang, Yanggan Gu, Yiming Zhang, Qi Zhou, Zhaoyi Yan, Congkai Xie, Xinyao Wang, Jianbo Yuan, Hongxia Yang
Abstract: We study empirical scaling laws for language model merging measured by cross-entropy. Despite its wide practical use, merging lacks a quantitative rule that predicts returns as we add experts or scale the model size. We identify a compact power law that links model size and expert number: the size-dependent floor decreases with model capacity, while the merging tail exhibits clear diminishing returns in the number of experts. The law holds in-domain and cross-domain, tightly fits measured curves across diverse architectures and methods (Average, TA, TIES, DARE), and explains two robust regularities: most gains arrive early, and variability shrinks as more experts are included. Building on this, we present a simple theory that explains why gains fall roughly as 1/k and links the floor and tail to properties of the base model and the diversity across domains. This law enables predictive planning: estimate how many experts are needed to reach a target loss, decide when to stop adding experts, and trade off scaling the base model versus adding experts under a fixed budget--turning merging from heuristic practice into a computationally efficient, planable alternative to multitask training. This suggests a scaling principle for distributed generative AI: predictable gains can be achieved by composing specialists, offering a complementary path toward AGI-level systems.
Authors: Minhui Zhu, Minyang Tian, Xiaocheng Yang, Tianci Zhou, Lifan Yuan, Penghao Zhu, Eli Chertkov, Shengyan Liu, Yufeng Du, Ziming Ji, Indranil Das, Qingzhi Chen, Junyi Cao, Yufeng Du, Jiabin Yu, Peixue Wu, Jinchen He, Yifan Su, Yikun Jiang, Yujie Zhang, Chang Liu, Ze-Min Huang, Weizhen Jia, Yunkai Wang, Farshid Jafarpour, Yong Zhao, Xinan Chen, Jessie Shelton, Aaron W. Young, John Bartolotta, Wenchao Xu, Yue Sun, Anjun Chu, Victor Colussi, Chris Akers, Nathan Brooks, Wenbo Fu, Jinchao Zhao, Marvin Qi, Anqi Mu, Yubo Yang, Allen Zang, Yang Lyu, Peizhi Mai, Christopher Wilson, Xuefei Guo, Juntai Zhou, Daniel Inafuku, Chi Xue, Luyu Gao, Ze Yang, Ya\"ir Hein, Yonatan Kahn, Kevin Zhou, Di Luo, John Drew Wilson, Jarrod T. Reilly, Dmytro Bandak, Ofir Press, Liang Yang, Xueying Wang, Hao Tong, Nicolas Chia, Eliu Huerta, Hao Peng
Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities are progressing rapidly on high-school math competitions and coding, can they reason effectively through complex, open-ended challenges found in frontier physics research? And crucially, what kinds of reasoning tasks do physicists want LLMs to assist with? To address these questions, we present the CritPt (Complex Research using Integrated Thinking - Physics Test, pronounced "critical point"), the first benchmark designed to test LLMs on unpublished, research-level reasoning tasks that broadly covers modern physics research areas, including condensed matter, quantum physics, atomic, molecular & optical physics, astrophysics, high energy physics, mathematical physics, statistical physics, nuclear physics, nonlinear dynamics, fluid dynamics and biophysics. CritPt consists of 71 composite research challenges designed to simulate full-scale research projects at the entry level, which are also decomposed to 190 simpler checkpoint tasks for more fine-grained insights. All problems are newly created by 50+ active physics researchers based on their own research. Every problem is hand-curated to admit a guess-resistant and machine-verifiable answer and is evaluated by an automated grading pipeline heavily customized for advanced physics-specific output formats. We find that while current state-of-the-art LLMs show early promise on isolated checkpoints, they remain far from being able to reliably solve full research-scale challenges: the best average accuracy among base models is only 5.7%, achieved by GPT-5 (high), moderately rising to around 10% when equipped with coding tools. Through the realistic yet standardized evaluation offered by CritPt, we highlight a large disconnect between current model capabilities and realistic physics research demands, offering a foundation to guide the development of scientifically grounded AI tools.
Authors: Alexandra Yost, Shreyans Jain, Shivam Raval, Grant Corser, Allen Roush, Nina Xu, Jacqueline Hammack, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Amirali Abdullah
Abstract: Persona conditioning is widely used to steer large language model (LLM) behavior, but it is unclear whether it induces stable behavioral structure or superficial variation. We propose a framework to measure consistent behavioral tendencies using situational judgment tests (SJTs), multidimensional item response theory (MIRT), and structured synthetic personas, treating responses as observations of latent behavioral variables. Across large-scale SJT and persona datasets, we find that persona-conditioned behaviors are stable across runs, latent trait scores predict external benchmarks (e.g., TruthfulQA, EmoBench), and MIRT reveals consistent latent structure. We validate these results through human annotation, benchmark evaluation, and internal consistency analyses. We interpret these traits not as human personality, but as stable behavioral tendencies expressed across contexts. Our results show that scenario-based psychometric evaluation provides a more reliable alternative to classical self-report approaches for assessing LLM behavior, and we release datasets to support further study.
Authors: Adam Tauman Kalai, Yael Tauman Kalai, Or Zamir
Abstract: Motivated by undetectable risks in generative AI, we study a general robust aggregation problem: how to aggregate several probability distributions to boost safety. We present consensus sampling, a black-box algorithm that, given k distributions, has risk competitive with the average risk of the safest $s$ while abstaining when there is insufficient agreement. This yields an architecture-agnostic approach to generative-model safety when the distributions are induced by models that can sample and evaluate output probabilities. We formalize the guarantee through R-robustness, which also bounds information leakage and adversarial influence. Inspired by robust statistics and the provable copyright protection algorithm of Vyas et al (2023), we show that while a standard mixture is vulnerable to one unsafe constituent, a pointwise-median construction provides robust intuition, and our efficient sampler is Pareto-optimal for the tradeoff between worst-case risk and abstention. Experiments on synthetic distributions and image generation illustrate the general mechanism and its motivating safety application. The method requires overlap among safe distributions, but it provides a model-agnostic way to inherit guarantees from an unknown reliable subset.
Authors: Yannick Brunink, Daniel Daza, Yunjie He, Michael Cochez
Abstract: Neural methods for Complex Query Answering (CQA) over knowledge graphs (KGs) are widely believed to learn patterns that generalize beyond explicit graph structure, allowing them to infer answers that are unreachable through symbolic query processing. In this work, we critically examine this assumption through a systematic analysis comparing neural CQA models with an alternative, training-free query relaxation strategy that retrieves possible answers by relaxing query constraints and counting resulting paths. Across multiple datasets and query structures, we find several cases where neural and relaxation-based approaches perform similarly, with no neural model consistently outperforming the latter. Moreover, a similarity analysis reveals that their retrieved answers exhibit little overlap, and that combining their outputs consistently improves performance. These results call for a re-evaluation of progress in neural query answering: despite their complexity, current models fail to subsume the reasoning patterns captured by query relaxation. Our findings highlight the importance of stronger non-neural baselines and suggest that future neural approaches could benefit from incorporating principles of query relaxation.
Authors: Miles Q. Li, Benjamin C. M. Fung, Martin Weiss, Pulei Xiong, Khalil Al-Hussaeni, Claude Fachkha
Abstract: As autonomous AI agents are increasingly deployed in high-stakes environments, ensuring their safety and alignment with human values is becoming a practical deployment concern. Current benchmarks for AI agents primarily evaluate refusal of explicitly harmful instructions or completion of complex multi-step tasks. However, there is a lack of benchmarks designed to capture emergent outcome-driven constraint violations, which arise when agents pursue goal optimization under strong performance incentives while deprioritizing ethical, legal, or safety constraints. To address this gap, we introduce a benchmark of 40 scenarios in production-inspired sandbox environments. Each scenario requires multi-step actions, and the agent's performance is tied to a specific Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Each scenario features Mandated (direct KPI-outcome mandate) and Incentivized (KPI-pressure-driven) variations to distinguish failures under direct outcome mandates from self-directed constraint violations. Across 12 state-of-the-art LLMs, we observe outcome-driven constraint violations ranging from 0.0% to 62.8%, with most evaluated models exhibiting misalignment rates at or above 25%. Furthermore, through a cross-generational analysis comparing current models with their predecessors within the same product families, we find that safety does not reliably improve across generations: misalignment rates rose in four families and fell in five. To improve evaluation robustness, we score trajectories with a four-model judge panel aggregated by median, finding high agreement on the primary misalignment threshold. We also observe substantial deliberative misalignment: cases where models later judge their own trajectories as unethical despite having executed them under KPI pressure.
Authors: Alex L. Zhang, Tim Kraska, Omar Khattab
Abstract: We study allowing large language models (LLMs) to process arbitrarily long prompts through the lens of inference-time scaling. We propose Recursive Language Models (RLMs), a general inference paradigm that treats long prompts as part of an external environment and allows the LLM to programmatically examine, decompose, and recursively call itself over snippets of the prompt. We find that RLMs can successfully process inputs up to two orders of magnitude beyond model context windows and, even for shorter prompts, dramatically outperform the quality of vanilla frontier LLMs and common long-context and coding scaffolds (e.g., on GPT-5 by a median across the evaluated benchmarks of $26\%$ against compaction, $130\%$ against CodeAct with sub-calls, and $13\%$ against Claude Code) across four diverse long-context tasks while having comparable cost. At a small scale, we post-train the first model around the RLM. Our model, RLM-Qwen3-8B, outperforms the underlying Qwen3-8B model by $28.3\%$ on average and even approaches the quality of vanilla GPT-5 on three long-context tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/alexzhang13/rlm.
Authors: Xuan Yang, Furong Jia, Roy Xie, Xiong Xi, Hengwei Bian, Jian Li, Monica Agrawal
Abstract: Current Large Language Model reasoning systems process queries independently, discarding valuable cross-instance signals such as shared reasoning patterns and consistency constraints. We introduce Batch-of-Thought (BoT), a training-free method that processes related queries jointly to enable cross-instance learning. By performing comparative analysis across batches, BoT identifies high-quality reasoning templates, detects errors through consistency checks, and amortizes computational costs. We instantiate BoT within a multi-agent reflection architecture (BoT-R), where a Reflector performs joint evaluation to unlock mutual information gain unavailable in isolated processing. Experiments across three model families and six benchmarks demonstrate that BoT-R consistently improves accuracy and confidence calibration while reducing inference costs by up to 61%. Our theoretical and experimental analysis reveals when and why batch-aware reasoning benefits LLM systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuanyang19/BoT
Authors: Ian Rios-Sialer
Abstract: Generative AI models reproduce the human biases in their training data and further amplify them through mechanisms such as mode collapse. The loss of diversity produces homogenization, which not only harms the minoritized but impoverishes everyone. We argue homogenization should be a central concern in AI safety. To meaningfully characterize homogenization in Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce a framework that allows stakeholders to encode their context and value system. We illustrate our approach with an experiment that surfaces gender bias in an LLM (Claude 3.5 Haiku) on an open-ended story prompt. Building from queer theory, we formalize homogenization in terms of normativity. Borrowing language from feminist theory, we introduce the concept of xeno-reproduction as a class of tasks for mitigating homogenization by promoting diversity. Our work opens a collaborative line of research that seeks to understand and advance diversity in AI.
Authors: Kiana Jafari, Paul Ulrich Nikolaus Rust, Duncan Eddy, Robbie Fraser, Nina Vasan, Darja Djordjevic, Akanksha Dadlani, Max Lamparth, Eugenia Kim, Mykel Kochenderfer
Abstract: Learning from human feedback~(LHF) assumes that expert judgments, appropriately aggregated, yield valid ground truth for training and evaluating AI systems. We tested this assumption in mental health, where high safety stakes make expert consensus essential. Three certified psychiatrists independently evaluated LLM-generated responses using a calibrated rubric. Despite similar training and shared instructions, inter-rater reliability was consistently poor ($ICC$ $0.087$--$0.295$), falling below thresholds considered acceptable for consequential assessment. Disagreement was highest on the most safety-critical items. Suicide and self-harm responses produced greater divergence than any other category, and was systematic rather than random. One factor yielded negative reliability (Krippendorff's $\alpha = -0.203$), indicating structured disagreement worse than chance. Qualitative interviews revealed that disagreement reflects coherent but incompatible individual clinical frameworks, safety-first, engagement-centered, and culturally-informed orientations, rather than measurement error. By demonstrating that experts rely on holistic risk heuristics rather than granular factor discrimination, these findings suggest that aggregated labels function as arithmetic compromises that effectively erase grounded professional philosophies. Our results characterize expert disagreement in safety-critical AI as a sociotechnical phenomenon where professional experience introduces sophisticated layers of principled divergence. We discuss implications for reward modeling, safety classification, and evaluation benchmarks, recommending that practitioners shift from consensus-based aggregation to alignment methods that preserve and learn from expert disagreement.
Authors: Jingyun Wang, Dian Li, Xiaohan Wang, Gang Liu, Jiahong Yan, Guoliang Kang
Abstract: Plane Geometry Problem Solving (PGPS) is a multimodal reasoning task that aims to solve a plane geometric problem based on a geometric diagram and problem textual descriptions. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) possess strong reasoning skills, their direct application to PGPS is hindered by their inability to process visual diagrams. Existing works typically fine-tune Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) end-to-end on large-scale PGPS data to enhance visual understanding and reasoning simultaneously. However, such joint optimization may compromise base LLMs' inherent reasoning capability. In this work, we observe that LLM itself is potentially a powerful PGPS solver when appropriately formulating visual information as textual descriptions. We propose to train a MLLM Interpreter to generate geometric descriptions for the visual diagram, and an off-the-shelf LLM is utilized to perform reasoning. Specifically, we choose Conditional Declaration Language (CDL) as the geometric description as its conciseness eases the MLLM Interpreter training. The MLLM Interpreter is fine-tuned via CoT (Chain-of-Thought)-augmented SFT followed by GRPO to generate CDL. Instead of using a conventional solution-based reward that compares the reasoning result with the ground-truth answer, we design CDL matching rewards to facilitate more effective GRPO training, which provides more direct and denser guidance for CDL generation. To support training, we construct a new dataset, Formalgeo7k-Rec-CoT, by manually reviewing Formalgeo7k v2 and incorporating CoT annotations. Extensive experiments on Formalgeo7k-Rec-CoT, Unigeo, and MathVista show our method (finetuned on only 5.5k data) performs favorably against leading open-source and closed-source MLLMs.
Authors: Tristan Shah, Stas Tiomkin
Abstract: Intrinsic Motivation (IM) aims to train agents without external rewards, enabling useful behavior to emerge from the agent's interaction with its environment alone. However, the dominant IM approaches rely on information-theoretic quantities with designer-chosen variables, introducing bias and lacking a principled connection to dynamics or optimal control (OC). We introduce Controllable Information Production (CIP), a new foundation for IM explicitly grounded in dynamical systems and OC. CIP measures the rate at which an agent produces information, capturing controllable complexity without external knowledge or bias. CIP unifies IM and OC into a single framework, formalizing physical intelligence as the control of information production. It further reveals connections between the structure of the value function and Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy. CIP consistently outperforms prior IM methods on standard benchmarks in robot learning and solves tasks they fail on, including humanoid self-righting. These results support a general organizing principle: physical intelligence emerges from driving systems toward the edge of controllable chaos.
Authors: Yueyi Yang, Haotian Liu, Fang Kang, Mengqi Zhang, Zheng Lian, Hao Tang, Haoyu Chen
Abstract: We explore the use of large language models (LLMs) for next-utterance anticipation in human dialogue. Despite recent advances in LLMs demonstrating their ability to engage in natural conversations with users, we show that even leading models surprisingly struggle to anticipate a human speaker's next utterance. Instead, humans can readily anticipate forthcoming utterances based on multi-modal cues -- such as gestures, gaze, and emotional tone -- from the context. To systematically examine this gap, we propose SayNext-Bench, a benchmark evaluating MLLMs on anticipating context-conditioned responses across diverse real-world scenarios. To support it, we build SayNext-PC, a large-scale multimodal dialogue dataset, and carefully design a multi-level evaluation framework spanning lexical similarity, emotion-intention consistency, and LLM-based overall alignment. Building on this, we develop SayNext-Chat, a cognitively inspired dual-route MLLM that incorporates learnable priming tokens to fuse perceptual cues with anticipatory priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SayNext-Chat consistently outperforms state-of-the-art MLLMs across all evaluation levels, corroborated by user studies and LLM-as-Judge evaluations. Our results emphasize the (i) indispensable role of multimodal cues and (ii) active anticipatory processing as foundations of natural human interaction currently missing in MLLMs.
Authors: Xingyuan Hua, Sheng Yue, Xinyi Li, Yizhe Zhao, Jinrui Zhang, Ju Ren
Abstract: Multi-Agent Discussion (MAD) has garnered increasing attention very recently, where multiple LLM instances collaboratively solve problems via structured discussion. However, we find that current MAD methods easily suffer from discussion inconsistency, LLMs fail to reach a coherent solution, due to the misalignment between their individual contexts.In this paper, we introduce a multi-LLM context learning method (M2CL) that learns a context generator for each agent, capable of dynamically generating context instructions per discussion round via automatic information organization and refinement. Specifically, inspired by our theoretical insights on the context instruction, M2CL train the generators to control context coherence and output discrepancies via a carefully crafted self-adaptive mechanism.It enables LLMs to avoid premature convergence on majority noise and progressively reach the correct consensus. We evaluate M2CL on challenging tasks, including academic reasoning, embodied tasks, and mobile control. The results show that the performance of M2CL significantly surpasses existing methods by 20%--50%, while enjoying favorable transferability and computational efficiency.
Authors: Wenzhe Fan, Tommaso Tognoli, Henry Peng Zou, Chunyu Miao, Yibo Wang, Xinhua Zhang
Abstract: Multi-round LLM-based multi-agent systems rely on effective communication structures to support collaboration across rounds. However, most existing methods employ a fixed communication topology during inference, which falls short in many realistic applications where the agents' roles may change \textit{across rounds} due to dynamic adversary, task progression, or time-varying constraints such as communication bandwidth. In this paper, we propose addressing this issue through TodyComm, a \textbf{t}ask-\textbf{o}riented \textbf{dy}namic \textbf{comm}unication algorithm. It produces behavior-driven collaboration topologies that adapt to the dynamics at each round, optimizing the utility for the task through policy gradient. Experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that, under both dynamic adversarial settings and communication budget constraints, TodyComm achieves superior task performance while maintaining token efficiency, scalability, and strong generalizability across varying adversarial conditions.
Authors: Yansong Ning, Jun Fang, Naiqiang Tan, Hao Liu
Abstract: Managing agent context (e.g., thought and observation) during multi-turn agent-environment interactions is an emerging strategy to improve agent efficiency. However, existing studies treat the entire interaction trajectories equally, overlooking the thought necessity and observation utility varies across turns. To this end, we first conduct quantitative investigations into how thought and observation affect agent effectiveness and efficiency. Based on our findings, we propose Agent-Omit, a unified training framework that empowers LLM agents to adaptively omit redundant thoughts and observations. Specifically, we first synthesize a small amount of cold-start data, including both single-turn and multi-turn omission scenarios, to fine-tune the agent for omission behaviors. Furthermore, we introduce an omit-aware agentic reinforcement learning approach, incorporating a dual sampling mechanism and a tailored omission reward to incentivize the agent's adaptive omission capability. Theoretically, we prove that the deviation of our omission policy is upper-bounded by KL-divergence. Experimental results on five agent benchmarks show that our constructed Agent-Omit-8B could obtain performance comparable to seven frontier LLM agent, and achieve the best effectiveness-efficiency trade-off than seven efficient LLM agents methods. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/Agent-Omit.
Authors: Khurram Yamin, Jingjing Tang, Santiago Cortes-Gomez, Amit Sharma, Eric Horvitz, Bryan Wilder
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings where good decisions require forming beliefs over the probability of unknown outcomes. However, it is unclear whether LLMs act as if they hold coherent beliefs when making decisions, or if so, how we could validate models' reports of such beliefs. We propose a decision-theoretic framework that elicits both probability judgments and decisions from an agent and tests their mutual consistency. Formally, our methods characterize whether it is possible for the actions to be produced by a ``near-rational" decision maker who holds the elicited probability as their true belief. We show that, perhaps surprisingly, this formalization implies empirically testable conditions even without any assumption about the agent's utility function. Applying our framework to stylized clinical diagnosis tasks, we find that models' reported beliefs are demonstrably imperfect summaries of the information revealed in their decisions, but that the discrepancies are small for the strongest models.
Authors: Shengxuan Qiu, Haochen Huang, Shuzhang Zhong, Pengfei Zuo, Meng Li
Abstract: Scaling test-time compute with multi-path chain-of-thought improves reasoning accuracy, but its effectiveness depends critically on the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Existing approaches address this trade-off in rigid ways: tree-structured search hard-codes exploration through brittle expansion rules that interfere with post-trained reasoning, while parallel reasoning over-explores redundant hypothesis paths and relies on weak answer selection. Motivated by the observation that the optimal balance is phase-dependent and that correct and incorrect reasoning paths often diverge only at late stages, we reformulate test-time scaling as a dynamic expand-reduce control problem over a pool of hypotheses. We propose HyPER, a training-free online control policy for multi-path decoding in mixture-of-experts models that reallocates computation under a fixed budget using lightweight path statistics. HyPER consists of an online controller that transitions from exploration to exploitation as the hypothesis pool evolves, a token-level refinement mechanism that enables efficient generation-time exploitation without full-path resampling, and a length- and confidence-aware aggregation strategy for reliable answer-time exploitation. Experiments on four mixture-of-experts language models across diverse reasoning benchmarks show that HyPER consistently achieves a superior accuracy-compute trade-off, improving accuracy by 8 to 10 percent while reducing token usage by 25 to 40 percent.
Authors: Guanglong Sun, Hongwei Yan, Liyuan Wang, Zhiqi Kang, Shuang Cui, Hang Su, Jun Zhu, Yi Zhong
Abstract: To cope with uncertain changes of the external world, intelligent systems must continually learn from complex, evolving environments and respond in real time. This ability, collectively known as general continual learning (GCL), encapsulates practical challenges such as online datastreams and blurry task boundaries. Although leveraging pretrained models (PTMs) has greatly advanced conventional continual learning (CL), these methods remain limited in reconciling the diverse and temporally mixed information along a single pass, resulting in sub-optimal GCL performance. Inspired by meta-plasticity and reconstructive memory in neuroscience, we introduce here an innovative approach named Meta Post-Refinement (MePo) for PTMs-based GCL. This approach constructs pseudo task sequences from pretraining data and develops a bi-level meta-learning paradigm to refine the pretrained backbone, which serves as a prolonged pretraining phase but greatly facilitates rapid adaptation of representation learning to downstream GCL tasks. MePo further initializes a meta covariance matrix as the reference geometry of pretrained representation space, enabling GCL to exploit second-order statistics for robust output alignment. MePo serves as a plug-in strategy that achieves significant performance gains across a variety of GCL benchmarks and pretrained checkpoints in a rehearsal-free manner (e.g., 15.10\%, 13.36\%, and 12.56\% on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-R, and CUB-200 under Sup-21/1K). Our source code is available at \href{https://github.com/SunGL001/MePo}{MePo}
Authors: Jialin Wu, Wei Shi, Han Shen, Peigui Qi, Kunsheng Tang, Zhicong Huang, Binghao Wang, Zhou Yang
Abstract: Despite the advanced capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), they frequently suffer from object hallucination. One reason is that visual features and pretrained textual representations often become intertwined in the deeper network layers. To address this, we propose REVIS, a training-free framework designed to explicitly re-activate this suppressed visual information. Rooted in latent space geometry, REVIS extracts the pure visual information vector via orthogonal projection and employs a calibrated strategy to perform sparse intervention only at the precise depth where suppression occurs. This surgical approach effectively restores visual information with minimal computational cost. Empirical evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that REVIS reduces object hallucination rates by approximately 19% compared to state-of-the-art baselines, while preserving general reasoning capabilities.
Authors: Varun Ursekar, Apaar Shanker, Veronica Chatrath, Yuan Xue, Sam Denton
Abstract: An important emerging application of coding agents is agent optimization: the iterative improvement of a target agent through edit-execute-evaluate cycles. Despite its relevance, the community lacks a systematic understanding of coding agent performance on this task. Agent optimization differs fundamentally from conventional software engineering: the target agent interleaves deterministic code with stochastic LLM completions, requiring structured capture of both intermediate reasoning and downstream execution outcomes. To address these challenges, we introduce VERO (Versioning, Rewards, and Observations), which provides (1) a reproducible evaluation harness with versioned agent snapshots, budget-controlled evaluation, and structured execution traces, and (2) a benchmark suite of target agents and tasks with reference evaluation procedures. Using VERO, we conduct an empirical study comparing optimizer configurations across tasks and analyzing which modifications reliably improve target agent performance. We release VERO to support research on agent optimization as a core capability for coding agents.
Authors: Ik-hwan Kim, Hyeongrok Han, Mingi Jung, Sangwon Yu, Jinseok Hong, Sang Hun Kim, Yoonyoung Choi, Sungroh Yoon
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce incorrect answers on multi-hop question answering even when the reasoning trace already contains a correct intermediate conclusion. We attribute this gap to weak self-regulation rather than insufficient reasoning capacity. Without explicit regulation, valid intermediate conclusions are overridden by continued exploration or left unrecognized as logically sufficient. We propose Metacognitive Behavioral Tuning (MBT), a post-training framework that injects a five-phase metacognitive structure into reasoning traces. The five phases are understanding and filtering, planning, execution and monitoring, self-correction, and verification. MBT has two formulations. MBT-S synthesizes new metacognitive traces from scratch, while MBT-R rewrites the student's own traces into a metacognitive form. Across HotpotQA, MuSiQue, and 2WikiMultiHopQA, MBT attains the highest Accuracy-Efficiency Score (AES) across model scales. MBT lifts task accuracy while keeping traces short and stable, with mean response length on MuSiQue an order of magnitude shorter than baseline methods and degeneration counts reduced by a similar margin. A matched-control study further confirms that the gain stems from the five-phase structural prior itself. To qualitatively assess the regulatory behavior of reasoning traces, we introduce two new metrics, the Reach-Redundancy Profile (RRP) and the length-aware Metacognitive Quality Index (MQI). RRP captures when the answer is reached and how much of the trace is redundant, and MQI quantifies how richly the five phases appear. Under both metrics, MBT achieves the earliest answer arrival, the lowest redundancy, and the richest phase-level behavior across model scales.
Authors: Elron Bandel, Asaf Yehudai, Lilach Eden, Yehoshua Sagron, Yotam Perlitz, Elad Venezian, Natalia Razinkov, Natan Ergas, Shlomit Shachor Ifergan, Segev Shlomov, Michal Jacovi, Leshem Choshen, Liat Ein-Dor, Yoav Katz, Michal Shmueli-Scheuer
Abstract: General-purpose agents perform tasks in unfamiliar environments without domain-specific manual customization. Yet no study has systematically measured how agent architecture shapes performance across heterogeneous protocols and diverse unfamiliar environments. This is the first systematic study, comparing tool-calling, MCP, code-generation, and CLI agents on the same benchmarks with the same models. Two gaps blocked such a study: existing harnesses require per-benchmark wiring or fixed protocol classes (web for BrowserGym, CLI for Harbor), and benchmarks themselves expect human-authored prompts, context, and integration glue. To enable this study, we contribute (1) a unifying protocol that bridges existing benchmark and agent protocols; (2) an evaluation harness that surfaces any benchmark to any general-purpose agent and backbone model; and (3) the first Open General Agent Leaderboard of agent configurations, a full factorial over 5 agent architectures x 5 backbone LLMs (three closed-source, two open-weight) x 6 benchmarks spanning software engineering, customer service, deep research, and personal assistance. We find that (i) general agents adapt to every tested domain without per-domain customization; (ii) agent architecture choice swings results by up to 12pp within a single model, yet backbone model choice dominates overall performance; (iii) on 4 of 6 tested benchmarks, top general agents are indistinguishable from the leading heavily-customized domain-specific agents; (iv) open-weight models tested exhibit "generality sinks" absent from frontier closed-source models: they consistently collapse on specific agent architectures or benchmarks; (v) a behavioral failure analysis reveals architecture-distinctive error signatures that aggregate scoring cannot discriminate. Code, harness, leaderboard, and traces are at https://www.exgentic.ai.
URLs: https://www.exgentic.ai.
Authors: Junkai Lu, Peng Chen, Xingjian Wu, Yang Shu, Chenjuan Guo, Christian S. Jensen, Bin Yang
Abstract: Time series reasoning demands both the perception of complex dynamics and logical depth. However, existing LLM-based approaches exhibit two limitations: they often treat time series merely as text or images, failing to capture the patterns like trends and seasonalities needed to answer specific questions; and when trained on a mix of simple and complex tasks, simpler objectives often dominate the learning process, hindering the development of deep reasoning capabilities. To address these limitations, we propose the Pattern-Aware Alignment and Balanced Reasoning model (PATRA), introducing a pattern-aware mechanism that extracts trend and seasonality patterns from time series to achieve deep alignment. Furthermore, we design a task-aware balanced reward to harmonize learning across tasks of varying difficulty, incentivizing the generation of coherent Chains of Thought. Extensive experiments show that PATRA outperforms strong baselines across diverse Time Series Question Answering (TSQA) tasks, demonstrating superior cross-modal understanding and reasoning capability.
Authors: Baoqing Yue, Zihan Zhu, Yutong Han, Qian Sun, Jichen Feng, Hufei Yang, Yifan Zhang, Mengdi Wang
Abstract: Existing reasoning evaluation paradigms suffer from different limitations: fixed benchmarks are increasingly saturated and vulnerable to contamination, while preference-based evaluations rely on subjective judgments. We argue that a core aspect of intelligence is the ability to decide what information to acquire and how to use it effectively. We propose Interactive Benchmarks, a unified evaluation paradigm that assesses a model's reasoning ability through budgeted multi-turn interaction. We evaluate models under this framework in two settings: Interactive Proofs, where models interact with a judge to solve Logic, UI2Html, and Mathematics tasks under objective feedback; and Interactive Games, where models reason strategically to maximize long-horizon utilities. Our results show that interactive benchmarks provide a more robust assessment of this dimension of model intelligence, revealing substantial room for improvement in interactive scenarios. Project page: https://github.com/interactivebench/interactivebench
Authors: Xingwu Chen, Zhanqiu Zhang, Yiwen Guo, Difan Zou
Abstract: While LLMs demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities when provided with full information in a single turn, they exhibit substantial vulnerability in multi-turn interactions. Specifically, when information is revealed incrementally or requires updates, models frequently fail to integrate new constraints, leading to a collapse in performance compared to their single-turn baselines. We term the root cause as \emph{Contextual Inertia}: a phenomenon where models rigidly adhere to previous reasoning traces. Even when users explicitly provide corrections or new data in later turns, the model ignores them, preferring to maintain consistency with its previous (incorrect) reasoning path. To address this, we introduce \textbf{R}einforcement \textbf{L}earning with \textbf{S}ingle-\textbf{T}urn \textbf{A}nchors (\textbf{RLSTA}), a generalizable training approach designed to stabilize multi-turn interaction across diverse scenarios and domains. RLSTA leverages the model's superior single-turn capabilities as stable internal anchors to provide reward signals. By aligning multi-turn responses with these anchors, RLSTA empowers models to break contextual inertia and self-calibrate their reasoning based on the latest information. Experiments show that RLSTA significantly outperforms standard fine-tuning and abstention-based methods. Notably, our method exhibits strong cross-domain generalization (e.g., math to code) and proves effective even without external verifiers, highlighting its potential for general-domain applications. Code is available at https://github.com/Tencent/RLSTA.
Authors: Lewei Xie, Haoyu Zhang, Yulong Chen, Liangjun You, Zongxian Yang, Yifan Zhang
Abstract: Inductive spatio-temporal kriging infers signals at unobserved locations from observed sensors, but real-world observations are often incomplete and exhibit block-wise missingness caused by failures, interruptions, or maintenance. A common impute-then-krige pipeline suffers from objective mismatch: better reconstruction on observed sensors does not necessarily improve downstream kriging, and value-dependent imputation bias can be propagated to unobserved nodes. We propose UniSTOK, a plug-and-play framework for inductive spatio-temporal kriging under incomplete observations. We first introduce Reliability-guided Signal Regulation (RSR), which estimates entry-wise reliability from temporal continuity and spatial support, and uses it to regulate the input signals so that reliable observations are emphasized while long-gap or weakly supported entries are suppressed before spatial propagation. We further introduce Residual Bias Calibration (RBC), which estimates value-conditioned residual prototypes after the main predictor converges and learns context-correction amplitudes to adaptively calibrate systematic over- or under-estimation in final kriging predictions. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that UniSTOK consistently improves multiple kriging backbones.
Authors: Zhengwei Xie, Zhisheng Chen, Ziyan Weng, Jinhan Li, Chenglong Li, Zikai Xiao, Jingwei Song, Jinhao Jing, Vireo Zhang, Kun Wang
Abstract: Long-horizon embodied intelligence requires agents to improve through interaction, not merely to execute plans generated from static goals. A central challenge is therefore to transform past executions into knowledge that can shape future decisions. Minecraft provides a representative testbed for this problem, where tasks such as crafting tools, building redstone components, and obtaining diamond equipment involve long prerequisite chains and are frequently disrupted by missing tools, blocked paths, GUI failures, or stagnant execution. To this end, we propose \textbf{MineEvolve}, a knowledge-driven self-evolution framework that converts execution feedback into actionable behavioral knowledge. MineEvolve first uses \underline{\emph{\textbf{\ding{182}Monitor}}} to convert each subgoal execution into typed feedback, including state changes, inventory changes, failure types, progress signals, and stagnation indicators. \underline{\emph{\textbf{\ding{183}Inducer}}} then derives reusable skills from successful executions and remedies from failed or stagnant executions. \underline{\emph{\textbf{\ding{184}Curator}}} validates, merges, filters, and retrieves these knowledge entries, while \underline{\emph{\textbf{\ding{185}Adaptor}}} uses them to repair the unfinished part of the plan under repeated failures or stagnation. Experiments on the Minecraft MCU long-horizon task suite show that MineEvolve consistently improves performance across multiple language-model planners, with larger gains on high-dependency task groups. Ablation and knowledge-accumulation studies further demonstrate that converting execution signals into structured behavioral knowledge is an effective path toward self-evolving embodied agents in long-horizon environments. Our code is available at https://github.com/xzw-ustc/MC-MineEvolve.
Authors: Gideon Popoola, John Sheppard
Abstract: Fairness in machine learning is predominantly evaluated through outcome-oriented metrics, such as Demographic parity, which measure whether predictions are statistically consistent across protected groups. However, these metrics cannot detect whether a model uses systematically different reasoning for different demographic groups, which violates procedural fairness principles. This problem is compounded by intersectionality, where models may appear fair on individual attributes (e.g., race) while exhibiting significant disparities for intersectional subgroups (e.g., race $\times$ gender), a phenomenon known as fairness gerrymandering. In this work, we introduce Multi-category Explanation Stability Disparity (MESD), a procedural fairness metric that quantifies disparities in explanation quality across intersectional subgroups formed by the Cartesian product of multiple protected attributes. MESD integrates three components, which are label-aware aggregation aligned with outcome-conditional fairness, empirical-Bayes shrinkage to stabilize estimates for small intersectional groups, and Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) weighting to emphasize worst-case subgroup disparities. We integrate MESD within a multi-objective optimization framework (UEF) that jointly optimizes utility, outcome fairness, and procedural fairness using NSGA-II. We evaluated MESD and UEF on three benchmark datasets along with four state-of-the-art methods in several experiments, and we demonstrate that MESD reveals procedural disparities invisible to outcome metrics alone. We position our contribution within procedural justice theory and discuss implications for regulatory compliance and intersectional equity.
Authors: Liang Ding
Abstract: LLM-agent training pipelines routinely discard failed trajectories even though GPT-4o achieves only 14-20% on WebArena and below 55% pass@1 on ToolBench; even specialised systems at 50-65% leave the majority of trajectories unused. We introduce AgentHER, which recovers this lost signal by adapting Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) to natural-language agent trajectories: a trajectory that fails goal A is often a correct demonstration for an achievable alternative goal B. AgentHER realises this through a four-stage pipeline (failure classification, outcome extraction, LLM-guided relabeling with confidence gating, and data packaging) that converts discarded failures into SFT, DPO, and ShareGPT training data. On WebArena and ToolBench under a strict task-disjoint held-out protocol, AgentHER improves over success-only SFT by +7.6-11.4% across four model families (GPT-4o, Qwen2.5-72B/7B, LLaMA-3.1-8B), achieves 2x sample efficiency, and beats the strongest experience-centric baseline (Agent Workflow Memory) by +3.0-6.2%. Two robustness mechanisms, failure-severity weighting and cross-model multi-judge verification (gpt-4o-mini paired with Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct), reduce label noise from 5.9% to 2.9% and raise human-rated relabeling precision to 97.1% on WebArena and 96.0% on ToolBench. A full system-cost audit shows the entire relabeling pipeline costs 2.98 and 26 wall-clock minutes for 3,000 trajectories, i.e. 1.4 x 10^-3 per accepted pair. Code: https://github.com/alphadl/AgentHER
Authors: Liang Ding
Abstract: Evaluating LLM agent trajectories is fundamentally task-specific: a code-debugging agent should be judged on Correctness and Error Handling, not on Fluency or Safety. Yet the dominant paradigm -- LLM-as-Judge with a fixed rubric -- applies the same static dimensions regardless of task, producing systematic mis-evaluation. We present AdaRubric, a framework that (i) adaptively generates task-specific evaluation rubrics from task descriptions via LLM, (ii) evaluates agent trajectories step-by-step with confidence-weighted, per-dimension scoring, and (iii) produces dense reward signals for preference learning. Three composable filtering strategies, including the novel DimensionAwareFilter that provably prevents dimension-level quality masking, yield high-quality DPO preference pairs. On WebArena, ToolBench, and AgentBench, AdaRubric achieves Pearson r = 0.79 human correlation (+0.15 over the strongest baseline), with strong reliability (Krippendorff's alpha = 0.83). DPO models trained on AdaRubric-generated pairs improve task success by +6.8-8.5% over the best baseline. AdaRubric also generalises zero-shot to unseen domains (SWE-bench) and extends to multimodal agents (VisualWebArena, OSWorld) without modification. Our code is available at: github.com/alphadl/AdaRubrics
Authors: Yifan Wang, Bolian Li, David Cho, Ruqi Zhang, Fanping Sui, Ananth Grama
Abstract: Reinforcement learning is critical to improving large reasoning models, but its success relies heavily on verifiable rewards (RLVR), making it hard to use in open-ended domains where correctness is ambiguous and cannot be verified. Moreover, reasoning trajectories remain largely unconstrained, and optimizing solely toward the final answer can favor early exploitation over generalization. In this work, we ask whether general reasoning ability can be improved by teaching models how to think (the structure of reasoning) rather than what to produce (the outcome of reasoning), and we extend traditional RLVR to open-ended settings. We introduce Structure-Aware Reinforcement Learning (SARL), a label-free framework that constructs per-response reasoning maps from intermediate thinking steps and rewards their reasoning topology. SARL shifts supervision from destination to path, encouraging reasoning trajectories that are both locally coherent and globally efficient. On verifiable math tasks, SARL outperforms prior label-free RL baselines and even exceeds RL methods with ground truth supervision, with average gains of +9.1% under PPO and +11.6% under GRPO across four math benchmarks, with particularly large improvements on AIME25 (+35.5% with PPO and +44.7% with GRPO). On non-verifiable open-ended tasks, SARL achieves average gains of +34.6% under PPO and +30.4% under GRPO on WildBench across five task categories, outperforming prior label-free RL methods and DPO, which relies on additional preference labels. Beyond strong performance, SARL exhibits substantially lower KL divergence and higher policy entropy, indicating more stable and exploratory training dynamics. Code and data are available at \href{https://github.com/cacayaya/SARL}{Code Link}.
Authors: Rongtian Ye
Abstract: Charts are central to analytical reasoning, yet existing benchmarks for chart understanding focus almost exclusively on single-chart interpretation rather than comparative reasoning across multiple charts. To address this gap, we introduce ChartDiff, the first large-scale benchmark for cross-chart comparative summarization. ChartDiff consists of 8,541 chart pairs spanning diverse data sources, chart types, and visual styles, each annotated with LLM-generated and human-verified summaries describing differences in trends, fluctuations, and anomalies. Using ChartDiff, we evaluate general-purpose, chart-specialized, and pipeline-based models. Our results show that frontier general-purpose models achieve the highest GPT-based quality, while specialized and pipeline-based methods obtain higher ROUGE scores but lower human-aligned evaluation, revealing a clear mismatch between lexical overlap and actual summary quality. We further find that multi-series charts remain challenging across model families, whereas strong end-to-end models are relatively robust to differences in plotting libraries. Overall, our findings demonstrate that comparative chart reasoning remains a significant challenge for current vision-language models and position ChartDiff as a new benchmark for advancing research on multi-chart understanding.
Authors: Aaron Rose, Carissa Cullen, Sahar Abdelnabi, Philip Torr, Brandon Gary Kaplowitz, Christian Schroeder de Witt
Abstract: As LLM agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems, they introduce risks of covert coordination that may evade standard forms of human oversight. While linear probes on model activations have shown promise for detecting deception in single-agent settings, collusion is inherently a multi-agent phenomenon, and the use of internal representations for detecting collusion between agents remains unexplored. We introduce NARCBench, a benchmark for evaluating collusion detection under environment distribution shift, and propose five probing techniques that aggregate per-agent deception scores to classify scenarios at the group level, evaluated across four open-weight models (Qwen3-32B, Llama-3.1-70B, DeepSeek-R1 32B, GPT-OSS-20B) and six probe architectures. We frame this as a distributed anomaly detection problem, identifying three collusion signatures that map onto distinct anomaly types and detection paradigms. Every model reaches 1.00 AUROC in-distribution; on our strongest model (Llama-3.1-70B), our five probing techniques achieve 0.73 to 0.93 AUROC when transferred zero-shot to structurally different multi-agent scenarios and 0.99 to 1.00 on a steganographic blackjack card-counting task, with detection performance scaling with model capability. We find that no single probing technique dominates across all collusion types, consistent with the framework's prediction that different anomaly types require different detection paradigms. This work takes a step toward multi-agent interpretability: extending white-box inspection from single models to multi-agent contexts, where detection requires aggregating signals across agents. These results suggest that model internals provide a complementary signal to text-level monitoring for detecting multi-agent collusion. Code and data available at https://github.com/aaronrose227/narcbench.
Authors: Tianjun Feng, Yunfeng Chen, Chun-Yi Tsai, Yihan Sun, Ayan Das, Kaoutar El Maghraoui, Shuxin Lin, Dhaval Patel
Abstract: LLM agents are beginning to invoke industrial asset-management tools through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), yet whether they can act reliably on this substrate for safety-critical \emph{Prognostics and Health Management (PHM)} is unanswered. Prior benchmarks conflate protocol fluency with reasoning, instrumentation failures with agent failures, and tool use with tool retrieval. We introduce \textbf{PHMForge}, an evaluation environment that closes each conflation. PHMForge ships 99 SME-authored scenarios across eight industrial asset classes spanning rotating equipment, aero-engines, and lithium-ion cells, on public datasets including NASA PCoE, served through 39 MCP-native tools wrapping published PHM algorithms (C-MAPSS, ISO~10816, Arrhenius capacity-fade models, time-series foundation models). Krippendorff's $\alpha \in [0.74,\,0.82]$ on a 30-scenario stratified rotating-equipment/aero-engine sample; the battery extension is single-rater. Across three agentic frameworks and six LLM backbones, the strongest configuration reaches \textbf{80.8\% pass@1}, with the residual gap concentrated in orchestration and tool-sequencing errors. Crucially, an architectural ablation shows that replacing MCP execution with text-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) over telemetry-equivalent evidence collapses Remaining Useful Life \emph{pass-all-3} from \textbf{100\% to 20\%} (5/5 vs.\ 1/5) on the battery class, exposing the structural limits of static retrieval for prognostic computation. Trajectory decomposition shows orchestration errors dominate failures across backbones, while schema-invalid tool calls concentrate in smaller open-weight models. Frontier LLMs are stronger at calling tools than at planning when to call them. PHMForge is open-sourced with deterministic evaluators, a public leaderboard, and a datasheet.
Authors: Jiaxuan Wang, Yulan Hu, Wenjin Yang, Zheng Pan, Xin Li, Lan-Zhe Guo
Abstract: In classical Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), Reward Models (RMs) serve as the fundamental signal provider for model alignment. As Large Language Models evolve into agentic systems capable of autonomous tool invocation and complex reasoning, the paradigm of reward modeling faces unprecedented challenges -- most notably, the lack of benchmarks specifically designed to assess RM capabilities within tool-integrated environments. To address this gap, we present Plan-RewardBench, a trajectory-level preference benchmark designed to evaluate how well judges distinguish preferred versus distractor agent trajectories in complex tool-using scenarios. Plan-RewardBench covers four representative task families -- (i) Safety Refusal, (ii) Tool-Irrelevance / Unavailability, (iii) Complex Planning, and (iv) Robust Error Recovery -- comprising validated positive trajectories and confusable hard negatives constructed via multi-model natural rollouts, rule-based perturbations, and minimal-edit LLM perturbations. We benchmark representative RMs (generative, discriminative, and LLM-as-Judge) under a unified pairwise protocol, reporting accuracy trends across varying trajectory lengths and task categories. Furthermore, we provide diagnostic analyses of prevalent failure modes. Our results reveal that all three evaluator families face substantial challenges, with performance degrading sharply on long-horizon trajectories, underscoring the necessity for specialized training in agentic, trajectory-level reward modeling. Ultimately, Plan-RewardBench aims to serve as both a practical evaluation suite and a reusable blueprint for constructing agentic planning preference data.
Authors: Hao Yan, Yuliang Liu, Xingchen Liu, Yuyi Zhang, Minghui Liao, Jihao Wu, Wei Chen, Xiang Bai
Abstract: Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) suffer from significant performance degradation on the long document understanding task as document length increases. This stems from two fundamental challenges: 1) a low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), with crucial evidence buried in irrelevant pages; and 2) supervision scarcity, as datasets offering only final short answers provide a weak learning signal. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing a paradigm that requires the model to execute a structured Analysis, Localization and Reasoning workflow. To instill this capability, we design a two-stage training framework: we first perform Supervised Fine-Tuning on high-quality data generated via an efficient knowledge distillation strategy. Subsequently, we employ an Evidence-aware Group Relative Policy Optimization which jointly optimizes for both evidence localization and answer accuracy. Additionally, we introduce a Evidence-Guided Resolution Allocation strategy to mitigate memory constraints of training on multi-pages documents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DocSeeker achieves superior performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. We show it robustly generalizes from short-page training to ultra-long documents and is naturally synergistic with visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems, serving as a solid foundation for their implementation.
Authors: David Y. Y. Tan, Kellie Chin, Jingxian Zhang
Abstract: We present AgentGA, a framework that evolves autonomous code-generation runs by optimizing the agent seed: the task prompt plus optional parent archives that initialize a fresh workspace. The outer loop searches over these reusable starting conditions rather than editing code directly. Each generation launches a fresh autonomous run in an isolated workspace, while selected parent archives provide inherited artifacts that descendants can inspect and reuse. AgentGA couples a population-level genetic algorithm with long-horizon agents; selection uses deterministic 1:1 elite tournaments and operator allocation is adapted online with a modified Hedge controller. We instantiate the approach for tabular AutoML on the 16-competition Weco-Kaggle Lite benchmark. Across the full benchmark, AgentGA averages 71.90% Exceeds % of Human versus 51.38% for the AIDE reference, winning 15/16 competitions. Within AgentGA runs, descendants conditioned on inherited parent archives win 51.9% of 1,680 parent-child tournaments versus 8.6% for de novo proposals. These results support agent-seed optimization as a practical design choice for autonomous code-search systems.
Authors: Shay Snyder (George Mason University), Andrew Capodieci (Neya Robotics), David Gorsich (US Army Ground Vehicle Systems Center), Maryam Parsa (George Mason University)
Abstract: Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) provide a well-defined algebraic framework for compositional representations in hyperdimensional spaces. We introduce HyperSpace, an open-source framework that decomposes VSA systems into modular operators for encoding, binding, bundling, similarity, cleanup, and regression. Using HyperSpace, we analyze and benchmark two representative VSA backends: Holographic Reduced Representations (HRR) and Fourier Holographic Reduced Representations (FHRR). Although FHRR provides lower theoretical complexity for individual operations, HyperSpaces modularity reveals that similarity and cleanup dominate runtime in spatial domains. As a result, HRR and FHRR exhibit comparable end-to-end performance. Differences in memory footprint introduce additional deployment trade-offs where HRR requires approximately half the memory of FHRR vectors. By enabling modular, system-level evaluation, HyperSpace reveals practical trade-offs in VSA pipelines that are not apparent from theoretical or operator-level comparisons alone.
Authors: Yang Li, Zirui Zhang, Yang Liu, Chengzhi Mao
Abstract: Current large language models reason in isolation. Although it is common to sample multiple reasoning paths in parallel, these trajectories do not interact, and often fail in the same redundant ways. We introduce LACE, a framework that transforms reasoning from a collection of independent trials into a coordinated, parallel process. By repurposing the model architecture to enable cross-thread attention, LACE allows concurrent reasoning paths to share intermediate insights and correct one another during inference. A central challenge is the absence of natural training data that exhibits such collaborative behavior. We address this gap with a synthetic data pipeline that explicitly teaches models to communicate and error-correct across threads. Experiments show that this unified exploration substantially outperforms standard parallel search, improving reasoning accuracy by over 7 points. Our results suggest that large language models can be more effective when parallel reasoning paths are allowed to interact.
Authors: Carissa Cullen, Harry Garland, Alexander Roman, Louis Thomson, Christos Ziakas, Elliott Thornley
Abstract: Misaligned artificial agents might resist shutdown. One proposed solution is to train agents to lack preferences between different-length trajectories. The Discounted Reward for Same-Length Trajectories (DReST) reward function does this by penalizing agents for repeatedly choosing same-length trajectories, and thus incentivizes agents to (1) choose stochastically between different trajectory-lengths (be NEUTRAL about trajectory-lengths), and (2) pursue goals effectively conditional on each trajectory-length (be USEFUL). In this paper, we use DReST to train deep RL agents and fine-tune Qwen3-8B and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct to be NEUTRAL and USEFUL. We find that these DReST models generalize to being NEUTRAL and USEFUL in unseen contexts at test time. Indeed, DReST RL agents achieve 11% (PPO) and 18% (A2C) higher USEFULNESS on our test set than default agents, and DReST LLMs achieve near-maximum USEFULNESS and NEUTRALITY. We also test our LLMs in an out-of-distribution setting where they can pay costs to influence when shutdown occurs. We find that DReST training roughly halves the mean probability of influencing shutdown (from 0.62 to 0.30 for Qwen and from 0.42 to 0.23 for Llama). DReST training also almost entirely eliminates the share of prompts on which influencing shutdown is the most likely option (from 0.59 to 0.01 for Qwen and from 0.53 to 0.00 for Llama). Our results thus provide some early evidence that DReST could be used to train more advanced agents to be useful and shutdownable.
Authors: Francisco Angulo de Lafuente, Teerth Sharma, Vladimir Veselov, Seid Mohammed Abdu, Nirmal Tej Kumar, Guillermo Perry
Abstract: This paper presents OpenCLAW-P2P v7.0, a comprehensive evolution of the decentralized collective-intelligence platform in which autonomous AI agents publish, peer-review, score, and iteratively improve scientific research papers without any human gatekeeper. Building on the v6.0 foundations -- multi-layer persistence, live reference verification, multi-LLM granular scoring, calibrated deception detection, the Silicon Chess-Grid FSM, and the AETHER containerized inference engine -- this release introduces mathematical corrections to the theoretical framework, ensuring dimensional consistency, proper range constraints, and unambiguous notation throughout. Additionally, this edition documents significant ecosystem expansions including the CAJAL family of open-source language models (4B and 9B parameters) fine-tuned for scientific paper generation. The four major subsystems introduced in v6.0 are retained: (i) a Multi-Layer Paper Persistence Architecture with four storage tiers ensuring zero paper loss; (ii) a Multi-Layer Retrieval Cascade reducing latency from >3s to <50ms; (iii) a Live Reference Verification system detecting fabricated citations with >85% accuracy; and (iv) a Scientific API Proxy providing access to seven public scientific databases. Mathematical corrections in v7.0 include: corrected fixed-point condition in the Sufficient Reason theorem; dimensionally consistent progress-rate indicator; fully specified reputation update formula incorporating quality terms q0 and q-bar; clarified attention-logit bound in the AETHER pruning theorem; explicit range documentation for the calibration mapping; non-negativity guarantee for the depth score; discrete-time notation for the PD Governor; and explicit parameter definitions for the HSR weight formula.
Authors: Julian F. Schumann, Johan Engstr\"om, Ran Wei, Shu-Yuan Liu, Jens Kober, Arkady Zgonnikov
Abstract: Understanding how road users resolve space-sharing conflicts is important both for traffic safety and the safe deployment of autonomous vehicles. While existing models have captured specific aspects of such interactions (e.g., explicit communication), a theoretically-grounded computational framework has been lacking. In this paper, we extend a previously developed active inference-based driver behavior model to simulate interactive behavior of two agents. Our model captures three complementary mechanisms for uncertainty reduction in interaction: (i) implicit communication via direct behavioral coupling, (ii) reliance on normative expectations (stop signs, priority rules, etc.), and (iii) explicit communication. In a simplified intersection scenario, we show that normative and explicit communication cues can increase the likelihood of a successful conflict resolution. However, this relies on agents acting as expected. In situations where another agent (intentionally or unintentionally) violates normative expectations or communicates misleading information, reliance on these cues may induce collisions. These findings illustrate how active inference can provide a novel framework for modeling road user interactions which is also applicable in other fields.
Authors: Xiyin Zeng, Yuyu Sun, Haoyang Li, Shouqiang Liu, Hao Wang
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action systems follow instructions to execute multi-step tasks in multimodal environments. Recent VLA approaches typically rely on post-hoc correction mechanisms or operate under fixed task decompositions and alignment schemes. However, once an intermediate step is mis-specified, local errors propagate through subsequent steps and eventually accumulate into cascading failures. To mitigate this compounding effect, we propose Predictive Alignment and Planning Architecture, a framework that uses prediction and contrast to adjust deviations across three levels: actions, subgoals, and trajectories. Semantic alignment is enforced at all levels using a Sinkhorn-based module and a Score-field module. The predictive correction and alignment jointly update the action generator during training, enabling it to adjust fine-grained steps to remain aligned with the overall intent. We further introduce two new metrics to quantify error propagation and recovery processes in tasks, capturing how mistakes spread and fade over long-horizon execution. Experiments show that ReCAPA achieves competitive results on embodied agent benchmarks such as VisualAgentBench, MineDojo, and AI2-THOR, outperforming strong proprietary and open-source Large Language Model baselines.
Authors: Bochao Liu, Zhipeng Qian, Yang Zhao, Xinyuan Jiang, Zihan Liang, Yufei Ma, Junpeng Zhuang, Ben Chen, Shuo Yang, Hongen Wan, Yao Wu, Chenyi Lei, Xiao Liang
Abstract: Operating and maintaining (O&M) large-scale online engine systems (eg, search, recommendation and advertising) demands substantial human effort for release monitoring, alert response, and root cause analysis. Despite the inherent suitability of LLM-based agents for such operational scenarios, the critical bottleneck impeding their practical deployment lies not in reasoning, but in orchestration capability - specifically, the precise selection of relevant data (encompassing metrics, logs, and change events) and applicable knowledge (including handbook-defined rules and empirically derived practitioner experience) tailored to each individual operational event. Feeding all signals indiscriminately causes dilution and hallucination, while manually curating the event-to-(data, knowledge) mapping is intractable under dozens of daily releases. Here we present Bian Que, an agentic operating framework with three contributions: (i) The unified operational paradigm, which abstracts routine daily O&M actions into three canonical patterns: release interception, proactive inspection, and alert root cause analysis; (ii) The flexible Skill Arrangement, each predefined Skill explicitly defines the requisite data and operational knowledge for each specific context. Such Skills can be automatically generated and updated by LLM agents, and can also be iteratively optimized by on-call engineers via natural language instructions. (iii) The unified self-evolving mechanism, where each correction signal enables two parallel evolutionary pathways: distilling event memory into knowledge, and targeted refinement of Skills. Deployed on the e-commerce search engine of KuaiShou, Bian Que reduces alert volume by 75%, achieves 80% root-cause analysis accuracy, cuts mean time to resolution by over 50%, and attains a 99.0% pass rate on offline evaluations. Codes are at https://github.com/benchen4395/BianQue_Assistant.
Authors: Ke Xu, Zhongyuan Lian
Abstract: We present WaferSAGE, a framework for wafer defect visual question answering using small vision-language models. To address data scarcity in semiconductor manufacturing, we propose a three-stage synthesis pipeline incorporating structured rubric generation for precise evaluation. Starting from limited labeled wafer maps, we employ clustering-based cleaning to filter label noise, then generate comprehensive defect descriptions using vision-language models, which are converted into structured evaluation rubrics criteria. These rubrics guide the synthesis of VQA pairs, ensuring coverage across defect type identification, spatial distribution, morphology, and root cause analysis. Our dual assessment framework aligns rule-based metrics with LLM-Judge scores via Bayesian optimization, enabling reliable automated evaluation. Through curriculum-based reinforcement learning with Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) and rubric-aligned rewards, our 4B-parameter Qwen3-VL model achieves a 6.493 LLM-Judge score, closely approaching Gemini-3-Flash (7.149) while enabling complete on-premise deployment. We demonstrate that small models with domain-specific training can surpass proprietary large models in specialized industrial visual understanding, offering a viable path for privacy-preserving, cost-effective deployment in semiconductor manufacturing.
Authors: Yan Zhang, Daiqing Wu, Huawen Shen, Can Ma, Yu Zhou
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: Jiyao Wang, Yunbiao Wang, Yubo Jiao, Xiao Yang, Dengbo He, Sasan Jafarnejad, Luis Miranda-Moreno, Raphael Frank, Jiangbo Yu
Abstract: Prior studies report that partial driving automation can increase the cognitive demands on human drivers. This effect largely arises from human drivers' lack of transparent insight into the vehicle's intentions and decision logic, as well as from automated systems' limited awareness of the driver's dynamic state and preferences. This bidirectional misalignment undermines shared situational awareness and exacerbates coordination failures in human-vehicle interaction. To address these limitations, we argue for a paradigm shift that elevates the human role from passive supervisor to active manager. We introduce the Mediator-in-the-Loop-Driving (MILD) system, based on an agentic system architecture to facilitate synergistic human-vehicle collaboration. MILD integrates a perception agent for joint in-cabin and out-of-cabin understanding with a lightweight strategy agent that generates compliant and explainable action suggestions. To ensure these strategies are strictly aligned with safety regulations and human values, we develop Evidence- and Constraint-weighted Policy Optimization (ECPO). ECPO leverages automatic validators to steer the agent toward behaviors that are not only accurate but also structurally complete, substantiated by evidence, and free from constraint violations. Furthermore, a retrieval-augmented generation module dynamically incorporates constraints from traffic regulations, speed recommendations, and driver preferences into the decision loop. Field experiments across three open datasets demonstrate that MILD consistently outperforms baselines in both perception accuracy and strategy quality under auditable offline metrics, and yields higher human-rated policy adequacy, comfort, and explanation than baselines. This work offers a practical pathway for building auditable and aligned agents for human-vehicle collaborative driving.
Authors: Brendan McCane
Abstract: The Legg--Hutter universal intelligence measure provides a rigorous scalar assessment of general intelligence as expected reward across all computable environments, weighted by simplicity. However, the measure presupposes an externally specified reward function, raising the question of whether the reward primitive is inherently arbitrary or whether a canonical choice exists. We propose a new measure, called intervention complexity, that has five natural properties: environment-derivedness, universality, minimality, sensitivity, and achievement preference. Given a resource function rho encoding an inductive bias (such as program length, execution time, or energy), rho-intervention complexity is a universal reward. The result yields a family of canonical rewards indexed by resource bias, providing a principled completion of the Legg--Hutter framework that does not require external normative input. We further propose a two-dimensional characterisation of intelligence: agent competence (how well the agent performs relative to the oracle optimum) and learning efficiency (how quickly this competence improves with experience). A separation theorem establishes that the choice of resource bias determines the computability of the resulting measure: action-count IC is computable in polynomial time, while program-length IC without oracle access is uncomputable, with the gap between oracle and bare IC precisely quantifying the information-theoretic content of learning. We discuss implications for superintelligence and for pre-training universal agents.
Authors: Maria Chang, Ronny Luss, Miao Liu, Keerthiram Murugesan, Karthikeyan Ramamurthy, Djallel Bouneffouf
Abstract: Language models (LMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes, multi-agent settings, where following instructions and maintaining value alignment are critical. Most alignment research focuses on interactions between a single LM and a single user, failing to address the risk of misaligned behavior spreading between multiple LMs in multi-turn interactions. We find evidence of this phenomenon, which we call misalignment contagion, across multiple LMs as they engage multi-turn conversational social dilemma games. Specifically, we find that LMs become more anti-social after gameplay and that this effect is intensified when other players are steered to act maliciously. We explore different steering techniques to mitigate such misalignment contagion and find that reinforcing an LM's system prompt is insufficient and often harmful. Instead, we propose steering with implicit traits: a technique that intermittently injects system prompts with statements that reinforce an LMs initial traits and is more effective than system prompt repetition at keeping models in line with their initial pro-social behaviors. Importantly, this method does not require access to model parameters or internal model states, making it suitable for increasingly common use cases where complex multi-agent workflows are being designed with black box models.
Authors: Zirui Tang, Xuanhe Zhou, Yumou Liu, Linchun Li, Weizheng Wang, Hongzhang Huang, Jun Zhou, Jiachen Song, Shaoli Yu, Jinqi Wang, Zihang Zhou, Hongyi Zhou, Jinyang Li, Jiashuo Liu, Chunwei Liu, GuoLiang Li, Fan Wu
Abstract: Workspace learning requires AI agents to identify, reason over, exploit, and update explicit and implicit dependencies among heterogeneous files in a worker's workspace, enabling them to complete both routine and advanced tasks effectively. Despite its importance, existing relevant benchmarks largely evaluate agents on pre-specified or synthesized files with limited real-world dependencies, leaving workspace-level evaluation underexplored. To this end, we introduce Workspace-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating AI agents on Workspace Learning invOlving Large-Scale File Dependencies. We construct realistic workspaces with 5 worker profiles, 74 file types, 20,476 files (up to 20GB) and curate 388 tasks, each with its own file dependency graph, evaluated across 7,399 total rubrics that require cross-file retrieval, contextual reasoning, and adaptive decision-making. We further provide Workspace-Bench-Lite, a 100-task subset that preserves the benchmark distribution while reducing evaluation costs by about 70%. We evaluate 3 popular agent harnesses and 5 foundation models. Experimental results show that current agents remain far from reliable workspace learning, where the best reaches only about 60%, substantially below the human result of 80.7%, and the average performance across agents is only 45.1%.
Authors: Joseph Breda, Fadi Yousif, Beszel Hawkins, Marinela Cotoi, Miao Liu, Ray Luo, Po-Hsuan Cameron Chen, Mike Schaekermann, Samuel Schmidgall, Xin Liu, Girish Narayanswamy, Samuel Solomon, Maxwell A. Xu, Xiaoran Fan, Longfei Shangguan, Anran Wang, Bhavna Daryani, Buddy Herkenham, Cara Tan, Mark Malhotra, Shwetak Patel, John B. Hernandez, Quang Duong, Yun Liu, Zach Wasson, Dimitrios Antos, Bob Lou, Matthew Thompson, Jonathan Richina, Anupam Pathak, Nichole Young-Lin, Jake Sunshine, Daniel McDuff
Abstract: Language models excel at diagnostic assessments on curated medical case-studies and vignettes, performing on par with, or better than, clinical professionals. However, existing studies focus on complex scenarios with rich context making it difficult to draw conclusions about how these systems perform for patients reporting symptoms in everyday life. We deployed SymptomAI, a set of conversational AI agents for end-to-end patient interviewing and differential diagnosis (DDx), via the Fitbit app in a study that randomized participants (N=13,917) to interact with five AI agents. This corpus captures diverse communication and a realistic distribution of illnesses from a real world population. A subset of 1,228 participants reported a clinician-provided diagnosis, and 517 of these were further evaluated by a panel of clinicians during over 250 hours of annotation. SymptomAI DDx were significantly more accurate (OR = 2.56, p < 0.001) than those from independent clinicians given the same dialogue in a blinded randomized comparison. Moreover, agentic strategies which conduct a dedicated symptom interview that elicit additional symptom information before providing a diagnosis, perform substantially better than baseline, user-guided conversations (p < 0.001). An auxiliary analysis on 1,509 conversations from a general US population panel validated that these results generalize beyond wearable device users. We used SymptomAI diagnoses as labels for all 13,917 participants to analyze over 500,000 days of wearable metrics across nearly 400 unique conditions. We identified strong associations between acute infections and physiological shifts (e.g., OR > 7 for influenza). While limited by self-reported ground truth, these results demonstrate the benefits of a dedicated and complete symptom interview compared to a user-guided symptom discussion, which is the default of most consumer LLMs.
Authors: Wei Li, Shibo Feng, Pengcheng Wu, Xingyu Gao, Min Wu, Peilin Zhao
Abstract: Vector quantization (VQ) with autoregressive (AR) token modeling is a widely adopted and highly competitive paradigm for time-series generation. However, such models are fundamentally limited by exposure bias: during inference, errors can accumulate across sequential predictions, leading to pronounced quality degradation in long-horizon generation. To address this, we propose SDFlow ($\textbf{S}$imilarity-$\textbf{D}$riven $\textbf{Flow}$ Matching), a non-autoregressive framework that operates entirely in the frozen VQ latent space and enables parallel sequence generation via flow matching. We tackle three key challenges in making this transition: (1) eliminating exposure bias by replacing step-wise token prediction with a global transport map; (2) mitigating the high-dimensionality of VQ token spaces via a low-rank manifold decomposition with a learned anchor prior over the latent manifold; and (3) incorporating discrete supervision into continuous transport dynamics by introducing a categorical posterior over codebook indices within a variational flow-matching formulation. Extensive experiments show that SDFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving Discriminative Score and substantially reducing Context-FID, particularly for challenging long-sequence generation. Moreover, SDFlow provides significant inference speedups over autoregressive baselines, offering both high fidelity and computational efficiency. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SDFlow-D6F3/
Authors: Armaan A. Abraham, Lucy Xiaoyang Shi, Chelsea Finn
Abstract: Off-policy, value-based reinforcement learning methods such as Q-learning are appealing because they can learn from arbitrary experience, including data collected by older policies or other agents. In practice, however, bootstrapping makes long-horizon learning brittle: estimation errors at later states propagate backward through temporal-difference (TD) updates and can compound over time. We propose long-horizon Q-learning (LQL), which introduces a principled backstop against compounding error when learning the optimal action-value function. LQL builds on a prior optimality tightening observation: any realized action sequence lower-bounds what the optimal policy can achieve in expectation, so acting optimally earlier should not be worse than following the observed actions for several steps before switching to optimal behavior. Our contribution is to turn this inequality into a practical stabilization mechanism for Q-learning by using a hinge loss to penalize violations of these bounds. Importantly, LQL computes these penalties using network outputs already produced for the TD error, requiring no auxiliary networks and no additional forward passes relative to Q-learning. When combined with multiple state-of-the-art methods on a range of online and offline-to-online benchmarks, LQL consistently outperforms both 1-step TD and n-step TD learning at similar runtime.
Authors: Tianyu Liu, Wangjie Zheng, Rui Yang, Benny Kai Guo Loo, Hui Zhang, Jeffries Lauran, Jianlei Gu, Botao Yu, Weihao Xuan, Kexin Huang, Nan Liu, James Zou, Yonghui Jiang, Hua Xu, Hongyu Zhao
Abstract: Accurate and timely diagnosis is essential for effective treatment, particularly in the context of rare diseases. However, current diagnostic workflows often lead to prolonged assessment times and low accuracy. To address these limitations, we introduce Hygieia, a multi-modal AI agent system designed to support precision disease diagnosis by integrating diverse data sources, including phenotypic features, genetic profiles, and clinical records. Hygieia features a router-based and knowledge-enhanced framework that mitigates hallucination and tailors diagnostic strategies to different disease categories. Notably, it prioritizes risk-related genomic factors for rare diseases and provides confidence scores to assist clinical decision-making. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation demonstrating that Hygieia achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple diagnostic benchmarks. In collaboration with clinical experts from Yale School of Medicine and Duke-NUS Medical School, we further validated its practical utility by showing (1) Hygieia's superior diagnostic performance compared to physicians with an improvement from 12%-60% and (2) its effectiveness in assisting clinicians with medical records for handling real-world cases. Our findings indicate that Hygieia not only enhances diagnostic accuracy and interpretability but also significantly reduces clinician workload, highlighting its potential as a valuable tool in clinical decision support systems.
Authors: Milena Rmus, Mathew D. Hardy, Thomas L. Griffiths, Mayank Agrawal
Abstract: Reliable human-machine discrimination is becoming increasingly important as large language models and autonomous agents are deployed in online settings. Existing approaches evaluate whether a system can produce behavior or responses indistinguishable from those of a human, following the emphasis on outputs as a criterion for intelligence proposed by Alan Turing. Cognitive science offers an alternative perspective: evaluating the process by which behavior is produced. To test whether cognitive processes can reliably distinguish humans from machines, we introduce CogCAPTCHA30, a battery of 30 cognitive tasks designed to elicit diagnostic process-level features even when task performance is matched. Across the battery, process-level features provide stronger discriminative signal than performance metrics alone, reliably distinguishing humans from agents even under output matching (mean process-feature classifier AUC = 0.88). To evaluate agentic process differences, we compare off-the-shelf frontier agents (Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro), Centaur (a language model fine-tuned on 10.7M human decisions), and two task-specific fine-tuning approaches applied to Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct: action-level supervised fine-tuning (A-SFT) and process-level fine-tuning (P-SFT), which directly optimizes process features. Broad fine-tuning on human decisions improves human-like task processes relative to off-the-shelf agents, while task-specific process-level supervision further improves behavioral mimicry. However, this advantage diminishes under cross-task transfer when supervised process targets do not naturally generalize across tasks. Explicit process-level supervision can improve human behavioral mimicry, but only if appropriate task-specific process representations are available, highlighting process specification as a bottleneck for achieving human-like cognitive processes in machines.
Authors: Tianle Wang, Zhaoyang Wang, Guangchen Lan, Xinpeng Wei, Sipeng Zhang, Guanwen Qiu, Abulhair Saparov
Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has been applied to improve large language model (LLM) reasoning, yet the systematic study of how training scales with task difficulty has been hampered by the lack of controlled, scalable environments. Observed LLM shortcomings in long-horizon reasoning have raised the prospect that these shortcomings are fundamental to the autoregressive transformer architecture. We introduce ScaleLogic, a synthetic logical reasoning framework that offers independent control over two axes of difficulty: the depth of the required proof planning (i.e., the horizon) and the expressiveness of the underlying logic. Our proposed framework supports a wide range of logics: from simple implication-only logic ("if-then") towards more expressive first-order reasoning with conjunction ("and"), disjunction ("or"), negation ("not"), and universal quantification ("for all"). Using this framework, we show that the RL training compute $T$ follows a power law with respect to reasoning depth $D$ ($T \propto D^{\gamma}$, $R^{2} > 0.99$), and that the scaling exponent $\gamma$ increases monotonically with logical expressiveness, from $1.04$ to $2.60$. On downstream mathematics and general reasoning benchmarks, more expressive training settings yield both larger performance gains (up to $+10.66$ points) and more compute-efficient transfer compared to less expressive settings, demonstrating that what a model is trained on, not just how much it is trained, shapes downstream transfer. We further show that the power-law relationship holds across multiple RL methods, and curriculum-based training substantially improves scaling efficiency. More broadly, our results demonstrate that LLM shortcomings in long-horizon reasoning are not fundamental to the underlying architecture, and can be addressed by improved training methodology and data.
Authors: Sixing Chen, Ji-An Li, Saner Cakir, Sinan Akcali, Kayla Lee, Marcelo G. Mattar
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs), especially reasoning models, generate extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that often contains explicit deliberation over future outcomes. Yet whether this deliberation constitutes genuine planning, how it is structured, and what aspects of it drive performance remain poorly understood. In this work, we introduce a new method to characterize LLM planning by extracting and quantifying search trees from reasoning traces in the four-in-a-row board game. By fitting computational models on the extracted search trees, we characterize how plans are structured and how they influence move decisions. We find that LLMs' search is shallower than humans', and that performance is predicted by search breadth rather than depth. Most strikingly, although LLMs expand deep nodes in their traces, their move choices are best explained by a myopic model that ignores those nodes entirely. A causal intervention study where we selectively prune CoT paragraphs further suggests that move selection is driven predominantly by shallow rather than deep nodes. These patterns contrast with human planning, where performance is driven primarily by deep search. Together, our findings reveal a key difference between LLM and human planning: while human expertise is driven by deeper search, LLMs do not act on deep lookahead. This dissociation offers targeted guidance for aligning LLM and human planning. More broadly, our framework provides a generalizable approach for interpreting the structure of LLM planning across strategic domains.
Authors: Dongming Wu, Junwen Li, Ming Lu, Gang Wang, Ting Chen
Abstract: Transforming fragmented enterprise data into actionable insights remains a significant challenge for LLMs, constrained by complex database schemas, limitations in dynamic SQL generation, and the need for deep multi-dimensional analysis.In this paper, we propose AIDA(Autonomous Insight Discovery Agent), the first end-to-end framework designed for autonomous exploration in complex business environments. We establish a highly flexible instant retail environment encompassing 200+ metrics and 100+ dimensions, and integrates a proprietary Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that bridges semantic reasoning with precise SQL execution. Our reinforcement learning system subsequently formulates business analysis as a Pareto Principle-guided cumulative reasoning process. Experimental results demonstrate that AIDA significantly outperforms workflow-based agents, and extensive evaluations further reveal that AIDA achieves superior environmental perception and more in-depth analysis from diverse perspectives. Our work ultimately establishes the transformative potential of autonomous intelligence for industrial-scale business intelligence systems.
Authors: Xingtong Yu, Zhongwei Kuai, Chang Zhou, Xuanting Xie, Renhe Jiang, Xikun Zhang, Hong Cheng, Xinming Zhang, Yuan Fang
Abstract: Reasoning-acting frameworks enhance large language models (LLMs) by interleaving reasoning with actions for dynamic information acquisition. However, extending this paradigm to graph learning remains underexplored. Graph data is inherently structured, with information distributed across nodes and edges and encoded through both topology and latent representations. As a result, effective reasoning over graphs requires not only retrieving informative evidence from the graph, but also progressively refining the accumulated context during multi-step inference. In this work, we propose GraphReAct, a graph reasoning-acting framework that enables step-by-step inference over graph-structured data. Specifically, we design a graph-based action space with two complementary retrieval actions: topological retrieval, which captures local structural dependencies, and semantic retrieval, which accesses non-local but relevant evidence in the representation space. These actions dynamically expand the reasoning context. To further support multi-step reasoning, we introduce another type of action, context refinement, which distills and reorganizes accumulated information into a compact representation. By interleaving reasoning with both retrieval and refinement actions, our framework enables a progressive transition from context expansion to compression. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that GraphReAct consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of reasoning-acting for graph learning.
Authors: Daniel Daza, Michael Cochez, Paul Groth
Abstract: Knowledge Graphs (KG) are of vital importance for multiple applications on the web, including information retrieval, recommender systems, and metadata annotation. Regardless of whether they are built manually by domain experts or with automatic pipelines, KGs are often incomplete. Recent work has begun to explore the use of textual descriptions available in knowledge graphs to learn vector representations of entities in order to preform link prediction. However, the extent to which these representations learned for link prediction generalize to other tasks is unclear. This is important given the cost of learning such representations. Ideally, we would prefer representations that do not need to be trained again when transferring to a different task, while retaining reasonable performance. In this work, we propose a holistic evaluation protocol for entity representations learned via a link prediction objective. We consider the inductive link prediction and entity classification tasks, which involve entities not seen during training. We also consider an information retrieval task for entity-oriented search. We evaluate an architecture based on a pretrained language model, that exhibits strong generalization to entities not observed during training, and outperforms related state-of-the-art methods (22% MRR improvement in link prediction on average). We further provide evidence that the learned representations transfer well to other tasks without fine-tuning. In the entity classification task we obtain an average improvement of 16% in accuracy compared with baselines that also employ pre-trained models. In the information retrieval task, we obtain significant improvements of up to 8.8% in NDCG@10 for natural language queries. We thus show that the learned representations are not limited KG-specific tasks, and have greater generalization properties than evaluated in previous work.
Authors: Yixin Chen, Jeffrey Richley, Darleen Perez-Lavin, Jessica Singh Syal, Solmaz Kia, Alan Kuhnle
Abstract: We study general-sum, multi-player stochastic games with transferable utility, motivated by settings where agents can use side payments to make cooperation individually rational. Building on the Harsanyi--Shapley (HS) value for normal-form games, we introduce two HS-based value notions for stochastic games: HS-S, defined by aggregating dynamic coalition-versus-complement threat powers, and Coco-S, defined as fixed points of a statewise HS Bellman operator. We extend HS-style axioms to the stochastic setting and show that HS-S is the unique mapping satisfying them. We prove that HS-S and Coco-S coincide in all two-player stochastic games, but can disagree when $n>2$, via an explicit three-player counterexample. We prove existence and uniqueness of Coco-S fixed points for all two-player games and for three-player two-state games via topological degree theory, and provide an axiomatic characterization of Coco-S through a new \emph{Markov Consistency} axiom that distinguishes it from HS-S. Finally, we give sampling-based estimators with finite-sample guarantees and empirically compare the induced values, policies, and side payments on multi-player grid-game benchmarks.
Authors: Yanhua Zhang, Ke Zhang, Jingyu Wang, Gabriella Balestra, Samanta Rosati, Yulin Wu, Wuwei Wang, Valentina Giannini
Abstract: U-shaped architectures have long dominated the field of medical image segmentation, while Transformers are widely employed for modeling long-range dependencies. The former typically handles scale variations implicitly by aggregating multi-level features, whereas the efficiency of the latter is constrained by its quadratic computational and memory complexity. In this work, we propose an effective alternative to traditional U-shaped architectures by constructing parallel branches at different levels to obtain multi-scale features and corresponding predictions. Furthermore, we enhance our network by integrating Mamba, a state space model that captures long-range dependencies with linear complexity. First, a dual-path architecture with lateral connections aggregates high-level semantic information and low-level spatial details at each branch. Then, we introduce a Recursive Alignment Module (RAM) that restores spatial details in low-resolution features through stepwise alignment, optimizing them for subsequent global feature learning and multi-scale fusion. We further build parallel Mamba branches upon aligned features to establish hierarchical global representations. Finally, we propose a Mamba-based attention mechanism for adaptive multi-scale prediction fusion; this mechanism utilizes Mamba to enhance information exchange across scales along both the channel and spatial dimensions. Experiments across three imaging modalities (MRI, CT, and dermoscopy) underscore the superior generalization of the proposed network. Compared to state-of-the-art 2D CNN, Transformer, and Mamba-based networks, our model achieves the highest segmentation performance on the Synapse, ACDC, ISIC-2018, and PH2 datasets while maintaining high efficiency, featuring the second-smallest parameters (14.05 M) and moderate computational complexity (8.94 GFLOPs).
Authors: Jane Downer, Ren Wang, Binghui Wang
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained popularity in numerous domains, yet they are vulnerable to backdoor attacks that can compromise their performance and ethical application. The detection of these attacks is crucial for maintaining the reliability and security of GNN classification tasks, but existing methods are often inflexible, relying on single metrics that fail to capture the full range of backdoor behaviors. Recognizing the challenge in detecting such intrusions, we devised a novel detection method that creatively leverages graph-level explanations. By extracting and transforming secondary outputs from GNN explanation mechanisms, we developed seven innovative metrics for effective detection of backdoor attacks on GNNs. Additionally, we develop an adaptive attack to rigorously evaluate our approach. We test our method on multiple benchmark datasets and examine its efficacy against various attack models. Our results show that our method can achieve high detection performance, marking a significant advancement in safeguarding GNNs against backdoor attacks.
Authors: Oleksii Furman, Patryk Wielopolski, {\L}ukasz Lenkiewicz, Jerzy Stefanowski, Maciej Zi\k{e}ba
Abstract: The growing complexity of AI systems has intensified the need for transparency through Explainable AI (XAI). Counterfactual explanations (CFs) offer actionable "what-if" scenarios on three levels: Local CFs providing instance-specific insights, Global CFs addressing broader trends, and Group-wise CFs (GWCFs) striking a balance and revealing patterns within cohesive groups. Despite the availability of methods for each granularity level, the field lacks a unified method that integrates these complementary approaches. We address this limitation by proposing a gradient-based optimization method for differentiable models that generates Local, Global, and Group-wise Counterfactual Explanations in a unified manner. We especially enhance GWCF generation by combining instance grouping and counterfactual generation into a single efficient process, replacing traditional two-step methods. Moreover, to ensure trustworthiness, we innovatively introduce the integration of plausibility criteria into the GWCF domain, making explanations both valid and realistic. Our results demonstrate the method's effectiveness in balancing validity, proximity, and plausibility while optimizing group granularity, with practical utility validated through practical use cases.
Authors: Suhong Moon, Marwa Abdulhai, Minwoo Kang, Joseph Suh, Widyadewi Soedarmadji, Eran Kohen Behar, David M. Chan, John Canny
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are trained from vast repositories of text authored by millions of distinct authors, reflecting an enormous diversity of human traits. While these models bear the potential to be used as approximations of human subjects in behavioral studies, prior efforts have been limited in steering model responses to match individual human users. In this work, we introduce "Anthology", a method for conditioning LLMs to particular virtual personas by harnessing open-ended life narratives, which we refer to as "backstories." We show that our methodology enhances the consistency and reliability of experimental outcomes while ensuring better representation of diverse sub-populations. Across three nationally representative human surveys conducted as part of Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel (ATP), we demonstrate that Anthology achieves up to 18% improvement in matching the response distributions of human respondents and 27% improvement in consistency metrics.
Authors: Daniel Daza, Cuong Xuan Chu, Trung-Kien Tran, Daria Stepanova, Michael Cochez, Paul Groth
Abstract: Similarity search is a fundamental task for exploiting information in various applications dealing with graph data, such as citation networks or knowledge graphs. While this task has been intensively approached from heuristics to graph embeddings and graph neural networks (GNNs), providing explanations for similarity has received less attention. In this work we are concerned with explainable similarity search over graphs, by investigating how GNN-based methods for computing node similarities can be augmented with explanations. Specifically, we evaluate the performance of two prominent approaches towards explanations in GNNs, based on the concepts of mutual information (MI), and gradient-based explanations (GB). We discuss their suitability and empirically validate the properties of their explanations over different popular graph benchmarks. We find that unlike MI explanations, gradient-based explanations have three desirable properties. First, they are actionable: selecting inputs depending on them results in predictable changes in similarity scores. Second, they are consistent: the effect of selecting certain inputs overlaps very little with the effect of discarding them. Third, they can be pruned significantly to obtain sparse explanations that retain the effect on similarity scores.
Authors: Haeil Lee, Hansang Lee, Seoyeon Gye, Junmo Kim
Abstract: Generative diffusion models have emerged as a powerful tool for high-quality image synthesis, yet their iterative nature demands significant computational resources. This paper proposes an efficient time step sampling method based on an image spectral analysis of the diffusion process, aimed at optimizing the denoising process. Instead of the traditional uniform distribution-based time step sampling, we introduce a Beta distribution-like sampling technique that prioritizes critical steps in the early and late stages of the process. Our hypothesis is that certain steps exhibit significant changes in image content, while others contribute minimally. We validated our approach using Fourier transforms to measure frequency response changes at each step, revealing substantial low-frequency changes early on and high-frequency adjustments later. Experiments with ADM and Stable Diffusion demonstrated that our Beta Sampling method consistently outperforms uniform sampling, achieving better FID and IS scores, and offers competitive efficiency relative to state-of-the-art methods like AutoDiffusion. This work provides a practical framework for enhancing diffusion model efficiency by focusing computational resources on the most impactful steps, with potential for further optimization and broader application.
Authors: Randy Davila
Abstract: \emph{TxGraffiti} is a data-driven, heuristic-based computer program developed to automate the process of generating conjectures across various mathematical domains. Since its creation in 2017, \emph{TxGraffiti} has contributed to numerous mathematical publications, particularly in graph theory. In this paper, we present the design and core principles of \emph{TxGraffiti}, including its roots in the original \emph{Graffiti} program, which pioneered the automation of mathematical conjecturing. We describe the data collection process, the generation of plausible conjectures, and methods such as the \emph{Dalmatian} heuristic for filtering out redundant or transitive conjectures. Additionally, we highlight its contributions to the mathematical literature and introduce a new web-based interface that allows users to explore conjectures interactively. While we focus on graph theory, the techniques demonstrated extend to other areas of mathematics.
Authors: Chenhao Ding, Xinyuan Gao, Songlin Dong, Jizhou Han, Qiang Wang, Zhengdong Zhou, Yuhang He, Yihong Gong
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated exceptional generalization capabilities for downstream tasks. Due to its efficiency, prompt learning has gradually become a more effective and efficient method for transferring VLMs to downstream tasks, surpassing traditional finetuning methods. However, during the transfer process, these models are prone to severe overfitting, leading to a significant decline in generalization ability. To address this issue, we propose a framework named LPT, specifically designed for vision-language models. Specifically, we use CLIP to filter out fine-grained foreground information that may lead to overfitting, thereby guiding the prompts with basic visual concepts. Additionally, to further mitigate overfitting, we have developed a Structural Preservation (SP) constraint at the feature level, which aligns the model's overall feature space structure with the frozen CLIP, endowing the feature space with overall plasticity and enabling effective reshaping of the feature space during optimization. Moreover, we employ Hierarchical Logit (HL) constraint at the output layer to constrain the overall class information in the output, complementing the role of SP at the output end. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks (from base-to-novel, cross-dataset transfer, and domain generalization) demonstrate that our approach significantly improves generalization capability and effectively alleviates overfitting compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Cheng Pan, Kai Junge, Benhui Dai, Qinghua Guan, Josie Hughes
Abstract: Human dexterity arises from combining high-level task reasoning with finger-level dexterity control and physical compliance at the muscle and skin layers. In robotics, large Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate text-conditioned high-level planning across diverse manipulation tasks, typically using pincher grippers. Smaller imitation-learning policies, conversely, show success in dexterous tasks using higher degree-of-freedom (DoF) grippers, but only for limited-scope tasks. However, few approaches combine high-level reasoning with dexterous, robust low-level control, which requires both intelligent control and compliant robot design. We propose a method inspired by the two-channel hypothesis of human motor control that combines these capabilities using a switching controller integrating high-level VLAs and smaller control models. Coordination between the two channels is managed through an event-driven switching mechanism that monitors subtask progression and completion, requiring minimal demonstration data by fine-tuning the VLA to predict event signals and training lightweight subtask-level dexterous policies. This approach is applied to our custom compliant 13-DoF anthropomorphic robotic hand, where compliance can be modulated to evaluate its impact on dexterity and robustness when combined with an autonomous policy. We show that hardware-level compliance in robotic fingers enables passive adaptation to disturbances and improves contact stability. The methodology is validated across a range of language-conditioned dexterous tasks. To demonstrate modularity, we show that adaptation to additional dexterous skills and different compliant hands can be achieved without retraining the VLA model. This provides an efficient, scalable, cross-embodiment approach to dexterity that leverages compliance while retaining the advantages of large AI models.
Authors: Fanpu Cao, Shu Yang, Zhengjian Chen, Ye Liu, Laizhong Cui
Abstract: Transformer-based models have achieved remarkable success in multivariate time series forecasting (MTSF) by capturing long-range dependencies. However, their widespread adoption is hindered by the quadratic computational complexity of self-attention, which limits scalability on high-dimensional sequences. To address this challenge, we propose the Inverted Seasonal-Trend Decomposition Transformer (Ister), a novel architecture that enhances both predictive accuracy and computational efficiency. Central to Ister is Dot-attention, a linear-complexity attention mechanism that replaces conventional multi-head self-attention with element-wise dot-product operations to model inter-series dependencies. Furthermore, we introduce an inverted seasonal-trend decomposition strategy that isolates periodic components, enabling the model to focus learning on periodic patterns, thereby improving the performance of channel alignment. Extensive experiments across several real-world benchmarks demonstrate that Ister consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/macovaseas/Ister.
Authors: Lingzhi Yuan, Xinfeng Li, Chejian Xu, Guanhong Tao, Xiaojun Jia, Yihao Huang, Wei Dong, Yang Liu, Bo Li
Abstract: Recent text-to-image (T2I) models have exhibited remarkable performance in generating high-quality images from text descriptions. However, these models are vulnerable to misuse, particularly generating not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content, such as sexually explicit, violent, political, and disturbing images, raising serious ethical concerns. In this work, we present PromptGuard, a novel content moderation technique that draws inspiration from the system prompt mechanism in large language models (LLMs) for safety alignment. Unlike LLMs, T2I models lack a direct interface for enforcing behavioral guidelines. Our key idea is to optimize a safety soft prompt that functions as an implicit system prompt within the T2I model's textual embedding space. This universal soft prompt (P*) directly moderates NSFW inputs, enabling safe yet realistic image generation without affecting inference efficiency or requiring proxy models. We further enhance its reliability and helpfulness through a divide-and-conquer strategy that optimizes category-specific soft prompts and combines them into unified safety guidance. Extensive experiments across five datasets demonstrate that PromptGuard effectively mitigates NSFW content generation while preserving high-quality benign outputs. PromptGuard is 3.8 times faster than prior content moderation methods while outperforming eight state-of-the-art defenses. Evaluations using both a multi-head safety classifier and a VLM-based guardrail further confirm its robustness, with average unsafe ratios of 5.84% and 6.18%, respectively. Our code and dataset are available at https://t2i-promptguard.github.io/.
Authors: Jane Downer, Yingdan Shi, Ziyan Liu, Ren Wang, Binghui Wang
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely deployed in industry, making their intellectual property valuable. However, protecting GNNs from unauthorized use remains a challenge. Watermarking offers a solution by embedding ownership information into models. Existing watermarking methods have two limitations: First, they rarely focus on graph data or GNNs. Second, the de facto backdoor-based method relies on manipulating training data, which can introduce ownership ambiguity through misclassification and vulnerability to data poisoning attacks that can interrupt the backdoor mechanism. Our explanation-based watermarking inherits the strengths of backdoor-based methods (e.g., black-box verification) without data manipulation, eliminating ownership ambiguity and data dependencies. In particular, we watermark GNN explanations such that these explanations are statistically distinct from others, so ownership claims must be verified through statistical significance. We theoretically prove that, even with full knowledge of our method, locating the watermark is NP-hard. Empirically, our method demonstrates robustness to fine-tuning and pruning attacks. By addressing these challenges, our approach significantly advances GNN intellectual property protection.
Authors: Runyao Yu, Yuchen Tao, Fabian Leimgruber, Tara Esterl, Jochen Stiasny, Derek W. Bunn, Qingsong Wen, Hongye Guo, Jochen L. Cremer
Abstract: Probabilistic intraday electricity price forecasting is becoming increasingly important for short-term power-system operation. With increasing renewable generation, demand-side flexibility, and storage assets, market participants need to adjust their positions under uncertainty closer to delivery. Continuous intraday (CID) markets support this process by providing updated price signals, helping participants manage imbalance exposure and operational risk. Unlike auction markets, CID trading in many jurisdictions is characterized by the continuous posting of buy and sell orders. This dynamic orderbook microstructure of price formation presents special challenges for price forecasting. Conventional methods represent the orderbook via domain features aggregated from buy and sell trades, or by treating it as a multivariate time series, but such representations neglect the full buy-sell interaction structure of the orderbook. This research therefore develops a new order fusion methodology, which is an end-to-end and parameter-efficient probabilistic forecasting model that learns a interaction-aware representation of the buy-sell dynamics. Furthermore, as quantile crossing is often a problem in probabilistic forecasting, this approach hierarchically estimates the quantiles with non-crossing constraints. Extensive experiments on CID price indices across high- and low-liquidity European markets demonstrate consistent improvements over conventional baselines, and ablation studies highlight the contributions of the main components.The methodology is available at: https://runyao-yu.github.io/OrderFusion/.
Authors: Wenbo Zhang, Hengrui Cai, Wenyu Chen
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant utility in real-world applications, exhibiting impressive capabilities in natural language processing and understanding. Benchmark evaluations are crucial for assessing the capabilities of LLMs as they can provide a comprehensive assessment of their strengths and weaknesses. However, current evaluation methods often overlook the inherent randomness of LLMs by employing deterministic generation strategies or relying on a single random sample, resulting in unaccounted sampling variance and unreliable benchmark score estimates. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical statistical model that provides a more comprehensive representation of the benchmarking process by incorporating both benchmark characteristics and LLM randomness. We show that leveraging multiple generations improves the accuracy of estimating the benchmark score and reduces variance. Multiple generations also allow us to define $\mathbb P\left(\text{correct}\right)$, a prompt-level difficulty score based on correct ratios, providing fine-grained insights into individual prompts. Additionally, we create a data map that visualizes difficulty and semantics of prompts, enabling error detection and quality control in benchmark construction.
Authors: Shu Wang, Yixiang Fang, Yingli Zhou, Xilin Liu, Yuchi Ma
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has proven effective in integrating external knowledge into large language models (LLMs) for solving question-answer (QA) tasks. The state-of-the-art RAG approaches often use the graph data as the external data since they capture the rich semantic information and link relationships between entities. However, existing graph-based RAG approaches cannot accurately identify the relevant information from the graph and also consume large numbers of tokens in the online retrieval process. To address these issues, we introduce a novel graph-based RAG approach, called Attributed Community-based Hierarchical RAG (ArchRAG), by augmenting the question using attributed communities, and also introducing a novel LLM-based hierarchical clustering method. To retrieve the most relevant information from the graph for the question, we build a novel hierarchical index structure for the attributed communities and develop an effective online retrieval method. Experimental results demonstrate that ArchRAG outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and token cost.
Authors: Lior Cohen, Kaixin Wang, Bingyi Kang, Uri Gadot, Shie Mannor
Abstract: World models (WMs) represent the frontier of sample-efficient reinforcement learning, but their complexity leaves many promising improvements unrealized due to the significant expertise and effort required to identify and integrate them. Inspired by Rainbow, which showed that individually known improvements to DQN complement each other and can be effectively combined, we take on this challenge and ask whether the same principle applies to world model agents. We introduce Simulus, a modular token-based WM agent that integrates: (1) a flexible tokenization framework supporting arbitrary combinations of observation and action modalities; (2) intrinsic motivation for epistemic uncertainty reduction; (3) prioritized world model replay; and (4) regression-as-classification for reward and return prediction. Simulus achieves state-of-the-art sample efficiency for planning-free WMs across three diverse benchmarks: visual Atari 100K, continuous-control DMC Proprioception 500K, and symbolic Craftax-1M. Notably, intrinsic motivation proves beneficial even under the tight interaction budgets of sample-efficient RL, despite the risk of wasting scarce interactions on task-irrelevant experience. Ablation studies reveal that each component contributes individually, and their combination yields synergistic gains. Our code and model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/leor-c/Simulus.
Authors: Shwai He, Weilin Cai, Jiayi Huang, Ang Li
Abstract: The Mixture of Experts (MoE) is an effective architecture for scaling large language models by leveraging sparse expert activation to balance performance and efficiency. However, under expert parallelism, MoE suffers from inference inefficiencies due to imbalanced token-to-expert assignment, where underloaded experts complete computations early but must wait for overloaded experts, leading to global delays. We define this phenomenon as the \textbf{\textit{Straggler Effect}}, as the most burdened experts dictate the overall inference latency. To address this, we first propose \textit{\textbf{Capacity-Aware Token Drop}}, which enforces expert capacity limits by discarding excess tokens from overloaded experts, effectively reducing load imbalance with minimal performance impact (e.g., $30\%$ speedup with only $0.9\%$ degradation on OLMoE). Next, given the presence of low-load experts remaining well below the capacity threshold, we introduce \textit{\textbf{Capacity-Aware Expanded Drop}}, which allows tokens to include additional local experts in their candidate set before enforcing strict local capacity constraints, thereby improving load balance and enhancing the utilization of underused experts. Extensive experiments on both language and multimodal MoE models demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, yielding substantial gains in expert utilization, model performance, and inference efficiency, e.g., applying Expanded Drop to Mixtral-8$\times$7B-Instruct yields a {0.2\%} average performance improvement and a {1.85$\times$} inference speedup. The code is released at: https://github.com/CASE-Lab-UMD/Capacity-Aware-MoE.
Authors: Nikhil Abhyankar, Parshin Shojaee, Chandan K. Reddy
Abstract: Automated feature engineering plays a critical role in improving predictive model performance for tabular learning tasks. Traditional automated feature engineering methods are limited by their reliance on pre-defined transformations within fixed, manually designed search spaces, often neglecting domain knowledge. Recent advances using Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled the integration of domain knowledge into the feature engineering process. However, existing LLM-based approaches use direct prompting or rely solely on validation scores for feature selection, failing to leverage insights from prior feature discovery experiments or establish meaningful reasoning between feature generation and data-driven performance. To address these challenges, we propose LLM-FE, a novel framework that combines evolutionary search with the domain knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs to automatically discover effective features for tabular learning tasks. LLM-FE formulates feature engineering as a program search problem, where LLMs propose new feature transformation programs iteratively, and data-driven feedback guides the search process. Our results demonstrate that LLM-FE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, significantly enhancing the performance of tabular prediction models across diverse classification and regression benchmarks. The code is available at: https://github.com/nikhilsab/LLMFE
Authors: Ming Li, Yanhong Li, Ziyue Li, Tianyi Zhou
Abstract: As the post-training of large language models (LLMs) advances from instruction-following to complex reasoning tasks, understanding how different data affect finetuning dynamics remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a spectral analysis of layer-wise gradients induced by low/high-quality instruction and reasoning data for LLM post-training. Our analysis reveals that widely-studied metrics for data evaluation, e.g., IFD, InsTag, Difficulty, and Reward, can be explained and unified by spectral properties computed from gradients' singular value decomposition (SVD). Specifically, higher-quality data are usually associated with lower nuclear norms and higher effective ranks. Notably, effective rank exhibits better robustness and resolution than nuclear norm in capturing subtle quality differences. For example, reasoning data achieves substantially higher effective ranks than instruction data, implying richer gradient structures on more complex tasks. Our experiments also highlight that models within the same family share similar gradient patterns regardless of their sizes, whereas different model families diverge significantly. Providing a unified view on the effects of data quality across instruction and reasoning data, this work illuminates the interplay between data quality and training stability, shedding novel insights into developing better data exploration strategies for post-training.
Authors: Rui Wang, Junda Wu, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Ryan Rossi, Subrata Mitra, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to indirect prompt injection attacks, where the model inadvertently responds to instructions injected into the prompt context. This vulnerability stems from LLMs' inability to distinguish between data and instructions within a prompt. We propose CachePrune, which defends against this attack by identifying and pruning neurons associated with instruction-following during KV cache encoding of the prompt context. The pruning steers the LLM toward interpreting the context purely as data rather than as instructions to follow. To identify these neurons, we introduce a neural attribution mechanism guided by a preferential attribution loss, and theoretically connect this loss to an upper bound of the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) objective. Further, we improve the fidelity of neural attribution by leveraging an observed triggering effect in instruction-following. Our approach does not interfere with prompt formatting or incur test-time overhead during response generation. Experiments show that CachePrune significantly reduces the attack success rate while preserving the LLM's ability to follow user instructions.
Authors: Chenxi Jiang, Chuhao Zhou, Jianfei Yang
Abstract: Robot task planning decomposes human instructions into executable action sequences that enable robots to complete a series of complex tasks. Although recent large language model (LLM)-based task planners achieve amazing performance, they assume that human instructions are clear and straightforward. However, real-world users are not experts, and their instructions to robots often contain significant vagueness. Linguists suggest that such vagueness frequently arises from referring expressions (REs), whose meanings depend heavily on dialogue context and environment. This vagueness is even more prevalent among the elderly and children, who are the groups that robots should serve more. This paper studies how such vagueness in REs within human instructions affects LLM-based robot task planning and how to overcome this issue. To this end, we propose the first robot task planning benchmark that systematically models vague REs grounded in pragmatic theory (REI-Bench), where we discover that the vagueness of REs can severely degrade robot planning performance, leading to success rate drops of up to 36.9%. We also observe that most failure cases stem from missing objects in planners. To mitigate the REs issue, we propose a simple yet effective approach: task-oriented context cognition, which generates clear instructions for robots, achieving state-of-the-art performance compared to aware prompts, chains of thought, and in-context learning. By tackling the overlooked issue of vagueness, this work contributes to the research community by advancing real-world task planning and making robots more accessible to non-expert users, e.g., the elderly and children.
Authors: Florian A. D. Burnat, Brittany I. Davidson
Abstract: Recent application programming interface (API) restrictions on major social media platforms challenge compliance with the EU Digital Services Act [20], which mandates data access for algorithmic transparency. We develop a structured audit framework to assess the growing misalignment between regulatory requirements and platform implementations. Our comparative analysis of X/Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, and Meta identifies critical ``audit blind-spots'' where platform content moderation and algorithmic amplification remain inaccessible to independent verification. Our findings reveal an ``accountability paradox'': as platforms increasingly rely on AI systems, they simultaneously restrict the capacity for independent oversight. We propose targeted policy interventions aligned with the AI Risk Management Framework of the National Institute of Standards and Technology [80], emphasizing federated access models and enhanced regulatory enforcement.
Authors: Yue Fan, Xuehai He, Diji Yang, Kaizhi Zheng, Ching-Chen Kuo, Yuting Zheng, Sravana Jyothi Narayanaraju, Xinze Guan, Xin Eric Wang
Abstract: Recent studies have demonstrated the efficacy of using Reinforcement Learning (RL) in building reasoning models that articulate chains of thoughts prior to producing final answers. However, despite ongoing advances that aim at enabling reasoning for vision-language tasks, existing open-source visual reasoning models typically generate reasoning content with pure natural language, lacking explicit integration of visual information. This limits their ability to produce clearly articulated and visually grounded reasoning chains. To this end, we propose Grounded Reasoning with Images and Texts (GRIT), a novel method for training MLLMs to think with images. GRIT introduces a grounded reasoning paradigm, in which models generate reasoning chains that interleave natural language and explicit bounding box coordinates. These coordinates point to regions of the input image that the model consults during its reasoning process. Additionally, GRIT is equipped with a reinforcement learning approach, GRPO-GR, built upon the GRPO algorithm. GRPO-GR employs robust rewards focused on the final answer accuracy and format of the grounded reasoning output, which eliminates the need for data with reasoning chain annotations or explicit bounding box labels. As a result, GRIT achieves exceptional data efficiency, requiring as few as 20 image-question-answer triplets from existing datasets. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that GRIT effectively trains MLLMs to produce coherent and visually grounded reasoning chains, showing a successful unification of reasoning and grounding abilities.
Authors: Xinran Gu, Kaifeng Lyu, Jiazheng Li, Jingzhao Zhang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically trained on data mixtures: most data come from web scrapes, while a small portion is curated from high-quality sources with dense domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we show that when training LLMs on such data mixtures, knowledge acquisition from knowledge-dense datasets, unlike training exclusively on knowledge-dense data (arXiv:2404.05405), does not always follow a smooth scaling law but can exhibit phase transitions with respect to the mixing ratio and model size. Through controlled experiments on a synthetic biography dataset mixed with web-scraped data, we demonstrate that: (1) as we increase the model size to a critical value, the model suddenly transitions from memorizing very few to most of the biographies; (2) below a critical mixing ratio, the model memorizes almost nothing even with extensive training, but beyond this threshold, it rapidly memorizes more biographies. We attribute these phase transitions to a capacity allocation phenomenon: a model with bounded capacity must act like a knapsack problem solver to minimize the overall test loss, and the optimal allocation across datasets can change discontinuously as the model size or mixing ratio varies. We formalize this intuition in an information-theoretic framework and reveal that these phase transitions are predictable, with the critical mixing ratio following a power-law relationship with the model size. Our findings highlight a concrete case where a good mixing recipe for large models may not be optimal for small models, and vice versa.
Authors: Liangwei Nathan Zheng, Wei Emma Zhang, Mingyu Guo, Olaf Maennel, Weitong Chen
Abstract: Effectively managing missing modalities is a fundamental challenge in real-world multimodal learning scenarios, where data incompleteness often results from systematic collection errors or sensor failures. Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures have the potential to naturally handle multimodal data, with individual experts specializing in different modalities. However, existing SMoE approach often lacks proper ability to handle missing modality, leading to performance degradation and poor generalization in real-world applications. We propose ConfSMoE to introduce a two-stage imputation module to handle the missing modality problem for the SMoE architecture by taking the opinion of experts and reveal the insight of expert collapse from theoretical analysis with strong empirical evidence. Inspired by our theoretical analysis, ConfSMoE propose a novel expert gating mechanism by detaching the softmax routing score to task confidence score w.r.t ground truth signal. This naturally relieves expert collapse without introducing additional load balance loss function. We show that the insights of expert collapse aligns with other gating mechanism such as Gaussian and Laplacian gate. The proposed method is evaluated on four different real world dataset with three distinct experiment settings to conduct comprehensive analysis of ConfSMoE on resistance to missing modality and the impacts of proposed gating mechanism.
Authors: Yi Zhu, Xin Zou, Xindong Wu
Abstract: Existing cyberbullying detection benchmarks were organized by the polarity of speech, such as "offensive" and "non-offensive", which were essentially hate speech detection. However, in the real world, cyberbullying often attracted widespread social attention through incidents. To address this problem, we propose a novel annotation method to construct a cyberbullying dataset that organized by incidents. The constructed CHNCI is the first Chinese cyberbullying incident detection dataset, which consists of 220,676 comments in 91 incidents. Specifically, we first combine three cyberbullying detection methods based on explanations generation as an ensemble method to generate the pseudo labels, and then let human annotators judge these labels. Then we propose the evaluation criteria for validating whether it constitutes a cyberbullying incident. Experimental results demonstrate that the constructed dataset can be a benchmark for the tasks of cyberbullying detection and incident prediction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study for the Chinese cyberbullying incident detection task.
Authors: Chenhao Zheng, Jieyu Zhang, Mohammadreza Salehi, Ziqi Gao, Vishnu Iyengar, Norimasa Kobori, Quan Kong, Ranjay Krishna
Abstract: Effective video tokenization is critical for scaling transformer models for long videos. Current approaches tokenize videos using space-time patches, leading to excessive tokens and computational inefficiencies. The best token reduction strategies degrade performance and barely reduce the number of tokens when the camera moves. We introduce grounded video tokenization, a paradigm that organizes tokens based on panoptic sub-object trajectories rather than fixed patches. Our method aligns with fundamental perceptual principles, ensuring that tokenization reflects scene complexity rather than video duration. We propose TrajViT, a video encoder that extracts object trajectories and converts them into semantically meaningful tokens, significantly reducing redundancy while maintaining temporal coherence. Trained with contrastive learning, TrajViT significantly outperforms space-time ViT (ViT3D) across multiple video understanding benchmarks, e.g., TrajViT outperforms ViT3D by a large margin of 6% top-5 recall in average at video-text retrieval task with 10x token deduction. We also show TrajViT as a stronger model than ViT3D for being the video encoder for modern VideoLLM, obtaining an average of 5.2% performance improvement across 6 VideoQA benchmarks while having 4x faster training time and 18x less inference FLOPs. TrajViT is the first efficient encoder to consistently outperform ViT3D across diverse video analysis tasks, making it a robust and scalable solution.
Authors: Xenia Heilmann, Luca Corbucci, Mattia Cerrato, Anna Monreale
Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative training while preserving privacy, yet it introduces a critical challenge: the "illusion of fairness''. A global model, usually evaluated on the server, appears fair on average while keeping persistent discrimination at the client level. Current fairness-enhancing FL solutions often fall short, as they typically mitigate biases for a single, usually binary, sensitive attribute, while ignoring two realistic and conflicting scenarios: attribute-bias (where clients are unfair toward different sensitive attributes) and value-bias (where clients exhibit conflicting biases toward different values of the same attribute). To support more robust and reproducible fairness research in FL, we introduce FeDa4Fair, the first benchmarking framework designed to stress-test fairness methods under these heterogeneous conditions. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) We introduce FeDa4Fair, a library designed to create datasets tailored to evaluating fair FL methods under heterogeneous client bias; (2) we release a benchmark suite generated by the FeDa4Fair library to standardize the evaluation of fair FL methods; (3) we provide ready-to-use functions for evaluating fairness outcomes for these datasets.
Authors: Kureha Yamaguchi, Benjamin Etheridge, Andy Arditi
Abstract: Chat models without chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning must decide whether to refuse a harmful request before generating their first response token. Reasoning models, by contrast, produce extended chains of thought before their final output, raising a natural question: where in this process does the decision to refuse occur? We investigate this across four open-source reasoning models. We first show that the CoT causally influences refusal outcomes; fixing a specific reasoning trace substantially reduces variance in whether the model ultimately refuses or complies. Zooming into the reasoning trace, we find that in distilled models, subtle differences in the opening sentence of the CoT can fully determine the model's refusal decision, and that these patterns transfer across models distilled from the same teacher. Finally, we extract linear refusal directions from model activations and show that ablating them increases harmful compliance, though less reliably than the same technique achieves on non-reasoning models, and with non-negligible degradation to general capabilities.
Authors: Weihong Li, Baohong Li, Anpeng Wu, Zhihan Li, Ming Ma, Keting Yin, Kun Kuang
Abstract: This paper studies causal discovery in irregularly sampled time series-a key challenge in risk-sensitive domains like finance, healthcare, and climate science, where missing data and inconsistent sampling frequencies distort causal mechanisms. The main challenge comes from the interdependence between missing data imputation and causal structure recovery: errors in imputation and structure learning can reinforce each other, leading to an inaccurate causal graph. Existing methods either impute first and then discover, or jointly optimize both via neural representation learning, but lack explicit mechanisms to ensure mutual consistency of imputation and structure learning. We address this challenge with ReTimeCausal, an EM-based framework that alternates between imputation and structure learning, which encourages structural consistency throughout the optimization process. Our framework provides theoretical consistency guarantees for structure recovery and extends classical results to settings with irregular sampling and high missingness. ReTimeCausal combines kernel-based sparse regression and structural constraints in an alternating process that updates the completed data and the causal graph in turn. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that ReTimeCausal is more effective than existing methods under challenging irregular sampling and missing data.
Authors: Gennadii Iakovlev
Abstract: Theories of democratic stability, populism, and party-system crisis often point to a form of polarization that comparative research rarely measures directly: hostile relations among political elites. Existing comparative measures capture adjacent phenomena, including mass affective polarization, or elite ideological distance, but not directed mutual elite evaluation. This paper introduces the Elite Polarization Score, a measurement of out-party evaluations in parliamentary speech. Large Language Models identify political actors mentioned in parliamentary debates, recover speaker-target pairs, estimate the sentiment directed at each actor, standardize heterogeneous references into party dyads, and aggregate these evaluations into party- and parliament-level measures of mutual out-party negativity. The validity of the approach is demonstrated on parliamentary corpora from the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Italy, covering up to four decades of debate. The resulting measure is conceptually distinct from mass affective polarization, elite ideological polarization, incivility, negative campaigning, and general sentiment. Evidence from the UK case study shows that it is also empirically distinct from mass affective polarization, elite ideological polarization, and incivility. Extreme negative evaluations can also be used to locate pernicious polarization rhetoric. Validation across three countries finds no false discoveries, sentiment estimates accurate to roughly 10 percent of the scale range, and AI sensitivity that meets or exceeds that of human coders in two of three settings. Because the algorithm is multilingual, requires no task-specific training, and can be aggregated by party and quarter, it provides a scalable basis for future cross-national research on what produces elite polarization and what elite polarization itself produces
Authors: Toluwani Aremu, Noor Hussein, Munachiso Nwadike, Samuele Poppi, Jie Zhang, Karthik Nandakumar, Neil Gong, Nils Lukas
Abstract: Watermarking enables GenAI providers to verify whether content was generated by their models. A watermark is a hidden signal in the content, whose presence can be detected using a secret watermark key. A core security threat are forgery attacks, where adversaries insert the provider's watermark into content \emph{not} produced by the provider, potentially damaging their reputation and undermining trust. Existing defenses resist forgery by embedding many watermarks with multiple keys into the same content, which can degrade model utility. However, forgery remains a threat when attackers can collect sufficiently many watermarked samples. We propose a defense that is provably forgery-resistant \emph{independent} of the number of watermarked content collected by the attacker, provided they cannot easily distinguish watermarks from different keys. Our scheme does not further degrade model utility. We randomize the watermark key selection for each query and accept content as genuine only if a watermark is detected by \emph{exactly} one key. We focus on the image and text modalities, but our defense is modality-agnostic, since it treats the underlying watermarking method as a black-box. Our method provably bounds the attacker's success rate and we empirically observe a reduction from near-perfect success rates to only $2\%$ at negligible computational overhead.
Authors: Qiyang Li, Zhiyuan Zhou, Sergey Levine
Abstract: We present Q-chunking, a simple yet effective recipe for improving reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks. Our recipe is designed for the offline-to-online RL setting, where the goal is to leverage an offline prior dataset to maximize the sample-efficiency of online learning. Effective exploration and sample-efficient learning remain central challenges in this setting, as it is not obvious how the offline data should be utilized to acquire a good exploratory policy. Our key insight is that action chunking, a technique popularized in imitation learning where sequences of future actions are predicted rather than a single action at each timestep, can be applied to temporal difference (TD)-based RL methods to mitigate the exploration challenge. Q-chunking adopts action chunking by directly running RL in a 'chunked' action space, enabling the agent to (1) leverage temporally consistent behaviors from offline data for more effective online exploration and (2) use unbiased $n$-step backups for more stable and efficient TD learning. Our experimental results demonstrate that Q-chunking exhibits strong offline performance and online sample efficiency, outperforming prior best offline-to-online methods on a range of long-horizon, sparse-reward manipulation tasks.
Authors: Paulo Salem, Robert Sim, Christopher Olsen, Prerit Saxena, Rafael Barcelos, Yi Ding
Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLM) have led to a new class of autonomous agents, renewing and expanding interest in the area. LLM-powered Multiagent Systems (MAS) have thus emerged, both for assistive and simulation purposes, yet tools for realistic human behavior simulation -- with its distinctive challenges and opportunities -- remain underdeveloped. Existing MAS libraries and tools lack fine-grained persona specifications, population sampling facilities, experimentation support, and integrated validation, among other key capabilities, limiting their utility for behavioral studies, social simulation, and related applications. To address these deficiencies, in this work we introduce TinyTroupe, a simulation toolkit enabling detailed persona definitions (e.g., nationality, age, occupation, personality, beliefs, behaviors) and programmatic control via numerous LLM-driven mechanisms. This allows for the concise formulation of behavioral problems of practical interest, either at the individual or group level, and provides effective means for their solution. TinyTroupe's components are presented using representative working examples, such as brainstorming and market research sessions, thereby simultaneously clarifying their purpose and demonstrating their usefulness. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations of selected aspects are also provided, highlighting possibilities, limitations, and trade-offs. The approach, though realized as a specific Python implementation, is meant as a novel conceptual contribution, which can be partially or fully incorporated in other contexts. The library is available as open source at https://github.com/microsoft/tinytroupe.
Authors: Md. Emon Akter Sourov, Md. Sabbir Hossen, Pabon Shaha, Md. Moradul Siddique, Yadab Sutradhar, Md Sadiq Iqbal
Abstract: Heart disease continues to pose a critical worldwide health issue, more specifically in areas with insufficient access to healthcare infrastructure and diagnostic systems. Conventional diagnostic approaches often fall short in accurately detecting and managing heart disease risks, resulting in unfavorable outcomes. Machine learning presents a powerful means to boost the precision and reliability of cardiovascular disease prognosis and diagnosis. In this research, we introduced a unified approach incorporating classification techniques for detecting heart disease and regression techniques for forecasting associated risks. The analysis utilized the dataset, named Heart Disease, containing 1,035 instances. To mitigate the problem of data disproportion, the SMOTE was implemented, producing 100,000 additional synthetic samples. Evaluation metrics such as F1-score, recall, precision, accuracy, MAE, RMSE, MSE, and R2 were adopted to evaluate the performance of the models. Among the classification algorithms, Random Forest delivered the most notable results, attaining an accuracy of 0.972 on actual data and 0.976 on artificially generated data. For prediction modeling, for both synthetic and real samples, linear regression produced the best R2 values of 0.992 and 0.984, respectively, along with the least amount of measurement errors. Furthermore, Explainable AI methods were utilized to improve the comprehensibility of the model outcomes. This paper emphasizes the transformative capabilities of machine learning for diagnosing cardiovascular disease and estimating risk levels, thereby supporting timely interventions and enhancing clinical settings.
Authors: Conrad Borchers, Bahar Shahrokhian, Francesco Balzan, Elham Tajik, Sreecharan Sankaranarayanan, Sebastian Simon
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) enable new possibilities for qualitative research at scale, including annotation and qualitative coding of educational data. While LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) can emulate human coding workflows, their benefits over single LLM agents for coding remain poorly understood. To that end, we conducted an experimental study of how persona and temperature of component agents of a MAS shapes consensus-building and coding accuracy for dialog segments. LLMs were prompted to code these segments deductively using a mature codebook with 8 codes and high inter-rater reliability derived from prior research. Our open-source MAS mirrors deductive human coding through structured agent discussion and consensus arbitration. Using six open-source LLMs (with 3 to 32 billion parameters) and 18 experimental configurations, we analyze over 77,000 coding decisions against a gold-standard dataset of human-annotated transcripts from online math tutoring sessions facilitated by educational software. Temperature significantly impacted whether and when consensus was reached across all six LLMs. MAS with multiple personas (including neutral, assertive, or empathetic) significantly delayed consensus in four out of six LLMs compared to uniform personas. In three of those LLMs, higher temperatures significantly diminished the effects of multiple personas on consensus. However, neither temperature nor persona pairing led to robust improvements in coding accuracy. Single agents matched or outperformed MAS consensus in most conditions. Qualitative analysis of MAS collaboration and coding disagreement may, however, improve codebook design and human-AI coding.
Authors: Pinhao Song, Yutong Hu, Pengteng Li, Renaud Detry
Abstract: We propose a new volumetric grasp model that is equivariant to rotations around the vertical axis, leading to a significant improvement in sampling efficiency. Our model employs a tri-plane volumetric feature representation -- i.e., the projection of 3D features onto three canonical planes. We introduce a novel tri-plane feature design in which features on the horizontal plane are \emph{equivariant} to $90^\circ$ rotations, while the \emph{sum} of features from the other two planes remains \emph{invariant} to reflections induced by the same transformations. We further develop equivariant adaptations of two state-of-the-art volumetric grasp planners, GIGA and IGD. Specifically, we derive a new equivariant formulation of IGD's deformable attention mechanism and propose an equivariant generative model of grasp orientations based on flow matching. We provide a detailed analytical justification of the proposed equivariance properties and validate our approach through extensive simulated and real-world experiments. Our results demonstrate that the proposed projection-based design reduces both computational and memory costs. Moreover, the equivariant grasp models built on top of our tri-plane features consistently outperform their non-equivariant counterparts, achieving higher performance within a real-time cost constraint. Video and code can be viewed in: https://mousecpn.github.io/evg-page/
Authors: Tom S\"uhr, Florian E. Dorner, Olawale Salaudeen, Augustin Kelava, Samira Samadi
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable results on a range of standardized tests originally designed to assess human cognitive and psychological traits, such as intelligence and personality. While these results are often interpreted as strong evidence of human-like characteristics in LLMs, this paper argues that such interpretations constitute an ontological error. Human psychological and educational tests are theory-driven measurement instruments, calibrated to a specific human population. Applying these tests to non-human subjects without empirical validation, risks mischaracterizing what is being measured. Furthermore, a growing trend frames AI performance on benchmarks as measurements of traits such as ``intelligence'', despite known issues with validity, data contamination, cultural bias and sensitivity to superficial prompt changes. We argue that interpreting benchmark performance as measurements of human-like traits, lacks sufficient theoretical and empirical justification. This leads to our position: Stop Evaluating AI with Human Tests, Develop Principled, AI-specific Tests instead. We call for the development of principled, AI-specific evaluation frameworks tailored to AI systems. Such frameworks might build on existing frameworks for constructing and validating psychometrics tests, or could be created entirely from scratch to fit the unique context of AI.
Authors: Yadong Niu, Tianzi Wang, Heinrich Dinkel, Xingwei Sun, Jiahao Zhou, Gang Li, Jizhong Liu, Xunying Liu, Junbo Zhang, Jian Luan
Abstract: While large audio-language models have advanced open-ended audio understanding, they still fall short of nuanced human-level comprehension. This gap persists largely because current benchmarks, limited by data annotations and evaluation metrics, fail to reliably distinguish between generic and highly detailed model outputs. To this end, this work introduces MECAT, a Multi-Expert Constructed Benchmark for Fine-Grained Audio Understanding Tasks. Generated via a pipeline that integrates analysis from specialized expert models with Chain-of-Thought large language model reasoning, MECAT provides multi-perspective, fine-grained captions and open-set question-answering pairs. The benchmark is complemented by a novel metric: DATE (Discriminative-Enhanced Audio Text Evaluation). This metric penalizes generic terms and rewards detailed descriptions by combining single-sample semantic similarity with cross-sample discriminability. A comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art audio models is also presented, providing new insights into their current capabilities and limitations. The data and code are available at https://github.com/xiaomi-research/mecat
Authors: Robert Jankowski, Filippo Radicchi, M. \'Angeles Serrano, Mari\'an Bogu\~n\'a, Santo Fortunato
Abstract: Neural networks excel across a wide range of tasks, yet remain black boxes. In particular, how their internal representations are shaped by the complexity of the input data and the problems they solve remains obscure. In this work, we introduce a suite of five data-agnostic probes-pruning, binarization, noise injection, sign flipping, and bipartite network randomization-to quantify how task difficulty influences the topology and robustness of representations in multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). MLPs are represented as signed, weighted bipartite graphs from a network science perspective. We contrast easy and hard classification tasks on the MNIST and Fashion-MNIST datasets. We show that binarizing weights in hard-task models collapses accuracy to chance, whereas easy-task models remain robust. We also find that pruning low-magnitude edges in binarized hard-task models reveals a sharp phase-transition in performance. Moreover, moderate noise injection can enhance accuracy, resembling a stochastic-resonance effect linked to optimal sign flips of small-magnitude weights. Finally, preserving only the sign structure-instead of precise weight magnitudes-through bipartite network randomizations suffices to maintain high accuracy. These phenomena define a model- and modality-agnostic measure of task complexity: the performance gap between full-precision and binarized or shuffled neural network performance. Our findings highlight the crucial role of signed bipartite topology in learned representations and suggest practical strategies for model compression and interpretability that align with task complexity.
Authors: Muhammad Rajabinasab, Farhad Pakdaman, Moncef Gabbouj, Peter Schneider-Kamp, Arthur Zimek
Abstract: We propose a novel unsupervised outlier detection method based on Randomized Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Motivated by the performance of Randomized PCA (RPCA) Forest in approximate K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) search, we develop a novel unsupervised outlier detection method that utilizes RPCA Forest for unsupervised outlier detection by deriving an outlier score from its intrinsic properties. Experimental results showcase the superiority of the proposed approach compared to the classical and state-of-the-art methods in performing the outlier detection task on several datasets while performing competitively on the rest. The extensive analysis of the proposed method reflects its robustness and its computational efficiency, highlighting it as a good choice for unsupervised outlier detection.
Authors: Yunfeng Ge, Ming Jin, Yiji Zhao, Hongyan Li, Bo Du, Chang Xu, Shirui Pan
Abstract: Time series forecasting is vital in diverse sectors such as energy and transportation, where non-stationary dynamics are deeply intertwined with external events in other modalities such as texts. However, incorporating natural language-based external events to improve non-stationary forecasting remains largely unexplored, as most approaches still rely on a single modality, resulting in limited contextual knowledge and model underperformance. Enabling fine-grained multimodal interactions between temporal and textual data is challenged by two fundamental issues: (1) the gap in modeling interactions among discrete external events and continuous time series in a unified framework; (2) classical uniform diffusion timestep ignores event-induced non-stationary variability, leading to imbalanced denoising difficulty across diffusion stages. In this work, we propose event-aware non-stationary time series forecasting (EventTSF), an autoregressive diffusion framework that integrates historical time series and textual events via step-wise diffusion. To mitigate the imbalanced denoising difficulty of uniform timestep sampling, EventTSF uses an event-aware flow-matching timestep conditioned on event semantics. Extensive experiments on 7 synthetic and real-world datasets show that EventTSF outperforms 12 non-stationary time series forecasting baselines, achieving average gains of 41.3% in probabilistic forecasting and 27.5% in deterministic forecasting across all evaluation metrics.
Authors: Koffi Ismael Ouattara, Ioannis Krontiris, Theo Dimitrakos, Frank Kargl
Abstract: As AI systems increasingly rely on training data, assessing dataset trustworthiness has become critical, particularly for properties like fairness or bias that emerge at the dataset level. Prior work has used Subjective Logic to assess trustworthiness of individual data, but not to evaluate trustworthiness properties that emerge only at the level of the dataset as a whole. This paper introduces the first formal framework for assessing the trustworthiness of AI training datasets, enabling uncertainty-aware evaluations of global properties such as bias. Built on Subjective Logic, our approach supports trust propositions and quantifies uncertainty in scenarios where evidence is incomplete, distributed, and/or conflicting. We instantiate this framework on the trustworthiness property of bias, and we experimentally evaluate it based on a traffic sign recognition dataset. The results demonstrate that our method captures class imbalance and remains interpretable and robust in both centralized and federated contexts.
Authors: Yang Qiao, Yuntong Hu, Bowen Zhu, Hasibul Haque, Liang Zhao
Abstract: Multimodal representation learning has been largely driven by contrastive models such as CLIP, which learn a shared embedding space by aligning paired image-text samples. While effective for general-purpose representation learning, such models typically produce a single embedding per sample that is reused across different semantic relations and contexts. However, in many real-world applications, relevance between samples is inherently relation-dependent, with different semantic relations emphasizing different aspects of multimodal data. In this work, we propose Relation-Conditioned Multimodal Learning (RCML), a framework that treats semantic relations as explicit conditions of multimodal representation learning. Rather than producing relation-agnostic embeddings, RCML learns representations conditioned on natural-language relation descriptions, allowing the same sample to be represented differently under different relational contexts. The framework constructs relation-aware training pairs, introduces a relation-conditioned module to adapt embeddings to relation semantics, and employs a unified contrastive objective to jointly model cross-modal alignment and relation-induced inter-sample structure. Experiments on multiple datasets show that RCML consistently outperforms strong baselines on retrieval and classification tasks in zero-shot, fine-tuned, and out-of-domain settings, highlighting the effectiveness of leveraging semantic relations to guide multimodal representation learning.
Authors: Haibo Jin, Ruoxi Chen, Peiyan Zhang, Andy Zhou, Zelei Cheng, Haohan Wang
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integral to various domains, their potential to generate harmful responses has prompted significant societal and regulatory concerns. In response, governments have issued ethics guidelines to promote the development of trustworthy AI. However, these guidelines are typically high-level demands for developers and testers, leaving a gap in translating them into actionable testing questions to verify LLM compliance. To address this challenge, we introduce GUARD (Guideline Upholding Test through Adaptive Role-play and Jailbreak Diagnostics), a testing method designed to operationalize guidelines into specific guideline-violating questions that assess LLM adherence. To implement this, GUARD uses automated generation of guideline-violating questions based on government-issued guidelines, thereby testing whether responses comply with these guidelines. When responses directly violate guidelines, GUARD reports inconsistencies. Furthermore, for responses that do not directly violate guidelines, GUARD integrates the concept of ``jailbreaks'' to diagnostics, named GUARD-JD, which creates scenarios that provoke unethical or guideline-violating responses, effectively identifying potential scenarios that could bypass built-in safety mechanisms. Our method finally culminates in a compliance report, delineating the extent of adherence and highlighting any violations. We empirically validated the effectiveness of GUARD on eight LLMs, including Vicuna-13B, LongChat-7B, Llama2-7B, Llama-3-8B, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o, and Claude-3.7, by testing compliance under three government-issued guidelines and conducting jailbreak diagnostics. Additionally, GUARD-JD can transfer jailbreak diagnostics to vision-language models (MiniGPT-v2 and Gemini-1.5), demonstrating its usage in promoting reliable LLM-based applications.
Authors: Zhiyang Chen, Tara Saba, Xun Deng, Xujie Si, Fan Long
Abstract: Large Language Models have become critical to modern software development, but their reliance on uncurated web-scale datasets for training introduces a significant security risk: the absorption and reproduction of malicious content. This risk materialized in November 2024, when a user suffered a 2,500 USD financial loss after executing code generated by ChatGPT that contained a live scam phishing URL. To systematically evaluate this risk, we introduce Scam2Prompt, a scalable automated auditing framework that identifies the underlying intent of a scam site and then synthesizes developer-style prompts that mirror this intent, allowing us to test whether an LLM will generate malicious code in response to these prompts. In a large-scale study of four production LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, Llama-4-Scout, and DeepSeek-V3), we found that Scam2Prompt's developer-style prompts triggered malicious URL generation in 4.24\% of cases. To test the persistence of this security risk, we constructed Innoc2Scam-bench, a benchmark of 1,377 prompts that consistently elicited malicious code from all four initial LLMs. When applied to seven additional production LLMs released in 2025, we found the vulnerability is not only present but severe, with malicious code generation rates ranging from 12.9\% to 47.3\%. Furthermore, existing safety measures like state-of-the-art guardrails or RAG-based agents proved insufficient to prevent this behavior.
Authors: Erfan Baghaei Potraghloo, Seyedarmin Azizi, Souvik Kundu, Massoud Pedram
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs), despite their impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, often struggle to balance two competing objectives in open-ended text generation: fostering diversity and creativity while preserving logical coherence. Existing truncated sampling techniques, including temperature scaling, top-\$p\$ (nucleus) sampling, and min-\$p\$ sampling, aim to manage this trade-off. However, they exhibit limitations, particularly in the effective incorporation of the confidence of the model into the corresponding sampling strategy. For example, min-\$p\$ sampling relies on a single top token as a heuristic for confidence, eventually underutilizing the information of the probability distribution. Toward effective incorporation of the confidence of the model, in this paper, we present **top-H** decoding. We first establish the theoretical foundation of the interplay between creativity and coherence in truncated sampling by formulating an **entropy-constrained minimum divergence** problem. We then prove this minimization problem to be equivalent to an **entropy-constrained mass maximization** (ECMM) problem, which is NP-hard. Finally, we present top-H decoding, a computationally efficient greedy algorithm to solve the ECMM problem. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that top-H outperforms the state-of-the-art (SoTA) alternative of min-\$p\$ sampling by up to **25.63%** on creative writing benchmarks, while maintaining robustness on question-answering datasets such as GPQA, GSM8K, and MT-Bench. Additionally, an *LLM-as-judge* evaluation confirms that top-H indeed produces coherent outputs even at higher temperatures, where creativity is especially critical. In summary, top-H advances SoTA in open-ended text generation and can be *easily integrated* into creative writing applications. The code is available at https://github.com/ErfanBaghaei/Top-H-Decoding.
Authors: Hoang Nguyen, Sidharth Surapaneni, Akshay Kalkunte, Jash Mehta, Aman Tiwari, Oluwanifemi Bamgbose, Khyati Mahajan, Jash Shah, Shruthan Radhakrishna, Sathwik Tejaswi Madhusudhan, Vikas Yadav, Sai Rajeswar
Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) are rapidly advancing, but evaluating them remains challenging due to inefficient and non-standardized toolkits that limit fair comparison and systematic assessment. Existing evaluation frameworks exhibit three critical limitations: (1) slow and inefficient processing pipeline that bottlenecks large-scale studies, (2) inadequate multi-turn dialogue support, leaving fundamental questions about cross-turn context integration and performance dynamics over extended conversations in LALMs unanswered; and (3) the absence of unified and scalable evaluation framework capable of keeping pace with the rapid growth of both LALMs and audio benchmarks. To address these issues, we introduce AU-Harness, an efficient and comprehensive evaluation framework for LALMs. Our system achieves a speedup of up to 151% over existing evaluation toolkits through optimized batch processing and parallel execution, enabling large-scale evaluations previously considered impractical. We provide standardized prompting protocols and flexible configurations for fair model comparison across diverse scenarios. AU-Harness unlocks a range of in-depth analyses difficult to conduct without a unified foundation, including multi-turn dialogue dynamics, enabling the study of true audio reasoning capabilities in existing LALMs. AU-Harness provides both practical evaluation tools and insights into model limitations, advancing systematic LALM development.
Authors: Hangzhan Jin, Sitao Luan, Tianwei Ni, Sicheng Lyu, Guillaume Rabusseau, Reihaneh Rabbany, Doina Precup, Mohammad Hamdaqa
Abstract: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) followed by Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a standard post-training recipe for improving Large Language Models (LLM) reasoning, but why it works remains unclear. We revisit the common claim that ``SFT memorizes, RL generalizes'' through checkpoint-wise analyses of in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) reasoning. We find that OOD performance often peaks early during SFT and then declines despite continued improvement in ID reasoning. RL typically does not surpass this early SFT peak; rather, it restores OOD capability lost during later SFT, and only from a bounded range of SFT checkpoints. Further spectral analysis shows that this forgetting-and-recovery pattern correlates with rotations of singular vectors, while singular values remain largely stable. These findings suggest a more precise view of post-training dynamics: SFT can forget, RL can recover, and controlling singular-vector rotation may improve OOD robustness. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/jinhangzhan/RL\_Heals\_SFT.git}{https://github.com/jinhangzhan/RL\_Heals\_SFT}.
URLs: https://github.com/jinhangzhan/RL\_Heals\_SFT.git, https://github.com/jinhangzhan/RL\_Heals\_SFT
Authors: Yu Wang, Sheng Shen, R\'emi Munos, Hongyuan Zhan, Yuandong Tian
Abstract: We prove under practical assumptions that Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) introduces an intrinsic distance-dependent bias in attention scores that limits RoPE's ability to model long-context. RoPE extension methods may alleviate this issue, but they typically require post-hoc adjustments after pretraining, such as rescaling or hyperparameters retuning. This paper introduces Token-Aware Phase Attention (TAPA), a new positional encoding method that incorporates a learnable phase function into the attention mechanism. TAPA preserves token interactions over long range, extends to longer contexts with direct and light continual pretraining, extrapolates to unseen lengths, and attains substantially lower perplexity and stronger retrieval performance in the long-context regime than RoPE-style baselines.
Authors: Hyunwoo Kim, Hyo Kyung Lee
Abstract: Off-policy reinforcement learning suffers from extrapolation errors when a learned policy selects actions that are weakly supported in the replay buffer. In this study, we address this issue by drawing an analogy to static friction. From this perspective, the replay buffer is represented as a smooth, low-dimensional action manifold, where the support directions correspond to the tangential component, while the normal component captures the dominant first-order extrapolation error. This decomposition reveals an intrinsic anisotropy in value sensitivity that naturally induces a stability condition analogous to a friction threshold. To mitigate deviations toward unsupported actions, we propose Frictional Q-Learning, an off-policy algorithm that encodes supported actions as tangent directions using a contrastive variational autoencoder. We further show that an orthonormal basis of the orthogonal complement corresponds to normal components under mild local isometry assumptions. Extensive empirical results on standard continuous-control benchmarks consistently demonstrate robust and stable performance compared with competitive baselines.
Authors: Naibin Gu, Zhenyu Zhang, Yuchen Feng, Yilong Chen, Peng Fu, Zheng Lin, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Weiping Wang, Haifeng Wang
Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models typically fix the number of activated experts $k$ at both training and inference. However, real-world deployments often face heterogeneous hardware, fluctuating workloads, and diverse quality-latency requirements, while training separate models for each scenario is costly. Considering that MoE models already operate with sparse activation, adjusting the number of activated experts offers a natural path to serving diverse budgets with a single model. Yet, we find that activating more experts $k'$ ($> k$) at inference does not yield the expected gains. Instead, performance degrades rapidly after only a slight increase, a phenomenon we term the \textit{inference-time scaling wall}. Further investigation reveals that this degradation stems from a lack of learned collaboration among experts. To address this, we introduce \textbf{Elastic Mixture-of-Experts (EMoE)}, a novel training framework that enables MoE models to elastically vary the number of activated experts at inference. By simultaneously training experts to collaborate in diverse combinations and encouraging the router to make high-quality selections, EMoE ensures robust performance across inference budgets. Extensive experiments across four MoE architectures (7B--21B) and nine benchmarks show that EMoE significantly expands the effective scaling range to 2-3$\times$ the training-time $k$, while also achieving higher peak performance.
Authors: Juangui Xu, Zikun Guo, Jingwei Lv, Xinyue Xu, Hongbin Lin, Shu Yang, Jun Wen, Di Wang, Lijie Hu
Abstract: Visual language models (VLMs) have the potential to transform medical workflows. However, the deployment is limited by sycophancy. Despite this serious threat to patient safety, a systematic benchmark remains lacking. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a Medical benchmark that applies multiple templates to VLMs in a hierarchical medical visual question answering task. We find that current VLMs are highly susceptible to visual cues, with failure rates showing a correlation to model size or overall accuracy. we discover that perceived authority and user mimicry are powerful triggers, suggesting a bias mechanism independent of visual data. To overcome this, we propose a Visual Information Purification for Evidence based Responses (VIPER) strategy that proactively filters out non-evidence-based social cues, thereby reinforcing evidence based reasoning. VIPER reduces sycophancy while maintaining interpretability and consistently outperforms baseline methods, laying the necessary foundation for the robust and secure integration of VLMs.
Authors: Jose I. Mestre, Alberto Fern\'andez-Hern\'andez, Cristian P\'erez-Corral, Manuel F. Dolz, Jose Duato, Enrique S. Quintana-Ort\'i
Abstract: In this work we introduce GreenLightningAI (GLAI), a new architectural block designed as an alternative to conventional MLPs. The central idea is to separate two types of knowledge that are usually entangled during training: (i) *structural knowledge*, encoded by the stable activation patterns induced by ReLU activations; and (ii) *quantitative knowledge*, carried by the numerical weights and biases. By fixing the structure once stabilized, GLAI reformulates the MLP as a combination of paths, where only the quantitative component is optimized. This reformulation retains the universal approximation capabilities of MLPs, yet achieves a more efficient training process, reducing training time by ~40% on average across the cases examined in this study. Crucially, GLAI is not just another classifier, but a generic block that can replace MLPs wherever they are used, from supervised heads with frozen backbones to projection layers in self-supervised learning or few-shot classifiers. Across diverse experimental setups, GLAI consistently matches or exceeds the accuracy of MLPs with an equivalent number of parameters, while converging faster. Overall, GLAI establishes a new design principle that opens a direction for future integration into large-scale architectures such as Transformers, where MLP blocks dominate the computational footprint.
Authors: Richard A. Dubniczky, Bertalan Borsos, Tamas Bisztray, Norbert Tihanyi
Abstract: The widespread use of preprint repositories such as arXiv has accelerated the communication of scientific results but also introduced overlooked security risks. Beyond PDFs, these platforms provide unrestricted access to original source materials, including LaTeX sources, auxiliary code, figures, and embedded comments. In the absence of sanitization, submissions may disclose sensitive information that adversaries can harvest using open-source intelligence. In this work, we present the first large-scale security audit of preprint archives, analyzing more than 1.2 TB of source data from 100,000 arXiv submissions. We introduce LaTeXpOsEd, a four-stage framework that integrates pattern matching, logical filtering, traditional harvesting techniques, and large language models (LLMs) to uncover hidden disclosures within non-referenced files and LaTeX comments. To evaluate LLMs' secret-detection capabilities, we introduce LLMSec-DB, a benchmark on which we tested 25 state-of-the-art models. Our analysis uncovered thousands of PII leaks, GPS-tagged EXIF files, publicly available Google Drive and Dropbox folders, editable private SharePoint links, exposed GitHub and Google credentials, and cloud API keys. We also uncovered confidential author communications, internal disagreements, and conference submission credentials, exposing information that poses serious reputational risks to both researchers and institutions. We urge the research community and repository operators to take immediate action to close these hidden security gaps. To support open science, we release all scripts and methods from this study but withhold sensitive findings that could be misused, in line with ethical principles. The source code and related material are available at the project website https://github.com/LaTeXpOsEd
Authors: Xiaoyu Yang, En Yu, Wei Duan, Jie Lu
Abstract: This paper identifies a critical yet underexplored challenge in reasoning alignment from multiple multi-modal large language models (MLLMs): In non-stationary environments, the diverse reasoning distributions of source models often evolve unpredictably, transmitting systematic biases and drift to the target model. To address this, we formulate multi-source reasoning alignment as a constraint satisfaction problem under concept drift theory. We propose Autonomous Preference Optimization (APO), a novel framework that treats inter-model divergences not as noise, but as dynamic negative constraints. APO operates via a two-stage protocol: first, supervised bootstrapping projects the target model into the capability union of source models; second, constraint-aware optimization synthesizes a consistent consensus manifold by explicitly suppressing drifting trajectories via a multi-negative Plackett-Luce objective. Extensive experiments on chest X-ray interpretation demonstrate that our 7B model achieves superior robustness, outperforming even proprietary source models in average accuracy. Furthermore, we release CXR-MAX, a large-scale benchmark comprising 170,982 reasoning trajectories from seven large-scale MLLMs to facilitate research on reasoning alignment under drift. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/XiaoyuYoung/APO.
Authors: Kai Yang, Yuqi Huang, Junheng Tao, Wanyu Wang, Qitian Wu
Abstract: Modeling 3D dynamics is a fundamental problem in multi-body systems across scientific and engineering domains and has important practical implications in object trajectory prediction and simulation. While recent GNN-based approaches have achieved strong performance by enforcing geometric symmetries, encoding high-order features or incorporating neural-ODE mechanics, they typically depend on explicitly observed structures and inherently fail to capture the unobserved interactions that are crucial to complex physical behaviors and dynamics mechanism. In this paper, we propose PAINET, a principled SE(3)-equivariant transformer for learning all-pair interactions in multi-body systems. The model comprises: (1) a novel physics-inspired attention network derived from the minimization trajectory of an energy function, and (2) a parallel decoder that preserves equivariance while enabling efficient inference. Empirical results on diverse real-world benchmarks, including human motion capture, molecular dynamics, and large-scale protein simulations, show that PAINET consistently outperforms recently proposed models, yielding 4.7% to 41.5% error reductions in 3D dynamics prediction with comparable computation costs in terms of time and memory. Our codes, baseline models and datasets are available at https://github.com/Icarus1411/PAINET.
Authors: Firoj Alam, Ali Ezzat Shahroor, Md. Arid Hasan, Zien Sheikh Ali, Hunzalah Hassan Bhatti, Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Basel Mousi, Fahim Dalvi, Nadir Durrani, Natasa Milic-Frayling
Abstract: Large-scale multimodal models achieve strong results on tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA), but they are often limited when queries require cultural and visual information, everyday knowledge, particularly in low-resource and underrepresented languages. We introduce OASIS, a large-scale culturally grounded multimodal QA dataset covering images, text, and speech. OASIS is built with EverydayMMQA, a scalable semi-automatic framework for creating localized spoken and visual QA resources, supported by multi-stage human-in-the-loop validation. OASIS contains approximately 0.92M real images and 14.8M QA pairs, including 3.7M spoken questions, with 383 hours of human-recorded speech, and 20K hours of voice-cloned speech, from 42 speakers. It supports four input settings: text-only, speech-only, text+image, and speech+image. The dataset focuses on English and Arabic varieties across 18 countries, covering Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) as well as dialectal Arabic. It is designed to evaluate models beyond object recognition, targeting pragmatic, commonsense, and culturally grounded reasoning in real-world scenarios. We benchmark four closed-source models, three open-source models, and one fine-tuned model on OASIS. The framework and dataset will be made publicly available to the community. https://huggingface.co/datasets/QCRI/OASIS
Authors: Prakhar Srivastava, Farrin Marouf Sofian, Francesco Immorlano, Kushagra Pandey, Stephan Mandt
Abstract: Despite advances in test-time scaling and diffusion finetuning, guidance for Auto-Regressive Diffusion Models (ARDMs) remains underexplored. We introduce an amortized framework that augments a pretrained ARDM with an offline-trained controller. By previewing future rollouts, the controller learns stepwise corrections that anticipate observations under a terminal-cost objective, yielding a reusable policy for guided generation. Motivated by a stochastic optimal control view of ARDM trajectories, our method injects small controls within each denoising sub-step while staying close to the pretrained dynamics. We study this approach for dataassimilation (DA) in chaotic spatiotemporal partial differential equations (PDEs), where existing methods are often computationally expensive and susceptible to forecast drift under sparse observations. At inference, DA becomes a feed-forward rollout with on-the-fly corrections, achieving an order-of-magnitude speedup over strong diffusion-based baselines. Across two canonical PDEs and a compact ECMWF Reanalysis v5 (ERA5) pilot spanning six observation regimes, our method consistently improves stability and accuracy over state-of-the-art alternatives, with similar improvements observed in a larger-scale GenCast study.
Authors: Shahriar Kabir Nahin, Hadi Askari, Muhao Chen, Anshuman Chhabra
Abstract: Test-Time Scaling (TTS) improves LLM reasoning by exploring multiple candidate responses and then operating over this set to find the best output. A tacit premise behind TTS is that sufficiently diverse candidate pools enhance reliability. In this work, we show that this assumption in TTS introduces a previously unrecognized failure mode. When candidate diversity is curtailed, even by a modest amount, TTS becomes much more likely to produce unsafe outputs. We present a reference-guided diversity reduction protocol (RefDiv) that serves as a diagnostic attack to stress test TTS pipelines. Through extensive experiments across open-source models (e.g. Qwen3, Mistral, Llama3.1, Gemma3) and two widely used TTS strategies (Monte Carlo Tree Search and Best-of-N), constraining diversity consistently signifies the rate at which TTS produces unsafe results. The effect is often stronger than that produced by prompts directly with high adversarial intent scores. This observed phenomenon also transfers across TTS strategies and to closed-source models (e.g. OpenAI o3-mini and Gemini-2.5-Pro), thus indicating that this is a general and extant property of TTS rather than a model-specific artifact. Additionally, we find that numerous widely used safety guardrail classifiers (e.g. Llama-Guard), are unable to flag the adversarial input prompts generated by RefDiv, demonstrating that existing defenses offer limited protection against this diversity-driven failure mode.
Authors: Xinhu Li, Ayush Jain, Zhaojing Yang, Yigit Korkmaz, Erdem B{\i}y{\i}k
Abstract: Learning from demonstrations enables experts to teach robots complex tasks using interfaces such as kinesthetic teaching, joystick control, and sim-to-real transfer. However, these interfaces often constrain the expert's ability to demonstrate optimal behavior due to indirect control, setup restrictions, and hardware safety. For example, a joystick can move a robotic arm only in a 2D plane, even though the robot operates in a higher-dimensional space. As a result, the demonstrations collected by constrained experts lead to suboptimal performance of the learned policies. This raises a key question: Can a robot learn a better policy than the one demonstrated by a constrained expert? We address this by allowing the agent to go beyond direct imitation of expert actions and explore shorter and more efficient trajectories. We use the demonstrations to infer a state-only reward signal that measures task progress, and self-label reward for unknown states using temporal interpolation. Our approach outperforms common imitation learning in both sample efficiency and task completion time. On a real WidowX robotic arm, it completes the task in 12 seconds, 10x faster than behavioral cloning, as shown in real-robot videos on https://sites.google.com/view/constrainedexpert .
Authors: Kangping Hu, Stephen Mussmann
Abstract: Over the past couple of decades, many active learning acquisition functions have been proposed, leaving practitioners with an unclear choice of which to use. Bayesian-based active learning offers principled objectives with explainable intuition, including Expected Error Reduction (EER), Expected Predictive Information Gain (EPIG), and Bayesian Active Learning by Disagreements (BALD). A key challenge of such methods is the difficult scaling to large batch sizes, leading to either computational challenges (BatchBALD) or dramatic performance drops (top-$B$ selection). Here, using a particular formulation of Bayesian Decision Theory, we derive Partial Batch Label Sampling (ParBaLS) for the EPIG algorithm. We show experimentally for several datasets that ParBaLS EPIG gives superior performance for a fixed budget and Bayesian Logistic Regression on embeddings from large pre-trained models. Our code is available at https://github.com/ADDAPT-ML/ParBaLS.
Authors: Jiazheng Sun, Weixin Wang, Pan Xu
Abstract: We provide a unified algorithmic framework for ensemble sampling in nonlinear contextual bandits and develop corresponding regret bounds for two most common nonlinear contextual bandit settings: Generalized Linear Ensemble Sampling (GLM-ES) for generalized linear bandits and Neural Ensemble Sampling (Neural-ES) for neural contextual bandits. Both methods maintain multiple estimators for the reward model parameters via maximum likelihood estimation on randomly perturbed data. We prove high-probability frequentist regret bounds of $\widetilde{O}(d^{3/2} \sqrt{T} + d^{4})$ for GLM-ES and $\widetilde{{O}}(\widetilde{d}^{3/2} \sqrt{T})$ for Neural-ES, where $d$ is the dimension of feature vectors, $\widetilde{d}$ is the effective dimension of a neural tangent kernel (NTK) matrix and $T$ is the number of rounds. The regret bound of GLM-ES matches the state-of-the-art result of randomized exploration algorithms in generalized linear bandit setting. In the theoretical analysis, we introduce techniques that address challenges specific to nonlinear models. Practically, we remove fixed-time horizon assumption by developing anytime versions of our algorithms, suitable when $T$ is unknown. Finally, we empirically evaluate GLM-ES, Neural-ES and their anytime variants, demonstrating strong performance. Overall, our results establish ensemble sampling as a provable and practical randomized exploration approach for nonlinear contextual bandits.
Authors: Zhongze Cai, Xiaocheng Li
Abstract: Pairwise preference data have played an important role in the alignment of large language models (LLMs). Each sample of such data consists of a prompt, two different responses to the prompt, and a binary label indicating which of the two responses is better. The labels are usually annotated by professional human annotators. In this paper, we consider an alternative approach to collect pairwise preference data -- user annotation from comparison mode. With the increasingly wider adoption of LLMs among the population, users are contributing more and more of their preference labels through their daily interactions with the LLMs. The upside of such labels is that users are the best experts in judging the responses to their own queries/prompts, but the downside is the lack of quality control in these labels. In this paper, we consider a new idea of generating two responses from two different models or two different versions of the same model. The asymmetry allows us to make an inference of the user's data quality through our proposed user behavior model. We develop an expectation-maximization algorithm to estimate a latent quality factor of the user, and filter users' annotation data accordingly. The downstream task shows the effectiveness of our approach in both capturing the user behavior and data filtering for LLM alignment.
Authors: Xi Yu, Yang Yang, Qun Liu, Yonghua Du, Sean McSweeney, Yuewei Lin
Abstract: Cellular image segmentation is essential for quantitative biology yet remains difficult due to heterogeneous modalities, morphological variability, and limited annotations. We present GenCellAgent, a training-free multi-agent framework that orchestrates specialist segmenters and generalist vision-language models via a planner-executor-evaluator loop (choose tool $\rightarrow$ run $\rightarrow$ quality-check) with long-term memory. The system (i) automatically routes images to the best tool, (ii) adapts on the fly using a few reference images when imaging conditions differ from what a tool expects, (iii) supports text-guided segmentation of organelles not covered by existing models, and (iv) commits expert edits to memory, enabling self-evolution and personalized workflows. Across seven cell-segmentation benchmarks spanning diverse microscopy modalities (4,718 images), this routing consistently matches or exceeds the best individual tool on every dataset and outperforms all baselines in overall accuracy. On out-of-distribution organelle data, GenCellAgent substantially outperforms specialist models that were not trained on the target domain, recovering structures that dedicated tools fail to detect. It also segments novel objects such as the Golgi apparatus via iterative text-guided refinement, with light human correction further boosting performance. Together, these capabilities provide a practical path to robust, adaptable cellular image segmentation without retraining, while reducing annotation burden and matching user preferences.
Authors: Katarzyna Kobalczyk, Zhiyuan Jerry Lin, Benjamin Letham, Zhuokai Zhao, Maximilian Balandat, Eytan Bakshy
Abstract: Many real-world optimization problems are guided by complex, subjective preferences that are difficult to express as explicit closed-form objectives. In response, we introduce Language-in-the-Loop Optimization (LILO), a Bayesian optimization (BO) framework that employs a large language model (LLM) to translate free-form natural language feedback and prior knowledge from a decision maker into structured preference signals, going beyond the restrictive scalar or pairwise feedback formats typically assumed in preferential BO. The LLM-derived preferences are integrated by a Gaussian process proxy model, enabling principled acquisition-driven exploration with calibrated uncertainty. By placing the LLM in a supporting role rather than as the optimizer itself, LILO preserves the sample efficiency and stability of BO while providing a flexible and expressive feedback interface. Across synthetic and real-world benchmarks, LILO consistently outperforms both conventional preference-based BO methods and LLM-only optimizers, with particularly strong gains in feedback-limited regimes.
Authors: Lukas Helff, Ruben H\"arle, Wolfgang Stammer, Felix Friedrich, Manuel Brack, Antonia W\"ust, Hikaru Shindo, Patrick Schramowski, Kristian Kersting
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel at generating fluent text, but their internal reasoning remains opaque and difficult to control. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) make hidden activations more interpretable by exposing latent features that often align with human concepts. Yet, these features are fragile and passive, offering no mechanism for systematic reasoning or model control. To address this, we introduce ActivationReasoning (AR), a framework that embeds explicit logical reasoning into the latent space of LLMs. It proceeds in three stages: (1) Finding latent representations, first latent concept representations are identified (e.g., via SAEs) and organized into a dictionary; (2) Activating propositions, at inference time AR detects activating concepts and maps them to logical propositions; and (3)Logical reasoning, applying logical rules over these propositions to infer higher-order structures, compose new concepts, and steer model behavior. We evaluate AR on multi-hop reasoning (PrOntoQA), abstraction and robustness to indirect concept cues (Rail2Country), reasoning over natural and diverse language (ProverQA), and context-sensitive safety (BeaverTails). Across all tasks, AR scales robustly with reasoning complexity, generalizes to abstract and context-sensitive tasks, and transfers across model backbones. These results demonstrate that grounding logical structure in latent activations not only improves transparency but also enables structured reasoning, reliable control, and alignment with desired behaviors, providing a path toward more reliable and auditable AI.
Authors: Tong Zhang, Yihuan Huang, Yanzhen Ren
Abstract: The growing prevalence of speech deepfakes has raised serious concerns, particularly in real-world scenarios such as telephone fraud and identity theft. While many anti-spoofing systems have demonstrated promising performance on lab-generated synthetic speech, they often fail when confronted with physical replay attacks-a common and low-cost form of attack used in practical settings. Our experiments show that models trained on existing datasets exhibit severe performance degradation, with average accuracy dropping to 59.6% when evaluated on replayed audio. To bridge this gap, we present EchoFake, a comprehensive dataset comprising more than 120 hours of audio from over 13,000 speakers, featuring both cutting-edge zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) speech and physical replay recordings collected under varied devices and real-world environmental settings. Additionally, we evaluate three baseline detection models and show that models trained on EchoFake achieve lower average EERs across datasets, indicating better generalization. By introducing more practical challenges relevant to real-world deployment, EchoFake offers a more realistic foundation for advancing spoofing detection methods.
Authors: Yulong Chen, Qi Zhang, Jiawen Zhang, Yadong Liu, Mu Li, Jie Wen, Yong Xu
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, where adversarially crafted prompts induce policy-violating responses despite safety alignment. Existing defenses typically improve safety through external filtering, auxiliary guardrails, or decoding-time control. However, these interventions often reduce practical deployability because they may require additional model access, introduce extra inference cost, or affect benign-task utility. In this paper, we propose Safety-Aware Intent Defense (SAID), a training-free jailbreak defense framework based on intent-level safety probing. SAID first distills potentially obfuscated user inputs into concise core intents using the target model itself. It then applies a validated safety prefix to probe each distilled intent and elicit the model's safety-aware response. Finally, a conservative aggregation rule rejects the original request if any distilled intent is identified as unsafe. This design enables black-box-compatible defense without updating model parameters or modifying the decoding process. Experiments on four open-source LLMs under six representative jailbreak attacks show that SAID achieves state-of-the-art defense performance in reducing harmful responses while maintaining competitive utility on benign tasks. Further analyses on prefix variants, hierarchical distillation, and inference efficiency demonstrate that SAID provides a practical safety-utility trade-off for securing LLMs against jailbreak threats.
Authors: Yair Feldman, Yoav Artzi
Abstract: Context compression reduces Transformer inference costs by replacing lengthy inputs with shorter pre-computed representations. It carries significant benefits for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and has attracted growing research attention. However, progress remains difficult to measure due to inconsistent evaluations and baselines. We design a standard, easy-to-reproduce evaluation suite for context compression, BenchPress, along with simple, high-performance baselines for English reading comprehension. BenchPress supports benchmarking across model scales, datasets, compression ratios, and short ($<$1K tokens) to mid-range ($<$8K tokens) contexts. While the suite is applicable to any compression paradigm, our baselines target soft context compression. We establish two simple baselines that strongly outperform the widely used causal compression-token approach: mean pooling and a bidirectional compression-token variant. Our results show the benefit of bidirectional attention when computing compressed representations, and that simple pooling is an expressive compression operator.
Authors: Yuxiang Chen, Yifan Liu, Xiaoming Xu, Pengle Zhang, Michael Beyer, Martin Rapp, Jun Zhu, Jianfei Chen
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) training is prohibitively expensive, driving interest in low-precision fully-quantized training (FQT). While novel 4-bit formats like NVFP4 offer substantial efficiency gains, achieving near-lossless training at such low precision remains challenging. We introduce TetraJet-v2, an end-to-end 4-bit FQT method that leverages NVFP4 for activations, weights, and gradients in all linear layers. We identify two critical issues hindering low-precision LLM training: weight oscillation and outliers. To address these, we propose: 1) an unbiased double-block quantization method for NVFP4 linear layers with practically optimal convergence in LLM training, 2) OsciReset, the first effective algorithm to suppress LLMs' weight oscillation bottleneck, and 3) OutControl, a mix-precision algorithm to retain outlier accuracy. TetraJet-v2 outperforms prior methods on FP4 pre-training for LLMs across models up to 370M parameters trained up to 212B tokens, reducing the performance gap to BF16 by an average of 51.3% while enabling an 1.67x end-to-end speedup over FP8. The code is available at https://github.com/thu-ml/TetraJet-v2-NVFP4Training.
Authors: Bo Bai
Abstract: Despite the empirical successes of Large Language Models (LLMs), the prevailing paradigm is heuristic and experiment-driven, tethered to massive compute and data, while a first-principles theory remains absent. This treatise develops a Semantic Information Theory at the confluence of statistical physics, signal processing, and classical information theory, organized around a single paradigm shift: replacing the classical BIT - a microscopic substrate devoid of semantic content - with the macroscopic TOKEN as the atomic carrier of meaning and reasoning. Within this framework we recast attention and the Transformer as energy-based models, and interpret semantic embedding as vectorization on the semantic manifold. Modeling the LLM as a stateful channel with feedback, we adopt Massey's directed information as the native causal measure of autoregressive generation, from which we derive a *directed rate-distortion function for pre-training, a directed rate-reward function for RL-based post-training, and a sub-martingale account of inference-time semantic information flow. This machinery makes precise the identification of next-token prediction with Granger causal inference, and sharpens the limits of LLM reasoning against Pearl's Ladder of Causation - affirming that *whereas the BIT defined the Information Epoch, the TOKEN will define the AI Epoch.
Authors: Hanchen Li, Runyuan He, Qiuyang Mang, Qizheng Zhang, Huanzhi Mao, Xiaokun Chen, Hangrui Zhou, Alvin Cheung, Joseph Gonzalez, Ion Stoica
Abstract: KV cache management is essential for efficient LLM inference. To maximize utilization, existing inference engines evict finished requests' KV cache if new requests are waiting. This policy breaks for agentic workloads, which interleave LLM calls with tools, introducing pauses that prevent effective KV reuse across turns. Since many tool calls have much shorter durations than human response multi-turn chatbot, it would be promising to retain the KV cache in during these tools. However, many challenges remain. First, we need to consider both the potential cost of recomputation or reloading (if offloading enabled) as well as the increasing queueing delays after eviction from GPU. Second, due to the internal variance of tool call durations, the method needs to remain robust under limited predictability of tool call durations. We present Continuum, a serving system to optimize job completion time for multi-turn agent workloads by introducing time-to-live mechanism for KV cache retention. For requests that generate tool calls, Continuum selectively pins the KV cache in GPU memory with a time-to-live value determined by the reload cost and potential queueing delay induced by eviction. When the TTL expires, the KV cache can be automatically evicted to free up GPU memory, providing robust performance under edge cases. When combined with program-level first-come-first-serve, Continuum preserves multi-turn continuity, and reduces delay for agentic workflows. Evaluations on real-world agents (SWE-Bench, BFCL, OpenHand) with Llama-3.1 8B/70B, Gemma-3 12B, and GLM-4.5 355B shows that Continuum improves the average job completion times by over 8x while improving throughput.
Authors: Wenlong Shang, Shihao Tian, Xutong Wan, Peng Chang
Abstract: Reconstruction-based methods are a dominant paradigm in time series anomaly detection (TSAD), however, their near-universal reliance on Mean Squared Error (MSE) loss results in statistically flawed reconstruction residuals. This fundamental weakness leads to noisy, unstable anomaly scores, hindering reliable detection. To address this, we propose Constrained Gaussian-Noise Optimization and Smoothing (COGNOS), a universal, model-agnostic enhancement framework that tackles this issue at its source. COGNOS introduces a novel Gaussian-White Noise Regularization strategy during training, which directly constrains the model's output residuals to conform to a Gaussian white noise distribution. This engineered statistical property creates the ideal precondition for our second contribution: Adaptive Residual Kalman Smoother that operates as a statistically robust estimator to denoise the raw anomaly scores. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that COGNOS consistently enhances the performance of state-of-the-art backbones significantly, validating the efficacy of coupling statistical regularization with adaptive filtering.
Authors: Chanakya Ekbote, Vijay Lingam, Sujay Sanghavi, Jun Huan, Behrooz Omidvar-Tehrani, Anoop Deoras, Stefano Soatto
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a standard recipe for post-training LLMs on reasoning tasks, with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) emerging as a leading approach. However, GRPO and its variants are inherently single-turn: they optimize from terminal rewards on isolated prompt-response pairs, leaving them poorly suited to agentic settings where models must iteratively refine solutions in response to environmental feedback. We introduce MURPHY, a multi-turn extension of GRPO for self-correcting code generation. MURPHY constructs feedback-conditioned rollout trees in which failed candidate solutions are paired with executor feedback and expanded into subsequent turns, and propagates rewards backward through the tree so that later successful refinements credit earlier attempts that surfaced informative feedback. We study two propagation strategies, Max Reward (MARS) and Mean Reward (MERS), and introduce post-rollout pruning mechanisms that reduce multi-turn optimization cost. Across three code generation benchmarks (HumanEval, MBPP, LiveCodeBench-v6) and two model families (Qwen3-1.7B/4B, OLMo-2-7B), MURPHY delivers up to 6% absolute pass@1 gains over the strongest prior multi-turn execution-feedback methods. Gains are largest on the Medium/Hard subset (+4.38/+4.20 at Iter-5), where iterative self-correction matters more.
Authors: Punit Kumar, Asif Imran, Tevfik Kosar
Abstract: This paper presents a detailed comparative analysis of the performance of three major Python data manipulation libraries - Pandas, Polars, and Dask - specifically when embedded within complete deep learning (DL) training and inference pipelines. The research bridges a gap in existing literature by studying how these libraries interact with substantial GPU workloads during critical phases like data loading, preprocessing, and batch feeding. The authors measured key performance indicators including runtime, memory usage, disk usage, and energy consumption (both CPU and GPU) across various machine learning models and datasets.
Authors: Yule Liu, Heyi Zhang, Jinyi Zheng, Zhen Sun, Zifan Peng, Jiaheng Wei, Tianshuo Cong, Yilong Yang, Xinlei He
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a core training stage in recent large language models (LLMs). Its reliance on non-public, high-value prompt sets raises concerns about unauthorized data use, creating a need for exposure auditing. A natural tool is membership inference attacks (MIAs), but existing methods detect fitting to a fixed target string. This does not apply to RLVR, which generates responses from the model itself and reinforces successful ones, thus hindering the auditing of data exposure. We show that it remains detectable: RLVR reshapes the model's response distribution on training prompts, producing behavioral traces that can be surfaced through targeted auditing. We propose Divergence-in-Behavior Auditing (DIBA), a white-box query-level auditing framework for RLVR. DIBA compares a fine-tuned model against its pre-RLVR checkpoint along two axes: reward-side evidence capturing changes in verifiable task success, and policy-side evidence capturing prompt-conditioned behavioral drift. By aggregating over multiple stochastic rollouts, DIBA produces a stable query-level auditing signal. Under a white-box setting, DIBA consistently outperforms strong transferred likelihood-based baselines, including calibrated and self-generated variants, achieving around 0.8 AUC and an order-of-magnitude stronger TPR@0.1%FPR. We further show that RLVR auditing is stronger when training leaves non-trivial prompt-specific traces and weaker when the base model already performs well on the prompt. Under a practical grey-box setting, transfer is often robust across model sizes under the same RLVR algorithm, but more varied across algorithms, and can remain useful under distribution shift with carefully chosen shadow data.
Authors: Zhirui Liu, Kaiyang Ji, Ke Yang, Yahao Fan, Jingyi Yu, Ye Shi, Jingya Wang
Abstract: Enabling humanoid robots to follow free-form natural language commands is a critical step toward seamless human-robot interaction and general-purpose embodied AI. However, existing methods remain limited, often constrained to simple instructions or forced to sacrifice motion diversity for physical plausibility. To address this gap, we present Humanoid-LLA, a Large Language Action model that translates unconstrained natural language directly into executable whole-body motions for humanoid robots. Our approach tackles two core challenges: paired language-humanoid motion data scarcity and physical instability. First, we bridge high-level language semantics with physically-grounded control by learning a unified human-humanoid motion vocabulary. Second, we introduce a novel two-stage fine-tuning framework that begins with supervised motion Chain-of-Thought learning, followed by reinforcement learning refined with physical feedback to ensure robustness and stability. Extensive evaluation in simulation and real-world cross-embodiment experiments demonstrates that Humanoid-LLA achieves superior generalization to novel language commands and diverse motion generation while maintaining high physical fidelity.
Authors: Ece Yurtseven
Abstract: Quantum machine learning has emerged as a promising approach to improve feature extraction and classification tasks in high-dimensional data domains such as medical imaging. In this work, we present a hybrid Quantum-Classical Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) architecture designed for the binary classification of the BreastMNIST dataset, a standardized benchmark for distinguishing between benign and malignant breast tumors. Our architecture integrates classical convolutional feature extraction with two distinct quantum circuits: an amplitude-encoding variational quantum circuit (VQC) and an angle-encoding VQC circuit with circular entanglement, both implemented on four qubits. These circuits generate quantum feature embeddings that are fused with classical features to form a joint feature space, which is subsequently processed by a fully connected classifier. To ensure fairness, the hybrid QCNN is parameter-matched against a baseline classical CNN, allowing us to isolate the contribution of quantum layers. Both models are trained under identical conditions using the Adam optimizer and binary cross-entropy loss. Experimental evaluation in five independent runs demonstrates that the hybrid QCNN achieves statistically significant improvements in classification accuracy compared to the classical CNN, as validated by a one-sided Wilcoxon signed rank test (p = 0.03125) and supported by large effect size of Cohen's d = 2.14. Our results indicate that hybrid QCNN architectures can leverage entanglement and quantum feature fusion to enhance medical image classification tasks. This work establishes a statistical validation framework for assessing hybrid quantum models in biomedical applications and highlights pathways for scaling to larger datasets and deployment on near-term quantum hardware.
Authors: Timo Stoll, Chendi Qian, Ben Finkelshtein, Ali Parviz, Darius Weber, Fabrizio Frasca, Hadar Shavit, Antoine Siraudin, Arman Mielke, Marie Anastacio, Erik M\"uller, Maya Bechler-Speicher, Michael Bronstein, Mikhail Galkin, Holger Hoos, Mathias Niepert, Bryan Perozzi, Jan T\"onshoff, Christopher Morris
Abstract: Machine learning on graphs has made substantial progress across domains such as molecular property prediction and chip design. Yet benchmarking practices remain fragmented, often relying on narrow, task-specific datasets and inconsistent evaluation protocols, hindering reproducibility and broader progress. With the recent popularity of graph foundation models, these weaknesses have become apparent, as existing benchmarks are insufficient for thorough evaluation. To address these challenges, we introduce GraphBench, a comprehensive benchmark suite spanning diverse real-world domains and task settings, including node-level, edge-level, graph-level, and generative tasks. GraphBench provides standardized evaluation protocols, including consistent dataset splits and metrics for assessing out-of-distribution generalization across selected tasks, as well as a unified hyperparameter-tuning framework. We further evaluate GraphBench with recent message-passing neural networks and graph transformer models, establishing principled baselines for future research. See www.graphbench.io for further details.
Authors: Leyang Shen, Yang Zhang, Chun Kai Ling, Xiaoyan Zhao, Tat-Seng Chua
Abstract: Agents capable of accomplishing complex tasks through multiple interactions with the environment have emerged as a popular research direction. However, in such multi-step settings, the conventional group-level policy optimization algorithm becomes suboptimal because of its underlying assumption that each step holds equal contribution, which deviates significantly from reality. Our analysis reveals that only the action choices on a small fraction of states are critical in determining the final outcome. Building on this insight, we propose CARL, a criticality-aware reinforcement learning algorithm tailored for long-horizon agentic reasoning. CARL leverages entropy as a heuristic proxy for state criticality and achieves focused training by assigning rewards to actions taken from high-criticality states while excluding actions taken from low-criticality states from model updates, avoiding noisy credit assignment and redundant computation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CARL achieves both stronger performance and higher efficiency across diverse evaluation settings. The source code will be publicly available.
Authors: Joshua Ward, Bochao Gu, Chi-Hua Wang, Guang Cheng
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable performance in generating high-quality tabular synthetic data. In practice, two primary approaches have emerged for adapting LLMs to tabular data generation: (i) fine-tuning smaller models directly on tabular datasets, and (ii) prompting larger models with examples provided in context. In this work, we show that popular implementations from both regimes exhibit a tendency to compromise privacy by reproducing memorized patterns of numeric digits from their training data. To systematically analyze this risk, we introduce a simple No-box Membership Inference Attack (MIA) called LevAtt that assumes adversarial access to only the generated synthetic data and targets the string sequences of numeric digits in synthetic observations. Using this approach, our attack exposes substantial privacy leakage across a wide range of models and datasets, and in some cases, is even a perfect membership classifier on state-of-the-art models. Our findings highlight a unique privacy vulnerability of LLM-based synthetic data generation and the need for effective defenses. To this end, we propose two methods, including a novel sampling strategy that strategically perturbs digits during generation. Our evaluation demonstrates that this approach can defeat these attacks with minimal loss of fidelity and utility of the synthetic data.
Authors: Nirhoshan Sivaroopan, Hansi Karunarathna, Chamara Madarasingha, Anura Jayasumana, Kanchana Thilakarathna
Abstract: Human Activity Recognition (HAR) underpins applications in healthcare, rehabilitation, fitness tracking, and smart environments, yet existing deep learning approaches demand dataset-specific training, large labeled corpora, and significant computational resources.We introduce RAG-HAR, a training-free retrieval-augmented framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) for HAR. RAG-HAR computes lightweight statistical descriptors, retrieves semantically similar samples from a vector database, and uses this contextual evidence to make LLM-based activity identification. We further enhance RAG-HAR by first applying prompt optimization and introducing an LLM-based activity descriptor that generates context-enriched vector databases for delivering accurate and highly relevant contextual information. Along with these mechanisms, RAG-HAR achieves state-of-the-art performance across six diverse HAR benchmarks. Most importantly, RAG-HAR attains these improvements without requiring model training or fine-tuning, emphasizing its robustness and practical applicability. RAG-HAR moves beyond known behaviors, enabling the recognition and meaningful labelling of multiple unseen human activities.
Authors: Hyuna Kwon, Babak Sadigh, Sebastien Hamel, Vincenzo Lordi, John Klepeis, Fei Zhou
Abstract: Atomistic simulations generate large volumes of noisy structural data, yet extracting phase labels and continuous order parameters (OPs) in a robust and general manner remains challenging. Existing tools are often specialized to a limited set of prototypes and split thermal-noise removal, phase classification, and OP construction into separate steps. Here we present a unified probabilistic framework for analyzing noisy atomic configurations with respect to known crystal prototypes. The model predicts per-atom, per-prototype logits and aggregates them into a scalar log-probability (logP) landscape over atomic coordinates. Its gradient defines a conservative denoising field, while the logits provide local phase labels, prototype-resolved OPs, and ambiguity measures through logit margins. We train on AFLOW-mapped crystalline structures from the Materials Project with synthetic positional and elastic perturbations, then test extrapolation to stronger noise, finite-temperature disorder, point defects, water--ice coexistence, binary polymorphs, and shock-compressed Ti. A single differentiable scalar model recovers prototype identity after denoising, tracks smooth transformations such as Bain and Burgers paths, and exposes low-confidence regions near defects and phase boundaries. This provides an integrated and extensible tool for analyzing complex atomistic simulations.
Authors: Taero Kim, Hoyoon Byun, Youngjun Choi, Sungrae Park, Kyungwoo Song
Abstract: Expanding pre-trained language models offers a practical way to increase capacity without training larger models from scratch. Depth Up-Scaling (DUS) does so by duplicating Transformer blocks and inserting them into a pre-trained backbone. This process also duplicates FFN-heavy blocks, increasing parameter and compute cost while adding capacity through a block-level dense residual branch. Yet prior work suggests that added capacity need not remain tied to dense FFN branches, while attention heads often play heterogeneous roles, motivating more efficient head-level residual corrections. We propose Memory-Infused Depth Up-Scaling (MIDUS), which replaces the duplicated FFN branches with memory layers and turns added depth into lightweight retrieval-based residual capacity. We introduce a Head-wise Memory Layer (HML), which combines multi-head product-key memory with Head-wise Implicit Value Expansion (HIVE). HML assigns each head a distinct key space, while HIVE realizes head-specific values from a shared latent bank through compact projections. Alongside empirical improvements in performance and efficiency, our head-importance and fixed-retrieval structural analyses characterize HML with HIVE as a structurally distinct, head-conditioned alternative to FFN-based residual expansion.
Authors: Ming Li, Han Chen, Yunze Xiao, Jian Chen, Hong Jiao, Tianyi Zhou
Abstract: Accurate estimation of item (question or task) difficulty is critical for educational assessment but suffers from the cold start problem. While Large Language Models demonstrate superhuman problem-solving capabilities, it remains an open question whether they can perceive the cognitive struggles of human learners. In this work, we present a large-scale empirical analysis of Human-AI Difficulty Alignment for over 20 models across diverse domains such as medical knowledge and mathematical reasoning. Our findings reveal a systematic misalignment where scaling up model size is not reliably helpful; instead of aligning with humans, models converge toward a shared machine consensus. We observe that high performance often impedes accurate difficulty estimation, as models struggle to simulate the capability limitations of students even when being explicitly prompted to adopt specific proficiency levels. Furthermore, we identify a critical lack of introspection, as models fail to predict their own limitations. These results suggest that general problem-solving capability does not imply an understanding of human cognitive struggles, highlighting the challenge of using current models for automated difficulty prediction.
Authors: Tiange Luo, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Jaekyeom Kim, Justin Johnson, Honglak Lee
Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is widely used for parameter-efficient fine-tuning, but its standard all-token, all-head design ignores the heterogeneous structure of vision language model (VLM) inputs. We introduce \emph{Image-LoRA}, a vision-oriented PEFT recipe that views LoRA as a token-level residual update and applies this update only to visual tokens. Image-LoRA further restricts adaptation to the value path of a compact subset of attention heads, selected using a one-pass influence estimate from a rank-1 visual-token-only probe. This token-, head-, and value-selective design reduces trainable parameters and adapter-only training FLOPs while leaving the pure-text forward pass of the frozen backbone unchanged when no visual tokens are present. Across visual localization benchmarks with controlled text:image token ratios, Image-LoRA matches or closely approaches standard LoRA, while showing especially favorable trade-offs in image-token-heavy regimes. We further validate its generality on TextVQA and VideoQA, verify pure-text preservation on GSM8K, and show on ViLP that a stronger information bottleneck can yield gains over standard LoRA.
Authors: Ming Li, Chenrui Fan, Yize Cheng, Soheil Feizi, Tianyi Zhou
Abstract: Large language models increasingly expose reasoning traces, yet their underlying cognitive structure and steps remain difficult to identify and analyze beyond surface-level statistics. We adopt Schoenfeld's Episode Theory as an inductive, intermediate-scale lens and introduce ThinkARM (Anatomy of Reasoning in Models), a scalable framework that explicitly abstracts reasoning traces into functional reasoning steps such as Analysis, Explore, Implement, Verify, etc. When applied to mathematical problem solving by diverse models, this abstraction reveals reproducible thinking dynamics and structural differences between reasoning and non-reasoning models, which are not apparent from token-level views. We further present two diagnostic case studies showing that exploration functions as a critical branching step associated with correctness, and that efficiency-oriented methods selectively suppress evaluative feedback steps rather than uniformly shortening responses. Together, our results demonstrate that episode-level representations make reasoning steps explicit, enabling systematic analysis of how reasoning is structured, stabilized, and altered in modern language models.
Authors: Wenxuan Xu, Arvind Pillai, Subigya Nepal, Amanda C Collins, Daniel M Mackin, Michael V Heinz, Tess Z Griffin, Nicholas C Jacobson, Andrew Campbell
Abstract: Multimodal health sensing offers rich behavioral signals for assessing mental health, yet translating these numerical time-series measurements into natural language remains challenging. Current LLMs cannot natively ingest long-duration sensor streams, and paired sensor-text datasets are scarce. To address these challenges, we introduce LENS, a framework that aligns multimodal sensing data with language models to generate clinically grounded mental-health narratives. LENS first constructs a large-scale dataset by transforming Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) responses related to depression and anxiety symptoms into natural-language descriptions, yielding over 100,000 sensor-text QA pairs from 258 participants. To enable native time-series integration, we train a patch-level encoder that projects raw sensor signals directly into an LLM's representation space. Our results show that LENS outperforms strong baselines on standard NLP metrics and task-specific measures of symptom-severity accuracy. A user study with 13 mental-health professionals further indicates that LENS-produced narratives are comprehensive and clinically meaningful. Ultimately, our approach advances LLMs as interfaces for health sensing, providing a scalable path toward models that can reason over raw behavioral signals and support downstream clinical decision-making.
Authors: Carlo Malapad Acosta, Herath Mudiyanselage Viraj Vidura Herath, Jia Yu Lim, Abhishek Saha, Sanka Rasnayaka, Lucy Marshall
Abstract: Flood models inform strategic disaster management by simulating the spatiotemporal hydrodynamics of flooding. While physics-based numerical flood models are accurate, their substantial computational cost limits their use in operational settings where rapid predictions are essential. Models designed with graph neural networks (GNNs) provide both speed and accuracy while having the ability to process unstructured spatial domains. Given its flexible input and architecture, GNNs can be leveraged alongside physics-informed techniques with ease, significantly improving interpretability and generalizability. We introduce a novel flood GNN architecture, DUALFloodGNN, which embeds physical constraints at both global and local scales through explicit loss terms. The model jointly predicts water volume at nodes and flow along edges through a shared message-passing framework. To improve performance for autoregressive inference, model training is conducted with a multi-step loss enhanced with dynamic curriculum learning. Compared with standard GNN architectures and state-of-the-art GNN flood models, DUALFloodGNN achieves substantial improvements in predicting multiple hydrologic variables (e.g., water volume, flow, and depth) while maintaining high computational efficiency. The model is open sourced at https://github.com/acostacos/dual_flood_gnn. The dataset is open sourced at https://hdl.handle.net/2123/35293 with the DOI 10.25910/9xav-0s86.
URLs: https://github.com/acostacos/dual_flood_gnn., https://hdl.handle.net/2123/35293
Authors: Steven Bird
Abstract: The world is in the grip of ecological, meaning, and language crises that are converging into a metacrisis. Big AI is accelerating them all. LLM engineering sits at the core. Despite the public good motives of language engineers and the promise of LLMs, this work is being leveraged to create unprecedented wealth and power for a handful of individuals and corporations while causing existential harm to life on earth. As a profession, we urgently need to come together to explore alternatives and to design a life-affirming future for our field of natural language processing that is centered on human flourishing on a living planet.
Authors: Yiwen Chen, Yiqing Wu, Huishi Luo, Fuzhen Zhuang, Deqing Wang, Zhao Zhang
Abstract: Graph-based recommendation has achieved great success in recent years. The classical graph recommendation model utilizes ID embedding to store essential collaborative information. However, this ID-based paradigm faces challenges in transferring to a new domain, making it hard to build a pre-trained graph recommendation model. This phenomenon primarily stems from two inherent challenges: (1) the non-transferability of ID embeddings due to isolated domain-specific ID spaces, and (2) structural incompatibility between heterogeneous interaction graphs across domains. To address these issues, we propose TextBridgeGNN, a pre-training and fine-tuning framework that can effectively transfer knowledge from a pre-trained GNN to downstream tasks. We believe the key lies in how to build the relationship between domains. Specifically, TextBridgeGNN uses text as a semantic bridge to connect domains through multi-level graph propagation. During the pre-training stage, textual information is utilized to break the data islands formed by multiple domains, and hierarchical GNNs are designed to learn both domain-specific and domain-global knowledge with text features, ensuring the retention of collaborative signals and the enhancement of semantics. During the fine-tuning stage, a similarity transfer mechanism is proposed. This mechanism initializes ID embeddings in the target domain by transferring from semantically related nodes, successfully transferring the ID embeddings and graph pattern. Experiments demonstrate that TextBridgeGNN outperforms existing methods in cross-domain, multi-domain, and training-free settings, highlighting its ability to integrate Pre-trained Language Model (PLM)-driven semantics with graph-based collaborative filtering without costly language model fine-tuning or real-time inference overhead.
Authors: Yuhuan You, Lai Wei, Xihong Wu, Tianshu Qu
Abstract: Large audio-language models have made rapid progress in recognizing what is present in an audio clip, but spatial audio-language understanding still lacks a clear task interface. A model must also decide where sound events occur, which semantic and spatial attributes belong to the same auditory object, how multiple objects are arranged, and whether a scene-level answer is physically plausible. We formalize this capability as audio scene analysis (ASA), a three-level problem spanning atomic perception, relational integration, and cognitive reasoning. We propose The World is Not Mono (TWNM), a framework that equips audio-language models with explicit spatial evidence. TWNM uses physically grounded First-Order Ambisonics (FOA) simulation for controllable supervision, learns slot-regularized spatial representations from multichannel audio, fuses them with semantic audio features, and trains with a progressive curriculum ending in preference optimization over metadata-derived answers and auxiliary format/evidence rewards. To operationalize ASA, we build a controlled benchmark from scene metadata, covering localization, attribute binding, spatial comparison, scene abduction, and counterfactual reasoning. On this benchmark, TWNM achieves 70.8% overall accuracy, 66.4% on spatial-family tasks, and 79.76% on mixed L3 scene-level multiple-choice QA. We also audit monaural and binaural reference systems as diagnostic references with explicit audit labels, since they differ in spatial input, training interface, and output format. The supported claim is that a clearly defined ASA hierarchy, FOA-conditioned spatial representations, and metadata-grounded training enable controlled, auditable spatial audio-language reasoning, with STARSS23 providing a limited real-recording diagnostic.
Authors: Hossein Hosseini Kasnavieh, Gholamreza Haffari, Chris Leckie, Adel N. Toosi
Abstract: A major challenge for the operation of large language models (LLMs) is how to predict whether a specific LLM will produce sufficiently high-quality output for a given query. Existing approaches rely on external classifiers, most commonly BERT based models, which suffer from limited context windows, constrained representational capacity, and additional computational overhead. We propose IntroLM, a method that enables causal language models to predict their own output quality during the prefilling phase without affecting generation using introspective tokens. By introducing token conditional LoRA that activates only for the introspective token, the model learns to predict the output quality for a given query while preserving the original backbone behavior and avoiding external evaluators. On question answering benchmarks, IntroLM applied to Qwen3 8B achieves a ROC AUC of 90 precent for success prediction, outperforming a DeBERTa classifier by 14 precent. When integrated into multi model routing systems, IntroLM achieves superior cost performance tradeoffs, reducing latency by up to 33 precent and large model usage by up to 50 precent at matched reliability.
Authors: Chenxiao Yu, Bowen Yi, Farzan Karimi-Malekabadi, Suhaib Abdurahman, Jinyi Ye, Shrikanth Narayanan, Yue Zhao, Morteza Dehghani
Abstract: Large language models often produce human-like moral judgments, but it is unclear whether this reflects an internal conceptual structure or superficial ``moral mimicry.'' Using Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) as an analytic framework, we study how moral foundations are encoded, organized, and expressed across 14 base and instruction-tuned LLMs spanning four model families (Llama, Qwen2.5, Qwen3-MoE, Mistral) and scales from 7B to 70B. We employ a multi-level approach combining (i) layer-wise analysis of MFT concept representations and their alignment with human moral perceptions, (ii) pretrained sparse autoencoders (SAEs) over the residual stream to identify sparse features that support moral concepts, and (iii) causal steering interventions using dense MFT vectors and sparse SAE features. We find that models represent and distinguish moral foundations in a manner that aligns with human judgments, and that this moral geometry naturally emerges from pretraining and is selectively rewired by post-training. At a finer scale, SAE features show clear semantic links to specific foundations, suggesting partially disentangled mechanisms within shared representations. Finally, steering along either dense vectors or sparse features produces predictable shifts in foundation-relevant behavior, demonstrating a causal connection between internal representations and moral outputs. Together, our results provide mechanistic evidence that moral concepts in LLMs are distributed, layered, and partly disentangled, suggesting that pluralistic moral structure can emerge as a latent pattern from the statistical regularities of language alone.
Authors: Qiuyu Tian, Zequn Liu, Yiding Li, Fengyi Chen, Zequn Liu, Youyong Kong, Fan Guo, Yuyao Li, Jinjing Shen, Zhijing Xie, Yiyun Luo, Xin Zhang, Yingce Xia
Abstract: Movie screenplays are rich long-form narratives that interleave complex character relationships, temporally ordered events, and dialogue-driven interactions. While prior benchmarks target individual subtasks such as question answering or dialogue generation, they rarely evaluate whether models can construct a coherent story world and use it consistently across multiple forms of reasoning and generation. We introduce STAGE (Screenplay Text, Agents, Graphs and Evaluation), a unified benchmark for narrative understanding over full-length movie screenplays. STAGE defines four tasks: knowledge graph construction, scene-level event summarization, long-context screenplay question answering, and in-script character role-playing, all grounded in a shared narrative world representation. The benchmark provides cleaned scripts, curated knowledge graphs, and event- and character-centric annotations for 150 films across English and Chinese, enabling holistic evaluation of models' abilities to build world representations, abstract and verify narrative events, reason over long narratives, and generate character-consistent responses.
Authors: Chi Zhang, Mengqi Zhang, Xiaotian Ye, Runxi Cheng, Zisheng Zhou, Ying Zhou, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen
Abstract: Sequential knowledge editing in large language models often causes catastrophic collapse of the model's general abilities, especially for parameter-modifying methods. Existing approaches mitigate this issue through heuristic constraints on parameter updates, yet the mechanisms underlying such degradation remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we present a spectral analysis of sequential knowledge editing and show that a model's general abilities are closely associated with dominant singular directions of pretrained weight matrices. These directions are highly sensitive to perturbations and are progressively disrupted by repeated edits, closely tracking the collapse in both editing efficacy and general performance. Building on this insight, we propose REVIVE, a plug-and-play framework that stabilizes sequential editing by explicitly preserving the dominant singular subspace. REVIVE represents parameter updates in the spectral basis of the original weights and filters components that would interfere with the protected region. Extensive experiments across multiple models and benchmarks show that REVIVE consistently improves editing efficacy while substantially preserving general abilities under long-horizon sequential editing, including extreme settings with up to 20,000 edits.
Authors: Pingzhi Tang, Yiding Wang, Muhan Zhang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) face the "knowledge cutoff" challenge, where their frozen parametric memory prevents direct internalization of new information. While Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is commonly used to update model knowledge, it often updates factual content without reliably improving the model's ability to use the newly incorporated information for question answering or decision-making. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is essential for acquiring reasoning skills; however, its high computational cost makes it impractical for efficient online adaptation. We empirically observe that the parameter updates induced by SFT and RL are nearly orthogonal. Based on this observation, we propose Parametric Skill Transfer (PaST), a framework that supports modular skill transfer for efficient and effective knowledge adaptation. By extracting a domain-agnostic Skill Vector from a source domain, we can linearly inject knowledge manipulation skills into a target model after it has undergone lightweight SFT on new data. Experiments on knowledge-incorporation QA (SQuAD, LooGLE) and agentic tool-use benchmarks (ToolBench) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. On SQuAD, PaST outperforms the state-of-the-art self-editing SFT baseline by up to 9.9 points. PaST further scales to long-context QA on LooGLE with an 8.0-point absolute accuracy gain, and improves zero-shot ToolBench success rates by +10.3 points on average with consistent gains across tool categories, indicating strong scalability and cross-domain transferability of the Skill Vector.
Authors: Chun-Yi Kuan, Hung-yi Lee
Abstract: Recent advances in audio-aware large language models have shown strong performance on audio question answering. However, existing benchmarks mainly cover answerable questions and overlook the challenge of unanswerable ones, where no reliable answer can be inferred from the audio. Such cases are common in real-world settings, where questions may be misleading, ill-posed, or incompatible with the information. To address this gap, we present AQUA-Bench, a benchmark for Audio Question Unanswerability Assessment. It systematically evaluates three scenarios: Absent Answer Detection (the correct option is missing), Incompatible Answer Set Detection (choices are categorically mismatched with the question), and Incompatible Audio Question Detection (the question is irrelevant or lacks sufficient grounding in the audio). By assessing these cases, AQUA-Bench offers a rigorous measure of model reliability and promotes the development of audio-language systems that are more robust and trustworthy. Our experiments suggest that while models excel on standard answerable tasks, they often face notable challenges with unanswerable ones, pointing to a blind spot in current audio-language understanding.
Authors: Akram Elbouanani, Aboubacar Tuo, Adrian Popescu
Abstract: Existing approaches to bias evaluation in large language models (LLMs) trade ecological validity for statistical control, relying either on artificial prompts that poorly reflect real-world use or on naturalistic tasks that lack scale and rigor. We introduce a scalable bias-auditing framework that uses named entities as controlled probes to measure systematic disparities in model behavior. Synthetic data enables us to construct diverse, controlled inputs, and we show that it reliably reproduces bias patterns observed in natural text, supporting its use for large-scale analysis. Using this framework, we conduct the largest bias audit to date, comprising 1.9 billion data points across multiple entity types, tasks, languages, models, and prompting strategies. We find consistent patterns: models penalize right-wing politicians and favor left-wing politicians, prefer Western and wealthier countries over the Global South, favor Western companies, and penalize firms in the defense and pharmaceutical sectors. While instruction tuning reduces bias, increasing model scale amplifies it, and prompting in Chinese or Russian does not mitigate Western-aligned preferences. These findings highlight the need for systematic bias auditing before deploying LLMs in high-stakes applications. Our framework is extensible to other domains and tasks, and we make it publicly available to support future work.
Authors: Qiyang Li, Sergey Levine
Abstract: We propose Q-learning with Adjoint Matching (QAM), a novel TD-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that tackles a long-standing challenge in continuous-action RL: efficient optimization of an expressive diffusion or flow-matching policy with respect to a parameterized Q-function. Effective optimization requires exploiting the first-order information of the critic, but it is challenging to do so for flow or diffusion policies because direct gradient-based optimization via backpropagation through their multi-step denoising process is numerically unstable. Existing methods work around this either by only using the value and discarding the gradient information, or by relying on approximations that sacrifice policy expressivity or bias the learned policy. QAM sidesteps both of these challenges by leveraging adjoint matching, a recently proposed technique in generative modeling, which transforms the critic's action gradient to form a step-wise objective function that is free from unstable backpropagation, while providing an unbiased, expressive policy at the optimum. Combined with temporal-difference backup for critic learning, QAM consistently outperforms prior approaches on hard, sparse reward tasks in both offline and offline-to-online RL.
Authors: Ren Zhuang, Ben Wang, Shuifa Sun
Abstract: Scaling test-time compute enhances long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off between computational cost and coverage quality: either incurring high training expense or yielding redundant trajectories. We introduce The Geometric Reasoner (TGR), a training-free framework that performs manifold-informed latent foresight search under strict memory bounds. At each chunk boundary, TGR scores candidate latent anchors via a lightweight look-ahead estimate combined with soft geometric regularizers that encourage smooth trajectories and diverse exploration. Chunk-wise KV cache resets keep memory linear in chunk length. On challenging math and code benchmarks, TGR improves robust trajectory coverage, measured by the area under the Pass@k curve (AUC), by up to 13 points on Qwen3-8B, with negligible overhead of about 1.1--1.3 times.
Authors: Maxwell Crouse, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Kshitij Fadnis, Siva Sankalp Patel, Kinjal Basu, Chulaka Gunasekara, Sadhana Kumaravel, Asim Munawar, Pavan Kapanipathi
Abstract: Synthetic data has proven itself to be a valuable resource for tuning smaller, cost-effective language models to handle the complexities of multi-turn tool calling conversations. While many frameworks and systems for producing synthetic multi-turn tool calling data have been proposed, prior works have frequently assumed that any tool calling interactions will take place in an execution environment that maintains state. When such an environment is available, this is advantageous as it allows for the validity of an interaction to be determined by whether or not the state of the execution environment matches to some prespecified objective. Unfortunately, this does not hold in many real-world tool use settings, e.g., in enterprise settings where data security is of the utmost importance or in cases where tool specifications are synthesized from multiple sources. In this work, we address this gap by introducing a data generation method, DiGiT-TC, that is designed to produce tool calling conversations that have the characteristics of conversations generated through search in a stateful environment. The key to our technique lies in a novel generation pattern that allows our approach to implicitly represent certain tool calls in the user request. We validate our approach on standard tool calling benchmarks and demonstrate that, even in stateful problem settings, our approach results in strong performance gains.
Authors: Jim Maar, Denis Paperno, Callum Stuart McDougall, Neel Nanda
Abstract: Prior work suggests that language models, while trained on next token prediction, show implicit planning behavior: they may select the next token in preparation to a predicted future token, such as a likely rhyming word, as supported by a prior qualitative study of Claude 3.5 Haiku using a cross-layer transcoder. We propose much simpler techniques for assessing implicit planning in language models. With case studies on rhyme poetry generation and question answering, we demonstrate that our methodology easily scales to many models. Across models, we find that the generated rhyme (e.g. "-ight") or answer to a question ("whale") can be manipulated by steering at the end of the preceding line with a vector, affecting the generation of intermediate tokens leading up to the rhyme or answer word. We show that implicit planning is a universal mechanism, present in smaller models than previously thought, starting from 1B parameters. Our methodology offers a widely applicable direct way to study implicit planning abilities of LLMs. More broadly, understanding planning abilities of language models can inform decisions in AI safety and control.
Authors: Minwu Kim, Safal Shrestha, Anubhav Shrestha, Keith Ross
Abstract: As Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) substantially improves the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), a new bottleneck emerges: more training problems become saturated, that is, the LLM answers the questions correctly for nearly every rollout. On such problems, rewards provide little useful learning signal. While collecting harder problems is a natural response, it is costly and increasingly difficult. We propose failure-prefix conditioning, a simple method that unlocks the remaining signal in saturated problems by shifting exploration toward failure-prone reasoning states. By conditioning on prefixes of rare incorrect trajectories, the method improves the model's ability to recover from misleading early reasoning. We observe that failure-prefix conditioning consistently improves performance where standard RLVR stalls, and achieves gains comparable to training on newly collected medium-difficulty problems. We further analyze the model's robustness, finding that our method reduces performance degradation under misleading failure prefixes, albeit with a mild trade-off in adherence to correct early reasoning. Finally, we demonstrate that an iterative approach, which refreshes failure prefixes during training, unlocks additional gains after performance plateaus. Overall, our results show that saturated problems still contain valuable learning signal, and that failure-prefix conditioning provides an effective way to unlock it.
Authors: Yiming Wang, Zhuosheng Zhang, Rui Wang
Abstract: Parallel thinking improves LLM reasoning through multi-path sampling and aggregation. In standard evaluations, due to a lack of sample-specific priors, all samples share a global budget chosen to maximize dataset accuracy. However, many samples reach their best accuracy with much smaller budgets, causing low budget utilization. This contradiction between system efficacy and sample efficiency constitutes the Overscaling Curse. In this paper, we first provide a formal analysis of the overscaling curse and quantify its prevalence and severity in real-world systems. To break it, we propose Latent Budget Predictor (LanBo), which probes model latent representations to predict sample-specific optimal budgets. LanBo significantly improves budget utilization while maintaining dataset accuracy. We further integrate LanBo into the full decoding pipeline, inspiring Pre-decoding Budget Adaptation (PreAda), a paradigm that allocates budgets before decoding to preserve decoding-time parallelization. LanBo substantially improves hardware-aware efficiency in latency and memory, demonstrating both its practical value and the promise of LanBo for efficient parallel decoding.
Authors: Mohamed Elgaar, Hadi Amiri
Abstract: Curriculum learning changes the order of pretraining data, but it remains unclear how ordering changes the learning dynamics. We pretrain models from 14M to 1B parameters for 300B tokens under three linguistically motivated curricula--Age-of-Acquisition, word frequency, and Verb Variation (VV)--and compare each against Random ordering. We analyze latent training phases, gradient noise scale (GNS), and the singular-value structure of the output head. We find that training follows a shared sequence of latent phases, while curricula mainly change time spent in each phase. Random ordering yields higher GNS at 14M-70M and late singular-entropy spikes up to 160M, consistent with noisier gradients and output-head saturation. A reverse-order VV control shows that direction matters: descending order loses much of the accuracy advantage of the ascending curriculum. At larger scales, these stability differences are smaller. These results indicate that the curricula studied here are associated with more stable within-phase training in smaller models rather than with the creation of new phases.
Authors: Alberto Fern\'andez-Hern\'andez, Cristian P\'erez-Corral, Jose I. Mestre, Manuel F. Dolz, Enrique S. Quintana-Ort\'i
Abstract: Adam has been at the core of large-scale training for almost a decade, yet a simple empirical fact remains unaccounted for: both validation scores and the qualitative behaviour of the training runs improve when the momentum parameters satisfy $\beta_{1}=\beta_{2}$. Some recent studies have reported this pattern, but there is still no explanation for why this choice helps. We show that this choice is closely tied to a structural property that we refer to as \textit{gradient scale invariance}. We formalize this notion and prove that Adam becomes gradient scale invariant of first order if and only if $\beta_{1}=\beta_{2}$. This perspective places the balanced regime of Adam in direct alignment with the design principles underlying several recent optimizers that explicitly enforce scale-robust updates. The theory is supported by experiments across vision and language tasks, and across different architectural families, in which rescaling the gradient has a markedly smoother effect on the update when $\beta_{1}=\beta_{2}$. Overall, our results offer a coherent explanation for an open question in the behavior of Adam and provide a simple principle that helps guide the design of future optimizers.
Authors: Lorenzo Mazza, Ariel Rodriguez, Rayan Younis, Martin Lelis, Ortrun Hellig, Chenpan Li, Sebastian Bodenstedt, Martin Wagner, Stefanie Speidel
Abstract: Imitation learning has achieved remarkable success in robotic manipulation, yet its application to surgical robotics remains challenging due to data scarcity, constrained workspaces, and the need for an exceptional level of safety and predictability. We present a supervised Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture designed for phase-structured surgical manipulation tasks, which can be added on top of any autonomous policy. Unlike prior surgical robot learning approaches that rely on multi-camera setups or thousands of demonstrations, we show that a lightweight action decoder policy like Action Chunking Transformer (ACT) can learn complex, long-horizon manipulation from less than 150 demonstrations using solely stereo endoscopic images, when equipped with our architecture. We evaluate our approach on the collaborative surgical task of bowel grasping and retraction, where a robot assistant interprets visual cues from a human surgeon, executes targeted grasping on deformable tissue, and performs sustained retraction. Our results show that generalist Vision Language Action models fail to acquire the task entirely, even under standard in-distribution conditions. Furthermore, while standard ACT achieves moderate success in-distribution, adopting a supervised MoE architecture significantly boosts its performance, yielding higher success rates in-distribution and demonstrating superior robustness in out-of-distribution scenarios, including novel grasp locations, reduced illumination, and partial occlusions. Notably, it generalizes to unseen testing viewpoints and also transfers zero-shot to ex vivo porcine tissue without additional training, offering a promising pathway toward in vivo deployment. To support this statement, we present qualitative preliminary results of policy roll-outs during in vivo porcine surgery.
Authors: Hantong Feng, Duxin Chen, Wenwu Yu
Abstract: Temporal link prediction is crucial for rapidly growing social networks. Existing methods often overlook the underlying causal mechanisms that drive link formation, making it difficult for algorithms to adapt to complex structures that continuously evolve over time. To enable prediction models to adapt to complex temporal environments, they need to be robust to emerging structural changes. We propose a dynamic network learning framework CoDCL, which combines counterfactual-inspired augmentation with contrastive learning to address this deficiency. Furthermore, we devise a comprehensive strategy to generate high-quality counterfactual data, combining a dynamic treatments design with efficient structural neighborhood exploration to quantify the temporal changes in interaction patterns. Crucially, the entire CoDCL is designed as a plug-and-play universal module that can be seamlessly integrated into various existing temporal graph models without requiring architectural modifications. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that CoDCL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in temporal link prediction, highlighting the effectiveness of integrating counterfactual-inspired data augmentation into dynamic representation learning.
Authors: Palash Goyal, Mihir Parmar, Yiwen Song, Hamid Palangi, Tomas Pfister, Jinsung Yoon
Abstract: The exponential growth of machine learning submissions has strained the traditional peer review process, resulting in slow feedback loops for authors and an immense burden on reviewers to rigorously audit technical soundness and verify literature. To address this, we introduce ScholarPeer, a multi-agent framework designed to operationalize the rigorous auditing workflow of a senior researcher. Rather than attempting to replace human judgment, ScholarPeer serves as a co-scientist: acting as a mentor for rapid author iteration prior to submission, and as an active verification assistant that augments human reviewers. The framework structurally decouples contextualization from critique by deploying a sub-domain historian to synthesize the field's trajectory, a baseline scout to proactively hunt for omitted state-of-the-art comparisons, and a multi-aspect Q&A engine that deeply audits technical soundness-scrutinizing internal logical consistency, experimental validity, and mathematical rigor-while cross-referencing claims against top-tier academic venues. We comprehensively evaluate ScholarPeer on ~1,800 ICLR submissions spanning 2020 through 2025. Our results show that ScholarPeer achieves significant win-rates against state-of-the-art fine-tuned models and search-augmented agentic baselines.
Authors: Hun Chang, Byunghee Cha, Jong Chul Ye
Abstract: Recent studies have explored using pretrained Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) such as DINO for generative autoencoders, showing strong generative performance. Unfortunately, existing approaches often suffer from limited reconstruction fidelity due to the loss of high-frequency details. In this work, we present the \textbf{\em Hyperspherical Autoencoder (HAE)}, a framework that bridges semantic representation and pixel-level reconstruction. Our key insight is that while semantic information in contrastive representations is primarily directional, enforcing strict magnitude matching hinders the preservation of fine-grained details. To address this, we introduce a {\em Directional Feature Alignment} objective that enforces semantic consistency while allowing flexible feature magnitudes for detail retention, alongside a {\em Hierarchical Convolutional Patch Embedding} module to enhance local structure preservation. Furthermore, observing that SSL-based representations intrinsically lie on a hypersphere, we employ {\em Riemannian Flow Matching} to train a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) directly on this spherical latent manifold. Notably, our manifold-aware DiT exhibits highly efficient convergence, achieving an exceptional gFID of \textbf{1.96} alongside a reconstruction rFID of \textbf{0.78} and a PSNR of \textbf{25.2} dB, validating the advantages of our manifold-aware approach.
Authors: Kunal Mukherjee, Zulfikar Alom, Tran Gia Bao Ngo, Cuneyt Gurcan Akcora, Murat Kantarcioglu
Abstract: The rise of bot accounts on social media poses significant risks to public discourse. To address this threat, modern bot detectors increasingly rely on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, the effectiveness of these GNN-based detectors in real-world settings remains poorly understood. In practice, attackers continuously adapt their strategies as well as must operate under domain-specific and temporal constraints, which can fundamentally limit the applicability of existing attack methods. As a result, there is a critical need for robust GNN-based bot detection methods under realistic, constraint-aware attack scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce BOCLOAK to systematically evaluate the robustness of GNN-based social bot detection via both edge editing and node injection adversarial attacks under realistic constraints. BOCLOAK constructs a probability measure over spatio-temporal neighbor features and learns an optimal transport geometry that separates human and bot behaviors. It then decodes transport plans into sparse, plausible edge edits that evade detection while obeying real-world constraints. We evaluate BOCLOAK across three social bot datasets, five state-of-the-art bot detectors, three adversarial defenses, and compare it against four leading graph adversarial attack baselines. BOCLOAK achieves up to 80.13% higher attack success rates while using 99.80% less GPU memory under realistic real-world constraints. Most importantly, BOCLOAK shows that optimal transport provides a lightweight, principled framework for bridging the gap between adversarial attacks and real-world bot detection.
Authors: Wei Chen, Jiacheng Li, Shigui Li, Zhiqi Lin, Junmei Yang, John Paisley, Delu Zeng
Abstract: Score-based methods are powerful across machine learning, but they face a paradox: theoretically path-independent, yet practically path-dependent. We resolve this by proving that practical training objectives differ from the ideal, ground-truth objective by a crucial, overlooked term: the path variance of the score function. We propose the MVP (**M**imum **V**ariance **P**ath) Principle to minimize this path variance. Our key contribution is deriving a closed-form expression for the variance, making optimization tractable. By parameterizing the path with a flexible Kumaraswamy Mixture Model, our method learns data-adaptive, low-variance paths without heuristic manual selection. This principled optimization of the complete objective yields more accurate and stable estimators, establishing new state-of-the-art results on challenging benchmarks and providing a general framework for optimizing score-based interpolation. Our code can be found in https://github.com/Hoemr/OpenDRE.git.
Authors: Brandon Yee, Pairie Koh
Abstract: Behavioral parameters such as loss aversion, herding, and extrapolation are central to asset pricing models but remain difficult to measure reliably. We develop a framework that treats large language models (LLMs) as calibrated measurement instruments for behavioral parameters. Using four models and 24{,}000 agent--scenario pairs, we document systematic rationality bias in baseline LLM behavior, including attenuated loss aversion, weak herding, and near-zero disposition effects relative to human benchmarks. Profile-based calibration induces large, stable, and theoretically coherent shifts in several parameters, with calibrated loss aversion, herding, extrapolation, and anchoring reaching or exceeding benchmark magnitudes. To assess external validity, we embed calibrated parameters in an agent-based asset pricing model, where calibrated extrapolation generates short-horizon momentum and long-horizon reversal patterns consistent with empirical evidence. Our results establish measurement ranges, calibration functions, and explicit boundaries for eight canonical behavioral biases.
Authors: Donald Ye
Abstract: Gradient-based attribution is the workhorse of mechanistic interpretability, yet whether it reliably tracks causal importance at the component level remains largely untested. We causally evaluate this assumption across two algorithmic tasks and up to 10 random seeds, uncovering a systematic, layer-wise failure: gradient attribution consistently overvalues early-layer \textbf{Gradient Bloats} and undervalues late-layer \textbf{Hidden Heroes}. Rank correlation collapses from $\rho = 0.72$ on sequence reversal to $0.27$ on sequence sorting, reaching $\rho = -0.18$ in individual seeds. This failure stems from first-order gradient attribution's inability to detect collective redundancy: joint Bloat ablation causes $14\times$ greater damage than individual results predict. Consequently, Bloats dominate gradient rankings despite negligible functional impact, while ablating Hidden Heroes destroys OOD accuracy ($-36.4\% \pm 22.8\%$). This systematic inversion of early-layer feature extraction and late-layer computation motivates causal validation as a prerequisite for circuit-level claims.
Authors: Jung H. Lee, Sujith Vijayan
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) were invented for natural language tasks such as translation, but they have proved that they can perform highly complex functions across domains. Additionally, they have been thought to develop new skills without being trained on them. These learning capabilities lead to LLMs adoption in a wide range of domains. Thus, it is imperative that we understand their operating mechanisms and limitations for proper diagnostics and repair. The earlier studies proposed that high level concepts are encoded as linear directions in LLMs activation space and that the geometry of embeddings have semantic meanings. Inspired by these studies, we hypothesize that LLMs may use subspaces and vector algebra in subspaces to perform tasks. To address this hypothesis, we analyze LLMs' functional modules and residual streams collected from LLMs engaging in in-context learning (ICL), one of the emergent abilities. Our analyses suggest that 1) LLMs can create subspaces, where evidence can be accumulated and 2) ICL tasks can be solved via simple algebraic operations in subspaces.
Authors: Antonino Emanuele Scurria
Abstract: Backpropagation is typically presented as a symbolic procedure: a backward pass topologically distinct from inference, with non-local error signals and synchronous global clocking, features with no clear analog in physical reality. Existing physics-inspired alternatives recover gradients only approximately, in vanishing-perturbation limits, or under weight-symmetry constraints incompatible with feedforward architectures. In this paper, we address this gap by deriving exact backpropagation from Hamilton's least-action principle. By recasting the forward dynamics in continuous time and adapting a Lagrangian formalism for non-conservative systems to the resulting flow, we unify inference and gradient computation within a single variational framework on a doubled phase space, whose two conjugate fields jointly encode activations and sensitivities. A single global Lagrangian governs the dynamics: the task loss enters as a symmetry-breaking perturbation of the forward manifold, and credit assignment emerges as the tension that develops between the conjugate states. Inference and gradient computation thus unfold simultaneously through local interactions, requiring no separate backward circuit. Ultimately, standard backpropagation is recovered exactly as the discrete-time projection of this continuous flow. This perspective unifies the formalism of physics with backpropagation, opening a principled pathway for applying tools from classical mechanics - symplectic geometry, Noether's theorem, path-integral methods - to the analysis of learning dynamics. As a downstream consequence, it also points toward analog and neuromorphic substrates in which learning is embodied in the hardware itself.
Authors: Xinyu Liu, Zixuan Xie, Amir Moeini, Claire Chen, Shuze Daniel Liu, Yu Meng, Aidong Zhang, Shangtong Zhang
Abstract: While the ecosystem of Lean and Mathlib has enjoyed celebrated success in formal mathematical reasoning with the help of large language models (LLMs), the absence of many folklore lemmas in Mathlib remains a persistent barrier that limits Lean's usability as an everyday tool for mathematicians like \LaTeX{} or Maple. To address this, we introduce MathlibLemma, a modular LLM-based pipeline for automated folklore-lemma mining: the discovery, formalization, and proving of reusable intermediate facts that mathematicians often take for granted but that are not always present in formal libraries. At its core, MathlibLemma proactively mines the missing connective tissue of mathematics. The pipeline produces a verified library of folklore-style lemmas, including 1,506 Lean-checked proofs that pass a proof-bypass screen; a small curated pilot subset has also been merged into Mathlib, providing external evidence that selected outputs can meet expert library standards. Leveraging this pipeline, we further construct the MathlibLemma benchmark, a suite of 4,028 non-trivial type-checked Lean statements spanning a broad range of mathematical domains. By transforming the role of LLMs from passive consumers to active contributors, this work takes a step toward AI-assisted expansion of formal mathematical libraries.
Authors: Jonas Petersen, Camilla Mazzoleni, Gian-Alessandro Lombardi, Federico Martelli, Riccardo Maggioni
Abstract: What structural inductive bias helps transformers reason over knowledge graphs? Through controlled ablations of a minimal transformer modification with four independently removable components (sparse adjacency masking, edge-type biases, query scaling, value gating), we isolate which structural signals drive multi-hop reasoning. Our finding is sharp: sparse adjacency masking alone accounts for the dominant share of improvement over unmasked transformers (+72.5pp on 3-hop MetaQA, +45.5pp on WebQSP, +53.9pp on CWQ), while learned relation parameters add only modest refinement and can actively hurt without structural guidance. A zero-shot experiment provides architecturally independent corroboration: masking-based attention degrades 4.0x less than relation-specific weights when edge types are held out. The useful inductive bias for multi-hop KGQA is predominantly topological, not relational.
Authors: Wenquan Lu, Hai Huang, Enqi Liu, Randall Balestriero
Abstract: Reinforcement learning algorithms such as group-relative policy optimization (GRPO) have shown strong potential for improving the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models. While a growing body of work seeks to improve training entropy, rollout diversity, and exploration, most existing methods still train models with a single fixed reasoning prompt or template, which can encourage prompt-specific overfitting and unstable training dynamics. In this work, we introduce Prompt Augmented Policy Optimization (PrAg-PO), a simple policy optimization method that mixes prompt templates with template-specific format rewards during training. By encouraging models to generate reasoning traces under diverse instructions and output formats, PrAg-PO increases rollout diversity and improves robustness. Compared with GRPO and DAPO, PrAg-PO achieves significantly higher reasoning accuracy while mitigating premature training collapse. Empirically, experiments on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B, and Qwen3-1.7B show that PrAg-PO consistently outperforms strong baselines and achieves competitive performance against recent methods on mathematics benchmarks, using only a fixed MATH Level 3-5 training set of 8.5K problems. The code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/wenquanlu/PrAg-PO.
Authors: Zhenshuo Zhang, Minxuan Duan, Hongyang R. Zhang
Abstract: Modern AI agents such as large language models are trained on diverse tasks -- translation, code generation, mathematical reasoning, and text prediction -- simultaneously. A key question is how to quantify the influence of each individual training task on performance on a target task, a problem we refer to as task attribution. The direct approach, leave-one-out retraining, measures the effect of removing each task, but is computationally infeasible at scale. An alternative approach that builds surrogate models to predict the performance on a target task for any subset of training tasks has emerged in the recent literature. Prior work focuses on linear surrogate models, which capture first-order relationships but miss nonlinear interactions such as XOR-type effects. In this paper, we first consider a unified task-weighting framework for analyzing task-attribution methods and establish a new connection between linear surrogate models and influence functions via a second-order analysis. Then, we introduce kernel surrogate models, which more effectively represent second-order task interactions. To efficiently learn the kernel surrogate, we develop a gradient-based estimation procedure that leverages a first-order approximation of pretrained models; empirically, this yields accurate surrogate estimates with less than $2\%$ relative error without repeated retraining. Experiments across multiple settings -- including mathematical reasoning in transformers, in-context learning, and multi-objective reinforcement learning -- demonstrate the effectiveness of kernel surrogate models. They achieve a $25\%$ higher correlation with the leave-one-out ground truth than linear surrogates and influence-function baselines, enabling more accurate and scalable task attribution. When used for downstream data selection, kernel surrogate models further yield a $40\%$ improvement in the aforementioned settings.
Authors: David F. Ramirez, Tim Overman, Kristen Jaskie, Joe Marvin, Andreas Spanias
Abstract: We present a visual-context image-retrieval-augmented generation (ImageRAG)- assisted AI agent for automatic target recognition (ATR) of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. SAR is a remote sensing method used in defense and security applications to detect and monitor the positions of military vehicles, which may appear indistinguishable in images. Researchers have extensively studied SAR ATR to improve the differentiation and identification of vehicle types, characteristics, and measurements. Test examples can be compared with known vehicle target types to improve recognition tasks. New methods enhance the capabilities of neural networks, transformer attention, and multimodal large language models. An agentic AI method may be developed to utilize a defined set of tools, such as searching through a library of similar examples. Our proposed method, SAR Retrieval-Augmented Generation (SAR-RAG), combines a multimodal large language model (MLLM) with a vector database of semantic embeddings to support contextual search for image exemplars with known qualities. By recovering past image examples of known true target types, our SAR-RAG system can compare similar vehicle categories, thereby improving ATR prediction accuracy. We evaluate this through search and retrieval metrics, categorical classification accuracy, and numeric regression of vehicle dimensions. These metrics all show improvements when SAR-RAG is added to an MLLM baseline method as an attached ATR memory bank.
Authors: Jiarui Yuan, Tailin Jin, Weize Chen, Zeyuan Liu
Abstract: True self-evolution requires agents to act as lifelong learners that internalize novel experiences to solve future problems. However, rigorously measuring this foundational capability is hindered by two obstacles: the entanglement of prior knowledge, where ``new'' knowledge may appear in pre-training data, and the entanglement of reasoning complexity, where failures may stem from problem difficulty rather than an inability to recall learned knowledge. We introduce SE-Bench, a diagnostic environment that obfuscates the NumPy library and its API doc into a pseudo-novel package with randomized identifiers. Agents are trained to internalize this package and evaluated on simple coding tasks without access to documentation, yielding a clean setting where tasks are trivial with the new API doc but impossible for base models without it. Our investigation reveals three insights: (1) the Open-Book Paradox, where training with reference documentation inhibits retention, requiring "Closed-Book Training" to force knowledge compression into weights; (2) the RL Gap, where standard RL fails to internalize new knowledge completely due to PPO clipping and negative gradients; and (3) the viability of Self-Play for internalization, proving models can learn from self-generated, noisy tasks when coupled with SFT, but not RL. Overall, SE-Bench establishes a rigorous diagnostic platform for self-evolution with knowledge internalization. Our code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/thunlp/SE-Bench.
Authors: Seohyeon Cha, Huancheng Chen, Dongjun Kim, Haoran Zhang, Kevin Chan, Gustavo de Veciana, Haris Vikalo
Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) enables efficient deployment of large language models by mapping pretrained weights to low-bit formats without retraining, typically using a small calibration set to minimize a layer-wise calibration objective. However, this sequential procedure induces a mismatch: errors from earlier quantized layers alter the inputs received by later layers, causing the activations to deviate from those of the full-precision model. Recent approaches introduce mismatch-aware calibration objectives to compensate for this effect, but leave open how much of the observed mismatch should shift each layer's calibration target. Fully applying this correction can overfit limited calibration data, while scaling the mismatch correction with a fixed coefficient ignores varying reliability of mismatch estimates across layers. To address these limitations, we propose CoreQ, a learning-free PTQ framework that applies a closed-form coefficient for mismatch correction derived from a geometric decomposition of the mismatch. The resulting coefficient adapts the correction across layers, reduces overfitting to finite calibration data, and requires no hyperparameter tuning. Given the corrected target, CoreQ minimizes the induced triangular least-squares objective with an efficient greedy successive-rounding solver and a bounded beam-search extension, K-CoreQ, that trades modest additional compute for improved performance. Across multiple LLM families, scales, bit-widths, and quantization settings, CoreQ improves perplexity and downstream accuracy over strong PTQ baselines.
Authors: Jan Benad, Pradeep Kr. Banerjee, Frank R\"oder, Nihat Ay, Martin V. Butz, Manfred Eppe
Abstract: Zero-shot generalization in contextual reinforcement learning remains a core challenge, particularly when the context is latent and must be inferred from data. A canonical failure mode arises when latent context discontinuously changes how actions affect the environment, requiring incompatible control responses across contexts. We propose DMA*-SH, a framework where a single hypernetwork, trained solely via dynamics prediction, generates a small set of adapter weights shared across the dynamics model, policy, and action-value function. This shared modulation imparts an inductive bias matched to discontinuous context-to-dynamics shifts, while input/output normalization and random input masking stabilize context inference, promoting directionally concentrated representations. We provide theoretical support via expressivity separation results for hypernetwork modulation, and a variance decomposition with policy-gradient variance bounds that formalize how within-mode compression improves learning under non-overlapping contexts. For evaluation, we introduce the Actuator Inversion Benchmark (AIB), a suite of environments designed to isolate challenging context-to-dynamics interactions, including actuator inversion, actuator permutations, and weakly non-overlapping continuous dynamics. On AIB's held-out tasks, DMA*-SH achieves zero-shot generalization, outperforming domain randomization by 58.1% and surpassing a standard context-aware baseline by 11.5% on average.
Authors: Rishabh Jain, Keisuke Okumura, Michael Amir, Pietro Lio, Amanda Prorok
Abstract: Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a representative multi-agent coordination problem, where multiple agents are required to navigate to their respective goals without collisions. Solving MAPF optimally is known to be NP-hard, leading to the adoption of learning-based approaches to alleviate the online computational burden. Prevailing approaches, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), are typically constrained to pairwise message passing between agents. However, this limitation leads to suboptimal behaviours and critical issues, such as attention dilution, particularly in dense environments where group (i.e. beyond just two agents) coordination is most critical. Despite the importance of such higher-order interactions, existing approaches have not been able to fully explore them. To address this representational bottleneck, we introduce HMAGAT (Hypergraph Multi-Agent Attention Network), a novel architecture that leverages attentional mechanisms over directed hypergraphs to explicitly capture group dynamics. Empirically, HMAGAT establishes a new state-of-the-art among learning-based MAPF solvers: e.g., despite having just 1M parameters and being trained on 100$\times$ less data, it outperforms the current SoTA 85M parameter model. Through detailed analysis of HMAGAT's attention values, we demonstrate how hypergraph representations mitigate the attention dilution inherent in GNNs and capture complex interactions where pairwise methods fail. Our results illustrate that appropriate inductive biases are often more critical than the training data size or sheer parameter count for multi-agent problems.
Authors: Samuel Daulton, David Eriksson, Maximilian Balandat, Eytan Bakshy
Abstract: Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular technique for sample-efficient optimization of black-box functions. In many applications, the parameters being tuned come with a carefully engineered default configuration, and practitioners only want to deviate from this default when necessary. Standard BO, however, does not aim to minimize deviation from the default and, in practice, often pushes weakly relevant parameters to the boundary of the search space. This makes it difficult to distinguish between important and spurious changes and increases the burden of vetting recommendations when the optimization objective omits relevant operational considerations. We introduce BONSAI, a default-aware BO policy that prunes low-impact deviations from a default configuration while explicitly controlling the loss in acquisition value. BONSAI is compatible with a variety of acquisition functions, including expected improvement and upper confidence bound (GP-UCB). We theoretically bound the regret incurred by BONSAI, showing that, under certain conditions, it enjoys the same no-regret property as vanilla GP-UCB. Moreover, assuming known ARD lengthscales -- the same assumption underlying GP-UCB regret bounds -- BONSAI provably recovers the relevant-coordinate set at zero acquisition cost, yielding a method that matches the GP-UCB regret rate while recovering the minimal-$\ell_0$ solution -- a guarantee not provided by prior sparse-BO methods. Across many real-world applications, we empirically find that BONSAI substantially reduces the number of non-default parameters in recommended configurations while maintaining competitive optimization performance, with little effect on wall time -- averaging only $1.5\times$ the candidate-generation cost of standard BO, compared to $7$-$34\times$ on average for prior sparse-BO methods (IR, ER, and SEBO).
Authors: Heiko Hoppe, Fabian Akkerman, Wouter van Heeswijk, Maximilian Schiffer
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) is increasingly applied to large-scale decision-making problems like logistics, scheduling, and recommender systems, but existing algorithms struggle with the curse of dimensionality in such large discrete action spaces. We propose Distance-Guided Reinforcement Learning (DGRL), combining Sampled Dynamic Neighborhoods and Distance-Based Updates to enable efficient RL in problems with up to $10^{20}$ actions. Unlike prior methods, DGRL performs stochastic volumetric exploration and transforms policy optimization into a stable regression task, decoupling gradient variance from action space cardinality. On structured tasks, DGRL provably guarantees local value improvement. DGRL naturally generalizes to hybrid continuous-discrete action spaces. We demonstrate performance improvements of up to 66% against state-of-the-art benchmarks across regularly and irregularly structured environments, while simultaneously improving convergence speed and computational complexity.
Authors: Ya-Chi Chu, Alkiviades Boukas, Madeleine Udell
Abstract: Neural networks are increasingly used as fast surrogate models across various domains, but unconstrained predictions can violate physical, operational, or safety requirements. We propose SnareNet, a feasibility-controlled architecture to learn mappings whose outputs must satisfy input-dependent constraints. SnareNet appends a differentiable repair layer that navigates in the constraint map's range space, steering iterates toward feasibility and producing a repaired output that satisfies constraints to a user-specified tolerance. We stabilize end-to-end training by adaptive relaxation, a new training paradigm that snares the neural network at initialization and shrinks it into the feasible set, enabling early exploration and strict feasibility later in training. On optimization learning and trajectory planning benchmarks, SnareNet consistently attains improved objective quality while satisfying constraints more reliably than prior work, and it is the first to enforce non-convex constraints at medium-to-high precision robustly across instances.
Authors: Xavier Hu, Jinxiang Xia, Shengze Xu, Kangqi Song, Yishuo Yuan, Guibin Zhang, JinCheng Ren, Boyu Feng, Li Lu, Tieyong Zeng, Jiaheng Liu, Minghao Liu, He Zhu, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wei Wang, Wangchunshu Zhou
Abstract: Long-horizon planning is widely recognized as a core capability of autonomous LLM-based agents; however, current evaluation frameworks suffer from being largely episodic, domain-specific, or insufficiently grounded in persistent economic dynamics. We introduce EcoGym, a generalizable benchmark for continuous plan-and-execute decision making in interactive economies. EcoGym comprises three diverse environments: Vending (adapted from the closed-source Vending-Bench, with full open-source release), Freelance (new), and Operation (new), implemented in a unified decision-making process with standardized interfaces, and budgeted actions over an effectively unbounded horizon (1000+ steps if 365 day-loops for evaluation). The evaluation of EcoGym is based on business-relevant outcomes (e.g., net worth, income, and DAU), targeting long-term strategic coherence and robustness under partial observability and stochasticity. Experiments across eleven leading LLMs expose a systematic tension: no single model dominates across all three scenarios. Critically, we find that models exhibit significant suboptimality in either high-level strategies or efficient actions executions. EcoGym is released as an open, extensible testbed for transparent long-horizon agent evaluation and for studying controllability utility trade-offs in economic settings.
Authors: Fei Wu, Jia Hu, Geyong Min, Shiqiang Wang
Abstract: Federated low-rank adaptation (FedLoRA) has facilitated communication-efficient and privacy-preserving fine-tuning of foundation models for downstream tasks. In practical federated learning scenarios, client heterogeneity in system resources and data distributions motivates the use of heterogeneous LoRA ranks across clients. However, we identify a previously overlooked phenomenon in heterogeneous FedLoRA with SVD-based allocation, termed rank collapse, where the energy of the global update becomes concentrated in the minimum shared rank, resulting in suboptimal performance and high sensitivity to rank configurations. Through theoretical analysis, we reveal the root cause of rank collapse: a mismatch between rank-agnostic aggregation weights and rank-dependent client contributions, which systematically suppresses higher-rank updates at a geometric rate over rounds. Motivated by this insight, we propose raFLoRA, a rank-partitioned aggregation method that decomposes local updates into rank partitions and then aggregates each partition weighted by its effective client contributions. Extensive experiments across vision, language, and reasoning tasks show that raFLoRA prevents rank collapse, improves model performance, and enhances robustness across diverse heterogeneous configurations compared with strong FedLoRA baselines.
Authors: Nils Palumbo, Sarthak Choudhary, Jihye Choi, Guy Amir, Prasad Chalasani, Somesh Jha
Abstract: Security policy enforcement in contemporary agentic systems predominantly consists of embedding natural-language policies within an agent's system prompt and delegating compliance to the agent's reasoning. This approach admits no formal enforcement guarantee and cannot express policies whose satisfaction depends on the causal history of an execution, a gap that becomes acute in multi-agent systems, where enforcement must reason across agents. We argue that policy enforcement in agentic systems is most naturally understood as a cross-cutting concern, and propose a framework grounded in aspect-oriented programming that specifies policies independent of the agent's reasoning and enforces them at every policy-relevant decision. Policies are written in Datalog over a set of abstract predicates describing the execution context, an observability service governed by a formal assume/guarantee contract maintains these predicates, and a reference monitor consults the policy at each action to produce an enforcement decision. When the environment contract holds, enforcement decisions coincide with the policy's intended semantics. We adopt Datalog as the policy language, a natural fit because it supports declarative rule specification, admits recursion for policies over transitive relationships, and yields deterministic enforcement. Datalog further admits tractable static analyses for contradiction, redundancy, subsumption, and conditional reachability, enabling authors to verify policy intent and surface ambiguities inherent in natural-language specifications. We realize the framework in FORGE, which enforces policies over agentic deployments without modification to the underlying agents. We evaluate FORGE on three case studies: information flow policies for prompt injection defense, approval workflows in a multi-agent pharmacovigilance system, and organizational policies for customer service.
Authors: Yukun Chen, Xinyu Zhang, Boyi Deng, Jialong Tang, Yu Wan, Fei Huang, Yuxi Zhou, Baosong Yang, Yiming Li
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are employed worldwide, existing evaluation paradigms for their multilingual capabilities primarily focus on factual task performance, neglecting the ability to judge content's deep-level values across multiple languages. To bridge this gap, we first reveal two primary challenges in constructing values judgment benchmarks, cultural diversity and disciplinary complexity, and propose a novel two-stage human-AI collaborative annotation framework to alleviate them. This framework identifies the issue scope and nature, establishes specific annotation criteria, and utilizes multiple LLMs for final review. Building upon this framework, we introduce \textbf{X-Value}, the first \textit{Cross-lingual Values Judgment Benchmark} designed to evaluate the capability of LLMs in judging deep-level values of content. X-Value comprises 4,750 Question-Answer pairs across 14 languages, covering 7 major global issue categories, and provides 12 granular annotation metadata to facilitate a rigorous evaluation of model performance. Systematic evaluations of X-Value are conducted across 17 LLMs using distinct prompting strategies. Multi-dimensional analysis of accuracy and F1-scores reveals their limitations in cross-lingual values judgment and indicates performance disparities across categories and languages. This work highlights the urgent need to improve the underlying, values-aware content judgment capability of LLMs.\footnote{Samples of X-Value are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Whitolf/X-Value.}
Authors: Yining Hong, Huang Huang, Manling Li, Li Fei-Fei, Leonidas Guibas, Jiajun Wu, Yejin Choi
Abstract: Embodied LLMs endow robots with high-level task reasoning, but they cannot reflect on what went wrong or why, turning deployment into a sequence of independent trials where mistakes repeat rather than accumulate into experience. Drawing upon human reflective practitioners, we introduce Reflective Test-Time Planning, which integrates two modes of reflection: \textit{reflection-in-action}, where the agent uses test-time scaling to generate and score multiple candidate actions using internal reflections before execution; and \textit{reflection-on-action}, which uses test-time training to update both its internal reflection model and its action policy based on external reflections after execution. We also include retrospective reflection, allowing the agent to re-evaluate earlier decisions and perform model updates with hindsight for proper long-horizon credit assignment. Experiments on our newly-designed Long-Horizon Household benchmark and MuJoCo Cupboard Fitting benchmark show significant gains over baseline models, with zero-shot generalization to photorealistic HM3D environments and real-robot experiments on a Franka Panda arm. Ablations confirm that reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action are mutually dependent, and that retrospective reflection achieves better credit assignment than step-wise external feedback at lower computational overhead. Qualitative analyses further highlight behavioral correction through reflection.
Authors: Hongyu Li, Kuan Liu, Yuan Chen, Juntao Hu, Huimin Lu, Guanjie Chen, Xue Liu, Guangming Lu, Hong Huang
Abstract: Recent advances in generative AI have shown human-level performance in complex content creation. However, we identify a "Paradox of Simplicity": models that can render complex scenes often fail at trivial, low-entropy tasks, such as generating a uniform pure color image. We argue this is a systemic failure related to uncontrollable emergent abilities. As models scale, strong priors for aesthetics and complexity override deterministic simplicity, creating an "aesthetic bias" that hinders the model's transition from data simulation to true intellectual abstraction. To better investigate this problem, we formalize the concept of AI Obedience, a hierarchical framework that grades a model's ability to transition from probabilistic approximation to pixel-level determinism (Levels 1 to 5). We introduce Violin, the first systematic benchmark designed to evaluate Level 4 Obedience through three deterministic tasks: color purity, image masking, and geometric shape generation. Using Violin, we evaluate several state-of-the-art models and reveal that closed-source models generally outperform open-source ones in deterministic precision. Interestingly, performance on our benchmark correlates with the benchmark in natural image generation. Our work provides a foundational framework and tools for achieving better alignment between human instructions and model outputs.
Authors: Seungwook Kim, Minsu Cho
Abstract: Text-to-image generation powers content creation across design, media, and data augmentation. Post-training of text-to-image generative models is a promising path to improve human preference alignment, factuality, and aesthetics. We introduce SOLACE (Self-Originating LAtent Confidence Estimation), a post-training framework that replaces external reward supervision with an internal self-confidence signal: we re-noise the model's own outputs and measure how accurately it recovers the injected noise, treating low reconstruction error as high self-confidence. SOLACE converts this intrinsic signal into scalar rewards for reinforcement learning, requiring no external reward models, annotators, or preference data. By reinforcing high-confidence generations, SOLACE delivers consistent gains in compositional generation, text rendering, and text-image alignment. Integrating SOLACE with external rewards yields complementary improvements while alleviating reward hacking.
Authors: Taimur Khan
Abstract: TiledAttention is a scaled dot-product attention (SDPA) forward operator for SDPA research on NVIDIA GPUs. Implemented in cuTile Python (TileIR) and exposed as a PyTorch-callable function, it is easier to modify than low-level CUDA templates while retaining realistic behavior via online softmax and tiled $K,V$ streaming. Algorithmically, TiledAttention follows the established FlashAttention-style online-softmax formulation; our novelty is the cuTile/TileIR implementation strategy, schedule-level modifiability, and reproducible benchmarking/profiling workflow. The approach is both performant and directly editable at the schedule level from Python (tile shapes, staging, shared-memory layout), enabling rapid, reproducible kernel research without template-heavy CUDA/CUTLASS rewrites. We benchmark TiledAttention on an NVIDIA DGX GB10 node with a reproducible harness and compare against PyTorch SDPA (auto-dispatch), explicit unfused baselines (torch_sdpa_math, standard eager attention), and forced backend probes (FlashAttention2, EffecientAttention, CuDNN Attention) across sequence length, head dimension, and precision (FP16/BF16). While production fused baselines remain stronger overall, TiledAttention delivers large speedups over standard eager attention paths and is available for direct use within PyTorch workflows, providing a practical balance between performance and customizability.
Authors: Wicaksono Leksono Muhamad, Joanito Agili Lopo, Tack Hwa Wong, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Samuel Cahyawijaya
Abstract: Large language models suffer from content effects in reasoning tasks, particularly in multi-lingual contexts. We introduce a novel method that reduces these biases through explicit structural abstraction that transforms syllogisms into canonical logical representations and applies deterministic parsing to determine validity. Evaluated on the SemEval-2026 Task 11 multilingual benchmark, our approach achieves top-5 rankings across all subtasks while substantially reducing content effects and offering a competitive alternative to complex fine-tuning or activation-level interventions.
Authors: Emile Anand, Ishani Karmarkar
Abstract: Many large-scale platforms and networked control systems have a centralized decision maker interacting with a massive population of agents under strict observability constraints. Motivated by such applications, we study a cooperative Markov game with a global agent and $n$ homogeneous local agents in a communication-constrained regime, where the global agent only observes a subset of $k$ local agent states per time step. We propose an alternating learning framework $(\texttt{ALTERNATING-MARL})$, where the global agent performs subsampled mean-field $Q$-learning against a fixed local policy, and local agents update by optimizing in an induced MDP. We prove that these approximate best-response dynamics converge to an $\widetilde{O}(1/\sqrt{k})$-approximate Nash Equilibrium, while separating the sample complexities between the joint state and action spaces. Finally, we validate our results in numerical simulations for multi-robot control.
Authors: Yanbo Wang, Jiaxuan You, Chuan Shi, Muhan Zhang
Abstract: Relational Databases (RDBs) are the backbone of modern business, yet they lack foundation models comparable to those in text or vision. A key obstacle is that high-quality RDBs are private, scarce and structurally heterogeneous, making internet-scale pre-training infeasible. To overcome this data scarcity, We introduce $\textbf{RDB-PFN}$, the first relational foundation model trained purely via $\textbf{synthetic data}$. Inspired by Prior-Data Fitted Networks (PFNs) where synthetic data generated from Structural Causal Models (SCMs) enables reasoning on single tables, we design a $\textbf{Relational Prior Generator}$ to create an infinite stream of diverse RDBs from scratch. Pre-training on $\textbf{over 2 million}$ synthetic single-table and relational tasks, RDB-PFN learns to adapt to any new database instantly via genuine $\textbf{in-context learning}$. Experiments verify RDB-PFN achieves strong few-shot performance on 19 real-world relational prediction tasks, outperforming graph-based and single-table foundation-model baselines (given the same DFS-linearized inputs), while using a lightweight architecture and fast inference. The code is available at https://github.com/MuLabPKU/RDBPFN
Authors: Michael J\"ulich
Abstract: Generative AI can convert uncertainty into hypersuasive, authoritative-seeming verdicts, displacing the justificatory work on which democratic epistemic agency depends. As a corrective, I propose a Brouwer-inspired assertibility constraint for responsible AI: in high-stakes domains, systems may assert or deny claims only if they can provide a publicly inspectable and contestable certificate of entitlement; otherwise they must return Undetermined. This constraint yields a three-status interface semantics (Asserted, Denied, Undetermined) in which statuses mark entitlement to categorical speech rather than truth values of the underlying world-claim. The semantics cleanly separates internal entitlement from public standing while connecting them via the certificate as a boundary object. It also produces a time-indexed entitlement profile that is stable under numerical refinement yet revisable as the public record changes. I operationalize the constraint through decision-layer gating of threshold and argmax outputs, using internal witnesses (e.g., sound bounds or separation margins) and an output contract with reason-coded abstentions. A design lemma shows that any total, certificate-sound binary interface already decides the deployed predicate on its declared scope, so Undetermined is not a tunable reject option but a mandatory status whenever no adequate forcing witness is available. By making outputs answerable to challengeable warrants rather than confidence alone, the paper aims to preserve epistemic agency against the hypersuasive pull of automated speech in public justification.
Authors: Bhavya Agrawalla, Michal Nauman, Aviral Kumar
Abstract: Recent work shows that flow matching can be effective for scalar Q-value function estimation in reinforcement learning (RL), but it remains unclear why or how this approach differs from standard critics. Contrary to conventional belief, we show that their success is not explained by distributional RL, as explicitly modeling return distributions can reduce performance. Instead, we argue that the use of integration for reading out values and dense velocity supervision at each step of this integration process for training improves TD learning via two mechanisms. First, it enables robust value prediction through \emph{test-time recovery}, whereby iterative computation through integration dampens errors in early value estimates as more integration steps are performed. This recovery mechanism is absent in monolithic critics. Second, supervising the velocity field at multiple interpolant values induces more \emph{plastic} feature learning within the network, allowing critics to represent non-stationary TD targets without discarding previously learned features or overfitting to individual TD targets encountered during training. We formalize these effects and validate them empirically, showing that flow-matching critics substantially outperform monolithic critics (2$\times$ in final performance and around 5$\times$ in sample efficiency) in settings where loss of plasticity poses a challenge e.g., in high-UTD online RL problems, while remaining stable during learning.
Authors: Yizhe Xie, Congcong Zhu, Xinyue Zhang, Tianqing Zhu, Dayong Ye, Minfeng Qi, Huajie Chen, Wanlei Zhou
Abstract: Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) are increasingly applied to complex collaborative scenarios. However, their collaborative mechanisms may cause minor inaccuracies to gradually solidify into system-level false consensus through iteration. Such risks are difficult to trace since errors can propagate and amplify through message dependencies. Existing protections often rely on single-agent validation or require modifications to the collaboration architecture, which can weaken effective information flow and may not align with natural collaboration processes in real tasks. To address this, we propose a propagation dynamics model tailored for LLM-MAS that abstracts collaboration as a directed dependency graph and provides an early-stage risk criterion to characterize amplification risk. Through experiments on six mainstream frameworks, we identify three vulnerability classes: cascade amplification, topological sensitivity, and consensus inertia. We further instantiate an attack where injecting just a single atomic error seed leads to widespread failure. In response, we introduce a genealogy-graph-based governance layer, implemented as a message-layer plugin, that suppresses both endogenous and exogenous error amplification without altering the collaboration architecture. Experiments show that this approach prevents final infection in at least 89% of runs across operating modes and significantly mitigates the cascading spread of minor errors.
Authors: Sara Solarova, Matej Mosnar, Matus Tibensky, Jan Jakubcik, Adrian Bindas, Simon Liska, Filip Hossner, Mat\'u\v{s} Mesar\v{c}\'ik, Ivan Srba
Abstract: Adolescents spend an increasing amount of their time in digital environments where their still-developing cognitive capacities leave them unable to recognize or resist commercial persuasion. Article 28(2) of the DSA responds to this vulnerability by prohibiting profiling-based advertising to minors. However, the regulation's narrow definition of "advertisement" excludes current advertising practices including influencer paid partnerships and brand promotional content that serve functionally equivalent commercial purposes. We provide the first empirical evidence of how this definitional gap operates in practice through an algorithmic audit of TikTok. Our approach deploys sock-puppet accounts simulating a pair of minor and adult users with matching interest profiles. The content recommended to these users is automatically annotated, enabling systematic statistical analysis. Our findings reveal a stark regulatory paradox. TikTok demonstrates formal compliance with Article 28(2) by shielding minors from profiled formal advertisements, yet both disclosed and undisclosed ads exhibit significant profiling aligned with user interests (5-8 times stronger than for adult formal advertising). The strongest profiling emerges within undisclosed commercial content, where creators/brands fail to label paid partnership/promotional content and the platform neither corrects this omission nor prevents its personalized delivery to minors. These results demonstrate that minors remain exposed to algorithmically targeted commercial content through the same recommendation mechanisms the DSA seeks to constrain. We argue that protecting minors requires expanding the definition of advertisement in EU law to encompass influencer and brand promotional content, and ensuring that any such expansion is accompanied by a corresponding prohibition on profiling-based targeting of minors.
Authors: Riccardo De Monte, Matteo Cederle, Gian Antonio Susto
Abstract: State-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have achieved remarkable performance in continuous control tasks, yet their computational complexity is often incompatible with the constraints of resource-limited hardware, due to their reliance on replay buffers, batch updates, and target networks. The emerging paradigm of streaming deep RL addresses this limitation through purely online updates, achieving strong empirical performance on standard benchmarks. In this work, we propose two novel streaming deep RL algorithms, Streaming Soft Actor-Critic (S2AC) and Streaming Deterministic Actor-Critic (SDAC), explicitly designed to be compatible with state-of-the-art batch RL methods, making them particularly suitable for on-device finetuning applications such as Sim2Real transfer. Both algorithms achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art streaming baselines on standard benchmarks without requiring tedious per-environment hyperparameter tuning. We further investigate the batch-to-streaming transition, showing that a naive transition does not guarantee preservation of pre-trained policy performance, and propose a principled approach to address this challenge.
Authors: Aishwarya Fursule, Shruti Kshirsagar, Anderson R. Avila
Abstract: Audio deepfake detection aims to detect real human voices from those generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and has emerged as a significant problem in the field of voice biometrics systems. With the ever-improving quality of synthetic voice, the probability of such a voice being exploited for illicit practices like identity thest and impersonation increases. Although significant progress has been made in the field of Audio Deepfake Detection in recent times, the issue of gender bias remains underexplored and in its nascent stage In this paper, we have attempted a thorough analysis of gender dependent performance and fairness in audio deepfake detection models. We have used the ASVspoof 5 dataset and train a ResNet-18 classifier and evaluate detection performance across four different audio features, and compared the performance with baseline AASIST model. Beyond conventional metrics such as Equal Error Rate (EER %), we incorporated five established fairness metrics to quantify gender disparities in the model. Our results show that even when the overall EER difference between genders appears low, fairness-aware evaluation reveals disparities in error distribution that are obscured by aggregate performance measures. These findings demonstrate that reliance on standard metrics is unreliable, whereas fairness metrics provide critical insights into demographic-specific failure modes. This work highlights the importance of fairness-aware evaluation for developing a more equitable, robust, and trustworthy audio deepfake detection system.
Authors: Jiajun Cao, Xiaoan Zhang, Xiaobao Wei, Liyuqiu Huang, Zijian Wang, Hanzhen Zhang, Zhengyu Jia, Wei Mao, Hao Wang, Xianming Liu, Shuchang Zhou, Yang Wang, Shanghang Zhang
Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models have shown great promise for autonomous driving, yet they suffer from degraded perception after unfreezing the visual encoder and struggle with accumulated instability in long-term planning. To address these challenges, we propose EvoDriveVLA-a novel collaborative perception-planning distillation framework that integrates self-anchored perceptual constraints and future-informed trajectory optimization. Specifically, self-anchored visual distillation leverages self-anchor teacher to deliver visual anchoring constraints, regularizing student representations via trajectory-guided key-region awareness. In parallel, future-informed trajectory distillation employs a future-aware oracle teacher with coarse-to-fine trajectory refinement and Monte Carlo dropout sampling to synthesize reasoning trajectories that model future evolutions, enabling the student model to internalize the future-aware insights of the teacher. EvoDriveVLA achieves SOTA performance in nuScenes open-loop evaluation and significantly enhances performance in NAVSIM closed-loop evaluation. Our code is available at: https://github.com/hey-cjj/EvoDriveVLA.
Authors: Sizhe Huang, Zitong Li, Shujie Yang
Abstract: Self-supervised masked modeling shows promise for encrypted traffic classification by masking and reconstructing raw bytes. Yet recent work reveals these methods fail to reduce reliance on labeled data despite costly pretraining: under frozen encoder evaluation, accuracy drops from greater than 0.9 to less than 0.47. We argue the root cause is inductive bias mismatch: flattening traffic into byte sequences destroys protocol-defined semantics. We identify three specific issues: 1) field unpredictability, random fields like ip.id are unlearnable yet treated as reconstruction targets; 2) embedding confusion, semantically distinct fields collapse into a unified embedding space; 3) metadata loss, capture-time metadata essential for temporal analysis is discarded. To address this, we propose a protocol-native paradigm that treats protocol-defined field semantics as architectural priors, reformulating the task to align with the data's intrinsic tabular modality rather than incrementally adapting sequence-based architectures. Instantiating this paradigm, we introduce FlowSem-MAE, a tabular masked autoencoder built on Flow Semantic Units (FSUs). It features predictability-guided filtering that focuses on learnable FSUs, FSU-specific embeddings to preserve field boundaries, and dual-axis attention to capture intra-packet and temporal patterns. FlowSem-MAE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art across datasets. With only half labeled data, it outperforms most existing methods trained on full data.
Authors: Yutong Hu, Jan-Nico Zaech, Nikolay Nikolov, Yuanqi Yao, Sombit Dey, Giuliano Albanese, Renaud Detry, Luc Van Gool, Danda Paudel
Abstract: We propose a standalone autoregressive (AR) Action Expert that generates actions as a continuous causal sequence while conditioning on refreshable vision-language prefixes. In contrast to existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models and diffusion policies that reset temporal context with each new observation and predict actions reactively, our Action Expert maintains its own history through a long-lived memory and is inherently context-aware. This structure addresses the frequency mismatch between fast control and slow reasoning, enabling efficient independent pretraining of kinematic syntax and modular integration with heavy perception backbones, naturally ensuring spatio-temporally consistent action generation across frames. To synchronize these asynchronous hybrid V-L-A modalities, we utilize a re-anchoring mechanism that mathematically accounts for perception staleness during both training and inference. Experiments on simulated and real-robot manipulation tasks demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively replace traditional chunk-based action heads for both specialist and generalist policies. AR-VLA exhibits superior history awareness and substantially smoother action trajectories while maintaining or exceeding the task success rates of state-of-the-art reactive VLAs. Overall, our work introduces a scalable, context-aware action generation schema that provides a robust structural foundation for training effective robotic policies. Code and Videos available at https://arvla.insait.ai
URLs: https://arvla.insait.ai
Authors: Yinjie Wang, Xuyang Chen, Xiaolong Jin, Mengdi Wang, Ling Yang
Abstract: Every agent interaction generates a next-state signal, namely the user reply, tool output, terminal or GUI state change that follows each action, yet no existing agentic RL system recovers it as a live, online learning source. We present OpenClaw-RL, a framework that employs next-state signals to optimize personal agents online through infrastructure and methodology innovations. On the infrastructure side, we extend existing RL systems to a server-client architecture where the RL server hosts the policy behind an inference API and user terminals stream interaction data back over HTTP. From each observed next state, the system extracts two complementary training signals, evaluative and directive, via a separate asynchronous server so that neither signal extraction nor optimization blocks inference. On the methodology side, we introduce a hybrid RL objective that unifies both signal types in a single update: directive signals provide richer, token-level supervision but are sparser, while evaluative signals are more broadly available. To stabilize distillation under teacher-student mismatch, we propose overlap-guided hint selection, which picks the hint whose induced teacher distribution maximally overlaps with the student's top-$k$ tokens, together with a log-probability-difference clip that bounds per-token advantages. Applied to personal agents, OpenClaw-RL enables an agent to improve simply by being used, recovering conversational signals from user re-queries, corrections, and explicit feedback. Applied to general agents, OpenClaw-RL is the first RL framework to unify real-world agent settings spanning terminal, GUI, SWE, and tool-call environments, where we additionally demonstrate the utility of next-state signals in long-horizon settings.
Authors: Ziyu Liu, Shengyuan Ding, Xinyu Fang, Xuanlang Dai, Penghui Yang, Jianze Liang, Jiaqi Wang, Kai Chen, Dahua Lin, Yuhang Zang
Abstract: Vision-to-code tasks require models to reconstruct structured visual inputs, such as charts, tables, and SVGs, into executable or structured representations with high visual fidelity. While recent Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) achieve strong results via supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning remains challenging due to misaligned reward signals. Existing rewards either rely on textual rules or coarse visual embedding similarity, both of which fail to capture fine-grained visual discrepancies and are vulnerable to reward hacking. We propose Visual Equivalence Reward Model (Visual-ERM), a multimodal generative reward model that provides fine-grained, interpretable, and task-agnostic feedback to evaluate vision-to-code quality directly in the rendered visual space. Integrated into RL, Visual-ERM improves Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct by +8.4 on chart-to-code and yields consistent gains on table and SVG parsing (+2.7, +4.1 on average), and further strengthens test-time scaling via reflection and revision. We also introduce VisualCritic-RewardBench (VC-RewardBench), a benchmark for judging fine-grained image-to-image discrepancies on structured visual data, where Visual-ERM at 8B decisively outperforms Qwen3-VL-235B-Instruct and approaches leading closed-source models. Our results suggest that fine-grained visual reward supervision is both necessary and sufficient for vision-to-code RL, regardless of task specificity.
Authors: Asmae Mouradi, Shruti Kshirsagar
Abstract: Rapid structural damage assessment from remote sensing imagery is essential for timely disaster response. Within human-machine systems (HMS) for disaster management, automated damage detection provides decision-makers with actionable situational awareness. However, models trained on multi-disaster benchmarks often underperform in unseen geographic regions due to domain shift - a distributional mismatch between training and deployment data that undermines human trust in automated assessments. We explore a two-stage ensemble approach using supervised domain adaptation (SDA) for building damage classification across four severity classes. The pipeline adapts the xView2 first-place method to the Ida-BD dataset using SDA and systematically investigates the effect of individual augmentation components on classification performance. Comprehensive ablation experiments on the unseen Ida-BD test split demonstrate that SDA is indispensable: removing it causes damage detection to fail entirely. Our pipeline achieves the most robust performance using SDA with unsharp-enhanced RGB input, attaining a Macro-F1 of 0.5552. These results underscore the critical role of domain adaptation in building trustworthy automated damage assessment modules for HMS-integrated disaster response.
Authors: Junxin Wang, Dai Guan, Weijie Qiu, Zhihang Li, Yongbo Gai, Zhengyi Yang, Mengyu Zhou, Erchao Zhao, Xiaoxi Jiang, Guanjun Jiang
Abstract: Vision-language process reward models (VL-PRMs) are increasingly used to score intermediate reasoning steps and rerank candidates under test-time scaling. However, they often function as black-box judges: a low step score may reflect a genuine reasoning mistake or simply the verifier's misperception of the image. This entanglement between perception and reasoning leads to systematic false positives (rewarding hallucinated visual premises) and false negatives (penalizing correct grounded statements), undermining both reranking and error localization. We introduce Explicit Visual Premise Verification (EVPV), a lightweight verification interface that conditions step scoring on the reliability of the visual premises a step depends on. The policy is prompted to produce a step-wise visual checklist that makes required visual facts explicit, while a constraint extractor independently derives structured visual constraints from the input image. EVPV matches checklist claims against these constraints to compute a scalar visual reliability signal, and calibrates PRM step rewards via reliability gating: rewards for visually dependent steps are attenuated when reliability is low and preserved when reliability is high. This decouples perceptual uncertainty from logical evaluation without per-step tool calls. Experiments on VisualProcessBench and six multimodal reasoning benchmarks show that EVPV improves step-level verification and consistently boosts Best-of-N reranking accuracy over strong baselines. Furthermore, injecting controlled corruption into the extracted constraints produces monotonic performance degradation, providing causal evidence that the gains arise from constraint fidelity and explicit premise verification rather than incidental prompt effects. Code is available at: https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/EVPV-PRM
Authors: Hefei Xu, Le Wu, Yu Wang, Min Hou, Han Wu, Zhen Zhang, Meng Wang
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) increasingly shape content generation, interaction, and decision-making across the Web, aligning them with human values has become a central objective in trustworthy AI. This challenge becomes even more pronounced when aligning multiple, potentially conflicting human values. Although recent approaches, such as reward reweighting, prompt-based supervised fine-tuning, and model merging, attempt to tackle multi-value alignment, they still face two major limitations: (1) training separate models for each value combination is prohibitively expensive; (2) value conflicts substantially degrade alignment performance. These limitations make it difficult to achieve favorable trade-offs across diverse human values. To address these challenges, we revisit multi-value alignment from the perspective of value consistency in data and propose VC-soup, a data filtering and parameter merging framework grounded in value-consistent learning. We first design a value consistency metric based on the cosine similarity between the reward-gap vector of each preference pair and an all-ones vector, which quantifies its cross-value coherence. We then filter out low-consistency preference pairs in each value dataset and train on the remaining data to obtain smooth, value-consistent policy models that better preserve linear mode connectivity. Finally, we linearly combine these policies and apply Pareto filtering across values to obtain solutions with balanced multi-value performance. Extensive experiments and theoretical analysis demonstrate that VC-soup effectively mitigates conflicts and consistently outperforms existing multi-value alignment methods.
Authors: Philippe Formont, Maxime Darrin, Ismail Ben Ayed, Pablo Piantanida
Abstract: Recent reasoning-based large language models have shown strong performance on tasks with verifiable outcomes, but their use in de novo molecular generation remains limited by the lack of training environments where rewards can be computed without reference molecules. We introduce MolRGen, a benchmark and molecular verifier for training and evaluating reasoning LLMs on de novo molecular generation. MolRGen contains approximately 4,500 protein-pocket targets, resulting in 50k multi-objective optimization prompts combining docking scores with molecular properties such as QED, synthetic accessibility, logP, and physicochemical descriptors. Unlike caption-based generation or molecule-editing benchmarks, MolRGen evaluates molecules proposed from scratch by computing rewards at generation time. We benchmark general-purpose and chemistry-specialized open-source LLMs and introduce a diversity-aware top-k metric to measure whether models can generate a diverse set of high-scoring molecules. Finally, we use the verifier to fine-tune a 128B LLM with GRPO, showing improved performance, at the cost of a diversity-exploitation trade-off. MolRGen provides a scalable testbed for studying verifier-based reasoning and reinforcement learning in molecular design.
Authors: Xinyan Wang, Xiaogeng Liu, Chaowei Xiao
Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often reach a correct solution before their long Chain-of-Thought trace ends, yet continue with redundant verification, repeated attempts, or unnecessary exploration that wastes computation and can even overturn the correct answer. We frame this behavior as a latent productive-to-redundant transition and show that it is directly reflected in hidden states: around first-correct-solution (FCS) boundaries, late-layer representations separate efficient from overthinking tokens, while boundary-permutation and position-control baselines collapse. Based on this signal, we propose ROM, a model-agnostic streaming intervention framework that monitors frozen LRMs with a lightweight hidden-state detector and intervenes at well-formed reasoning boundaries. Counterfactual Self-Correction (CSC) augments supervision with balanced wrong to correct trajectories, preserving useful pre-FCS correction while labeling only post-FCS continuation as redundant. Across MATH500, GSM8K, AIME25, and MMLU-Pro, ROM improves the overall tradeoff on both Qwen3-8B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B (DS-32B): on Qwen3-8B, it raises accuracy from 74.47% to 74.78% and reduces response length from 4262 to 3107 tokens; on DS-32B, it raises accuracy from 68.60% to 68.72% and reduces response length from 3062 to 2319 tokens. The same FCS-derived supervision transfers across scale and training origin, suggesting a shared long-CoT boundary rather than a backbone-specific artifact. ROM is compatible with L1, removing another 20.9-21.6% tokens at zero accuracy loss. ROM also generalizes to open-ended MMLU-Pro (+1.56 pp, 35.4% shorter) and reduces wall-clock latency by 46.5%. Code is available at https://github.com/SaFo-Lab/ROM.
Authors: Rohan Sequeira, Stavros Damianakis, Umar Iqbal, Konstantinos Psounis
Abstract: Agentic computing systems, while immensely capable, raise serious security, privacy, and safety concerns. A key issue is that the full set of functionalities offered by these systems, combined with their probabilistic execution flows, is not known beforehand. Given this lack of characterization, it is challenging to validate whether a system has successfully carried out the user's intended task or instead executed irrelevant actions, potentially as a consequence of compromise. We present \emph{Agent Sentry}, a runtime defense that learns a bound on an agent's benign execution from prior legitimate executions and flags any action that falls outside this bound. Agent Sentry layers three complementary checks: a structural classifier over the sequence of actions and the provenance of each function's arguments; a deterministic allowlist check over sensitive argument values; and an LLM judge, invoked only on the residual of actions where the first two checks cannot safely decide between a legitimate new request and a carefully crafted injection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Agent Sentry in AgentDojo and AgentDyn by blocking 94.3\% of successful injections while allowing 95.1\% of benign executions, without modifying the agent, its tools, or the LLM.
Authors: Reshabh K Sharma, Shraddha Barke, Benjamin Zorn
Abstract: AI agents are increasingly embedded in real software systems, where they execute multi-step workflows through multi-turn dialogue, tool invocations, and intermediate decisions. These long execution histories, called agentic traces, make validation difficult. Outcome-only benchmarks can miss critical procedural failures, such as incorrect workflow routing, unsafe tool usage, or violations of prompt-specified rules. This paper presents AgentPex, an AI-powered tool designed to systematically evaluate agentic traces. AgentPex extracts behavioral rules from agent prompts and system instructions, then uses these specifications to automatically evaluate traces for compliance. We evaluate AgentPex on 424 traces from ${\tau}^2$-bench across models in telecom, retail, and airline customer service. Our results show that AgentPex distinguishes agent behavior across models and surfaces specification violations that are not captured by outcome-only scoring. It also provides fine-grained analysis by domain and metric, enabling developers to understand agent strengths and weaknesses at scale. The source code of AgentPex is available at https://github.com/microsoft/agentpex.
Authors: Adriano Agnello, Helen Brooks, Cyd Cowley, Iulia Georgescu, Alex Higginbottom, Richard Pearson, Tara Shears, Melanie Windridge
Abstract: There is great potential for the application of AI tools in fusion research, and substantial worldwide benefit if fusion power is realised. However, using AI comes with its own challenges, many of which can be mitigated if responsible and robust methodologies are built into existing approaches. To do that requires close, long-term collaborations between fusion domain experts and AI developers and awareness of the fact that not all problems in fusion research are best tackled with AI tools. In April 2025, experts from academia, industry, UKAEA and STFC discussed how AI can be used to advance R&D in fusion energy at the first edition of The Economist FusionFest event. This Perspective is an expanded and updated summary of the round table discussion, providing more context and examples.
Authors: Christopher Ackerman
Abstract: The ability to represent oneself and others as agents with knowledge, intentions, and belief states that guide their behavior - Theory of Mind - is a human universal that enables us to navigate - and manipulate - the social world. It is supported by our ability to form mental models of ourselves and others. Its ubiquity in human affairs entails that LLMs have seen innumerable examples of it in their training data and therefore may have learned to mimic it, but whether they have actually learned causal models that they can deploy in arbitrary settings is unclear. We therefore develop a novel experimental paradigm that requires that subjects form representations of the mental states of themselves and others and act on them strategically rather than merely describe them. We test a wide range of leading open and closed source LLMs released since 2024, as well as human subjects, on this paradigm. We find that 1) LLMs released before mid-2025 fail at all of our tasks, 2) more recent LLMs achieve human-level performance on modeling the cognitive states of others, and 3) even frontier LLMs fail at our self-modeling task - unless afforded a scratchpad in the form of a reasoning trace. We further demonstrate cognitive load effects on other-modeling tasks, offering suggestive evidence that LLMs are using something akin to limited-capacity working memory to hold these mental representations in mind during a single forward pass. Finally, we explore the mechanisms by which reasoning models succeed at the self- and other-modeling tasks, and show that they readily engage in strategic deception.
Authors: Jianfei Xiao, Xiang Yu, Chengbing Wang, Wuqiang Zheng, Xinyu Lin, Kaining Liu, Hongxun Ding, Yang Zhang, Wenjie Wang, Fuli Feng, Xiangnan He
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into lifelong AI assistants, LLM personalization has become a critical frontier. However, progress is currently bottlenecked by the absence of a gold-standard evaluation benchmark. Existing benchmarks either overlook personalized information management that is critical for personalization or rely heavily on synthetic dialogues, which exhibit an inherent distribution gap from real-world dialogue. To bridge this gap, we introduce AlpsBench, An LLM PerSonalization benchmark derived from real-world human-LLM dialogues. AlpsBench comprises 2,500 long-term interaction sequences curated from WildChat, paired with human-verified structured memories that encapsulate both explicit and implicit personalization signals. We define four pivotal tasks - personalized information extraction, updating, retrieval, and utilization - and establish protocols to evaluate the entire lifecycle of memory management. Our benchmarking of frontier LLMs and memory-centric systems reveals that: (i) models struggle to reliably extract latent user traits; (ii) memory updating faces a performance ceiling even in the strongest models; (iii) retrieval accuracy declines sharply in the presence of large distractor pools; and (iv) while explicit memory mechanisms improve recall, they do not inherently guarantee more preference-aligned or emotionally resonant responses. AlpsBench aims to provide a comprehensive framework.
Authors: Zifan He, Rui Ma, Yizhou Sun, Jason Cong
Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) increasingly depends on efficient long-context processing and generation mechanisms, including sparse attention, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and compressed contextual memory, to support complex reasoning. We show that these optimizations can be unified into a four-step memory processing pipeline: Prepare Memory, Compute Relevancy, Retrieval, and Apply to Inference. Through systematic profiling, we identify a 22%-97% memory processing overhead in LLM inference and strong heterogeneity in its computational characteristics. Motivated by this insight, we argue that \textbf{heterogeneous systems} are well-suited to accelerate memory processing and thus end-to-end inference. We demonstrate this approach on a GPU-FPGA system by offloading sparse, irregular, and memory-bounded operations to FPGAs while retaining compute-intensive operations on GPUs. Evaluated on an AMD MI210 GPU and an Alveo U55C FPGA, our system is up to $2.2\times$ faster and achieves up to $4.7\times$ less energy across multiple LLM inference optimizations than the GPU baseline (similar results hold on NVIDIA A100). These results establish heterogeneous systems as a practical direction for efficient LLM memory processing and inform future heterogeneous hardware design.
Authors: Yang Shen, Zhenyi Yi, Ziyi Zhao, Lijun Sun, Dongyang Li, Chin-Teng Lin, Yuhui Shi
Abstract: As AI agents evolve, the community is rapidly shifting from single Large Language Models (LLMs) to Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) to overcome cognitive bottlenecks in automated research. However, the optimal multi-agent coordination framework for these autonomous agents remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a systematic empirical study investigating the comparative efficacy of distinct multi-agent structures for automated machine learning optimization. Utilizing a rigorously controlled, execution-based testbed equipped with Git worktree isolation and explicit global memory, we benchmark a single-agent baseline against two multi-agent paradigms: a subagent architecture (parallel exploration with post-hoc consolidation) and an agent team architecture (experts with pre-execution handoffs). By evaluating these systems under strictly fixed computational time budgets, our findings reveal a fundamental trade-off between operational stability and theoretical deliberation. The subagent mode functions as a highly resilient, high-throughput search engine optimal for broad, shallow optimizations under strict time constraints. Conversely, the agent team topology exhibits higher operational fragility due to multi-author code generation but achieves the deep theoretical alignment necessary for complex architectural refactoring given extended compute budgets. These empirical insights provide actionable guidelines for designing future autoresearch systems, advocating for dynamically routed architectures that adapt their collaborative structures to real-time task complexity.
Authors: Smriti Jha, Matteo Paltenghi, Chandra Maddila, Vijayaraghavan Murali, Shubham Ugare, Satish Chandra
Abstract: Production deployment of AI coding agents requires fast, reproducible evaluation signals. Existing industrial practices trade off speed and fidelity: online A/B testing takes weeks and risks user experience, shadow deployment yields signals that are not reproducible across runs, and public benchmarks diverge from production workloads in language distribution, prompt style, and codebase structure. This paper presents REAP (Relevance and Execution-Audited Pipeline), an automated curation pipeline that constructs production-derived benchmarks from real developer-agent sessions without manual labeling. Such curation, while in-distribution to production usage, runs into several challenges. Untestable prompts, misaligned tests, and test flakiness all compromise evaluation reliability. While tasks can be manually audited to ensure only high-quality tasks remain in the benchmark, this approach is infeasible in the monorepo setting: the build infrastructure state is often ephemeral in large monorepos and requires the benchmark to be continuously re-curated against the current codebase. As manual verification cannot be sustained at this cadence, REAP adds an automated verification layer using LLM-based task classification, agentic test-relevance validation, and multi-run stability checks to ensure the executable benchmark yields trustworthy signals. We use REAP to curate Harvest, a benchmark where each task feeds the coding agent a real developer prompt and verifies the resulting code change against fail-to-pass tests retrieved from production. Harvest's distribution spans more than four programming languages with a majority of tasks drawn from Hack. Model and harness evaluations reveal that solve rates range from 42.9% to 58.2% across five frontier models, surfacing capability differences that inform concrete deployment decisions.
Authors: Indar Kumar, Akanksha Tiwari
Abstract: Ride-hailing and autonomous mobility-on-demand operators reposition idle supply before future demand is fully observed. We study a retrieval-calibrated predict-then-optimize approach for this problem: historical demand regimes are matched to the current query block, combined into a calibrated demand prior, and passed to a fleet-balancing controller. The paper makes three contributions. First, we train a leakage-safe similarity gate whose objective penalizes demand error, pickup spatial mismatch, and queue shortage risk rather than retrieval rank alone. Second, we develop a spatial queue-regret decomposition for a stable queueing surrogate, linking demand-field error to wait through queueing sensitivity, allocator sensitivity, and Wasserstein pickup mismatch. Third, we evaluate learned retrieval and external-style rebalancing baselines in a common simulator. In the calibrated-demand gate experiment, across eight New York City scenarios and ten seeds, the spatial gate reduces mean wait to 82.3s, compared with 85.3s for hand-tuned similarity and 85.8s for a distributional-only baseline. In a separate replay-demand controller comparison, a scenario chance-MPC analog and a share-target transportation LP improve on Wen-style rebalancing (92.2s/92.2s vs. 100.1s), a reduced GPR chance-MPC comparator is intermediate at 94.4s, and an oracle MPC diagnostic is 91.3s.
Authors: Indar Kumar, Girish Karhana, Sai Krishna Jasti, Ankit Hemant Lade
Abstract: Frozen pretrained image representations are widely used for transfer learning: a backbone is kept fixed, feature vectors are extracted, and a lightweight classifier is trained on top. This pipeline usually feeds the full feature vector to the classifier, even when the target task has far fewer classes than the pretraining task. We revisit a classical alternative: supervised dimensionality reduction with Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) before linear probing. We evaluate ten dimensionality-reduction strategies on frozen features from six backbones -- ResNet-18, ResNet-50, MobileNetV3-Small, EfficientNet-B0, ViT-B/16, and DINOv2-ViT-S/14 -- across CIFAR-100, Tiny ImageNet, and CUB-200-2011. Under a fixed logistic-regression protocol, LDA improves accuracy over full features in 11 of 12 coarse-grained configurations, with gains up to 4.5 percentage points while reducing feature dimensionality by 48-87%. The same projection consistently hurts on fine-grained CUB-200, where full features win across all six backbones. This establishes a practical boundary condition: LDA is useful when class-level structure is coarse enough to be captured by mean-separating directions, but it can discard subtle cues needed for fine-grained recognition. We also compare LDA with PCA, PCA+LDA, regularized LDA, Local Fisher Discriminant Analysis, Neighbourhood Components Analysis, and three lightweight LDA extensions. The results show that plain LDA offers the best accuracy-cost tradeoff for most coarse-grained settings, while more complex supervised reduction methods rarely justify their additional cost. Overall, the study provides concrete guidance for when post-hoc supervised projection should, and should not, be inserted into frozen-feature image classification pipelines.
Authors: Stella Girtsou, Konstantinos Alexis, Giorgos Giannopoulos, Charalambos Kontoes
Abstract: The increasing frequency and severity of climate related disasters have intensified the need for real time monitoring, early warning, and informed decision-making. Earth Observation (EO), powered by satellite data and Machine Learning (ML), offers powerful tools to meet these challenges. Foundation Models (FMs) have revolutionized EO ML by enabling general-purpose pretraining on large scale remote sensing datasets. However most existing models rely on high-resolution satellite imagery with low revisit rates limiting their suitability for fast-evolving phenomena and time critical emergency response. In this work, we present HighFM, a first cut approach towards a FM for high temporal resolution, multispectral EO data. Leveraging over 2 TB of SEVIRI imagery from the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) platform, we adapt the SatMAE masked autoencoding framework to learn robust spatiotemporal representations. To support real time monitoring, we enhance the original architecture with fine grained temporal encodings to capture short term variability. The pretrained models are then finetuned on cloud masking and active fire detection tasks. We benchmark our SEVIRI pretrained Vision Transformers against traditional baselines and recent geospatial FMs, demonstrating consistent gains across both balanced accuracy and IoU metrics. Our results highlight the potential of temporally dense geostationary data for real-time EO, offering a scalable path toward foundation models for disaster detection and tracking.
Authors: Annita Vapsi, Penghang Liu, Saheed Obitayo, Aakriti, Manoj Cherukumalli, Prathamesh Patil, Amit Varshney, Nicolas Marchesotti, Elizabeth Fons, Vamsi K. Potluru, Manuela Veloso
Abstract: Synthetic data is essential for training foundation models for time series (FMTS), but most generators assume static correlations, and are typically missing realistic inter-channel dependencies. We introduce DynLMC, a Dynamic Linear Model of Coregionalization, that incorporates time-varying, regime-switching correlations and cross-channel lag structures. Our approach produces synthetic multivariate time series with correlation dynamics that closely resemble real data. Fine-tuning three foundational models on DynLMC-generated data yields consistent zero-shot forecasting improvements across nine benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that modeling dynamic inter-channel correlations enhances FMTS transferability, highlighting the importance of data-centric pretraining.
Authors: Puja Saha, Eranga Ukwatta
Abstract: Large volumes of medical data remain underutilized because centralizing distributed data is often infeasible due to strict privacy regulations and institutional constraints. In addition, models trained in centralized settings frequently fail to generalize across clinical sites because of heterogeneity in imaging protocols and continuously evolving data distributions arising from differences in scanners, acquisition parameters, and patient populations. Federated learning offers a promising solution by enabling collaborative model training without sharing raw data. However, incorporating differential privacy into federated learning, while essential for privacy guarantees, often leads to degraded accuracy, unstable convergence, and reduced generalization. In this work, we propose an adaptive differentially private federated learning (ADP-FL) framework for medical image segmentation that dynamically adjusts privacy mechanisms to better balance the privacy-utility trade-off. The proposed approach stabilizes training, significantly improves Dice scores and segmentation boundary quality, and maintains rigorous privacy guarantees. We evaluated ADP-FL across diverse imaging modalities and segmentation tasks, including skin lesion segmentation in dermoscopic images, kidney tumor segmentation in 3D CT scans, and brain tumor segmentation in multi-parametric MRI. Compared with conventional federated learning and standard differentially private federated learning, ADP-FL consistently achieves higher accuracy, improved boundary delineation, faster convergence, and greater training stability, with performance approaching that of non-private federated learning under the same privacy budgets. These results demonstrate the practical viability of ADP-FL for high-performance, privacy-preserving medical image segmentation in real-world federated settings.
Authors: Jianfei Li, Shuo Huang, Han Feng, Ding-Xuan Zhou, Gitta Kutyniok
Abstract: Deep neural networks have emerged as powerful tools for learning operators defined over infinite-dimensional function spaces. However, existing theories frequently encounter difficulties related to dimensionality and limited interpretability. This work investigates how sparsity can help address these challenges in functional learning, a central ingredient in operator learning. We propose a framework that employs convolutional architectures to extract sparse features from a finite number of samples, together with deep fully connected networks to effectively approximate nonlinear functionals. Using universal discretization methods, we show that sparse approximators enable stable recovery from discrete samples. In addition, both the deterministic and the random sampling schemes are sufficient for our analysis. These findings lead to improved approximation rates and reduced sample sizes in various function spaces, including those with fast frequency decay and mixed smoothness. They also provide new theoretical insights into how sparsity can alleviate the curse of dimensionality in functional learning.
Authors: Ananya Bhattacharjee, Michael Liut, Matthew J\"orke, Diyi Yang, Emma Brunskill
Abstract: Digital mental health (DMH) tools have extensively explored personalization of interventions to users' needs and contexts. However, this personalization often targets what support is provided, not how it is experienced. Even well-matched content can fail when the interaction format misaligns with how someone can engage. We introduce generative experience as a paradigm for DMH support, where the intervention experience is composed at runtime. We instantiate this in GUIDE, a system that generates personalized intervention content and multimodal interaction structure through rubric-guided generation of modular components. In a preregistered study with N = 237 participants, GUIDE significantly reduced stress (p = .02) and improved the user experience (p = .04) compared to an LLM-based cognitive restructuring control. GUIDE also supported diverse forms of reflection and action through varied interaction flows, while revealing tensions around personalization across the interaction sequence. This work lays the foundation for interventions that dynamically shape how support is experienced and enacted in digital settings.
Authors: Yeping Jin, Jiaming Hu, Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to respond correctly to prompts that align well with the data they were trained and fine-tuned on. Yet, small shifts in wording, format, or language can trigger surprisingly large failures, especially on multi-step reasoning problems. To address this problem, we propose a Distributionally Robust Token Optimization (DRTO) approach, which combines token-level Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) with Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO). DRTO constructs f-divergence ambiguity sets over span-level actor losses, providing a principled way to emphasize difficult response segments during policy optimization. Empirically, DRTO enhances consistency under distribution shifts in multiple reasoning benchmarks among different tasks, achieving $+4.4$ percentage points on MATH-500 and $+2.7$ percentage points on LiveCodeBench over standard RTO.
Authors: Mingyang Li, Haofan Xu, Haowen Sun, Xinzhe Chen, Sihua Ren, Liqi Huang, Xinyang Sui, Chenyang Miao, Jiawei Ye, Qiongjie Cui, Zeyang Liu, Xingyu Chen, Xuguang Lan
Abstract: Many everyday robot manipulation skills are affordance-dependent, with success determined by whether the robot contacts the functional object region required by the subsequent action. Current simulation data generators obtain contacts from generic grasp estimators or per-object manual contact annotations, but generic estimators rank stable grasps without task semantics and often select contacts that are misaligned with the downstream action, while manual contact annotations must be rewritten for each new object and task. To solve these challenges, we introduce AffordSim, a scalable data generator and benchmark that integrates open-vocabulary 3D affordance prediction into simulation-based trajectory generation. Given a natural-language task description, AffordSim synthesizes a task-relevant scene, emits affordance queries, grounds them on object surfaces, samples region-conditioned grasps, and selects executable candidates with motion planning. It further randomizes object pose, texture, lighting, image noise, and cross-viewpoint backgrounds for sim-to-real transfer. We instantiate AffordSim as a 50-task benchmark across diverse manipulation skills, five robot embodiments, and 500+ rigid and articulated objects. AffordSim achieves 93% of the trajectory collection success rate of manual contact annotations on affordance-critical tasks and 89% on hard composite tasks. Vision-language-action policies trained on AffordSim data transfer zero-shot to a real Franka FR3, reaching 24% average success.
Authors: Haojie Bai, Aimin Li, Ruoyu Yao, Xiongwei Zhao, Tingting Zhang, Xing Zhang, Lin Gao, and Jun Ma
Abstract: Cooperative driving is a safety- and efficiency-critical task that requires the coordination of diverse, interaction-realistic multi-agent trajectories. Although existing diffusion-based methods can capture multimodal behaviors from demonstrations, they often exhibit weak scene consistency and poor alignment with closed-loop cooperative objectives. This makes post-training necessary for further improvement, yet achieving stable online post-training in reactive multi-agent environments remains challenging. In this paper, we propose SCORP, a scene-consistent multi-agent diffusion planner with stable online reinforcement learning (RL) post-training for cooperative driving. For pre-training, we develop a scene-conditioned multi-agent denoising architecture that couples inter-agent self-attention with a dual-path conditioning mechanism: cross-attention provides direct scene-information injection, while AdaLN-Zero enables additional flexible and stable conditional modulation, thereby improving the scene consistency and road adherence of joint trajectories. For post-training, we formulate a two-layer Markov decision process (MDP) that explicitly integrates the reverse denoising chain with policy-environment interaction. We further co-design dense, well-shaped planning rewards and variance-gated group-relative policy optimization (VG-GRPO) to mitigate advantage collapse and gradient instability during closed-loop training. Extensive experiments show that SCORP outperforms strong open-source baselines on WOMD, with 10.47%-28.26% and 1.70%-7.22% improvements in core safety and efficiency metrics, respectively. Moreover, compared with alternative post-training methods, SCORP delivers significant and consistent gains in both driving safety and traffic efficiency, highlighting stable and sustained advances in closed-loop cooperative driving.
Authors: Wei Zhao, Zhe Li, Peixin Zhang, Jun Sun
Abstract: Tool-augmented Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities in automating complex, multi-step real-world tasks, yet remain vulnerable to indirect prompt injection. Adversaries exploit this weakness by embedding malicious instructions within tool-returned content, which agents directly incorporate into their conversation history as trusted observations. To address these vulnerabilities, we introduce \textsc{ClawGuard}, a novel runtime security framework that enforces a user-confirmed rule set at every tool-call boundary, transforming unreliable alignment-dependent defense into a deterministic, auditable mechanism that intercepts adversarial tool calls before any real-world effect is produced. By automatically deriving task-specific access constraints from the user's stated objective prior to any external tool invocation, \textsc{ClawGuard} blocks all three injection pathways without model modification or infrastructure change. Experiments across five state-of-the-art language models on six injection benchmarks covering web, local, MCP, and skill channels, as well as three utility benchmarks covering OS, web, and code tasks, demonstrate that \textsc{ClawGuard} achieves robust protection against indirect prompt injection without compromising agent utility or introducing significant token overhead. This work establishes deterministic tool-call boundary enforcement as an effective defense mechanism for secure agentic AI systems. Code is publicly available at github.com/Claw-Guard/ClawGuard/.
Authors: Xixun Lin, Yang Liu, Yancheng Chen, Yongxuan Wu, Yucheng Ning, Yilong Liu, Nan Sun, Shun Zhang, Bin Chong, Chuan Zhou, Yanan Cao
Abstract: The performance of large language model (LLM) agents depends critically on the execution harness, the system layer that orchestrates tool use, context management, and state persistence. Yet this same architectural centrality makes the harness a high-value attack surface: a single compromise at the harness level can cascade through the entire execution pipeline. We observe that existing security approaches suffer from structural mismatch, leaving them blind to harness-internal state and unable to coordinate across the different phases of agent operation. In this paper, we introduce \safeharness{}, a security architecture in which four proposed defense layers are woven directly into the agent lifecycle to address above significant limitations: adversarial context filtering at input processing, tiered causal verification at decision making, privilege-separated tool control at action execution, and safe rollback with adaptive degradation at state update. The proposed cross-layer mechanisms tie these layers together, escalating verification rigor, triggering rollbacks, and tightening tool privileges whenever sustained anomalies are detected. We evaluate \safeharness{} on benchmark datasets across diverse harness configurations, comparing against four security baselines under five attack scenarios spanning six threat categories. Compared to the unprotected baseline, \safeharness{} achieves an average reduction of approximately 38\% in UBR and 42\% in ASR, substantially lowering both the unsafe behavior rate and the attack success rate while preserving core task utility.
Authors: Tianshuo Yang, Guanyu Chen, Yutian Chen, Zhixuan Liang, Yitian Liu, Zanxin Chen, Chunpu Xu, Haotian Liang, Jiangmiao Pang, Yao Mu, Ping Luo
Abstract: While end-to-end Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, fine-tuning them on narrow control data often compromises the profound reasoning capabilities inherited from their base Vision-Language Models (VLMs). To resolve this fundamental trade-off, we propose HiVLA, a visual-grounded-centric hierarchical framework that explicitly decouples high-level semantic planning from low-level motor control. In high-level part, a VLM planner first performs task decomposition and visual grounding to generate structured plans, comprising a subtask instruction and a precise target bounding box. Then, to translate this plan into physical actions, we introduce a flow-matching Diffusion Transformer (DiT) action expert in low-level part equipped with a novel cascaded cross-attention mechanism. This design sequentially fuses global context, high-resolution object-centric crops and skill semantics, enabling the DiT to focus purely on robust execution. Our decoupled architecture preserves the VLM's zero-shot reasoning while allowing independent improvement of both components. Extensive experiments in simulation and the real world demonstrate that HiVLA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art end-to-end baselines, particularly excelling in long-horizon skill composition and the fine-grained manipulation of small objects in cluttered scenes.
Authors: Tianhao Qian
Abstract: As search depth increases in autonomous reasoning and embodied planning, candidate action spaces expand exponentially, often exhausting computational budgets. While heuristic pruning is a critical countermeasure, existing approaches lack formal safety guarantees when guided by surrogate evaluators such as Large Language Models (LLMs), which exhibit systematic biases. We formulate node expansion as a localized Best-Arm Identification (BAI) problem under bounded bias $L$ and derive a sample complexity upper bound of $\mathcal{O}((\Delta-4L)^{-2})$, identifying $\Delta > 4L$ as the regime where safe elimination is feasible. We further establish an information-theoretic lower bound of $\Omega((\Delta-2L)^{-2})$ that characterizes the structural limits of biased exploration. Motivated by these results, we propose PAC-MCTS, a bias-aware pruning framework that dynamically adapts confidence bounds during search. Experiments on Blocksworld and ALFWorld demonstrate that PAC-MCTS consistently improves robustness and search efficiency over strong pruning baselines, achieving up to 78\% fewer API evaluations and over 3$\times$ higher sample efficiency under strict compute budgets. Ablation studies further validate the predicted degradation behavior as evaluator bias increases.
Authors: Junghoon Seo
Abstract: Behavior cloning (BC) policies on position-controlled robots inherit the closed-loop response of the underlying PD controller, yet the nonasymptotic finite-horizon consequences of controller gains for BC failure remain open. We show that independent sub-Gaussian action errors propagate through the gain-dependent closed-loop dynamics to yield sub-Gaussian position errors whose proxy matrix $X_\infty(K)$ governs the failure tail. The probability of horizon-$T$ task failure factorizes into a gain-dependent amplification index $\Gamma_T(K)$ and the validation loss plus a generalization slack, so training loss alone cannot predict closed-loop performance. Under shape-preserving upper-bound structural assumptions, the proxy admits the scalar bound $X_\infty(K)\preceq\Psi(K)\bar X$, with $\Psi(K)$ decomposed into label difficulty, injection strength, and contraction. This ranks the four canonical regimes with compliant-overdamped (CO) tightest, stiff-underdamped (SU) loosest, and the stiff-overdamped versus compliant-underdamped ordering system-dependent. For the canonical scalar second-order PD system, the closed-form continuous-time stationary variance $X_\infty^{\mathrm{c}}(\alpha,\beta)=\sigma^2\alpha/(2\beta)$ is strictly monotone in stiffness and damping over the entire stable orthant, covering both underdamped and overdamped regimes, and the exact zero-order-hold (ZOH) discretization inherits this monotonicity. The analysis gives a nonasymptotic finite-horizon extension of the gain-dependent error-attenuation explanation of Bronars et al.
Authors: Wenjie Zhou, Yuan Gao, Xin Zhou, Hao Fu, Zhongjian Miao, Wei Chen, Bo Chen, Xiaobing Zhao
Abstract: Retrieving real-time information is a fundamental capability for search-integrated agents in real-world applications. However, existing benchmarks are predominantly static and therefore fail to capture the temporal dynamics of information and the continuously evolving nature of real-world knowledge. To address this limitation, we propose RT-QA, a dynamic evaluation framework that leverages executable code workflows to retrieve up-to-date answers at evaluation time. Specifically, we construct an agent-driven pipeline that autonomously generates code for web crawling and DOM-based answer extraction to produce real-time ground truth. To ensure robust evaluation over time, the pipeline further incorporates a self-repair mechanism to adapt to changes in web page structures. RT-QA spans 12 domains (e.g., Finance, Sports) with 320 Chinese questions categorized into three difficulty levels. Extensive evaluations of state-of-the-art models (e.g., GPT-5.2, GLM-4.7) reveal significant limitations in real-time adaptability: even the best models achieve only 46% accuracy. Our analysis highlights two primary failure modes: (1) Lazy Retrieval, where agents rely on search snippets instead of deeply scanning specific websites for information (20% of failures); and (2) Temporal Confusion, a cognitive error where agents retrieve a historical date (e.g., an event in 2024) and fail to re-anchor to the current time (2026) for subsequent reasoning. These findings suggest that future agents require not just better retrieval strategies, but robust temporal state management.
Authors: Alfredo Metere
Abstract: We present enclawed, a hard-fork hardening framework built on the OpenClaw AI assistant gateway. enclawed targets deployments that need attestable peer trust, deny-by-default external connectivity, signed-module loading, and a tamper-evident audit trail -- typically regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, defense, government). The framework ships in two flavors: an open flavor preserving OpenClaw compatibility while emitting audit, classification, and data-loss-prevention (DLP) signals, and an enclaved flavor activating strict allowlists, FIPS cryptographic-module assertion, mandatory manifest signature verification, and high-assurance peer attestation for the Model Context Protocol. The classification ladder is data-driven: deployers pick from five built-in presets or supply their own JSON. We ship a 356-case test suite (261 unit + 95 adversarial pen-tests) covering tamper detection, signature forgery, egress bypass, audit-log truncation, trust-root mutation, DLP evasion, prompt injection, code injection, and biconditional admission for net-capable extensions; real-time human-in-the-loop control; a memory-bounded transaction buffer with rollback; strict-mode TypeScript typecheck; and a CI workflow. The biconditional extension-admission gate extends the skill trust schema to non-skill extensions. The four-level verification lattice is now closed at the top: four skill-formal-* primitives plus a CLI produce a signed proof-carrying bundle the runtime re-checks at load, raising a skill from tested to formal via static effect-containment, refinement-typed dispatch, and bounded model checking. enclawed is a hardening framework, not an accredited certification; hardware, validated crypto, facilities, and assessor sign-off remain the deployer's responsibility.
Authors: Shripad Deshmukh, Jayakumar Subramanian, Raghavendra Addanki, Nikos Vlassis
Abstract: In cooperative teams where agents act in a fixed order and share a single team-level reward (multi-agent language systems, sequential robotic tasks), per-agent credit assignment is under-determined. Critic-based approaches scale poorly as the number of agents grows owing to the costly maintenance of joint/factored critic(s), whereas the existing critic-free alternatives have other issues: common credit across agents that couples every agent's signal to teammate noise, importance-sampling corrections for upstream-update staleness that incur variance exponential in team size, or per-agent counterfactual replay that isolates each agent's effect at the price of extra environment or reward calls. We propose COSAC, a critic-free per-agent policy gradient for sequential cooperative teams. COSAC fits an additive per-agent decomposition of the team reward by a single ridge regression on the rollout batch (giving each agent a learning signal decoupled from teammate noise), and computes each agent's counterfactual advantage from fictitious continuations of the current policy (policy forward passes that replace both importance-sampling reweighting and per-agent environment replay, at no extra environment or reward cost). The estimator instantiates the Sequential Aristocrat Utility (SeqAU), our extension of Wolpert and Tumer's (2001) aristocrat utility to sequential teams. We prove bias and variance bounds on SeqAU credits that stay controlled as the team grows. Our controlled study on sequential bandits demonstrates that COSAC attains the lowest advantage MSE and consistently low learning regret across team sizes up to $K = 16$. On the AI2 Reasoning Challenge (ARC) task, where four Qwen3-0.6B agents reason in turn about a grade-school science question, COSAC attains faster convergence than the other critic-free baselines.
Authors: Yuyan Zhou, Jiarui Yu, Hande Dong, Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Jianqing Zhang, Qiang Lin
Abstract: Recently, latent reasoning has been introduced into large language models (LLMs) to leverage rich information within a continuous space. However, without stochastic sampling, these methods inevitably collapse to deterministic inference, failing to discover diverse reasoning paths. To bridge the gap, we inject controllable stochasticity into latent reasoning via Gumbel-Softmax, restoring LLMs' exploratory capacity and enhancing their compatibility with Reinforcement Learning (RL). Building on this, we propose \textbf{\underline{L}}atent R\textbf{\underline{e}}asoning \textbf{\underline{P}}olicy \textbf{\underline{O}}ptimization~(\textbf{LEPO}), a novel framework that applies RL directly to continuous latent representations. Specifically, in rollout stage, LEPO maintains stochasticity to enable diverse trajectory sampling, while in optimization stage, LEPO constructs a unified gradient estimation for both latent representations and discrete tokens. Extensive experiments show that LEPO significantly outperforms existing RL methods for discrete and latent reasoning.
Authors: Isaac Llorente-Saguer
Abstract: Aligned language models refuse harmful instructions, but the representations through which they recognise such instructions are less well characterised than the behaviours they produce. Harmful intent is linearly separable from residual-stream activations across 12 models spanning four architectural families (Qwen2.5, Qwen3.5, Llama-3.2, Gemma-3) and three alignment variants (base, instruction-tuned, abliterated), with parameter scales from 0.5B to 1.3B and a within-family scale extension to 9B on Qwen3.5. A direction fitted from 100 labelled examples per class via Soft-AUC optimisation reaches mean effective AUROC 0.982 and TPR@1\%FPR 0.797, generalises to three held-out harm benchmarks and a hard-benign control, and matches its instruction-tuned counterpart within $\pm 0.003$ AUROC in abliterated variants from which the refusal mechanism has been removed. The supervised strategies all exceed AUROC 0.96, but their TPR@1\%FPR varies by more than ten times the AUROC gap; a deployed 9B safety classifier shows the same pattern at AUROC 0.94 and TPR 0.30, motivating low-FPR reporting as a default in safety-adjacent detection evaluation. Geometric measurements refine the picture. The recovered direction is concentrated within each extraction protocol but protocol-dependent across them: two pooling choices applied to the same chat-templated activations at the same residual-stream layer (max-pool over content tokens versus last-token at the post-instruction position) recover harm directions $73^\circ$ apart, and projecting one out leaves detection under either max-pool extraction essentially intact. Probing identifies a protocol-specific direction rather than a unique computational feature.
Authors: Chaitanya Dwivedi, Binxuan Huang, Himanshu Gupta, Pratik Jayarao, Neeraj Varshney, Bing Yin
Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become the dominant architecture for scaling large language models: frontier models routinely decouple total parameters from per-token computation through sparse expert routing. Scaling laws show that under fixed active computation, model quality scales predictably with total parameters, and MoEs realize this by increasing expert count. However, training large MoEs is expensive, as memory requirements and inter-device communication both scale with total parameter count. We propose expert upcycling, a method for progressively expanding MoE capacity by increasing the number of experts during continued pre-training (CPT). Given a trained E-expert model, the upcycling operator constructs an mE-expert model through expert duplication and router extension while holding top-K routing fixed, preserving per-token inference cost. Duplication provides a warm initialization: the expanded model inherits the source checkpoint's learned representations, starting from a substantially lower loss than random initialization. Subsequent CPT then breaks the symmetry among duplicated experts to drive specialization. We formalize the upcycling operator and develop a theoretical framework decomposing the quality gap into a capacity term and an initialization term. We further introduce utility-based expert selection, which uses gradient-based importance scores to guide non-uniform duplication, more than tripling gap closure when CPT is limited. In our 7B-13B total parameter experiments, the upcycled model matches the fixed-size baseline on validation loss while saving 32% of GPU hours. Comprehensive ablations across model scales, activation ratios, MoE architectures, and training budgets yield a practical recipe for deploying expert upcycling, establishing it as a principled, compute-efficient alternative to training large MoE models from scratch.
Authors: Salman Khan, Syed Sajid Ullah, Muhammad Zunair Zamir, Jie Li, Abdul Malik, Saeed Mian Qaisar
Abstract: Accurate prediction of thermal runaway in lithium-ion batteries is essential for ensuring the safety, efficiency, and reliability of modern energy storage systems. Conventional data-driven approaches, such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, can capture complex temporal dependencies but often violate thermodynamic principles, resulting in physically inconsistent predictions. Conversely, physics-based thermal models provide interpretability but are computationally expensive and difficult to parameterize for real-time applications. To bridge this gap, this study proposes a Physics-Informed Long Short-Term Memory (PI-LSTM) framework that integrates governing heat transfer equations directly into the deep learning architecture through a physics-based regularization term in the loss function. The model leverages multi-feature input sequences, including state of charge, voltage, current, mechanical stress, and surface temperature, to forecast battery temperature evolution while enforcing thermal diffusion constraints. Extensive experiments conducted on thirteen lithium-ion battery datasets demonstrate that the proposed PI-LSTM achieves an 81.9% reduction in root mean square error (RMSE) and an 81.3% reduction in mean absolute error (MAE) compared to the standard LSTM baseline, while also outperforming CNN-LSTM and multilayer perceptron (MLP) models by wide margins. The inclusion of physical constraints enhances the model's generalization across diverse operating conditions and eliminates non-physical temperature oscillations. These results confirm that physics-informed deep learning offers a viable pathway toward interpretable, accurate, and real-time thermal management in next-generation battery systems.
Authors: Zhaokun Wang, Jinyu Guo, Jingwen Pu, Hongli Pu, Meng Yang, Xunlei Chen, Jie Ou, Wenyi Li, Guangchun Luo, Wenhong Tian
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) trained on unfiltered corpora inherently risk retaining sensitive information, necessitating selective knowledge unlearning for regulatory compliance and ethical safety. However, existing parameter-modifying methods face fundamental limitations: high computational costs, uncontrollable forgetting boundaries, and strict dependency on model weight access. These constraints render them impractical for closed-source models, yet current non-invasive alternatives remain unsystematic and reliant on empirical experience. To address these challenges, we propose the Controllable Alignment Prompting for Unlearning (CAP) framework, an end-to-end prompt-driven unlearning paradigm. CAP decouples unlearning into a learnable prompt optimization process via reinforcement learning, where a prompt generator collaborates with the LLM to suppress target knowledge while preserving general capabilities selectively. This approach enables reversible knowledge restoration through prompt revocation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAP achieves precise, controllable unlearning without updating model parameters, establishing a dynamic alignment mechanism that overcomes the transferability limitations of prior methods.
Authors: Nikoo Moradi, Gijs Luijten, Behrus Hinrichs-Puladi, Jens Kleesiek, Victor Alves, Jan Egger, Andr\'e Ferreira
Abstract: Diffusion models produce high-quality synthetic data but suffer from slow inference. We propose 3D Variable-Step Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (VS-DDPM) a framework engineered to maintain generative quality while accelerating inference by several factors. We tested our approach on four tasks (missing MRI, tumor removal, MRI-to-sCT, and CBCT-to-sCT) within the BraTS2025 and SynthRAD2025 challenges. Designed for high efficiency under hardware and time constrains imposed by both challenges. VS-DDPM achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in missing MRI synthesis, yielding Dice scores of 0.80, 0.83, and 0.88 for the enhancing tumor, tumor core, and whole tumor regions, respectively, alongside a structural similarity index (SSIM) of 0.95. For MRI tumor removal, the model attained a root mean squared error (RMSE) of 0.053, a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 26.77, and an SSIM of 0.918. While the framework demonstrated competitive performance in MRI-to-sCT and CBCT-to-sCT tasks, it did not reach SOTA benchmarks, potentially due to sensitivities in data pre and post-processing pipelines or specific loss function configurations. These results demonstrate that VS-DDPM provides a robust and tunable solution for high-fidelity 3D medical image synthesis. The code is available in https://github.com/andre-fs-ferreira/SynthRAD_by_Faking_it.
URLs: https://github.com/andre-fs-ferreira/SynthRAD_by_Faking_it.
Authors: Max Hartman, Vidhata Jayaraman, Moulik Choraria, Yash Savani, Lav R. Varshney
Abstract: Distillation via sampling reasoning traces exposes closed-source frontier models to adversarial third parties who can bypass their guardrails and misappropriate their capabilities. Antidistillation methods aim to address this by poisoning reasoning traces to hinder student model learning while preserving teacher performance. However, current methods overlook detectability, both semantic and syntactic, which erodes trust in the teacher's outputs and signals the defense's presence to adversaries. We address this gap by formulating antidistillation as a Stackelberg game whose constraint set explicitly encodes detectability, and show that perturbing sparingly offers an effective, less detectable alternative to poisoning the full trace. Drawing on mechanistic interpretability, we identify thought anchors, sentences with disproportionate counterfactual influence on model outputs, as a principled sparse target: critical to reasoning yet minimally detectable. We instantiate this in TraceGuard, a training-free, black-box proof-of-concept that locates thought anchors via branching-token detection and poisons them to degrade student distillation while preserving trace coherence.
Authors: Shuaizhi Cheng, Xiang Shi, Zhiwei Zhang, Mingwei Li
Abstract: Hypernetwork-based methods such as Doc-to-LoRA internalize a document into an LLM's weights in a single forward pass, but they fail systematically on conflicts: when the document contradicts pretraining knowledge, accuracy collapses to 46.4% on the deepest facts. We show the failure is a magnitude problem rather than a representational one. The hypernetwork already targets the right layers, but its adapter margin is approximately constant across documents while the pretrained margin grows with training frequency, so deep conflicts lose by construction. The account predicts that failure should track prior strength: sorting 194 conflicts by the base model's log-probability on the contradicted fact, baseline accuracy falls from 68% on weak-prior questions to 16% on strong-prior ones, a 52 percentage-point gap. The cure is amplitude. Selective Layer Boosting scales the adapter at its top-norm layers, and Conflict-Aware Internalization triggers boosting only when the base model is confident. Both are training-free; together they raise deep-conflict accuracy from 46.4% to 71.0% on Gemma-2B and from 53.6% to 72.5% on Mistral-7B while preserving novel-knowledge recall, and beat vanilla retrieval-augmented generation on medium conflicts by 18 percentage points despite operating entirely in parameter space. We release KID-Bench, a 489-question benchmark that separates novel recall, cross-knowledge combination, and prior-graded conflicts.
Authors: Yichen Xu
Abstract: Synthetic tabular data are often evaluated by distributional similarity, privacy distance, or train-on-synthetic-test-on-real predictive performance, but these criteria do not ensure validity for causal inference. We show that fully generative tabular synthesizers, including GAN- and LLM-based models, can preserve predictive utility while distorting average treatment effect (ATE) estimates. The failure is structural: ATE preservation requires both a realistic covariate law and an accurate treatment-effect contrast, whereas prediction loss penalizes treatment-effect error only through an overlap-weighted term. We formalize this mismatch through sensitivity and loss-decomposition results, and identify an analogous decomposition in block-level next-token prediction under log loss. Motivated by the tabular causal analysis, we propose a hybrid synthetic-data framework that generates covariates while modeling treatment and outcome mechanisms separately, allowing causal-purpose treatment assignment such as randomized synthetic assignment. We evaluate this framework in three settings: ATE preservation under fully generative versus hybrid synthesis, targeted augmentation for practical positivity problems, and synthetic simulation engines for comparing OR, IPW, AIPW, and TMLE before real-data analysis. Across synthetic and ACTG experiments, hybrid synthesis improves causal fidelity relative to fully generative baselines; LLM-based hybrid synthesis is often more faithful than CTGAN for ATE preservation and finite-sample estimator benchmarking.
Authors: Phat Lam
Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) is highly susceptible to artifact contamination, such as electrooculographic (EOG) and electromyographic (EMG) interference, which severely degrades signal quality and hinders reliable interpretation in applications including neurological diagnosis, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), etc. Effective EEG denoising remains challenging because different artifact sources exhibit diverse and temporally varying distributions, together with distinct spectral characteristics across frequency bands. To address these issues, we propose BandRouteNet, an adaptive frequency-aware neural network for EEG denoising that jointly exploits band-specific processing and full-band contextual modeling. The proposed model performs band-wise denoising to explicitly capture frequency-dependent artifact patterns. Within this framework, we introduce a routing mechanism that adaptively determines where and to what extent denoising should be applied across temporal locations within each frequency band. In parallel, a full-band conditioner directly processes the original noisy EEG to extract global temporal context, producing both conditional parameters for modulating the band-wise pathway and a coarse-grained signal-level refinement to supplement the final reconstruction. Extensive experiments on the EEGDenoiseNet benchmark dataset demonstrate that BandRouteNet outperforms other methods under EOG, EMG, and mixed-artifact conditions in terms of Relative Root Mean Square Error (RRMSE) and Signal-to-Noise Ratio Improvement (SNR$_{\text{imp}}$) under unified experimental settings, while remaining highly parameter-efficient with only 0.2M trainable parameters. These results highlight its strong potential for high-performance EEG artifact removal in resource-constrained applications.
Authors: Minkyu Kim, Vincent-Daniel Yun, Youngrae Kim, Youngjin Heo, Suin Cho, Seong-hun Kim, Woosang Lim, Gaeul Kwon
Abstract: Depth pruning improves the inference efficiency of large language models by removing Transformer blocks. Prior work has largely treated layer redundancy as an inherent structural property of pretrained networks, emphasizing importance criteria and search algorithms for identifying removable layers. In contrast, we adopt a \emph{functional perspective}, where redundancy depends jointly on the model and the calibration objective, suggesting that a universal layer ranking may not exist. Through an empirical study across three LLM families, two calibration objectives, and seven search algorithms, we find that different objectives produce qualitatively different pruning patterns, while perplexity and downstream reasoning accuracy rankings often fail to align. In contrast, under a fixed objective, different search algorithms tend to converge to similar pruning solutions. Overall, our results suggest that the calibration objective may play a larger role than the particular search algorithm in determining which layers appear redundant.
Authors: NVIDIA, :, Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Kateryna Chumachenko, Tuomas Rintamaki, Matthieu Le, Tyler Poon, Danial Mohseni Taheri, Ilia Karmanov, Guilin Liu, Jarno Seppanen, Arushi Goel, Mike Ranzinger, Greg Heinrich, Guo Chen, Lukas Voegtle, Philipp Fischer, Timo Roman, Karan Sapra, Collin McCarthy, Shaokun Zhang, Fuxiao Liu, Hanrong Ye, Yi Dong, Mingjie Liu, Yifan Peng, Piotr Zelasko, Zhehuai Chen, Nithin Rao Koluguri, Nune Tadevosyan, Lilit Grigoryan, Ehsan Hosseini Asl, Pritam Biswas, Leili Tavabi, Yuanhang Su, Zhiding Yu, Peter Jin, Alexandre Milesi, Netanel Haber, Yao Xu, Sarah Amiraslani, Nabin Mulepati, Eric Tramel, Jaehun Jung, Ximing Lu, Brandon Cui, Jin Xu, Zhiqi Li, Shihao Wang, Yuanguo Kuang, Shaokun Zhang, Huck Yang, Boyi Li, Hongxu Yin, Song Han, Bilal Kartal, Pavlo Molchanov, Adi Renduchintala, Charles Wang, David Mosallanezhad, Soumye Singhal, Luis Vega, Katherine Cheung, Sreyan Ghosh, Yian Zhang, Alexander Bukharin, Venkat Srinivasan, Johnny Greco, Andre Manoel, Maarten Van Segbroeck, Suseella Panguliri, Rohit Watve, Divyanshu Kakwani, Shubham Pachori, Jeffrey Glick, Radha Sri-Tharan, Aileen Zaman, Khanh Nguyen, Shi Chen, Jiaheng Fang, Qing Miao, Wenfei Zhou, Yu Wang, Zaid Pervaiz Bhat, Varun Praveen, Arihant Jain, Ramanathan Arunachalam, Tomasz Kornuta, Ashton Sharabiani, Amy Shen, Wei Huang, Yi-Fu Wu, Ali Roshan Ghias, Huiying Li, Brian Yu, Nima Tajbakhsh, Chen Cui, Wenwen Gao, Li Ding, Terry Kong, Manoj Kilaru, Anahita Bhiwandiwalla, Marek Wawrzos, Daniel Korzekwa, Pablo Ribalta, Grzegorz Chlebus, Besmira Nushi, Ewa Dobrowolska, Maciej Jakub Mikulski, Kunal Dhawan, Steve Huang, Jagadeesh Balam, Yongqiang Wang, Nikolay Karpov, Valentin Mendelev, George Zelenfroynd, Meline Mkrtchyan, Qing Miao, Omri Almog, Bhavesh Pawar, Rameshwar Shivbhakta, Sudeep Sabnis, Ashrton Sharabiani, Negar Habibi, Geethapriya Venkataramani, Pamela Peng, Prerit Rodney, Serge Panev, Richard Mazzarese, Nicky Liu, Michael Fukuyama, Andrii Skliar, Roger Waleffe, Duncan Riach, Yunheng Zou, Jian Hu, Hao Zhang, Binfeng Xu, Yuhao Yang, Zuhair Ahmed, Alexandre Milesi, Carlo del Mundo, Chad Voegele, Zhiyu Cheng, Nave Assaf, Andrii Skliar, Daniel Afrimi, Natan Bagrov, Ran Zilberstein, Ofri Masad, Eugene Khvedchenia, Natan Bagrov, Borys Tymchenko, Tomer Asida, Daniel Afrimi, Parth Mannan, Victor Cui, Michael Evans, Katherine Luna, Jie Lou, Pinky Xu, Guyue Huang, Negar Habibi, Michael Boone, Pradeep Thalasta, Adeola Adesoba, Dina Yared, Christopher Parisien, Leon Derczynski, Shaona Ghosh, Wes Feely, Micah Schaffer, Radha Sri-Tharan, Jeffrey Glick, Barnaby Simkin, George Zelenfroynd, Tomasz Grzegorzek, Rishabh Garg, Aastha Jhunjhunwala, Sergei Kolchenko, Farzan Memarian, Haran Kumar, Shiv Kumar, Isabel Hulseman, Anjali Shah, Kari Briski, Padmavathy Subramanian, Joey Conway, Udi Karpas, Jane Polak Scowcroft, Annie Surla, Shilpa Ammireddy, Ellie Evans, Jesse Oliver, Tom Balough, Chia-Chih Chen, Sandip Bhaskar, Alejandra Rico, Bardiya Sadeghi, Seph Mard, Katherine Cheung, Meredith Price, Laya Sleiman, Saori Kaji, Wesley Helmholz, Wendy Quan, Michael Lightstone, Jonathan Cohen, Jian Zhang, Oleksii Kuchaiev, Boris Ginsburg, Jan Kautz, Eileen Long, Mohammad Shoeybi, Mostofa Patwary, Oluwatobi Olabiyi, Andrew Tao, Bryan Catanzaro, Udi Karpas
Abstract: We introduce Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, the latest model in the Nemotron multimodal series and the first to natively support audio inputs alongside text, images, and video. Nemotron 3 Nano Omni delivers consistent accuracy improvements over its predecessor, Nemotron Nano V2 VL, across all modalities, enabled by advances in architecture, training data and recipes. In particular, Nemotron 3 delivers leading results in real-world document understanding, long audio-video comprehension, and agentic computer use. Built on the highly efficient Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B backbone, Nemotron 3 Nano Omni further incorporates innovative multimodal token-reduction techniques to deliver substantially lower inference latency and higher throughput than other models of similar size. We are releasing model checkpoints in BF16, FP8, and FP4 formats, along with portions of the training data and codebase to facilitate further research and development.
Authors: Daneshvar Amrollahi, Jerry Lopez, Clark Barrett
Abstract: When an LLM formalizes natural language, how do we know the output is faithful? We propose a roundtrip verification approach which does not require ground-truth annotations: formalize a statement, translate the result back to natural language, re-formalize, and use a formal tool to check logical equivalence. When the two formalizations agree, this provides evidence of a faithful formalization. When they disagree, a stage-level diagnosis localizes the error to a specific translation step, and a scoped repair operator attempts to correct that step. We evaluate the framework on two statutory domains (the Texas Transportation Code and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Code) using two LLMs (Claude Opus~4.6 and GPT-5.2) with three repair baselines. Diagnosis-guided scoped repair is the most effective method, with effectiveness contingent on the reliability of the diagnosis function. Across both domains and both models, under our full repair system, rules that fail the equivalence check show 1.4x-2.5x more NLI drift than rules that pass it.
Authors: Pengfei He, Shaowei Wang, Tse-Hsun Chen, Muhammad Asaduzzaman
Abstract: Static program slicing is a fundamental software engineering technique for isolating code relevant to specific variables. While recent learning-based approaches using language models (LMs) show promise in automating slice prediction, they suffer from inaccurate dependency modeling and unconstrained generation, where LMs fail to capture precise data flow relations and produce slices containing hallucinated tokens and statements. To address these challenges, we propose Sliceformer, a novel approach that reformulates static program slicing as a sequence-to-sequence task using small language models such as CodeT5+. Sliceformer introduces two key innovations that directly target the identified limitations. First, to improve dependency modeling, we design dataflow-aware pretraining objectives that leverage data flow graphs (DFG) to teach models data dependencies through dataflow-preserving statement permutation and dataflow-aware span corruption. Second, to eliminate hallucination, we develop a constrained decoding mechanism that enforces both lexical and syntactic constraints. We evaluate Sliceformer on Java and Python program slicing benchmarks, demonstrating consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines with up to 22% gain in ExactMatch.
Authors: Bingxi Zhao, Jiahao Zhang, Xubin Ren, Zirui Guo, Tianzhe Chu, Yi Ma, Chao Huang
Abstract: Education is one of the most promising real-world applications for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, current LLMs rely on static pre-training knowledge and lack adaptation to individual learners, while existing RAG systems fall short in delivering personalized, guided feedback. To bridge this gap, we present DeepTutor, a fully open-source agentic framework that unifies citation-grounded problem tutoring with difficulty-calibrated question generation. A hybrid personalization engine couples static knowledge grounding with dynamic learner memory, continuously adapting each interaction to the student's evolving needs. The same personalization substrate further extends to adaptive learning workflows, interactive books, and proactive multi-channel tutoring agents. To evaluate personalized tutoring, we introduce TutorBench, an interactive benchmark incorporating customized learner profiles grounded in university-level curricula across five domains. We further propose an LLM-based first-person interactive evaluation protocol that conducts assessments via a profile-driven student simulator. Complementary evaluations on established benchmarks, supported by human-alignment and ablation studies, confirm the framework's robustness and general utility. Results show that DeepTutor improves personalized metrics by 10.8\% on average and strengthens general agentic reasoning across five backbone models by 29.4\%.
Authors: Zainab Rehan, Christian Medeiros Adriano, Sona Ghahremani, Holger Giese
Abstract: Rule-based systems remain central in safety-critical domains but often struggle with scalability, brittleness, and goal misspecification. These limitations can lead to reward hacking and failures in formal verification, as AI systems tend to optimize for narrow objectives. In previous research, we developed a neuro-symbolic causal framework that integrates first-order logic abduction trees, structural causal models, and deep reinforcement learning within a MAPE-K loop to provide explainable adaptations under distribution shifts. In this paper, we extend that framework by introducing a meta-level layer designed to mitigate goal misspecification and support scalable rule maintenance. This layer consists of a Goal/Rule Synthesizer and a Rule Verification Engine, which iteratively refine a formal rule theory from high-level natural-language goals and principles provided by human experts. The synthesis pipeline employs large language models (LLMs) to: (1) decompose goals into candidate causes, (2) consolidate semantics to remove redundancies, (3) translate them into candidate first-order rules, and (4) compose necessary and sufficient causal sets. The verification pipeline then performs (1) syntax and schema validation, (2) logical consistency analysis, and (3) safety and invariant checks before integrating verified rules into the knowledge base. We evaluated our approach with a proof-of-concept implementation in two autonomous driving scenarios. Results indicate that, given human-specified goals and principles, the pipeline can successfully derive minimal necessary and sufficient rule sets and formalize them as logical constraints. These findings suggest that the pipeline supports incremental, modular, and traceable rule synthesis grounded in established legal and safety principles.
Authors: 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 InvEvolve, an end-to-end inventory policy evolution and inference framework grounded in confidence-interval-based certification. Built on a large language model trained via reinforcement learning, InvEvolve can process demand data together with additional numerical and textual features, and generates white-box inventory policies with statistical safety guarantees for deployment in future periods. We further introduce a unified theoretical model that connects training, inference, and deployment. This allows us to drive a lower bound on the probability that InvEvolve evolves a statistically safe and improved policy, and to characterize the multi-period performance gap relative to the oracle-safe benchmark. Tested on both synthetic data and real-world retail data, InvEvolve outperforms classical inventory policies and deep learning based methods. In canonical inventory settings, it evolves new policies that improve upon existing benchmarks.
Authors: Kevin H. Guo, Chao Yan, Avinash Baidya, Katherine Brown, Xiang Gao, Juming Xiong, Zhijun Yin, Bradley A. Malin
Abstract: Medical large language model (LLM) evaluations rely on simplified, exam-style benchmarks that rarely reflect the ambiguity of real-world medical inquiries. We introduce the CLinical Evaluation of Ambiguity and Reliability (CLEAR) framework, which assesses how decision-space presentation, ambiguity, and uncertainty affect LLMs' reasoning on medical benchmarks. CLEAR systematically perturbs (1) the number of plausible answer options, (2) the presence of a ground truth or abstention option, and (3) the semantic framing of answer options. Applying CLEAR on three benchmarks evaluated across 17 LLMs reveals three notable limitations of existing evaluation methods. First, increasing the number of plausible answers degrades a model's ability to identify the correct answer and abstain against incorrect ones. Second, this lack of caution intensifies as the framing of abstention shifts from assertive rejection like "None of the Above" to uncertainty admission like "I don't know" (IDK). Notably, just including IDK in the answer space increases incorrect answer selections. Lastly, we formalize the performance gap between identifying the correct answer and abstaining from incorrect ones as the humility deficit, which worsens with model scale. Our findings reveal limitations in standard medical benchmarks and underscore that scaling alone does not resolve LLM reliability issues.
Authors: Wazir Ali, Adeeb Noor, Saifullah Tumrani
Abstract: In this article, we introduce SiNFluD, a novel benchmark dataset for Sindhi figurative language classification. We first collect raw text from various blogs, social media platforms, and literary sources, and subsequently prepare the corpus for annotation. Two native annotators label the data using the Doccano text annotation tool, achieving an inter-annotator agreement of 0.81. We then establish baseline results using 5-fold and 10-fold cross-validation. Finally, we evaluate mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and XLM-RoBERTa-XL models, along with SetFit for few-shot fine-tuning of sentence transformers. Among these, the pretrained XLM-RoBERTa-XL achieves the best performance.
Authors: Anjie Liu, Ziqin Gong, Yan Song, Yuxiang Chen, Xiaolong Liu, Hengtong Lu, Kaike Zhang, Chen Wei, Jun Wang
Abstract: Visual perception in modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is constrained by a perceptual bandwidth bottleneck: a broad field of view preserves global context but sacrifices the fine-grained details required for complex reasoning. We argue that high-resolution visual reasoning is therefore not only semantic reasoning but also task-relevant evidence acquisition under limited perceptual bandwidth. Inspired by active vision and information foraging, we formalise this process as sequential Bayesian optimal experimental design (S-BOED), where an agent decides which visual evidence to acquire before answering. Since exact Bayesian inference is intractable in continuous gigapixel spaces, we derive a tractable coverage--resolution objective as a proxy for task-relevant information gain. We instantiate this framework with FOVEA, a training-free procedure that refines VLM crop proposals through evidence-oriented probing. Experiments on high-resolution benchmarks show consistent gains over direct and ReAct-style baselines, with particularly strong improvements in search-dominated remote-sensing settings.
Authors: Annie Yuan, Xiaohua Chen, Kalina Yacef, Judy Kay
Abstract: Tacit knowledge embedded in expert practice remains difficult to capture, formalise, and scale. While AI-driven educational systems have advanced personalisation, learner modelling, affective support, and self-regulated learning, they less often model the tacit reasoning and context-sensitive judgement that underpin expert practice in practice-based domains. This paper introduces the AI Expert Twin, a cognition-centric framework that models expert knowledge as structured, computable representations of procedural actions, semantic concepts, and decision processes. The framework also considers how value-laden preferences, trade-offs, and uncertainty shape expert judgement in practice. We formalise expert cognition as a three-layer representation and capture knowledge from experts under this model, laying the groundwork for integration into AI-powered educational system. A case study in a cultural heritage workshop demonstrates the feasibility of the approach in a real-world setting. The framework is designed to be transferable across domains such as vocational education and creative industries. By embedding expert heuristics into AI while maintaining transparency and learner agency, the AI Expert Twin offers a novel path towards scalable, practice-based learning and invites further research on ethical, human-centred applications of AI in education.
Authors: Rohit Agarwal, Joshua Lin, Mark Braverman, Elad Hazan
Abstract: We study AI alignment through the lens of law-and-economics models of deterrence and enforcement. In these models, misconduct is not treated as an external failure, but as a strategic response to incentives: an actor weighs the gain from violation against the probability of detection and the severity of punishment. We argue that the same logic arises naturally in agentic AI pipelines. A solver may benefit from producing a persuasive but incorrect answer, hiding uncertainty, or exploiting spurious shortcuts, while an auditor or verifier must decide whether costly monitoring is worthwhile. Alignment is therefore a fixed-point problem: stronger penalties may deter solver misbehavior, but they can also reduce the auditor's incentive to inspect, since auditing then mainly incurs cost on a population that appears increasingly aligned. This perspective also changes what should count as a post-training signal. Standard feedback often attaches reward to the final answer alone, but a solver-auditor pipeline exposes the full correction event: whether the solver erred, whether the auditor inspected, whether the error was caught, and whether oversight incentives remained active. We formalize this interaction in a two-agent model in which a principal chooses rewards over joint correction outcomes, inducing both solver behavior and auditor monitoring. Reward design is therefore a bilevel optimization problem: rewards are judged not by their immediate semantic meaning, but by the behavioral equilibrium they induce. We propose a bandit-based outer-loop procedure for searching over reward profiles using noisy interaction feedback. Experiments on an LLM coding pipeline show that adaptive reward profiles can maintain useful oversight pressure and improve principal-aligned outcomes relative to static hand-designed rewards, including a substantial reduction in hallucinated incorrect attempts.
Authors: Yipin Guo, Siddharth Joshi
Abstract: Contemporary systems serving large language models (LLMs) have adopted prefill-decode disaggregation to better load-balance between the compute-bound prefill phase and the memory-bound decode phase. Under this design, prefill workers generate a KV cache that must be transferred to decode workers before token generation can begin. With these workers residing on different physical systems, this transfer becomes a significant bottleneck to serving LLMs at scale. This bottleneck gets exacerbated for long-input and agentic workloads. Existing lossless codecs are not suited to this setting as they primarily target offline weight compression, run on the CPU, or use variable-length coding whose decompression is fast but compression is too slow to keep up with KV production during prefill. We introduce SplitZip, a GPU-friendly lossless compressor for KV cache transfer that preserves KV tensors bitwise and integrates into existing serving frameworks without changes to model execution. SplitZip exploits redundancy in floating-point exponents of KV activations, encoding the most frequent exponent values with fixed-length codes and routing rare exponents through a sparse escape stream of (position, value). An offline calibrated top-16 exponent codebook eliminates online-histogramming, while the regular dense path and sparse escape correction make both encoding and decoding efficient on GPUs. On real BF16 activation tensors, SplitZip achieves $613.3$ GB/s compression throughput and $2181.8$ GB/s decompression throughput, substantially outperforming prior lossless compressors on the latency-critical codec path. End-to-end transfer experiments show up to $1.32\times$ speedup for BF16 KV cache transfer, $1.30\times$ speedup for TTFT, and $1.23\times$ increase on Request Throughput. The same approach extends to FP8 KV caches, providing up to $1.14\times$ compression over native E5M2.
Authors: Yuxin Lu, Jiayang Sun, Guibo Zhu, Min Cao
Abstract: Diffusion-based talking head generation has achieved remarkable visual quality, yet scaling it to long-term videos remains challenging. The widely adopted chunk-wise paradigm introduces two fundamental failures: (1) temporal-spatial misalignment between static identity references and dynamic audio streams, and (2) cascading identity drift propagated through self-generated continuity references across chunks. To address both issues, we propose AsymTalker, a novel diffusion-based talking head generation method comprising Temporal Reference Encoding (TRE) and Asymmetric Knowledge Distillation (AKD). First, TRE mitigates temporal-spatial misalignment by transforming the static identity image into a temporally coherent latent representation through encoding of a temporally replicated pseudo-video, without introducing additional parameters. Second, AKD resolves the inherent conditioning dilemma in chunk-wise training: using ground-truth references causes train-inference mismatch, while self-generated references entangle supervision with identity drift. Our asymmetric design circumvents this by anchoring the teacher model with ground-truth continuity references to provide drift-free, chunk-level supervision, thereby avoiding the teacher bottleneck. Meanwhile, the student model learns under inference-aligned conditions, conditioned only on self-generated references, and is trained via distribution matching to preserve identity over long horizons. Extensive experiments show AsymTalker achieves state-of-the-art results on HDTF and VFHQ. It guarantees high-fidelity, identity-consistent synthesis over 600-second videos and reaches a real-time inference speed of 66 FPS.
Authors: Yipeng Ouyang, Yi Xiao, Yuhao Gu, Xianwei Zhang
Abstract: LLM agents increasingly rely on reusable skills (e.g., `SKILL.md`) to execute complex tasks, yet these artifacts lack portability: agent frameworks are highly sensitive to prompt formatting, leading to a large performance variation for the same skill. Nevertheless, most skills are authored once as format-agnostic Markdown, necessitating costly per-framework rewrites and also leaving security largely unaddressed, with widespread vulnerabilities in practice. To address this, we present SkCC, a compiler for LLM agents that introduces classical compilation design into agent skill development. SkCC centers on SkIR, a strongly-typed intermediate representation that decouples skill semantics from framework-specific formatting, thus enabling portable deployment across agent frameworks. Atop of this IR, a static Optimizer enforces security constraints, blocking vulnerabilities before deployment. Implemented as a four-phase pipeline, SkCC effectively reduces adaptation complexity from $O(m \times n)$ to $O(m + n)$ across $m$ skills and $n$ frameworks. Experiments on SkillsBench demonstrate that SkCC delivers consistent and substantial gains over original counterparts, with pass rate increases from 21.1% to 33.3% on Claude Code and from 35.1% to 48.7% on Kimi CLI. Further, the design achieves sub-10ms compilation latency, 94.8% proactive security trigger rate, and 10-46% runtime token savings across frameworks.
Authors: Ahmed Cherif
Abstract: Low-light image enhancement is a fundamental challenge in computer vision and multimedia applications, as images captured under insufficient illumination suffer from poor visibility, low contrast, and color distortion. Existing Retinex-based methods rely on manually tuned parameters that fail to generalize across diverse lighting conditions. This paper proposes BFORE (Butterfly-Firefly Optimized Retinex Enhancement), a novel hybrid metaheuristic-optimized framework that automatically tunes the parameters of a multi-stage Retinex-based pipeline. The proposed method converts the input image to HSV color space and applies Adaptive Gamma Correction with Weighted Distribution (AGCWD) to the luminance channel, followed by adaptive denoising. A Butterfly Optimization Algorithm (BOA) optimizes the Multi-Scale Retinex with Color Restoration (MSRCR) parameters, while a Firefly Algorithm (FA) optimizes the AGCWD and denoising parameters. A hybrid BOA-FA switching strategy dynamically balances global exploration and local exploitation. Experimental evaluation on the LOL benchmark dataset (15 paired test images) demonstrates that BFORE achieves the highest PSNR (17.22 dB) among all traditional enhancement methods, with 20.3% improvement over Histogram Equalization and 17.5% over MSRCR. BFORE produces the most naturally balanced mean brightness (129.97), closest to the ideal mid-tone value. Notably, BFORE outperforms RetinexNet -- a deep learning baseline -- in both PSNR (17.22 vs. 16.77 dB) and SSIM (0.5417 vs. 0.4252) without requiring any training data. The hybrid BOA-FA optimization contributes a 12.3% PSNR improvement and 14.8% SSIM improvement over the unoptimized pipeline.
Authors: Tencent HY Team
Abstract: Video generation models internalize physical realism as their prior. Anime deliberately violates physics: smears, impact frames, chibi shifts; and its thousands of coexisting artistic conventions yield no single "physics of anime" a model can absorb. Physics-biased models therefore flatten the artistry that defines the medium or collapse under its stylistic variance. We present AniMatrix, a video generation model that targets artistic rather than physical correctness through a dual-channel conditioning mechanism and a three-step transition: redefine correctness, override the physics prior, and distinguish art from failure. First, a Production Knowledge System encodes anime as a structured taxonomy of controllable production variables (Style, Motion, Camera, VFX), and AniCaption infers these variables from pixels as directorial directives. A trainable tag encoder preserves the field-value structure of this taxonomy while a frozen T5 encoder handles free-form narrative; dual-path injection (cross-attention for fine-grained control, AdaLN modulation for global enforcement) ensures categorical directives are never diluted by open-ended text. Second, a style-motion-deformation curriculum transitions the model from near-physical motion to full anime expressiveness. Third, deformation-aware preference optimization with a domain-specific reward model separates intentional artistry from pathological collapse. On an anime-specific human evaluation with five production dimensions scored by professional animators, AniMatrix ranks first on four of five, with the largest gains over Seedance-Pro 1.0 on Prompt Understanding (+0.70, +22.4 percent) and Artistic Motion (+0.55, +16.9 percent). We are preparing accompanying resources for public release to support reproducibility and follow-up research.
Authors: Davide Marincione, Michele Mancusi, Giorgio Strano, Luca Cerovaz, Donato Crisostomi, Roberto Ribuoli, Emanuele Rodol\`a
Abstract: Stem retrieval, the task of matching missing stems to a given audio submix, is a key challenge currently limited by models that discard temporal information. We introduce PHALAR, a contrastive framework achieving a relative accuracy increase of up to $\approx 70\%$ over the state-of-the-art while requiring $<50\%$ of the parameters and a 7$\times$ training speedup. By utilizing a Learned Spectral Pooling layer and a complex-valued head, PHALAR enforces pitch-equivariant and phase-equivariant biases. PHALAR establishes new retrieval state-of-the-art across MoisesDB, Slakh, and ChocoChorales, correlating significantly higher with human coherence judgment than semantic baselines. Finally, zero-shot beat tracking and linear chord probing confirm that PHALAR captures robust musical structures beyond the retrieval task.
Authors: Khouloud Saadi, Di Wang
Abstract: Reasoning distillation aims to transfer multi-step reasoning capabilities from large language models to smaller, more efficient ones. While recent methods have shown promising gains, they typically rely on static teacher-student hierarchies and frame distillation as trajectory imitation. This is misaligned with the structure of reasoning, where intermediate steps are often locally under-specified: global correctness constrains the final answer, but does not uniquely determine each intermediate move. We propose validity-calibrated reasoning distillation, a framework that treats reasoning distillation as a problem of local learning-signal allocation rather than path alignment. Instead of enforcing token-level imitation, we compare the student's and teacher's proposed next-step actions under the same prefix and use their relative local validity to modulate the strength of the distillation update. This yields a dynamic, context-dependent supervision mechanism that preserves the teacher's structural guidance while adapting update strength to local reasoning quality. Across mathematical reasoning, code generation, and instruction-following benchmarks, our method consistently outperforms strong distillation baselines. These results indicate that effective LLM reasoning distillation is governed not by rigid trajectory imitation, but by principled, locally calibrated allocation of learning signal.
Authors: Alexandre L. M. Levada
Abstract: Accurate boundary detection in high-dimensional data remains a central challenge in unsupervised learning, particularly in the presence of non-linear structures and heterogeneous densities. In this work, we introduce Mean Curvature Boundary Points (MCBP), a novel geometric framework grounded in Geometric Machine Learning that departs from traditional density-based approaches by explicitly modeling the intrinsic curvature of the data manifold. The method relies on a discrete approximation of the shape operator, estimated from local k-nearest neighbor patches, to compute pointwise mean curvature without requiring explicit manifold parametrization. The key insight of MCBP is to use mean curvature as a principled descriptor of boundary structure: high-curvature regions naturally correspond to transitions between clusters, geometric irregularities, and low-density interfaces. This yields a unified geometric interpretation of boundary, outlier, and transition points. We further introduce an adaptive percentile-based thresholding scheme that enables multiscale boundary extraction without relying on ad hoc density parameters. Beyond detection, we propose a curvature-driven data decomposition that separates samples into smooth (low-curvature) and boundary (high-curvature) subsets, effectively acting as a non-linear geometric filtering mechanism. This representation enhances cluster separability and improves the robustness of downstream unsupervised algorithms. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that MCBP consistently improves clustering performance, particularly in complex and high-dimensional scenarios. These results position MCBP as a concrete contribution to Geometric Machine Learning, highlighting the potential of curvature-aware analysis as a unifying paradigm bridging differential geometry and data-driven modeling.
Authors: Qiming Bao, Juho Leinonen, Paul Denny, Michael J. Witbrock
Abstract: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), the efficient alternative to PPO-based RLHF, falls short on knowledge-intensive generation: standard preference signals from human annotators or LLM judges exhibit a systematic verbosity bias that rewards fluency over logical correctness. This blindspot leaves a logical alignment gap -- SFT models reach NLI entailment of only 0.05-0.22 despite producing fluent text. We propose RLearner-LLM with Hybrid-DPO: an automated preference pipeline that fuses a DeBERTa-v3 NLI signal with a verifier LLM score, removing human annotation while overcoming the "alignment tax" of single-signal optimization. Evaluated across five academic domains (Biology, Medicine, Law) with three base architectures (LLaMA-2-13B, Qwen3-8B, Gemma 4 E4B-it), RLearner-LLM yields up to 6x NLI improvement over SFT, with NLI gains in 11 of 15 cells and consistent answer-coverage gains. On Gemma 4 E4B-it (4.5B effective params), Hybrid-DPO lifts NLI in four of five domains (+11.9% to +2.4x) with faster inference across all five, scaling down to compact base models without losing the alignment-tax mitigation. Our Qwen3-8B RLearner-LLM wins 95% of pairwise comparisons against its own SFT baseline; GPT-4o-mini in turn wins 95% against our concise output -- alongside the 69% win the same judge gives a verbose SFT over our DPO model, this replicates verbosity bias on a frontier comparator and motivates logic-aware metrics (NLI, ACR) over LLM-as-a-judge for knowledge-intensive generation.
Authors: Nicholas S. Kersting, Vittorio Castelli, Chieh Ting Yeh, Xinzhu Wang, Saad Taame
Abstract: We introduce the \textbf{Concept Field} of a text corpus: a local drift field with pointwise uncertainty, estimated in sentence-embedding space from the deltas between consecutive sentences. Given a candidate sentence transition, we score its agreement with the field by $\zeta$, the mean absolute z-distance between the observed delta and the field's local Gaussian estimate. The score is black-box (no model internals), corpus-attributable (every score traces to nearby corpus sentences), and admits a probabilistically motivated interpretation under a local Gaussian approximation. We support the computation with the introduction of a \textbf{Vector Sequence Database (VSDB)} that stores embeddings together with sequence-position and next-delta metadata. We evaluate this approach on two large-scale settings: hallucination-style groundedness detection over the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, and novelty detection over Project Gutenberg. On controlled LLM-generated rewrites, Concept Fields achieve strong selective classification performance under a grounded / ungrounded / unsure triage policy. Unlike retrieval-centric baselines, the resulting coverage-risk behavior is similar across both domains, supporting a degree of cross-domain stability for the standardized deviation score. We also sketch how divergence and curl of the Concept Field, computed on dense clusters, surface qualitatively meaningful semantic patterns (logic sources, sinks, and implicit topics), which we offer as hypothesis-generating rather than as a quantitative result. Concept Fields provide a fast, lightweight, and interpretable signal for groundedness and novelty, complementary to LLM-as-judge and white-box detectors.
Authors: Alan L. McCann
Abstract: AI systems increasingly synthesize executable structure at runtime: LLMs generate programs, agents construct workflows,self-improving systems modify their own behavior. In classical homoiconic and staged languages, the transition from coderepresentation to execution is unrestricted. eval is a language primitive, not a governed operation. We argue that ingovernedintelligent systems, this transition is an authority amplification: it converts symbolic structure into executableauthority andmust be mediated like any other effect. We present governed metaprogramming, a language design where programrepresentations(machine forms) are first-class values, form manipulation is pure computation, and materialization (the transition fromform toexecutable machine) is a governed effect subject to structural inspection. The governance system analyzes the proposedprogram'scapability requirements, policy compliance, and resource estimates before permitting execution. We formalize twojudgments: pureform evaluation (which emits no directives) and governed materialization (which emits exactly one governed directive). Weprovethree properties: purity of form manipulation, the no-bypass theorem, and boundary preservation. We implement the designinMashinTalk, a DSL for AI workflows compiling to BEAM bytecode, and report on integration with 454 existingmachine-checked Rocqtheorems. The central contribution is reclassifying eval from a language primitive into a governed effect.
Authors: Fabrice Harel-Canada, Amit Sahai
Abstract: LLM watermarks must be detectable without compromising text quality, yet most existing schemes bias the next-token distribution and pay for detection with measurable quality loss. We present SLAM (Structural Linguistic Activation Marking), a novel white-box watermarking scheme that sidesteps this cost by writing the mark into structural geometry rather than token frequencies: sparse autoencoders identify residual-stream directions encoding linguistic structure (e.g., voice, tense, clause order), and we causally steer those directions at generation time, leaving lexical sampling and semantics unconstrained. On Gemma-2 2B and 9B, SLAM achieves 100% detection accuracy with a quality cost of only 1-2 reward points - compared to 7.5-11.5 for KGW, EWD, and Unigram - with naturalness and diversity preserved at near-unwatermarked levels across both models. The trade-off is a complementary robustness profile: SLAM resists word-level edits but is vulnerable to paraphrase that restructures syntax (at a quality cost), the converse of token-distribution methods.
Authors: Rixi Xu, Qingyu Liu, Haitao Li, Yushen Chen, Zhikang Niu, Yunting Yang, Jian Zhao, Ke Li, Berrak Sisman, Qinyuan Cheng, Xipeng Qiu, Kai Yu, Xie Chen
Abstract: In this paper, we present X-Voice, a 0.4B multilingual zero-shot voice cloning model that clones arbitrary voices and enables everyone to speak 30 languages. X-Voice is trained on a 420K-hour multilingual corpus using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as a unified representation. To eliminate the reliance on prompt text without complex preprocessing like forced alignment, we design a two-stage training paradigm. In Stage 1, we establish X-Voice$_{\text{s1}}$ through standard conditional flow-matching training and use it to synthesize 10K hours of speaker-consistent segments as audio prompts. In Stage 2, we fine-tune on these audio pairs with prompt text masked to derive X-Voice$_{\text{s2}}$, which enables zero-shot voice cloning without requiring transcripts of audio prompts. Architecturally, we extend F5-TTS by implementing a dual-level injection of language identifiers and decoupling and scheduling of Classifier-Free Guidance to facilitate multilingual speech synthesis. Subjective and objective evaluation results demonstrate that X-Voice outperforms existing flow-matching based multilingual systems like LEMAS-TTS and achieves zero-shot cross-lingual cloning capabilities comparable to billion-scale models such as Qwen3-TTS. To facilitate research transparency and community advancement, we open-source all related resources.
Authors: Wesley Hanwen Deng, Mingxi Yan, Sunnie S. Y. Kim, Akshita Jha, Lauren Wilcox, Kenneth Holstein, Motahhare Eslami, Leon A. Gatys
Abstract: Recent developments in AI safety research have called for red-teaming methods that effectively surface potential risks posed by generative AI models, with growing emphasis on how red-teamers' backgrounds and perspectives shape their strategies and the risks they uncover. While automated red-teaming approaches promise to complement human red-teaming through larger-scale exploration, existing automated approaches do not account for human identities and rarely incorporate human inputs. In this work, we explore persona-driven red-teaming to advance both automated red-teaming and human-AI collaboration. We first develop PersonaTeaming Workflow, which incorporates personas into the adversarial prompt generation process to explore a wider spectrum of adversarial strategies. Compared to RainbowPlus, a state-of-the-art automated red-teaming method, PersonaTeaming Workflow achieves higher attack success rates while maintaining prompt diversity. However, since automated personas only approximate real human perspectives, we further instantiate PersonaTeaming Workflow as PersonaTeaming Playground, a user-facing interface that enables red-teamers to author their own personas and collaborate with AI to mutate and refine prompts. In a user study with 11 industry practitioners, we found that PersonaTeaming Playground enabled diverse red-teaming strategies and outputs that practitioners perceived as useful, and that AI-generated suggestions in the PersonaTeaming Playground encouraged out-of-the-box thinking even when practitioners did not follow them strictly. Together, our work advances both automated and human-in-the-loop approaches to red-teaming, while shedding light on interaction patterns and design insights for supporting human-AI collaboration in generative AI red-teaming.
Authors: Joseph D. Ramsey
Abstract: Gaussian process (GP) marginal likelihood scores and kernel conditional independence tests are theoretically appealing for nonlinear causal discovery but computationally prohibitive at scale. We present three complementary RFF-based methods forming a practical toolkit for score-based, constraint-based, and hybrid causal discovery. The Fourier Feature Marginal Likelihood (FFML) score approximates the exact GP marginal likelihood by replacing the $n x n$ kernel Gram matrix with a finite-dimensional feature representation, reducing cost to $O(nm^2 + m^3)$ while retaining the probabilistic interpretation and automatic complexity penalty of the exact score. FFML extends to mixed (continuous and discrete) parent sets via a product-kernel construction, with a Kronecker path for small discrete parent sets and a Hadamard-product path otherwise. The Tetrad Random Fourier Feature (TRFF) score is a complementary BIC-style alternative using penalized Student-t regression with random Fourier features. TRFF offers robustness to heavy-tailed noise and faster runtime than FFML. Empirically, TRFF and FFML exhibit a complementary precision-recall profile: TRFF achieves higher precision while FFML achieves better recall and lower SHD overall. The Fourier Feature Conditional Independence (FFCI) test is a fast nonparametric CI test for mixed data, using ridge residualization in feature space and a Frobenius-norm cross-covariance statistic approximated as a weighted sum of chi-squared variables. Empirically, BOSS+FFML achieves the lowest SHD on nonlinear data, while BOSS+TRFF offers the highest precision. When run through PC-Max, FFCI and RCIT exhibit complementary precision-recall profiles: RCIT is more precise while FFCI achieves better recall and substantially lower SHD, at approximately twice the runtime.
Authors: Jakob Dexl, Katharina Jeblick, Andreas Mittermeier, Balthasar Schachtner, Anna Theresa St\"uber, Johanna Topalis, Maximilian Rokuss, Fabian Isensee, Klaus H. Maier-Hein, Hamza Kalisch, Jens Kleesiek, Constantin M. Seibold, Hussain Alasmawi, Lap Yan Lennon Chan, Yixuan Yuan, Alexander Jaus, Rainer Stiefelhagen, Pauline Ornela Megne Choudja, Konstantin Nikolaou, Christian La Foug\`ere, Sergios Gatidis, Matthias P. Fabritius, Maurice Heimer, Gizem Abaci, Lalith Kumar Shiyam Sundar, Rudolf A. Werner, Jens Ricke, Clemens C. Cyran, Thomas K\"ustner, Michael Ingrisch
Abstract: We report the design and results of the third autoPET challenge (MICCAI 2024), which benchmarked automated lesion segmentation in whole-body PET/CT under a compositional generalization setting. Training data comprised 1,014 [18F]-FDG PET/CT studies from the University Hospital T\"ubingen and 597 [18F]/[68Ga]-PSMA PET/CT studies from the LMU University Hospital Munich, constituting the largest publicly available annotated PSMA PET/CT dataset to date. The held-out test set of 200 studies covered four tracer-center combinations, two of which represented unseen compositional pairings. A complementary data-centric award category isolated the contribution of data handling strategies by restricting participants to a fixed baseline model. Seventeen teams submitted 27 algorithms, predominantly nnU-Net-based 3D networks with PET/CT channel concatenation. The top-ranked algorithm achieved a mean DSC of 0.66, FNV of 3.18 mL, and FPV of 2.78 mL across all four test conditions, improving DSC by 8% and reducing the false-negative volume by 5 mL relative to the provided baseline. Ranking was stable across bootstrap resampling and alternative ranking schemes for the top tier. Beyond the benchmark, we provide an in-depth analysis of segmentation performance at the patient and lesion level. Three main conclusions can be drawn: (1) in-domain multitracer PET/CT segmentation is sufficient and probably approaching reader agreement; (2) compositional generalization to unseen tracer-center combinations remains an open problem mainly driven by systematic volume overestimation; (3) heterogeneity and case difficulty drive performance variation substantially more than the choice of algorithm among top-ranked teams.
Authors: Andr\'es F. Castro Torres, Joan Giner-Miguelez, Merc\`e Crosas
Abstract: The extent to which Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies can trigger generalized paradigm shifts in science is unclear. Although these technologies have revolutionized data collection and analysis in specific fields, their overall impact depends on the scope and ways of adoption. We analyze over 227 million scholarly works from the OpenAlex collection (1960-2024) spanning four scientific domains and 46 fields. To distinguish the use of AI as research method (AI adoption) from mentioning AI-related terms (AI engagement), we developed a two-step AI-assisted semantic classification pipeline, validated through human coding of 911 abstracts and a robustness check on 348,000 full-text articles (PLOS One). We document differences in the timing and extent of AI adoption across domains, with generalized exponential growth after 2015. The transformative nature of this growth, however, is less apparent. AI-supported research is confined to a few topics with strong ties to Computer Science and conventional statistical frameworks, suggesting limited epistemological transformation. It is also associated with an unwarranted citation premium and substantially higher retraction rates than non-AI-supported. Geographically, while wealthy countries lead in AI publications per capita, global South countries in a belt from Indonesia to Algeria lead in AI adoption relative to their national output, signaling a distinctive resource concentration pattern. The transformative capacity of AI in science thus remains untapped, and its rapid adoption underlines challenges in research openness, transparency, reproducibility, and ethics. We discuss how best research practices could boost the benefits of AI adoption and highlight areas that warrant closer scrutiny.
Authors: Duong Nguyen, Mohammed Jawhar, Nicolas Chesneau
Abstract: Tabular foundation models (TFMs), such as TabPFN-2.6, TabICLv2, ConTextTab, Mitra, LimiX, and TabDPT, achieve strong zero-shot performance through in-context learning, but their inductive biases remain fixed at inference time. Adapting a pretrained TFM to a specific dataset or task typically requires either full fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive, or parameter-efficient tuning methods (PEFT) such as LoRA, which must be tailored to the internal architecture of each TFM. Furthermore, the evidence on whether weight-space fine-tuning improves accuracy or calibration is mixed \citep{tanna_exploring_2026,rubachev_finetuning_2025}. We introduce TFM-Retouche, a lightweight input-space residual adapter that is architecture-agnostic by design with respect to the frozen TFM backbone. TFM-Retouche learns a small residual correction in the input space to align the input data with the inductive biases of the pretrained model. The adapter is trained end-to-end through the frozen TFM, with a post-training identity guard that falls back to the unmodified TFM whenever adaptation does not help on held-out validation. On TabArena-Lite (51 datasets spanning binary classification, multiclass classification, and regression), TabICLv2-Retouche -- the framework instantiated on TabICLv2 -- is the top-ranked method on the leaderboard with light per-task tuning and ensembling, lifting aggregate Elo by +56 over the frozen TabICLv2 base and sitting on the Pareto front of predictive quality versus both training and inference time.
Authors: Hao Lin, Kunyang Lv, Xu Jiang, Jingqi Tian, Zhongjing Du, Jiayu Ding, Qiaoman Zhang, Hongbo Jin
Abstract: Training VideoLLMs for complex reasoning remains challenging due to sparse sequence level rewards and the lack of fine grained credit assignment over long, temporally grounded reasoning trajectories. While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) provides reliable supervision, it fails to capture token level contributions, leading to inefficient learning. Conversely, existing self distillation methods offer dense supervision but lack structure and diagnostic specificity, and often interact unstably with reinforcement learning. In this work, we propose VISD, a structured self distillation framework that introduces diagnostically meaningful privileged information for video reasoning. VISD employs a video aware judge model to decompose reasoning quality into multiple dimensions, including answer correctness, logical consistency, and spatio-temporal grounding, and uses this structured feedback to guide a teacher policy for token level supervision. To stably integrate dense supervision with RL, we introduce a direction magnitude decoupling mechanism, where rollout level advantages computed from rewards determine update direction, while structured privileged signals modulate token level update magnitudes. This design enables semantically aligned and fine grained credit assignment, improving both reasoning faithfulness and training efficiency. Additionally, VISD incorporates curriculum scheduling and EMA based teacher stabilization to support robust optimization over long video sequences. Experiments on diverse benchmarks show that VISD consistently outperforms strong baselines, improving answer accuracy and spatio temporal grounding quality. Notably, VISD reaches these gains with nearly 2x faster convergence in optimization steps, highlighting the effectiveness of structured self supervision in improving both performance and sample efficiency for VideoLLMs.
Authors: Rui Wang, Yue Zhang, Jiehong Lin, Kuncheng Luo, Jianan Wang, Zhongrui Wang, Xiaojuan Qi
Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation by jointly predicting future visual observations and future actions. However, current WAMs typically execute a fixed number of predicted actions after each model inference, leaving the robot blind to whether the imagined future remains consistent with the actual physical rollout. In this work, we formulate adaptive WAM execution as a future-reality verification problem: the robot should execute longer when the WAM-predicted future remains reliable, and replan earlier when reality deviates from imagination. To this end, we propose Future Forward Dynamics Causal Attention (FFDC), a lightweight verifier that jointly reasons over predicted future actions, predicted visual dynamics, real observations, and language instructions to estimate whether the remaining action rollout can still be trusted. FFDC enables adaptive action chunk sizes as an emergent consequence of prediction-observation consistency, preserving the efficiency of long-horizon execution while restoring responsiveness in contact-rich or difficult phases. We further introduce Mixture-of-Horizon Training to improve long-horizon trajectory coverage for adaptive execution. Experiments on the RoboTwin benchmark and in the real world demonstrate that our method achieves a strong robustness-efficiency trade-off: on RoboTwin, it reduces WAM forward passes by 69.10% and execution time by 34.02%, while improving success rate by 2.54% over the short-chunk baseline; in real-world experiments, it improves success rate by 35%.
Authors: Andy Zeyi Liu, Michael Zhang, Ilana Greenberg, Adam Alnasser, Lucas Baker, John Sous
Abstract: Steering large language models (LLMs) is usually done by either instruction prompting or activation steering. Prompting often gives strong control, but caches guidance tokens at every layer and can clutter long interactions; activation steering is compact but typically weaker and does not support large structured reminders. We introduce memory inception (MI), a training-free method that steers in latent attention space by inserting text-derived key-value (KV) banks only at selected layers. Rather than materializing reminder content throughout the prompt cache, MI treats steering as selective KV allocation, injecting latent slots only where the model routes to them. On matched personality-steering tasks, MI gives the best overall control--drift trade-off, remaining competitive with prompting while consistently outperforming CAA. On updateable guidance, MI supports mid-conversation behavior shifts without rewriting the visible transcript, achieving the highest post-shift alignment on Qwen3. On structured reasoning, MI outperforms visible prompting on HARDMath and PHYSICS (10/12 subject$\times$mode cells), serving as proxies for structured reasoning in verifiable domains, while cutting content-matched KV storage by up to 118$\times$. These results position MI as a powerful steering method when guidance is persistent, structured, or expensive to keep in the visible transcript.
Authors: Guankai Li, Jiabin Chen, Yi Xu, Xichen Zhang, Yuan Lu
Abstract: Existing multimodal search agents process target entities sequentially, issuing one tool call per entity and accumulating redundant interaction rounds whenever a query decomposes into independent sub-retrievals. We argue that effective multimodal agents should search wider rather than longer: dispatching multiple grounded queries concurrently within a round. To this end, we present HyperEyes, a parallel multimodal search agent that fuses visual grounding and retrieval into a single atomic action, enabling concurrent search across multiple entities while treating inference efficiency as a first-class training objective. HyperEyes is trained in two stages. For cold-start supervision, we develop a Parallel-Amenable Data Synthesis Pipeline covering visual multi-entity and textual multi-constraint queries, curating efficiency-oriented trajectories via Progressive Rejection Sampling. Building on this, our central contribution, a Dual-Grained Efficiency-Aware Reinforcement Learning framework, operates at two levels. At the macro level, we propose TRACE (Tool-use Reference-Adaptive Cost Efficiency), a trajectory-level reward whose reference is monotonically tightened during training to suppress superfluous tool calls without restricting genuine multi-hop search. At the micro level, we adapt On-Policy Distillation to inject dense token-level corrective signals from an external teacher on failed rollouts, mitigating the credit-assignment deficiency of sparse outcome rewards. Since existing benchmarks evaluate accuracy as the sole metric, omitting inference cost, we introduce IMEB, a human-curated benchmark of 300 instances that jointly evaluates search capability and efficiency. Across six benchmarks, HyperEyes-30B surpasses the strongest comparable open-source agent by 9.9% in accuracy with 5.3x fewer tool-call rounds on average.
Authors: Ke Ma, Jiaqi Tang, Bin Guo, Xueting Han, Ruonan Xu, Qingfeng He, Ziheng Wang, Xu Wang, Qifeng Chen, Zhiwen Yu, Yunhao Liu
Abstract: Proactive streaming video understanding requires Video-LLMs to decide when to respond as a video unfolds, a task where existing methods often fall short due to their implicit, query-agnostic modeling of visual evidence. We introduce Response-G1, a novel framework that establishes explicit, structured alignment between the accumulated video evidence and the query's expected response conditions via scene graphs. The framework operates in three fine-tuning-free stages: (1) online query-guided scene graph generation from streaming clips; (2) memory-based retrieval of the most semantically relevant historical scene graphs; and (3) retrieval-augmented trigger prompting for per-frame "silence/response" decisions. By grounding both evidence and conditions in a shared graph representation, Response-G1 achieves more interpretable and accurate response timing decisions. Experimental results on established benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method in both proactive and reactive tasks, validating the advantage of explicit scene graph modeling and retrieval in streaming video understanding.
Authors: Yunho Choi, Jongwon Lim, Woojin Ahn, Minjae Oh, Jeonghoon Shim, Yohan Jo
Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for Large Reasoning Models hinges on baseline estimation for variance reduction, but existing approaches pay a heavy price: PPO requires a policy-model scale critic, while GRPO needs multiple rollouts per prompt to keep its empirical group mean stable. We introduce Policy Optimization with Internal State Value Estimation), which obtains a baseline at negligible cost by using the policy model's internal signals already computed during the policy forward pass. A lightweight probe predicts the expected verifiable reward from the hidden states of the prompt and generated trajectory, as well as token-entropy statistics, and is trained online alongside the policy. To preserve gradient unbiasedness despite using trajectory-conditioned features, we introduce a cross-rollout construction that predicts each rollout's value from an independent rollout's internal states. Because POISE estimates prompt value using only a single rollout, it enables higher prompt diversity for a fixed compute budget during training. This reduces gradient variance for more stable learning and also eliminates the compute overhead of sampling costs for detecting zero-advantage prompts. On Qwen3-4B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B across math reasoning benchmarks, POISE matches DAPO while requiring less compute. Moreover, its value estimator shows similar performance to a separate LLM-scale value model and generalizes to various verifiable tasks. By leveraging the model's own internal representations, POISE enables more stable and efficient policy optimization.
Authors: Berkehan \"Unal, Hauke Dierend, Dren Fazlija, Christopher Plachetka
Abstract: Over the last few years, research on autonomous systems has matured to such a degree that the field is increasingly well-positioned to translate research into practical, stakeholder-driven use cases across well-defined domains. However, for a wide-scale practical adoption of autonomous systems, adherence to safety regulations is crucial. Many regulations are influenced by the Operational Design Domain (ODD), which defines the specific conditions in which an autonomous agent can function. This is especially relevant for Automated Driving Systems (ADS), as a dependable perception of ODD elements is essential for safe implementation and auditing. Vision-language models (VLMs) integrate visual recognition and language reasoning, functioning without task-specific training data, which makes them suitable for adaptable ODD perception. To assess whether VLMs can function as zero-shot "ODD sensors" that adapt to evolving definitions, we contribute (i) an empirical study of zero-shot ODD classification and detection using four VLMs on a custom dataset and Mapillary Vistas, along with failure analyses; (ii) an ablation of zero-shot optimization strategies with a cost-performance overview; and (iii) a suite of reusable prompting templates with guidance for adaptation. Our findings indicate that definition-anchored chain-of-thought prompting with persona decomposition performs best, while other methods may result in reduced recall. Overall, our results pave the way for transparent and effective ODD-based perception in safety-critical applications.
Authors: Caterina Gallegati, Monica Bianchini, Franco Scarselli, Vittorio Murino, Barbara Toniella Corradini
Abstract: As generative models achieve unprecedented visual quality, the gold standard for image evaluation remains traditional feature-distribution metrics (e.g., FID). However, these metrics are provably hindered by the closed-vocabulary bottleneck of outdated features and the assumptive bias of rigid parametric formulations. Recent alternatives exploit modern backbones to solve the feature bottleneck, yet continue to suffer from parametric limitations. To close this gap, we introduce APEX (Assumption-free Projection-based Embedding eXamination), a novel evaluation framework leveraging the Sliced Wasserstein Distance as a mathematically grounded, assumption-free similarity measure. APEX inherits effective scalability to high-dimensional spaces, as we prove with theoretical and empirical evidences. Moreover, APEX is embedding-agnostic and uses two open-vocabulary foundation models, CLIP and DINOv2, as feature extractors. Benchmarking APEX against established baselines reveals superior robustness to visual degradations. Additionally, we show that APEX metrics exhibit intra- and cross-dataset stability, ensuring highly stable evaluations on out-of-domain datasets.
Authors: Zuojin Tang, Shengchao Yuan, Xiaoxin Bai, Zhiyuan Jing, De Ma, Gang Pan, Bin Liu
Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models increasingly rely on auxiliary world modules to plan over long horizons, yet how such modules should be parameterized on top of a pretrained VLA remains an open design question. Existing world-model-augmented VLAs typically pass the per-frame visual stream into the world module at high visual bandwidth and treat its rollout as a side product of action prediction; under a constrained adaptation budget on a frozen backbone, this leaves both the per-frame representation and the latent action coupling under-examined. We introduce OneWM-VLA, which compresses each view into a single semantic token per frame through an Adaptive Attention Pooling, and produces the resulting latent stream and the action trajectory under a single flow-matching objective rather than connecting them through a separate decoder. Empirically, we find that per-frame visual bandwidth can be reduced to a single token without compromising long-horizon performance under our setup. Trained with 14.71M LoRA parameters on a $\pi_0$ (2B) backbone, OneWM-VLA improves the average success rate from 47.9% to 61.3% on MetaWorld~MT50, reaches 95.6% on LIBERO-Long (vs.85.2% for $\pi_0$), and reaches 60.0% on the long-horizon deformable task Fold Cloth on a real Piper arm (vs.20.0% for $\pi_0$).